2025-12-08 23:39:38
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.
I have been somewhat obsessed with making a print product for the last year or so, and we’re really excited to try this experiment. If it goes well, we hope to make more of our journalism available in print. We are doing this in part because we were invited to help throw a benefit concert by our friends at heaven2nite in Los Angeles on January 4, with the proceeds going to the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA), an LA-based nonprofit providing support to Dreamers, immigrant families, and low-wage workers in California. We are going to be giving away copies of the zine at that concert and are selling copies on our Shopify page to ship in early January.
404 Media
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 have spent the last two-and-a-half years trying to build something more sustainable and more human in a world and on an internet that feels more automated and more artificial than ever. We have shown that it’s possible for a small team of dedicated reporters to do impactful, groundbreaking accountability journalism on the companies and powers that are pushing us to a more inhumane world without overwhelmingly focusing on appeasing social media and search algorithms. Nevertheless, we still spend a lot of our time trying to figure out how to reach new audiences using social media and search, without making ourselves feel totally beholden to it. Alongside that, we put a huge amount of effort into convincing people who find our stuff on Instagram or TikTok or YouTube or Reddit (and Bluesky and Mastodon) to follow our work on platforms where we can directly reach them without an algorithmic intermediary. That’s why we focus so much on building our own website, our own direct email newsletters, our own full-text RSS feeds, and RSS-based podcast feeds.
This has gone well, but we have seen our colleagues at The Onion and other independent media outlets bring back the printed word, which, again, is cool, but also comes with other benefits. Print can totally sidestep Big Tech’s distribution mechanisms. It can be mailed, sold in stores, and handed out at concerts. It can be read and passed to a friend, donated to a thrift store and discovered by someone killing time on a weekend, or tossed in a recycling bin and rescued by a random passerby. It is a piece of physical media that can be organically discovered in the real world.
Print does come with some complications, most notably it is significantly more expensive to make and distribute a print product than it is to make a website, and it’s also a slower medium (duh). Ghost, our website and email infrastructure, also doesn’t have a native way to integrate a print subscription into a membership. This is a long way of saying that the only way this first print experiment makes sense is if we sell it as a separate product. Subscribers at the Supporter level will get a discount; we can’t yet include print in your existing subscription for all sorts of logistical and financial reasons, but we will eventually make a PDF of the zine available to subscribers. If you're a subscriber, your code is at the bottom of this post.
Some other details: Our cover art was made by Veri Alvarez, a super talented LA-based artist whose work you can find here. The interior of the magazine was designed and laid out by our old friend Ernie Smith, who runs the amazing Tedium newsletter and who was willing to unretire from his days of laying out newspapers to help us with this. We are printing it at Punch Kiss Press, a DIY risograph studio here in Los Angeles. For those unfamiliar, risograph printing is sort of like silkscreening on paper, where you print one color at a time and layer them on top of each other to get very cool color mixing effects.
We did not originally set out to spend most of the last year reporting on ICE. But we have watched the agency grow from an already horrifying organization into a deportation force that is better funded than most militaries. We have seen full-scale occupations of Los Angeles and Chicago, daily raids playing out in cities, towns, and workplaces across the country, and people getting abducted while they are at work, shopping, or walking down the street.
As this has played out, we have focused on highlighting the ways that the Trump administration has used the considerable power of the federal government and the vast amounts of information it has to empower ICE’s surveillance machine. Technologies and databases created during earlier administrations for one governmental purpose (collecting taxes, for example) have been repurposed as huge caches of data now used to track and detain undocumented immigrants. Privacy protections and data sharing walls between federal agencies have been knocked down. Technologies that were designed for local law enforcement or were created to make rich people feel safer, like license plate tracking cameras, have grown into huge surveillance dragnets that can be accessed by ICE. Surveillance tools that have always been concerning—phone hacking malware, social media surveillance software, facial recognition algorithms, and AI-powered smart glasses—are being used against some of society’s most vulnerable people. There is not a ton of reason for optimism, but in the face of an oppressive force, people are fighting back, and we tried to highlight their work in the zine, too.
Again, this is an experiment, so we can’t commit at the moment to a print subscription, future zines, future magazines, or anything like that. But we are hopeful that people like it and that we can figure out how to do more print products and to do them more often. If you have a connection at a newspaper printing press, a place that prints magazines or catalogs, or otherwise have expertise in printmaking, design, layout, or other things that deal with the printed word, please get in touch, it will help us as we explore the feasibility of doing future print products ([email protected]).
We are also hoping that groups who work with immigrants throughout the United States will be interested in this; if that’s you please email me ([email protected]). We are also exploring translating the zine into Spanish.
If you are a subscriber, your discount code is below this:
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2025-12-08 23:38:50
This week Sam is in conversation with Noelle Perdue. Noelle is a writer, producer, and internet porn historian whose works has been published in Wired, the Washington Post, Slate, and more, and you’re probably familiar with her work if you’ve been paying attention to the plot in your favorite pornographic films. She’s writing on Stubstack so look her up there!
Noelle and Sam discuss everything from sexbots and AI porn to censorship, age verification legislation, and their favorite parody porn flicks.
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.
Michigan Lawmakers Are Attempting to Ban Porn Entirely
New Bill Would Make All Pornography a Federal Crime in the U.S.
OpenAI Catches Up to AI Market Reality: People Are Horny
2025-12-08 23:11:06
The creator of ICEBlock, a popular ICE-spotting app that Apple removed after direct pressure from the Department of Justice, is suing Attorney General Pam Bondi and other top officials, arguing that the demand violated his First Amendment rights.
The move is the latest in the ongoing crackdown on ICE-spotting apps and other information about the Trump administration’s mass deportation effort. Both Apple and Google have removed other similar apps from their app stores, with Apple also removing one called Eyes Up that simply archived videos of ICE abuses.
2025-12-06 22:00:38
Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that fought for their food, took one for the team, passed the extraterrestrial sugar, and got lost in an ancient haze.
First, a story about the spiciest meatball in the animal kingdom. Then: ants are being interesting again, a new discovery about an old rock, and a walk in an ancient sulfur rainstorm.
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.
Most animals don’t eat hornets, because dinner is just not as fun if it comes with a side of deadly venom and stab wounds. But a scientist has now observed an incredible exception to the rule with the humble black-spotted pond frog (Pelophylax nigromaculatus), which will straight-up house a hornet and ask for seconds.
Hornets have occasionally been found in the bellies of pond frogs, suggesting that the amphibians can tolerate their intense stings, but not much else is known about this unusual predator-prey relationship. To remedy the situation, Shinji Sugiura of Kobe University went out to the prefecture of Hyogo in Central Japan and netted a bunch of hornets from grasslands and forests—including the infamous “murder hornet” Vespa mandarinia, the largest in the world. He then captured pond frogs from wetlands with paddy fields and ponds in Hyogo and Shimane prefectures. Then, he let them duke it out in the lab in the world’s gnarliest series of cage matches.
“When a frog opened its mouth and its tongue made contact with a hornet, the action was classified as an attack on the hornet,” Sugiura said in the study. “If the frog did not stop the attack, spit out, or regurgitate the hornet, it was considered to have successfully consumed the hornet.”
The results revealed that most frogs made short work of the hornets (Videos S2) even though their meals were actively stinging them in their faces, eyes, tongues, palates, or throats of the frogs during attacks (Figure 3c,d).
“None of the frogs regurgitated the hornets after swallowing them,” Sugiura noted. “All frogs that swallowed hornets excreted the undigested body parts of the hornets as feces 2–4 days after ingestion.”
Lets just sit with that mental image of poopy undigested hornets for a second. What a nightmare. But what’s truly wild about this study is that the insects are known to inject lethal doses of venom into much larger animals, like mice, so the frogs clearly have some unknown defense against their attacks.
“Although many frogs were stung repeatedly by [hornets] in this study…none of the frogs died, and all individuals resumed normal behavior shortly after being stung,” Suguira said. “Moreover, despite repeated stings, most of the frogs ultimately consumed hornet workers…indicating a high level of predation success even against the largest hornet species.”
We humans are so lucky that when we sit down to dinner, our food generally does not try to kill us with repeated venomous needlepoint impalements. Count your blessings!
In other news…
Dawson, Erika H. “Altruistic disease signalling in ant colonies.” Nature Communications.
We’ll move now from death by frog munchies to death by team spirit. Scientists have discovered that ant pupae (baby ants) will sacrifice themselves if they are sick, lest they risk the health of the entire colony.
“Here we show…that sick ant pupae instead actively emit a chemical signal that in itself is sufficient to trigger their own destruction by colony members,” said researchers led by Erika H. Dawson of the Institute of Science and Technology Austria. “Our data suggest the evolution of a finely-tuned signalling system…that triggers pupal signalling for sacrifice. This demonstrates a balanced interplay between individual and social immunity that efficiently achieves whole-colony health.”
In other words, if an ant gets bitten by a zombie in a movie, it would immediately let everyone know and offer its life for the good of the group. Do what you will with this information.
Furukawa, Yoshihiro et al. “Bio-essential sugars in samples from asteroid Bennu.” Nature Geoscience.
Scientists have found bio-essential sugars, including ribose and glucose, in samples of an asteroid called Bennu that were brought to Earth by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission in 2023. The discovery marks the first time key sugars have been found in any extraterrestrial sample. Ribose is an essential ingredient of RNA (ribonucleic acid), making it a particularly significant find in the quest to understand how life arose on Earth, and if it exists elsewhere.
“All five of the canonical nucleobases in DNA and RNA, and phosphate, were previously found in Bennu samples,” said researchers led by Yoshihiro Furukawa of Tohoku University. “Our detection of ribose means that all the components of RNA are present in Bennu.”
“Our confident detection in Bennu of abundant glucose—the hexose molecule that is life’s common energy source—and other hexoses indicates that they were present in the early solar system,” the team added. “Thus, all three crucial building blocks of life”— bio-essential sugars, nucleobases, and protein-building amino acids—”would have reached the prebiotic Earth and other potentially habitable planets.”
While Bennu bears the stuff of life, it may also be an omen of death: It has a 1 in 2,700 chance of hitting Earth on September 24, 2182. These are very low odds, but the risk is high enough to classify Bennu as potentially hazardous. So while visions of sugar plums may dance in your head this season, beware the nightmares about sugar-asteroids.
I’ve made you walk through many valleys of death in this newsletter, but we’ll close with some unadulterated life. Scientists have discovered that many of the sulfur molecules that help make up all modern organisms may have rained down from the hazy skies of the Archean period four billion years ago.
Assuming the results are confirmed in future research, it would mean that these sulfur molecules could have predated life, upending a leading hypothesis that they were a product of life and thus emerged later.
The work challenges “the assumption that life must have ‘invented’ sulfur biomolecules during evolution…by demonstrating the production of a variety of sulfur biomolecules, including cysteine, in laboratory experiments mimicking the atmospheric chemistry of the early Earth,” said researchers led by Nathan Reed of NASA, who conducted the work while at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
“The results presented here imply that an atmospheric organic haze is a potential powerhouse in providing a diversity of essential biomolecules in sufficient quantities for a budding global biosphere,” the team concluded.
Taken together with the Bennu study, it looks as if early Earth was positively marinating in life juices from multiple sources, including the sky and extraterrestrial impactors. Though this still doesn’t explain how living things sprang up from the prebiotic stew, it provides further confirmation that the ingredients of life as we know it are spread far and wide here in our solar system, and beyond.
Thanks for reading! See you next week.
2025-12-06 01:53:23
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 PC woes, voice deepfakes, and mutual aid.
JOSEPH: Today I’m speaking at the Digital Vulnerabilities in the Age of AI Summit (DIVAS) (good name) on a panel about the financial risks of AI. The way I see it, that applies to the scams and are being powered by AI.
As soon as a new technology is launched, I typically think of ways it might be abused. Sometimes I cover this, sometimes not, but the thought always crosses my mind. One example that did lead to coverage was back at Motherboard in 2023 with an article called How I Broke Into a Bank Account With an AI-Generated Voice.
At the time, ElevenLabs had just launched. This company focuses on audio and AI and cloning voices. Basically you upload audio (originally that could be of anyone before ElevenLabs introduced some guardrails) and the company then lets you ‘say’ anything as that voice. I spoke to voice actors at the time who were obviously very concerned.
2025-12-06 01:05:47
A Customs and Border Protection (CBP) app that lets local cops use facial recognition to hunt immigrants on behalf of the federal government has been removed from the Google Play Store, 404 Media has learned.
It is unclear if the removal is temporary or not, or what the exact reason is for the removal. Google told 404 Media it did not remove the app, and directed inquiries to its developer. CBP did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Its removal comes after 404 Media documented multiple instances of CBP and ICE officials using their own facial recognition app to identify people and verify their immigration status, including people who said they were U.S. citizens.
The removal also comes after “hundreds” of Google employees took issue with the app, according to a source with knowledge of the situation.