2025-12-02 23:56:38
As of this week, half of the states in the U.S. are under restrictive age verification laws that require adults to hand over their biometric and personal identification to access legal porn.
Missouri became the 25th state to enact its own age verification law on Sunday. As it’s done in multiple other states, Pornhub and its network of sister sites—some of the largest adult content platforms in the world—pulled service in Missouri, replacing their homepages with a video of performer Cherie DeVille speaking about the privacy risks and chilling effects of age verification.
The other states include Louisiana, Utah, Mississippi, Virginia, Arkansas, Texas, Montana, North Carolina, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Nebraska, Indiana, Alabama, Oklahoma, Florida, South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, Wyoming, South Dakota, North Dakota, Arizona, and Ohio.
“As you may know, your elected officials in Missouri are requiring us to verify your age before allowing you access to our website. While safety and compliance are at the forefront of our mission, giving your ID card every time you want to visit an adult platform is not the most effective solution for protecting our users, and in fact, will put children and your privacy at risk,” DeVille says in the video. On the blocked homepages there’s also a link to an explanation of the “Restricted to Adults,” or RTA label, which porn site administrators place on their sites to signal to device-based parental controls that the websites are inappropriate for minors.
Like most of the other 24 laws across the country, Missouri’s age verification law requires websites containing more than one third of material that’s considered “harmful to minors,” or sexual content, to perform age verification checks. Similar or more restrictive laws have swept the country since Louisiana became the first state to enact age verification legislation in 2023.
Emanuel Maiberg
Age verification laws reach beyond porn sites, however. In Wyoming, South Dakota, Mississippi and Ohio, where the laws are written broadly enough to cover social media sites and any platform hosting adult content, Bluesky users have to submit to a face scan by the third-party company Yoti or upload a photo of their credit card to verify they’re over 18 years of age. In July, Bluesky started requiring all UK users to verify their ages in response to the Online Safety Act. We’ve previously reported on the security risks in uploading sensitive personal data to identity verification services, including the potential for hackers to then get ahold of that information themselves. In October, after Discord started requiring UK users to verify ages, the platform announced hackers breached one of its third-party vendors that handles age-related appeals, and said it identified around 70,000 users who may have had their government ID photos exposed as part of the breach.
Last week, Pornhub’s parent company Aylo sent letters to Apple, Google, and Microsoft, urging them to support device-based age verification in their app stores and operating systems, WIRED reported. “Based on our real-world experience with existing age assurance laws, we strongly support the initiative to protect minors online,” Anthony Penhale, chief legal officer for Aylo, said in the letter. “However, we have found site-based age assurance approaches to be fundamentally flawed and counterproductive.”
Instead of protecting minors, age verification laws spike usage of virtual private networks and send users—including, potentially, minors—to unregulated or unmoderated sites that don’t care about complying with U.S. or UK laws. In Missouri, searches for VPNs spiked following the law’s enactment.
Missouri schools are not required to teach sex education, leaving it up to local school boards to decide what, if anything, children are taught about sexual health. School districts that do teach sex ed are required to promote abstinence, a modality long recognized as ineffective at protecting children from engaging in risky sexual behaviors. Even if a district offers sex ed, parents are allowed to pull their kids out of that class altogether. But despite research showing age verification laws don’t work either, Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway believes forcing adults to undergo age verification protects the children in her state. “We are proud to stand on the side of parents, families and basic decency. Missouri will not apologize for protecting children,” Hanaway said in a press release.
2025-12-02 01:27:52
A live map that tracks frontlines of the war in Ukraine was edited to show a fake Russian advance on the city of Myrnohrad on November 15. The edit coincided with the resolution of a bet on Polymarket, a site where users can bet on anything from basketball games to presidential election and ongoing conflicts. If Russia captured Myrnohrad by the middle of November, then some gamblers would make money. According to the map that Polymarket relies on, they secured the town just before 10:48 UTC on November 15. The bet resolved and then, mysteriously, the map was edited again and the Russian advance vanished.
The degenerate gamblers on Polymarket are making money by betting on the outcomes of battles big and small in the war between Ukraine and Russia. To adjudicate the real time exchange of territory in a complicated war, Polymarket uses a map generated by the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a DC-based think tank that monitors conflict around the globe.
2025-12-02 01:06:10
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2025-12-01 22:00:52
Joseph speaks to Michael Bobbitt, a former FBI official who worked directly on Operation Trojan Shield. In this operation the FBI secretly ran its own encrypted phone company for organized crime, backdoored the phone, and collected tens of millions of messages. Michael and Joseph discuss how Michael handled intelligence sourced from the phones, how to navigate an operation that complex, and its fallout.
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.
2025-12-01 22:00:02
This article was produced with support from WIRED.
Flock, the automatic license plate reader (ALPR) and AI-powered camera company, uses overseas workers from Upwork to train its machine learning algorithms, with training material telling workers how to review and categorize footage including images people and vehicles in the U.S., according to material reviewed by 404 Media that was accidentally exposed by the company.
The findings bring up questions about who exactly has access to footage collected by Flock surveillance cameras and where people reviewing the footage may be based. Flock has become a pervasive technology in the U.S., with its cameras present in thousands of communities that cops use everyday to investigate things like car jackings. Local police have also performed numerous lookups for ICE in the system.
Companies that use AI or machine learning regularly turn to overseas workers to train their algorithms, often because the labor is cheaper than hiring domestically. But the nature of Flock’s business—creating a surveillance system that constantly monitors U.S. residents’ movements—means that footage might be more sensitive than other AI training jobs.
Flock’s cameras continuously scan the license plate, color, brand, and model of all vehicles that drive by. Law enforcement are then able to search cameras nationwide to see where else a vehicle has driven. Authorities typically dig through this data without a warrant, leading the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) to recently sue a city blanketed in nearly 500 Flock cameras.
Broadly, Flock uses AI or machine learning to automatically detect license plates, vehicles, and people, including what clothes they are wearing, from camera footage. A Flock patent also mentions cameras detecting “race.”
Screenshots from the exposed material. Redactions by 404 Media.
Multiple tipsters pointed 404 Media to an exposed online panel which showed various metrics associated with Flock’s AI training.
2025-11-29 22:00:30
Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that hit the books, bottled alien lightning, reared wolf cubs, and tallied the price of fame.
First, we’ve got a centuries-long history of an Indian savannah told through songs, folktales, and screaming peacocks. Then: Mars gets charged, the secrets of Stora Karlsö, and the epidemiology of stardom.
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.
It has happened again: Researchers have turned to the annals of literature to address a scientific question. Longtime readers of the Abstract will recall that this is a simply irresistible category of research to me (see: China’s porpoise corpus, Transylvanian weather reports, and milky seas). To the library!
In this edition of Science from the Stacks, researchers probed the origins of the tropical savannah in western Maharashtra, India, by collecting references to plants in 28 stories and songs dating back at least 750 years. The aim was to reconstruct a vegetation history that could hint at shifts in the region between forest and savannah biomes.
“Ttraditional literature—for example, myths, folk songs and stories—is a culturally resonant, yet underutilized line of evidence to understand ecological histories and foster biodiversity conservation,” said researchers led by Ashish N. Nerlekar of Michigan State University.
“We found that descriptions of both the landscape and specific plants point to an open-canopy savanna in the past rather than a forest,” the team said. “Of the 44 wild plant species recorded (i.e. omitting exclusively cultivated plants), a clear majority (27 species) were savanna indicators, 14 were generalists, and only three were forest indicators. Our ecological reconstructions from traditional literature complement data from archival paintings, revenue records, plant and animal fossils, and dated molecular phylogenies of endemic biodiversity—all attesting to the antiquity of India's savannas.”
It’s an out-of-the-box way to reconstruct the natural history of a region. But the highlights of these studies are always the excerpts from the literature, like the amazing origin story of this village:
“A folk tale illustrates the founding myth of Kolvihire village near Jejuri. The tale is about a robber-murderer named Vālhyā Koḷī, who lived near Kolvihire. Upon meeting a sage, Vālhyā Koḷī introspected on his wrongdoings and performed penance for 12 years. After completion of the penance, as a living testimony to Vālhyā Koḷī's sincere devotion, leaves sprouted from his stick, which he had used to hit and kill travellers to loot their money. Eventually, Vālhyā Koḷī became the sage-poet Vālmikī. According to the tale, the sprouted stick grew into a pāḍaḷa tree, and the tree still exists in Kolvihire.”
You have to love a good botanical redemption story. Another standout line is this memorable description of a thorny patch in the savannah from the early 16th century: “Such is this thorny forest | it is highly frightening | this forest is empty | peacocks scream here.”
I don’t know exactly why, but “peacocks scream here” is just about the scariest description I’ve ever heard of a place. Shout out to this ancient poet for capturing some legendary bad vibes.
In other news…
Chide, Baptiste et al. “Detection of triboelectric discharges during dust events on Mars.” Nature.
Lightning is a big deal on Earth, inspiring awe, fear, and some of the naughtiest deities imaginable. But lightning also strikes on other planets, including Jupiter and Saturn. For years, scientists have suspected that Mars might host its own bolts, but detecting them has remained elusive.
Now, scientists have finally captured lightning on Mars thanks to “serendipitous observations” from the SuperCam microphone aboard the Perseverance rover.
“Fifty-five events have been detected over two Martian years, usually associated with dust devils and dust storm convective fronts,” said researchers led by Baptiste Chide of the Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planétologie in Toulouse, France. “Beyond Mars, this work also reinforces the prospect of triboelectric discharges associated with wind-blown sediment on Venus and Titan.”
It goes to show that even a very dead world like Mars can still crackle and zap now and then.
About 4,000 years ago on a small island in the Baltic sea, people cared for two wolves — perhaps as pets — feeding them fish, seals, and other marine fare. That’s the cozy portrait presented in a new study that analyzed the remains of ancient wolves buried in the Stora Förvar cave on the Swedish island of Stora Karlsö.
While dogs are commonly buried at ancient human sites, wolves and humans rarely mix in the archaeological record. But the wolves at Stora Karlsö were unlikely to have reached the island without the aid of humans, and their primarily seafood diet—unusual for wild wolves—suggests they were also fed by people. Moreover, one of the animals suffered from a pathology that might have limited its mobility, hinting that it was kept alive by humans.
The cave where the wolf remains were found. Image: Jan Storå/Stockholm University
The study presents the “possibility of prehistoric human control of wolves,” said researchers led by Linus Girdland-Flink of the University of Aberdeen. “Our results provide evidence that extends the discourse about past human–wolf interactions and relationships.”
Celebrity may literally be to die for, according to a new study that evaluated fame as a comorbidity.
Scientists collected a list of 324 big music stars active between 1950 and 1990, including Elvis Presley, Kurt Cobain, Sam Cooke, and Janis Joplin. Those heavy-hitters were then matched with 324 “twin” musicians that were not household names, but otherwise shared many characteristics of the celebs, including gender, nationality, genre, and roughly similar birth dates. The idea was to directly compare the lifespans of A-listers and B-listers to isolate the extent to which fame itself is a mortality risk factor, rather than the lifestyle of a musician.
The study suggests that famous singers die four years earlier, on average, compared to their B-list peers, demonstrating “a 33% higher mortality risk compared with less famous singers,” said researchers led by Johanna Hepp of the Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim, Germany. “This study provides new evidence suggesting that fame may be associated with increased mortality risk among musicians, beyond occupational factors.”
Lady Gaga had it right, as if there were ever any doubt: Under the glitz, the Fame Monster is always waiting.
Thanks for reading! See you next week.
