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 messy Tea and our first livestreamed event.

SAM: We had an awesome time hanging out with a couple hundred of our Angeleno friends at Rip.Space on Wednesday! The full live podcast is here (start around 1:45) and it’ll be in your feeds soon, too. The first portion of the livestream is partially us testing that it worked, but then an impromptu panel happened with the Rip.Space folks that’s extremely worth a watch.

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 creeper glasses, Amazon comms, and a DIY 404 party.

SAM: Earlier this week, Chris Samra released this teaser video for Waves, smart glasses in the vein of Meta’s Raybans that he says “record in stealth.” 

You’ll have to watch the video for yourself and tell me what you think—and I’m sure Joe will do a  much smarter and more thorough writeup on these things, as he’s done about smart glasses in the past. But a few things immediately came to my mind when I watched this video. First: this looks like the 30 seconds of fun young carefree plot in the trailer for a horror movie before the power goes out and someone starts screaming. It’s shot and edited in such a nefarious style.

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 data dumps, high stakes, and lizard brain screen time.

JOSEPH: Flight Manifests Reveal Dozens of Previously Unknown People on Three Deportation Flights to El Salvador is the hardest hacking related article we’ve ever worked on. 

I’ve obtained some very sensitive data breaches over the last decade: metadata of specific individuals from the massive AT&T breach; photos of peoples’ genitalia pre- and post-plastic surgery. Honestly it’s hard to remember them all.

The data here wasn’t even necessarily as sensitive or personal as those. It was flight manifests, which contain peoples’ names, the flight they were on, and their gender. That’s basically it. But it was how to handle publication of the data that was exceptionally complicated and why it took us a while from when we first obtained the data a few months ago to publishing this 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 choosing what to cover, fishing expeditions, and the library.

JOSEPH: There’s an interesting cybersecurity story going on: a politically-motivated, right wing extremist hacker broke into Columbia University, stole swathes of applicant and other data, and then leaked parts of it. That’s how you got this New York Times article about New York mayoral hopeful Zohran Mamdani applying to the university as Asian and African American. Predictably, some people are reading that in bad faith, when in reality it shows how stupid and regimented application processes can be in a diverse society.

This week The Verge published a piece called The Columbia hack is a much bigger deal than Mamdani’s college application, which basically elaborates on that point. One section was this:

And yet, there has been precious little reporting on the Columbia hack. Wired hasn’t covered it, and, until this story, neither has The Verge. Nor have The Chronicle of Higher Education, CyberScoop, 404 Media, TechCrunch, or Krebs on Security. These—including The Verge—are small to medium-size entities, and there’s any number of possible reasons why they didn’t pick it up. (On our end, it was partly because we were short-staffed during a national holiday, and partly because we didn’t immediately piece together how extraordinary this particular hack is.) But coverage at the much bigger, well-resourced institutions is also scanty. The Wall Street Journal passed on the story. Reuters has a brief on the initial outage; AP has a short write-up as well, which The Washington Post ran as part of their syndication deal.

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 wrestling over a good headline, what to read this summer, and Super 8 film.

EMANUEL: I would really love it if the people who accuse us of using “clickbait” headlines saw how long, pedantic, and annoying our internal debates are about headlines for some stories. Case in point is Jason’s story this week, which had the headline “Judge Rules Training AI on Authors' Books Is Legal But Pirating Them Is Not.” 

This is an important decision so it got covered everywhere. I don’t think any of the other headlines I saw from other big publications are wrong, but they do reflect why it was hard to summarize this story in a headline, and different headlines reflect what different publications’ thought was most important and notable about it. If you want a full breakdown you should read Jason’s story, but the gist is that a judge ruled that it’s okay for companies to use copyrighted books for their training data, but it’s not okay for them to get these books by pirating them, which many of them did. That’s the simplest way I can think of to sum it up and that’s what our headline says, but there are still many levels of complexity to the story that no headline could fully capture.