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

Take your personal data back with Incogni! Use code 404MEDIA at the link below and get 60% off an annual plan: https://incogni.com/404media

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This week Joseph talks to Dhruv Mehrotra, a journalist and technologist at Bloomberg. Before that, Dhruv was at WIRED, where you probably saw a ton of his interesting work. Dhruv sits in a very unusual space in journalism: he is able to both write technical tools to dig through data, or collect information, or really anything else, and is also able to just write a damn good story. That is a very unique blend. The pair chat about Dhruv’s entry into journalism, how computational journalism has changed over the years, and how Dhruv uses AI too.

• Jeffrey Epstein’s Island Visitors Exposed by Data Broker

  
  

• ‘They're Not Breathing’: Inside the Chaos of ICE Detention Center 911 Calls

  
  

• Epstein’s Inbox

  
  

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This week we start with Emanuel’s crazy story about WebinarTV, a company that is secretly recording Zoom meetings and turning them into AI-powered podcasts. It’s nuts. After the break, Joseph tells us about the eccentric billionaire who tried to become a cocaine kingpin. In the subscribers-only section, we lament the lose of the metaverse.

1:06 - This Company Is Secretly Turning Your Zoom Meetings into AI Podcasts

25:58 - An Adrenaline Junkie Millionaire’s Quest to Become a Cocaine Kingpin

Sub's Story: RIP Metaverse, an $80 Billion Dumpster Fire Nobody Wanted

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This week, Sam talks to Emily Bender and Alex Hanna about the marketing ploys of “artificial intelligence,” why ridicule works to keep big tech’s claims in check, and what makes them hopeful for the future. They’re the authors of The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want.Dr. Alex Hanna is a writer and sociologist of technology, labor, and politics. She’s the Director of Research at the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR) and a Lecturer in the School of Information at the University of California Berkeley.

Dr. Emily M. Bender is a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Washington where she is also the Faculty Director of the Computational Linguistics Master of Science program and affiliate faculty in the School of Computer Science and Engineering and the Information School.They also host the The Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 podcast which “deflates AI hype and draws attention to the real harms of the automation technologies we call ‘artificial intelligence’.” 

• Flood of AI-Generated Submissions ‘Final Straw’ for Small 22-Year-Old Publisher
• The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want
• Emily’s cartoon 
• Questioning the Normalization of Surveillance by the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown
• You Are Not a Parrot at NY Mag

YouTube Version: https://youtu.be/UwBZiuH-1QY

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This week we start with Joseph’s series of articles about the DOGE depositions. He watched hours and hours of them, then a judge ordered them removed from YouTube. But, they’ve already been archived all over the web. After the break, Jason tells us about the AI data labelers who are fighting back. In the subscribers-only section, Jason breaks down what’s wrong with all the AI job loss research at the moment.

0:00 - Intro 0:51 - Google Street View's Unmappable City 3:40 - I Watched 6 Hours of DOGE Bro Testimony. Here's What They Had to Say For Themselves 13:24 - DOGE Deposition Videos Taken Down After Judge Order and Widespread Mockery 18:58 - The Removed DOGE Deposition Videos Have Already Been Backed Up Across the Internet 28:32 - 'AI Is African Intelligence': The Workers Who Train AI Are Fighting Back

SUB'S STORY - AI Job Loss Research Ignores How AI Is Utterly Destroying the Internet

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

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There's only one city in America that isn't on Google's Street View. Documentary filmmaker Chris Parr set out to map it, using North Oak, Minnesota's byzantine rules and the help of a drone. His experience shows who gets privacy in America, and who doesn't.

'I Mapped Google’s ONLY SECRET CITY'

YouTube Version: https://youtu.be/3iGvHBr0mJw

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This week we start with Sam’s story discussing something that has come up a lot but no one has really answered: how do you speak to your friend or family member falling into AI psychosis? After the break, Joseph breaks down what happened when the FBI wanted data from ProtonMail. In the subscribers-only section, Emanuel tells us about the viral developers behind an app called Quittr, and how they exposed very sensitive data of hundreds of thousands of users.

1:21 - 'How to Talk to Someone Experiencing 'AI Psychosis'

27:33 - Proton Mail Helped FBI Unmask Anonymous ‘Stop Cop City’ Protester

SUBSCRIBER'S STORY: Viral 'Quittr' Porn Addiction App Exposed the Masturbation Habits of Hundreds of Thousands of Users

• 'How to Talk to Someone Experiencing 'AI Psychosis'
• Proton Mail Helped FBI Unmask Anonymous ‘Stop Cop City’ Protester
• Viral 'Quittr' Porn Addiction App Exposed the Masturbation Habits of Hundreds of Thousands of Users

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

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