2025-11-22 00:54:35
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 how data is accessed, AI in games, and more.
JOSEPH: This was a pretty big week for impact at 404 Media. Sam’s piece on an exposed AI porn platform ended up with the company closing off those exposed images. Our months-long reporting and pressure from lawmakers led to the closure of the Travel Intelligence Program (TIP), in which a company owned by the U.S.’s major airlines sold flyers data to the government for warrantless surveillance.
For the quick bit of context I have typed many, many times this year: that company is Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC), and is owned by United, American, Delta, Southwest, JetBlue, Alaska, Lufthansa, Air France, and Air Canada. ARC gets data, including a traveler’s name, credit card used, where they’re flying to and from, whenever someone books a flight with one of more than 10,000 travel agencies. Think Expedia, especially. ARC then sells access to that data to a slew of government agencies, including ICE, the FBI, the SEC, the State Department, ATF, and more.
2025-11-21 08:00:09
Police departments and officials from Border Patrol used Flock’s automatic license plate reader (ALPR) cameras to monitor protests hundreds of times around the country during the last year, including No Kings protests in June and October, according to data obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).
The data provides the clearest picture yet of how cops widely use Flock to monitor protesters. In June, 404 Media reported cops in California used Flock to track what it described as an “immigration protest.” The new data shows more than 50 federal, state, and local law enforcement ran hundreds of searches in connection with protest activity, according to the EFF.
2025-11-21 05:38:30
Elon Musk is a better role model than Jesus, better at conquering Europe than Hitler, the greatest blowjob giver of all time, should have been selected before Peyton Manning in the 1998 NFL draft, is a better pitcher than Randy Johnson, has the “potential to drink piss better than any human in history,” and is a better porn star than Riley Reid, according to Grok, X’s sycophantic AI chatbot that has seemingly been reprogrammed to treat Musk like a god.
Grok has been tweaked sometime in the last several days and will now choose Musk as being superior to the entire rest of humanity at any given task. The change is somewhat reminiscent of Grok’s MechaHitler debacle. It is, for the moment, something that is pretty funny and which people on various social media platforms are dunking on Musk and Grok for, but it’s also an example of how big tech companies, like X, are regularly putting their thumbs on the scales of their AI chatbots to distort reality and to obtain their desired outcome.
2025-11-21 03:40:43
The federal government claims that the day after it was sued for allegedly abusing detainees at an ICE detention center, a “system crash” deleted nearly two weeks of surveillance footage from inside the facility.
People detained at ICE’s Broadview Detention Center in suburban Chicago sued the government on October 30; according to their lawyers and the government, nearly two weeks of footage that could show how they were treated was lost in a “system crash” that happened on October 31.
“The government has said that the data for that period was lost in a system crash apparently on the day after the lawsuit was filed,” Alec Solotorovsky, one of the lawyers representing people detained at the facility, said in a hearing about the footage on Thursday that 404 Media attended via phone. “That period we think is going to be critical […] because that’s the period right before the lawsuit was filed.”
Earlier this week, we reported on the fact that the footage, from October 20 to October 30, had been “irretrievably destroyed.” At a hearing Thursday, we learned more about what was lost and the apparent circumstances of the deletion. According to lawyers representing people detained at the facility, it is unclear whether the government is even trying to recover the footage; government lawyers, meanwhile, said “we don’t have the resources” to continue preserving surveillance footage from the facility and suggested that immigrants detained at the facility (or their lawyers) could provide “endless hard drives where we could save the information, that might be one solution.”
It should be noted that ICE and Border Patrol agents continued to be paid during the government shutdown, that Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” provided $170 billion in funding for immigration enforcement and border protection, which included tens of billions of dollars in funding for detention centers.
People detained at the facility are suing the government over alleged horrific treatment and living conditions at the detention center, which has become a site of mass protest against the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign.
Solotorovsky said that the footage the government has offered is from between September 28 and October 19, and from between October 31 and November 7. Government lawyers have said they are prepared to provide footage from five cameras from those time periods; Solotorovsky said the plaintiffs’ attorneys believe there are 63 surveillance cameras total at the facility. He added that over the last few weeks the plaintiffs’ legal team has been trying to work with the government to figure out if the footage can be recovered but that it is unclear who is doing this work on the government’s side. He said they were referred to a company called Five by Five Management, “that appears to be based out of a house,” has supposedly been retained by the government.
“We tried to engage with the government through our IT specialist, and we hired a video forensic specialist,” Solotorovsky said. He added that the government specialist they spoke to “didn’t really know anything beyond the basic specifications of the system. He wasn’t able to answer any questions about preservation or attempts to recover the data.” He said that the government eventually put him in touch with “a person who ostensibly was involved in those events [attempting to recover the data], and it was kind of a no-name LLC called Five by Five Management that appears to be based out of a house in Carol Stream. We were told they were on site and involved with the system when the October 20 to 30 data was lost, but nobody has told us that Five By Five Management or anyone else has been trying to recover the data, and also very importantly things like system logs, administrator logs, event logs, data in the system that may show changes to settings or configurations or deletion events or people accessing the system at important times.”
Five by Five Management could not be reached for comment.
Solotorovsky said those logs are going to be critical for “determining whether the loss was intentional. We’re deeply concerned that nobody is trying to recover the data, and nobody is trying to preserve the data that we’re going to need for this case going forward.”
Jana Brady, an assistant US attorney representing the Department of Homeland Security in the case, did not have much information about what had happened to the footage, and said she was trying to get in touch with contractors the government had hired. She also said the government should not be forced to retain surveillance footage from every camera at the facility and that the “we [the federal government] don’t have the resources to save all of the video footage.”
“We need to keep in mind proportionality. It took a huge effort to download and save and produce the video footage that we are producing and to say that we have to produce and preserve video footage indefinitely for 24 hours a day, seven days a week, indefinitely, which is what they’re asking, we don’t have the resources to do that,” Brady said. “we don't have the resources to save all of the video footage 24/7 for 65 cameras for basically the end of time.”
She added that the government would be amenable to saving all footage if the plaintiffs “have endless hard drives that we could save things to, because again we don’t have the resources to do what the court is ordering us to do. But if they have endless hard drives where we could save the information, that might be one solution.”
Magistrate Judge Laura McNally said they aren’t being “preserved from now until the end of time, they’re being preserved for now,” and said “I’m guessing the federal government has more resources than the plaintiffs here and, I’ll just leave it at that.”
When McNally asked if the footage was gone and not recoverable, Brady said “that’s what I’ve been told.”
“I’ve asked for the name and phone number for the person that is most knowledgeable from the vendor [attempting to recover] the footage, and if I need to depose them to confirm this, I can do this,” she said. “But I have been told that it’s not recoverable, that the system crashed.”
Plaintiffs in the case say they are being held in “inhumane” conditions. The complaint describes a facility where detainees are “confined at Broadview inside overcrowded holding cells containing dozens of people at a time. People are forced to attempt to sleep for days or sometimes weeks on plastic chairs or on the filthy concrete floor. They are denied sufficient food and water […] the temperatures are extreme and uncomfortable […] the physical conditions are filthy, with poor sanitation, clogged toilets, and blood, human fluids, and insects in the sinks and the floor […] federal officers who patrol Broadview under Defendants’ authority are abusive and cruel. Putative class members are routinely degraded, mistreated, and humiliated by these officers.”
2025-11-20 23:45:13
OnlyFans will start running background checks on people signing up as content creators, the platform’s CEO recently announced.
As reported by adult industry news outlet XBIZ, OnlyFans CEO Keily Blair announced the partnership in a LinkedIn post. Blair doesn’t say in the post when the checks will be implemented, whether all types of criminal convictions will bar creators from signing up, if existing creators will be checked as well, or what countries’ criminal records will be checked.
OnlyFans did not respond to 404 Media's request for comment.
“I am very proud to add our partnership with Checkr Trust to our onboarding process in the US,” Blair wrote. “Checkr, Inc. helps OnlyFans to prevent people who have a criminal conviction which may impact on our community's safety from signing up as a Creator on OnlyFans. It’s collaborations like this that make the real difference behind the scenes and keep OnlyFans a space where creators and fans feel secure and empowered.”
Many OnlyFans creators turned to the platform, and to online sex work more generally, when they’re not able to obtain employment at traditional workplaces. Some sex workers doing in-person work turned to online sex work as a way to make ends meet—especially after the passage of the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act in 2018 made it much more difficult to screen clients for escorting. And in-person sex work is still criminalized in the U.S. and many other countries.
“Criminal background checks will not stop potential predators from using the platform (OF), it will only harm individuals who are already at higher risk. Sex work has always had a low barrier to entry, making it the most accessible career for people from all walks of life,” performer GoAskAlex, who’s on OnlyFans and other platforms, told me in an email. “Removing creators with criminal/arrest records will only push more vulnerable people (overwhelmingly, women) to street based/survival sex work. Adding more barriers to what is arguably the safest form of sex work (online sex work) will push sex industry workers to less and less safe options.”
Jessica Starling, who also creates adult content on OnlyFans, told me in a call that their first thought was that if someone using OnlyFans has a prostitution charge, they might not be able to use the platform. “If they're trying to transition to online work, they won’t be able to do that anymore,” they said. “And the second thing I thought was that it's just invasive and overreaching... And then I looked up the company, and I'm like, ‘Oh, wow, this is really bad.’”
Checkr is reportedly used by Uber, Instacart, Shipt, Postmates, and Lyft, and lists many more companies like Dominos and Doordash on its site as clients. The company has been sued hundreds of times for violations of the Fair Credit Reporting Act or other consumer credit complaints. The Fair Credit Reporting Act says that companies providing information to consumer reporting agencies are legally obligated to investigate disputed information. And a lot of people dispute the information Checkr and Inflection provide on them, claiming mixed-up names, acquittals, and decades-old misdemeanors or traffic tickets prevented them from accessing platforms that use background checking services.
Checkr regularly acquires other background checking and age verification companies, and acquired a background check company called Inflection in 2022. At the time, I found more than a dozen lawsuits against Inflection alone in a three year span, many of them from people who found out about the allegedly inaccurate reports Inflection kept about them after being banned from Airbnb after the company claimed they failed checks.
Emanuel Maiberg
“Sex workers face discrimination when leaving the sex trade, especially those who have been face-out and are identifiable in the online world. Facial recognition technology has advanced to a point where just about anyone can ascertain your identity from a single picture,” Alex said. “Leaving the online sex trade is not as easy as it once was, and anything you've done online will follow you for a lifetime. Creators who are forced to leave the platform will find that safe and stable alternatives are far and few between.”
Last month, Pornhub announced that it would start performing background checks on existing content partners—which primarily include studios—next year. "To further protect our creators and users, all new applicants must now complete a criminal background check during onboarding," the platform announced in a newsletter to partners, as reported by AVN.
Alex said she believes background checks in the porn industry could be beneficial, under very specific circumstances. “I do not think that someone with egregious history of sexual violence should be allowed to work in the sex trade in any capacity—similarly, a person convicted of hurting children should be not able to work with children—so if the criminal record checks were searching specifically for sex based offences I could see the benefit, but that doesn't appear to be the case (to my knowledge). What's to stop OnlyFans from deactivating someone's account due to a shoplifting offense?” she said. “I'd like to know more about what they're searching for with these background checks.”
Even with third-party companies like Checkr doing the work, as is the case with third-party age verification that’s swept the U.S. and targeted the porn industry, increased data means increased risk of it being leaked or hacked. Last year, a background check company called National Public Data claimed it was breached by hackers who got the confidential data of 2.9 billion people. The unencrypted data was then sold on the dark web.
Samantha Cole
“It’s dangerous for anyone, but it's especially dangerous for us [adult creators] because we're more vulnerable anyway. Especially when you're online, you're hypervisible,” Starling said. “It doesn't protect anyone except OnlyFans themselves, the company.”
OnlyFans became the household name in independent porn because of the work of its adult content creators. Starling mentioned that because the platform has dominated the market, it’s difficult to just go to another platform if creators don’t want to be subjected to background checks. “We're put in a position where we have very limited power," they said. "So when a platform decides to do something like this, we’re kind of screwed, right?”
Earlier this year, OnlyFans owner Fenix International Ltd reportedly entered talks to sell the company to an investor group at a valuation of around $8 billion.
2025-11-20 23:11:25
The Ukrainian Army is knocking a once-hyped Russian superweapon out of the sky by jamming it with a song and tricking it into thinking it’s in Lima, Peru. The Kremlin once called its Kh-47M2 Kinzhal ballistic missiles “invincible.” Joe Biden said the missile was “almost impossible to stop.” Now Ukrainian electronic warfare experts say they can counter the Kinzhal with some music and a re-direction order.
As winter begins in Ukraine, Russia has ramped up attacks on power and water infrastructure using the hypersonic Kinzhal missile. Russia has come to rely on massive long-range barrages that include drones and missiles. An overnight attack in early October included 496 drones and 53 missiles, including the Kinzhal. Another attack at the end of October involved more than 700 mixed missiles and drones, according to the Ukrainian Air Force.
“Only one type of system in Ukraine was able to intercept those kinds of missiles. It was the Patriot system, which the United States provided to Ukraine. But, because of the limits of those systems and the shortage of ammunition, Ukraine defense are unable to intercept most of those Kijnhals,” a member of Night Watch—a Ukrainian electronic warfare team—told 404 Media. The representative from Night Watch spoke to me on the condition of anonymity to discuss war tactics.
Kinzhals and other guided munitions navigate by communicating with Russian satellites that are part of the GLONASS system, a GPS-style navigation network. Night Watch uses a jamming system called Lima EW to generate a disruption field that prevents anything in the area from communicating with a satellite. Many traditional jamming systems work by blasting receivers on munitions and aircraft with radio noise. Lima does that, but also sends along a digital signal and spoofs navigation signals. It “hacks” the receiver it's communicating with to throw it off course.
Night Watch shared pictures of the downed Kinzhals with 404 Media that showed a missile with a controlled reception pattern antenna (CRPA), an active antenna that’s meant to resist jamming and spoofing. “We discovered that this missile had pretty old type of technology,” Night Watch said. “They had the same type of receivers as old Soviet missiles used to have. So there is nothing special, there is nothing new in those types of missiles.”
Night Watch told 404 Media that it used this Lima to take down 19 Kinzhals in the past two weeks. First, it replaces the missile’s satellite navigation signals with the Ukrainian song “Our Father Is Bandera.”
Any digital noise or random signal would work to jam the navigation system, but Night Watch wanted to use the song because they think it’s funny. “We just send a song…we just make it into binary code, you know, like 010101, and just send it to the Russian navigation system,” Night Watch said. “It’s just kind of a joke. [Bandera] is a Ukrainian nationalist and Russia tries to use this person in their propaganda to say all Ukrainians are Nazis. They always try to scare the Russian people that Ukrainians are, culturally, all the same as Bandera.”
Once the song hits, Night Watch uses Lima to spoof a navigation signal to the missiles and make them think they’re in Lima, Peru. Once the missile’s confused about its location, it attempts to change direction. These missiles are fast—launched from a MiG-31 they can hit speeds of up to Mach 5.7 or more than 4,000 miles per hour—and an object moving that fast doesn’t fare well with sudden changes of direction.
“The airframe cannot withstand the excessive stress and the missile naturally fails,” Night Watch said. “When the Kinzhal missile tried to quickly change navigation, the fuselage of this missile was unable to handle the speed…and, yeah., it was just cut into two parts…the biggest advantage of those missiles, speed, was used against them. So that’s why we have intercepted 19 missiles for the last two weeks.”
Night Watch told 404 Media that Russia is attempting to defeat the Lima system by loading the missiles with more of the old tech. The goal seems to be to use the different receivers to hop frequencies and avoid Lima’s signal.
“What is Russia trying to do? Increase the amount of receivers on those missiles. They used to have eight receivers and right now they increase it up to 12, but it will not help,” Night Watch said. “The last one we intercepted, they already used 16 receivers. It’s pretty useless, that type of modification.”
According to Night Watch, countering Lima by increasing the number of receivers on the missile is a profound misunderstanding of its tech. “They think we make the attack on each receiver and as soon as one receiver attacks, they try to swap in another receiver and get a signal from another satellite. But when the missile enters the range of our system, we cover all types of receivers,” they said. “It’s physically impossible to connect with another satellite, but they think that it’s possible. That’s why they started with four receivers and right now it’s 16. I guess in the future we’ll see 24, but it’s pretty useless.”