Notices by Jason Koebler (jasonkoebler@mastodon.social)

New: Public records show how a city that ended its Flock contract spent months trying to get the company to remove or turn off the cameras. They were told Flock "objects" to the city removing the camera itself. Eventually city put trash bags over them:

https://www.404media.co/flock-objects-to-our-removing-their-equipment-emails-reveal-why-a-town-put-bags-over-its-flock-cameras/

New Orleans published a document saying its police could put weapons on their drones, deleted it, now says it was a mistake. But it aligns exactly with when the drone manufacturer began musing about allowing police to weaponize their drones:

https://www.404media.co/new-orleans-cops-published-policy-document-allowing-weaponized-drones/

New: Researchers have quantified how easy AI search is to manipulate. Just 13 words buried in a random Reddit comment can poison AI search results. They suggest this is not easy to stop: "The way you can attack these systems is so much dumber than you think it is"

https://www.404media.co/it-is-trivially-easy-to-use-reddit-to-manipulate-ai-search-research-suggests/

New: Cops keep getting arrested for using Flock to stalk people. Seemingly every week there's a new case, the details usually similar. Cops use unfettered access to Flock to surveil an ex. They most often search their plates hundreds of times over course of months

https://www.404media.co/cops-keep-getting-arrested-for-using-flock-to-stalk-people/

extremely broad and alarming drone no fly zone designed to protect ICE agents just dropped. notable in part because some folks have used drones to film law enforcement abuses:

https://www.404media.co/feds-create-drone-no-fly-zone-that-would-stop-people-filming-ice/

SCOOP: Flock left at least 60 of its AI-powered, people-tracking surveillance cameras exposed and livestreaming to the open internet. We tracked ourselves. The exposure highlights the power of these cameras and types of things they're tracking. Not just cars.

https://www.404media.co/flock-exposed-its-ai-powered-cameras-to-the-internet-we-tracked-ourselves/

Porn is being injected into dozens of government websites across the country using malicious PDFs. A separate attack is hijacking govt websites to redirect to penis enlargement scams and animal vagina masturbators.

Cool stuff:

https://www.404media.co/porn-is-being-injected-into-government-websites-via-malicious-pdfs/

New: The FBI filed a subpoena trying to unmask the person or people behind archive.is/archive.today, which have been running anonymously for 13 yrs. Site was widely used by GamerGate, and then to bypass paywalls but has become kind of core archiving infrastructure

https://www.404media.co/fbi-tries-to-unmask-owner-of-infamous-archive-is-site/

Some exciting news: 404 Media just won a grant via Muckrock to investigate book bans and educational censorship in the U.S. The plan is to file hundreds of public records requests around the country and to report on and archive all the documents for public use:

https://www.404media.co/help-us-investigate-book-bans-and-educational-censorship-around-america/

New: We have just sued ICE to demand it turns over a secretive spyware contract that it refuses to release:

https://www.404media.co/were-suing-ice-for-its-2-million-spyware-contract/

AI "boring history" slop has taken over YouTube and is particularly insidious because it flattens history and drowns out the tireless work of creators who have been integral to legitimizing YouTube as a place for high-quality history videos

https://www.404media.co/ai-generated-boring-history-videos-are-flooding-youtube-and-drowning-out-real-history/

80s nostalgia AI slop: A niche like any other, reverse engineered by 20-something digital nomads in Bali to boomerfy the masses as they astral project to a fake past in service of making fractions of a cent per view on Zuckerberg's cultish algorithmic slop machine

https://www.404media.co/80s-nostalgia-ai-slop-is-boomerfying-the-masses-for-a-past-that-never-existed/

Today is the two year anniversary of 404 Media, which is hard to fathom. We wrote about how it's going, what we've done, what we're going to do, and what we've learned. We cannot do this without the support of our subscribers and for that we are endlessly thankful:

https://www.404media.co/two-years-404-media-anniversary/

TikTok Shop is selling 'Silent' GPS trackers that are marketed to stalkers and domestic abusers. Many of the videos have millions of views and at least 100,000 of them have been sold. TikTok's algorithm endlessly puts these in front of you if you fall into the algo:

https://www.404media.co/tiktok-shop-sells-viral-gps-trackers-marketed-to-stalkers/

SCOOP: A CBP agent wore Meta's AI smart glasses to an immigration raid in Los Angeles. CBP has no deal with Meta so it's possibly his own personal device

https://www.404media.co/a-cbp-agent-wore-meta-smart-glasses-to-an-immigration-raid-in-los-angeles/

New: A Sheriff's Office in Texas has access to data from AI license plate reading cameras at hundreds of Home Depots (in Texas) and Lowe's (around the country)

https://www.404media.co/home-depot-and-lowes-share-data-from-hundreds-of-ai-cameras-with-cops/

All American trains have a vulnerability where a hacker can remotely trigger the brakes over radio frequency. A single researcher has been warning about this for 13 years and the government has FINALLY acknowledged it’s real and is making train companies fix it: https://www.404media.co/hackers-can-remotely-trigger-the-brakes-on-american-trains-and-the-problem-has-been-ignored-for-years/

Media outlets can't pivot to AI to save themselves. It's not a business strategy and it's not going to work. The only path forward is for journalists to lean into their humanity, to do things AI can't, and to make clear they are writing for people, not algorithms:

https://www.404media.co/the-medias-pivot-to-ai-is-not-real-and-not-going-to-work/

NEW: ICE is using a facial recognition smartphone app that pulls faces from CBP's database of people who cross the border:

https://www.404media.co/ice-is-using-a-new-facial-recognition-app-to-identify-people-leaked-emails-show/

Airlines sell passenger data to the feds through a separate data broker they spun up and put in the contract that DHS is not allowed to tell anyone that it comes from the airlines:

https://www.404media.co/airlines-dont-want-you-to-know-they-sold-your-flight-data-to-dhs/