404 Media is making a print zine about the surveillance tactics used by ICE, and the ways people are resisting this technology. It will be 16 pages and printed on a risograph printer by a printshop in Los Angeles. It contains both reworked versions of our best reporting on ICE and some new articles for the zine. It will be available at the beginning of January.
Why are we doing this? Well, zines are cool, and print media is cool. We have joked about wanting to print out our blogs and hand them out door-to-door or staple them to lamp posts. Handing out zines at a concert or sending them to you in the mail will get the job done, too.
We’ll be handing out zines at the @heaven2nite@lafightsback_ show on January 4 in Los Angeles. Cover art by @veridreamy / printed by @punchkisspress
14 BANDS. 2 STAGES. 1 CAUSE.
404 Media is joining hands with community members and organizations to throw LA FIGHTS BACK, a benefit show to raise money to support immigrants and refugees as ICE and DHS continue their dehumanzing crackdown across the U.S.
We’ve been extensively covering the Trump administration’s dystopic use of surveillance, technology and force in raids targeting undocumented people, immigrants, and U.S. citizens. 404 Media has also sued ICE for its $2 million spyware contract.
ALL PROCEEDS FROM TICKET SALES WILL BE DONATED TO THE COALITION FOR HUMANE IMMIGRANT RIGHTS @chirla_org . CHIRLA provides services such as legal assistance with deportation defense and labor complaints, wage theft protection, and has an assistance line for issues like DACA, citizenship, and know-your-rights information.
Head to @lafightsback_ for tickets. More to come from us at 404 Media.
Scientists have identified four men who died in Sir John Franklin’s disastrous expedition of 1845, a British mission to chart a passage through the Arctic that ended in misery, starvation, and cannibalism, leaving no survivors. Then: the sights and sounds of an Arctic seafloor, a glimpse into the guts of ice giants, and a wedding kiss of death. This week on The Abstract with @beckyjferreria
Head to 404media.co to read now.
ArXiv, the open-access repository of preprint academic research, will ban authors of papers for a year if they submit obviously AI-generated work.
Late Thursday evening, Thomas Dietterich, chair of the computer science section of ArXiv, wrote on X: “If generative AI tools generate inappropriate language, plagiarized content, biased content, errors, mistakes, incorrect references, or misleading content, and that output is included in scientific works, it is the responsibility of the author(s). We have recently clarified our penalties for this. If a submission contains incontrovertible evidence that the authors did not check the results of LLM generation, this means we can’t trust anything in the paper.”
Examples of incontrovertible evidence, he wrote, include “hallucinated references, meta-comments from the LLM (‘here is a 200 word summary; would you like me to make any changes?’; ‘the data in this table is illustrative, fill it in with the real numbers from your experiments’.”
“The penalty is a 1-year ban from arXiv followed by the requirement that subsequent arXiv submissions must first be accepted at a reputable peer-reviewed venue,” Dietterich wrote.
Read now at 404media.co
Days into Donald Trump’s second term, his administration began rapidly dismantling USAID, which had, up until that point, been the world’s largest national humanitarian donor. Elon Musk, who spearheaded the Department of Government Efficiency, announced that his team had fed the agency “into the woodchipper” in February 2025. Tracking models suggest the collapse of USAID may have already caused 762,000 preventable deaths, of which 500,000 are children, and the cuts could lead to more than nine million preventable deaths by 2030, according to a study published in February 2026.
Now, a team reports “the earliest evidence of the impact of cuts to USAID on the incidence of violent events” which suggests that “the radical cuts…led to an increase in conflict in the regions that received the most aid from the United States,” according to the new study. @beckyjferreira has more.
Read at 404media.co
The poop database comes from an app called PoopCheck, an app made by a company called Soft All Things that purports to use AI to analyze images of one’s stool in order to give you a “daily gut health score.” When 404 Media’s @jasonkoebler saw a post on Reddit from a user who said they wanted to sell “150K stool images,” we entered this world of shit. @evystadium has more.
Read at 404media.co now
Tech company executives are confident that AI will completely transform the economy and point to the changes they see in-house to prove that this change is coming fast. At Meta, Google, Microsoft, and others, leadership says that AI generates a growing share of the overall code, which makes it cheaper and faster to produce.
Developers who are told to use AI whether they like it or not, however, tell a different story. On Reddit, Hacker News and other places where people in software development talk to each other, more and more people are becoming disillusioned with the promise of code generated by large language models. Developers talk not just about how the AI output is often flawed, but that using AI to get the job done is often a more time consuming, harder, and more frustrating experience because they have to go through the output and fix its mistakes. More concerning, developers who use AI at work report that they feel like they are de-skilling themselves and losing their ability to do their jobs as well as they used to.
Read the full story at 404media.co
404 Media has obtained a copy of ‘Haotian AI’, a popular piece of realtime deepfake software marketed to scammers. It can turn a fraudster’s face into anyone else’s on WhatsApp, Zoom, and Teams.
While providing instructions for how to configure Haotian AI with WhatsApp, a customer support worker sent a couple of related screenshots. One of them showed a WhatsApp video call including the distinctive logo of the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) in Washington D.C. The MPD told 404 Media it has not received reports of scammers using deepfakes, but in November the MPD warned the public that fraudsters were impersonating MPD officials in video calls.
FInd 404 Media on YouTube to listen now or wherever you get your favorite podcasts.
While ICE and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) generally won’t answer questions from journalists about how the agency is using Palantir’s technology, senior officials were much more talkative during the Border Security Expo which took place in Phoenix, Arizona, last week. 404 Media spoke to four people who attended the conference. Here companies looking to sell their technology to ICE or other agencies gathered for two days of speeches, Q&As, and product pitches.
The officials’ comments may need to be taken with a pinch of salt, but still reflect ICE’s position that Palantir is allowing the agency to identify people to arrest and locations to raid faster.
Read now at 404media.co
How did we get to a point where it’s legal for anyone to bet on anything? Be it the results of a baseball game or a land war in Europe, if you have access to a credit card and a computer you can try to predict the outcome of anything that’s happening in the world and win a little bit of money if you’re right. If we know that gambling can lead to high rates gambling addiction and financial ruin, why does it seem like our culture has suddenly embraced it? Also, how has it changed us and how we see the world?
For years, anyone who has reported on our increasing addiction to technology has found their way to Natasha Dow Schüll’s book Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas. Find 404 Media on YouTube or wherever you listen to your podcasts to listen to our convo.
Speaking to graduates of University of Central Florida’s College of Arts and Humanities and Nicholson School of Communication and Media on May 8, commencement speaker Gloria Caulfield, vice president of strategic alliances at Tavistock Group, told graduating humanities students that AI is the “next industrial revolution,” and was met with thousands of booing graduates.
Caulfield is saying this to humanities and communications graduates, who are entering a workforce that AI has been gutting with increasing intensity for years. Not even the people and companies she valorizes in her speech believe that these graduates are headed for an easy time in the workforce: In April, Palantir CEO Alex Karp said AI will “destroy” humanities jobs, and last week, a report found that AI is blamed for one in four lost jobs, amounting to 21,490 AI-related cuts last month, or 26 percent of the 88,387 total, “marking the second straight month the technology has been the top driver of layoffs,” CBS reported.
Read now at 404media.co
Last week, millions of students at thousands of universities and K-12 schools were locked out of Canvas, a piece of catch-all education technology software that has become the de facto core of many classes. ShinyHunters, a ransomware group, hacked Canvas’s parent company and apparently stole “billions” of messages and accessed more than 275 million individuals’ data, according to the hacking group. The group also locked students out of Canvas.
Later Thursday, Instructure, which makes Canvas, was able to mostly put Canvas back online; it is not clear if the company paid a ransom or not. The breach demonstrates the danger in centralizing the educational and personal data of millions of students in a single service. Canvas is essentially a portal where teachers post assignments and lectures, have discussion boards, and students can message with each other and their teachers and connect with other pieces of education tech software.
Read at 404media.co
