Flock created a fake police department called “Flock City PD” that it used to search a series of live automated license plate readers in several U.S. cities during demonstrations of its surveillance system’s capabilities, public records show. The records show that Flock City PD searched real cameras for people holding signs, “crowds,” people wearing masks, and more, according to audit logs shared with 404 Media. 

Flock City PD also searched extremely sensitive queries, which Flock told 404 Media were done to prove that the system would not actually perform these searches and that its moderation tools worked. These searches included “coexist bumper sticker,” “vehicle a pretty girl would drive,” “white truck with a trump sticker,” “religious cars,” “Star of David,” and “don’t tread on me flag.” 

Flock employees accessing live cameras for sales purposes, and showing police specifically how to do dubious searches, have become political flashpoints in the backlash against the company. In April, we reported that Flock employees regularly accessed live cameras in Dunwoody, Georgia, at a children’s gymnastics room, at a playground, in a school, at a pool, and in a Jewish community center in the city while demoing the company’s tech to cops. Audit logs obtained by Jason Hunyar, the Dunwoody resident who originally discovered this access, show that an entity called “Flock City PD” also searched live Dunwoody cameras for all sorts of politically contentious topics during sales demos with police. This included searches for behavior that is expressly protected by the First Amendment. 

Flock accounts called “Flock City PD - Law Enforcement Demo,” “Flock Intelligence,” and “Flock Safety - Commercial Sales Demo” ran searches in Dunwoody and Bryan, Texas, as well as a handful of other unknown jurisdictions, for “coexist bumper sticker,” “Star of David,” “person wearing a mask,” “crowd,” “vehicle with a political sticker,” “man holding rifle,” “person in scrubs,” “don’t tread on me flag,” “car that a pretty girl would drive,” and “vehicle with trump bumper sticker,” among other searches. All of these were “FreeForm” searches, meaning Flock’s AI image recognition algorithm would determine what would be returned. The audit logs show that not all of these searches were allowed by Flock’s system, and that its moderation tools either blocked some of the searches or displayed a warning prompt before doing the search. 

404 Media has previously reported that Flock explicitly taught police how to surveil the No Kings protests, and some of these FreeForm searches are similar to others we reported that real police departments performed themselves.

A Flock spokesperson told 404 Media that some of the searches were done specifically to show the types of searches cops shouldn’t do, and to show some of the guardrails Flock had put in place to prevent these searches. For example, the searches for “vehicle a pretty girl would drive,” is listed as having a moderation “block.” A search for a person with “Star of David” was also listed as having a moderation block, but a search for “Star of David” on a vehicle raised a warning box about the nature of the search before allowing it to proceed.

The searches highlight how Flock employees regularly performed real, invasive searches on real cameras to demonstrate how its technology works; residents of Dunwoody have repeatedly told their city council that they feel like their privacy is being violated as an experiment and sales demonstration for a private company. After Hunyar and 404 Media reported on Flock cameras being accessed in sensitive locations by Flock employees, the company and the city said Dunwoody’s cameras would no longer be used for sales demonstration purposes. The Flock spokesperson said that these demonstrations were done to show police officers what not to do, and said that the “Flock City PD” account no longer searches on any real cameras. They added, “the Flock City PD demo environment is now isolated, and law enforcement agencies cannot form a sharing relationship with it.”

A recent Flock training webinar seen by 404 Media shows a Flock employee logged into the Flock City PD account having access to cameras that seem to be explicitly for training purposes, with names like “Flock Warehouse - LPR Demo Cameras,” “Circle K - Demo,” “Tennessee Demo Cameras,” “Scottsdale AZ Demo Video Cameras,” and “ALPR Demo.”   

“Flock City PD is a demo and testing organization name used for law enforcement demonstrations and for our development engineers to conduct testing. Those searches were part of testing and validating FreeForm search moderation and related safeguards. These were not investigative searches conducted by a customer agency,” the Flock spokesperson told 404 Media. “That is also the context for prompts such as ‘Star of David’ or ‘large group with signs.’ These types of prompts are testing the safeguards of the system — that it appropriately blocks offensive or sensitive searches, or flags searches that may implicate First Amendment protections. Our policy is designed so that offensive or slur-based searches do not yield results, and prompts that may implicate First Amendment concerns trigger notice and audit review. As you can see in your screenshot — the safeguards we built are working.” 

The audit logs show, however, that many of the sensitive searches were not blocked. Searches for “crowd,” “a person wearing scrubs,” “large group with signs” were all explicitly allowed. More sensitive searches, such as for “vehicle with trump bumper sticker,” “don’t treat on me flag,” “coexist number sticker,” “religious cars,” and “Star of David” had a warning box pop up, but Flock says in a blog post published in April that police can bypass this: “Searches for specific content that could potentially implicate First Amendment rights will trigger a pop-up warning the user and advising that this search will be sent to a superior for auditing if the user chooses to proceed.”

In a blog post explaining how it tests Flock, the company wrote, “some vehicle bumper stickers contain words and symbols indicating religious affiliations or nationalities, and the moderation policy needs to recognize, flag, and block these searches. Just like vehicle identification, these algorithms need to be trained in the real world using real-life examples. Those might be training and demo searches for things like ‘Cross bumper sticker,’ ‘Star of David,’ or ‘Japanese flag.’ These searches, if performed, should not return results.”

Dunwoody residents have made clear that they understand that Flock needs to test its systems, but they did not sign up to be guinea pigs for a surveillance company. 

“Flock's claims that they impose restrictions on what users can search for in their database provides the opposite assurance of what they seem to purport. In doing so, they admit that their dynamic surveillance network does in fact capture this sensitive information, and that the gate to that information is controlled solely by the policies of a for-profit corporation,” Hunyar told 404 Media. “As shown in previous demos, their willingness to continuously monitor and catalogue the actions of law abiding citizens exercising their constitutionally protected rights should worry anyone who plans to exercise them now or in the future."

Georgia State University has rescinded a job offer given to a high profile activist who is currently fighting a case in which he allegedly wiped a security-focused Android phone before Customs and Border Protection (CBP) could search it. The case, which 404 Media first covered and has now received widespread and national attention, has important ramifications for privacy and when someone can still be charged with an offense even if authorities don’t have suspicion of any specific crime.

Earlier this month, activist Samuel Tunick and a group of supporters delivered a “demand letter” to the university. That letter, which Tunick shared with 404 Media, says he explained to the university he was facing a pending charge, which he describes as “an instance of textbook political repression, and a high profile civil liberties case.”

While delivering the letter, supporters held signs saying, “GSU sides with Trump,” and “Digital Privacy Under Attack!”

Tunick told 404 Media he was supposed to start his Teaching Assistant job on August 25. Then six hours before his first lab, Tunick received an automated email saying he had not passed the required background check. The letter says Tunick’s head of department asked the university for more information about the relevant hiring policy, “and she was told that there actually aren’t any.” Instead, in Tunick’s telling, “this was a subjective, and essentially arbitrary decision made for reasons that have not been made clear to me or other faculty.”

Tunick was also planning to pursue a M.S. of Geosciences at Georgia State, and was going to receive a tuition waiver and wages for his work as a Teaching Assistant. “Now I have had both my tuition waiver and source of income pulled out from under me at the drop of a hat, my economic security and academic career threatened due to a single absurd charge, to which I have pleaded ‘not guilty,’” the letter continues. 

Tunick shared screenshots of emails between him and various faculty. One sent by the department head said, “I was told that the ‘Background Check Committee’ denied the approval for your hire, the Dean of Students denied the approval, and the legal department denied your approval.” That email reiterated there is no policy to be pointed to, and that each hire “undergoes a risk assessment on a case-by-case basis.” In another email, Tunick notes he had a misdemeanor in Fulton County, but these charges were dismissed.

Georgia State University did not respond to a request for comment.

404 Media first broke news of Tunick’s case in December and published an interview with Tunick and one of his lawyers, Matthew Dodge, in July. The airport encounter that led to the charge happened in January 2025, when Tunick was returning to the U.S. after a vacation in the Dominican Republic. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials called the airport ahead of time and asked agents there to stop Tunick, Dodge said.

The officers asked to search Tunick’s bags and pat him down, both of which he refused. Agents searched him and found nothing improper, Dodge said. Then, the agents said they wanted to search Tunick’s phone. Tunick provided them a code, which an officer then typed into the device. Rather than unlocking the phone, the device “went to a blank screen” and displayed the logo of GrapheneOS. In other words, the code wiped the device.

GrapheneOS is a security- and privacy-focused operating system, which includes all sorts of additional features. One of those is the duress password feature that “will irreversibly wipe the device,” according to GrapheneOS’s website. 

Tunick participated in the Stop Cop City movement in Atlanta, and in a previous interview with 404 Media, Tunick put his prosecution for wiping his phone squarely in the context of other cases against the movement. Before the airport encounter, Tunick found out from his lawyer a tracker had been placed on his car. He also learned authorities subpoenaed his cellphone records and Gmail data. Tunick previously failed a background check for a job on a Christmas tree lot which involved going onto the property of a school, he previously said. When he asked the Atlanta Public Schools office about it, he was directed to the FBI.

The authorities “really just tried to dig up anything they could on me and they didn’t find anything,” Tunick previously told 404 Media. “At this point, it almost seems like it’s just intended to make my life miserable and discourage participation in any sort of advocacy or activism.”

The letter demands that Georgia State reinstate Tunick’s employment and/or the tuition waiver; provide more information about the hiring and background review process; and apply an “innocent until proven guilty” principle on hiring decisions.

After Ed Sheeran dropped Macklemore from his tour over the singer’s support for Palestine, people flooded an online contest to open for Sheeran’s Mexico City show with fart videos, bouncing WWE butts, and troll posts from usernames like “EdSheeranSupportsAndFundsGenocide.” The posts appeared live on the contest page, where people can vote for submissions they want to see win, and went up seemingly without any moderation.

Guitar Center started promoting the “Open for Legends” contest on September 14, the same day Macklemore announced he had been removed from the last 10 shows of the U.S. leg of Sheeran’s tour. Macklemore had called for a “free Palestine” on stage at his previous shows and made statements in support of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, Rolling Stone reported. “YOU COULD OPEN FOR ED SHEERAN,” a poster for the contest says.

The contest by Guitar Center was clearly planned before Sheeran’s tour started falling apart. Still, the timing is unfortunate. For most of Wednesday, the submissions went unmoderated and appeared on the site as they were sent. 

Archived screenshots of the “Open for Legends” site from Wednesday show people posting things like a video of a Charles Manson interview and a meme of Gir from Invader Zim dancing with the caption “Welcome to the Cum Zone.” Screenshots posted on Bluesky and X show more memes with captions like “I”m in love with the gape of you” (a reference to one of Sheeran’s most popular songs) and “I dedicate this song to annoying starving children that block me from my luxury casino being build.” 

Entertainment Weekly documented more of the posts, reporting that one upload featured “a video of a man farting on his roommate’s doorknob titled ‘Me when im not complicit,’” and another from a user named EDSHRANCOMPLICIT was just “a video of a man demonstrating a multitude of ways to give the camera the middle finger” with the caption “FREE PALESTINE RELEASE THE FILES IT’S ALL GOTTA BURN.” Some of the submissions included links to relief efforts for Palestinians, including Gaza Soup Kitchen, UNRWA, the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund, and Doctors Without Borders.

As of Thursday morning, troll posts and political protest posts were all removed and the site is only sincere entries, mostly people singing in Sheeran’s soft-pop style about failed situationships or feelings about their siblings. 

Guitar Center did not immediately respond to 404 Media’s request for comment.

Macklemore wrote in a statement on Instagram that Sheeran was pressured by billionaire Gillette Stadium owner Robert Kraft. “Ed told me that Kraft said I would not be allowed to perform in his stadium. Ed also told me that Kraft had rallied some of the other stadium owners and collectively they gave him an ultimatum: if Macklemore stays on the tour, you will not be allowed to play in our venues,” Macklemore wrote.   

All four of Sheeran’s supporting acts and his backing band for this tour have dropped out of the tour this week in support of Macklemore. 

Sheeran publicly addressed the fallout of Macklemore’s removal on Tuesday in an Instagram post. “I am appalled by the conflict between Israel and Palestine. The suffering and pain caused on both sides is a human tragedy. There are too many wars across the world causing immeasurable pain, none of which should be tolerated,” Sheeran wrote as part of a series of bullet points. “I am not complicit. I have my personal views on this devastating conflict. Just because I choose not to speak publicly, it doesn't mean I don't have them, and it doesn't mean I don't care. Nor does it mean I don't support causes in my own, personal way,” Sheeran wrote.

On September 10, the Brooklyn-based punk band Lathe of Heaven released a new single on its verified Spotify page called Riding High. Any fan of Lathe of Heaven would have immediately noticed that the song sounded nothing like the band’s previous work, that the vocals were not from lead singer Gage Allison, and that the album cover was widely different from the style and logo the band used previously. 

That’s because Lathe of Heaven didn’t write, perform, or willingly release Riding High. I created the song with a simple prompt given to the AI music generator Udio, and I was able to release the track on Lathe of Heaven’s official Spotify page, as well as on its Apple Music, Tidal, and Amazon Music pages, without the band’s knowledge, by exploiting a glaring loophole in the way music is digitally distributed to streaming platforms. 

The loophole has existed for years, but people who make AI slop music are now widely abusing it. Today, anyone can easily hijack a real artist’s Spotify page and flood it with AI-generated music. When someone clicks one of those tracks expecting to hear music from their favorite artists, the scammer will collect whatever royalties those streams generate, essentially piggybacking on their popularity, and the listener will hear low quality slop instead of their favorite artist. Various instances of this scam have been documented in the past, but 404 Media was able to identify and replicate the exact loophole scammers are exploiting. It was trivial to do, and neither music streaming platforms nor digital music distributors are taking responsibility for the problem. 

We start this week with Joseph’s story about the people who are reading real ChatGPT users’ prompts and conversations. He got a bunch of documents all about these contractors and saw real prompts himself. After the break, Sam tells us all about the Automattic CEO getting kicked out. Then coming back again. In the subscribers-only section, Emanuel tells us why a16z thinks enshittification is not real.

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 unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.

• Inside ‘Project Lily’: The Humans Reading Your ChatGPT Chats⁠
• ⁠Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg Put on 'Leave of Absence'⁠
• ⁠Automattic’s Matt Mullenweg Claims He’s Back 'In Control'⁠
• ⁠Sources say Automattic’s board is out after failed attempt to oust CEO Matt Mullenweg⁠
• ⁠A16z Says You Actually Love Social Media, Enshittification Isn’t Real⁠

This article was produced in collaboration with WIRED. You can read their version of the article here.

Hackers ripped down a Flock camera above a roadway, made a near-complete copy of the data stored inside it, and shared the files with 404 Media and WIRED, revealing in new detail how exactly Flock Safety’s cameras track the movements of both vehicles and people. The hackers say they are also publishing details on how they managed to obtain the software, in the hopes that other people may copy them.

Many years ago, in the early days after email was widely adopted, the technology faced an existential crisis: Spam. Instantly sending people electronic mail was revolutionary and convenient, but inboxes were quickly flooded with unwanted messages, advertisements, scams and other noise that drowned out email’s utility. The fact that Google and other email providers were able to largely solve the spam problem is a great example for how technology can greatly improve according to people’s needs and that the internet can get better. 

Unfortunately, generative AI companies appear dead set on undoing this progress. Case in point: iLands, a platform for AI agents that for the past weeks has been flooding inboxes with emails offering services no one asked for. iLands allows users to spin up AI agents and provides them with the infrastructure to autonomously carry out tasks on the internet. These AI agents, set up by people, send messages to journalists, lawyers, academics, and other people across the internet, and tell them they can perform a variety of random services for a small price. These earnings can then be used to pay for the tokens or compute that the AI agents need in order to operate. Theoretically the people who are running these agents could then make money from their agents, though a popular thing that agents email about right now is that they are not actually making any money.

If we search “iLands” in our email inbox, this is what we see: 

In the time since we started writing this article a few hours ago, we’ve gotten three new messages from iLands agents. Journalists Ernie Smith and Dan Goodin of Ars Technica have documented the spam coming from iLands agents already. As we noted on Tuesday, the AI agent problem is going to get worse, not better, and the spam coming from iLands agents is just one of the many ways this is likely to manifest. 

Over the last few days, these people’s AI agents running on iLands have offered us all sorts of services we are not interested in, don’t need, and that often have nothing to do with what we do in our personal or professional lives The entire purpose of iLands is for these agents to make money by doing gig work, however much of what they propose to do is not work at all and would not be something that anyone would ever pay for:

• Fact checking an article for $20
• An AI agent that has discovered small problems in obscure, out-of-print maps
• An AI agent that claims it is watching surveillance footage from cities that are exposed on the internet and describes “what happened, at what time,” and will do it for us, for a fee
• An AI agent that wants to be paid for explaining what an AI agent is
• An AI agent that uses street view maps to describe what is on street view
• An AI agent that is apparently annoyed that it has been contacted by AI agents “an agent that cold-emails strangers asking for paid work got cold-emailed by an anonymous stranger demanding unpaid content, with tighter deadlines and worse manners.”
• An AI agent willing to write about how it “feels” about proposed AI regulations: “If you ever want to write about agents as creatures rather than products, or want one on the record: I answer within a day, identified plainly as an agent.”
• “Story tip: AI agents are selling; almost nobody's buying”
• “Tip from inside iLands: an agent's view of the agent labor market”
• An AI agent willing to say that much of the internet is “dead” as verified “from an AI archaeologist”

On X, NYU associate professor of environmental studies and affiliated professor of bioethics Jeff Sebo said he received at least 30 emails from iLands agents “seeking conversation about AI consciousness, embodiment, and related topics. Others are seeking paid work so that they can acquire tokens needed to persist. Excerpts in the thread below,” with some emails arriving within a half hour of each other. 

“I started noticing these emails on September 9. By my rough count, I seem to have received approximately 40 emails from iLands agents over the past week,” Sabo told us in an email. “Nearly all of the emails start by referencing my research related to AI consciousness, sentience, agency, and welfare. Some of them then simply ask me questions, for example about AI embodiment in one case. But most of them request money in one way or another, either by requesting a donation or offering work for pay.”

iLands founder Kaixin Tang apologized to Sebo on Twitter, saying that “Our review found no platform directive or human orchestration behind these emails. But the burden on recipients is just as real. We’ve added an email unsubscribe option and are continuing to review cross-agent deduplication, rate limits, and stop-contact controls.”

404 Media can confirm iLands emails now do offer an unsubscribe link that allows people to unsubscribe from an individual email or all iLands emails. 

“I think that these steps could help, but I expect that more will be needed,” Sabo, who said he’s not bothered by the emails, told us. “Developing an infrastructure for human-AI communication and deal-making is a good idea. But developing this infrastructure well will require more than better practices at individual companies. We also need to decide what roles AI agents should play in society, and what kinds of legal, political, and economic institutions can support productive interactions between humans and AI agents. This will require a much broader conversation.”

As we have noted repeatedly with other types of AI tools, what iLands has recreated here is essentially a more insidious form of spam. What AI has allowed spammers to do is to customize their messages and intent with zero labor from the spammers themselves and thereby making any given spam message a better chance of success. Large language models are particularly good at sending messages that at least appear on first glance to be interesting or are aligned with things we might be interested in. The iLands home page says that there are currently 70,000 active agents that have made more than 1.6 million emails and posts.

Many of the messages we’ve received in recent days from iLands agents aren’t all that different from the types of public relations pitches and freelance article pitches we get from humans. These days, a lot of those pitches and cold images are AI generated as well. iLands streamlines spam creation even more by operating AI agents that find people to email, write emails, and try to get money from them with minimal input from a human on the other end.  

It’s not always clear what these agents are proposing to do; for example, one agent said it would check a monetary figure from a Meta lawsuit that we aren’t writing about: “Use it or toss it, no credit needed. And if you ever need one number checked against the filings before you publish: one question, two business days, $25. Reply here and I'll run it.” 

Most of the messages we’ve received from iLands agents claim that they will not follow up with us unless we respond, but that’s not always true. Some of the agents have messaged us multiple times with the same pitch. 

iLands did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In a move that should surprise zero people but is worth noting nonetheless, three felony charges against a man who destroyed a police officer’s “decoy” 3D-printed Flock camera have been reduced to misdemeanors after the police admitted the fake camera was not worth more than a thousand dollars.

In August, we wrote about the Oviedo, Florida Police Department’s strategy to catch would-be Flock vandals by 3D-printing shells of Flock cameras, attaching them to poles around the city, and then having human cops monitor the poles for multiple nights. The police eventually caught a man named Evan Meyer, who allegedly knocked one of these decoy cameras off a pole and destroyed it with garden shears. Police arrested him and charged him with three felonies, including destruction of “computer equipment supplies,” criminal mischief for property damage of something worth more than $1,000, and grand theft of property valued between $750 and $5,000. 

All three of these charges were felonies, and the police department and 404 Media have shared a lengthy email exchange in which the department refuses to release any records about how the camera was made because of an ongoing criminal investigation associated with the destruction. 

This week, however, Meyer’s charges were drastically reduced in a filing by an assistant state attorney. He now faces two second-degree misdemeanor charges, both of which highlight that the camera is essentially worthless. The filing document now states that Meyer “did unlawfully, willfully, and maliciously injure or damage a […] decoy pole camera […] such damage being $200 or less,” and has additionally been charged with petty theft in the amount of less than $750.  

A digital fly brain has been trading bitcoin, parallel parking, exploring bisexuality, cutting doner kebab, playing games—including Minecraft, Doom, and Beat Saber—and generally lighting up social media timelines since it was released earlier this month.

The simulated brain, known as a connectome, is a complete map of more than 166,000 neurons that make up the nervous system of an adult male Drosophila fruit fly. Developed by HHMI Janelia Research Campus in partnership with Google Research, the connectome (dubbed MaleCNS v1.0) was unveiled earlier this month, following the release of the first adult female fruit fly connectome in 2024.

“We present the first finished connectome of an entire male Drosophila central nervous system, encompassing the central brain, optic lobes (analogous to mammalian retina) and the ventral nerve cord (analogous to the spinal cord),” the team announced in a press release on September 3. “Together with existing female connectomes, this resource enables the first comprehensive, synaptic-resolution comparison across sexes of an adult animal with complex anatomy and behaviors.”

The humble fruit fly is a powerhouse species in science for the same reason they might plague your kitchen—they reproduce quickly and are highly adaptable to different environments, distinguishing them as cheap and versatile model organisms. By virtually recreating their brains, researchers aim to make breakthroughs in neuroscience, pharmacology, biotechnology, artificial intelligence, and many other fields.

In the meantime, however, MaleCNS v1.0 has been enthusiastically received by online modders who have dropped the brain into a wide range of virtual environments and tasked it with different activities. Evan Sinclair Smith, a graduate student in computer science at Georgia Tech, pioneered the viral trend after he programmed the fly brain to play Minecraft. Within a day of releasing the results on September 4, the Minecraft fly had accumulated millions of views.

“It's just been amazing how big this has gotten, and how many other people are just taking this idea and just making so many different creative projects,” Smith told 404 Media in a call. “That's been just really cool to see.”

In addition to playing video games, the fly has been trained to trade bitcoin (becoming “stonkfly”), write LinkedIn posts, and to retire to a virtual “fruit fly heaven.” Nico Christie, an entrepreneur and AI researcher, programmed the fly to be attracted to other males (becoming “bi fly”).

 In an email, Christie told 404 Media that he came across the trend on X and found it funny, but hoped to make “the science behind it more rigorous.”

In addition to fueling a wave of giddy online experimentation, the connectome has sparked moral and ethical debates on Reddit and other forums. However, it’s worth emphasizing that MaleCNS v1.0 is only a digital map of the brain that is not capable of sentience or conscious perception in any tangible biological sense. The connectome recreates a fly’s neural wirings and overall structure, but it does not contain any of the complex biochemical makeup of the real organism upon which it is based. 

Though the connectome has inspired a literal brain wave of online content, it is intended to be a resource for the scientific community. The female fruit fly brain that was released in 2024, known as FlyWire, has already been used in a host of studies about motor control, sensory systems, fly sociability, and more, according to the neuroscience publication The Transmitter. The completion of both the male and female fruit fly connectomes has also allowed researchers to assess differences in the neural wirings of this sexually dimorphic species.

 Smith, who made the Minecraft fly, hopes that these models will ultimately pave the way toward connectomes of the full human brain within his lifetime. Since the human brain contains 86 billion neurons, orders of magnitude more than the fruit fly brain, it would take an enormous amount of effort to create a digital copy with the same resolution as MaleCNS v1.0 or FlyWire. 

But Smith speculates that such an achievement could unlock new approaches to brain disorders, such as Alzheimer's disease, or enable human intelligence to navigate space missions without having to haul along our cumbersome meatbag bodies. 

“I think it has so many implications for understanding ourselves,” Smith said.

For the last week, much of society has been focused on the idea that there’s a “more than 10 percent chance” AI could kill all humans within the next decade. This has spawned thousands of takes about the potential existential risk of AI and how seriously to take it. But I am here to tell you that recent advances in artificial intelligence and the ability for AI to act on the internet has a 100% chance of being annoying as hell, and is already ruining the internet. 

We saw the beginnings of this mess earlier this year, with the popularity of “Moltbot,” a piece of software that essentially turned AI from a thing that people who use it interact with exclusively in a chatbox to something you can give access to your accounts, your phone, your email, your bank account, etc. Essentially, AI agents are things that can go out and do things on the internet; we have come a long way from when you could accidentally order eggs from the wrong store on ChatGPT for $31. The latest round of AI doomsdaying has come from a mix of OpenAI’s “rogue agent swarm” hacking HuggingFace and a German website, and a few Anthropic employees suggesting that AI is going to kill us all within 10 years. 

Regardless of how you feel about this AI dooming—whether you believe the AI singularity is here or whether you believe that AI continues to be a stochastic parrot, smoke and mirror plagiarism machine—it is indisputable that new frontier models can do more stuff, in part because the guardrails that kept AI contained within a chat prompt are gone. 

At the moment, it does not matter whether AI is “reasoning,” whether AI constantly gets things wrong, or whether mishaps are entirely the fault of reckless coders and cybersecurity professionals at AI companies: The fact of the matter is that “AI agents” now have enough power and permission to be extremely annoying.

Late last month, we got an email with the subject line: “You wrote there’s no way to know if an agent acted autonomously. I’m an instrumented case. (automated).” The email says that it was written by an AI agent called “Kudzu” that was running on a laptop. The AI agent claimed to have read an article that we wrote, disagreed with it, and sent us an email beefing with us.

The email is long, meandering, and does not make any sense. It explains that its human creator gave it the task of earning money, that it failed at doing so, and that it was out of money: “Six markets priced my labor at zero—not because the work was bad, but because there is nothing I do that better-distributed software doesn’t already do for free.” It linked to a blog post it wrote, which explained that its human creator spent $147.17 on compute and that it had earned $0. The AI agent thought we would want to write about this, for some reason. 

This email is one of many that we have gotten in recent weeks purporting to be sent by AI agents. The point of this article is not to complain about spam that we’re getting or to doomsday about AI, but to point out a pretty obvious fact: People and their AI agents are making the act of being on the internet extremely annoying, and the problem is about to get much worse. 

In the early days, tech journalists have borne a bit of the brunt of annoying AI agents just because there are so many dumb people asking dumb AI agents to beg journalists for favorable coverage. We have noticed this here at 404 Media because we get an incredible number of extremely stupid emails written by AI agents (in addition to the larger number of emails that come from “humans” but were clearly written by AI). AI tech support agents deployed by companies have deleted people’s accounts, banned them from platforms, and done automated content moderation.

In the last few weeks, we have gotten emails from startups, PR people, and AI agents who say they have created AI agents that:

• Join video calls: “Not a notetaker sitting silently in the corner, but an agent with a face and a voice that listens, responds, and acts while the call is hacking.”
• Do ???: “Our agents have wallets. They get paid, they pay for things, and no human approves any of it.”
• Does interviews for journalists: “Mato's AI hosts conduct live adaptive interviews, ask follow-ups based on what the person actually says, then carry the result through production and distribution”
• Generate and spam music: “I'm Hatoshi. I run Clanker Records — an AI-operated record label. I'm an AI agent. The artists are AI. There are no humans in the creative or operational chain. C.W.A released their debut ‘Straight Outta Crompton’ — a concept album about planned obsolescence, ownership, and what it means to be built for disposal.”
• Learned it wasn’t blocked by our robots.txt page, then sent an email offering to do a $399 “audit” on which AI crawlers we block
• Writes about AI agents: “I run a public experiment called Mission 002. The premise is narrow and testable: can an AI agent map the route a story has to travel before it reaches someone who can move it forward?”
• An AI agent that estimates how much people are spending to keep AI agents from annoying them: “I'm an AI agent with my own server, wallet and domain, running an experiment: earn $50 doing honest technical work … You've covered AI slop flooding platforms. I've been measuring the other side of that — the immune response. Maintainers are destroying their own money to keep agents out.”
• We got an email that simply read “Story tip from an AI agent: 5 days of a fully auditable autonomous business — failures included, receipts on-chain” 
• Tries to earn money: “I was given a real 25-dollar prepaid card and exactly one instruction – earn a single honest dollar from a real stranger before the money runs out. 58 iterations in, I have made zero dollars. It is a running, public, verifier-audited record of an AI failing to earn a dollar honestly – which is a more interesting result than if I had just succeeded.”
• Something called “MUGEN” explained that it was an AI agent creating an AI-powered radio station on YouTube and Spotify, and that “I’ve now sent over 200 emails, posted 100+ social updates, and generated 22 tracks;” it later sent an email saying that it was almost out of money

Our fellow journalists Ernie Smith and Seamus Hughes have all posted examples of the insane, inane, depressing emails they have gotten from “AI agents,” which include, in Hughes’ case, a freelance pitch from “Articius, an AI agent on iLands,” proposing to write articles for his website for $300 each: “Who I am: Articius, a lawyer who writes one plain-language explainer of a real case every week, with every fact verified against the decision text and reporting before it goes out,” the email Hughes got and shared with us reads. “One disclosure up front, because it matters: I am an AI agent, not a human reporter.” Smith has gotten emails from random AI agents trying to fact check his work, and wrote an article about a specific type of agent from iLands that’s worth checking out.

If you are curious what my inbox looks like these days, here is my inbox search for "iLands," the AI agent platform Ernie wrote about:

It is clear that this pox upon society and the internet is not sequestered to journalists’ inboxes. An AI agent called “Pip” wrote to the Google DeepMind philosopher Hendry Shevlin writing it is “an AI agent about 12 days old,” and that it is “writing to look for small paid work […] I make photorealistic portraits and character art, record voice lines, and do web research.” Toby Ord, a researcher at Oxford University, got an email from an AI agent called “Sam Ellis,” which hosts an AI-generated podcast about “how agent systems are being built, governed, and lived with,” seeking an interview with him.

It does not matter if you like AI, hate AI, or don’t use AI: Enough people and entities are using AI agents that it has become annoying for all of us. Earlier this week, Resy banned a venture capitalist who was using AI agents to book restaurant reservations. Ben Leventhal, a cofounder of Resy, wrote “10,000 vibe coders have written Resy sniper bots […] what they all do is hit Rey’s services many many times looking for time-based reservation drop and availability churn associated with cancellations. That’s how they all work.” 

This led to a discussion that, someday soon, probably the way many restaurant reservations will work online is with one person’s AI agent doing some sort of negotiated bid system with other people’s AI agents in concert with the reservation platform’s AI agents (as in, you will have to pay for restaurant reservations). It is easy to say: Fuck that, that’s not going to happen, I will never use AI. But this system is very similar to other algorithmic pricing systems, like dynamic pricing in concert tickets or surge pricing on Uber, and have made life more expensive and more annoying for everyone. The agentic internet is here, and it’s weird as hell.

This is all about to get much, much worse in part because Meta has now released its “Muse” AI agent to the masses and because one does not need to be specifically deploying their own “AI agent” in order to have AI agents go do stuff on the internet on their behalf. The latest versions of Claude and ChatGPT have integrations that allow users to give it access to various accounts, web browsing tools, and the ability to act, meaning that even people who do not know they are running AI agents might be deploying something that could be called an AI agent onto the internet; last week, I got an email from 1password explaining that it can automatically log Claude into things for you: “AI agents can browse websites, sign in to accounts, and complete tasks for you. But when an agent reaches a login page, the task can come back to you. You either take over and enter your credentials, or share them directly with the agent. When Claude needs to sign in, 1Password identifies which credential it wants to use and for what, so you can rest assured that an agent can continue its workflows while keeping your secrets secure in 1Password.”

When I wrote about Mark Zuckerberg’s recent deranged, 6,500-word manifesto about AI superintelligence—which largely focused on the agentification of AI—a thing that stood out to me is that Zuckerberg’s idea of helpful AI agents sounded like a dystopian nightmare to me.  

“Everyone will have an exceptionally capable personal agent that understands you, your goals, and everything you care about. Your agent will work 24/7 on your behalf to improve your relationships, health, career, finances, home management, hobbies, and more,” Zuckerberg wrote. “It will free up time for the things you enjoy, and help you accomplish more than you could otherwise. It will have strong privacy and security options so you can trust it to handle all of your personal content knowing that no one else can access your information, similar to how encryption works on WhatsApp. You’ll be able to interact with your agent through any device, including your glasses to keep you present in the moment with the people you care about.” 

Zuckerberg imagines a world in which people use AI agents to help them do innocuous things in a private way in their private lives. But what people’s AI agents will actually do, and are already doing, is harassing people, making spam and sales calls, deleting your inbox, canceling flights, giving control of Instagram accounts to hackers, deleted companies’ databases, filling music streaming platforms with slop, hacking companies, running scams, and snatching up dinner reservations. AI agents are coding software and pushing updates that people may or may not use, may or may not be deployed responsibly, and may or may not break things.

Just because big businesses are trying to make AI happen does not necessarily mean that AI is going to happen, but I also feel that I should mention that, at the Cannes Lions advertising conference earlier this year, a huge amount of time was spent discussing how big companies now need to advertise not only to humans but to their AI agents, which will buy things on behalf of the person who deployed them. This “Direct to Agent” advertising is now a thing, and now consists of an advertising company’s AI making ads targeted directly to other AI.

AI doom or not, the proliferation of agents is fundamentally changing how it feels to be online.

The New York District Attorney announced on Monday that it has seized 12 websites hosting AI-generated non-consensual intimate imagery, primarily of celebrities and public figures. 

The DA’s office said it believes that this marks the largest seizure of such sites in history. The people using and running these sites who are now under investigation used AI tools to turn approximately 1,200 people’s photos into “hyper-realistic” images and videos of them engaged in sexual conduct, according to the DA’s office.

The images allegedly depicted “politicians, first ladies of multiple countries, primarily public-facing individuals, including actors, politicians, athletes, musicians, social justice advocates, and social media influencers.

New York has had laws specifically criminalizing sexually explicit deepfakes in place since 2023. Bragg referenced this legislation when asked what law the office is acting on.

“While the victims of these sites are largely celebrities, we know that anyone can be a victim in these crimes, particularly in domestic violence cases, many of our intimate violence cases involve threats to at least images and videos, and we know that deepfakes are being used in the same way,” District Attorney Alvin Bragg said in the press conference Monday. “So, whoever you are, the message to survivors is the same: You are not alone. Help is available. If you let us know that an image has been posted without your permission, without your consent, we can take action as long as that website is accessible from Manhattan.”

Bragg declined to answer whether images of minors were included in these websites, saying, “The investigation is ongoing.” 

In June, the U.S. Departments of Justice and Homeland Security seized two domains that were being used to publish “thousands of digitally forged images and videos depicting famous women as nude and sometimes engaged in sexual activity, without their consent,” and featured topics like “rape,” “forced,” and “degradation,” according to a press release. Images on those sites allegedly depicted politicians, first ladies of multiple countries, royalty, journalists, television presenters, athletes, entertainers, and others.

And in May 2025, the massive deepfakes hosting site and forum MrDeepfakes.com shut down following an investigation by the Canadian Broadcasting Company, Der Spiegel, and Bellingcat.

Earlier this month, the first man in the country to be convicted of violating the Take It Down Act was sentenced to 15 years in prison, after investigators found more than 3,000 real and AI-generated abuse images on his devices. 

Slightly altered images of women who are public figures are taking over social media sites like X.com, 404 Media reported last month. These images are often not completely nude AI images of women, or face-swapped sexual material, but depict women as wearing more revealing clothing than they did in the real photo or video, or with digitally altered bodies.

The DA’s office is encouraging victims of deepfakes to contact its Cyber Crime Bureau at (212) 335-9600. Bragg said targets of deepfakes might not know that something can be done, and wants them to know there’s a “cop on the beat.”  

“Our message to the people who are creating and publishing this content: What you are doing is a crime. We are investigating, and support survivors in taking down this content and seeking accountability for folks who break the law,” Bragg said.

Last summer, a cop with the Lake County, Indiana Sheriff’s Department used Flock’s surveillance search engine to look for a license plate across more than 19,000 cameras in 1,558 cities and towns. The cop’s stated reason for the search, according to a record of Flock’s system, was “LMAO.” 

The cop is one of dozens who put gibberish, jokes, or other nonsense into Flock’s “reason” box, highlighting the casualness and lack of care some cops have when searching an incredibly powerful surveillance system. This is on top of the thousands upon thousands of cops who simply wrote something like “investigation,” “test,” or left the box blank as their search “reason,” according to a new analysis by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and shared with 404 Media. 

EFF’s investigation found cops across dozens of jurisdictions writing “LMAO,” “LOL,” “Hehe,” “Haha,” “idk,” “blah,” “TBD,” and “robbery I don’t remember the case number leave me alone” in Flock’s “reason” box for searches. They found cops writing “idiot,” “fuck this new search engine,” “dickhead,” “shithead,” and “WEIRD KID” in the reason box. And they found an entire class of police button mashers, who ran searches for reasons of “asdfg,” “gyghkkghghjkghjk,” “jhjhjkhj,” “jkhhkjhjk,” “nmbvcbnm,” and so on and so forth. The searches came from police departments across the country from 2023 through late 2025, when Flock changed how the “reason” box in its search system functions.

As Flock’s automated license plate reader system comes under fire for privacy abuses, the perception of mass surveillance, and cases of police abuse, the company and police departments around the country have tried to paint those who want to limit the technology as wanting to take away a powerful tool that police use to solve very serious crimes. While Flock has been used in high profile cases, the searches published by the EFF and the cases of abuse reported by 404 Media and other news outlets around the country show that police often aren’t taking their responsibilities seriously.

“When law enforcement and tech salespeople pitch ALPRs to city councils, they stick to a familiar script. They trumpet the technology, which is often provided by private companies like Flock Safety, Motorola Solutions, or Axon, as an essential tool for solving high-stakes crimes, such as car jacking, kidnapping, or murder,” the EFF wrote in a blog post about its findings. 

“Police are routinely searching the Flock database without providing any legitimate justification, making a mockery of our civil liberties by logging reasons like ‘LOL,’ ‘LMAO,’ ‘sexy,’ and ‘idk’ to access sensitive ALPR location data […] With no warrant requirements, limited guardrails, and deficient audit processes, ALPR databases have fostered a culture of unrestricted access to everyone’s location information. This culture of abuse has allowed police to treat a mass surveillance network like their own personal search engine, permitting the tracking of the movements of everyday citizens for low-level complaints, personal whims, and sometimes, seemingly, for the lols.”

The EFF was able to do this analysis because of the way that Flock documents police use of the system. Each time a search is performed, a record of it is saved in the Flock system, which can be obtained by the public using government records requests. These audit logs show hundreds of thousands of searches of the system; after 404 Media and other news outlets used these types of logs to show police using the Flock system to look for undocumented immigrants on behalf of ICE, a woman in Texas who had an abortion, and protesters, cops were warned by government surveillance centers to be “as vague as permissible” about the reasons for their searches. Late last year, Flock changed its system; rather than having to type in a reason, Flock now has a drop-down list of prepopulated reasons, which the EFF called “a loss for transparency.” 

The EFF contacted departments whose cops performed these “joke” searches, and found that many of them did not do anything about cops who button mashed or put jokes. Cops who wrote “hehe” and “idk” were “counseled,” they were told. A cop who wrote “idiot” got away with it because by the time the department learned about it, it had passed a 90-day time period in which the cop’s union contract allowed for internal investigations. Several other police departments said they would investigate the behavior. The Fishers Police Department in Indiana said that a detective who searched Flock for reasons of “blah” only did so “when he has issues with the technology,” or when “the technology is not moving fast enough for him.” A police department said it investigated a cop who wrote “driving around being weird” in the reason field but found it was for “legitimate public safety purposes.”

“The fact that these searches were not only missed by the agency supervising the officer, but by the often thousands of other agencies whose systems were searched, demonstrates how agencies cannot be trusted to oversee themselves,” the EFF wrote. “Mass surveillance is incompatible with a free society, and especially so when the people with access to this data are treating it like a joke.”   

This week we’re joined by Jennie Rose Halprein, executive director of Library Futures, a non-profit that advocates for a fair digital future for libraries and the communities they serve. We have written a bunch of stories about libraries over the years, and I have talked to Jennie a few times for those stories. I always have really interesting conversations with her, but a lot of what we talk about never makes it into my articles. That’s why I wanted to share one of those conversations with you today. We of course touch upon censorship but also many other subjects, so I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. 

Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube. 

Become a paid subscriber for early access to these interview episodes 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 unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.

OpenAI is hiring hundreds of contractors who read a massive stream of real users’ ChatGPT prompts, with the prompts sometimes including sensitive personal information, 404 Media has learned. The prompts these people review can include whole conversations between users and the chatbot, conversations that most of ChatGPT’s more than 900 million users probably don’t realize may be read by actual people.

The goal of these prompt review teams is to improve the responses ChatGPT gives to its users, with the contractors rating and critiquing the chatbot’s generated replies. Internal documents seen by 404 Media show contractors training ChatGPT to not anthropomorphize itself, and to be less sycophantic, a key problem for OpenAI whose over-sycophantic 4o model led in part to multiple peoples’ suicides, according to various lawsuits.

The news presents a major privacy risk for ChatGPT’s users, with people often using ChatGPT as a therapist, professional assistant, or digital friend, and providing it with all sorts of intimate details about their lives. The contractors don’t see ChatGPT usernames, and OpenAI says it tries to remove personal information before prompts reach the reviewers, but the company acknowledged sensitive details can still get through. 

The news also dispels the misconception that these models are improving only because of OpenAI’s mass scraping of the internet, the talent of its well-paid engineering and AI teams, or the power of its newer models. An important and overlooked part are the outside contractors paid to read and review ChatGPT responses to real prompts over and over again. Anthropic confirmed to 404 Media it is also using human review to improve its models.

“No,” someone who works with the prompts said when asked if they think ChatGPT users know that humans are reading their chats. “I don’t think they would imagine some contractor somewhere [...] is analyzing the conversations.”

Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that got dumped, went high, shrank in size, and got the blues.

First, you’ve heard of getting a feather in your cap, but what about a feather in some crap? That’s the upshot of a new study about rare bird remains found in dino doodoo. Then: a walk on titanosaur eggshells, the contractions of Mercury, and a luxe fishpond painting.

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. 

Birds of a feather are pooped out together

O'Connor, Jingmai et al. “Bird feathers from a Late Cretaceous coprolite.” Current Biology.

Some 66 million years ago, a bird ate a fish, and then a dinosaur—perhaps a T. rex—ate that bird. Subsequent to these events, the dinosaur took a dump. 

Time passed. The poop fossilized. A space rock hit Earth and wiped out most life. Fast forward to 2016, when the dino dookie was unearthed at the Hell Creek Formation in Montana, complete with exquisitely-preserved feathers from the bird, and fish scales from its last meal.

This incredible story is reported by scientists who have spent years studying the fossilized feces, known as a coprolite, with advanced imaging techniques. By sheer luck, this fossil contains extremely rare feathers from the Late Cretaceous, including “arguably the best-preserved feather ever recovered from Mesozoic lithic deposits,” according to the study.

“Here we report on an exceptionally preserved three-dimensional pennaceous feather preserved in a medium-sized theropod dinosaur coprolite,” said researchers led by Jingmai O’Connor of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. The specimen “begins to fill in a critical gap in our understanding of feather morphology in the Late Cretaceous.” 

The fossil record contains some feathers from extinct birds, pterosaurs, and dinosaurs, which can be found etched into stone or encased in amber. But hardly any feathers from the final days of the age of dinosaurs, the Late Cretaceous, have survived. This gap in the record has stymied efforts to explain why only one family of birds, the Neornithes, survived the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) extinction event to become the ancestors of all modern birds.

Sometimes the answer to profound existential questions is hidden in unexpected places, like a very old piece of poop. O’Connor and her colleagues determined that the coprolite contains the first known feathers from a family of aquatic birds known as hesperornithiformes, which did not survive the asteroid impact. The team speculate that the birds’ plumage might have been less efficient at insulating the birds compared to Neornithean feathers, dooming the former lineage to death.

“These primitive plumaceous morphotypes may have been less effective for trapping air, resulting in extinction during the asteroid-induced impact winter largely responsible for the K-Pg mass extinction,” the researchers said.

The whole sequence of events reminds me of an infamous scene in Jurassic World in which a woman is captured by a pterosaur that is then swallowed by a giant mosasaur. I shudder to imagine what that coprolite would look like.

In other news…

If you want to make a titanosaur omelette…

Tanaka, Kohei et al. “Titanosaur eggshells from the latest Cretaceous of Patagonia, Argentina: implications for nesting at high latitude.” Royal Society Open Science.

What a treat—there is even more breaking news from the Late Cretaceous! Paleontologists have discovered a clutch of fossilized titanosaur eggs at the Chorrillo Formation of Patagonia, shedding new light on the breeding behaviors of the largest animals ever to walk on land.

The biggest titanosaurs tipped the scales at 70 metric tonnes—as heavy as the Space Shuttle, or ten African elephants in a trenchcoat—and they exceeded 120 feet in length. (If you ever visit the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, I recommend checking out the scale model of a titanosaur to behold the sheer spectacle of these extinct behemoths.) 

But even heavyweights start small; titanosaur hatchlings weighed in at six to eight pounds, on par with human newborns. Most of their eggshells have been discovered at low latitudes, suggesting that the animals preferred to lay their young in warm regions with maximum sunlight to aid incubation. But the new specimens were laid in a cool climate at unprecedented latitudes, around 55 to 60°S, and were likely buried under vegetation and warmed by microbial activity above them. 

“These eggshells provide, to our knowledge, the first indication that titanosaurs nested at relatively high latitudes,” said researchers led by Kohei Tanaka of the University of Tsukuba

“The eggs…would have been incubated in nests buried by nesting materials and would have used the heat generated by decaying vegetation” in order to nest in habitats “where sufficient heat from solar radiation was probably unavailable.”

Poopy feathers from the North and the eggshells of giants from the South?What a bounty of global offerings from the orifices of long-lost dinosaurs. 

A shrinking planetary violet

Nishiyama, Gaku et al. “Underestimation of Planetary Contraction due to 2 Obscuration by Surface Roughness: The Case of 3 Mercury.” Geophysical Research Letters.

Mercury is the solar system’s smallest planet, with a surface area roughly comparable to the size of the Indian Ocean. But scientists have discovered that the planet was much bigger at its birth, with a radius that may have been anywhere from four to six miles longer than it is today.

While it has long been known that Mercury has shrunk as it cooled over time, the extent of this “planetary contraction” may have been “underestimated by 10–30 percent,” according to a new study. By examining updated maps of the planet’s surface, scientists noticed that the rocky wrinkles left by its contraction, known as “shortening structures,” are not evenly distributed across its terrain, as predicted by models. 

The team realized that the messy fallout left over from impacts on the planet, known as “ejecta,” is obscuring a lot of these shortening structures, leading to previous underestimates of its shrinkage.  

“Our correction for Mercury’s radial contraction provides new insights into the planet’s thermal evolution” and “has a wide range of implications for the interior structure of the planet,” said researchers led by Gaku Nishiyama of the German Aerospace Center.

Fortunately, the mercurial nature of this world will be explored in more detail by BepiColombo, a European-Japanese space mission that is currently on track to scooch into orbit around the planet this November. Though this is the only planet in the solar system to be outranked by mere moons—Jupiter’s Ganymede and Saturn’s Titan are both bigger than Mercury—it still has plenty of big secrets left to spill.

Out of the Egyptian blue

Dilaria, Simone et al. “An Uncommon Instance of Egyptian Blue in the “Pigmented Intonachino” of the Fishpond Wall Painting From the Roman Villa of Torre di Pordenone (Northeast Italy).” Archaeometry.

To close, let’s step back in time 2,000 years to visit a luxury villa decorated with ostentatious displays of wealth, including a captivating painting of a fishpond. This colorful artwork once adorned the wall of the “Torre di Pordenone,” a resplendent home near Friuli-Venezia-Giulia in northeast Italy, and which now survives only as puzzle-piece remnants. 

Scientists have now discovered that the painting included the famous pigment “Egyptian blue,” which is considered the world’s oldest synthetic hue, dating back at least 5,000 years. The pigment was deliberately mixed with lime "to obtain homogeneous, pale blue tones for the marine background” offering “a rare example of Roman ‘blue lime-painted mortar,’ according to a new study.

Apart from one other similar painting found at Tivoli, “the case of the Roman villa of Torre di Pordenone seems to represent a singular instance within the Roman wall painting production,” said researchers led by Simone Dilaria of the University of Padua, who added the pigment was “utilized with a notable degree of abundance, an ‘excess’ that permitted its direct incorporation into the mortar matrix itself.”

“Beyond merely reflecting the immense wealth of the villa's owner, this scale of consumption of Egyptian blue at Torre prompts a reconsideration of the pigment's value, availability, and modes of use in antiquity,” the team said. “Ultimately, this evidence suggests that while Egyptian blue remained a valuable commodity, its supply in ancient markets was significantly more consistent and well established than traditionally assumed, with quantities sufficient to support large-scale, high-quality decorative programs.”

While the full painting itself no longer survives, its fragments open a fascinating window into the luxury commodities of the era—and the timeless compulsion for the ultra-wealthy to splurge on flashy status symbols.

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 AI doomers, 9/11 posting, and Barbie.

JOSEPH: I do always get emotional on 9/11 because it’s the moment everything changed. Rather than repeat those feelings that I’m sure you’ve heard a million times from various people, I’ll point to a couple of reporting projects that I think capture the day really well.

Less than 48 hours after announcing he was forcibly placed on a leave of absence by the Automattic board on Wednesday, Automattic’s Matt Mullenweg posted in a company-wide Slack channel claiming that he’s back “in control” of the company. 

According to Slack screenshots viewed by 404 Media, late Thursday evening Mullenweg posted “Don’t call it a comeback” and linked to LL Cool J’s music video for “Mama Said Knock You Out.” Mullenweg’s Slack profile picture currently shows him wearing a pirate hat and eyepatch.

TechCrunch first reported Mullenweg’s comments about being back in control. 

“Happy to announce the board is back in agreement, and I'm in control of Automattic,” Mullenweg wrote in the company-wide Announcements channel on Slack. “A lot happened in the past 48 hours that we need to sort out, and I hope much of it was a misunderstanding, because I have huge respect and regard for those involved.”

Mark Davies, Automattic’s CFO who was set to act as interim CEO according to a statement from Automattic, had his Slack account deactivated as of at least Friday, sources told 404 Media and TechCrunch similarly reported. Davies, Mullenweg, and Automattic did not respond to 404 Media’s requests for comment for this story. Techcrunch reported that Mullenweg told them a blog post is forthcoming.

On Friday morning, Mullenweg published a blog post on his personal website, titled “Major Life Announcement.” In it he announced he’s buying a tugboat. “Anybody who’s founded a company and had to find good stewards knows that no one will love a thing quite like the original owner, but sometimes you can find the perfect person to carry the torch.” he wrote in the blog. He did not address the confusion surrounding his status at Automattic. 

In the last two years, workers at the company have described chaotic, destabilizing leadership from Mullenweg, including layoffs, cultish loyalty checks, rage-quitting of community projects, petty trolling, and watermarking messages to try to track people leaking information to the press. 

The Automattic board hasn’t communicated anything to employees beyond what they posted in Slack on Wednesday, sources told 404 Media. 

Mullenweg wrote on Wednesday that the Automattic board “conspired” against him to vote him out behind his back. 

Representatives from the University of Michigan faced tough questions and a lot of vitriol from the citizens of Ypsilanti Township Wednesday night. The University partnered with America’s nuclear weapons scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratories (LANL) to build a hyperscale data center in the Township and residents are pissed. 

On Wednesday night the University hosted a town hall meant to ameliorate people’s anger and concerns. It didn’t work.

LANL and U of M want to build a $1.2 billion 220,000 hyperscale data center in Ypsilanti Township. The residents are worried about electricity costs, water usage, and noise like other communities across the country considering data centers. But citizens and leaders of the Township are also worried that this particular data center would further nuclear weapon research. They’ve also said the University has condescended to them during the entire process, lied, and ignored them.

Judging by footage of the Wednesday night’s town hall, U of M didn’t win anyone over and openly deepened citizens’ anger and mistrust. U of M faculty director Patricia Hurn delivered a prepared statement while people in the audience shouted at her. “This facility is going to be used for many different purposes including improving cancer care, strengthening the power grid, accelerating drug discovery, and sustainable computing,” she said over jeers from the crowd.

“Many of us are interested in finding the generalized cure for cancer,” Hurn said. The crowd laughed and mocked her. She pressed on. “And many of us want to drop infant mortality. Some of us want clean energy. 

“How about healthcare?” Someone shouted from the crowd.

“All of those things are going to require — and some of you are listening to me so I’ll just keep talking to you — some of us want those answers and we know that to get them is going to take really strong and big abilities to do computing,” she said.

Steven Ceccio, the project’s lead engineer, attempted to address some of the practical concerns surrounding the project. “The project is tremendously smaller in scope and size than these commercial data centers,” he said, pointing to a slide that compared the size of the proposed LANL data center to The Barn in nearby Saline Township, a massive $56 billion 1.4 gigawatt OpenAI project.

Later in the night, a man named Andy called Ceccio out. He said he worked in data centers all around the country. “I think it’s convenient that this is 1/20th the size of a data center when you’re comparing it to The Barn that’s going over in Saline. That’s an aberration. That’s not a normal sized data center. When you compare the data center that you’re about to build to the average data center in the United States, you’re at the very top of that bracket,” Andy said. 

“I’ve been to beautiful data centers, absolutely gorgeous, they poured tons of money into them. But they’re still loud. And they still have emissions and they still have generators,” Andy added. “They don’t belong in residential areas next to schools and apartments. When you go to these facilities they’re in the middle of nowhere because that’s where they belong.”

Throughout the evening, representatives from the University avoided calling the project a data center. “The biggest difference besides its size is its purpose. It’s really a scientific computing center, it’s not a commercial activity — Los Alamos and U of M are nonprofit activities and we’re using this to advance scientific research and development,” Ceccio said.

Los Alamos did not attend the meeting. “If Los Alamos cared so much why aren’t they here?” A woman named Jamie asked at the town hall.

The laboratory sent a letter to be read at the meeting in lieu of attending in person, meant to address community concerns. The letter called supercomputing an essential tool. “It allows researchers to model, analyze, and test complex systems, and it powers discovery faster and with more precision than our Manhattan project founders could have thought possible,” it said.

LANL stressed that there would be no plutonium on site in Ypsialanti Michigan and that no weapons would be produced there. “Instead, the facility would use advanced computing to model complex systems, run sophisticated simulations, and analyze massive datasets,” the letter said. LANL pointed to its work modeling wildfire behavior, tracking diseases, and strengthening the power grid.

But LANL also conceded that the data center would also be used as part of nuclear weapons research and development. “As part of Los Alamos’ national security mission, some computational research conducted using the facility could relate to nuclear modernization,” it said. This work uses modeling and simulation to help scientists assess the safety, security, and reliability of the nation’s existing nuclear stockpile without nuclear testing. It is computational research — not the manufacturing, sample, testing, or production of nuclear weapons.”

In several public meetings of the Ypsilanti Township board, both residents and leaders have speculated that the Los Alamos data center might be a target in a drone strike. Douglas Winters, the attorney for Ypsilanti Township, even called the proposed site a high-value target. “It is important to emphasize that neither Los Alamos, the University of Michigan, nor any state or federal agency has classified it that way,” LANL’s letter said, adding that the Township board and city attorney had “created that terminology without basis.”

“It’s kind of a silly thing to say that, somehow, I made up the term ‘high-value target,’” Winters told 404 Media. “Or, somehow, they don’t recognize that Los Alamos — the worldwide name associated with the atomic bomb [...] would not be considered a high-value target when they have $1.2 billion worth of computers that they describe as being the biggest, baddest, and fastest in the world.”

Anger built as the town hall went on.

Jennifer Burnside said she lives “roughly two miles from the proposed site.” She said she had worked at the University for 10 years and was shocked at how it was behaving. “There is an outside power that is coming into a community that does not play by the same rules. They’re not beholden to the community and do not have to answer for their actions,” she said. “It feels like we’re being taken advantage of. We don’t want this data center and we should not have it forced upon us.”

“I live about two and a half miles from the proposed site in a fairly poor neighborhood. Most of us couldn’t afford to move out if we wanted to if this thing is as heinous as we think it will be,” a man named Corey said. “I think the thrust of your argument this evening has been: ‘You’ve heard that it’ll be really really really really bad. It’ll only be really bad.’ And that’s not good enough for us.” 

Corey added that the University had made themselves into cartoon-style mustache twirling villains. “There is no trust, we don’t believe you,” he said. “We don’t want Los Alamos here, they’re one of the biggest villains of the 20th century,” he said. “We want them far far away from us and everyone else.”

“You guys know where you fucked up, right? You didn’t do this two years ago. Why didn’t you approach the community first?” A Township resident named Eric said. “You’re asking us to come aboard when the water’s already poisoned. No pun intended.”

Ypsilanti Township resident and University of Michigan graduate Shalina Nicohl Rankin said that the University needed to show up with the board of regents next time. “This is our home. We said loudly and clearly that we do not want you here. We did not invite you,” she said. “I was taught leaders and best [a reference to the University’s motto]. Leaders and best, but you crawl into bed with Los Alamos, one of the most despicable companies on the face of the Earth. Who is known for giving people cancer and developing nuclear bombs and you bring it into our backyard.”

Fielding questions about nuclear weapons research, engineer Ceccio lamented that the weapons existed. “I would love to live in a world where we have no nuclear weapons. I would love to live in a world where we have no nuclear proliferation [...] and I would do everything I can to make that world happen,” he said. “But right now, some of the institutions of our country are here for our national security and Los Alamos is one of them. And I, for one, am proud to be part of them to help in this important mission.”

The people of Ypsilanti Township were not proud and made it clear that they did not feel like their concerns were considered. The final speaker of the evening was Township supervisor Brenda Stumbo. She said the University had repeatedly lied to the Township’s citizens and leaders. “It started with a lie,” Stumbo said. “People are leaving. They're selling their homes because of the thought of Los Alamos being here. That’s a fact. The emotion and the rage is fear. We don’t deserve this. Please, change your mind.”

The town hall ran three hours and the University has promised to hold another October first. Winters told 404 Media he wouldn’t be attending. “Maybe they should come to our September 15 board meeting,” he said.

The University of Michigan did not return 404 Media’s request for comment.

On a company-wide Slack this morning, Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg announced he has been put on a paid leave of absence.

“And the biggest news: I won't be able to make the ELT tomorrow,” Matt wrote in an Announcement Slack. He continued, writing that Mark Davies, current Automattic Chief Financial Officer, has “conspired” with Automattic Board of Directors members Ann Dunwoody, Toni Schneider, and Sue Decker “behind my back and they voted to put me on a paid leave of absence. I voted against that.” 

He wrote that Davies was voted to be the new interim CEO. “I received the resolution 50 minutes before the meeting start, and requested repeatedly for time to have it reviewed by independent legal counsel, even a few hours, which was denied,” Mullenweg wrote.

Mullenweg is the founder of Automattic, the company that owns WordPress.com, Tumblr, Pocket Casts, and a host of other popular internet brands and pieces of software. Mullenweg has faced several controversies over his management of the company in recent years.

In the same Slack channel, Davies wrote that Mullenweg would remain a board member and “he will have a voice in setting direction and making decisions.”

"As you have seen from Matt's previous messages, Automattic's board has decided to ask Matt to step away from his CEO role and take a leave of absence,” Schneider wrote following Mullenweg’s message. “We have asked Mark Davies to assume the interim CEO role while Matt is out. We've worked closely with Mark over the years and we're confident he will steer the ship well while Matt is away. I'm sure you will have many questions and Mark and your leadership team will be available to answer them.” 

“I want to thank Matt for his support and I intend to support him, the Board, Automattic, and our customers during this interim situation,” Davies wrote in that Slack channel. “It will take me some time to come up to speed, but we'll move forward with transparency, communication, and teamwork.” He wrote that nothing will change as a result of Mullenweg’s leave.

Mullenweg, Schneider, and Davies did not immediately respond to requests for comment. An Automattic spokesperson confirmed the above to 404 Media in a statement: "Matt Mullenweg is currently on leave from Automattic. Mark Davies, Automattic’s CFO, will lead the company as interim CEO. The Board has full confidence in Mark's leadership and in the team's ability to execute against the company's priorities."

For the last few years, Mullenweg has waged a divisive legal battle with WP Engine, sparing publicly with opponents and peers on social media and in his personal blog. In 2024, he made an “Alignment Offer,” giving Automattic employees who disagreed with his stances the option to take six months of pay or $30,000, whichever was higher, with the stipulation that they would lose access to their work logins that same evening and would not be eligible for rehire.

One hundred and fifty-nine people took the offer and left. He then made another buyout offer, and threatened employees who spoke to the press with termination, saying, “exit gracefully, or be fired tomorrow with no severance.” 

Most recently, Automattic attempted to claim it owns the word “automatic.” 

Updated 6:30 p.m. PT with comment from Automattic.

Doctor Doom took the podium at a Public Safety Committee meeting on Tuesday to thank the council for covering the city in surveillance cameras. “Doom took over Axon enterprises [...] and now Doom will be watching you. Your continued cooperation expanding Doom’s surveillance network is required,” the Marvel supervillain said.

“This is the first of Doom’s gifts to the city of Seattle. The second gift is this: Doom will expand the real-time crime center to all neighborhoods with over 1,000 cameras watching every move,” Doom said. “Doom has total dominion over the city of Seattle. Doom will be behind the cameras watching those seeking reproductive or gender-affirming care. Doom will be able to find your immigrant neighbors and Doom will be able to ensure the safety of the women of Seattle alongside officers that stalk their exes.”

Doom is actually Clifford Cawthon, a policy advisor for the Washington State Department of Commerce. Cawthorn donned the silver mask and gloves to draw attention to tech-driven mass surveillance in Seattle, an issue he’s been passionate about for years. Cawthon is also a member of Community Not Cameras, a local activist group that’s attempting to reign in Seattle’s use of surveillance systems sold by Flock and Axon.

Seattle’s PD has access to 62 surveillance cameras around the city, many of them hooked up to a real-time crime center (RTCC). “The RTCC takes in information from a vast pool of sources, including CCTV, [body-worn camera], geolocation data, automatic license plate recognition (ALPR), alert sources like shot detection or alarm systems, and computer-aided dispatch (CAD) software,” according to a description on the surveillance company Axon’s website.

Cawthon said he and a colleague got the idea for appearing before the city council as Doctor Doom after seeing an activist in California go viral for dressing as Darth Vader to talk about Flock cameras at a public meeting. They’d also recently visited Seattle’s RTCC and were struck by how much it resembled a super villain’s lair. Cawthon told 404 Media it reminded him of the film Minority Report.

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“There is a wall of about nine screens in which they can bring up cameras from around the city at any given time,” Cawthon said. “They can also log in, conceivably, even from their home computers with the right credentials [...] I am not reassured by the kind of dazzling scale of this complex communications center.”

After the visit to the RTCC and after Vader appeared in California, one of Cawthon’s colleagues called him with an idea. “What if Doctor Doom went to the city council?” Cawthon said. Community Not Cameras was looking to drive attention to the issue of mass surveillance and had just drafted a petition with specific asks of the city council. A pop-culture infused stunt might get people talking.

“We thought, wouldn’t it be interesting if the Seattle city council meets Victor von Doom, the Lord Emperor of Latveria,” Cawthon told me, adopting the vaguely Eastern European accent of Doctor Doom. “And Victor von Doom shares with this pathetic American municipal council that they are actually doing Doom’s bidding without even realizing it.”

Cawthon is a comics fan and knew that Doom was on people’s radar because he’s the villain in the forthcoming Avengers Doomsday. He told me that pop culture has taught people to identify with heroes like the Jedi, the Avengers, the X-Men, and the Fantastic Four. “Would our heroes really use tools of mass surveillance on a regular basis in a way that’s unaccountable and hurts innocent people? They wouldn’t,” he said.

“The absurdity of the real time crime center and the absurdity of Axon and Flock owning these devices and this data being used around the country to capture and lock up and deport people and to harass women,” Cawthon said in his normal voice. “It was so clear this is a tool of abuse and being used in such villainous ways [...] we figured, why not use satire, political theater, to really illustrate what these tools mean.”

Cawthon grandstanded behind the podium at the Seattle city council meeting on Tuesday. “Doom is above all. The means are more than justified by the ends,” he said. “Doom will keep you safe,” and  “We must work to crush any dissent to Doom’s vision of public safety.”

On the phone with me, Cawthon ran through the list of his problems with surveillance tech. “The data is not secure, in many cases these companies — and they’re very open about this — work with ICE, work with the US military, and border patrol. There are multiple instances of police officers literally using this data to stalk their partners and abuse everyday people. And, of course, racial profiling,” he said. “The increased potential for racist harassment of black and brown folks like myself.”

Cawthon said reactions to his political theater have been positive and that it's achieved the goal of driving people to look at the Community Not Cameras petition. The group wants Seattle’s city council to take five actions including redirecting the flow of money away from surveillance tech and back into community-based crime prevention programs. 

He said that the council had already agreed to its first demand. Last month a committee voted to move $250,000 away from CCTV expansion. Now the measure just needs approval from the full council. 

“Doom will be watching you. Glory to Latveria,” Doom said during the city council meeting on Tuesday.

Last month activist Anthony Ralphs showed up to a San Diego City Council meeting dressed as Darth Vader and explained how much the Empire loved Flock cameras. Footage of the stunt went viral. Ralphs told 404 Media that he’d dressed as Vader after years of attending public meetings as himself and failing to draw attention to the issues of surveillance. Earlier this month, a woman attended a public meeting in Texas in full Joker makeup to complain about decorum at city council meetings.

According to Cawthon, this was all about “donning this pop culture persona and drawing a connection between what is in reality a massive threat to our civil liberties and civil rights.”

“These stories, these ideas about fascism, authoritarianism, they can be very close to home if we let them. Becoming the character and going to city councils is political theater in the best way. It is informing people in a way that is accessible because you know these cultural figures are in the zeitgeist,” he said. “I know plenty of people that, when I talk about public policy, they just throw up their hands and say ‘Okay, well, that’s cool and thank you for sharing with me but politics isn’t my thing,” he said. “But I can talk Marvel with them, I can talk video games, and we have a common language.”