Notices by Jason Koebler (jasonkoebler@mastodon.social)

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/

I spoke to two former govt workers who helped create IRS's Direct File software, which is set to be killed by DOGE/Trump/Intuit but thankfully just got open sourced. Both of them seem optimistic about what people are going to be able to do with the codebase:

https://www.404media.co/directfile-open-source-irs-tax-filing-software-turbotax-is-trying-to-kil/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter

"The Trump administration’s constant use of AI art reflects its own brute force attack on American democracy. It’s not just that its aesthetics are useful for Trump, its entire mode of being is useful for how his administration has governed so far"

https://www.404media.co/the-ai-slop-presidency/

NEW: GlobalX, the company doing many deportation flights for ICE, has been hacked. Hackers claim to have stolen flight manifest information and flight details, and have also defaced the website

https://www.404media.co/globalx-airline-for-trumps-deportations-hacked/

The idea of reshoring high-tech manufacturing isn't bad but it has to be done in a coherent and strategic way. Here is where Apple components are currently made. This is not coming back to the US overnight and probably not ever

Here I explain why the idea that we are going to suddenly make iPhones in the U.S. is pure fantasy and if Apple WERE to do that it would come after several years of deep pain. The iPhone is perhaps the most global product that has ever existed: https://www.404media.co/a-us-made-iphone-is-pure-fantasy/

Meanwhile, Apple's automation efforts are not going that well and there are still millions of human beings who work on it. Reshoring think tank suggests American workers in the same job make ~10x what a similar worker in Vietnam makes

Flexport's CEO, who handles international logistics, says some clients it works with have already *stopped plans to build factories in the US* because tariffs have made buying equipment to expensive

It's not clear that Americans can even build the types of factories needed to make something like the iPhone. TSMC had to import workers from Taiwan on special visas to build its factory in Arizona. Half of the workers there are Taiwanese. Foxconn's factory in Wisconsin never opened

DOGE "saves" a million dollars by taking critical government archives off of best-in-class, durable tape archives and putting them on hard drives

https://www.404media.co/doge-gsa-magnetic-tape-archives-digital-storage/

Here I explain why the idea that we are going to suddenly make iPhones in the U.S. is pure fantasy and if Apple WERE to do that it would come after several years of deep pain. The iPhone is perhaps the most global product that has ever existed: https://www.404media.co/a-us-made-iphone-is-pure-fantasy/

The most powerful people and companies in the world have successfully orchestrated one of the most damaging and stupid self owns imaginable:

https://www.404media.co/big-tech-backed-trump-for-acceleration-they-got-a-decel-president-instead/

NEW: Yesterday, a T-Mobile tracking app for children began showing parents the exact real-time locations and images of random kids, and showed the locations of their own kids to other random adults:

https://www.404media.co/t-mobile-shows-users-the-names-pictures-and-exact-locations-of-random-children/

23andMe as a functioning company was a privacy disaster. 23andMe as a bankrupt, for sale company is a fucking nightmare

https://www.404media.co/dna-of-15-million-people-for-sale-in-23andme-bankruptcy/

We are testing Ghost's ActivityPub beta integration for 404 Media! We're really excited about the future of the decentralized internet, we're stoked that Ghost is leading the way, and we're proud to be one of its first adopters. You can follow us @index

Right now things seem pretty buggy but it's obviously very early. Looking forward to messing around with it and making the product better

Tucker Carlson and others alleging new Deep State conspiracy about JFK records. Someone at National Archives with knowledge of the situation, meanwhile, tells me that thousands of pages of 60-year-old documents don't just magically digitize themselves

https://www.404media.co/why-all-of-the-jfk-assassination-documents-havent-been-released-yet/

My latest: Generative AI is enabling a brute force attack against the algorithms that control reality. AI slop is taking over every algorithmically controlled social media platform and search platform, and the tech platforms are helping:

https://www.404media.co/ai-slop-is-a-brute-force-attack-on-the-algorithms-that-control-reality/

A French University has so much interest from American scientists trying to flee the country that it is now asking other European universities to begin taking them into "scientific exile"

https://www.404media.co/nasa-yale-and-stanford-scientists-consider-scientific-exile-french-university-says/

We've confirmed that the TSA credit cards it uses to pay for stuff for bomb-sniffing dogs have been cut off

https://www.404media.co/tsa-k9-bomb-sniffing-dogs-funding/

Pokemon Go sale to a Saudi Arabian company owned by govt comes with six separate corporate announcement blogs, not one of them directly addressing what happens to 100 million people's location data, AR mapping capabilities, or the AI maps they have been training:

https://www.404media.co/saudi-arabia-buys-pokemon-go-and-probably-all-of-your-location-data/