2026-04-08 22:31:59
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.
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.
0:00 - Intro
1:03 - Wildlife Conservation Police Are Searching Thousands of Flock Cameras for ICE
27:55 - Wikipedia Bans AI-Generated Content
34:33 - 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’
2026-04-08 22:18:44
It’s Trans Day of Visibility, and I’m at an event space in the heart of New York City’s Commie Corridor to learn how to become less visible online.
The crowd gathered at the aptly-named Trans Pecos in Ridgewood, Queens is here for “404: Deadname Not Found,” a digital self-defense workshop which promises to teach trans people how to find and remove their sensitive personal information from the internet (and which also has no relation to this website). The vibe is giving OpSec rave happy hour—attendees sip colorful drinks, groove to DJ sets, and huddle around laptops using online tools to track down their own digital footprints.
The goal of the exercise is to find holes in your digital defenses, a practice cybersecurity folks call “red-teaming.” A slide deck guides participants through this “self-doxing” ritual, instructing them to use websites like IntelBase, PimEyes, and haveibeenpwned to find addresses, selfies, passwords, old names and aliases, and other personal info that might have been left sitting around on the open internet.
It makes for great cocktail party banter. One participant raises their arms in triumph upon receiving a clean bill of health while checking if their information was leaked in a data breach. Others swivel laptop screens and compare notes on the various places their digital detritus had cropped up. In my case, I was lucky: I mostly found data brokers with incorrect information, a long-forgotten MySpace page, and a woman whose spam calls I’ve been receiving for the past 10 years. Finally, participants are directed to various pages where they can request data to be removed, or sign up for discounted services like Kanary and DeleteMe that do the removals on your behalf.
Behind the fun and light atmosphere, everyone here knows the unspoken reality that drives tonight’s activities: an unrelenting wave of discriminatory bills and executive orders that are rapidly demolishing trans rights across the US. “Trans Visibility” is a nice idea, but it turns out it really sucks to be visible in a fascist surveillance state where the highest levels of government are obsessively trying to destroy your ability to live.
“In this world of hyper-surveillance, I want to make sure all my stuff is safe and that no one is trying to harvest my data for anything,” Anna, a workshop participant, told 404 Media. Anna asked to use a pseudonym to protect her identity, which is not surprising given that the goal of the workshop is to make it harder to be doxed. “Especially now that there’s lots of incentives for the federal government to get into that business, I just wanna make sure all of that is under wraps.”
Like the event’s name suggests, many attendees are looking for traces of their “deadnames,” which is how some trans folks refer to the names they were given pre-transition. Trans people face a disproportionately high risk of being doxed online, and deadnames and other sensitive info are frequently dug up on right-wing hate forums like KiwiFarms and social media sites like Elon Musk’s X, where harassment campaigns and hate speech are allowed and even encouraged.
“We have to protect ourselves,” said Ryan, who also used a pseudonym. “It’s great to know how to find stuff like this, because you never know what’s still out there.”
Imani Thompson, a digital security trainer who organized the event as part of her series Cache Me Outside, says she started hosting the free workshops at queer bars in Brooklyn a year ago, after noticing trans and intersex friends who were noticeably shaken by the opening salvos of the second Trump administration.
“I hadn't seen cybersecurity events that looked like they would attract or resonate with the crowds I felt needed this information the most,” she told 404 Media. “I wanted to make this fun and un-intimidating and doing digital security training at the bar is kind of silly and fun and gives us a built-in VPN and protection from sensitive convos being recorded.”
There are specific reasons many trans people are anxious about their personal data and online presence these days. For one, trans identities often don’t fit neatly into government boxes, and the name and gender they are assigned at birth may or may not match their government-issued IDs. Recently, a new law in Kansas resulted in hundreds of trans people being told that their drivers licenses and IDs had been invalidated overnight, forcing them to obtain new documents that revert to the sex marker assigned at birth. Journalist Marissa Kabas later reported that the 300 trans IDs in question had been flagged and not immediately invalidated, but the goal of the law and its ensuing chaos was clear: requiring trans people to have IDs that don’t match their appearance or lived reality, forcing them to out themselves and introducing friction and discrimination into their everyday lives.
The same Kansas law also implemented the first state-level “bathroom bounty,” making it a crime for trans people to use appropriate bathrooms and changing rooms and promising rewards to random passersby who feel “aggrieved” by someone they think might be trans. Lawmakers in Idaho have passed an even harsher bill, which would charge repeat trans bathroom-users with a felony and up to 5 years of jail time. These bills threaten not only trans people, but anyone whose appearance might fall outside of someone’s normative expectations of “male” and “female.” And they are especially dangerous at a time when facial recognition can near-instantly identify someone with a quick search.
Thompson also worries about the information that queer folks can reveal while asking for help online. Trans people experience unemployment, housing insecurity, and violence at exponentially higher rates than cis people, and it’s not uncommon to see Gofundme pages and Venmo accounts flooding social media feeds. These posts will sometimes include personal details like a person’s name, face, transition status, location, immigration status, and even how much they have in their bank account—great for getting donations, but not so great for the doxable breadcrumbs they leave behind.
Janus Rose
“I think the risk is tenfold for the dolls and Black trans siblings because of disproportionate scrutiny in light of these bathroom bills and also how we do mutual aid,” said Thompson. “Whenever I see a mutual aid request being reposted or processed it makes me nervous, because we're basically doxing our most vulnerable friends.” To reduce risk, she recommends people take down mutual aid posts as soon as needs are met and set their Venmo activity to private. “I feel like the intention in listing off how all these systems of oppression impact our friends are meant to create a sense of urgency and care, but then months later it's still floating around and is a goldmine for someone who wants to claim they were made to feel unsafe in a bathroom so they can claim $3k or further an agenda.”
The privacy attitudes on display at the event contrast with the dominant media narratives about trans communities a decade ago. Fresh off the Supreme Court victory in Obergefell vs. Hodges that legalized same-sex marriage, many at that time were convinced that trans visibility would pave the way to equality, as glossy magazine covers featuring stars like Laverne Cox declared a “Trans Tipping Point.” But while conditions for some trans people marginally improved, we all know what happened next: a wave of reactionary anti-trans state laws, culminating in the re-election of Donald Trump and a series of executive orders aimed at destroying trans peoples’ access to healthcare, sports, bathrooms—essentially the ability to live a normal life.
At the same time, protection can’t be a retreat back into the closet. “It’s still important for trans voices to be heard in online spaces,” said Anna. “It’s not like I wanna go into the shadows or anything. I just don’t want people to know my personal data, my personal records, any of that.”
“Being Black, I also understand the distinction between visibility and hypervisibility and the precarity and lack of agency that hypervisibility creates,” said Thompson. “It's tricky to find language around digital security that doesn't imply queerness is something to hide or a shameful thing, because of course it's not. I think having agency and purpose in how we can show up online and interact with tech as well as literacy around how technology and surveillance operates makes us better equipped.”
Janus Rose is New York City-based journalist, educator and artist whose work explores the impacts of A.I. and technology on activists and marginalized communities. Previously a senior editor at VICE, she has been published in digital and print outlets including e-Flux Journal, DAZED Magazine, The New Yorker, and Al Jazeera.
2026-04-08 22:08:37
For the last month Joseph and I have been playing as much Marathon as we can fit into our busy lives. During the pandemic, we bonded over playing Call of Duty: Warzone, and we’ve been chasing that high for years with little success. Bungie’s new extraction shooter finally gave it to us.
We should be happy, and we are as long as we’re focused on the game we’re playing and not the industry that’s collapsing around it. Marathon’s commercial success, measured by outsiders mostly by the number of people Steam shows is actively playing the game at any given moment, has no bearing on our enjoyment. But I can’t help but follow those numbers because they are a reminder of how brutal the video game industry is right now, where it might be headed, and how viable Marathon and games like it are in the future.
We don’t know how much Marathon cost to develop or what Sony Interactive Entertainment, which owns Bungie and is publishing the game, wants from it. The game has been a critical success, has reportedly sold 1.2 million copies, and players who have latched onto it like myself love how Bungie has been updating and balancing it after release. People are making horny fan art of Marathon characters.
At the same time, I watch the number of concurrent players on Steam, currently hovering at between 20,000 and 30,000, and fret. Is that enough for Sony to support Marathon for the long haul, and is it enough for the rest of the industry that’s watching this unfold to decide that the kind of player who enjoys a game like Marathon is still worth catering to?
Whether 20,000-30,000 concurrent players is a good number or not is relative and ultimately a decision only Sony can make. More than 19,000 games released on Steam in 2025 and only 6,000 of them earned more than $100,000. With at least tens of millions of dollars worth of sales on Steam alone, Marathon is one of the highest earning games on that platform. Marathon’s numbers are also considerably higher than Sony’s other big competitive shooter, Concord, which barely cracked 700 concurrent players on Steam before it was shuttered in 2024, barely a month after it was released. Highguard, another multiplayer shooter that was unveiled at the end of 2025’s Game Awards, also shuttered just a bit over a month after it launched. It peaked at almost 100,000 concurrent players on Steam, but it was free to play.
One might naively assume that the basic math at Sony would be to see how much Marathon cost to develop and maintain, see how much money it’s making after launch, and to keep the party going as long as it’s turning a profit. The reality is probably a bit more cynical and complicated than that. Bungie is a big studio that employees hundreds of developers that Sony acquired for $3.7 billion. One line item on Marathon’s budget that’s extremely hard to calculate is the opportunity cost of Bungie making Marathon as opposed to the next Fortnite, now that it’s becoming increasingly clear that Marathon will not be doing Fortnite numbers.
That doesn’t mean there isn’t a tremendously profitable business to be had there, given some patience and care. Ubisoft launched Rainbow Six Siege in 2015 to a tepid response, but has turned it into a decade-old cash cow with consistent support, updates, and a devious loot box-based monetization scheme. It essentially did the same thing for For Honor, a melee multiplayer game that I bet you forgot existed but that’s been going since 2017.
But Sony is a publicly traded company that wants to show quarter over quarter growth, and a modestly healthy profit that also happens to keep hundreds of game developers employed is not what shareholders are salivating over. Sony wants to do Fortnite numbers, which is a very tall order considering that even Fortnite isn’t doing Fortnite numbers anymore.
Our friends at Remap Radio have spoken at length about why discussions about player numbers teach us little about games and are often toxic. Part of the reason that games like Concord and Highguard can crash and burn so quickly is that the numbers become a self-fulfilling prophecy. There’s skepticism about the game before it launches, and when it fails to go viral, people write it off because why would they invest their time in an online game with player numbers that signal imminent and unceremonious execution by its financial backers, which only leads to even lower player numbers. It also shifts the conversation entirely away from what the game is, what people like about it, and why, and to its business model, infecting players with the quarterly earnings report view of the world. Games and players become expressions and subjects of business models, and the part where we play games because we enjoy them are reduced to a curious byproduct of Sony’s Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization. Games from major publishers become either mega hits or are quickly slapped with the “dead game” label before they’re taken offline. What the game actually was is barely relevant.
Everyone I’m playing Marathon with is aware of the player numbers anxiety but is responding to it in different ways. Most of us are doing armchair video game industry analysis, while others are actively trying to enjoy Marathon’s popularity while we can precisely because it may be fleeting and eventually unavailable to play. Some of us are buying in-game cosmetic items not because we want them that bad, but as a signal to Sony that there’s money to be made here.
Adding to this player count anxiety is the fact that the video game industry appears to be going through what is increasingly looking like a proper crash. I don’t think we’ll ever have another near extinction event like the video game crash of 1983, where for a moment it didn’t seem like video games would even continue to be a thing, but a full one third of game developers in the U.S. were laid off last year, and the huge layoffs just keep on coming.
The question of whether Marathon is a viable business for Sony naturally leads us to the question: What business does Sony even want to be in going forward? Is it a business that’s in continuity with the games we grew up playing on the PlayStation and PlayStation 2, or will the market force it to chase something like Roblox or other free-to-play models? Can this continuity even exist when a PlayStation 5 Pro now costs $899 and a PlayStation 6 will cost more? Those are prices for 30 and 40 year-olds with disposable income, not the younger audiences game publishers need to be winning over now for their future business. Sony and other video game publishers are already losing them to different kinds of games and forms of entertainment.
“Marathon's low gravity, bouncy physics, and methodical boot clunks echo Master Chief's graceful, weighty gait circa 2004. It's got modern conveniences like aim-down-sights, sprinting, sliding—and yet Marathon evokes a more civilized age,” Morgan Park wrote in his excellent review in PC Gamer. “Those qualities make it more accessible to a range of people who struggle to keep up in faster games while maintaining a skill range in other disciplines: timing, positioning, and perception. It's fairly easy to track targets, but you're still rewarded for nailing headshots, taking the high ground, and utilizing shell abilities. Does that make Marathon an unc game?”
— 定 (@de3dsoul) March 19, 2026
To answer Park’s rhetorical question for him, yes, Marathon is in fact an unc game, which explains both why I like it so much and why I’m worried about its future. As you probably know, unc, short for uncle, is a way to jokingly refer to old, potentially out of touch people. As far as I can tell, it entered the video game discourse in the form of this meme in which a soyfaced unc excitedly points at the hall of fame of so-called “unc slop,” or, in other words, games that old people say are very good. Some of the games in this collage of video game box art includes Half-Life 2, Dawn of War, World of Warcraft, STALKER, Mass Effect, and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. Or, many of my favorite games of all time.
Marathon could easily fit in that collage. It’s excellent, and, I worry, catering to a dwindling audience of uncs who are having a great time while the culture and business of video games is largely moving on and eventually leaving them behind.
2026-04-08 21:59:46
Microsoft has terminated an account associated with VeraCrypt, a popular and long-running piece of encryption software, throwing future Windows updates of the tool into doubt, VeraCrypt’s developer told 404 Media.
The move highlights the sometimes delicate supply chain involved in the publication of open source software, especially software that relies on big tech companies even tangentially.
2026-04-07 23:56:48
Maine is getting closer to passing a moratorium on the construction of new datacenters, one of the first in the country. The State’s House and Senate have both passed LD 307, a bill that would pause construction on new datacenters until November 1, 2027. The Senate approved LD 307 by a vote of 19-13 on Monday night and now it will go to both chambers for a final vote. LD 307 specifically targets datacenters of 20 megawatts or more and calls for the creation of a Maine Data Center Coordination Council to better plan and facilitate the massive construction projects.
“We can’t afford health care for our constituents. School funding is a nightmare. School construction is entirely underfunded, but we can afford … $2 million out of the general fund for the richest—the richest corporations in the world, Amazon, Google, you name them—we’re going to give them money,” state Sen. Tim Nangle said during debate about the vote, according to the Maine Morning Star.
Maine’s vote comes days after journalists at The Maine Monitor and Maine Focus revealed a secretive plan to construct a datacenter in the town of Lewiston in the southern part of the state. In Lewiston, city councilors didn’t learn about the proposed $300 million datacenter until six days before they were supposed to vote on it. Discussions about the datacenter occurred behind closed doors and the city administrator said the developer had asked for confidentiality. In Wiscasset, the city killed a $5 billion proposed datacenter after residents learned the city had signed nondisclosure agreements with the developer.
As part of the moratorium, Maine’s Data Center Coordination Council would study and oversee the environmental impact and electricity bill increases datacenters often bring to local residents and “consider data-sharing requirements and processes for proposed datacenters.”
Anger against datacenters is mounting across the country. The massive complexes aren’t good neighbors. They use public land, increase the electricity rates of everyone near them, and have negative effects on water quality and noise levels. The deals to construct them are sometimes cut in secret and local communities have little to no say in what’s being built near them. In Texas, a 6,000 acre datacenter plans to consume water from a dwindling aquifer to power nuclear power plants in the desert. In Michigan, a township is pushing back against a $1.2 billion AI datacenter meant to service America’s nuclear weapons scientists.
In Port Washington, Wisconsin, citizens will vote directly on the issue this week. The town of 13,000 is voting directly on whether or not to allow an OpenAI “Stargate” datacenter project. Similar ballot measures are slated in Monterey Park, California, Augusta Township, Michigan, and Janesville, Wisconsin.
In communities with no ballot measures, citizens are letting politicians know they hate datacenters in other ways. Early Monday morning, someone fired a gun at the home of Indianapolis City-County Councilor Ron Gibson and left a note on his front porch that read “NO DATA CENTERS.” A week earlier, Indianapolis city leaders had approved the construction of a datacenter in Gibson’s district.
2026-04-07 21:56:41
Lobbyists for major tech firms like Cisco and IBM are trying to push through legislation in Colorado that would drastically roll back a groundbreaking right to repair law under the guise of protecting national security and data centers.
The legislation, which passed through a Colorado state senate committee on Thursday, would exempt hardware from the existing right to repair law if that hardware “is considered critical infrastructure.” One of the issues with this is that “critical infrastructure” is very broadly defined, and could include essentially anything. In practice, the law could essentially repeal huge parts of one of the most important right to repair laws in the United States.
“It relies on a broad, vague definition that allows the manufacturer themselves to self-designate whether their equipment is for critical infrastructure,” Louis Rossmann, a right to repair expert and popular YouTuber, testified at a hearing on the bill Thursday. “So if a laptop manufacturer knows the Pentagon buys their laptops, they can declare that line exempt. If a networking company sells a $20 switch to a federal building, they can claim that hardware is critical infrastructure. It’s a blank check for manufacturers to exempt themselves.”
Ever since consumer rights advocates began pushing for right to repair legislation roughly a decade ago, hardware manufacturers have been fear mongering to lawmakers by telling them that right to repair would introduce security threats by requiring them to reveal proprietary information about their products. In practice, the exact opposite has happened, because greater access to repair parts, tools, diagnostic software, and repair guides means that broken equipment that could potentially be more vulnerable to hacking attempts can be fixed more quickly.
“When we talk about critical infrastructure and fixing things, we often do not have time to wait for an official fix from a company that may not be motivated to fix things,” Andrew Brandt, a security researcher and cofounder of the nonprofit Elect More Hackers, testified Thursday. “What ends up happening is that with smaller companies, where they may have spent most of their budget buying some firewall or router that they can no longer afford, they end up in a situation where they’re just going to keep running that device in an unsafe state and leave themselves vulnerable to cyber attack.”
The groups pushing for this legislative rollback appear to be legacy enterprise hardware manufacturers, who highlighted during the hearing the fact that their technology is increasingly being used in data centers, which seem to be one of the only things the current American economy seems capable of building. Lobbyists for the Consumer Technology Association, which represents many large manufacturers, testified in support of the bill, as did Joseph Lee, who works for Cisco.
“While Cisco appreciates the arguments offered in favor of right to repair devices, not all digital technology devices are equal. A router used in a home is fundamentally different from the infrastructure equipment used to manage a power grid or secure confidential state agency data,” Lee said.
Chris Bresee, a lobbyist with the National Electrical Manufacturers Association, also highlighted the fact that, broadly, there is IT equipment that will need repairs at data centers.
“A growing number of products in data centers with connection to our electric grid as well. It is of the utmost importance to safeguard these critical systems,” he said. “This is not an argument against repair or against consumers rights, it is a recognition that fixing a smartphone is not the same as modifying systems that keep the lights on for our country.”
The argument being made by these lobbyists and major tech companies is that only the manufacturers or their authorized representatives should be allowed to fix these types of electronics. But, again, the definition of “critical infrastructure” is so broad that it can be applied to almost any type of electronic, and there is nothing fundamentally different between a router used at a data center and a router used in a school, business, or home.
“You look at who is backing this bill, it is large firms like Cisco and IBM. They sell information technology equipment to tens of thousands of Colorado businesses, and they are looking to create a de facto monopoly on that service, which exists in the states that have denied this business to business right to repair,” Paul Roberts, a cybersecurity expert and founder of SecuRepairs testified. “The big tech companies backing the bill are using a very real concern about cybersecurity and resilience of US critical infrastructure to pad their bottom line, locking in a monopoly on service and repair. Cyber attacks on US critical infrastructure are rampant and have nothing to do with information covered by Colorado’s right to repair law.”