2026-02-06 05:40:42
Update 2/5/26, 5:20 p.m. EST: The DOJ told 404 Media that the unredacted version of the document in question contains an image of a victim’s face overlayed on the face of the Mona Lisa image.
The Department of Justice redacted the face of the Mona Lisa, a 522-year-old painting of an Italian woman who died centuries ago, as part of its release of files related to the late convicted sex offender Jeffery Epstein.
In a PDF of an email with the subject line “simply paris” sent on July 3, 2009, a redacted sender sent Epstein several photos of, presumably, himself and a woman sightseeing in Paris. The photos of the woman are all redacted with a black box over her face, but the man’s face is visible.
2026-02-06 00:47:04
According to a new study from a team of researchers in Europe, vibe coding is killing open-source software (OSS) and it’s happening faster than anyone predicted.
Thanks to vibe coding, a colloquialism for the practice of quickly writing code with the assistance of an LLM, anyone with a small amount of technical knowledge can churn out computer code and deploy software, even if they don't fully review or understand all the code they churn out. But there’s a hidden cost. Vibe coding relies on vast amounts of open-source software, a trove of libraries, databases, and user knowledge that’s been built up over decades.
Open-source projects rely on community support to survive. They’re collaborative projects where the people who use them give back, either in time, money, or knowledge, to help maintain the projects. Humans have to come in and fix bugs and maintain libraries.
Vibe coders, according to these researchers, don’t give back.
The study Vibe Coding Kills Open Source, takes an economic view of the problem and asks the question: is vibe coding economically sustainable? Can OSS survive when so many of its users are takers and not givers? According to the study, no.
“Our main result is that under traditional OSS business models, where maintainers primarily monetize direct user engagement…higher adoption of vibe coding reduces OSS provision and lowers welfare,” the study said. “In the long-run equilibrium, mediated usage erodes the revenue base that sustains OSS, raises the quality threshold for sharing, and reduces the mass of shared packages…the decline can be rapid because the same magnification mechanism that amplifies positive shocks to software demand also amplifies negative shocks to monetizable engagement. In other words, feedback loops that once accelerated growth now accelerate contraction.”
This is already happening. Last month, Tailwind Labs—the company behind an open source CSS framework that helps people build websites—laid off three of its four engineers. Tailwind Labs is extremely popular, more popular than it’s ever been, but revenue has plunged.
Tailwind Labss head Adam Wathan explained why in a post on GitHub. “Traffic to our docs is down about 40% from early 2023 despite Tailwind being more popular than ever,” he said. “The docs are the only way people find out about our commercial products, and without customers we can't afford to maintain the framework. I really want to figure out a way to offer LLM-optimized docs that don't make that situation even worse (again we literally had to lay off 75% of the team yesterday), but I can't prioritize it right now unfortunately, and I'm nervous to offer them without solving that problem first.”
Miklós Koren, a professor of economics at Central European University in Vienna and one of the authors of the vibe coding study, told 404 Media that he and his colleagues had just finished the first draft of the study the day before Wathan posted his frustration. “Our results suggest that Tailwind's case will be the rule, not the exception,” he said.
According to Koren, vibe-coders simply don’t give back to the OSS communities they’re taking from. “The convenience of delegating your work to the AI agent is too strong. There are some superstar projects like Openclaw that generate a lot of community interest but I suspect the majority of vibe coders do not keep OSS developers in their minds,” he said. “I am guilty of this myself. Initially I limited my vibe coding to languages I can read if not write, like TypeScript. But for my personal projects I also vibe code in Go, and I don't even know what its package manager is called, let alone be familiar with its libraries.”
The study said that vibe coding is reducing the cost of software development, but that there are other costs people aren’t considering. “The interaction with human users is collapsing faster than development costs are falling,” Koren told 404 Media. “The key insight is that vibe coding is very easy to adopt. Even for a small increase in capability, a lot of people would switch. And recent coding models are very capable. AI companies have also begun targeting business users and other knowledge workers, which further eats into the potential ‘deep-pocket’ user base of OSS.”
This won’t end well. “Vibe coding is not sustainable without open source,” Koren said. “You cannot just freeze the current state of OSS and live off of that. Projects need to be maintained, bugs fixed, security vulnerabilities patched. If OSS collapses, vibe coding will go down with it. I think we have to speak up and act now to stop that from happening.”
He said that major AI firms like Anthropic and OpenAI can’t continue to free ride on OSS or the whole system will collapse. “We propose a revenue sharing model based on actual usage data,” he said. “The details would have to be worked out, but the technology is there to make such a business model feasible for OSS.”
AI is the ultimate rent seeker, a middle-man that inserts itself between a creator and a user and it often consumes the very thing that’s giving it life. The OSS/vibe-coding dynamic is playing out in other places. In October, Wikipedia said it had seen an explosion in traffic but that most of it was from AI scraping the site. Users who experience Wikipedia through an AI intermediary don’t update the site and don’t donate during its frequent fund-raising drives.
The same thing is happening with OSS. Vibe coding agents don’t read the advertisements in documentation about paid products, they don’t contribute to the knowledge base of the software, and they don’t donate to the people who maintain the software.
“Popular libraries will keep finding sponsors,” Koren said. “Smaller, niche projects are more likely to suffer. But many currently successful projects, like Linux, git, TeX, or grep, started out with one person trying to scratch their own itch. If the maintainers of small projects give up, who will produce the next Linux?”
2026-02-06 00:37:23
In 2015, after reading a book about how the telegraph created a sort of proto-internet that helped make various robber barons rich and powerful, I wrote an article about Elon Musk that, a decade later, feels both very embarrassing and somewhat prophetic. Musk and SpaceX had just announced a plan to launch a constellation of low-earth orbit, internet-providing satellites.
I saw this at the time as a step toward a kind of everything company. SpaceX was working on reusable rockets that would drastically lower the cost of flying things to space, and I imagined at the time that, if successful, being able to fly things to space for a far lower cost than his competitors would give Musk incredible power and wealth. This was in part because of SpaceX’s potential ability to become a telecom company in addition to a space launch company.
“If he can successfully develop the reusable launch vehicles, that gives him a tremendous dominance over the mode of getting to space. Once you can do it relatively cheaply and in high volume, instead of launching five or six times a year, you’re launching [and] putting stuff into orbit once a week. That’s the hard part,” Marco Caceres, a space industry analyst, told me at the time. “All the other stuff is really dessert, in a way. It’s the satellites, the services that’ll make you the real money.” SpaceX said at the time that Starlink would have 4,000 satellites. Today, it has more than 9,000 satellites, and the majority of all satellites in space have been launched by SpaceX and are owned by SpaceX.
2026-02-05 23:36:40
A new tool searches your LinkedIn connections for people who are mentioned in the Epstein files, just in case you don’t, understandably, want anything to do with them on the already deranged social network.
404 Media tested the tool, called EpsteIn—as in, a mash up of Epstein and LinkedIn—and it appears to work.
“I found myself wondering whether anyone had mapped Epstein's network in the style of LinkedIn—how many people are 1st/2nd/3rd degree connections of Jeffrey Epstein?” Christopher Finke, the creator of the tool, told 404 Media in an email. “Smarter programmers than me have already built tools to visualize that, but I couldn't find anything that would show the overlap between my network and his.”
“Thankfully the overlap is zero, but I did find that a previous co-worker who I purposefully chose not to keep in touch with appears in the files, and not in an incidental way. Trusting my gut on him paid off, I suppose,” he added.
Finke said the tool is based on the work of Patrick Duggan, who made an API to easily search the files.
“Search the publicly released Epstein court documents for mentions of your LinkedIn connections,” the GitHub repository for the tool reads.
The tool can output a report that shows each result’s name, company, and their position; the total number of mentions across all the searched documents; excerpts from each matching document, and links to the original material on the Department of Justice’s website.
In my case, the tool found 22 connections with mentions in the Epstein files. But, many of these are likely false positives. Some of them were very common names. The tool also found 5 hits for “Adam S.” Obviously, there could be a lot of people with that name and initial. The repository acknowledges this: “Common names may produce false positives—review the context excerpts to verify relevance.”
Last week the DOJ published 3.5 million pages of files related to the investigations of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. The massive dump also contained videos, images, and audio recordings. 404 Media found it included multiple unredacted photos of fully nude women or girls, with the DOJ only taking them down days after their upload. We also covered Musk’s inclusion in the files.
The dump contains a wealth of other tech elites, WIRED reported. Peter Thiel, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and many others all make an appearance.
But a mention does not necessarily mean those people were up to anything nefarious (although many, many were, obviously). Jeff Moss, the founder of the DEF CON hacking conference, is mentioned in the files because Vincenzo Iozzo, a well-known hacker, offered to introduce Epstein to the DEF CON founder.
On Reddit, Moss wrote, “Vincenzo approached me for free badges and I said no, and pointed him to the Epstein Wikipedia page and tried to warn him to stay away from any involvement. I didn’t realize how deep it went. As far as I know Epstein never attended. All this other behind the scenes stuff is wild, but not surprising.”
Moss’s LinkedIn post is also where 404 Media first saw the EpsteIN tool.
Update: this piece has been updated to include information from the tool's creator.
2026-02-05 23:05:56
When I was home over Christmas, I was digging through some of my dad’s baseball memorabilia when I came across a copy of the Washington Post from March 7, 1999: “Printing Revolution Spurs New Look,” the lead headline read. The paper was such an incredible artifact that I took photos of each of its pages.
The paper was a “special edition” printed to commemorate the opening of its College Park, Maryland printing press, where my dad worked for years. This special edition was presumably one of the first papers that came off those presses. It was an almost unimaginably optimistic time for the journalism business: “Newspapers are flying off the Washington Post’s new presses—four in its Springfield plant and four more in a new building in College Park,” the article read. “These papers are different from those printed even several weeks ago. They showcase state-of-the-art advances in the industry and culminate a printing revolution that began in the 15th century on Johann Gutenberg’s moveable type.” In a photo, the publisher of The Post, Donald Graham, posed with a stack of “some of the first color papers at College Park.”
An info box called “Things to Know” explained that The Post printed 800,000 copies on weekdays and 1.1 million copies on Sundays. In a letter from the publisher titled “Changes Benefiting Readers, Advertisers,” Graham wrote that the new printing plant was “the newspaper’s biggest investment ever” and cost $230 million. “You don’t spend that much money without a very good reason, and this morning’s Washington Post is that reason—a better printed, better-organized paper,” he wrote. “Within these walls work some of the best engravers, press operators, mailers and helpers, machinists, electricians, engineers, paper handlers, and general workers in the American newspaper industry […] you don’t spend hundreds of millions of dollars unless you have confidence in your readers and community and an unshakeable determination to meet their needs. No newspaper has better or more loyal readers, and none works harder to earn and keep its readers’ trust.”
You know the rest of the story. Graham eventually sold the newspaper to Jeff Bezos, one of the world’s richest men, for a little more than The Post paid for those printing presses. In the short term, Bezos invested in the paper but has appeared to have lost interest in employing large numbers of good journalists, at least some of whom reported aggressively on his various businesses. On Wednesday the Post laid off hundreds of journalists, which destroyed entire sections of the newspaper, including much of its foreign bureau coverage, and gutted many of its sections.
2026-02-04 23:53:58
Archeologists in Germany have unearthed a mysterious underground tunnel built centuries ago within a prehistoric burial ground, marking a “very special” discovery according to a recent release from the State Office for Monument Preservation and Archaeology (LDA) of Saxony-Anhalt.
The buried tunnel measures about two-feet wide and four-feet high, and was likely constructed anywhere between 800 to 1,100 years ago near the town of Reinstedt. Archeologists found pottery that dates to about the 13th or 14th century in the chamber, and also discovered a separate cavity that contained a horseshoe, a fox skeleton, and some small mammal bones. A layer of charcoal in the tunnel suggests that fires were once lit in this space.
The tunnel is just one of hundreds of similar structures, known as erdstalls, that have been discovered across Europe. Fascinatingly, nobody knows what function they served, with the debated possibilities including use as hideaways or sites for cultic activity. Erdstalls are “man-made underground tunnel systems, sometimes with chamber-like extensions,” said Jochen Fahr, an archaeologist at LDA who organized the excavation in an email to 404 Media. “Around a dozen such findings are known from the federal state of Saxony-Anhalt, which means that the density of these structures is lower in our region than it is in others. Their function has not yet been clarified and may also vary from case to case.”
“Possible interpretations include hiding places in case of danger or storage cellars,” Fahr continued. “A cultic-religious function could also be possible, as a kind of Christian chapel. The interpretation of these structures is made more difficult by the fact that the examples known to us contain little or no archaeological finds, which makes it very difficult to draw any firm conclusions on their function.”
Researchers initially set out to survey this site last year before the construction of wind turbines in the area. The site was already known as the location of a trapezoidal ditch that was used as a burial ground by the Baalberge people, who lived in Saxony-Anhalt during the Neolithic period of prehistory 6,000 years ago.
“In the course of the site‘s further investigation and documentation, the erdstall was discovered,” Fahr explained. “It had been dug into the southern part of the trapezoidal ditch thousands of years after the ditch‘s construction. Initially, the erdstall appeared as a well-defined elongated oval pit, about two meters long and up to 75 centimeters wide, which cut the older ditch almost at right angles.”
“This led to the assumption that it could be a burial—but the fact that the finding then turned out to be something completely different, that it was in fact an erdstall, was an unexpected surprise that caused fascination and excitement among the team,” he added.
The team speculated that the people who dug out this passageway may have deliberately selected the ancient burial ground as a secret hideaway. The area may have been “generally avoided by the population due to its special nature—perhaps a pagan burial site—and was therefore particularly suitable as a hiding place,” according to the press release.
Hundreds of erdstalls have been found across Europe, and they are often associated with local folklore passed down across generations. Because the tunnels are normally extremely narrow, some legends cast erdstalls as home to dwarfs, goblins, and other diminutive mythical creatures, which is why they are known as Schratzlloch (goblin holes) or Zwergloch (dwarf holes) in some regions.
Some of the most famous examples include the Beate Greithanner erdstall, a passage that was discovered in 2011 after a dairy cow fell into it. The Ratgöbluckn erdstall in Austria is one of the rare passages that is big enough to safely accommodate tourists.
The new erdstall found at Reinstedt deepens the mystery of these structures, which have intrigued archeologists for decades and still remain largely unexplained.
“The excavation has been completed, the team is currently in the process of evaluating the findings and finds,” Fahr said. “In this context, my colleagues are also in the process of delving deeper into the topic of the erdstall, based on the latest literature on the subject, for example. A scholarly publication is planned.”
“It is also hoped that further findings in the future will help us to better understand the phenomenon of erdstalls and, in particular, to further clarify their function,” he concluded.