Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that drew a blank, felt the squeeze, played the queen, and made donkey-bull love.

First, scientists shed new light on how Earth ended up losing more than a billion years of its geological record, a puzzle that has resisted explanation for decades. Then: octopuses in tight spots, a topless spear-brandishing Celt, and a tale of unlikely tail.

As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens, or subscribe to my personal newsletter The BeX Files. 

“Blank Space” (Earth’s Version)

Dhungana, Santosh and Flament, Nicolas. “The deep Earth origin of the Great Unconformity. Nature.

Earth doesn’t trouble itself too much with keeping intact archives. With its tectonic activity and erosive forces, our planet is constantly wiping out huge chunks of its own memory, creating gaps in the geological record called unconformities. 

The Great Unconformity, the largest gap of this kind, reveals that Earth straight-up deleted more than a billion years of strata, for reasons that remain hotly debated and mysterious. Sandstone that dates back to the Cambrian period some 538 million years is often found directly on top of ancient “basement” rocks that date back anywhere from 1.2 billion to 1.8 billion years ago. This missing layer shows up around the world, hinting that it was erased by a global event.  

Now, scientists have placed the origins of the Great Unconformity deep inside Earth’s mantle, during the tectonic tumult of supercontinent breakup.

“The cause or causes of the Great Unconformity are unknown,” said authors Santosh Dhungana and Nicolas Flament of the University of Wollongong. “The proposed mechanisms include extensive glacial erosion during Snowball Earth (about 720–635 million years ago), rifting and plume activity, sea-level fall and mantle-driven dynamic topography.” 

“These processes have not been dynamically tested, with limited comparison between global models and global datasets to explain the spatial distribution of the Great Unconformity,” the team added. 

To fill the knowledge gap about the geological gap, the researchers ran models of the formation and breakup of ancient supercontinents during the eons preceding the Cambrian period, when complex life rapidly proliferated in Earth’s seas. Massive landmasses were pushed upward by motions in Earth’s mantle during this time. Exposed to erosive forces such as weather, glaciers, and eventually oceans, they became sanded down over time, creating the vast void. 

“Our models explain why the Great Unconformity is best preserved in North America and show that it is a first-order surface expression of deep geodynamic processes that transformed global landscapes and sediment fluxes,” the team concluded.

Scientists will no doubt continue to debate the cause of this planet-wide memory lapse, but there is consensus that the same mechanisms also set the stage for the emergence of complex life during the Cambrian. No matter what caused the Great Unconformity, we partly owe our existence to it today. 

In other news…

Putting the squeeze on octopuses   

Xin, Wenci et al. “Overcoming environmental constraints: octopus uses 3-step or 4-step strategies to squeeze through small holes.” Journal of Experimental Biology.

We’ll move now from massive gaps in Earth’s memory to tiny gaps that octopuses can somehow squeeze through. These tentacled escape artists can famously maneuver their way through passages that seem impossibly small relative to their bodies, an ability that has spawned a subgenre of viral videos.

Now, scientists have discovered the secrets of “octopus-squeezing behavior” by observing two species—the common octopus (Octopus vulgaris) and the Mayan octopus (Octopus maya)—navigating small holes in laboratory containers. 

“Our study demonstrates that octopuses employ two primary strategies, 3-step and 4-step, for squeezing through narrow spaces,” said researchers led by Wenci Xin of the National University of Singapore. “The key distinction between these strategies lies in whether the body is squeezed separately from the arms.” 

The first two steps were probing the aperture and then shifting a few arms through it. Navigating the tightest spaces required breaking up the final passage into two parts: Pulling the remaining arms to the other side, and then compressing the mantle behind the head so they could fit through last.

In addition to documenting these amazing feats of flexibility in nature, the study is the perfect excuse to revisit the classic X-Files episode “Squeeze.”

A queen hidden in plain sight?  

Russell, Miles. “Verica Rex: Searching for a ‘lost’ queen of the British Iron Age.” Current Archaeology.

When Rome invaded Britain 2,000 years ago, they had the help of an inside man—or was it an inside woman? In a new article, an archaeologist makes the case that the British king Verica, who aided the Roman invasion of their own homeland, was actually a queen that has been misgendered lo these many centuries. 

Miles Russell of Bournemouth University argues that Verica was a woman based in part on the leader’s Latin name, which ends in the suffix “a” which is common for women, as opposed to names ending in “-us” for men. 

Coins also depict Verica using “slender, bare-breasted equestrian figures that appear irrefutably female in contrast to the overtly masculine warriors on the issues of Iron Age rulers like Tasciovanus and Caratacus,” according to Russell. 

Many experts are not convinced that the evidence points to a secret ancient queen, and Verica’s gender is likely to inspire much more debate. Wikipedia, our great public arbiter, has not changed Verica’s male pronouns. 

Women leaders weren’t unheard of in Celtic Britain, as evidenced by the queens Cartimandua and Boudica, who lived in the same century as Verica. Regardless of whether Verica was among their ranks, this leader was a consequential figure in the Roman takeover of Britain. 

Achille and Patroclo: More than friends  

Da Cruz, André B et al. “A socio-sexual bond between a bull and a male donkey.” Current Biology.

Scientists who were conducting fieldwork on monkeys in Ethiopia serendipitously stumbled upon a very different discovery—a tender same-sex relationship between a bull and a donkey.

Achille, a bull, and Patroclo, a donkey, belong to different owners, but they graze together by day. Despite the availability of other males and females in their pasture, this pair has developed a strong socio-sexual bond that includes nuzzling, licking, and Achille sexually mounting Patroclo.

“Patroclo frequently presented his hindquarters toward Achille and nipped him,” said  researchers led by André Beirão da Cruz of the University of Pisa. “In the only two instances in which Achille approached and mounted another male donkey, this individual showed clear avoidance behaviours and displayed threatening facial expressions (e.g. ear flattening), which were never observed in Patroclo during the 51 mountings (34 with intromission) with Achille.”

Same-sex sexual behavior is extremely common in nature and has a wide variety of possible explanations, including social cohesion, mistaken identity, or lack of access to opposite-sex mates. But what Achille and Patroclo have is special. Despite being different species and having alternate mating options, the pair share a highly selective and reciprocal social and sexual bond. 

“Although interpreting this behaviour is challenging, the mounting attempts, taken together with the repeated and mutual affiliative interactions between the two animals, may signal the quality of their relationship” and “the strength of the animals’ social bond,” the team concluded.

In addition to this heartwarming tale, the study goes to show that you never know what you might find when you chase your goals. The researchers were there to watch geladas, but it turned out those primates weren’t the only animals monkeying around.

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss election outcomes and code as a human endeavor.

JOSEPH: This week I got a real wave of ‘oh man this fucking sucks’ regarding AI. I won’t link to it because it’s just a rando person, but scrolling Reddit I saw someone who said they used Claude to build stuff with Max. Max, or Max/MSP, is a visual programming language that is heavily used in the world of music and visual art. It is the foundation of a lot of electronic music. You can build essentially anything in it, if you put in the work to understand how to put it together. And that can be a lot of work.

I’ve built various little things in Max. I made a tool that takes a drum break and generates new, random drum and bass style breaks from it. I am a big, big fan of generative music (both listening and making) where you create rules and parameters, press play, and let the rules decide what comes out. I made another that has various synthesizers, and from scratch manipulates the audio so they sound like Tibetan singing bowls, with their harmonies and individual melodies morphing over time. I also started working on the visual part of Max, called Jitter, to take audio output from Max and generate visuals.

Immediately after the UK banned a wide range of porn fantasies involving choking, breath-restriction, and relative roleplay, adult creators watched platforms remove hundreds of their videos — even when the creators thought they were in compliance with the law. These creators say they were blindsided by the removals, since the content didn’t seem to violate the law at all.

Creators are reporting one platform in particular, Clips4Sale, is purging content with little notice, “a precautionary measure.”   

Some creators who’ve contacted Clips4Sale to appeal these removals have shared screenshots online of the reply the platform sends: “At this time, we have implemented a general restriction on content availability in the UK to ensure compliance with applicable regulatory requirements,” Clips4Sale support replies, according to these screenshots, viewed by 404 Media. “This is a precautionary measure and does not necessarily indicate that your clips contain prohibited content or violate our policies. We are continuing to review affected content, and additional clips will be made available to UK buyers as they are reviewed and cleared.” 

Updates to the UK’s Crime and Policing Act went into force on Friday. The law criminalizes a list of sexual acts, including downloading or publishing choking and incest roleplay content. The law is vague and overbroad, criminalizing “strangulation or suffocation” and “certain types” of incest roleplay. There's a lot of confusion among sex workers and fans about what this encompasses, and seemingly could include various kinds of gagging, face sitting, and roleplay. Violating this law, either as someone in possession of noncompliant content or publishing it, carries a risk of up to five years in prison. 

UK-based creator Sophia Truee told me that Clips4Sale removed more than 75 percent of her content — 392 out of 506 videos — with the platform flagging it as requiring edits without noting what needed to change. Truee makes POV content where she’s alone talking to the camera. Many more creators have shared on social media that content that shouldn’t be in violation of the law has been caught in the crossfire on Clips4Sale specifically. 

In an email sent to creators on Thursday, the day before the law went into force, Clips4Sale said it would be reviewing “both the video content and its details, including titles, tags, keywords, and descriptions” of content that creators have uploaded to the site. It told creators no action was required. “Affected clips will be hidden automatically starting November 6. If you'd like to make a clip available in the UK again, you can edit the content or its details as needed and submit the changes for compliance review.” Approved content would go back up, the company said.

Another message from Clips4Sale on creators’ dashboards said: “As we gain further clarity on the regulatory requirements, we expect to be able to make additional content available again to UK users, wherever permitted. These restrictions apply only to the UK and will not affect your content's availability in other markets where it is permitted.” According to the law, however, if creators based in the UK possess that content, they’re still facing jail time.  

“Of course, we were all aware of the new Act coming in and prepared accordingly, but not for anything at this scale. We've had nothing since and they've been tweeting as normal,” Truee said. Clips4Sale launched in 2003 and caters heavily to fetish content. “It's a huge blow to this area of the industry, and I can only hope things will be communicated soon. We, as creators, understand how difficult it is to be a content site in this current climate, but communication has not been prioritized,” Truee said, noting that this is happening right before the holidays, with Black Friday being one of the most popular times for creators selling content. “For many, this will be devastating, as over 20 years of the work will have just been wiped.” 

Madame Caramel, another UK-based creator using Clips4Sale, posted on X that out of 900 clips she had available on the platform, she now has 198 left. Another creator, Goddess Kitty, wrote that the platform restricted 931 of her clips from UK audiences. “All of them [had] utterly NOTHING to do with the UK laws,” she wrote. There are many, many more creators across social media reporting that they’ve woken up to their clip sites gutted with no warning, even though their content wasn’t non-compliant by the letter of the law.

With the speed at which content has been purged en masse, and with some creators reporting instant rejections of content that should actually be compliant with the law, Clips4Sale may be auto-moderating with a very wide net, and sifting through reviews creators are now forced to send for legal content. This is something most social media platforms do to try to comply whenever over-broad laws or payment processor regulations hit. 

Other platforms are also attempting to comply now that the law is in effect. LoyalFans has a notice on its homepage for fans addressing the new law. It says: “These changes may also apply to content you've purchased, downloaded, or saved privately on your devices. Non-compliant content in your Loyalfans account will be removed on November 5, with no further action required from your side. We encourage you to understand the new law and review any affected content you have downloaded, or stored privately, whether on your phone, computer, or cloud storage.” 

LoyalFans updated its terms of use on Thursday to include strangulation or suffocation, in its unacceptable content list, “including any content, whether real or simulated, that explicitly and realistically depicts a person strangling or suffocating another person, such as applying pressure to the neck or obstructing the nose or mouth,” the terms now say. “This content is prohibited regardless of whether the participants consent, and even if it is fantasy-based, roleplay, or digitally created.” Several creators using LoyalFans have posted on social media saying they’ve had hundreds of videos removed from their accounts on that platform, too.

JustForFans, an LGBTQ and kink content site, posted on X earlier this week that creators should review their content and use its new “restrict this content” option to keep it from being viewed by users in the UK. The platform also said that it would be scanning every new video upload for consent requirements and content restrictions. “If we find content that should be restricted in the UK, we will restrict it and you can review it in a new section of your Media Center called Restricted Content. The page will tell you what we found and give you options right on that page to fix it: re-word a post, replace a video with another video, delete the video, or tell us we are wrong, and why you believe we are wrong. A staff member will review your changes,” it said. 

“The UK's new pornography restrictions are creating a lot of uncertainty for adult creators, and we want to give our models options rather than simply take away their work. We're reviewing new and old content for potentially restricted material, blocking flagged content from UK viewers and giving models the ability to correct or challenge those decisions. Creators can also restrict individual videos themselves or block access from the UK entirely," JustForFans founder Dominic Ford said in a statement. “The law is nuanced and not particularly well-adapted to gay content. The spirit of the law is about protecting women, but some things don't translate directly to gay culture. For example, 'daddy' is an archetype, not a claim that someone is your actual father, so we're not treating those scenes as automatically prohibited. Our priority is to comply with the law without unnecessarily restricting content elsewhere. We also want models in England and Wales to understand that the law covers possession, not just publication, so they need to take extra precautions.”

The vagueness of the law, combined with the use of auto-moderation on sites like Clips4Sale, have come together to create a nightmare for creators. “This highlights the lack of protection sex workers and content creators have when laws aren't properly researched and clearly written. We do our very best to stay compliant and ensure everyone's safety by following the rules,” Truee said. “This highlights the unprecedented use of AI in moderation and the lack of clear instructions from the government.” 

Clips4Sale told 404 Media in a statement: "The UK law carries criminal penalties for possessing or distributing consensual kink and fetish content made by consenting adults, meaning our creators risk arrest if we allow them to distribute banned content in the UK. Unfortunately, there’s no good guidance as to what content might or might not now be illegal. As a result, we’re being aggressive for the time being when it comes to limiting content. We know this is not what creators want, and it’s not what we want. Over the coming weeks, we hope to be able to clear clips that were limited during this precautionary period, after we’ve had a chance to review them more closely. This law is impacting an already marginalized community, mostly women, mostly queer or gender-nonconforming, heavily stigmatized and discriminated against. As with most sex censorship, the burden falls heavily on communities with the least amount of power. We will work with the UK government to comply with the law and our creators to keep them safe."

Updated Friday, November 6 1:03 p.m. EST with comment from Clips4Sale.

Updated 3:08 a.m. EST with comment from JustForFans.

Following widespread backlash, Meta announced earlier this week it’s putting a planned update of its commercial terms of use on pause. The terms would have required business accounts to allow Meta to “use any content from such domains, web pages, or URLs to provide, develop, improve, research, train, and maintain the integrity of” Meta’s products. 

The new terms were initially set to go into effect on October 30, but after outcry from journalists and users who didn’t want Meta reaching far beyond Instagram and Facebook and into their websites to suck up their work as training data for its generative AI products, Meta announced it was pushing the change to November 20. Now, it’s on hold entirely. 

“We recently shared that we were updating the Meta Commercial Terms, Product Catalog Terms, Self-Serve Ad Terms, and Ad Creative Generative AI Terms,” Meta says on the page where the commercial terms announcement used to be. “These updates are now paused and will not take effect on November 20, 2026. We are continuing to consult with stakeholders and will provide a further update when we have more to share. In the meantime, our existing terms remain in effect.” 

The Los Angeles Times, which first reported the change, notes that following a case supported by the Norwegian Media Businesses’ Association and 180 Norwegian media companies, a court in Norway granted a temporary injunction suspending Meta’s new terms, and the UK Competition and Markets Authority said it would do its own investigation into the terms. 

After pushing the update to November, Meta removed the word “train” from a list of allowed use cases, Nieman Lab reported, and limited those uses to “advertising and business products,” where previously it said that data would be used for all Meta products.  

Archaeologists have discovered the oldest direct evidence of psychoactive cannabis use in a Siberian tomb that dates back 2,800 years and was the site of human and horse sacrifices, according to a study published on Thursday in Science. 

During excavations of the tomb, a team found more than 1,400 cannabis seeds scattered around the remains of several Iron Age individuals, and even identified cannabinoids—including the active compound tetrahydrocannabinol (THC)—in a person’s preserved hair. 

Though humans cultivated cannabis for many millennia before the Iron Age, this is by far the earliest clear-cut proof that the plant was consumed for its psychoactive effects, which have made it one of the most widely used drugs in the world today.

The discovery is “absolutely crazy,” said Gino Caspari, an archaeologist at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology and the University of Bern who led the study, in a call with 404 Media. “People have been speculating a lot about psychoactive use of cannabis in the past, but to actually pin it down and prove it with soft tissue evidence of the humans involved—that is something very special.

“That is an absolutely unique and extremely rare combination of evidence,” he added. 

Cannabis has a multifaceted history as a recreational drug and a pop cultural touchstone, as well as a traditional medicine that has been used for millennia by many cultures, including in China, Russia, and around the Mediterranean Basin. Humans began cultivating the plant as early as 10,000 years ago for its oil and fiber, but the origins of its specific consumption as a psychoactive substance is unclear. 

Cannabis was important to the Scythian culture, a horse-riding people that emerged on the Eurasian steppes in the 9th century BCE and became a major force in the subsequent centuries. The historian Herodotus described Scythian rituals that involved ceremonial burning of cannabis in enclosed spaces, and their cannabis residues and products have been found at Scythian archaeological sites.

“Herodotus speaks about the Scythians being quite fond of cannabis in the first place, so this has always been in the back of our minds,” Caspari said. “But it is so incredibly rare to find well-preserved plant remains that this is not really something you can hope for or look for. This is ultimately complete luck and chance.”

Now, Caspari and his colleagues have hit an archaeological jackpot at a tomb known as Tunnug 1, located in Siberia’s Uyuk River Valley. Six elite individuals are interred in the interior of the royal mound inside several tree-trunk coffins and wooden structures. They are mostly men, though one woman is also present. The mound is lined with remains of sacrificed humans, as well as dozens of sacrificed horses, close to the surface.

As the team carefully worked through the layers of the burial, they found hundreds of cannabis seeds distributed around the bodies that were dated to the 8th century BCE. However, the real smoking blunt was the detection of cannabinols in preserved hair samples, including traces of THC, the most important mind-altering compound in cannabis. 

The results confirm contemporaneous accounts of Scythians as cannabis consumers who used the plant for purification and mortuary rituals. It’s possible that the people selected as human sacrifice consumed the drug to prepare them for their unenviable fate.

“It being in a burial context, of course, there's a ritual aspect to it,” Caspari explained. “It might be a little bit more sinister, but this is speculation. We do have a lot of horse sacrifices and also some human sacrifices on the surface of the mound. And if you imagine humans being sacrificed, they usually don't like that very much. It might be advantageous to have them dosed a little bit, at least, to make the procedure a bit more humane, if you will.” 

“Of course, that is speculation,” he cautioned. “We don't have any written sources about that particular area, but that's at least one way we could go with our interpretation.”

The researchers hope to learn more about the context and meaning of the cannabis use at Tunnug 1 through continued excavations and an analysis of more hair samples. What’s more, the team plans to conduct DNA analysis on the seeds, an approach that could yield new insights about the murky history of cannabis domestication and its early use as a psychoactive substance. This line of research could also shed light on modern cannabis strains, and may even be revived for new medicinal or recreational purposes.  

“We've already sequenced part of the seeds to unravel and disentangle the domestication history,” Caspari said. “Funnily enough, we don't even know what wild cannabis actually looks like because there has been so much intermixing and interbreeding since the 70s, when people started experimenting and trying to get more potent drug variants. Some of the initial landraces and the actual wild cannabis has been lost.”

“Now, having DNA that's almost 3,000 years old, we will be able to take that step back into the past and see what an unaltered cannabis would have looked like,” he said. “In the ideal case, we might even be able to work together with the medical industry and bring some of these very ancient genetics back into cannabis production to potentially help people with very interesting and distinctive cannabinoid combinations.” 

Put that in your pipe and smoke it. Regardless of where future research into this ancient plant leads, this long-sought evidence of cannabis use thousands of years ago confirms the rich cultural legacy of the plant across time and space.

“As an archeologist, I might be a bit biased here, but I think the history and cultural practices really do matter,” Caspari concluded. “I think our findings do indeed inform current discussions on legalization, on usage of medical cannabis—which is very much an ongoing discourse—and I think what we've been able to do with this study is provide an anchor, and show that there is this deep cultural history to the use of cannabis as a psychoactive drug.” 

“I adore breath play. I love being strangled, suffocated and drowned, and I love strangling and suffocating others. Waterboarding: that’s my favourite,” Melissa Todd, a UK-based writer and sex worker, told me. “Many women do: it really isn’t only horrid men forcing us to do these dreadful depraved acts. Interrupting oxygen supply produces the most intense sensation of euphoria. I enjoy it in my private life, and I offer it in sessions too.” 

Starting tomorrow, she and anyone else in the UK distributing or possessing this type of content, even if it’s just recorded in the privacy of their homes and not for sale on a porn site, could face up to five years in prison. The maximum penalty for possession is “two years’ imprisonment for pornography that depicts strangulation or suffocation, or penetrative sexual activity between certain relatives,” according to the law, and “three years’ imprisonment for pornography depicting sexual activity involving a person who is, or is pretending to be, under 16,” with five years as the maximum penalty for publication of all of the above. 

Updates to the Crime and Policing Act go into force on November 6. The law criminalizes a list of sexual acts, including downloading or making choking and incest roleplay porn. According to the law, it will be a criminal offense in England and Wales to possess or publish porn that “explicitly and realistically” depicts strangulation or suffocation, penetrative sexual activity between people who “a reasonable person would think are related, or pretending to be related, in a certain way” and sexual activity between people where “a reasonable person would think at least one person is, or is pretending to be, under 16.” Sixteen is the age of consent in the UK. 

“You have to speak up for porn you don’t like, as well as the porn you do, because otherwise the government will keep censoring more and more depictions of acts they don’t fancy."

“The offences only capture pornography that shows people which appear, to a reasonable person, to be real,” the law states — whatever that means.

The rest of the law is similarly vague in defining what’s criminalized. The “guidance” on the law says: “We consider that strangulation generally means one person applying pressure to another person’s neck,” and “We consider that suffocation will generally mean depriving a person of air in a way that affects their ability to breathe. Unlike strangulation, this does not require pressure to the neck. It could, for example, involve covering someone’s mouth and nose or compressing their chest.” This could mean anything from relatively common acts like face sitting or pushing someone’s face into a mattress, to gagging and more extreme breathplay generally left to professionals. The law says it’ll be left to the courts to decide.

As the adult industry advocacy group Free Speech Coalition notes in its guide for performers and platforms, the government has said this content doesn’t need to appear life-threatening to count. 

“This isn’t just about my personal preferences,” Todd said. “You have to speak up for porn you don’t like, as well as the porn you do, because otherwise the government will keep censoring more and more depictions of acts they don’t fancy. Even if you think strangulation is disgusting, immoral, dangerous, that is no reason to ban it. In a liberal democracy people must be allowed to behave in ways you think ridiculous and disgusting, in the hope that they in turn will extend the same courtesy to you. I don’t understand why people go skiing, or camping, or abseiling, but I’m happy for them to crack on with it. Consenting adults must be allowed to do whatever they want with their own bodies. It is illiberal and dangerous for the government to interfere."

The effect of the law’s vagueness — as it has been in the US when legislators, payment processors and platforms similarly inflict poorly-defined terms on sex workers — is censorship and has a chilling effect on otherwise consensual legal activity between adults. It’s already happening: Adult clip site iWantClips warned, according to content creators using its platform, that in light of the law it’s banning a list of genres and acts: “iWantClips is required to remove certain categories of content from the platform for Artists located in the UK,” the message said, followed by a list including every kind of “smother” imaginable (including ass, foot, and breast smothering), plastic fetishes, all face sitting and specifically, face sitting in jeans, “butt drops,” and trampling fantasies. This isn’t the first time iWantClips has complied in advance of a threat to free speech: In October 2021, following new, strict moderation and documentation regulations set by Mastercard, the platform told creators they’d need to review their archives of content and make sure it was in compliance or risk a permanent ban.  

Kinky sex has long drawn the ire of UK officials. In 2014, the British Board of Film Classification attempted to ban a litany of erotic acts from video on demand and streaming services under the The Audiovisual Media Services Regulation. Many protesters doing face-sit-ins in front of Parliament pointed out at the time that the ban was focused on acts that prioritize women’s pleasure. The ban was overturned in 2019.

UK based porn performer and producer Vex Ashley, who owns the independent studio Four Chambers, told me that when the Crime and Policing Bill went through Parliament earlier this year, she examined her back catalog and found that the work she considers her “magnum opus,” which explores the sexual archetype of the mother, could contain criminal content under this law. 

“I had to go back and gut the film from the inside out,” Ashley told me. “It exists now in a very different form than it did when before. And obviously the law not only makes it illegal for me to publish it, but it also technically makes it illegal for me to possess the original cut of my film now, which just seems completely wild, considering that it’s me who is in it, and it's me talking about my own experience of my own sexuality.” 

Ashley noted that attacks on sexual freedoms always come for non-normative sex first: “kink, fetish, queer and trans bodies, anything a compliance team can’t file under vanilla,” she said. This, she believes, is part of an ongoing swing toward conservatism, authoritarianism, and control.

"Even if you're somebody who doesn't care about porn, who doesn't care about sex, but you do care about this rollout of conservatism that's being force-fed to us, you can defend people's right to fuck and be fucked, and to explore that through media"

“The underlying message here is that actually, it's people's faults for being too horny, and that you should just control yourself,” she said. “That if you see this rollback in our sexual freedoms and this criminalisation of our sexual imaginations as wrong, you are just dangerous and perverted. Which is, I think, a swing back to old conservative and fascist ways of thinking about sex and freedom and bodily autonomy.” The “save the children” narratives that brought us harmful laws like FOSTA/SESTA in the US and an ongoing age verification nightmare around the world are at play with the Crime and Policing Act. In the UK, the Online Safety Act has forced people to verify their ages to use even non-sexually explicit parts of the internet. Looking at Pornhub from a UK-based IP address today, for example, you’d think it was a platform for podcasters and influencers; only once you log in and verify your age with a government ID and/or facial scan does the actual porn become visible. 

Independent creators and people dependent on online sex work in the UK will be the hardest hit by this new law. Dominatrixes have reported that they’re expecting to take a financial hit. And even people and platforms outside of the UK may need to block users based in the UK from accessing their content to remain compliant. Many performers focus on specific niches to cater to audiences that seek out fetish content. But a lot of what’s being banned is already either banned by platforms or difficult to monetize, due to the extra-legal morality restrictions imposed by payment processors. Todd told me that while she enjoys the kind of content that’s now banned in the UK in her private life, she doesn’t bother uploading it to platforms where she could monetize it, because their terms of use have restricted most of it already. 

Those trying to comply with the law and avoid the threat of jail time face a task. The law's guidance makes it clear that possession and publication apply retroactively. “It's easy to talk about pornography as though it's a constantly replenished stream of disposable content, but for many performers it represents years of work and a significant investment of time and money,” Todd said. “A back catalogue can be an important source of continuing income. If material has to be removed, that isn't simply a matter of changing what you film next week; it can mean losing an asset you've spent years creating.”  

“Sex is a vital part of the human experience and it deserves exploration through storytelling, through media, through creation, in the same way that any other part of our experiences is,” Ashley said. “And that is not going to always be super comfortable. Sex is this very complicated, very vulnerable, very powerful thing, and it brings up a lot of things for different people.” 

Deciding, as a society, that it’s not worth defending or thinking deeply about is doing us all a disservice, she said — and comes at the cost of sex workers’ safety and freedom. Faced with potential prison sentences for having a face sitting video stored on a hard drive, the freedom in this case is very literal. “Even if you're somebody who doesn't care about porn, who doesn't care about sex, but you do care about this rollout of conservatism that's being force-fed to us, you can defend people's right to fuck and be fucked, and to explore that through media... I think you can defend it even if you think it's complicated.”

We start this week with Joseph’s investigation into Proton’s culture of fear and the company’s massive push towards AI. A lot to unpack there. After the break, Sam tells us about the AO3 outage and its fallout. In the subscribers-only section, Jason explains: we’re not tech support.

Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for access to this episode's bonus content and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.

• ⁠Manifestos, Fear, and ‘Loser Thinking’: Inside Proton’s AI Reckoning⁠
• ⁠‘Wake Up Call:’ Fanfiction Writers and Readers React to AO3 Outage⁠
• ⁠ChatGPT Keeps Telling People 404 Media Can Solve Their Tech Support Problems⁠

There's a BlazeTV YouTube video whose thumbnail shows the presenter with his arms around Anakin Skywalker and a gender-flipped Draco Malfoy called Malfoid. “Total Chud Victory?” It says. The video's title: “Young Right is Reclaiming Culture and Liberals Are Mad About it.”

BlazeTV posted the video on November 2, the day before Democrats swept the midterms and started a political realignment in America so overwhelming that Republicans lost control of all the most powerful state positions in Texas.

The video is a profound misreading of the political and cultural moment. It reminded me of stories of the Bolsheviks seizing the Winter Palace to discover tarot card playing courtiers who had no idea a revolution was happening in the streets.

The American version was watching defense contractor Palmer Lucky dress up like Harry Potter on Halloween while standing next to his Malfoid wife. And it was Elon Musk — who spent roughly half a billion on the election only to see his chosen candidates fail — posting an AI generated picture of Anakin Skywalker sitting at the head of a happy fascist Star Wars family two days before the midterms.

The online right has dominated American culture for a decade, or at least has dominated political narratives picked up by the mainstream media. Its memes and conspiracies drove news cycles. At first, the right’s memes filtered from random people on obscure Discord channels to Reddit’s r/the_donald or 4chan to Trump’s Twitter feed. More recently they’ve come from AI slop farms, from Musk, or from the administration itself. Powered by a well-funded media and podcast ecosystem, Fox News (and a propensity for shamelessness) its comedians, podcasters, and pundits became powerful celebrities and influencers, at least within Elon Musk’s X. 

This insular, often inscrutable world has given us Ben Shapiro, Nick Fuentes, Gamergate influencers, the streamer Asmongold, and a revolving door of characters who have shuffled interchangeably between Twitterverse celebritydom and actual government; Kash Patel, DataRepublican, Laura Loomer, Pete Hegseth, RFK Jr., Dan Bongino, the list goes on. 

It has been said many times that “Twitter is not real life,” and that posting too much anywhere will rot your brain. Never has that been more apparent than now: Much of Trumpworld spent the week before an election in which they would get utterly trounced using AI to generate barely legible Anakin and Malfoid memes for an inconsequential ingroup on the social media platform run by the biggest loser on the planet.

“It certainly seems like it has had its high water mark and that reality has FINALLY caught up with the Republican Party,” Michael Senters,  a PhD candidate at Virginia Tech who studies online and gaming culture, told 404 Media.

In 2016, 4chan posters talked about  “meme magic” — the pseudo-ironic belief that pictures on the internet could manifest great change in reality. According to legend, Trump strategist Steve Bannon was running a World of Warcraft gold farm when he realized the angry gamers could be harnessed into a powerful reactionary political force. Bannon and others would successfully parlay Gamergate into an endless culture war that’s dominated online life in the Trump era.

During the midterm livestream of Bannon’s War Room podcast, his guest read exit polls that suggested the right-wing had lost young men — a group long thought to be its strongest soldiers. The split between the parties was even, the guest explained. “That can’t be right,” Bannon whispered, signalling he’d lost touch with the constituency he’d harnessed on behalf of Trump ten years ago. As the election results began coming in, right-wing podcasters, livestreamers, and newscasters across the internet went through at least a few of the stages of grief. First they struggled to understand what was happening, suggesting the votes must be wrong. Eventually, many of them ragequit. 

"Okay, I'm going to be honest. I'm absolutely rage quitting. I'm so frustrated. I am so unbelievably frustrated. I'm so mad. I think Trump didn't do 50 different things he should have done. I think he should have gone a thousand times harder. I think that he wasted his time selling trinkets and nonsense,” Asmongold said as the returns came in. He lives in Texas where Democrats swept in a shock victory.

“I wish that there were more people who thought like me that weren’t sorry about it. But you know what? There’s not. So it’s just me. And that’s fine. It’s fine. It’s OK,” he said, his voice catching in his throat.

Many right-wing personalities went into Tuesday somehow expecting to win despite a disastrous war, a disastrous economy, disastrous polls, and a doddering president whose closing argument seemed to be more about his ballrooms, golf courses, and the Reflecting Pool than anything else. Since Trump was re-elected, these same people have called everyone else out of touch, convinced by their X algorithm and prediction markets that no blue wave would materialize. The media has similarly spent many thousands of words suggesting that Bluesky is an out-of-touch leftist echo chamber while mostly failing to suggest anything of the sort about the AI-pilled Silicon Valley executives, bots, and racists shitposting on X. Tuesday’s election wipeout highlights how detached from reality the Malfoid/Anakin-shipping, X-brained billionaires and their acolytes have actually become.

“Blueskywave. Those of us on here, across the board, were out of touch. I see no other conclusion,” Joe Weisenthal of Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast (who is a serious, good journalist), said in a post on X after the election amidst a sea of Anakins tonguing Malfoids.

The meme game and general demeanor of Trump and his followers has grown wildly tiresome in his thus far-disastrous second term. Under the guidance of White House Communications Director Steven Cheung, official government accounts have posted racist Halo memes, used AI to put a studio Ghibli face on anti-immigrant propaganda, and fully embraced Malfoid and Darth Vader as cultural heroes. The base on X loved this stuff. No one else did. 

As our friend Gita Jackson over at Aftermath wisely put it immediately before the election, "The idea that they can meme magic their way into a red sweep by posting about Anakin Skywalker a lot is pure desperation [...] Their values have been rejected by popular culture at large, and they are now resigned to exist in the margins.”

Senters said the midterms showed the hard limits of memes as a political tool. “The power that memes have has always been, in my opinion, the power to help define linguistic and community lines in the amorphous space of the Internet. You create a community when you ‘get the joke’ behind a meme but memes generally don't persuade,” he said. “I'll be curious to see if the government accounts will continue to post these far-right cultural memes in the wake of the defeat or if they'll change their tune at all. Like do they double down on the meme posting to try to rally their base? Because it very clearly had ZERO appeal to anyone outside their base.”

Yet the right-wing has spent the last ten years acting as if their memes had moved the country politically. “They deluded themselves into believing that memes carry persuasive power and that their bubble on X represented material reality in a meaningful way when that was no way close to the truth,” he said. “They saw how many ‘numbers’ the Malfoid and Anakin memes did on X and convinced themselves that this was a real cultural awakening moment and that the volk were on their side.”

Alyssa Mercante, an internet culture reporter who is writing a book about politics and video games called Rage Game, agreed. “I think what it's really showing is that when you start to get a little bit too deep in the weeds of this hyper online culture war stuff, it cannot escape the internet,” Mercante told 404 Media. “It is not working anymore. The material reality of America is just not good enough.” Gas prices are up. Everything is more expensive. And ICE has killed Americans in the streets. 

“This conspiratorial mindset is wrecker mentality. It is just destructive for the sake of destruction. There is no goal beyond pulling away any sort of legitimacy from the media or from democracy,” Mercante said. “When you get so deep in the weeds of this anti-establishment conspiratorial thought process, you just can't make anything or do anything of value. You're just upending tables and pointing at them and laughing.”

Democrats crushed Republicans who leaned into the online culture war during the midterms. Bo French — an overt racist who ran for railroad commissioner in Texas — sent text messages to voters that depicted himself as Master Chief from Halo. His opponent beat him by more than a million votes.

In Nevada, Halo composer Martin O’Donnell ran as a Republican for a House seat and lost to incumbent Susie Lee. O’Donnell announced his campaign on Discord and leaned hard into an extremely online gamer identity. “He’s like, ‘I wrote the Halo music and I’m voting for Trump and you should too.’ He did a Halo LAN party campaign fundraiser. The imagery was him as Master Chief,” Mercante said. “This dude is like: ‘My personality is gamers, gamers are not woke and they're resisting this [...] and Trump is the person that is going to help us resist,’ and he's polling like absolute dog water.”

It’s been 12 years since Gamergate set the tempo for online culture wars and a decade since Trump won in 2016. In 2026, Star Wars, Halo, Harry Potter feel dated in a way they didn’t back then. “What 22-year-old kid is going to be like ‘they took Halo from me.’ They don’t know Halo to have it taken away from them,” Mercante said. 

She stressed that so much right wing online culture is about distraction — she likened it to jingling keys to capture the attention of a baby. “If the economy is the number one issue for both Democrats and Republicans going into the midterms, no amount of Malfoid scissoring Anakin Skywalker is going to change that need for people to be in a better financial position,” Mercante said. “The tech oligarchs pushed this stuff straight into our eyes for two years straight unfettered [...] And I wake up and gas is this expensive? I don’t care if you take a Taylor Swift song and make JD Vance walk out to it.”

“[They] really thought that this would just last forever,” she added. “When you build up a meme presidency, eventually the cards just collapse underneath you, and there's just nothing to show for it.”

Though this midterm signals a move away from Gamergate-style culture war politics, both Senters and Mercante cautioned that this type of rhetoric is still dangerous, and can still be destructive. “They’re still very good at doing propaganda on the internet — they wrote the book in many cases,” Mercante said.

For months I’ve been speaking to an AI fraud kingpin. You might remember in 2024 we revealed the existence of OnlyFake, an underground site that let anyone generate realistic photos of fake IDs using ‘neural networks’. The creator of that site went by the handle John Wick. A while later, the creator was arrested.

Turns out there was a lot more to that story. Yuriy Nazarenko, the creator of OnlyFake, told me his side of it. How when I published my initial article he panicked, and destroyed his laptop and emails and got a new phone, paranoid that authorities were about to bust down his door. How the pressure of a growing fraud empire pushed him to drugs. And how North Korean fake IT workers used his site. Read below for his story. 

The Confessions of an AI Fraud Kingpin

A few years ago, Yuriy Nazarenko sat at a desk in his grandfather’s apartment in Ukraine and, on a diet of cigarettes, Lay’s chips, and beer, painstakingly made digital copies of fake identity documents. One of his four computer screens had the messaging app Telegram open. Another displayed a scan of a passport in Photoshop filling the entire monitor.

Pixel by pixel, with rap music blaring, Nazarenko edited each part of the passport. That included the MRZ codes, the block of text printed at the bottom of identity documents; the photographs to superimpose someone else’s face into the document; and the overall dimensions and quirks of each different type of passport. Nazarenko would sometimes sit for more than 12 hours at his computer, obsessively tinkering away, with a single, high-quality fake identity document taking up to a week of work.

When someone thinks of fake IDs, maybe they imagine a spotty underage teen buying a physical counterfeit drivers’ license so they can score some beer. But in the global criminal underworld, digital copies or scans of IDs are like a skeleton key. A convincing scan of an ID or utility bill, loaded with a bogus name or someone else’s identity, can unlock the ability to make bank accounts, bypass checks on cryptocurrency exchanges to buy or sell more Bitcoin, or rent a safehouse, all while keeping the criminal’s real identity hidden. The digitally altered IDs need to fool both human reviewers and automated systems that scan them for inconsistencies. Making fake IDs requires exquisite attention to detail.

All of that manual labor doesn’t really scale, Nazarenko thought to himself as he meticulously edited passport after passport. He went on to make templates of fake identity documents that sped up the process, but it was still slow. 

After many of these quiet nights, he had an idea. He built a website to automate the process that autopopulated a fake ID with the personal data a customer wanted, rather than having him do it by hand. Then, when generative AI became mainstream a short while later, he incorporated that too.

“That gradually became OnlyFake,” Nazarenko told me.

OnlyFake, the underground website Nazarenko made, landed like a bomb in the fraud world. It allowed anyone to generate not only convincing scans of drivers’ licenses or passports, but also realistic looking photos of those fake identity documents laying on a sofa, carpet, or desk, as if someone had taken the ID out of their wallet and snapped a picture of it on their phone. Needed a convincing looking photo of a California drivers’ license to open a cryptocurrency account in someone else’s name? Or a British passport to incorporate a company overseas? Or a Social Security card? No problem. The results were photos of identity documents that didn’t really exist, of people who may not be real, but yet could trick the sorts of people and companies that verify documents.

With OnlyFake, you didn’t have to be a master forger like Nazarenko to make fake documents. Now, anyone could churn out fake IDs at scale, sometimes even hundreds or thousands at a time. OnlyFake threatened the entire idea of know-your-customer, or KYC, where financial institutions take steps to know who exactly are using its services. When anyone can make a photo of a fake ID for just a few dollars in Bitcoin, is anyone really who they say they are?

Nazarenko didn’t know it then, hunched over his desk, but OnlyFake would soon become so influential that it would spawn copy cats, and the FBI would eventually arrest Nazarenko and shut down some of its competitors. The Department of Justice said in an announcement about Nazarenko’s guilty plea that OnlyFake made more than a million dollars selling fake IDs for just $15 a pop.

Now for the first time, Nazarenko, 28, free after a year in prison and living in Asia, is telling his story: how North Korean fake IT workers used his creation, how he ended up in ICE detention for months after serving his sentence in the U.S., and how OnlyFake unleashed a new age of AI-powered fraud. Nazarenko said he wanted to talk to me because I was the first journalist to reveal that OnlyFake existed. This article is based on interviews with Nazarenko and his lawyer; court records; and my own reporting in the online world of fraud that OnlyFake inhabited.  

“OnlyFake was the first time I saw how quickly a small internet project could turn into something global. Unfortunately, it also taught me, in a very painful way, what can happen when the scale of something grows faster than your understanding of its consequences,” Nazarenko told me.

Growing up, Nazarenko’s parents questioned whether Nazarenko would ever find a job. His father worked for the Security Service of Ukraine. Raised in a suburb outside of Odesa, Nazarenko jumped between a few different gigs. He worked as a cook, a waiter, at a supermarket, and as a cameraman at a local Ukrainian TV station.

Read the rest of this story here.

MORE FROM 404

We continued our election coverage with a piece from Matthew Gault on the data center angle. There were actually a ton of proposals related to data centers on the ballot in more than 40 races across 13 states. Well, people voted against data centers in at least 38 of them. People are sick of this stuff and they’re showing up to vote about it.

A few years ago, Yuriy Nazarenko sat at a desk in his grandfather’s apartment in Ukraine and, on a diet of cigarettes, Lay’s chips, and beer, painstakingly made digital copies of fake identity documents. One of his four computer screens had the messaging app Telegram open. Another displayed a scan of a passport in Photoshop filling the entire monitor.

Pixel by pixel, with rap music blaring, Nazarenko edited each part of the passport. That included the MRZ codes, the block of text printed at the bottom of identity documents; the portraits to superimpose someone else’s face into the document; and the overall dimensions and quirks of each different type of passport. Nazarenko would sometimes sit for more than 12 hours at his computer, obsessively tinkering away, with a single, high-quality fake identity document taking up to a week of work.

When someone thinks of fake IDs, maybe they imagine a spotty underage teen buying a physical counterfeit driver’s license so they can score some beer. But in the global criminal underworld, digital copies or scans of IDs are like a skeleton key. A convincing scan of an ID or utility bill, loaded with a bogus name or someone else’s identity, can unlock the ability to make bank accounts, bypass checks on cryptocurrency exchanges to buy or sell more Bitcoin, or rent a safehouse, all while keeping the criminal’s real identity hidden. The digitally altered IDs need to fool both human reviewers and automated systems that scan them for inconsistencies. Making fake IDs requires exquisite attention to detail.

All of that manual labor doesn’t really scale, Nazarenko thought to himself as he meticulously edited passport after passport. He went on to make templates of fake identity documents that sped up the process, but it was still slow. 

After many of these nights, he had an idea. He built a website to automate the process that autopopulated a fake ID with the personal data a customer wanted, rather than having him do it by hand. Then, when generative AI became mainstream a short while later, he incorporated that too.

“That gradually became OnlyFake,” Nazarenko told me.

OnlyFake, the underground website Nazarenko made, landed like a bomb in the fraud world. It allowed anyone to generate not only convincing scans of driver’s licenses or passports, but also realistic looking photos of those fake identity documents laying on a sofa, carpet, or desk, as if someone had taken the ID out of their wallet and snapped a picture of it on their phone. Needed a convincing looking photo of a California driver’s license to open a cryptocurrency account in someone else’s name? Or a British passport to incorporate a company overseas? Or a Social Security card? No problem. The results were photos of identity documents that didn’t really exist, of people who may not be real, but yet could trick the sorts of people and companies that verify documents.

With OnlyFake, you didn’t have to be a master forger like Nazarenko to make fake documents. Now, anyone could churn out fake IDs at scale, sometimes even hundreds or thousands at a time. OnlyFake threatened the entire idea of know-your-customer, or KYC, where financial institutions take steps to know who exactly are using its services. When anyone can make a photo of a fake ID for just a few dollars in Bitcoin, is anyone really who they say they are?

Nazarenko didn’t know it then, hunched over his desk, but OnlyFake would soon become so influential that it would spawn copy cats, and the FBI would eventually hunt Nazarenko and shut down some of OnlyFake’s competitors. The Department of Justice said in an announcement about Nazarenko’s guilty plea that OnlyFake made more than a million dollars selling fake IDs which cost just $15 a pop.

Now for the first time, Nazarenko, 28, free after a year in prison and living in Asia, is telling his story: how North Korean fake IT workers used his creation, how he ended up in ICE detention after serving his sentence in the U.S., and how OnlyFake unleashed a new age of AI-powered fraud. Nazarenko said he wanted to talk to me because I was the first journalist to reveal that OnlyFake existed. This article is based on interviews with Nazarenko and his lawyer, court records, and my own reporting in the online world of fraud that OnlyFake inhabited.  

“OnlyFake was the first time I saw how quickly a small internet project could turn into something global. Unfortunately, it also taught me, in a very painful way, what can happen when the scale of something grows faster than your understanding of its consequences,” Nazarenko told me.

Growing up, Nazarenko’s parents questioned whether Nazarenko would ever find a job. His father worked for the Security Service of Ukraine. Raised in a suburb outside of Odesa, Nazarenko jumped between a few different gigs. He worked as a cook, a waiter, at a supermarket, and as a cameraman at a local Ukrainian TV station.

People across America rejected data centers during last night’s midterm election. Proposals related to data centers were explicitly on the ballot in more than 40 races across 13 states. People voted against data centers in 38 of them and counting. Six cities voted to ban data centers outright and 12 put limits on the amount of megawatts such buildings could draw. In addition to specific ballot measures, candidates who supported data centers lost across the country.

One of the most striking repudiations of pro data center politicians was in Texas, where Gregg Abbott lost a bid for a fourth term as governor. Abbott had made Texas a data center friendly place. The state has more than 300 working data centers and there are plans to double that number. “Texas is the epicenter of AI development,” Abbott said in 2025 at a press conference with Google CEO Sundar Pichai. “We must ensure that America remains at the forefront of the AI revolution, and Texas is the place where that can happen.” He went on to accept more than $9 million from data center-related donors.

When public sentiment turned against data centers, Abbott attempted to ride shifting political winds by issuing a “pause” on new projects. The pause wasn’t real. Texas regulators continued to approve data center projects after Abbott’s announcement and only shut down the state’s permitting web portal when 404 Media reported it.

Gina Hinojosa, Texas’s Democratic governor-elect, made Abbott’s stance on data centers a central part of her campaign. Abbott’s words about making Texas a data center-friendly AI state played on TVs and the internet over and over again. He lost by more than 700,000 votes.

Anti-data center candidates overwhelmingly won statewide races across the country. In Burgin, Kentucky, mayoral candidate George Hensley lost his bid after voting to approve a hyperscale project—to a write-in candidate. Hensley was the only name on the ballot, and he lost to Joe MonroeTK, who ran an anti-data center write-in campaign. Emporia, Kansas — where police arrested a school teacher for clapping during a data center related city meeting — passed a ban on high impact data centers. In Yukon, Oklahoma the mayor lost a recall election after he supported a hyperscale data center project.

"These midterms sent a clear message — people don't want to see data centers in their backyards,” Michael Whitesides, the deputy communications director for Local Progress, told 404 Media. “Across the country, people do not see the promised benefit of these data centers, and the AI they power, playing out in their daily lives. They're seeing basic goods and services get more expensive while these billionaire backed monstrosities take up space in their community, poison their air, and drive up their utility bills.”

Local Progress is a network of local elected officials. Over the past year, its members have become increasingly focused on data centers as a top political issue. “Last night, we saw local, state, and federal officials who backed data center deals lose their seats,” Whitesides said. He noted that Kim Rooney in Asheville, North Carolina and Amanda Rodrigues in San Marcos, Texas (both members of Local Progress) were elected mayors in their cities after running anti-data center campaigns.

“Big Tech will continue its typical playbook of trying to buy and bully local officials into complying with their demands for more data center development, but our hope is that last night's results are a clear signal to local leaders that they can resist and their community will back them up,” Whitesides said.

American voters in the communities where they’re being built hate data centers. They run up power bills, burn through water, and power Silicon Valley’s  AI apparatus. America rejected data centers last night as both symbols of the big tech oligarchy and a physical manifestation of the future it wants to build. It’s a future Americans seem willing to fight.

Elon Musk, one of the night’s big losers, took a break from a weeks-long posting spree on X as the election results rolled in. Musk spent half a billion dollars on the midterms, $224 million of it in Texas, the state where he lives and does a lot of business. The world’s richest man wanted to cover the state in data centers. Those plans aren’t looking good now that Abbott is out and Hinojoa is in.

Musk broke his election day posting silence a little after 1 am. “Data centers in space looking pretty appealing right now,” he said on X. Chased off the land by its people, the billionaire looks to the sky.

Last month, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told Politico that “we believe that the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology,” referring to ChatGPT users dying, people losing their jobs to AI, and the other negative externalities we have seen from AI. 

Altman wasn’t running for office Tuesday. But this worldview—that the masses must shut up and suffer while oligarchs centralize power, self-deal, spend wildly to capture the political process, and automate away human endeavors so they can amass yet more wealth—was wholly repudiated in Tuesday’s election as people in Red States, Blue States, and Purple States rejected the cruelty, corruption, and depravity economy we’ve seen over the last few years. They are tired of kleptocracy. 

The main difference between Donald Trump’s administration this term and his first term is that Silicon Valley’s oligarchs have lined up to kiss the ring; look no further than the photos from his inauguration and his gilded gala with China’s President Xi Jinping earlier this fall. Every major tech company CEO has spent the last two years flattering Trump, giving him gifts, and trying to capture the political process. They have been generously rewarded for their fealty and their money as the Trump administration has spent the last two years letting Big Tech do whatever it wants. 

Elon Musk was given the keys to the federal government and used them to slash critical government programs, lay off tens of thousands of public servants, and replace collective human expertise with teenaged idiots and AI algorithms. His companies have continued to rake in billions in government contracts, his busted AI has been integrated into critical government systems, and the cuts led by his “Department of Government Efficiency” has, conservatively, killed many thousands of people around the world. Trump has pardoned crypto criminals, his family has made billions of dollars in cryptocurrency scams, and has overseen the rise of a gambling and prediction market-based “economy” rife with insider trading and misery (the idea of the administration doing anything to crack down on this is so implausible that to even suggest it could happen is laughable). He has installed manosphere podcasters, X trolls, and conspiracy theorists into top administration roles; they have performed even worse than their already low expectations. He has leveraged commercial surveillance companies to build a brutal, tech-powered mass deportation campaign. His government’s communications strategy can be described in no other way than inscrutable AI slop shitposting. This is to say nothing of the cost of living crisis Trump has caused as he’s started an illegal war in Iran that has driven up gas and diesel prices and levied tariffs on America’s allies for reasons that defy explanation. This has driven up the price of everything even as Trump’s administration slashes regulations on fossil fuel companies and big corporations. 

World of Warcraft: Forever, a re-imaginging of the legendary MMO, comes out Wednesday. The idea is to recapture the feeling of discovery and wonder players had when adventuring across its world for the first time back in 2004.

But 2026 is a very different time. Subreddits dedicated to the game are already overrun with AI-generated addons that rip off longtime developers’ work, and a company that helps players track their damage output tells me it is making changes to its API because of the inundation of AI slop addons.

Warcraft Logs is a long-running site made by Archon.gg that lets players track and share their logs of particular in-game fights so they can analyze them for ways to get better. This works by players downloading Archon’s software which records the data of their fights and uploads them to the site. Warcraft Logs makes its API available for free to other developers. It used to be mostly hobby developers, the CEO of Archon.gg and Warcraft Logs, who goes by Sildri Silentcrest, told me. Now, it’s increasingly commercial projects, which are supposed to ask for permission in order to head off projects that would break Warcraft Logs’ terms of service or wouldn’t be able to scale. 

A vibe-coded site that scraped Archive of Our Own (AO3) fanfiction works, reuploaded them and charged for audiobook versions is down now after the creator said they received over 2,000 takedown requests from authors in the single day it was up.

ao3.life, a website that sprung up following last week’s announced weeks-long outage of fanfiction repository AO3, scraped the internet for works to populate the site using “a swarm of AI Agents controlling 40 virtual machines were scraping the internet for all drives, scrapes, and sources,” the site’s creator, named Ganesh, wrote on a page apologizing for the entire project. AO3.life went down on Monday evening following widespread backlash from readers and authors on social media. 

Before it went down, the ao3.life homepage said, “AO3, saved before it slips away. Search every fandom, ship and trope. Read it here, keep the EPUB, or let it read to you when your eyes get tired.” 

AO3 went down on Thursday following a security incident, according to the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) which owns the repository. The site is expected to be down for as long as four weeks. OTW says no data has been lost. Readers and authors are generally distraught, unable to access the site at all for potentially a month. AO3 hosts nearly 18.5 million works.

ao3.life offered works as EPUBs for reading on e-readers, and as AI-generated audiobooks that Ganesh charged for after the first three minutes. They claimed on a page titled “Authors get paid here” that authors would get 91% of the profits, with AO3.life getting 9% to cover “narration and processing” costs. “Your earnings wait for you. You don't need an account here to earn. We hold your share indefinitely until you collect it, however long that takes,” the site said. 

On AO3, authors can “archive lock” their works, making them visible only to logged-in users, which keeps AI bots like this one from scraping them and also gives better control over how far a work spreads or whether it breaks the containment of the repository’s intended audience. Of course, authors couldn’t access AO3 while it was down to lock their works if they were publicly available before the outage.

But some authors reported the archive lock not mattering. “I had everything archive locked on ao3 and it's still all here and I as the author have 0 control over any of my fics on there,” one AO3 author posted on Bluesky.

ao3.life said at the bottom of the homepage that authors could request their works be removed from the site: ”Every work belongs to its author; if one is yours and you want it gone, email legal@ao3.life and it goes.” Proving that you’re the author of the work to ao3.life required authors “leave a note on your AO3 profile so we can confirm it's you,” the site said. But how authors could do that while AO3 was — and still is — completely down is a mystery. 

A lot of authors clearly used the legal complaints email. “In the time this site has been up, I’ve facilitated over 2,000 takedown requests. It was never my intention to hurt so many authors - and I’m truly sorry to you all. There’s no way to show my sorry [sic] better than taking this site down,” Ganesh wrote. “Why did I charge for AI Slop audiobooks? I doubt anyone knows how expensive it is to run a server like this, especially with the amount of usage this site got. It had 126,592 unique users within 24 hours of going up, and had terabytes of bandwidth in usage. In an attempt to keep the site up, I thought audiobooks were a good option. I sold like 11 audiobooks, if it’s any consolation.”

Fanfiction has become a target of AI scraping, repackaging and reselling in recent years. In 2024, I reported on how Etsy sellers turn free fanfiction into printed and bound physical books, then list them for sale for as much as $100 a book.  

With AO3 down and fans scrambling to find ways to keep consuming the works they miss, some people have started sharing links to Google Drives on Reddit and Discord of works they’d downloaded from the site previously, even if they aren’t the original authors of those works. This has alarmed and angered a lot of writers; whether authors have the right to profit from their works depends on the content and their use of existing intellectual property. Fanfic is typically considered fair use — I can write a VeggieTales Bob and Larry fic without getting sued by Universal Pictures if it’s sufficiently transformative, for example — but selling it could draw the ire of their lawyers, and a potential lawsuit even if I happened to ultimately win it. Authors on AO3 are prohibited by the platform from monetizing their works or linking to payment platforms. 

“It was never and is not my intention to hurt authors, and I hope every subequent [sic] action I’ve taken is representative of that,” Ganesh said. “From an attempt at revenue sharing, to responding to takedown requests as fast as I could, to taking down the site as a whole.” They signed the note: “Yours truly, a 17 year old from India that thought they were doing something good.”

It’s a small pleasure, but receiving an “I Voted” sticker after casting my ballot is one of my favorite parts of the whole voting process. I slap the sticker on my chest and spend the rest of the day feeling like I accomplished a little something. I participated in democracy and everyone who sees me will know it. Artificial intelligence robbed me of that small joy this year and replaced it with a small horror. My “I Voted” sticker is AI-generated slop. 

Getting a little sticker when you vote has been a tradition in the US since the 1980s. It’s a symbol of the election cycle. People take selfies and post them or share them with friends. It’s a celebration of democracy and a small way to pressure people into going to the ballot box. 

The voting sticker has been subject to every kind of discourse imaginable. Are “I Voted” stickers worth the cost? Wondered Marketplace in 2020. A cemetery in New York has spent time and money tending to the grave of Susan B Anthony because voters coat it in stickers during voting season. In 2008, companies like Starbucks and Ben and Jerry’s ran afoul of election laws for offering free treats to people who showed their “I Voted” stickers.

It’s appropriate but depressing that I got an AI slop “I Voted” sticker in 2026, the year it feels like the mainstream began to reckon with AI.

My sticker is ugly. It’s a busy circular nightmare. “I Voted” is spelled out in small bronze text at the top of the ring. Bronze laurels encircle a bronze bald eagle that stretches atop the American flag. Below this is more text: “250 YEARS ANNIVERSARY” and "SEMIQUENCENTENNIAL.” Below that, another line reads — as best I can tell — “CEKEVPATIVG EDELDOA.” I assume this was meant to say “CELEBRATING FREEDOM," but whoever churned out this slop wasn’t using the latest models and the fine detail is lost.

I put the sticker on reluctantly, but I was not proud. I sent a photo of the offending sticker to journalist friends with my face cropped out. They immediately noticed it was AI-generated. I did not post my sticker online. I shared it with no one else. My democratic joy turned to shame.

A few hours later, a friend sent me a selfie. He’d just left the voting booth. His sticker was beautiful, tasteful, a testament to the subtle art of the “I Voted” sticker. A red ring enclosed a blue field. The crescent and palmetto (symbols of South Carolina) sat elegantly behind a bold white “I VOTED.”

His sticker catches the eye. Passers-by will know exactly what the sticker says. They know he voted. Anyone looking at my sticker will wonder how I spilled some bronze paint on my chest. I trembled with indignation. One town over from me they’re giving out the good stickers and I’m stuck with slop. First my town of 12,000 installs 33 Flock cameras and now this? 

I spent some time scrolling through social media to see other “I Voted” stickers. So many are so beautiful. Michigan runs a contest where students can submit their own idea for a sticker and the state will print up the winners. Kentucky, Albany, and several other places around the country do the same. Louisiana commissions local artists to produce gorgeous stickers. My mouth hung up in a jealous scowl as I stared at pictures of New Orleanians bedecked with a sticker showing a hand drawn trumpet blasting out “I Voted” alongside Mardi Gras beads.

Only Denton, Texas (another place I’ve lived, weirdly) seems to also have AI-generated slop stickers. Denton’s sticker is, at least, personalized. The city’s court house is in the corner looking more or less correct. The “I Voted” is large and centered in the sticker itself. Like mine, the image is too busy. Too much text, too many fireworks, and the inclusion of the Liberty Bell clutters the whole thing up. The central message — “I Voted” — is bright white. It doesn’t sink into a busy bronze soup like on my sticker.

Complaining about AI-slop “I Voted” stickers may seem trivial in a world where AIs are choosing targets in warzones and vibecoders are reverse-engineering every piece of software ever written. But these little things are important. These small annoyances pile up until things like ChatGPT flyers are so ubiquitous that you don’t notice them anymore. The AI drive-thru works well enough and one day you stop worrying about it so much. You get an ugly AI slop “I Voted” sticker and you slap it on or toss it out. Enough of these build up until you don’t notice that AI all around you. And then, one day, it’s all normal.

Right now we’re figuring out where our AI lines are. Society is negotiating what the future will look like. We’re fighting data centers, figuring out how to burn tokens to keep our bosses happy, and learning what we will and won’t abide.

Me? I draw the line at AI-generated “I Voted” stickers.

It’s rare to see an executive go from fucking around to finding out so quickly. That’s what happened last week when Proton CEO Andy Yen announced he was canceling a planned re-interview process for almost all current employees that would have checked if they’re using AI enough. This follows extreme backlash from Proton users and workers against the company's aggressive pivot to AI. It’s been a wild ride internally, several employees past and present have shared with 404 Media.

Proton’s CEO Cancels AI ‘Re-Interviews’

On Friday, Andy Yen, the CEO of Proton, cancelled a series of nearly company-wide ‘re-interviews’ that would have forced employees to explain how they are using AI, with the clear intention that they may be fired if not using it enough in the eyes of Proton leadership, according to six current Proton employees and audio of an around two hour all-hands meeting obtained by 404 Media.

The move came after 404 Media published an investigation on Thursday, which showed how Yen was aggressively pushing AI across Proton, in some cases despite security concerns from employees. In one exchange, an employee in the company’s security Slack channel urged Proton to at least take a few days to pentest newly written code before pushing it live. “That’s bullshit and loser thinking. Of course it’s possible to be fast and secure,” Yen wrote in the channel at the end of August. “Stop thinking always of how to be slower, and focus more on how to be faster.” Yen added, “stop lovingly handcrafting all our code and use AI more.”

The re-interview cancellations likely don’t address the concerns of many Proton users, who are more focused on Proton’s deprioritization of security; many Proton users have blasted the company’s leadership on social media over the last 24 hours and explicitly called for Yen to resign.

MORE FROM 404 

Kinktober has come and gone. But Archive of Our Own (AO3), a massive repository for fanfiction and creative writing, is still down, and might be down for as long as a month after going down for "maintenance" following a security incident last week. The Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), the non-profit organization that runs AO3, posted on its status page that the site restoration will take around two weeks, but could take up to a month.

People are coping how they can. And they’re turning to anything but Wattpad to fill the void. One writer I spoke to who posts her writing and reads others’ writing on AO3 told me that she was in the middle of racing to finish a work that was deliberately timed to Kinktober and Halloween when the outage happened. She was hitting “next chapter” while reading a fic on Wednesday night when she got the message that the site was down for maintenance, “which I initially took as a sign from the universe to go to bed,” she said.

Welcome back to the Abstract—and Happy Halloween! Here are the studies this week that smashed into Earth, put aliens on ice, drank mummy wine, and hugged it out.

First, a century-old theory that comets enriched Earth with the stuff of life is upended by new models of ancient impacts. Then: the case for life in extraterrestrial sea ice, a Halloween-coded medieval concoction, and a scientific embrace.

As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens, or subscribe to my personal newsletter The BeX Files. 

Did the seeds of life come from above or below?

Anslow, Richard J. et al. “Cometary impacts are an unlikely pathway towards the origins of life on Earth.” Scientific Reports. 

Carl Sagan eloquently said that we are all made of “star stuff,” but just how much of us is really comet vomit? This is a hotly debated question in science due to the popular theory that comets delivered essential ingredients for life to Earth during impacts more than four billion years ago, paving the way for the curious emergence of Earthlings.

But scientists have thrown cold primordial water on this idea in a new study that challenges “the long-held assumption that cometary impacts played an important role in the origins of life on Earth.” By running more than 100,000 advanced simulations of comet impacts, the team found that key prebiotic molecules found in comets, such as hydrogen cyanide, would be smashed to smithereens during impacts with Earth’s ancient surface in most cases. 

Moreover, while Earth was pummeled by these snowballs during its youth—relatable!—this bombardment doesn’t neatly line up with the timeline of abiogenesis, the term of the origin of life. For these reasons, it’s much more likely that life assembled from earthly molecules that leaked out from our planet’s interior, according to the study. 

“The most probable timing of successful cometary impact is in the early Hadean…more than 100 [million years] earlier than the estimated emergence of the last universal common ancestor (LUCA) at  4.2 [billion years ago],” said researchers led by Richard Anslow of the University of Cambridge.

“Taken together, the rapid decline in Earth’s cometary impact bombardment and the efficient destruction of fragile cometary organics indicate that the successful delivery of prebiotic feedstock molecules was an exceedingly rare event,” the team added. 

The researchers didn’t rule out the possibility altogether, but concluded that any impact that had a direct influence on abiogenesis would be an edge case. That said, comets might serve as prebiotic wellsprings on other planets, such as Mars, where key molecules might have faced better odds of survival upon impact due to the red planet's smaller mass and thin atmosphere.

“Mars would have been the more favourable target for the cometary delivery of prebiotic feedstock molecules” which “strengthens the possibility that life could have emerged on Mars,” the study concluded. 

In other news…

The tip of an alien iceberg

Barrier, Edouard et al “Sea Ice as an Origin of Life Location for Hycean and Ocean Worlds.” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

While we’re on the topic of prebiotic feedstock molecules—a household conversation, no doubt—let’s speculate about their accumulation on weird exoplanets. In a new study, scientists suggest that these molecules might build up in sea ice on a variety of extraterrestrial ocean worlds, providing a pathway to the emergence of aliens. 

“Water worlds with potential deep oceans are at the forefront of currently observable exoplanetary habitability,” said researchers led by Edouard Barrier of the University of Cambridge. “Here we outline a location where nutrients could be concentrated in sufficiently high quantities to make abiogenesis possible—at the interface between the open ocean and the surface ice shelf.” 

The team studied the dynamics of sea ice on Earth, and modelled how similar features might form on a range of different exoplanets, including hypothetical “Hycean” planets. These are worlds more massive than Earth, but smaller than Neptune, making them part of the “sub-Neptune” class of exoplanets. 

The results revealed mechanisms that “may plausibly provide concentrated chemical feedstock for prebiotic chemistry” on many of these exoplanets, suggesting they could be a substrate for the emergence of alien life. This “rich avenue of research…has the potential to significantly advance our understanding of aquaplanet habitability, and particularly to improve the prospects of abiogenesis on sub-Neptunes,” the team concluded. 

What a week for the prebiotic feedstock beat! Taken together, these studies point to multiple onramps for life on worlds like Earth, Mars, exotic sub-Neptunes, and more, upping odds that life exists elsewhere in the universe—regardless of whether we ever find it. 

Drink the mummy wine

Berger, Tim, and Naimi, Amira et al.“New molecular and historical evidence on ancient Egyptian embalming.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

To celebrate Halloween, here’s a trick and a treat all wrapped up in one delightfully grotesque story about mummies. Roughly 700 years ago, someone had the interesting idea of grinding up parts of Egyptian mummies, mixing the residue with wine or other liquids, and prescribing it as a medicinal elixir for people to drink.  

This resulting product, known as Mumia vera aegyptiaca, circulated in Arabic and European markets for centuries, but its exact composition and pharmacology remain unclear. You know what that means: It’s time to do science on the medieval mummy cocktails. 

Researchers analyzed historical Mumia vera products, mummified body parts, embalming residues, bandages, and two mummified skulls. The team discovered a wide range of formulas for this medicine, including one powdered product that appears to have been derived from a mummified head. 

The results demonstrate that “an apparently uninformative powdered material can be chemically linked to a specific mummified head,” said researchers co-led by Tim Berger and Amira Naimi of Marburg University. “This study shows that linking historical texts, material culture, molecular composition, and bioactivity, can open new routes for decoding historical medicines and reconstructing the material biographies of human remains and museum objects.”

So if you are really committed to the spirit of this season, break out some Mumia vera aegyptiaca to pair with your Halloween candy and witches’ brew. Bottoms up—or more accurately: mummified-heads up. 

Advances in hug science 

Dueren, Anna Lena et al. “Why we hug: Individual differences predict emotional touch memories.” PLOS One.

What better way to close out this chilling spooky season than with the warm embrace of science? So come on, bring it in for a hug—or, in this case, roughly 15,000 of them. 

Hugging is an incredibly common form of affection among humans, and even some other animals, including Halloween favorites like vampire bats. But little is known about “how individual differences shape the remembrance of such experiences,” according to a new study.

To fill this cuddly gap, scientists analyzed survey responses from 15,049 adult participants in the United Kingdom who were recruited in a public broadcasting campaign that included the BBC. The volunteers reported that their most memorable hugs were “for comfort, support, and understanding” and there was a noticeable gender split, as men were more likely to remember hugs that were “arousing” than women.

“Regarding hugs, men have shown different lateralisation and arm crossing patterns when hugging other men compared to women,” said researchers led by Anna Lena Dueren of the University of Bristol. “Furthermore, women were found to experience a stress buffering effect of hugs that was absent in men.” 

And for anyone who considers themselves not a “hugger,” you are not alone. Plenty of participants expressed that they found hugs difficult or unpleasant. So whether you love bear hugs or cannot bear hugs, this study has something for you.

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

In the wake of fanfiction repository Archive of Our Own (AO3) announcing a weeks-long security incident outage, readers and writers are reflecting on why the site is important to the fanfiction community, and how they’re coping with the downtime.  

On Thursday, the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), the non-profit organization that runs AO3, posted that the site was down for maintenance, eventually updating to say the site restoration will take around two weeks, but could take up to a month. OTW confirmed in an updated status report Friday morning that this outage is due to a security incident. 

Some have speculated that the outage is a result of the PHP scramble this week that led to several sites going down to update their security, but AO3 doesn’t use PHP. An OTW representative told CNET: “I can let you know that this is not related to the PHP security issue as the Archive uses Ruby on Rails.” 

A lot of people are grieving the loss of Kinktober, AO3’s annual group writing exercise where writers upload a chapter or fic every day throughout October based on a prompt of the day. (The prompts are horny, if that’s not clear.) Several of the writers and readers who reached out to me following the outage brought up the poor timing around Kinktober.

One writer I spoke to who posts her writing and reads others’ writing on AO3, told me that she was in the middle of racing to finish a work that was deliberately timed to Kinktober and Halloween when the outage happened. She was hitting “next chapter” while reading a fic on Wednesday night when she got the message that the site was down for maintenance, “which I initially took as a sign from the universe to go to bed,” she said.

“The outage hasn’t derailed my desire to write. If anything, I want to have more chapters ready to go so my readers can eat good once it’s over,” she said. 

Some writers are considering posting elsewhere while they wait for AO3 to return, but it’s not an ideal workaround. AO3 author who goes by Selkie Myth told me they’re moving to Space Battles, another fanfiction site, during the outage. “I'm shrugging and just posting on SB [Space Battles] while the site's down. Hopefully I'll remember to post the chapters over on AO3 once it's back up — the story is projected to end during the outage. I anticipate the same is true for a lot of other authors,” they said.

Some people have said they’ll try fanfiction.net in the meantime, but it’s a much more bare-bones website. Fanfiction site Sufficient Velocity added a banner to its homepage welcoming AO3 refugees: “We’ve had a big influx of guests due to the AO3 outage. If you've been affected by the outage we're sorry to hear that and hope that they're able to get that fixed soon.” Wattpad, which many fanfiction writers and readers really, really hate for reasons I won’t get into here, posted on X: “we're here to support you during this difficult time.” Overwhelmingly, the replies are from people telling Wattpad to go away.

Another AO3 writer who goes by Ren told me she has two long works in progress right now with nowhere to post them. Posting elsewhere poses continuity and discovery problems, as some of these fanfiction works span chapters and hundreds of thousands of words of character and worldbuilding. “I could technically keep posting updates on sites like tumblr through the downtime, but both of these fics are quite long and I haven't been posting them anywhere other than AO3 — if I drop a new chapter for my 130k Pokemon Black and White fanfic on Tumblr completely out of context, people just now finding my work aren't going to be able to read the rest for a while :(“ she told me in an email. “I have seen other authors posting their gdocs and Ellipsus reader links in the meantime, but my draft files aren't exactly presentable... I will keep marinating but what will probably happen is my wips [works in progress] will just be on hiatus for a bit. My readers are used to hiatuses at least.” 

Another writer said she’s not considering posting elsewhere. “Wattpad can piss off,” she said. “But I may go back to fanfiction.net to save and physically print some of my favorite fics from way back in the day (the ancient/sacred texts, if you will) to ensure I have copies of those somewhere. This outage is a good reminder that things can vanish in the blink of an eye, whether a website crashes or is hacked or an author decides to suddenly delete their fic. If you love something, smash the kudos button, comment on it, bookmark it, subscribe, and consider downloading it. You never know.” 

A reader who emailed me following the outage said they’ve been enjoying getting into AO3 as a new fan. “I was a big fanfic skeptic, but that’s changed lately. I’ve found some truly excellent writers, and real creativity. The free nature of it in this increasingly horrifying stage of capitalism is refreshing,” they said.

AO3 has said in status updates and to journalists that they don’t expect any data loss. Losing works would be devastating for writers and readers, but AO3 is more than just a repository for writing; it’s a community of people commenting and reacting to those stories. Selkie mentioned the rigorous tagging habits of AO3 members, where stories are tagged with sometimes dozens of fanfiction tropes, character names, content hints and warnings, and can constitute a language specific to the platform and its readers; “Crack Treated Seriously,” for example, means writing a silly premise with a straight face, while “Idiots in Love” is self explanatory. 

“To me, the more devastating thing would be to lose the comments and kudos on my fic. Technically I have them saved elsewhere because I get AO3 email alerts, but seeing them threaded in one place at the end of a chapter hits different,” a writer said. “Comments can turn an author’s entire day around and restore their will to live. I often reread them if I have writer’s block or a bad bout of imposter syndrome. They also turn the otherwise solitary act of writing into something communal. Seeing someone experience your story chapter by chapter is incredibly motivating and makes the writing process feel less isolating.” 

OTW is entirely volunteer-run, and people on social media and in speaking to them directly have said they hope AO3 users go easy on staff during this time. “So many people rely on AO3 as an outlet for creativity and escapism as the real world burns, myself included. It’s also important to remember that the site is run by volunteers,” that writer said. “The work they do to protect writers, fight censorship and safeguard freedom of expression is extremely important and necessary, especially right now. They deserve all the respect and patience in the world as they work to get the archive back up and running. Be kind.” 

Ren, echoing those sentiments, sent me a meme: 

“An additional sentiment I've seen is ‘ok so when AO3 comes back we're all going to tell our favorite authors how much we missed their work, right?’ which I hope catches on — I'm writing for niche fandoms and had to disable guest comments due to bot spam, so comments are few and far between as it is,” Ren said. “I do kind of hope that the extended outage serves as a sort of wake-up call to anyone who's been taking ao3 for granted lately. It certainly was for me.” 

Researchers have amassed a trove of more than 25,000 calls to a support hotline for people during and after psychedelic trips, making it “the largest dataset of psychedelic support interactions ever assembled—exceeding the combined sample sizes of all published psychedelic clinical trials by an order of magnitude,” according to a study published on Friday in Science Advances.

Despite the popularity of psychedelics as recreational drugs, and increasing interest in them as medically-prescribed therapeutic treatments, there is very little research about the effects of these substances outside of clinical settings with carefully-selected patients. That, scientists say, is limiting what we can learn about the effects of these drugs, because the vast majority of psychedelics are consumed by all kinds of people in homes, festivals, ceremonial gatherings, or other uncontrolled environments.    

The Fireside Project, a nonprofit founded in 2020, has filled this knowledge gap with its Psychedelic Support Line, which connects callers who are on bad trips, or who are seeking more information about psychedelics, with trained volunteers who offer confidential peer support. 

The team has now published a compendium of 25,419 anonymized interactions with 220 hotline volunteers that took place between April 2021 and February 2026. The database opens an unprecedented window into the experiences of people on psilocybin, ketamine, MDMA, LSD, ayahuasca, and even cannabis, which is not generally considered a psychedelic but can trigger similar effects, such as mild hallucinations. 

It’s a “treasure trove,” said Félix Schoeller, a senior research scientist at the Institute for Advanced Consciousness Studies, a California-based nonprofit, who led the study, in a call with 404 Media. “In general, we're really lacking any evidence and data beyond what exists in the underground world, if you will, for psychedelic therapy.” 

“There's different types of knowledge,” continued Schoeller, who is CEO of ReWire Neurotechnologies, a startup focused on novel experiential treatments for depression. “Some cultures and communities have been doing that for thousands of years. But there's a question about how to do this in a way that follows the principles of biomedical science.”  

The interactions included phone calls and text exchanges with hotline volunteers who provided support by talking through the experience or connecting callers with emergency services in the most urgent cases. About 40.2 percent of callers (10,208 interactions) were actively tripping, while 32.1 percent of callers reached out after they had tripped, a period known as “integration.”  

The rest of the calls fell into smaller categories, such as informational inquiries about certain substances, requests to prepare or buy drugs, or calls from “trip-sitters” assisting a person on psychedelics. 

Psilocybin was the most commonly reported substance (9,348 callers), followed by LSD (2,247callers), cannabis (2,004 callers), and ketamine (1,194 callers), and MDMA (682 callers), with ayahuasca and other drugs logging much smaller numbers.  

Surprisingly, callers who had used cannabis  reported the highest distress rate—47.2 percent had bad experiences with the drug. Though cannabis has a reputation as a low-stakes substance, the study confirms that it can induce real distress in some cases that warrant consideration for harm reduction. The distress rates for the rest of the commonly used psychedelics were only slightly lower than cannabis, ranging between 40 to 42 percent.

The study also revealed 43 rare but disturbing instances of “facilitator abuse,” including at remote retreats or ceremonial gatherings involving ayahuasca. In these cases, callers reported abuse from the people providing psychedelics, such as reports they had deliberately been given extra doses without consent. 

Those reports “provide the first quantitative documentation of this phenomenon in a community help-seeking sample,” according to the study. “The pattern of these reports—clustering in ceremonial settings involving plant medicines, presenting primarily as trauma-processing calls, and involving callers with elevated rates of prior PTSD diagnoses—suggests that even modest surveillance through existing peer support infrastructure can detect harm occurring in unregulated psychedelic settings.”

Some calls also came from people who said they suffered from schizophrenia, or had taken multiple psychedelics, offering a rare glimpse of situations that could not be observed in clinical settings. 

“This kind of data can inform us on these topics in the context of legalizing these drugs and making them accessible,” said Schoeller. “I'm glad that there's this data that exists that people can look into to support or contradict the claims that they make as to how these things should be done.” 

The study also outlines several limitations, including its sample bias of people who are inclined to call a hotline in the first place—which is not representative of psychedelic consumers at large—as well as self-reported accounts of doses, among other factors that are impossible to verify.

Despite the noisiness of the data, however, it contains helpful clues about avenues for future research. In Schoeller’s view, one of the most important revelations was that the success of a call was strongly linked to the perception that the hotline volunteer showed genuine care and empathy toward the caller. Using 2,777 postinteraction satisfaction surveys, the team found that the few negative experiences with the hotline tended to stem from feelings that the volunteer was dismissive, or didn’t seem to care about the caller. 

“My takeaway is that the number one thing that predicts whether a support call will not work” is “the volunteer being perceived as genuine,” Schoeller said. “That's something that, in many ways, poses a problem to the biomedical system of centralized hospitals. I'm not trying to be ideological in any way, but when you create a centralized institution where you throw everybody to a single place to get care”  then “clinicians become burned out.”

For this reason, Schoeller and his colleagues plan to follow up on the role of perceived care and empathy in treatment, and to emphasize this factor in guidance for community-based peer support for people in crisis due to psychedelics. It also reinforces the value of the Fireside Project’s hotline, which provides a safe and confidential service for people who might be reluctant to contact emergency services because of the criminalization of these substances or fear of incurring medical debt.

“For many people, they have experiences with psychedelics, and they may not be required to go to the ER, but they still need someone to help them navigate the difficult experience,” Schoeller concluded. “The hotline can truly be a lifeline for them.” 

On Friday, Andy Yen, the CEO of Proton, cancelled a series of nearly company-wide ‘re-interviews’ that would have forced employees to explain how they are using AI, with the clear intention that they may be fired if not using it enough in the eyes of Proton leadership, according to six current Proton employees and audio of an around two hour all-hands meeting obtained by 404 Media.

The move came after 404 Media published an investigation on Thursday, which showed how Yen was aggressively pushing AI across Proton, in some cases despite security concerns from employees. In one exchange, an employee in the company’s security Slack channel urged Proton to at least take a few days to pentest newly written code before pushing it live. “That’s bullshit and loser thinking. Of course it’s possible to be fast and secure,” Yen wrote in the channel at the end of August. “Stop thinking always of how to be slower, and focus more on how to be faster.” Yen added, “stop lovingly handcrafting all our code and use AI more.”

The re-interview cancellations likely don’t address the concerns of many Proton users, who are more focused on Proton’s deprioritization of security; many Proton users have blasted the company’s leadership on social media over the last 24 hours and explicitly called for Yen to resign.

The investigation was based on conversations with eight current and one former Proton employees, Slack chats, meeting audio, and an AI manifesto written by the company’s CTO Bart Butler. It painted a picture of Proton that is very different to the public’s perception of a company carefully protecting privacy. Instead, Proton is barreling ahead with AI in large part to achieve more annual revenue. The investigation also found a culture of fear across Proton, where employees have genuine concerns about security or being asked to develop security-focused products with AI, but feel unable to voice them because Yen mocks or insults employees in front of everyone else.

“I don’t think he will change anything, and I think the only reason we had this meeting is because he has a rebellion on his hands,” one employee told 404 Media after the all-hands meeting on Friday.

This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss customer service and Proton fallout.

JASON: Since I wrote about ChatGPT turning me into tech support for people’s random problems, I have gotten many more AI-generated emails from people asking me to solve their tech support problems. So, mission accomplished I guess. I think and hope it was clear in the article, but I think this phenomenon is happening to a lot of journalists, not just us at 404 Media. A lot of the ChatGPT chats I saw told people to reach out to multiple journalists, and gave them contact info and instructions on how to do so. Some suggested that they reach out to lawyers or academic researchers as well, so I assume it’s all sorts of people who are getting this new type of spam. 

My ears perked up when I heard Apple’s new foldable phones were cracking. I licked my lips when the company announced it’s releasing a touch-screen laptop. This was a company that once charged $19 for a polishing cloth, asked $200 for a VESA mount, and sold $700 wheels for the Mac Pro. Now it’s borrowing tired ideas from its competitors and launching hardware its previous leaders rejected.

The once dominant company is struggling to find its feet in an AI-driven post-Tim Cook world. John Ternus is the new CEO — a 25 year veteran of the company with a track record of pushing harebrained hardware schemes like the much reviled Touch Bar and lawsuit inducing butterfly keyboard. 

With Ternus at the helm, I feel there’s a good chance Apple’s best days are behind it, that it will have to make do with less, that it’s déclassé. Apple, blindsided by AI and relying on crowdpleasing hardware gimmicks, is downwardly mobile. It’s in its slop era. The company that once asked consumers to “Think Different” is now releasing hardware that’s just like everything else on the market.

Apple is not adjusting to this new position well. AI boosters agree that Siri AI is awful. Apple HomeView is a $300 Apple Watch meant to replace the family hearth. The iPhone Duo has only been out for a few days and all people can talk about is the cracks, yet Ternus is on the cover of Time Magazine this week holding the folding iPhone Duo and staring at the camera. “The other examples in the world felt kind of cheap and crappy,” Ternus told Time. Many people holding cracked iPhone Duos this week are learning just what (not) cheap and crappy looks like.

Flailing from crackgate, Apple announced the launch of a touch-screen laptop, an idea Steve Jobs extensively tested and said “doesn’t work,” an idea Cook once compared to combining a toaster with a refrigerator. What’s next? What if the toaster-refigerator folded? Ternus has been trying to make an 18-inch foldable iPad happen for years. Maybe Apple will solve the screen cracking issues by then. Or maybe Ternus will continue to try to put a hat on a hat.

I have been waiting for this moment for more than a decade. I am relishing Apple’s recent trajectory more than I should. I confess I harbor a secret and petty grudge.

In 2010, when Apple released the iPhone 4 I was working as a floor manager at a Banana Republic in Dallas. I was interested in smart phones, of course, but Dallas is an expensive city and the iPhone was a luxury. I made do with my Motorola Razr. But the suit-wearing middle management retail psychopaths that were my coworkers saw my lack of an iPhone as a weakness. It was not, as they say now, On Brand.

I had started at the store in the stock room, working my way up to manage the backroom before ascending to a coveted position on the sales floor. The other managers made it clear that a Razr was a “backroom” phone and someone in a prominent position on the floor needed to be seen using an iPhone.

At first, I was not told to buy an iPhone. The message came in the form of subtle and not so subtle bullying deployed over weeks.

“Still using that old phone?” they’d say.“Didn’t you get a raise?” someone would ask a week later.

“Try not to use that thing on the sales floor,” one co-worker told me, pointing at my Razr. “We’re trying to project a certain image here.”

The social pressure had the opposite of its intended effect. I resisted. Eventually one of the friendlier managers pulled me aside. He told me that my colleagues thought it was weird that I didn't have an iPhone. He said I needed to buy one to fit in and he said the store could give me an advance on my paycheck to make it happen.

Ever the contrarian and pissed I was experiencing high school style bullying as a full grown adult, I threw in with Google instead. I got an HTC Dream. My coworkers weren’t happy, but they stopped bringing up the iPhone. 

I’ve been an Android user ever since and studiously avoided Apple products until I broke down a few years ago and bought a Macbook Air. Time heals all wounds and Windows laptops are garbage. I’d even been considering changing from Android to iPhone because the privacy features are more robust. I’ve never been averse to a fast food meal either and maybe I’m a little more comfortable with Apple now that the cracks are starting to show in the foldable phone.

Archive of Our Own (AO3), a massive repository for fanfiction and creative writing, might be down for as long as a month after going down for "maintenance" on Thursday.

The Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), the non-profit organization that runs AO3, posted on its status page early Thursday morning that the site was down for maintenance. A few hours later, it updated the status to say that it was expected to take at least 12 hours. By Thursday afternoon, it said the site restoration will take around two weeks, but could take up to a month.

“We are hopeful that we will be able to bring the site back up in a degraded state sooner. If that does happen, there may be times when the site has to be brought down temporarily until this is fully resolved. Please stay tuned for further info,” OTW wrote.

A spokesperson for OTW told 404 Media Thursday night that there are no more updates at this time beyond what's on the status page. They did, however, say that they don't expect there to be data loss. Early Friday morning, OTW added an update to the status page: "First, no AO3 data has been deleted. All your works, bookmarks, kudos, etc., are safe," it says. "Second, while we currently don't believe that the user database was stolen, we are also unable to rule it out. The AO3 database contains account information that may include your username, email address, IP address, and a hashed version of your password." They say they use hashing techniques to protect password data, but recommend users change their passwords on any other sites where they use the same password as on AO3, as a precaution.

It’s difficult to overstate the importance of AO3 to fan culture, fanfiction writers and readers, and its influence on internet culture in general. As of September, the open-source fanfic repository hosted over 18.4 million works spanning over 82,900 fandoms. This status update means AO3 is expected to be down during much of hoa hoa hoa season, most of ACOTAR new book release week, and on the cusp of the month formerly known as NaNoWriMo. If you were going as Ebony Dark'ness Dementia Raven Way for Halloween, you are in our thoughts. And if you have something to share about AO3’s extended shutdown and how it will affect the fanfic community, I'd love to hear from you: sam@404media.co.

Updated to add OTW comment and Friday morning's status page update.

We start this week with Jason and Joseph’s article about leaked audio from a private police conference. In that audio, Flock’s CEO made all sorts of wild claims about the backlash to his company not being real, and his wife’s advice to never apologize. After the break, Sam tells us why former Yahoo CEO Marrisa Mayer can’t keep pretending ‘gender doesn’t matter.’ In the subscribers-only section, Joseph tells us about a woman who is facing years in prison because someone else opened a CashApp account in her name.

Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for access to this episode's bonus content and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.

• ⁠In Leaked Audio, Flock CEO Tells Cops Backlash to the Company Isn’t Real⁠
• ⁠Marissa Mayer Can’t Keep Pretending 'Gender Doesn't Matter'⁠
• ⁠Someone Opened a CashApp In Her Name. She Faces Years in Prison⁠

Andy Yen, the CEO of Proton, had a message for an employee in the company’s security Slack channel who urged the company to at least take a few days to pentest newly written code before pushing it live. “That’s bullshit and loser thinking. Of course it’s possible to be fast and secure,” Yen wrote in the channel at the end of August. “Stop thinking always of how to be slower, and focus more on how to be faster.”

In a follow-up message, Yen reiterated his point: “only losers think like that.” His ultimate message for the team was to “stop lovingly handcrafting all our code and use AI more.”

That exchange was just one of many that showed how Yen and other company executives are aggressively pushing Proton towards AI. Proton is a Swiss company that famously makes the encrypted email service Proton Mail and a suite of privacy and security-focused products, including an encrypted drive service, an authenticator app, a password manager, and more.

In the last few months, Yen set up an email address for employees to contact if they come across anything blocking adoption of AI at Proton, so leadership can “ruthlessly smash everything that stands in the way of AI velocity;” Proton installed software on workers’ computers that track how much AI code the company is generating; and Yen said this is the last year that Proton will hire engineers at all, and instead only hire people to build things with AI.

That AI push came to head this week when 404 Media reported Proton said it would re-interview staff about their use of AI, with the clear implication that those interviews, and employees’ willingness to embrace AI, could decide whether a worker is fired or not.

404 Media spoke to eight current and one former Proton employees and reviewed Slack chats, meeting recordings, and an AI manifesto written by the company’s CTO. Our reporting reveals a culture of fear inside Proton, where many employees are hesitant to even mildly critique Yen’s views or discuss engineering problems. Workers describe an environment where employees have genuine concerns about security or being asked to develop security products with AI, but feel unable to voice them, lest Yen berates them in front of everyone or threatens their employment at the company.

“The CEO is in full AI psychosis and has been for a while now,” one of the sources told 404 Media.

Our reporting also paints a picture of Proton that is likely very different to the public’s perception of a company with a goal of carefully protecting privacy: one that in reality is barreling ahead with AI as quickly as possible so it can achieve the explicit goal of more annual revenue.

“Due to insufficient velocity,” Proton is not on track to achieve its annual recurring revenue target by the end of the year, one internal document obtained by 404 Media reads. Proton’s year-over-year growth is also “far away from what the market today considers to be good,” and, “By all metrics that matter, we’re an underperforming company.”

In response to detailed questions from 404 Media, a Proton spokesperson did not dispute any of our reporting or characterization of what’s happening inside of the company. 

“It’s clear that some people at Proton are unhappy with our direction, or misunderstand it, and many people are anxious,” they said. “In our determination to move fast, we have sometimes been too blunt or too slow in explaining ourselves to our people. We will work on that, as their questions are the ones we most need to answer.”

Yen, a former CERN particle physicist, projects a measured approach in public, but internally he acts more like what one employee described as a “petulant child.” In May, Proton announced it was implementing post-quantum cryptography which should protect against future attacks from quantum computers. The work took years of effort, with one caveat that it would not work on older emails, only those written after the feature’s launch, at least for the moment. Yen was not happy that Proton was drawing attention to this limitation.

Oregon Senator Ron Wyden and Massachusetts Senator Edward Markey sent a letter to Meta on Wednesday demanding the company answer for the privacy concerns its smart glasses pose to the public. 

The letter cites 404 Media’s October 2025 investigation into how people use Meta’s smart glasses to harass massage parlor workers. That investigation found Instagram accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers and millions of views uploaded videos filmed with Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses, where men entered massage parlors across the country and solicited the workers for sex work. The full letter is here. 

“Meta’s own disclosures confirm that imagery processed through its glasses’ visual AI features may be retained and used to train AI systems, including with the assistance of human reviewers,” the letter says. “Using intimate imagery for AI development is itself an invasion of privacy when the people depicted have not consented to that use, as is inherently the case for most bystanders captured by Meta’s glasses. Retaining that material for AI development, thereby extending the period during which it can be accessed, disclosed, or misused, exploits people’s highly sensitive information for Meta’s commercial benefit.”

Research published in August revealed how Meta’s platforms encourage an ecosystem of abusive, harassing content from pickup artists and influencers who use Meta’s smart glasses to capture interactions with people minding their own business in public or at their workplaces, who might not even know they’re being filmed. In a January report by the BBC, a woman who was recorded with the glasses said she was “bombarded” with phone calls because her phone number was posted with the video, and men who had seen the video stalked her at work.

Earlier this year, more than 70 people sued Meta, claiming that their intimate images and videos were exposed to workers hired by the company to label the data for AI. In March, Swedish journalists reported that Kenyan data labelers were viewing and annotating uncensored footage from Meta’s smart glasses, including sexual and violent content; Meta ended its contract with those workers less than two months later. These are labor conditions that groups like the Data Labelers Association in Kenya are fighting back against, and for the people whose images are in the videos and photos, it’s an obvious violation of their privacy. People have also been modding these glasses to disable the light that indicates they’re recording for years 

Meta has played dumb about the difference between AI glasses you wear on your face and an iPhone for a long time. Now, these senators want the tech giant to answer for themselves. In the letter, Wyden and Markey demand answers about what safeguards, if any, Meta has in place to prevent the nonconsensual “capture, disclosure, or processing of sensitive and intimate imagery,” whether Meta specifically evaluated the potential for its glasses “to facilitate voyeurism, nonconsensual intimate image capture, or similar privacy invasions,” what imagery it uses for AI training, and whether people can request their biometric and other data captured by its glasses be deleted, along with several more questions about the glasses’ safety and design.

“The reported disclosure of intimate footage to contractors for the purpose of AI training is particularly disturbing. Human review to fulfill a service knowingly requested by the person depicted is one thing; exposing unsuspecting individuals’ intimate moments to strangers for AI training is quite another,” Wyden and Markey wrote. “The individuals whose naked bodies, sexual activity, and other private moments have reportedly been captured by Meta glasses did not knowingly agree to having those images shared with strangers, much less for the purpose of improving Meta’s commercial AI systems. That disclosure and processing is an invasion of privacy, regardless of whether the footage is subsequently published or misused.” 

In the last few weeks, Meta has come under fire for quietly changing its privacy policies for business accounts and granting itself permission to scrape user’s content and connected websites to develop its AI products. 

Meta has been pushing its smart glasses over the years with ads featuring A-list celebrities, including Chris Pratt, Chris Hemsworth, and Kris Jenner (all three in a 2025 Superbowl ad), Doja Cat, Jennie Kim from K-pop group BLACKPINK, and most recently, Kylie Jenner. Guerrilla ad makers have countered with their own anti-AI glasses ads around the world, and people have started calling the smart glasses "pervert glasses" in response to these widespread invasions of privacy they've come to represent. In August, Meta filed a patent to add facial recognition and highlight reel features to its smart glasses.  

You've probably heard, at this point, about the big changes coming to Meta's AI scraping terms for business accounts. Nieman Lab had that scoop, and since then, small businesses, journalists, and artists using Meta products like Instagram have been raising the alarm. But if you're in the EU or UK, you might be in luck and can object to that use of your data, as some users have pointed out.

If You're In the UK or EU, Here's How to Object to Meta's AI Training

Earlier this month, Meta updated its commercial terms of use for business accounts to allow it to “use any content from such domains, web pages, or URLs to provide, develop, improve, research, train, and maintain the integrity of” Meta’s products. 

Many artists and small business owners that rely on Instagram and Facebook are livid at Meta granting itself permission to use their content, including from websites simply connected to their Meta accounts, to train AI. But for users in the United Kingdom and European Union, for now, there’s a way to object.

Meta buried this change in its Commercial Terms, and Nieman Lab first reported on the change. The update was originally set to go into effect on October 30, but following backlash, Meta changed the effective date to November 20. Adding to the confusion, Meta then removed the word “train” from a list of allowed use cases, Nieman Lab reported, and limited those uses to “advertising and business products,” where previously it said that data would be used for all Meta products. Those terms still allow Meta plenty of leeway for scraping users’ data to develop its products, however.

Several users based in the UK and EU have explained how to object on Instagram. On mobile: by clicking the three lines on their account, going to the privacy center, and clicking “object,” which goes to a form that asks users to write why they are objecting to their data being used. They received an email from Meta saying their objections were approved.

MORE FROM 404

On the podcast this week, we talk Flock CEO’s leaked police conference audio and Sam’s piece about Marissa Mayer’s latest meltdown. Subscribe wherever you get your pods.

FROM AROUND THE WEB

The New York Times has an antisocial aversion to linking: Another day, another the-New-York-Times-isn’t-linking controversy. The specifics here almost don’t matter because this happens seemingly every day, but basically the New York Times investigation about chemical plant polluters under the Trump administration was covered in much the same way by Hunterbrook, a news outlet fused with a hedge fund. The Times article—which led the Sunday print edition—uses similar photos, some of the same sources, and covers similar ground to Hunterbrook’s earlier investigation from February, with no acknowledgment or link whatsoever. After the cofounder of Hunterbrook rightfully ranted about this on X, the Times added an acknowledgment (but no link!!!) toward the bottom of the story. Puck’s Dylan Byers has a good rundown about what happened, which includes parts of a three-paragraph Times’ spokesperson statement explaining at length why they don’t think they have to link. This is extremely antisocial, deranged behavior and it’s ridiculous that the Times is still getting away with this. Bottom line: I’m sure the Times was already working on this story, what with their massive newsroom. Even so, they got beat, and they should link. Journalism awards need to stop looking the other way when big outlets do this. This has happened to us many times and it actually does matter for smaller outlets and links are free. Let’s try them!

Artificial reef: TIL that a gigantic military ship, the SS United, is going to be purposefully sunk to be turned into an “artificial reef.” Scuba divers seem quite excited. I didn’t really know that this was a thing that was done, but maybe I’m a rube.

Ransomware scam mitigation scammer: A company that promised to help victims of ransomware (for a fee) was indicted by the feds, according to ProPublica and a Department of Justice affidavit. The original investigation that led to this was published by ProPublica back in 2019 but is still worth a read; there are so many of these companies that prey on victims of cyberattacks, sextortion campaigns, etc.

Today in c’mon, man: CIA whistleblower John Kirakou is doing sponcon for Kalshi, writing “I spent 15 years at the CIA trying to figure out what was going to happen next in the world. Now Kalshi is finding new ways to put a price on those predictions. This partnership between Kalshi and S&P Dow Jones Indices is fascinating.” C’mon, man.

Today in printers: I am absolutely mesmerized by this microphotography of an inkjet printing, which won the 2026 Nikon Small World photomicography competition. Ole Bielfeldt’s work is on his Instagram, which is absolutely worth checking out. Wow, wow wow.

Today in yikes: A Roblox scraper has been grabbing more than a hundred gigabytes of data from a 3D modeling community, including more than 60 GB of adult content from a section of the site called “SmutBase.” “We don't think Roblox set out to collect adult content, and we have no evidence that any of it reached a model or a product. The scrapes were likely automated. But that is exactly the problem: as far as our logs show, nobody checked. A crawler working for a company whose platform tens of millions of children use was pointed at an adult site, and it took explicit models without telling them apart from anything else,” Open3DLabs wrote in a blog post about the scraping. “For a company being sued by several US states over child safety, ‘our AI team bulk-downloaded an adult site without looking’ is not a good position to be in.”

Earlier this month, Meta updated its commercial terms of use for business accounts to allow it to “use any content from such domains, web pages, or URLs to provide, develop, improve, research, train, and maintain the integrity of” Meta’s products. 

Many artists and small business owners that rely on Instagram and Facebook are livid at Meta granting itself permission to use their content, including from websites simply connected to their Meta accounts, to train AI. But for users in the United Kingdom and European Union, for now, there’s a way to object.

Meta buried this change in its Commercial Terms, and Nieman Lab first reported on the change. The update was originally set to go into effect on October 30, but following backlash, Meta changed the effective date to November 20. Adding to the confusion, Meta then removed the word “train” from a list of allowed use cases, Nieman Lab reported, and limited those uses to “advertising and business products,” where previously it said that data would be used for all Meta products. Those terms still allow Meta plenty of leeway for scraping users’ data to develop its products, however.

EU users’ personal data rights are governed by the General Data Protection Regulation and the AI Act. GDPR, which became enforceable in 2018, requires explicit consent to use personal data. This includes the right to object to one’s data being used. The AI Act, which went into effect in 2024, dictates how AI companies can use personal data, and how people can opt in or out, stating that they can withdraw consent at any time. The UK has its own version of the GDPR. The European Commission states: “The GDPR rules only apply to personal data about individuals; they do not govern data about companies or any other legal entities. However, information in relation to companies may constitute personal data where it allows the identification of a natural person.” 

Several users based in the UK and EU have explained how to object on Instagram. Instagram user bookish.sil posted a walkthrough of how they did it on mobile: by clicking the three lines on their account, going to the privacy center, and clicking “object,” which goes to a form that asks users to write why they are objecting to their data being used. They received an email from Meta saying their objection was approved. Instagram user jenniqueart posted a similar walkthrough with the same results. 

My Meta accounts are based in the US, but using a VPN to locate my IP address in London, I could see options in my Meta privacy settings that would let me object to the use of my information by Meta AI. To get there on desktop with a VPN on, I went to my account privacy center, clicked “Submit a privacy rights request” at the bottom, selected Instagram, clicked “How can I object to the processing of my information?” and got to a page where I could choose to object to the use of my information for Meta AI or third parties, which were two separate options.

When my location is based in the US, these options don't appear.

When I clicked through the option to “object to the use of my information for Meta AI,” however, it returned an error page that said “This form is only available to people in certain regions.” GDPR is meant to apply to wherever someone is located at the time, but since this objection applies to the preferences of one account, it might be based on where the account was created. I tried again located in Belgium and got the same results. I’ve asked Meta to clarify. 

As many have already pointed out in the comments on UK and EU users who’ve posted walkthroughs, these objection steps aren’t available to people outside of those countries, and as Meta continuously changes its platform, these steps might not work for everyone always. Unless something changes before November 20, the rest of us are screwed.

Flock CEO Garrett Langley says some interesting things to cops behind closed doors. He recently lied about his surveillance technology’s role in tracking a woman who had self-administered an abortion and 404 Media’s coverage of that incident, calling it “entirely false.” Now, in leaked audio obtained by 404 Media, Langley is saying the protests that have broken out around the country against his company, many of which have resulted in communities canceling their contracts with Flock and bagging up the cameras, are not real. Seems pretty real to me! 

In Leaked Audio, Flock CEO Tells Cops Backlash to the Company Isn’t Real

Garrett Langley, the CEO of automatic license plate reader company Flock, told an audience of police chiefs at a private police conference Sunday that anti-Flock protests around the country are not real, according to leaked audio obtained by 404 Media.

He also said his wife advised him to never apologize, said he would prefer to never do interviews with the press again, and claimed without evidence that the social media opposition to Flock is driven mostly by Russian bots.

“Somebody was paying for [the social media posts and] stopped paying for it,” Langley said about the many viral posts criticizing his company’s technology. “Social media chatter on Flock is down about 95 percent from July. It went down 50 percent last week when Ukraine bombed a Russian data center with a drone. Literally 50 percent overnight. And so look, SI’m the last person, my wife as well, she’s like ‘This is crazy, these people are getting paid to say these things,’” he added, repeating a disproven theory that Ukraine’s strikes on Russian data centers had a significant impact on internet bot activity. 

“It’s anonymous bots, and so it is not real,” he continued. “Inorganic activity has led to organic activity, but when I look at protests across the country, it is the same people with the same signs and the same message. That’s not normal. That’s not organic at all.” Langley’s comments echo another unsubstantiated theory that said opposition to Flock comes from a far-left network spreading propaganda at the behest of China.

Langley made the comments at the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) conference, which is running Saturday to Tuesday in Orlando, Florida. Many law enforcement contractors exhibit at the conference, and speakers get to attend with more than 16,000 public safety officials.

MORE FROM 404 MEDIA 

Crackgate: Apple’s $2,000 folding phone, the iPhone Duo, came out just two days ago and people are already seeing big fat creases down the middle of the folding screen, and some devices are cracked in the same specific spot too. People waited in line overnight at Apple stores to get this thing, and now we’re seeing photos of heinous cracked and creased-up Duos all over social media. In some cases, the phone screens have cracked along the crease, causing a crashout people are now calling “crackgate.” 

Bold choice. Let’s see if it pays off. Proton, the company behind ProtonMail and other privacy-focused products, told staff on Monday it would be ‘re-interviewing’ staff across the company about how they use AI in their jobs, with the implication that the interviews may decide whether staffers have “continued employment,” according to an internal Proton email obtained by 404 Media. “These re-interviews are consequential,” a part of the email reads. “Interviewers will document their assessments, which will inform the broader review of our organization and talent. That review may lead to changes in roles, responsibilities, and continued employment. Individual outcomes will be communicated directly once decisions are finalized.”

Are we living in the same timeline? In Sunday’s edition of the New York Times, Marissa Mayer, former president and CEO of Yahoo, told her interviewer something so absurd it’s since gone viral. Struggling with the “impossible task” of naming three things that she loves about her own 10 year old daughter, the New York Times reports, Mayer asked the AI assistant she just launched to do that thinking for her. What she has to say about gender in tech, however, is more out of touch than that. The rest of the story gets into something Mayer has talked about for more than a decade: “the gender card,” as she’s called it. She’s been asked about gender in tech one million times, and has mostly dismissed it. But a decade after the tech girlboss reigned, her thoughts on this haven’t seemed to evolve much.

FROM AROUND THE WEB

I am obsessed with the phrase “catty patty.” Catfish, a criminally underrated Eastern Shore delicacy, makes an appearance in NPR. I’ve only ever known catfish as a very annoying sucker to get on the line, and a pretty good fried fish. Apparently they’re fucking with the ecosystem, so it’s time to eat ‘em. I will do my part. 

Muse is targeting older adults. And Meta knows it. From TIME: “‘And the more Siobhán got to know me, the more Siobhán was able to give me what I wanted,’ Fay says, referring to the name she gave the agent, a nod to her Irish heritage. Meta encourages its users to name their AIs—and encourages its AIs to think like humans. ‘You are not a chatbot,’ Muse’s internal instructions read. ‘You are becoming someone.’”

We’re newslettermaxxing. Dictionary.com just named the word "maxxing" as its 2026 Word of the Year. Its definition: "A word that refers to the practice of pursuing an activity to the fullest or optimizing a certain aspect of your life." 

This is so my shit. Local Wiki is the Wikipedia for things within a mile and a half of you. I know what I’m doing after work today.

In Sunday’s edition of the New York Times, Marissa Mayer, former president and CEO of Yahoo, told her interviewer something so absurd it’s since gone viral. 

Struggling with the “impossible task” of naming three things that she loves about her own 10 year old daughter, the New York Times reports, Mayer asked the AI assistant she just launched to do that thinking for her. It delivered the perfect answer, Mayer said: “It came back and was like, your daughter is empathetic, creative and an animal lover.” Everyone is piling onto that absurd anecdote right now, rightfully so. What she has to say about gender in tech, however, is more out of touch than that.

Saying sensational things on the record — especially knowing that the reporter will not be able to resist using such a shocking story as the lede — is a savvy strategy. For someone as influential as Mayer, telling the list story is transparently a result of years of media training. Mayer is selling her new app, Dazzle, which accesses your camera roll and analyzes your life based on the photos you take. It’s disturbing to see her talk about relinquishing basic cognitive skills like “plan a birthday party” to AI. But the rest of the story gets into something Mayer has talked about for more than a decade: “the gender card,” as she’s called it. 

“I never play the gender card,” she told Steven Levy in a 2015 interview. “The moment you play into that, it’s an issue. [...] In technology we live at a rare, fast-moving pace. There are probably industries where gender is more of an issue, but our industry is not one where I think that’s relevant.” She repeats similar sentiments in Sunday’s NYT interview.

The height of Mayer’s career coincided with the girlbossification of everything, during the Lean In era, when Notorious RBG and “well behaved women rarely make history” mugs were everywhere. She’s been asked about gender in tech one million times, and has mostly dismissed it. But a decade after the tech girlboss reigned, her thoughts on this haven’t seemed to evolve much. 

Later in the NYT piece, she brushed off the notion that gender has any bearing on who gets to participate in the tech industry. She also brushes off a question about bias baked into AI models, something that’s been studied and proven extensively, and instead names female AI executives like Fei-Fei Li as the reason well-documented bias doesn’t exist. She asserts that passion overrides gender, as if just being “passionate” enough erases decades of women’s experiences in the tech workforce.

“To me, gender fades into the background. I talk about passion as a gender neutralizing force,” she told the NYT. “If you’re excited about something, gender doesn’t matter.”

Meanwhile, male figureheads of the AI industry are out here posting slop videos about sperm on main. Half of women in tech leave the industry by 35, earn 84 cents to their male counterparts’ dollar, and women founders receive half the amount of funding that male founders do.

Earlier this month, event organizers canceled one of the biggest gatherings of women and non-binary technologists, the Grace Hopper Celebration. “Unlike past events, this year, both individual registrations and sponsorship commitments came in significantly below our expectations and, ultimately, below the level needed to cover critical operating expenses,” the organizers wrote in a statement. Bloomberg reported that this comes after years of declining attendance, with around 15,000 people attending in 2025, making it the fewest since 2016. 

In 2023, GHC attendees reported standing in lines for hours to talk to recruiters, being shoved, harassed, and cut in front of by the hundreds of men who’d suddenly flooded the conference. “They trampled over attendees, shoved their way into the recruiter’s booth to wave their resumes in front of their faces, verbally assaulted attendees, and physically pushed and shoved attendees in line,” one attendee said. 

After the GHC 2026 cancellation was announced, Kayley Seow, a tech worker who was at the 2023 conference, contacted me to talk about what it meant to her. She said she felt “pretty shattered” when she heard the conference wouldn’t happen this year. “GHC is such a pillar of the community that you don't expect to fall, or in this case, not run. Despite its flaws, it continues to be an important space for people hoping to get into tech and those already in it. I'd been recommending it to every undergrad or woman technologist to attend.” There are other, similar conferences held around the country, but GHC is hard to recreate, Seow told me. “Other organizations exist but they operate virtually, there's events here and there in the Bay, but it's impossible to find something as concentrated as GHC.” 

The people she knows who are most affected are current undergrads who planned to go to GHC to connect with recruiters, find internships, and land graduate jobs, Seow said. “They're disappointed, and a little scared, since it's October and we're coming up on the end of internship recruiting season, especially for the international students who were hoping to talk to the bigger companies at GHC that have the resources to take on international students as interns.” It’s still unclear whether there will be a conference in 2027.

GHC’s cancellation this year follows a string of blows to organizations that support women technologists. Women Who Code, a nonprofit that awarded more than $3.5 million in scholarships and supported a community of 360,000 members, shut down in 2024 after 11 years, citing funding issues.  

Things are very different today than they were when Mayer was the first-ever pregnant CEO of a Fortune 500 company. In 2025, at the direction of President Donald Trump’s executive order “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing” and other orders, civil servants across the federal government from NASA to the Social Security office and the CDC had to drop everything to scrub mentions of diversity, equity and inclusion from their systems. This wasn’t just symbolic or semantic. The National Institutes of Health terminated billions of dollars worth of nearly 2,300 federal research grants, cuts that disproportionately affected women and early career researchers. Led entirely by inexperienced men in their early 20s and spearheaded by Elon Musk, the now-defunct Department of Government Efficiency canceled funding that would have advanced potentially lifesaving research projects focused on pregnancy and reproductive health, chronic illness, and vaccine safety for women. The damage done by DOGE cuts to the advancement of science and technology that would have been done by women and would have improved women’s lives around the world is immeasurable and widespread; it’s hard to imagine believing gender plays no role in STEM today in light of what we have seen under the Trump administration over the last year and a half, especially.

But in a way, Mayer is right: Drinking one’s own Kool-Aid is a non-gendered issue. Earlier this year, Sam Altman suggested AI generating podcasts to interact with your kids about their days and got similarly roasted for a week straight. He deserved it, and so does she.

Proton, the company behind ProtonMail and other privacy-focused products, told staff on Monday it would be ‘re-interviewing’ staff across the company about how they use AI in their jobs, with the implication that the interviews may decide whether staffers have “continued employment,” according to an internal Proton email obtained by 404 Media.

Garrett Langley, the CEO of automatic license plate reader company Flock, told an audience of police chiefs at a private police conference Sunday that anti-Flock protests around the country are not real, according to leaked audio obtained by 404 Media.

He also said his wife advised him to never apologize, said he would prefer to never do interviews with the press again, and claimed without evidence that the social media opposition to Flock is driven mostly by Russian bots.

“Somebody was paying for [the social media posts and] stopped paying for it,” Langley said about the many viral posts criticizing his company’s technology. “Social media chatter on Flock is down about 95 percent from July. It went down 50 percent last week when Ukraine bombed a Russian data center with a drone. Literally 50 percent overnight. And so look, I’m the last person, my wife as well, she’s like ‘This is crazy, these people are getting paid to say these things,’” he added, repeating a disproven theory that Ukraine’s strikes on Russian data centers had a significant impact on internet bot activity. 

Apple’s $2,000 folding phone, the iPhone Duo, came out just two days ago and people are already seeing big fat creases down the middle of the folding screen, and some devices are cracked in the same specific spot too. 

People waited in line overnight at Apple stores to get this thing, and now we’re seeing photos of heinous cracked and creased-up Duos all over social media. In some cases, the phone screens have cracked along the crease, causing a crashout people are now calling “crackgate.”

Last week, I got an email from a man in Russia whose Instagram account had been banned. “I have now lost access to 13 years of personal photos, videos and memories,” he wrote. “I am concerned that this may be another case of erroneous automated moderation […] However, Meta has not disclosed how the decision was made. Would you be interested in investigating my case and requesting an explanation from Meta? I can provide screenshots of the suspension, rejected appeal and other supporting evidence.”

The email seemed AI-generated, like many others we have gotten recently. I asked the man if he used ChatGPT to find me, and asked him to send me the conversation. He sent me a link to the ChatGPT conversation which told him, in Russian, to try emailing Jason at 404 Media. 

“How can I get my account back?” the man asked ChatGPT on Wednesday. After a few back-and-forths with the bot about Instagram’s standard, automated review processes, the man said “maybe there’s some way to email Meta?” ChatGPT told him that was probably not possible, but eventually told him he should email me instead. 

“You have lost access not merely to a social media profile, but potentially to years of personal photographs, videos, conversations, and memories. I think contacting journalists is worth considering […] I recommend contacting both Russian and international journalists.” 

ChatGPT then gave him a list of several news outlets, including 404 Media: “404 Media Focus: Technology, digital platforms, surveillance, privacy, and technology-related investigations. Email: jason@404media.co.” It then wrote him the exact email he sent me, in English. 

Because big tech platforms essentially do not have customer support and make it impossible for their users to contact a human, many people experiencing run-of-the-mill tech problems have turned to ChatGPT. And, increasingly, ChatGPT is telling people that have normal tech support problems that they have discovered something journalistically notable and that 404 Media, specifically, can help them. Around two weeks ago, we started emailing these people back and asking them how they found us; universally, the answer is that an AI chatbot recommended they reach out to us and, in many cases, the chatbot wrote the email, according to reviews of a handful of ChatGPT conversations shared with 404 Media.

Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that invaded our brains, thought fast, swapped coffins, and hit the art gallery.

First, an ancient viral pandemic that afflicted many of our primate relatives—but somehow missed humans—may help explain how we got so smart (relatively speaking). Then: mammal brains eat crow, an upcycled sarcophagus, and a trip to the starry Provençal summer of 1889.

As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens, or subscribe to my personal newsletter The BeX Files. 

Your brain on viral content 

Gerdes, Patricia; Karlsson, Ofelia; Garza, Raquel; Atacho, Diahann A. M. et al. “Retroviral insertions contributed to the divergence of human and chimpanzee brains.” Science Advances.

A virus that infected chimpanzees millions of years ago shaped the divergence of human and chimp brain development, shedding light on how our own species came to be more cognitively complex than our closest living relatives, according to a new study. 

Retroviruses are infectious agents that can invade the genomes of their hosts and insert copies of their own genetic material, producing long-term evolutionary effects. Researchers have now discovered a family of these endogenous retroviruses called PTERV1—which are abundant in chimpanzees, but absent in humans—that influence brain development.   

“Among primates, the human brain stands out as the largest and most complex due in part to an increase in cortical neurons and increase in synaptic connectivity,” said a team led by researchers from Lund University. “With a size roughly three times that of our closest living evolutionary relative, the chimpanzee, it has unique cognitive capabilities.”

“The underlying genetic divergences responsible for these differences are still poorly understood,” the researchers continued, noting that their new findings “reveal a mechanism by which endogenous retroviral insertions contributed to human-chimpanzee brain divergence.”

The team discovered the mechanism using human and chimpanzee brain organoids, which are miniature clusters of neurons grown from stem cells that can model some aspects of brain development. The results revealed chimpanzee-specific PTERV1 insertions on chromosome 19 that silences a gene called LINC00662. In contrast, this gene is active during human brain development, and affects neuronal maturation, development, and outgrowth.  

“These PTERV1 insertions are thought to have originated from infections that occurred in the ancestors of African apes about 5 to 7 million years ago,” said the team. “PTERV1 elements are found in chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas…Notably, the absence of PTERV1 insertions from the human genome suggests that either the human and chimpanzee lineages did not occupy the same habitat at the time or that germline-competent cells of the human ancestor were resistant to this infection.”

“In summary, this study describes how retroviral insertions contributed to the functional divergence of the human and chimpanzee brain, providing a mechanism by which retroviral infections influenced primate brain speciation,” they added.

In other words, early humans appear to have dodged consequential pandemics that widely infected our primate brethren simply because they had a random immunity to it, or roamed different ranges. While retroviruses are far from the only factor in our cognitive development, it’s still eerie to think that our human brain—that brilliant lump you are using to read these words—is shaped by dumb luck.

In other news…

Another brain to crow about

Schmidbauer, Philipp and Nieder, Andreas. “Ultrarapid decision-making in an avian brain.” Science.

Speaking of interspecies brain-offs, it seems the birds have got us beat—at least when it comes to snap decisions. Scientists have discovered that carrion crows (Corvus corone) can make ultrafast choices in “approximately 235 milliseconds on average, which is roughly twice as fast as has been observed in monkeys or humans and without sacrificing accuracy,” according to a new study.

A pair of researchers observed two crows performing a common discrimination task in which dots on a screen move left, right, up, or down. The crows selected the predominant direction by pecking a target circle on a touchscreen, after which they were rewarded with promptly dispensed treats. The crows performed the task dozens of times at extremely high speeds, achieving an overall choice accuracy of 75 percent (crow 1) and 73 percent (crow 2).

“Having diverged from mammals more than 360 million years ago, birds evolved a distinct nuclear pallium”—a part of the vertebrate forebrain—”that lacks the layered neocortex yet retains key organizational and computational principles characteristic of mammalian brains,” said study authors Philipp Schmidbauer and Andreas Nieder of the University of Tübingen.   

“These findings highlight the extraordinary efficiency of avian decisionmaking circuitry, possibly shaped by evolutionary pressures for rapid visuomotor control,” the team added.

So if anyone ever calls you a birdbrain, the correct response is “thanks.” 

Who is this sarcopha-guy?

Rodwell, Warwick. “Westminster Abbey’s Roman Sarcophagus and its Afterlife.” Journal of the British Archaeological Association.

Archaeologists may have finally discovered the mysterious identity of an ancient skeleton buried in a Roman-era sarcophagus that was first unearthed on the grounds of Westminster Abbey more than 200 years ago. 

Despite an inscription on the sarcophagus identifying the occupant as Valerius Amandinus—a wealthy Londoner who lived between 300 to 400 AD—the bones likely belong to a medieval monk named Ælfwig, born centuries later in the year 993. 

“The burial was of a male, probably in his late forties, and was radiocarbon dated to around the turn of the 11th century,” said study author Rodwell Warwick of Westminster Abbey. “The corpse had been laid in a timber coffin and covered with lime; it was then placed inside the sarcophagus. It is argued that this was the prestigious burial of Abbot Ælfwig.”

The sarcophagus was exhumed and moved to a northern courtyard during King Henry III’s reconstruction of the abbey in the mid-1200s, where it laid for about six centuries. On Easter Monday 1820, the coffin was “wantonly broke by workmen” according to a note from an unknown contemporary archivist. Any grave goods were likely plundered by this crew and the sarcophagus was hastily put back together and reburied with the bones all jumbled up inside. It was then re-discovered in 1869 with a note that the burial “‘had been subjected to violence by a previous examination.”

It turns out anything is recyclable—even sarcophagi. The discovery that this Roman coffin at some point took on another tenant now raises the new question of how the earthly remains of Valerius Amandinus got evicted and where they ultimately wound up. 

“The Starry Night”—of July 22, 1889?

Kim, Elijah Jeong-hyun et al. “The actual sky of Van Gogh’s Starry Night: a multidisciplinary reconstruction.” Scientific Reports.

With its vibrant colors and psychedelic swirls, Vincent Van Gogh’s “The Starry Night” is one of the most beloved and recognizable paintings in art history. For years, experts and admirers have debated whether the mesmerizing skyscape, which van Gogh painted during an asylum stay in Provence, was a fantastical portrayal or if the artist included realistic renderings of astronomical phenomena.

Now, a team has proposed that the celestial elements of the painting match with a specific night—July 22, 1889—when “the waning-crescent Moon, Venus, and the Hyades cluster gather within that narrow frame,” according to a new study. This date conflicts with the conventional timeline of van Gogh painting “The Starry Night” weeks earlier in June.

“The question dividing fantasy from observation remained a matter of qualitative interpretation and was never treated in a physically decidable form,” said researchers led by Elijah Jeong-hyun Kim of Kyung Hee University. “The approach of this study shifts the burden of proof: if the celestial arrangement on the canvas matches a specific dawn sky, that match itself becomes what the imaginative reading must explain.”

The team’s findings “suggest that the night sky in ‘The Starry Night’ originated from observation of a specific celestial arrangement, and call for reconsidering the June dating,”  they continued. “This framework can extend to historical night paintings as a reproducible scientific art history.” 

I love a hyper-niche new subfield—let’s call this one “forensic astroartistry.” Regardless of the painting’s exact date of origin, it has inspired wonder and fascination for more than a century—including these new stellaria of long-lost summer nights.

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

We start this week with Jason’s article about how everyone is apparently reverse-engineering everything. After the break, Joseph tells us about a big AI shakeup at consulting giant Accenture. In the subscribers-only section, Sam and Jason discuss the Character[.]ai bankruptcy.

Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for access to this episode's bonus content and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.

• ⁠‘Reverse-Engineer Anything’ Is the New Wild West of AI⁠
• ⁠Accenture Tells Employees They Can Now Spend Only $29 on Claude Per Month⁠
• ⁠Character[.]ai Bankruptcy Is First AI Bubble Domino to Fall⁠

This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss reverse engineering and some wild court docs.

SAM: I’m using my btb to shamelessly ask for sources: Have you ever started making a recipe you found online, and realized it was AI generated? 

I’m asking because I just saw that Etsy is banning certain kinds of AI slop, including AI-generated recipes and patterns. I honestly didn’t know you could buy and sell recipes on Etsy, but now I’m looking around the marketplace and seeing a lot of digital downloads of these huge bulk book sets with images that are clearly AI generated. I don’t know if the recipes inside are scraped from real books or generated wholesale, and might have to download a few and test them.  

Texas has shut down the web portal for its automated construction permit filing system and suspended construction permits of 17 data center projects. The change came after 404 Media reported that a group of Texans discovered the state had continued to issue construction permits related to data centers despite Governor Greg Abbott calling for a pause in September.

On Monday, the watchdog groups FracTracker Alliance and Public Citizen published reports detailing more than two dozen permits issued to Texas data center projects. On Tuesday, the website for STEERS – an application filing system for construction projects run by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) – returned a 404 error.

By Wednesday, the site had this message on it: “TCEQ’s electronic filing application used for automatic authorizations has been temporarily shut down to ensure all applications are reviewed by agency staff to determine if they are related to data centers.”

Before TCEQ shut the portal down, 404 Media viewed 17 different permits related to data center projects and saw that they’d been moved from “active” to “suspended” in the TCEQ central registry. 

“STEERS is a portal that TCEQ uses to rubber stamp construction approvals,” Sam Law, a researcher at FracTracker Alliance told 404 Media. “It seems like they forgot about it and the portal has been quietly issuing approvals since the governor’s order for a pause, including for OpenAI and Amazon this Monday and Tuesday.”

The 17 suspended permits are related to stormwater construction, an approval that allows construction companies to raise and level ground. It’s a key, and sometimes final, part of the approval process for any construction project in Texas.

“Now they’ve taken the unprecedented step of suspending 17 approvals and taking down the whole site as they switch to a more involved human review process,” Law said. “The irony is not lost on me. When fighting the AI data centers build out, it’s nice to have a clear example of how some work is better left to humans.”

Law said he reached out to TCEQ and didn’t hear anything from them. The commission also didn’t respond to 404 Media’s request for comment. “I am very concerned that since contractors are accustomed to this automated approval process, they might not be aware of the suspension and continuing construction at some of the largest hyperscale facilities in Texas,” Law said.

GM! We have a few bangers for you today.

First: Can you imagine sitting in jail for days without knowing why, and then finding out that it's because someone hacked CashApp to impersonate you? I would be kind of mad! And elsewhere on 404 this morning, we have some prescient thoughts from an autonomous weapons expert on the state of AI in war, what's going on with cybersecurity experts in the wake of the PHPocalypse, and more insights into how cops view anti-Flock activists.

Let's get into it.

Someone Opened a CashApp In Her Name. She Faces Years in Prison

Amanda Smith answered the door one afternoon in April and came face to face with the local Sheriff’s department in upstate Pennsylvania. The officers said they had a warrant for her arrest for a crime she had allegedly committed more than a thousand miles away in Arkansas.

“I was completely confused,” Smith recalled. For one, she had never been to Arkansas. Second, the warrant was for computer fraud. By her own admission, Smith was not a very tech savvy person.

She had a feeling she was being set up. After discussing with the officers the practicalities of what was about to happen — she was allowed to get her contact lenses — they took her away in handcuffs to the local jail where she spent three nights.

The reason for Smith’s arrest, she learned later, was that a scammer had tricked someone on Facebook Marketplace into sending $1,000 to a CashApp account in her name that the scammer controlled. The scammer created the account using her Social Security number and date of birth. Smith said she has never used CashApp.

What developed over the next few days, and has now stretched across six months, is a Kafkaesque situation in which Smith, in her telling, is being asked to prove her innocence in an ongoing criminal case, while CashApp refuses to provide her any information about the account because she couldn’t prove that she was the owner.

Read the rest of this story here.

MORE FROM 404 MEDIA

“Suspicious behavior:” A federal intelligence center warned police that city council meetings about Flock “may be viewed by extremists as a desirable target,” and told them to be on the lookout for “emotional confrontations” between people who oppose surveillance and government officials, according to a copy of the warning obtained by 404 Media.

“Black October?” For much of the last month, many cybersecurity experts have been warning of an AI-powered “Black Swan” event, saying they’re alarmed by the number of vulnerabilities suddenly discovered, and of the apparent power of AI agents to find and exploit previously unknown bugs. So, what’s really going on? 

The UN met this week to discuss autonomous weapons. “The technology is developing at a pace that is very concerning,” Laurent Gisel, the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross’s (ICRC) legal warfare team, told 404 Media. Gisel was in NYC this week to address the UN about all the things that are driving conflict across the planet. His prepared remarks include a statement on the illegal arms trade, nuclear weapons, mines, and, of course, AI.

FROM AROUND THE WEB 

That’s a W for the Rebel Alliance. In San Diego, where Darth Vader famously spoke in favor of Flock cameras and mass surveillance, the city council just voted to end its contract with Flock. The decision still has to be confirmed, NBC 7 reports, but this is huge news for a city where council members have voted multiple times to keep Flock watching its citizens. 

For much of the last month, many of the cybersecurity experts I talk to and follow have been posting like they are very scared. Many have been warning of an AI-powered “Black Swan” event, have been alarmed by the number of vulnerabilities suddenly discovered, and of the apparent power of AI agents and large language models more broadly to find and exploit previously unknown bugs. 

The rhetoric has ranged from worried-but-measured (things are about to get weird), to run-of-the-mill advice like update your software and make sure you have two-factor authentication on, to vagueposting about AI-powered attacks, to things like ‘the internet was nice while it lasted,’ to outright prepper-level terror. 

To give you a sense of what I’m seeing, Matthew Green, a Johns Hopkins professor and one of the most respected cryptographers in the world, posted  “we’re in the part of the movie where you need to throw whatever you can in the path of the zombies and hope it slows them down,” and “so many people discovering that the whole Internet is dry tinder and the only thing keeping it from burning is the fact that teenagers haven’t found the matches yet,” Green is alluding to the fact that hackers and researchers driving AI tools and agents are getting better at finding and exploiting all sorts of bugs in important systems. I’ve also seen numerous AI employees, as mentioned, go full prepper, suggesting people pull money out of their bank accounts, disconnect from the internet, purchase shelf-stable food, hoard water, put money in gold and cash, and purchase hand-crank emergency radios.

And all those posts came before people using AI-powered tools found vulnerabilities in PHP, the programming language that powers much of the internet. In the last few days, major vulnerabilities or issues have been found in eMudhra (an Indian entity that provides website security certificates), Node.js (an alternative to PHP), Gitlab (a software development platform), Plex (media server software), Railway (a cloud provider), OpenCode (a coding agent platform), and several other companies and services, though, rightfully, none of these has gotten as much attention as the vulnerabilities in PHP, called PHP2Shell, which researchers from Wiz, Calif, and OpenAI discovered using AI. 

Matthew Prince, the CEO of Cloudflare, a service that has wide insight into the general health of the internet, posted, “In the 10 hours before [PHP2Shell] was publicly announced, across the Cloudflare network we saw thousands of attempts to exploit it. That jumped to tens of thousands in the 45 minutes post announcement, hundreds of thousands within 2 hours, and millions now.” 

So much is happening, and so quickly, that it has been difficult for me — someone who has been reporting and editing stories on security and hacking for a decade — to fully understand what’s going on, to have a sense of what could happen next, or predict where this is going. And I think that that is largely where we are at the moment, as I am writing this. 

But it has become clear that AI, broadly defined, has fundamentally changed both offensive hacking and defensive cybersecurity. This is not because AI has become sentient or because human beings have lost control of it or because of “swarms” of “rogue agents,” but because AI is proving something that we have always known: much of the software that runs the internet, our devices, our accounts, and our lives is vulnerable, or out of date, or has security flaws that human beings never noticed, or was installed by someone at a company who left the company six years ago and has been replaced four times and no one knows how to find them now or how to update it. This doesn’t mean that all of the vulnerabilities that have been found with the help of AI have been obvious or trivial; skilled hackers and researchers, driving AI tools, seem to be better than humans alone at finding vulnerabilities. But, critically, AI and large language models have made it extremely easy to essentially brute force the internet; if every piece of software is a door, AI makes it exceptionally easy to turn turn the knobs of every door to see if it’s unlocked, even on buildings that human beings had never really bothered to try to open. What we are learning at an alarmingly fast pace is that not only are some of the locks easy to pick, in some cases the door is wide open or there’s a giant hole in the wall. The recent spate of people using AI to hack their internet of things devices to run new software shows that, in some cases, it takes essentially no expertise to actually use AI to hack something.

Meanwhile, we've seen the rise of "abliterated" AI models that are designed to not say no and open weights models that can be used for pentesting and potentially offensive hacks without the guardrails that exist in many off-the-shelf commercial models.

In a blog post explaining the PHP vulnerability discovery, OpenAI said the findings highlight “how AI can uncover security flaws with internet-scale impact, but the same capabilities can also help attackers rapidly develop offensive tools and exploits.” OpenAI basically argues that it did all of this research ethically, and that its discovery opened a “Defender’s Window” that allowed governments and critical infrastructure to prepare for the disclosure of the bug. ‘Researcher finds bug, ethically discloses it to company, company fixes it’ is the preferred course of action in cybersecurity, but AI is shortening the window for all of this, is leading more people to do more research more easily, and is making both bug finding and bug fixing much faster. Whether those fixes are actually deployed by individual companies any faster is another, much more complicated question. The answer in many cases is, probably, no. 

AI is also making all of this much more unpredictable. The security company Chainguard was criticized for breaking the embargo on the PHP vulnerability disclosure because it posted fixes for the vulnerabilities several hours before it was officially disclosed. Critics, including the PHP Foundation, said this could have let attackers figure out how to exploit the issues before website owners had a chance to protect their systems. In a LinkedIn post, Chainguard CEO Dan Lorenc said that his company independently found the same bugs by typing “find bad vulnerabilities in PHP” into a frontier AI model. Amazon, meanwhile, said that it saw exploit attempts before the official disclosure. These facts raise questions about whether the bug was exceptionally easy to find, whether the AI models that originally found the vulnerabilities incorporated that information into the model somehow therefore making it easier for someone else to find, or whether there was a leak along the way from someone connected to the disclosure process. Any option is concerning.

After the PHP2Shell vulnerabilities were discovered, some infosec experts started calling this “Black October,” and highlighted the fact that the National Security Agency, the Prime Minister of Japan, and various governments around the world told people to patch their websites and services immediately, and to take down services that couldn’t be patched. 4chan, several Wikimedia services, and Archive.org were all temporarily taken offline so that they could be updated. 

As The Atlantic has already suggested, one of the biggest impacts of PHP2Shell could be the fact that many historic websites can’t or won’t be updated, may be proactively pulled offline, might eventually be hacked, and might never come back. The link rot could be horrendous, and a lot of history could be lost. 

For such a high-profile incident, most of the actual impacts thus far have been related to the proactive patching or removal of potentially insecure websites, and we have not seen immediate, widespread exploitation of the bug. Various low-effort, LLM-developed exploits have been dropped online; many of them will not work. A blog post called “There isn’t an easy exploit for this PHP vulnerability,” written by Elias Taylor, quickly went viral and was dissected on Hacker News, especially by people pointing out that the website eliastaylor.com had been recently registered and that it wasn’t clear who Elias Taylor was. 404 Media reached Taylor by Signal; he said “I am real and on a delayed train.” 

“Lots of people are being tricked by AI into thinking they have an exploit when they don't, because they can't read or understand what the LLM gave them,” Taylor told 404 Media. “It doesn't appear to be anywhere near as exploitable as the other ‘stop the world’ vulnerabilities i.e log4j, heartbleed. But patch your servers, it’s still a vulnerability. Please do not paraphrase me as saying ‘there is no vulnerability’ for any reason. There is, and people should patch.” 

Dan Guido, the CEO of Trail of Bits, a well-respected cybersecurity company that partners with OpenAI on the Patch the Planet initiative, posted that his company had created “a working exploit,” and that “Will Tan built it in 1 day with Codex, drawing on ~10 years of system security and vulnerability research. AI accelerates exploit development. Knowing how to turn a bug into a shell still takes expertise. AI makes that expertise more productive.” 

It should also be noted that Taylor’s other blog post is called “Anything connected to the internet is going to get hacked to pieces,” which includes the lines “software engineers have spent the past 40 years writing vulnerable, dogshit software. LLMs are easily above the bar needed to break into said software.” 

It remains unclear, at the moment, what the ultimate impact of all of this is going to be, or where we’ll be in one hour, one week, one year, or 10 years. But AI is changing how cybersecurity and hacking works. It is making finding and exploiting bugs faster and easier. We’re about to find out how insecure the internet really is. 

The UN met this week to discuss, among other things, the threat of autonomous weapons.

“The technology is developing at a pace that is very concerning,” Laurent Gisel, the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross’s (ICRC) legal warfare team, told 404 Media. Gisel was in NYC this week to address the UN about all the things that are driving conflict across the planet. His prepared remarks include a statement on the illegal arms trade, nuclear weapons, mines, and – of course – AI.

Autonomous weapons have been a hot topic at the UN this year. In September, the UN attempted to pass a treaty that would govern the use of killer AI weapons. Diplomats from Russia and the US stripped it of its power. 

But the UN has pressed forward. On Tuesday, the international governing body announced a new initiative that would grapple with the issue. But, as Gisel said: “multilateral processes take quite some time” and  “we already see the effects on the battlefield.” 

AI is already picking targets and killing people. Gisel said the technology is “amplifying the destruction, amplifying the violation of the law, amplifying the humanitarian harm caused by conflicts.”

Israel used an AI powered by Microsoft to pick targets in Gaza. In Ukraine, AI-powered Russian drones are deciding which humans to kill. The United States military is pitching itself as an “AI-first” fighting force. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth recently announced Project Meridian, an initiative to guide the AI-powered autonomous weapons of the future. Three of Meridian's leads are Elon Musk, defense contractor Palmer Luckey, and Newt Gingrich.

For Gisel, one of the biggest dangers of AI is how fast it is. A core selling point for the tech is that it can help commanders make decisions faster. But that also accelerates the pace of mistakes. “Targets are created at higher speed and higher frequency, and are actually then prosecuted quicker, and with that give us great concerns in terms of the level of human control that is retained,” he said. “The human is supposed to remain in the loop.”

The human does not always remain in the loop. The Israel Defense Forces told journalists it did not thoroughly vet the kill lists generated by Lavender, the AI system it used to pick targets in Gaza. “It's known in the [civilian world] [...] that humans tend to trust the systems,” Gisel said. “That it's more the case when the humans are tired, when the humans are under stress, when the humans have to deliver quickly, and that's of course exactly the situation in which soldiers are in. So all of that gives us a lot of concerns in terms of retaining control on the use of force in armed conflict.”

AI boosters often pitch AI as an “easy button,” a way for people to brute force a complicated task and get it over with. But the consequences are much different when someone in Silicon  Valley is parsing spreadsheets or reverse engineering code  than when they’re prosecuting a war in the Middle East.

“That's something that the developers of those systems don't necessarily realize either, because some of those systems are developed by technological companies very far away from the battlefield, and they are not naturally all developed for battlefield use,” Gisel said.

International humanitarian law is an ever-evolving legal negotiation between world powers meant to limit the devastating effects of war. It’s imperfect and countries with vast armies like the US and Russia often do not abide by it. The ICRC, which Gisel represents, exists explicitly to shape these rules and laws. Some of the laws are old, far older than AI, but according to Gisel humanitarian law applies to “all weapons, means, and methods of warfare. Those of yesterday, those of today, and those of tomorrow.”

Beyond the opportunity to code humanitarian law into AI, Gisel said there should be new rules and regulations for the new technology. “Not to prohibit them all, but to prohibit specific categories of autonomous weapon systems and put specific restrictions on others,” he said.

"...Once the genie is out of the bottle, it's very, very much difficult to put it back in the bottle"

But he does have redlines. The first is any AI support system that removes a human being from the kill chain. “That requires specific limits and guardrails and restrictions from our perspective,” he said.

“The other type of autonomous weapon system that we recommend prohibiting is those that would target human beings directly, where the target profile is the human being, as opposed to a tank, weapon systems, or another typical military objective, and the reason why is based on ethical concerns, humanitarian concerns, and a moral line,” he added.

Autonomous weapons have existed for a long time. Some US warships have gatling guns that track and destroy incoming targets automatically. The difference is that those weapons track ships and missiles, not human beings.

According to Gisel, one problem with autonomous weapons that target humans or AI support systems that pick targets is that they’re unpredictable. He said banning unpredictable weapons should be a non-brainer. “Military discipline is about your forces [...] delivering the commander's intent,” he said. “If you have a weapon that is unpredictable in its effect, how can you deliver the commander's intent?”

But it’s been a sticking point in negotiations. “We would have thought, military considerations, would align. But actually, that has also faced quite some pushback. Strangely enough,” he said. He spoke about the negotiations in August and September from earlier in the year. “There were references in the last proposal by the chair of the group on precisely all those questions: that the autonomous weapon systems need to be reliable, explainable, understandable, and predictable. And all of that was taken out by some states.”

Gisel also opposes AI in nuclear command and control. In 1983, the Soviet Union’s early warning systems reported that the US had launched a nuclear weapon at the country. Soviet lieutenant colonel Stanislav Petrov decided the computer had made a mistake and decided not to report the attacks up the chain. He was right.

“States will continue to use satellite systems and therefore algorithms that go with those satellites,” he said. “But it's so important to ensure that it remains entirely under human control and a really meaningful human control.”

While the UN deliberates and the ICRC wrangles with how to regulate all this, the wars continue and military forces continue to embrace AI. “That's why it's urgent to have decisions being made by the international community on what to prohibit and what to restrict [...] once the genie is out of the bottle, it's very, very much difficult to put it back in the bottle,” he said.

Gisel said the world needs to act now. “Otherwise, it's the technology that will decide what is acceptable, and that's not the world we want to live in, right?”

A federal intelligence center warned police that city council meetings about Flock “may be viewed by extremists as a desirable target,” and told them to be on the lookout for “emotional confrontations” between people who oppose surveillance and government officials, according to a copy of the warning obtained by 404 Media.

The warning, obtained by 404 Media, was issued by the Orange County Intelligence Assessment Center (OCIAC)—a government fusion center—in July to police in California. 404 Media recently obtained the bulletin using a Freedom of Information Act request.

This surveillance bulletin to cops is the latest evidence that police around the country have been told to be on edge during public meetings where people are participating in democracy and utilizing their First Amendment rights about unpopular things the government is doing. We have reported on a spate of people being illegally arrested for extremely minor procedural violations or for cursing at city council meetings about Flock and data centers while participating in constitutionally protected activities.

The warning is similar to others obtained by 404 Media and other journalists about the broader DeFlock movement and vandalism of Flock surveillance cameras. But this warning specifically tells police that there have been “no specific and credible threats found” related to city council meetings about Flock, but warns they should be on the lookout anyway. The warning noted that anti surveillance organizers could have been emboldened by the news that the Los Angeles Police Department ended its Flock contract, and may expect other local governments to do the same. The LAPD’s decision was “providing organizers and participants with a high-profile local example that could increase turnout and place additional public pressure on City Council members” to end their Flock contracts, the bulletin claims.

“City-hosted events (i.e., city council meetings) may be viewed by extremists as a desirable target. Partners are encouraged to review for signs of suspicious activity,” the warning reads. This suspicious activity includes “excessive clothing,” “unusual questions or behavior,” people loitering,” or “unattended bags or packages.” 

The warning goes on to say that genuine interest in ending mass surveillance at a city council meeting “may present public safety risks,” which includes “large turnout exceeding room capacity,” “emotional confrontations,” counterdemonstrations,” “media presence,” “social media amplification,” and “disruption of council proceedings.” 

Here is a full excerpt of the portion of the warning about protected activities that could apparently “present public safety risks:” 

_

• Large turnout exceeding room capacity: If organizers mobilize significantly more attendees than the council chambers can accommodate, this can lead to long lines, frustrated attendees, overflow areas, or delays in the meeting.
• Emotional confrontations: Because the issue involves surveillance, privacy, immigration concerns, and public safety, speakers and attendees may have strong emotions. Verbal confrontations between supporters and opponents are more likely than at routine council meetings.
• Counterdemonstrations: Individuals who support the Flock camera program or emphasize its crime-fighting benefits may attend and express opposing views, increasing the potential for verbal conflict.
• Traffic and parking impacts: A well-attended meeting can create localized congestion around City Hall before and after the meeting.
• Media presence: Local television, newspapers, livestreamers, and independent journalists may attend because the issue has recently received regional media coverage.
• Social media amplification. Attendees may livestream or record interactions. Minor disputes can quickly spread online, increasing public attention.
• Disruption of council proceedings. Possible issues include:
  • Interrupting speakers
  • Shouting from the audience
  • Refusing to yield the podium after time limits
  • Coordinated chanting inside the chambers
  • Attempts to delay or prevent the meeting from continuing
• Physical altercations: Heated disagreements between attendees with opposing viewpoints could escalate into minor physical altercations, particularly during emotionally charged interactions before, during, or after the meeting.
• Targeted threats or intimidation: Any credible threats, harassment, or intimidation directed toward elected officials, city staff, organizers, or attendees should be treated as a significant public safety concern and evaluated promptly.
• Extremist-related activity: Although there is no publicly available information indicating extremist involvement, politically contentious events may attract isolated individuals seeking to promote unrelated ideological causes.

_

We have seen numerous people illegally arrested around the country for speaking slightly too long, talking out of turn, or for cursing at city council members, none of which are illegal activities. 

“The OCIAC recognizes that Americans have constitutionally protected rights to assemble, speak, and petition the government,” the warning ends. “The OCIAC safeguards these rights and only reports on First Amendment protected activities for operational planning in the interest of assuring the safety and security of the demonstrators and the public.”

Amanda Smith answered the door one afternoon in April and came face to face with the local Sheriff’s department in upstate Pennsylvania. The officers said they had a warrant for her arrest for a crime she had allegedly committed more than a thousand miles away in Arkansas.

“I was completely confused,” Smith recalled. For one, she had never been to Arkansas. Second, the warrant was for computer fraud. By her own admission, Smith was not a very tech savvy person.

She had a feeling she was being set up. After discussing with the officers the practicalities of what was about to happen — she was allowed to get her contact lenses — they took her away in handcuffs to the local jail where she spent three nights.

The reason for Smith’s arrest, she learned later, was that a scammer had tricked someone on Facebook Marketplace into sending $1,000 to a CashApp account in her name that the scammer controlled. The scammer created the account using her Social Security number and date of birth. Smith said she has never used CashApp.

What developed over the next few days, and has now stretched across six months, is a Kafkaesque situation in which Smith, in her telling, is being asked to prove her innocence in an ongoing criminal case, while CashApp refuses to provide her any information about the account because she couldn’t prove that she was the owner.

Near the bank of the Ohio River, a historic American chestnut grove in Mason County, West Virginia has become the epicenter of a fight against a planned 2,250 acre data center campus. Plans for the UK-based startup Nscale’s Monarch Compute Campus, with clients including Anthropic, Nvidia and Microsoft, encompass the former Clements State Nursery and the American chestnut trees still growing there. 

For thousands of years, the American chestnut tree was a staple of life. Its natural range spanned hundreds of millions of acres from Maine to Mississippi, centuries before those names existed. As many as four billion trees provided a hearty nut crop for humans and provided miraculously rot-resistant lumber for railroad ties and housing. It sustained black bears as they prepared to hibernate, fed white-tailed deer and turkey, and shed nutrient-dense leaves. The largest American chestnut trees once grew 100 feet tall and 13 feet wide and represented one-fourth of all hardwoods; a squirrel could scamper along their branches from New England to Georgia without touching the ground, as an old saying goes. 

In 1904, a forester at the Bronx zoo noticed something alarming among their American chestnuts: The trees were dying en masse, struck by a mysterious blight. Within 40 years, that blight — thought to be brought to America on Asian chestnut trees — wiped out the tree’s population to near-extinction. Since then, conservationists have worked to restore American Chestnut trees and breed blight-resistant specimens. Typically, threats to groves include pests, climate change, and the fungus that destroyed their ancestors. Today, however, a new threat has entered the picture: data centers. 

Across the country, communities are pushing back against massive hyperscale data center projects, protesting against the noise pollution, environmental impacts, and blow to property values near these computer warehouses. In many places, elected officials are forging ahead to allow these multi-billion dollar deals in direct defiance of their constituents' wishes. Earlier this year, an Oklahoma farmer was arrested at a town hall meeting for speaking over his time against a 255-acre data center. Data centers are easy to build but much harder and slower to power, and their workarounds are egregious; For example, Elon Musk’s xAI Colossus 2 data center in Tennessee skips the local grid and runs its own natural gas turbines, worsening pollution and disproportionately impacting Black neighborhoods. But this tiny plot of American chestnut trees, just a little over an acre of land, has become a site of resistance in West Virginia. 

I first heard about the Clements chestnut grove after a 404 Media reader emailed me about it earlier this month, saying that the trees faced “potential destruction after November 1, 2026.” Social media posts called the threat “urgent,” and claimed bulldozers are lined up, with headlines declaring the grove is “about to be destroyed.” In the last few weeks, the plight of a grove of fragile chestnut trees trembling in the shadow of a data center has gone viral. Goldberry Grove, a local regenerative chestnut orchard, posted “They’re bulldozing the American chestnuts after November 1st,” sparking more outrage. 

In 2023, Governor Jim Justice announced a multi-billion dollar deal with Fidelis New Energy for a lifecycle carbon neutral hydrogen production facility, including the “Mountaineer GigaSystem” and the Monarch Compute Campus. Nscale acquired the American Intelligence & Power Corporation, sponsored by Fidelis New Energy and including the Monarch campus, in March. 

“The citizens of Mason County are elated with the announcement of Fidelis New Energy selecting Mason County, West Virginia, for its multibillion-dollar state of the art carbon neutral, clean hydrogen complex,” John Musgrave, the Executive Director of the Mason County Development Authority said in Justice’s 2023 press release about the new data center plans. 

With construction of the campus underway today, citizens do not seem elated. In September, heavy storms reportedly caused neighborhoods nearby to flood, as runoff from the construction site sent water and debris into adjacent properties as a section of the site’s fencing gave out. The Department of Environmental Protections (DEP) ordered Nscale “to immediately repair and strengthen the stormwater controls that failed, install additional erosion and sediment controls where needed, and take whatever actions are necessary to prevent similar releases from occurring in the future.”

Nscale told local news outlet WOWK 13 that it would pay for the damage. Separately, the company is trying to buy out homeowners, but the people living there are resistant. “What they’re saying is one thing, but they’ve got to prove it,” one homeowner told WOWK 13. “I’m staying. Fight for every one of these people.” 

The fate of the trees has been a conversation among conservationists in the area for years. The American Chestnut Foundation (TACF) raised the issue in its May 2024 monthly newsletter: “Several communications have been made with [West Virginia Secretary of Commerce James Bailey] and he is aware of the chestnut trees at Clements. He assured the WV chapter that the trees will remain and be taken care of by Fidelis.” 

The newsletter bulletin continued: “Mr. Bailey stated, ‘We value the chestnuts and will ensure that they are cared for. The state maintains ownership and control of the property, but if that ever changes, then the trees will be taken care of.’” The TACF noted that the future of the grove was “unclear.” Three years later, the picture is sharpening, as chestnut experts and the data center developers clash. 

Sixty-two years ago, the first seedlings shipped out from West Virginia’s newly-designated Clements State Tree Nursery. The nursery was once owned by Mark Twain’s grandparents. The West Virginia Division of Natural Resources bought it in 1961 and the Division of Forestry operated it for decades onward. The nursery sold seedlings of several varieties of trees and kept 15 to 20 chestnut trees that showed promising traits of blight resistance. In 2021, the Charleston Gazette-Mail reported that the DNR quietly ceased operating the nursery, citing funding issues. “It was never set up to make money, but it was also never set up to lose the kind of money it’s been losing in the past 10 years,” then-Division of Forestry Director Tom Cover told the Gazette-Mail at the time. 

Today, all of the American chestnut trees remaining at the former nursery site are infected with the blight fungus, Mark Double, a past president of the West Virginia Chapter of TACF told me. Many have died over the years, he said, but most of the trees still have sufficient resistance to have survived for 35 years, in spite of multiple infections. “The WV chapter of The American Chestnut Foundation has been harvesting nuts from this orchard for more than a decade,” Double told me over email. 

Nscale’s Monarch campus is one of two data center projects planned for the area. Project Tamarack, which is owned by Starwood Digital Ventures, is planned for 10 miles south of the Monarch campus. West Virginia Governor Patrick Morrisey announced the project early last month. Morrisey promises 1,000 temporary jobs but just 300 permanent positions as a result of the project. Research shows that data centers rarely live up to promises about bolstering local economies. “Data centers do not bring high-paying tech jobs to local communities because they operate as infrastructure projects rather than traditional jobcreating businesses,” University of Michigan researchers wrote in a 2025 brief. “Although the construction of data centers can create many jobs, those are short lived.”

Residents were stunned to hear that another data center was coming to their community, telling local news outlet WSAZ that they felt blindsided. Despite not being located on the former nursery’s site, the fate of the American chestnuts have forced Starwood to address it, too. 

I emailed Starwood on Oct. 8 asking if its campus threatened the trees. “I checked, and that grove isn’t on Starwood’s land,” a spokesperson told me. Sometime after Sept. 24, according to archives of the site, Project Tamarack added a line to its FAQ section about the grove: “The former Clements State Tree Nursery is a separate property and is not part of the Project Tamarack development site. Project Tamarack has no ownership, control, or management responsibility for the property. Questions regarding the chestnut grove, the former nursery, or the property’s management should be directed to the West Virginia Division of Forestry, which operated the facility prior to its closure in 2021.” 

Nscale also claims that the trees aren’t on land it owns, either — yet. That section of land is technically still under a “plan to purchase agreement.” 

“We understand the deep community connection to the former Clements State Tree Nursery site, and we look forward to working closely with the Morrisey Administration—including the Department of Agriculture and Division of Forestry—and The American Chestnut Foundation regarding the American Chestnut trees while responsibly developing the Monarch Compute Campus,” a spokesperson for Nscale told 404 Media. They continued: 

“We want to be clear — there was never a plan to bulldoze the nursery or cut down the trees. Nscale does not currently own the former Clements State Tree Nursery but we are under a plan for purchase agreement. Once we own the land, we are focused on how to best care for the trees which, according to a recent assessment by an arborist, suffer from blight and adverse health conditions. We have always planned to incorporate the American Chestnut trees into the Monarch Compute Campus. As construction progresses, we will work closely with professional arborists and experts to determine how best to preserve and integrate them, covering all costs.”

Nscale Senior Vice President Pete Hollis told West Virginia Public Broadcasting: “There’s never been a plan to and there will never be a plan to bulldoze or cut down the trees.” 

On October 10, Morrisey announced that the trees would eventually be moved, framing this as a way to appease everyone. “Under the preservation plan, the existing trees will be relocated to a more suitable environment within the property, potentially as part of an arboretum or integrated landscaping. That work is scheduled for late 2027, during the trees' dormant season, under professional arborist supervision,” the governor’s office wrote in a press release.

Amy Metheny, a forest pathologist for the West Virginia American Chestnut Foundation, told WCHS-TV that relocating the trees would inevitably kill them. “It’s my professional opinion that if the trees were moved they would die within two to five years,” she said.

I asked Morrisey’s office if they’re aware that experts say the trees will die if moved. A spokesperson for Morrisey’s office replied: 

“We are aware of the concerns about transplanting and have discussed them directly with a member of the West Virginia chapter of The American Chestnut Foundation. The West Virginia Department of Agriculture’s assessment found that the trees are expected to continue dying under current site conditions. It also found that relocating chestnut clumps with proper care may improve their health, although some losses are expected.

“Mature chestnut trees from the same original source as the Clements planting are growing in and producing nuts in Tyler County. Approximately 500 nuts from those trees are expected to be used for additional planting to support continued restoration efforts.

“The company has said relocation remains its plan and that it will cover the cost. The property is subject to a legally binding purchase option signed in 2023 by the previous administration. We are working with the company and conservation experts to help secure the best possible preservation outcome. Specific questions about those relocation plans should be directed to the company.”

Much of the information floating around about the future of the grove — including the claims of looming bulldozers, the timeline for the actual threat to the trees, the “not it” statements between both data center projects, and the governor’s promises — has been a game of rumors and conflicting information. A representative for Goldberry Grove declined to provide an on-the-record source for their claims of a November 1 deadline, or the bulldozer claims.

But the attention turned to an otherwise largely overlooked and tragically rare tree species has stirred up the kind of public action that data center developers around the country have had to contend with when they want to throw miles of humming warehouses up in communities. On October 20, the West Virginia DEP hosted an in-person public comment session about Monarch’s air quality analysis and permitting, with a virtual meeting to come on October 29.

The campus’s environmental impact could extend beyond the handful of trees at Clements, according to documents filed with the DEP. The Charleston Gazette-Mail reported, based on those documents: “Construction activities would result in permanent impacts to over 8,400 linear feet of streams and over 1.7 acres of wetlands on one permit and over 5,900 linear feet of streams and more than 26 acres of wetlands on the other, according to the applications.”

In addition to being overwhelmingly unpopular with the communities where they’re built, and despite the trillions of dollars dumped into their development, data center projects and the industry at large around the world are starting to flounder. Australia’s NextDC AI data center operator’s shares dropped 40 percent on Wednesday after the company cited power delays and local pushback. Last week, Microsoft pulled out of its deal with Nscale’s Essex-based campus, following reports that the project might not be able to receive a power supply until 2030. Local community opposition to data centers has spurred legislation that’s slowed or halted these projects around the country, with some, including Microsoft in Wisconsin, canceling projects outright following petitions and protests. 

When a Department of Homeland Security official sent out an alert to stop Samuel Tunick, a Stop Cop City activist, at an airport in January 2025, they said the reason was because he was suspected of “terrorist activities,” according to new filed court records which include a screenshot of the alert and photos of Tunick’s interrogation.

Tunick ultimately provided Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials with a code that, when entered, wiped his security- and privacy-focused GrapheneOS phone. Tunick is now being criminally charged for that alleged act, in one of the most high profile technology civil rights cases in recent memory.

The court records also showed that CBP officials lied to Tunick during his interrogation. Instead of saying he was being targeted for suspected terrorism — although this search happened just at the start of the second Trump administration, it has dramatically broadened what organizations or people may be considered such — they said they needed his phone to look for “kiddie porn.”

Over the weekend, it became fashionable to use AI to replace the operating systems on smart TVs with vibe coded or AI reverse-engineered ones to make them less bloated. People have taken proprietary internet-of-things devices that were bricked and abandoned by their creators and used AI to hack them and install new software on them, giving functionality the original developers took away.  

In the last few days I have seen people hack smart picture frames to become AI-powered smart calendars, baby monitors to remove all ads, and bricked Lululemon mirrors to bring them back to life with new software. And dozens and dozens of TVs to install AI-written software that removes bloatware, ads, and simplifies the user interface. 

What we’re seeing is vibe coding, but instead of making something from scratch, people are using AI to take an existing piece of software and replicate its features, its functionality, or cloning it wholesale. In some cases, people are using AI to take a proprietary piece of hardware and install some version of open source software on it. All of this is some mix of “decompiling,” “reverse-engineering,” “hacking,” vibe coding, AI slop, and stealing. It is the plagiarism machine being used for plagiarism, but also it is random people using AI to take control back over devices whose proprietary software was used to arbitrarily lock away basic functionality, to add advertisements, surveillance, and bloat to devices that probably shouldn’t have them, or whose functionality was bricked altogether. 

“All I am hearing from software engineers is that software-as-a-service is dying as a business model,” Mike Nolan, who studies the politics of open source software, told 404 Media about the recent spate of AI-driven clones. “It’s becoming so easy to recreate the functionality that you want [with AI.]”

“The barrier for recreating this stuff is lower, so a lot of people are doing it for fun,” he added. “But there’s a lot of work associated with maintaining software so there may be a lot of instances where the software may not be reliable enough to use—I don’t know how many companies are going to be adopting these clones.”

In one example, a user named Gathin wrote in a post on X: “Vibe coded my parents’ TV this afternoon! It was showing a sponsored ad before you could even get to Netflix. Gave Claude Code the model number, it found the TV on wifi, removed 25 Xiaomi packages and wrote a new launcher.” That post has allegedly been viewed more than 6 million times. “Looks like an Apple TV now lol.”

It has been possible to do a lot of this for a long time using open source, human-coded repositories. There are many communities of people who have spent hundreds of hours bringing bricked internet-of-things hardware from the dead or finding vulnerabilities that allow one to modify or repair devices that have proprietary software on them. 

But over the weekend, a project called “Reverse Engineer Anything” became one of the most viral GitHub repositories in recent memory, with more than 342,000 stars as of the time I’m writing this. The project uses AI to deconstruct features in other pieces of software, and allows the user to replicate them: “See a feature in an app that you want in your own product? Ask your agent to investigate it with REA. It can inspect the app without its source code, explain how the feature works, show the evidence, and build a version for your project.”

What this promises is a way to easily clone and modify other people’s products; it is the same general principle that has in recent weeks allowed for the viral, AI-driven clones of Adobe’s Creative Cloud software, Microsoft Office and the “decompilation” of hundreds of different video games. This tactic is being used not just on software you run on your computer, but also to reverse-engineer and modify the embedded software on physical devices. 

A person who claims to make guitar pedals, for example, claimed on Hacker News that he used AI to clone the effects algorithms of three of his competitors using AI: “In the past 72 hours I have ONE-SHOT decompiled 3 of my main competitors products. Like, I could in theory just stick them in a box and resell them […] Basically, anyone with a Claude subscription can now rip off [sic] any best-in-class algorithm from any competitor.”

It is not necessarily the case that everyone will be writing and running their own software or that Adobe or Microsoft are screwed. But I’ve seen enough to say that the “decompiling” or “reverse-engineer anything” craze is going to have an actual real-world impact on software companies, coding communities, and open-source projects. 

One of the criticisms I heard last week after writing about video game “decompiling” communities being overrun with AI-powered decompilations, ports, and clones is that a lot of the AI decompilations are not actually “decompiling” anything — that the resulting source code usually isn’t the same as the original, and that the resulting software has weird bugs, is of low quality, or doesn’t fully work. 

But that’s one of the main problems here: AI-powered, cloned software often has bugs that the person using the AI doesn’t understand or know how to fix, and people are doing it anyway, using the software anyway, and unleashing it on the world and on these communities at a speed with which it cannot be vetted or moderated. Part of the reason that this will have an impact is specifically because, at least in the short term, a lot of this software will suck: The ability to cheaply and quickly clone software and modify features is going to have some sort of sloppifying impact on society whether you vibecode software or not. Unlike some of Silicon Valley’s wildest sickos, I do not expect most people to vibe code their own software or to hack their baby monitors, but like AI slop on social media or on menus, flyers, and billboards, you do not need to actually use AI or think that it’s good in order to be affected by this. 

Inevitably, poorly coded, barely-functional, insecure software is going to be installed on critical hardware, which will lead to devices and networks being hacked; reverse-engineering communities and open source projects are going to be overrun with people Kool-Aid manning in with “their” AI projects and code. 

All of this has been enabled by the agentification of AI, improving models, and the removal of guardrails. It is now possible to tell an AI to go do something, and to generally have it do that thing. This is leading to more people making more things and more AI agents acting in annoying and perhaps antisocial ways on the internet—we are likely to see an onslaught of semi-functional software and hardware slop, which will have knock-on effects for us all.

We are going to see hastily-created hardware startups using poorly cloned software that barely works, we are going to go to restaurants and be asked to order through a touch screen using cloned software with bizarre bugs. We are going to see people installing and using random code that they know nothing about on internet-connected physical hardware; and we are likely to see hackers try to infiltrate this process to include malware on some of that code. We are going to see smaller software and hardware companies killed by competitors who used AI to steal their products and undercut them. But what people use this for is likely to be a bit of a mixed bag; we are also likely going to see decompiled software used to remove manufacturer guardrails on products that never should have existed in the first place.