2026-01-16 03:10:37
It’s possible to win a gem mint Surging Sparks Pikachu EX Pokémon card worth as much as $840 from a vending machine in the Pentagon food court. Thanks to a company called Lucky Box Vending, anyone passing through the center of American military power can pay to win a piece of randomized memorabilia from a machine dispensing collectibles.
On Christmas Eve, a company called Lucky Box announced it had installed one of its vending machines at the Pentagon in a now-deleted post on Threads. “A place built on legacy, leadership, and history—now experiencing the thrill of Lucky Box firsthand,” the post said. “This is a milestone moment for Lucky Box and we’re excited for this opportunity. Nostalgia. Pure Excitement.”
A Lucky Box is a kind of gacha machine or lootbox, a vending machine that dispenses random prizes for cash. A person puts in money and the machine spits out a random collectible. Customers pick a “type” of collectible they want—typically either a rare Pokémon card, sports card, or sports jersey—insert money and get a random item. The cost of a spin on the Lucky Box varies from location to location, but it’s typically somewhere around $100 to $200. Pictures and advertisements of the Pentagon Lucky Box don’t tell us how much a box cost in the nation’s capitol and the company did not respond to 404 Media’s request for comment.
Most of the cards and jerseys inside a Lucky Box vending machine are only worth a few dollars, but the company promises that every machine has a few of what it calls “holy grail” items. The Pentagon Lucky Box had a picture of a gem mint 1st edition Charizard Pokémon card on the side of it, a card worth more than $100,000. The company’s social media feed is full of people opening items like a CGC graded perfect 10 1st edition Venusaur shadowless holo Pokémon card (worth around $14,000) or a 2023 Mookie Betts rookie card. Most people, however, don’t win the big prizes.
Lucky Box vending machines are scattered across the country and mostly installed in malls. According to the store locator on its website, more than 20 of the machines are in Las Vegas. Which makes sense, because Lucky Boxes are a kind of gambling. These types of gacha machines are wildly popular in Japan and other countries in Southeast Asia. They’ve seen an uptick in popularity in the US in the past few years, driven by loosening restrictions on gambling and pop culture crazes such as Labubu.
Task & Purpose first reported that the Lucky Box had been in place since December 23, 2025. Pentagon spokesperson Susan Gough told 404 Media that, as of this writing, the Lucky Box vending machine was still installed in the Pentagon’s main food court.
Someone took pictures of the thing and posted them to the r/army on Monday. From there, the pictures made it onto most of the major military subreddits and various Instagram accounts like USArmyWTF. After Task & Purpose reported on the presence of the Lucky Box at the Pentagon, Lucky Box deleted any mention of the location from its social media and the Pentagon location is not currently listed on the company’s store locator. But it is, according to Gough, still there.
In gaming, the virtual versions of these loot boxes are frowned upon. Seven years ago, games like Star Wars: Battlefront II were at the center of a controversy around similar mechanics. At the time, it was common for video games to sell loot boxes to users for a few bucks. This culminated in an FTC investigation. A year ago, the developers of Genshin Impact agreed to pay a $20 million fine for selling loot boxes to teens under 16 without parental consent.The practice never went away in video games, but most major publishers backed off the practice in non-sports titles.
Now, almost a decade later, the lootboxes have spread into real life and one of them is in the Pentagon.
2026-01-15 22:03:04
Palantir is working on a tool for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that populates a map with potential deportation targets, brings up a dossier on each person, and provides a “confidence score” on the person’s current address, 404 Media has learned. ICE is using it to find locations where lots of people it might detain could be based.
The findings, based on internal ICE material obtained by 404 Media, public procurement records, and recent sworn testimony from an ICE official, show the clearest link yet between the technological infrastructure Palantir is building for ICE and the agency’s activities on the ground. The tool receives peoples’ addresses from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) among a range of other sources, according to the material.
The news comes after Department of Homeland Security (DHS) head Kristi Noem said the agency is sending hundreds more federal agents to Minneapolis amid widespread protests against the agency. Last week ICE officer Jonathan Ross shot and killed 37 year old U.S. citizen Renee Nicole Good. During Operation Metro Surge, which DHS calls the “largest immigration operation ever,” immigration agents have surrounded rideshare drivers and used pepper spray on high school students.
2026-01-15 22:00:41
A group of six Democratic lawmakers is proposing legislation that would dramatically rein in Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) facial recognition app, according to a copy of the draft bill shared with 404 Media. ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) have been scanning peoples’ faces with the app, called Mobile Fortify, across the country, using it to verify their citizenship and claiming that a result in the app should be trusted over a birth certificate.
The move signals the first potential legislative move against the app after 404 Media first revealed Mobile Fortify’s existence in June based on leaked ICE emails. Since then, 404 Media has covered its continued use against U.S. citizens, the 200 million images it uses, and the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) plan to roll out a version of the app to local law enforcement.
“When ICE claims that an image it snaps and runs through an unproven app can be enough evidence to detain people for possible deportation, no one is safe,” Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-MS), ranking member of the Committee on Homeland Security, and who authored the legislation, said. “ICE’s use of Mobile Fortify to determine a person’s legal status is an outrageous affront to the civil rights and civil liberties of U.S. citizens and immigrants alike. DHS should not be conducting surveillance by experimenting with Americans’ faces and fingerprints in the field—especially with unproven and biased technology. It is time to put an end to its widespread use. We can secure the Homeland and respect the rights and privacy of Americans at the same time.”
The bill is being cosponsored by by Rep. Lou Correa (D-CA), Ranking Member of the Subcommittee on Border Security & Enforcement; Rep. Shri Thanedar (D-MI), Ranking Member of the Subcommittee on Oversight, Investigations & Accountability; Rep. Yvette D. Clarke (D-NY), Chair of the Congressional Black Caucus; Rep. Grace Meng (D-NY), Chair of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus; and Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D-NY), Chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. It follows some of the lawmakers demanding answers from DHS about the app in September.
The proposed law, called the Realigning Mobile Phone Biometrics for American Privacy Protection Act, aims to curtail both Mobile Fortify and Mobile Identify, the local law enforcement version, in a few ways. First, it would ban use of the apps except for identification at ports of entry. As 404 Media showed, Mobile Fortify uses CBP systems that are usually reserved for identifying and taking photos of people as they enter the U.S. Mobile Fortify turned that capability inwards to American streets.
The law would also require all photos and fingerprints of U.S. citizens captured before the practices introduced by the bill be deleted, and require that all photographs or fingerprints of U.S. citizens be destroyed within 12 hours of being taken. The law would also prohibit DHS from sharing the apps with non-DHS law enforcement agencies, effectively killing the local law enforcement version. (404 Media reported the app became unavailable on the Google Play Store in early-December.)
When an immigration officer scans someone’s face with Mobile Fortify, the app runs their face against a bank of 200 million images held by DHS, according to the app’s user manual previously obtained by 404 Media. If the app finds what it believes is a matching face, it returns a name, their nationality, age and date of birth, unique identifiers such as their “alien registration,” and a field titled “Immig. Judge Decision,” the manual says. This appears to refer to whether an immigration judge has ruled on this person’s case, and may include a result that says “remove.”
404 Media previously obtained an internal DHS document through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) which showed ICE does not let people decline to be scanned by the app. 404 Media has found likely cases of the app being used in Chicago. In a partnership with Reveal, 404 Media reported the app has been used on U.S. citizens.
One video posted to social media this week showed an officer using the app to take a photo of an identification document in what the video said was Minnesota. 404 Media compared the app shown in the video to the user interface in the leaked Mobile Fortify user manual and they matched.
“The Trump Administration has weaponized federal agencies against the American people. This latest effort to use facial recognition to further target immigrant families is reckless and dangerous,” said Rep. Espaillat in a statement. “I’m proud to stand with Ranking Member Thompson to introduce legislation to combat ICE and DHS, prohibiting the use of facial recognition as yet another ruthless tactic to further this administration’s mass deportation agenda.”
“The abuse of this type of technology by DHS agents is not only invasive, it is likely unconstitutional and certainly un-American,” Rep. Meng added. “Immigration enforcement should not be conducted by an app and DHS should not conduct dragnet operations that terrorize communities and violate people's constitutional rights. I am proud to have worked with Ranking Member Thompson and my colleagues to introduce this commonsense legislation.”
A DHS spokesperson told 404 Media in a statement, “Claims that Mobile Fortify violates the Fourth Amendment or compromises privacy are false. The application does not access open-source material, scrape social media, or rely on publicly available data. Its use is governed by established legal authorities and formal privacy oversight, which set strict limits on data access, use, and retention.”
“Mobile Fortify is a lawful law-enforcement tool developed under the Trump Administration to support accurate identity and immigration-status verification during enforcement operations. It operates with a deliberately high matching threshold and queries only limited CBP immigration datasets. Mobile Fortify has not been blocked, restricted, or curtailed by the courts or by legal guidance. It is lawfully used nationwide in accordance with all applicable legal authorities,” the statement continued.
Update: this piece has been updated to include a statement from DHS.
2026-01-15 03:46:53
Astronomers think they have solved the puzzle of so-called “little red dots” in space, a population of bizarre objects at the very edge of the observable universe, according to a study published on Wednesday in Nature.
The new research suggests that these dots are likely the youngest black holes we have ever glimpsed, which are “cocooned” in dense gas, a never-before-seen phenomenon that sheds light on the early evolution of the universe.
“LRDs were first spotted in 2023 in the first images made with the James Webb Space Telescope,” said Vadim Rusakov, an astronomer at the University of Manchester, in an email to 404 Media. “People have very actively studied these objects since then.”
“They are tiny, bright and red objects seen when the universe was only about 5-15 percent of its current age,” he continued. “They have puzzled astronomers: on one hand, they are too compact and massive for normal galaxies, on the other, they do not look like typical supermassive black holes, because we do not detect their usual signals, such as X-rays. And they are not just a few odd apples—almost every tenth galaxy in the early universe is an LRD.”
These baffling properties have sparked spirited debate about the nature of LRDs. Some studies have suggested they might be exotic star-studded galaxies, or weirdly overmassive black holes.
Hoping to resolve the mystery, Rusakov and his colleagues analyzed JWST observations of more than a dozen of the little red dots across longer timescales. The team confirmed that the dots are likely black holes that are enshrouded by a “cocoon” of energetic gas that can explain their novel properties.
“Our simple solution is: we think that they are massive black holes wrapped in a thick cocoon of dense gas, which makes them appear red and hides the black hole,” Rusakov said. “This idea of the cocoon was inspired by another work that predicted the presence of thick gas. We could check this idea by studying the hydrogen emission from LRDs. This showed us that the cocoon is partly ionised—meaning it has lots of free electrons. This was a surprising discovery, because by scattering light, these electrons hid most useful black hole signals from our sight and also made it appear more evolved than it actually is.”
“By looking inside, we found that these are some of the youngest black holes ever seen,” he added. “This makes them unique laboratories for understanding how black holes got started in the early universe.”
In other words, it’s not that these objects aren’t radiating in X-rays, it’s just that those wavelengths are largely blotted out by the gassy cocoons. Moreover, the cocoons warp light from the black holes, making them seem much more massive than they actually are, like some kind of cosmic funhouse mirror. Rusakov and his colleagues calculated that the black holes are probably a few million times as massive as the Sun, more than a hundred times smaller than expected by their appearance.
The findings are part of a wave of discoveries about the early universe primarily fueled by the unparalleled precision and sensitivity of JWST’s infrared vision.
“The first JWST observations caused several debates about how galaxies formed in the early universe, such as whether galaxies grow quicker than we thought,” Rusakov explained. “In fact, some of those initially problematic galaxies turned out to be Little Red Dots. As our study shows, they were misinterpreted as purely stellar galaxies and they are supermassive black holes instead.”
As JWST continues to expose strange new frontiers of the universe, astronomers can determine which anomalies point to novel entities and which, like the little red dots, turn out to be familiar objects going through an unfamiliar phase.
Either way, each breakthrough raises new questions. Rusakov and his colleagues may have identified the origin of the little red dots, but it remains unclear whether these young black holes grow faster than the galaxies associated with them, and what that might mean for our understanding of galactic evolution.
“LRDs show us what the black holes looked like a long time ago, and if we are lucky, they may show us how these massive black holes got started,” Rusakov said. “Just to be clear, even though they are likely the youngest black holes we ever found, they already have masses of a few million Suns.”
“This opens up the next big questions: can we find even smaller black holes with the James Webb Space Telescope? Do black holes start tiny and grow or are they born already quite big?” he added. “These exciting questions will definitely keep us busy for some time.”
2026-01-15 00:28:09
When self-employed software engineer Nick Benson put out the call for dashcams online, he thought he’d get maybe 10 people to donate. More than 500 have shown up on his front porch in suburban Minneapolis. “The state apparatus, of course, has cameras everywhere,” Benson told 404 Media. “The citizens will also benefit from having the same cameras around to document what's going on and making sure that everything is on the up and up.”
In early January, the Trump administration sent 2,000 federal agents and officers to the Minneapolis area. DHS has said hundreds more are on the way. Earlier this week, President Donald Trump threatened Minnesota with a “DAY OF RECKONING & RETRIBUTION” in a Truth Social post.
2026-01-14 23:29:17
A police officer in Colorado used evidence from Flock cameras to wrongfully accuse an innocent woman for package theft, then yelled at her on the phone when she told him she had evidence that exonerated her, according to body camera footage obtained by 404 Media.
The nightmare situation happened in September in Columbine Valley, Colorado and was first reported by The Colorado Sun, which obtained Ring camera footage from the woman, Chrisanna Elser, that showed an initial interaction with Sergeant Jamie Milliman at her home. 404 Media has obtained body camera footage of that interaction as well as footage from a phone call Milliman made to Elser after he gave her a court summons.