This week we start with Jason's story about Flock accessing cameras in a children's gymnastics room as a sale pitch demo. After the break, Emanuel tells us why Nature retracted a paper about the alleged benefits of ChatGPT in education. In the subscibers-only section, we talk all about the cancellation of RightsCon after pressure from the Chinese government.

• City Learns Flock Accessed Cameras in Children's Gymnastics Room as a Sales Pitch Demo, Renews Contract Anyway
• 'Nature' Retracts Paper on the Benefits of ChatGPT in Education
• OpenAI, Google, aÍnd Microsoft Back Bill to Fund ‘AI Literacy’ in Schools
• World’s Largest Digital Human Rights Conference Suddenly Canceled
• China Pressure Canceled World’s Largest Digital Human Rights Conference

YouTube Version: https://youtu.be/hLR8MOOhRCo

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This week, we talk to Brian Merchant, author of Blood in the Machine, about a rash of people physically destroying AI and surveillance infrastructure. Brian puts this wave of attacks in the historical context of the Luddites, who are notoriously misunderstood and fought for worker protections against automation during the Industrial Revolution. Over the last few months, we have seen people in San Francisco and Los Angeles torch Waymos, bash delivery robots with baseball bats, destroy Flock cameras, and threaten AI data centers and the politicians championing them. This type of political violence doesn’t and cannot occur in a vacuum, it happens because people feel they are being taken advantage of and that their representatives aren’t listening to them. Given the current state of things, we can likely expect more of these sorts of attacks to occur.

Blood In The Machine

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This week, Jason explains the conspiracy theory circulating behind a trippy stock image that went viral after the White House Correspondents’ Dinner—was it sent here by a time traveler? (Spoiler: It was not.) Then Sam unpacks what’s happening at Arizona State University with a messy rollout of a new AI-powered tool that generates lessons by scraping professors’ lectures without their knowledge. In the second for subscribers at the Supporter level, Emanuel gets philosophical with a discussion about the question of machine consciousness and how it relates to a new paper from a Google-affiliated scientist.

• ⁠University Professors Disturbed to Find Their Lectures Chopped Up and Turned Into AI Slop⁠
• ⁠Did a Time Traveling Superintelligent AI Try to Warn About White House Correspondents Dinner Shooting? An Investigation⁠
• ⁠Google DeepMind Paper Argues LLMs Will Never Be Conscious⁠

YouTube Version: https://youtu.be/VOo0ZpIagP0

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This week Joseph talks to Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, a journalist at TechCrunch. Lorenzo has possibly the deepest understanding of one of the wildest cybersecurity stories in years: how an employee of Trenchant, a government malware vendor that is supposed to only sell to the ‘good’ guys, secretly sold a bunch of hacking tools to a Russian company. Those tools, it looks like, then ended up with the Russian government and possibly Chinese criminals too. It’s a really insane story about how powerful hacking tech can fall into the wrong hands.

• Inside the story of the US defense contractor who leaked hacking tools to Russia

• US military contractor likely built iPhone hacking tools used by Russian spies in Ukraine

Youtube Version: https://youtu.be/MWxLqopMo5o

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This week Sam unpacks how social media algorithms manipulate our emotions around everything from engagement rings to wedding dresses to babies, and what it feels like getting lost in the #Weddingtok sauce, and Emanuel breaks down a satirical but functional AI tool that rips off open source software. There’s a long history in “clean room” software that’s really interesting. In the section for subscribers at the Supporter level, Jason walks us through “tokenmaxxing” and startups obsessed with spending as much money as possible on AI—and as little as possible on humans.

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.

• 
  I Almost Lost My Mind in the Bridal Algorithm
  
• 
  This AI Tool Rips Off Open Source Software Without Violating Copyright

YouTube Version: https://youtu.be/-NEjEaOp1tI

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This week, Sam is joined by Maddy Myers, editor-in-chief of Mothership. She’s also a co-host of the video games podcast Triple Click. 

Maddy launched Mothership with co-founder Zoë Hannah in January. It’s a queer and women-owned independent publication that focuses on gender and games. They discuss Maddy’s early days of games journalism via a (print!) alt-weekly in Boston and then at the Mary Sue, how she and Zoë decided it was time to quit Polygon and launch their own indie outlet, and the importance of owning your own work as a journalist.

Subscribe to Mothership

Why I’m launching a feminist video games website in 2026 - The Guardian
Mothership and a History of Women in Games Media - the Post Games podcast

YouTube Version: https://youtu.be/sQUqYKXW3fE

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We start this week with Joseph’s story on the inherent friction between secure chat apps like Signal and the phone they’re running on. Incoming message content can be stored in a phone’s internal notification database. After the break, Matthew tells us the latest about the data center pushback. Then in the subscribers’ only section, Emanuel tells us all about Marathon and its player numbers.

(00:00) Intro

(01:21) FBI Extracts Suspect’s Deleted Signal Messages Saved in iPhone Notification Database

(26:01) Maine Is Close to Passing a Moratorium on New Datacenters

(33:21) Farmer Arrested for Speaking Too Long at Datacenter Town Hall Vows to Fight

Subscriber's Story: I Wish I Didn’t Care About 'Marathon' Player Numbers, But I Do

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‘The Ambivalent Intent’ and ‘The Shadow Gospel’ author Whitney Phillips on how online got so bad

Why does the internet feel like it’s getting worse every single day, and why does it feel like the political landscape is getting worse in response? The answer might seem obvious, especially if you read 404 Media on a regular basis, where we’ve been documenting this decline, but it’s important to occasionally zoom out and ask the big questions. 

That’s why this week on the podcast I’m joined by Whitney Phillips. Phillips is the author of several books about internet culture and ethics, including This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things and The Ambivalent Internet. She’s a professor of information politics and media ethics at the University of Oregon, and also one of my favorite people to talk to and listen to because she’s a genius when it comes to the kind of internet culture and platform dynamics we report on every day at 404 Media. 

I wanted to talk to Whitney today because it’s been a few years since we talked in depth about the state of the internet and so much has changed in that time, sadly for the worst, and I really wanted some help in understanding the current state of things, as bad as they are. We also spent quite a bit of time talking about her upcoming book, The Shadow Gospel: How Anti-liberal Demonology Possessed U.S. Religion, Media, and Politics.

YouTube Version: https://youtu.be/gp_n6vDmFfc

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This week we start with Jason’s story about how wildlife cops are doing Flock lookups for ICE. It shows that ICE is gaining access to this sort of information through pretty unexpected ways. After the break, Emanuel tells us all about the AI ban at Wikipedia. In the subscribers-only section, Joseph breaks down a set of vulnerabilities in the ‘secure’ chat app TeleGuard.

•  Wildlife Conservation Police Are Searching Thousands of Flock Cameras for ICE

•  Wikipedia Bans AI-Generated Content

•  An AI Agent Was Banned From Creating Wikipedia Articles, Then Wrote Angry Blogs About Being Banned

Subscriber's Story - A Secure Chat App’s Encryption Is So Bad It Is ‘Meaningless’

Youtube Version: https://youtu.be/YrHYwCb5aM8

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This week Jason brings you an interview he did with The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s executive director Cindy Cohn, who recently announced she would be stepping down from the legendary digital rights nonprofit after decades of service. Cindy's new book “Privacy’s Defender,” is a memoir of her work to protect Americans’ privacy and fight government surveillance.
Privacy’s Defender weaves Cindy’s life story through three incredibly important court cases. Rather than being a dry recounting of three complicated and technical cases, Cindy recounts her strategies in each case, the trials and tribulations she was going through during each period, and the stakes of each case. A quick backgrounder — the cases are Bernstein vs Department of Justice, decided in 1996, which established code and encryption as protected speech under the first amendment, a lasting decision that became critical in Apple’s lawsuit against the FBI in the aftermath of the San Bernardino shooting. It also follows EFF’s lawsuit against AT&T for building a secret backdoor in its internet data centers that gave data to the NSA for warrantless surveillance against American citizens, a case that was built in part around testimony and documents shared by Mark Klein, who showed schematics and design documents for secret surveillance rooms in AT&T’s offices. And finally it follows the Alphabet Cases, which were lawsuits against FBI gag orders for national security letters, which are secret demands for customer information that came with gag orders against internet companies that prevented them from disclosing the fact that the FBI approached them for information. Those cases concerned both Cloudflare and a telecom company called CREDO, and went on for many years.

Our interview with Cindy shows that the fight for privacy happens in fits and spurts, and is rarely linear.

Cindy's Book Privacy Defender: https://www.eff.org/Privacys-Defender

Youtube Version: https://youtu.be/2OwH_XyfEhs

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This week Matthew Gault joins us to discuss his article about Iran’s AI slop and LEGO-focused propaganda, and why the creators chose LEGO. After the break, Jason tells us all about the new automated system in baseball and the drama it’s causing. In the subscribers-only section, Sam walks us through perhaps one of the worst sex apps of all time.

• Iran Is Winning the AI Slop Propaganda War

• 'You Can't Defeat the Robots!': Baseball's AI Strike Zone Is Must-Watch Television

Subscriber's Story - I Tried to Find the ‘Arousal Intelligence’ In An Animated, Augmented Reality Porn Star

YouTube Version: https://youtu.be/_4buUas3tGs

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