2026-04-30 00:54:33
Days before thousands of researchers, academics, and human rights experts were set to convene in Lusaka, Zambia, the government of Zambia announced it was postponing RightsCon, one the largest and most important digital human rights conferences in the world. The announcement, which came as some participants and speakers were already en route to the conference, has sown confusion and chaos in the academic community.
Minister of Technology and Science Felix Mutati first announced the postponement on April 28, saying that Zambia needed more time to ensure the conference “fully [aligns] with national procedures, diplomatic protocols, and the broader objective of fostering a balanced and consensus-driven platform for dialogue.”
“In particular, certain invited speakers and participants remain subject to pending administrative and security clearances, which have not yet been concluded," he added, according to the Lusaka Times.
2026-04-29 22:35:14
Customs and Border Protection (CBP) plans to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to expand its fleet of high-powered surveillance drones, and other parts of the Department of the Homeland Security (DHS) may buy their own Predator-style drones, according to recently published procurement records.
The news shows DHS’s continued investment in drone surveillance technology, and how use of large scale drones could expand to other parts of the umbrella agency.
2026-04-29 21:01:22
Last week Apple fixed an issue that let the FBI forensically extract copies of incoming Signal messages from a defendant’s iPhone, even after the app had been deleted, because copies of those messages were stored in the iPhone’s notification database. The move comes directly in response to 404 Media’s coverage of a case in which the FBI was able to extract a suspect’s deleted Signal messages. Apple’s fix means iPhones should no longer save copies of deleted messages from Signal or other apps, and Apple said the patch also purges already saved and related notifications.
2026-04-29 20:56:30
This week, Jason explains the conspiracy theory circulating behind a trippy stock image that went viral after the White House Correspondents’ Dinner—was it sent here by a time traveler? (Spoiler: No.) Then Sam unpacks what’s happening at Arizona State University with a messy rollout of a new AI-powered tool that generates lessons by scraping professors’ lectures without their knowledge. In the second for subscribers at the Supporter level, Emanuel gets philosophical with a discussion about the question of machine consciousness and how it relates to a new paper from a Google-affiliated scientist.
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University Professors Disturbed to Find Their Lectures Chopped Up and Turned Into AI Slop
2026-04-29 01:19:29
If you’ve ever visited a haunted house or a paranormal hotspot, you may have experienced a weird sense of unease that you couldn’t quite explain. While it’s tempting to imagine that these feelings signal the presence of ghosts or other supernatural entities, they may actually be caused by acoustic frequencies below 20 hertz, known as infrasound, according to a study published on Monday in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience.
The human ear is not tuned to pick up infrasound, yet a growing body of research has shown that exposure to these frequencies nonetheless causes negative feelings in humans and many other animals. Now, scientists have probed this mysterious link with a new experimental approach involving 36 volunteers who self-reported their moods while listening to various musical styles that sometimes included infrasound.
In addition, the volunteers provided saliva samples for measuring their cortisol levels, which provided empirical evidence that they were more stressed when exposed to infrasound. The results clearly demonstrate that “infrasound may be aversive to humans, acting as a potential environmental irritant and contributing to more negative subjective experience,” according to the study.
“A lot of the literature seemed to tackle either one side of the conversation or the other, where people are looking at surveys and doing interviews with people, or they're looking into the physiology,” said Kale Scatterty, a PhD student at the Neuroscience and Mental Health Institute at the University of Alberta who led the study, in a call with 404 Media. “We wanted to use this as a first step in combining those approaches to get a whole picture of exactly what was happening with this effect.”
“It was surprising and exciting to see a significant difference in cortisol when the infrasound was turned on,” added Trevor Hamilton, a professor of psychology at MacEwan University who co-authored the study, in the same call.
For decades, scientists have linked infrasound to negative effects on humans and many other animals, though it is still not known how humans pick up on these sounds, or why we might have evolved an aversion to this frequency range. Given that natural sources of infrasound include dangerous events like volcanic eruptions, landslides, avalanches, intense storms, or stampeding animals, researchers speculate that humans and other species may have learned to interpret infrasound as a warning sign for incoming disaster.
Becky Ferreira
But, you may be asking yourself, where do the ghosts come in? Infrasound is also produced by a wide range of human-caused noise pollution, such as industrial machinery, wind farms, air conditioning units, busy roads and railways, or military activity in war zones. For this reason, many scientists have wondered if locations that are considered haunted or cursed in some way may sometimes be polluted by infrasound.
Rodney Schmaltz, a co-author of the study and a professor of psychology at MacEwan University, even organizes classes around taking his students to paranormal hotspots, such as the haunted house Deadmonton, to search for scientifically-grounded explanations of their spooky allure. These fun field experiments revealed that playing infrasound at Deadmonton motivates visitors to move more rapidly through the house.
In the new study, the interdisciplinary team combined their expertise by recruiting 36 undergraduate psychology students at MacEwan University (27 women and nine men). Each participant sat in a room alone while calming or unsettling music was played, and gave saliva samples before and after their session. Half of the participants were exposed to infrasound at 18 hertz while listening to both types of music. The participants were asked to report their feelings, their emotional rating of the music, and whether they thought infrasound had been played in their session.
The participants couldn’t consciously tell whether infrasound was played, but the elevated cortisol levels in the exposed group suggests that some part of their brain picked up on the frequencies, regardless of the type of music that accompanied it. Unlike many past studies, this research didn’t link infrasound exposure to heightened anxiety, though the exposed group reported more irritability, less interest in the music, and a sense that the music was sadder with infrasound.
The sample size of 36 is relatively small due to budget constraints—salivary cortisol tests are not cheap—but Scatterty’s team hopes their study offers a roadmap toward similar experiments that aim to pinpoint the mechanisms that cause infrasound to raise our hackles.
Becky Ferreira
“We get very excited when we find something really positive like this, but for every single question we answer, we tend to have five more questions come up,” Scatterty said. “It's really hard to give any definitive answers. But for those who have curious minds, it's exciting to see where this kind of work could go. People who are interested in haunted houses and the paranormal might be having something to chew into here. People who are looking at the ecological side of things might interpret it as a noise pollutant for either humans or animals in nature.”
“It's really exciting for the potential it offers for future research,” he concluded.
2026-04-28 23:59:23
An AI-powered tool designed to target trademark violations on social media was used to silence critics of SXSW, the massive annual tech, music and film conference in Austin, Texas.
Each year in March, SXSW takes over Austin. This year, thanks to the demolition of the city’s aging convention center, events sprawled to more locations than usual, from hotel ballrooms to vacant lots. But the character of SXSW has changed, growing more corporate and less accessible since its relatively humble origins in 1987, and today it has numerous detractors. This year some of those dissenting voices found themselves targeted by BrandShield, a “digital risk protection” service that claims to use artificial intelligence to automate the process of identifying and removing social posts that misuse trademarks.
Among the groups to receive a social media takedown notice was Vocal Texas, a nonprofit dedicated to ending homelessness, HIV, poverty and the war on drugs. On March 12, members of the group set up a mock encampment in downtown Austin, to draw attention to the possessions that unhoused people can lose during “sweeps,” when police and city officials clear out and destroy or confiscate their tents and other lifesaving supplies.
An Instagram post by Vocal Texas read, “SXSW means unhoused Austinites in downtown face encampment sweeps, tickets and arrests while the City makes room for billionaires and corporations to rake in profits.” The accompanying image promised an art installation called “Sweep the Billionaires,” and does not use SXSW’s logos.
Even so, the mere mention of SXSW was apparently enough to flag BrandShield’s trademark detection service, resulting in the post’s fully automated removal from Instagram. Cara Gagliano, a senior staff attorney who specializes in trademark and intellectual property law at the Electronic Frontier Foundation said that posts like these do not violate SXSW’s trademark.
“You’re allowed to use a company’s name to talk about the company, right?” Gagliano told 404 Media. “How else are you going to do it?”
Gagliano noted that trademark law has specific carveouts for exactly this kind of critical speech. “Examples like that, where it's not (for example) advertising a concert with a name similar to South by Southwest ... are pretty clearly over-enforcement,” she said.
EFF interceded in March 2024 when the Austin for Palestine coalition received a cease and desist letter from SXSW, accusing them of infringing on the conference’s trademark and copyright. The coalition, which was involved with organizing successful protests against the festival’s sponsorship by the U.S. military, had made social media posts featuring SXSW’s trademarked arrow logo reimagined with bloodstains, fighter jets, and other warlike imagery. The EFF wrote a letter on the coalition’s behalf, and the group never heard from SXSW again.
But Gagliano explained that this situation is different from the takedown notices sent by BrandShield. “When it's a threat sent to ... the person who made the allegedly infringing use, them going away is a victory for the client because nothing bad happens to them, but when you have these takedowns ... [while] it's good that they didn't go even further and file a lawsuit, they also don't have any incentive to retract the complaint, and so the content stays down.”
This year, many of the protests and “counter events” were organized by a very loosely associated coalition of groups called Smash By Smash West, which included Vocal Texas along with many others, from musicians and independent movie directors to event venues.
404 Media reached a representative of Smash By Smash West via Signal who used the name “Burnice.” We agreed to protect their anonymity, but verified that they were involved with the organizing of Smash By events. Operating since 2024, Smash By has no leaders and essentially anyone can organize an event under its umbrella. This year, there were over 100 events, according to Burnice. “It is a decentralized call to action and a platform that enables promotion and connecting together all of these different events.”
Smash By Smash West provided us with dozens of screenshots of Instagram takedown notices as well as many of the posts which had been removed.
BrandShield’s software enables mass reporting of potentially infringing content, with reports in turn evaluated by Instagram’s automated moderation systems. Despite their obviously automated nature, BrandShield claims to use a “dedicated enforcement team of IP lawyers” to ensure that takedowns are “timely, targeted and fully compliant.”
The BrandShield website reads, “Whether it's a distorted logo, a counterfeit image, or a cloned storefront, our proprietary image recognition technology scans marketplaces, social media, paid media, and mobile environments to catch threats at the source.”
However, despite these assurances, it seems clear that BrandShield’s trademark targets with a very broad brush, and seems incapable of distinguishing between trademark violations and protected free speech. Although BrandShield initially connected us with their public relations department, they did not respond to repeated requests for comment including an emailed list of inquiries.
Instagram’s automatically generated takedown notices include the sentence, “If you think this content shouldn’t have been removed from Instagram, you can contact the complaining party directly to resolve your issue.” However, there is a link allowing the recipient to appeal the takedown, which then leaves it up to Instagram moderators’ discretion if it returns.
Gagliano explained that this is a crucial area where trademark differs from copyright law. Thanks to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), there’s a clear (though often arduous) path to contesting false claims of copyright violations which allows content creators to get their posts put back. There’s no similar, mandatory pathway written into trademark law. “There's no counter notice process where they say, ‘Okay, you told us this is fair use, so we'll put it back up.’ And that's a really frustrating thing,” Gagliano said.
Mathew Zuniga, who does most of the booking for Tiny Sounds Collective, an organization that throws free DIY music shows and publishes zines, said he struggled with the process offered by Instagram after a post about a Tiny Sounds’ Smash By concert was taken down.
“I tried to do it,” he said. “It didn't really go through.“
When he reposted the same image and text, but without tagging Smash By Smash West’s Instagram account as a collaborator, the post remained online.
“I think it’s silly, as if these DIY shows in a bookstore are pulling anyone away from South By,” Zuniga said. “I think it was more of a deliberate attempt to take down anti-South By Southwest rhetoric online.”
When reached for comment, SXSW’s PR team sent back a prepared statement, noting that the law requires them to “take reasonable steps” to enforce their trademarks.
“SXSW’s efforts are not intended to limit commentary, criticism, or independent reporting, and we respect the importance of free expression,” the spokesperson’s statement continued. “We use third-party services, including BrandShield, to help identify potential issues at scale, and we recognize that errors can occur."
By contrast, Burnice explained that, rather than trying to steal SXSW’s trademark, Smash By Smash West makes it a condition that participants can’t describe their events as free or alternative SXSW events. “Smash By ... was an attempt to politicize the DIY scene, the ‘unofficial’ South By shows, and make them explicitly anti-South By.”
Smash By provides alternative logos, some of which are wholly unique but others based on parodying or “detournements” of the SXSW logo, similar to what the Austin for Palestine coalition did in 2024. Burnice expressed their frustration with the automated nature of the quashing of dissent this year.
“All of that is actually just happening by robots talking to robots,” they said. “It's an AI system that mass reports these accounts, and then, you know, probably an AI system at Instagram that just sorts through, and approves or rejects.”
For her part, Gagliano expressed skepticism over whether artificial intelligence plays a major or important role at companies like BrandShield beyond just its current popularity as a tech buzzword. ”I haven't seen any kind of change in the volume of requests for help that we're getting, and this is one thing where I'm a little skeptical that it's really made much difference, because they were already using automated tools before, and I think in any instance, the tools are not going to be able to reliably determine what's actually infringement.”