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Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that boiled my blood, warmed my heart, and got permanently inked into my memory.

First, a new look at some very old tattoos. Then: a posthumous discovery from a beloved defunct telescope, an update on lava planets, the adventures of translocated mole rats, and some provocative style tips from chimpanzees.

Ink of ages

Caspari, Gino et al. “High-resolution near-infrared data reveal Pazyryk tattooing methods.” Antiquity.

Some 2,300 years ago, a woman from the nomadic Pazyryk culture of Siberia was inked with elaborate tattoos, including dynamic animal fights. Her body and its mesmerizing displays have survived to this day, along with many other “Pazyryk ice mummies” that were immaculately preserved in permafrost tombs.

Now, scientists have imaged the woman’s epic epidermis with high-resolution techniques that expose hidden details of her tattoos, yielding new insights about the artists and tools that made them.

“While the images on the hands are mostly simple designs, the most elaborate of which is a rooster on the left thumb, the forearms display some of the most complex Pazyryk tattoos currently identified,”  said researchers led by Gino Caspari of the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology.

Photogrammetrically created 3D model of the mummy, showing: A) texture derived from visible-spectrum photographs; and B) texture derived from near-infrared photography. Credit: M. Vavulin

The results revealed that the middle-aged woman was tattooed with at least two different instruments: a multipoint tool that provided a uniform line thickness, as well as a finer tool with a single point. The pigment was probably crafted from soot or burnt plants, but the nature of the “needles” remains unclear (they may have been plant thorns, for instance). The new images exposed the superior quality in the scene on her right forearm compared to the left, which suggests that at least two artists worked on the decorations over multiple sessions.

“The right-forearm tattoo likely required at least two sessions to complete, beginning with the ungulate [stag] positioned at the wrist,” the researchers said. “This clever placement utilizes the contours of the wrist to enhance the ungulate’s form, allowing the tattoo to flow across the arm.”

“The right-forearm tattoo also features techniques that are challenging from the tattooist’s perspective” yet “the linework is clear and consistent, with nearly double the amount of outlining present on the left forearm,” they added. “Taken as a whole, this evidence suggests that the left forearm tattoo was created by an artist with less experience or skill.”

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A figure depicting the tattoos and placement on the body. Image: Svetlana Pankova

Tattoos represent a diversity of meanings and practices across regions and time, and it’s important not to color bodies of the past with our present biases. While we may never know exactly what these dramatic scenes meant to the Pazyryk culture, it is amazing that we can behold them in such fantastic detail thousands of years after this woman, and her tattooists, lived and died in the Altai Mountains.

“Modifications to soft tissue, including tattooing, present a temporal paradox as they are simultaneously permanent over the lifetime of the marked individual, yet transitory from an archaeological perspective,” said Caspari and his colleagues. “The interpretation of tattoos in prehistoric contexts necessarily remains speculative and may never reach the intricate richness of meaning with which the images and practices were originally associated.”

If this story piques your interest in the ancient artistry of Altai Mountain cultures (understandable!), check another recent study about the stylistic shifts in the region’s rock art depictions of elk over thousands of years.

In other news…

Tidal wave over Arecibo

Gong, Yun et al. “First Observation of a Strong Thermospheric 4.8-Hour Tide and Its Impact on the Ionosphere Over Arecibo.” Geophysical Research Letters.

Tidal waves are normally thought of as massive walls of ocean water, but the sky is also rippled by tides of solar energy generated by the Sun’s activity. This week, a team discovered a “strong and unusual” tidal wave that reverberated about 160 to 300 miles above Puerto Rico’s Arecibo telescope on the night of March 17, 2015.

“We found that this tide is surprisingly powerful, with wind speeds around 25 m/s—larger than those seen in more common tidal patterns,” said researchers led by Yun Gong of Wuhan University. “This is the first time such a strong 4.8-hour tide has been reported at these heights.”

The team noted that the wave was probably amplified by a geomagnetic storm, though the finer details of such complex interactions are still up in the air. The study is a testament to the ongoing afterlife of Arecibo, which sadly collapsed in 2020, but remains a legendary icon in part because of its extensive archives that date back to 1963.

The floor is lava

Boukaré, Charles-Édouard et al. “The role of interior dynamics and differentiation on the surface and in the atmosphere of lava planets.” Nature Astronomy.

Just in case you haven’t expressed gratitude to Earth lately, here’s a study about “lava planets,” which are rocky worlds that orbit so close to their stars that their day-sides reach 5,000°F.

Artist concept of a lava planet. Image: ESO/L. Calcada

“Unlike rocky planets in the solar system, lava planets maintain a long-lived, shallow magma ocean on their day-side, even after billions of years of interior cooling,” said researchers led by Charles-Édouard Boukaré of York University. “Such asymmetric magma oceans have no analogues in the solar system and their internal dynamics and evolution are still poorly understood.”

Fortunately, lava planets are a current priority for observation by the James Webb Space Telescope, so we may learn more about them soon. Even as we ride out more intense heat waves on Earth, pour a cold one out for these tortured worlds.

Moving day for mole rats

Moldován, Orsolya et al. “Challenges and opportunities in the translocation of grassland-dwelling subterranean mammals: The case of blind mole rats.” Global Ecology and Conservation.

Burrowing animals are disproportionately threatened by the steady march of human land developments (citation: Watership Down). European blind mole rats, for instance, “have long been persecuted, and many species are threatened by extinction as they only exist in a few small and isolated populations,” according to a new study.

A model of a blind mole rat in Ukraine. Image: Максим Яковлєв

Though maligned in the past, these unique rodents are increasingly recognized as beneficial ecosystem engineers—plus, they are textbook “ugly-cute,” an aesthetic I cherish. To that end, the study followed up on translocation efforts that moved vulnerable colonies to new and safer sites.

“In the seven projects, a total of 141 blind mole rat individuals were translocated, of which 56 were males and 85 were females,” said researchers led by Orsolya Moldován of the University of Debrecen in Hungary. These “recent conservation efforts… were mostly successful and reversed the 200-year trend of decline. The method is thus promising for saving blind mole rats from extinction and for ensuring their long-term survival.”

It’s uplifting to know that there’s still a light at the end of the tunnel for these burrowing beauties.

The hottest summer look: Butt-grass

Van Leeuwen,  Edwin J.C. et al. “Chimpanzees socially learn non-instrumental behaviour from conspecifics.” Behavior.

We’ll close with a recent study that I first saw reported by Sabrina Imbler of Defector about chimps that put grass in their buttholes as a style choice. I suggest you read their article through to the final reveal, which is surprisingly heart-warming for a tale of bum-grass. But for our purposes, here's the upshot:

After witnessing chimps at Zambia’s Chimfunshi sanctuary adorning their ears with grass, a team “observed the birth of a related variant in which chimpanzees started to wear the grass from their rectums,” a trend that spread “to most of the group within six weeks,” according to researchers led by Edwin J.C. van Leeuwen of Utrecht University in the Netherlands.

An analysis of the grass-wearing behaviors. Image: Van Leeuwen, Edwin J.C. et al.

“Though we primarily observed grass-in-rectum behavior by the same individual (the plausible innovator), the behavior was adopted by at least five other individuals from the same group, of whom two are still performing it to this day, almost a year after initial observations,” the team said.

It’s another reminder to be the plausible innovator you want to see in the world. You never know what hare-brained scheme (or grass-butted one) might catch on.

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

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After spending last week with Tesla fans who wanted the world to know that their Tesla purchases had nothing to do with politics, I spent this weekend at the Tesla diner protests, talking to people who disagreed with that stance.

On both Saturday and Sunday, organisers from Resist the Coup and Tesla Takedown Santa Monica brought crowds and sieg-heiling Elon Musk-shaped car-dealership inflatables  to the front of the new diner. Drums, megaphones, and shouts from the assembled protesters were accompanied by horns from passing drivers responding to “Honk If You Hate Elon” signs.

Steven was there on the first day of the protest with his 16-year-old daughter.

Protesters outside the diner on Sunday. Photo: 404 Media

“He’s a piece of shit, but let’s get the political science stuff out of the way,” Steven told me when I asked if he thought support of Tesla could be considered apolitical. “Elon Musk has platformed white supremacists and anti-semites on X. He got rid of all the moderation. He put back accounts that were clearly neo-Nazis. He's changed algorithms to promote that type of hate. Him and DOGE did massive cuts in the government, including our civil services. He's cut cancer research. Did I mention he was a giant piece of shit?”

“He's cut our aid to Africa, which will result, without exaggeration, in millions of women and children and innocent people dying. Millions,” he said. “I'm not a big fan of people who give the Hitler salute. I mean, I'm kind of fussy like that. He gave it twice at Trump's inauguration,” he continued. “He's a Nazi. And he cheats at video games. You have another question?”

“The guy saluted Hitler twice on national television,” Dave, lead organiser for Tesla Takedown Santa Monica. Dave spent both days of the protest drumming and calling chants, like “when you eat your Tesla burger, you’re funding mass murder, when you eat your Tesla fries, another hungry child dies”.

“We fear for the future of democracy in the United States of America,” he said. “And there is no bigger poster child for the corruption and the influence of money in politics than Elon Musk.”

Protesters brought signs and costumes. Photo: 404 Media

Dave explained that targeting Tesla, as a publicly-traded company, is one of the only levers available for people to express disapproval of Musk’s actions. The protests took place days after a July 23 Tesla earnings call which disclosed an almost 12 percent year-on-year decline in revenue—its “steepest year-over-year revenue decline in at least a decade.” The share price is currently around 15 percent lower than it was a year ago.

Antonia and Stas had come to the diner for date night; they had known the protest was happening and “were talking and joking about that in the car,” as it would be a “feature” of their date. Antonia said the diner “is capitalism”, and “you can't separate capitalism from politics.” But, she’d been thinking: “wouldn't it be great if he just focused on ideas like this? Making people's lives better and easier, in a way that, like, wasn't interfering with elections around the globe, and at home in America?”

“Elon’s a full blown fascist,” said Josh Greene on Saturday afternoon. “I mean, he donated $250 million to put Trump back in the White House. He bought Twitter to spread right wing conspiracy theories, and he's helping to dismantle democracy in this country.”

A diner guest leaving during the protest. Photo: 404 Media

A group of teenagers walking by yelled “four more years! Trump is the greatest!” at Greene as I was interviewing him. “Read a book, pal!” he yelled back.

The teenagers hung around to try to interrupt the protest further. They spent about an hour standing very close to, yelling at, and filming individual protesters, shouting about Trump.

One Tesla-owner, Holly, was standing and watching this happen. ’It makes me sort of sad and emotional to watch,” she said. “ I can tell they're trying to incite some sort of, like, interaction, violent or otherwise, and I don't know. It's just, I feel like it's a sad state right now.”

Holly had brought her kids to the diner for lunch as she thought it would be fun. She said she didn’t identify with the Tesla community, but had  “just wanted an electric car”, and she thinks it’s annoying that Tesla has become a political flashpoint.

“I don't think Musk is a good guy. I don't want him in politics. I don't want him running our country,” she said.

She said that, politically, her allegiance was with the protesters. But she didn’t think there was anything that Musk could do that would encourage her to get rid of the car: “my privilege is, it doesn't impact me one way or another,” she said.

People passing in cars honked their horns, waved, or flashed lights as they saw the protesters. A few times, I saw a Tesla slow down or pull up alongside the protesters to chat. Dave from Tesla Takedown later told me that “a lot of older Tesla model owners pump their fists and say, yeah, we're with you too, we just got to wait until our lease is up.”

Other passing cars filmed or yelled out of their windows. Twice, I saw Cybertruck drivers interact with the protest. The first time, a woman gave them the middle finger out of her car window, and the second time, a man who had driven past once lapped the block, to do a sieg heil over his kid’s head.

A man does a "Hitler salute" from his car as he drives by the protesters on Sunday afternoon. Photo: 404 Media

Dean Barlage, a resident of the adjacent building, came down to see the protest. He said that he felt the saluting Musk balloons and protesters’ signs with swastikas or curse words were inappropriate for children eating at the diner, who might ask their parents for explanations of what they were seeing or reading.

Toby Bronson, who had helped organise the protest with Resist the Coup, was also at the diner both days. He said that they had experienced much more support than harassment from passing cars, which “shows what the city is all about… LA is the one fighting back and this town's not going to quit. We're not going to stop.” He said that he hadn’t been bothered by the teenagers - “it's pretty hilarious considering they're all about 13. So they can't vote,” he said. “The only thing I said to them was, you know, you guys are the same age as the people on the Epstein list,” he told me. “They didn’t like that.”

On Tuesday, 29th July, I was contacted by Tesla Takedown Santa Monica who said that they had received anonymous messages online, threatening a drive-by pepper spraying event, if they came back to the diner the following weekend. That evening, Bronson posted that the protest would be happening again - every weekend until the diner closes.

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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 messy Tea and our first livestreamed event.

SAM: We had an awesome time hanging out with a couple hundred of our Angeleno friends at Rip.Space on Wednesday! The full live podcast is here (start around 1:45) and it’ll be in your feeds soon, too. The first portion of the livestream is partially us testing that it worked, but then an impromptu panel happened with the Rip.Space folks that’s extremely worth a watch.

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Independent game developer Paolo Pedercini wanted to announce his new game Future? No Thanks! a few weeks ago, but said it was delayed because Steam found a screenshot it planned to share “had suggestive themes.” The screenshot? A low-polygon woman in a short dress with her legs closed together.

Future? No Thanks! was meant to be announced weeks ago but the Steam page didn't pass the first review because a screenshot marked as "Suitable for all ages" had suggestive themes. The screenshot? This one:

— Molleindustria - Wishlist FUTURE? NO THANKS! (@molleindustria.org) 2025-07-30T14:31:04.532Z

Future? No Thanks!’s page did land on Steam, just a little late. “I thought the screenshot flagging was funny because they seem to have interpreted that low poly character as having no underwear, maybe due to the purple color matching the hair,” Pedercini, who releases games under the name Molleindustria, told 404 Media.

According to Pedercini, he had submitted the game to Steam earlier this month, a process which requires a developer to send in a trailer and at least four screenshots that are “suitable for all ages.” He marked the screenshot above as suitable, but Steam rejected it on July 10.

“The trailer does have a suggestive clip with a sexbot, and a hyperbolic disclaimer…so I guess that's fair,” Pedercini said. He pushed back against Steam and asked for a review. “Both reviews took more than a week, which I think it's longer than usual. I wonder if they were figuring out how to respond to the payment processor deal.”

Pedercini’s problems with Steam came at a time when the platform was facing pressure from credit card companies to remove adult games from its platform. Earlier this month, the credit card companies Visa and Mastercard pressured video game distributors Steam and Itch to remove adult games from their storefronts.

The payment processors themselves were bowing to a pressure campaign from the organization Collective Shout, which describes itself as being “for anyone concerned about the increasing pornification of culture” and which argued that many of the adult games normalized violence against women. But a lot of games with queer themes were kicked off Itch and Steam as part of the purge, and it’s not always clear what the lines are and who is drawing them.

“We live in a golden age of independent cultural production, but digital distribution is still extremely concentrated. There are a handful of entities that can instantly make huge swaths of digital culture disappear,” Pedercini said. “We thought digital marketplaces like the Apple Store were the main agents of market censorship, but now we've found out there are even more monopolistic companies upstream from them.”

Those upstream monopolies, pressured by outside lobbying groups, are now defining what can and can’t be said online. Payment processors have pushed other kinds of content to the margins before, video game storefronts are just the latest example. “Such marketplaces may default to freedom of expression because it's cheaper to not moderate content, but they will easily bow to calls for censorship because it's less trouble than advocating for controversial products. It cuts both ways: a few years ago, major online stores removed products showing the Confederate flag,” Pedercini said.

“Conservative groups are willing to exploit these vulnerabilities and are trying to put illegal content such as child pornography on a continuum with porn and queer representations,” he added. “I think they genuinely believe that homosexuality is in the same set as bestiality or rape, as something forbidden by the Bible or whatever, but we can't let that view be enshrined into law or into commercial content guidelines.”

Pedercini has been through something like this before. His 2007 game Operation: Pedopriest, a game about the well documented abuse of children in the Catholic Church, earned the ire of an Italian Christian group which accused the game of depicting virtual child pornography. “The accusation immediately lead the provider to shut down the site, legal charges, and a point of order all the way up to the Italian parliament,” Pedercini said.

Gamers, a group that can be particularly aggressive when politically activated, have launched a counter-pressure campaign on the payment processors. It’s too early to tell if Visa and Mastercard will bend to gamers the same way it did to collective shout.

The future of video games as a form of cultural expression is at risk of massive damage. “The status of video games as culture is still being negotiated. If thematic restrictions like the ones defined by itch.io were to be applied to movies or books, limiting their distribution, it would be major news immediately,” Pedercini said. “Arguably, most video games are currently moving away from culture and morphing into pseudo-cultural objects like slot machines, or apps for wasting time and feeling nothing. The problem is that those of us who still make video games as some kind of artform will be caught in the dragnet.”

Steam did not immediately respond to 404 Media’s request for comment.

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In late May, Apple announced what seemed on its face to be a big, positive development for iPad owners: It was going to begin selling repair parts for iPads to the general public, which is a requirement of a series of new right-to-repair laws. “With today’s announcement, we’re excited to expand our repair services to more customers, enabling them to further extend the life of their products—all without compromising safety, security, or privacy,” Brian Naumann, Apple’s vice president of AppleCare, said in a press release announcing the move.

The announcement was generally covered positively by the press: “Save Money, Make Your iPad Last Longer,” a Forbes headline read, for example. But independent repair professionals who have used the program told 404 Media that the prices Apple is charging for some repair parts are absurdly high, and that this functionally means that the iPad is as unrepairable as it has always been.

“As is typical for Apple, they’ve been pushing and testing the limits as time has gone on, and now they pushed too far. There are plenty of other examples of absurdly priced parts from Self Service, but these iPad parts are by far the worst,” Brian Clark, the cower of the iGuys Tech Shop, told 404 Media.

“For years, Apple effectively considered the iPad non-repairable. They did not offer any repairs on iPads, and Apple authorized service providers were not allowed to do iPad repairs of any kind, so this was a huge shift in their view of iPads. I was excited until the day they actually put the parts up and seeing the ridiculous prices of things, it was really, really disappointing,” Clark added. “It kind of sends the message that they don’t really want iPads to be repaired.

Clark points out that a new charge port for an iPad Pro 11, a part that goes bad all the time, costs $250 from Apple. Aftermarket charge ports, meanwhile, can be found for less than $20. “It’s a very basic part, and I just can’t see any reasonable explanation that part should be $250 from Apple,” he said. “That’s a component that probably costs them a few dollars to make.”

Clark said a digitizer for an iPad A16 is $200. That part can be bought from third-party suppliers for $50, and the iPad A16 sells brand new from Apple for $349, Clark said. The replacement screen assembly for an iPad Pro 13 costs $749 from Apple.

Jonathan Strange, the founder of XiRepair, put together a spreadsheet of all the new parts and found that more than a third of the iPad parts Apple is now selling are not being sold at a price that is economically viable for independent repair shops. The way he calculated this was by taking the price of the part, adding in $85 for labor and a 10 percent profit margin for a repair shop. If the total repair cost was more than half the price of buying a totally new device, he considers it to be not economically viable.

“Almost NO iPads with multi-repair needs (meaning an iPad has a cracked screen and needs a battery, for example), is a viable option when using only genuine OEM service parts,” Strange said.

Strange said that when analyzing iPad part prices, he found that nearly every part seemed to be correlated with the replacement value of the device versus what the part should probably actually cost.

“I don't believe Apple prices parts based on their cost to manufacturer plus a small margin, I fully believe they are pricing parts based on retail replacement cost of the device. Apple seems to keep almost all their repair parts plus an average shop's labor right at about 50 percent of the replacement cost of the device. I believe they do this to discourage repair,” Strange told 404 Media. “It doesn’t cost $250 or even $100 to manufacture a charge port cable, but I believe Apple is charging this because they know if the price is high enough no one will buy it. If right-to-repair laws force them to sell parts they'll do it but they will make them super high.”

It’s not clear what, if anything, can be done about Apple’s iPad part pricing. State right-to-repair laws require companies to sell parts to the public on “fair and reasonable terms,” but it’s not clear whether Apple’s iPad part prices are egregious enough to be out of line with different state laws.

Nathan Proctor, head of repair for the consumer rights group US PIRG, told 404 Media that Apple’s pricing is not competitive in many cases. “If Apple wants repair shops to use their brand-name parts, they should be more competitive in how they price them,” he said. “Some of the problems that we have is that Apple has long treated the iPad as a non-repairable product, despite the fact that many independent shops fix them. I expect iPad repair to get better over time, and there is more thought in the design process to repair—another positive development driven from progress on right-to-repair.”

Strange echoed this sentiment, and said that regardless of the sometimes absurd pricing, the program is a good start because “Apple has never repaired iPads.”

“Apple hasn't repaired their iPad products not because they aren't repairable, but because Apple's network of retail shops can't handle the complexity. A geek squad or genius bar employee at an Apple store doing an iPad repair is like a Ford sales rep doing a Ford transmission replacement—it would be a disaster due to complexity, differences in training and just lack of experience,” Strange said.

“Imagine the average customer breaks their iPad, goes to their nearest Apple store only to be told that they have to mail it off and they will replace it with a new one, only to have a friend tell them that a local repair shop that's partnered with Apple can do it in house the same day,” he added. “I believe that Apple being forced to service iPad parts will ultimately break their service model: either they admit that independents have skills their average retail worker doesn't have or they will damage a whole lot of customer's iPads over the coming months.”

Apple did not respond to a request for comment.

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By accident, journalist Jack Poulson discovered Google had completely de-listed two of his articles from its search results. “We only found it by complete coincidence,” Poulson told 404 Media. “I happened to be Googling for one of the articles, and even when I typed in the exact title in quotes it wouldn’t show up in search results anymore.”

Poulson had stumbled on a vulnerability in Google’s search engine that allowed people to maliciously delete links off of Google, which is a reputation management company’s dream and which could easily be used to suppress information. The SEO trick had allowed someone to de-list specific web pages from the search engine using Google’s Refresh Outdated Content tool, a site that lets users submit pages to URLs to be recrawled and re-listed after an update. The vulnerability had to do with capitalizing different letters in the URL in this tool, which ultimately caused the delisting.

In 2023, Poulson published an article about tech CEO Delwin Maurice Blackman’s 2021 arrest on a felony domestic violence charge.

After Poulson published Blackman’s arrest records in 2023, the CEO has attempted to suppress the story in various ways, including lawsuits and DMCA takedown requests. Eventually, the stories disappeared from Google, using this vulnerability. As far as Poulson could tell, the only two articles on his newsletter that had been de-listed by Google using the trick were related to the CEO.

Google confirmed the problem in an email to 404 Media. “This tool helps ensure our search results are up to date. We’re vigilant in monitoring abuse, and we worked quickly to roll out a fix for this specific issue, which was only impacting a tiny fraction of web pages.”

Poulson’s work has appeared at the Center for Investigative Journalism, Drop Site News, and his personal newsletter All-Source Intelligence.

The Freedom of the Press Foundation—a nonprofit dedicated to protecting the rights of journalists—has chronicled Poulson’s fight against censorship and Ahmed Zidan, its Deputy Director of Audience, told 404 Media that an article about that fight had also been de-listed from Google.

When Poulson noticed this, he alerted Zidan, who did some digging and figured out the problem. The owner of websites can access a Google Search Console (GSC) to tweak and optimize their site's place in the search engine. Digging around in GSC,  Zidan discovered someone had made repeated requests, starting in May and ending in June, to recrawl its article about Poulson and Blackman.

In every instance, the capitalization of letters in the URL had been changed. “So the first request that comes in, the ‘a’ of anatomy is a capital ‘A’ and the rest of the slug is the same. And apparently after this request would expire, the attackers would make another request, this time capitalizing the ‘n’ in anatomy,” Zidan said. When Google tries to index the URLs with tweaked capitalization, it gets a 404. “Then, Google, instead of indexing only the 404 page, would de-index all the variations including the live, valid, legitimate article,” Zidan said.

Image via Ahmed Zidan.

Zidan contacted Google who confirmed the bug to him. The company wouldn’t tell him or 404 Media how many pages had been affected or give further details about the incident. “We would really love Google and other social platforms to be more transparent with advocacy and press freedom organizations,” Zidan said.

It’s hard to know who, exactly, made the re-indexing requests. Anyone can use the Refresh Outdated Content tool and it doesn’t tag the person who made a request in GSC. But the only articles on Poulson’s newsletter affected by the issue were two related to Blackman and the one on the Freedom of the Press Foundation site was about Blackman’s fight with Poulson.

It is easy to imagine a celebrity, high-profile politician, or even a government using this bug to suppress negative information about themselves in a targeted way. Reputation management companies exist to help the rich and powerful do just that.

Discoverability is vital to a journalist and getting de-listed from Google search can crush a story’s impact. “It’s basically just silent censorship and who knows if there’s some other variant of this that exists…any child could do this. And it’s just shocking to me that a company as technical as Google would have such a simple bug,” Poulson said. “If your article doesn’t appear in Google search results, in many ways it just doesn’t exist.”

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The Sun powers almost all life on Earth, but chemosynthetic life is the fascinating exception. These organisms find fuel in chemical reactions, allowing them to flourish in places where the Sun doesn’t shine—like the deep sea.

Now, scientists have discovered chemosynthetic animals, such as foot-long tubeworms and mollusks, nearly six miles beneath the ocean surface, deeper than these ecosystems have ever been observed before, according to a study published on Wednesday in Nature.

Researchers witnessed the hotspots of chemosynthetic life in person during crewed dives in the Fendouzhe submersible, which descended nearly 31,000 feet to the ocean’s deepest regions, known as hadal trenches, in the North Pacific.

“Hadal trenches, some of the Earth’s least explored and understood environments, have long been proposed to harbour chemosynthesis-based communities,” said researchers co-led by Xiaotong Peng and Mengran Du of the Institute of Deep-Sea Science and Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, in the study. The authors did not reply to an interview request.

“Despite increasing attention, actual documentation of such communities has been exceptionally rare,” the team continued. “Here we report the discovery of the deepest and the most extensive chemosynthesis-based communities known to exist on Earth during an expedition to the Kuril–Kamchatka Trench and the western Aleutian Trench.”

The global ocean floor is etched with about 50 of these trenches, which form at the boundaries of tectonic plates and extend down to 35,876 feet at the deepest point, Challenger Deep. Chemicals like methane and hydrogen sulfide leak out of so-called “seeps” in these active zones, which can be metabolized by chemosynthetic microbes that form the basis of diverse ecosystems that live completely off the bio-solar grid.

Researchers with the Global Trench Exploration and Dive Programme, an international collaboration led by China, set out to investigate these sunless regions, which play a major role in global carbon cycling.

Over the course of several dives in the summer of 2024, the team documented thriving chemosynthetic ecosystems at otherworldly sites with names like Icy River, Cotton Field, and Wintersweet Valley. One site is simply called “the Deepest” because, at site 9,533 meters (31,276), it is the deepest known seepage location ever discovered.

Even at the Deepest, animals are living off the submerged land, including roving sea worms called polychaetes and giant tube worms called siboglinids that measure nearly a foot in length. Whereas some animals in the deep sea consume the remains of dead stuff that has sunk down from the surface, these ecosystems are entirely powered by the outflows from the seeps.

“These communities are sustained by hydrogen sulfide-rich and methane-rich fluids that are transported along faults traversing deep sediment layers in trenches,” according to the study. “Given geological similarities with other hadal trenches, such chemosynthesis-based communities might be more widespread than previously anticipated.”

 The discoveries can seem remote, considering the alien environment where these ecosystems flourish. But what happens in the hadal zone doesn’t stay in the hadal zone—these trenches are a major sink in the global carbon cycle because their V-shaped topography efficiently funnels biomass to depths where it can be sequestered. As we grapple to predict the future of our warming world, it will be essential to understand dynamics that reach from the upper limits of the sky to the deepest reaches of the oceans.

“These findings underscore the complex nature of carbon cycling in the deep sea and highlight the critical need to integrate hadal processes into global carbon models to improve the accuracy of predictions about carbon dynamics and climate change responses on geological timescale,” the researchers said.

They concluded that the new “findings challenge current models of life at extreme limits and carbon cycling in the deep ocean.”

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We start this week with Emanuel’s and Joseph’s coverage of Tea, a women’s dating safety app that was breached multiple times. After the break, Sam and Emanuel talk about how a new UK law about age verification is impacting peoples’ ability to see footage about current events. In the subscribers-only section, Jason explains that LeBron James is not in fact pregnant.

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.

Women Dating Safety App 'Tea' Breached, Users' IDs Posted to 4chanA Second Tea Breach Reveals Users’ DMs About Abortions and CheatingUK Users Need to Post Selfie or Photo ID to View Reddit's r/IsraelCrimes, r/UkraineWarFootageLeBron James' Lawyers Send Cease-and-Desist to AI Company Making Pregnant Videos of Him

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From 404 Media via this RSS feed

A generation who thought they were immune from being fooled by AI has been tricked by this video of bunnies jumping on a trampoline:

@rachelthecatlovers Just checked the home security cam and… I think we’ve got guest performers out back! @Ring #bunny #ringdoorbell #ring #bunnies #trampoline ♬ Bounce When She Walk - Ohboyprince

The video currently has 183 million views on TikTok and it is at first glance extremely adorable. The caption says “Just checked the home security cam and… I think we’ve got guest performers out back! @Ring”

People were excited by this. The bunnies seem to be having a nice time. @Greg posted on X  “Never knew how much I needed to see bunnies jumping on a trampoline”

Unfortunately, the bunnies are not real.

The video is AI generated. This becomes clear when, between the fifth and sixth seconds of the video, the back bunny vanishes.

The split second where the top left bunny vanishes

People want to believe, and the fact that it is AI generated is causing widespread crisis among people who thought that AI slop would only fool their parents. We are as a culture intensely attuned to the idea that animals might do cute things at night when we can’t see them, and there have been several real viral security camera videos lately of animals trepidatiously checking out trampolines.

This particular video was difficult to discern as AI in part because security camera footage is also famously the blurriest type of footage. The aesthetics of this particular video make it very difficult to tell that it’s AI at first glance, because we are used to looking at surveillance camera footage as being blurry and dark, which can hide some of the standard signs people look at when trying to determine if a video is AI generated. The background of the image is also static; newer AI video generators are getting pretty good at creating the foreground subject of a video, but the background often remains very surreal. In this video, that’s not the case because of the static nature of the background. Pretending to be nighttime security footage also helps to disguise the things AI is often bad at—accurate movement, correct blur and lighting, and fine details. Tagging “@Ring” was also pretty smart by the uploader, because it gives a plausible place for the video to come from.

People are responding totally normally, embodying a very relatable arc; the confidence of youth to think “that will never happen to me,” followed by the crushing realization that eventually we all become old and susceptible to scams.

This guy sings that the video of the bunnies “might manufacture the way you made me feel - how do I know that the sky’s really sunny?”

@olivesongs11

7/29/25 - day 576 of writing a song every day

♬ original sound - olivesongs

While @OliviaDaytonn says “Now I feel like I’m gonna be one of those old people that get scammed”.

@oliviadaytonn I wanted them to be real so badly #bunnies #trampoline ♬ original sound - olivia dayton

Another TikToker says the bunnies were “The first AI video I believed was real - I am doomed when I’m old”

@catenstuff #duet with @rachelthecatlovers #bunny #AAALASPARATUCURRO #bunnyjumpingontrampoline ♬ Bounce When She Walk - Ohboyprince

And @sydney_benjamin offers a public apology to her best friend for sending her the video. “Guys, I fell for AI.. I’m quite ashamed, I think of myself as like an educated person.” She says that she felt good when she busted a previous AI video trend for her friends (Grandma Does Interviews On Street).

@sydney_benjamin

This one was hard to admit

♬ original sound - Sydney Benjamin

This video breaks down the animal-on-trampoline trend and explains how to spot a fake animal-on-trampoline video.

@showtoolsai How to spot AI videos - animals on trampolines #bunnies #dog #bear #bunny #ai ♬ original sound - showtools

Of course, because the bunny video went viral, there are now copycats. This video, published on YouTube shorts one day after the first, by a different account, is also AI generated.

Copycat AI-generated bunny trampoline video on YouTube shorts

This is a theme that has a long history of being explored in song; for a more authentic trampolining-bunny musical experience, there is this video which is from a comfortably pre-AI “9 years ago”.

The uploader, @Rachelthecatlovers, only has four other videos. The account posted its first video a year ago, then waited, then posted a second one this week, which is also somewhat unusual for AI slop. Most AI slop accounts post multiple times a day, and most of the accounts are newly created. @Rachelthecatlovers has one other AI bunny video (the flap to the door disappears) and a bird cam video. It also has a video of grapes being rehydrated with a needle, tagged #bunny.

@Rachelthecatlovers' previous AI bunny video

People are freaked out by being fooled by this video and are clearly confident that they can usually spot videos that have been generated. But maybe that’s just the toupee fallacy; you only see the bad ones. Trampolining bunnies have broken that facade.

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From 404 Media via this RSS feed

Spotify is requiring users in the UK to verify they’re over 18 to view "certain age restricted content," and users are reporting seeing a popup on Spotify to verify their ages following the enactment of the UK's Online Safety Act last week, which forced platforms to verify the ages of everyone who tries to access certain kinds of content deemed harmful to children.

“You may be presented with an age check when you try to access certain age restricted content, like music videos tagged 18+,” Spotify says on an informational page about the checks. If you fail the checks, or if the age verification system can’t accurately determine your age—which involves getting your face scanned through your device’s camera to determine your age, or uploading your license or passport if that doesn’t work—your Spotify account will be deleted.

“You cannot use Spotify if you don’t meet the minimum age requirements for the market you’re in. If you cannot confirm you’re old enough to use Spotify, your account will be deactivated and eventually deleted,” Spotify says.

there is no fucking way. pic.twitter.com/o2L4tT8XAu

— bogus (@boogusangoos) July 29, 2025

Spotify is using a third-party system for age verification called Yoti. In 2023, when Utah started requiring age verification to access porn sites, porn site xHamster implemented Yoti, which involved a multi-step process including facial analysis or uploading a photo of a government-issued ID.

The Online Safety Act went into effect last week. Much like the many laws in U.S. states that keep users from accessing porn unless they upload an ID or pass biometric face scanning, the law requires sites operating in the UK to implement age verification or face millions of dollars in fines and jail—or up to 10 percent of global revenues, whichever is higher.

After publication of this story on Wednesday morning, a Spotify spokesperson emailed me to claim that the headline is not accurate.

"We are not forcing users to go through our age assurance checks, these are voluntary. There are multiple ways that users can go through our age assurance checks (e.g. ID verification) - not just ‘face scanning.' These checks are not in order to access explicit content, they are to access music videos that are labelled 18+," they wrote. All of this was already in the article as it first appeared when published Wednesday morning, cited directly from Spotify's own site.

"Will you please update your headline to reflect this?," the spokesperson said. "So to actually be accurate, your headline could read: 'Spotify is Offering Users Age Assurance Technology to Access Music Videos Labelled 18+'"

So far, the UK law has resulted in people having to verify their ages to visit subreddits that post news about war, certain Discord community, certain Bluesky content, and more. The UK’s Reform party is already vowing to repeal it, calling it “borderline dystopian.”

Also last week, 404 Media broke the news that in the process of collecting selfies to attempt to check users’ gender, women’s dating safety app Tea exposed the personal information, including private messages and IDs, of thousands of users. Critics of age verification laws say they only create more censorship for adults, while children and everyone else get around the checks by using VPNs or visiting less safe, noncompliant sites.

Updated 7/20/2025 at 12:32 p.m. EST with comment from Spotify, and to clarify in the first sentence that the verification is for "certain age restricted content."

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From 404 Media via this RSS feed

One of the big unanswered questions at last week’s grand opening of Hollywood’s Tesla Diner was how its neighbors were feeling about the new, four-story tall movie screen placed directly outside their apartment building.

Turns out, many of them are not liking it, or the general chaos that the diner has brought.

First, there was the construction. “Last night they have installed a flashing security light up against our fence,” Kristin Rose, a former resident of the apartment building next to the Tesla Diner, said in an email to the building management and to Tesla in February 2024, during building works. “This light is flashing BRIGHT into our apartments, including bedrooms, all night. Even with the blinds closed it feels like we're at the world's worst rave. Video is attached."

0:00/0:15 1×

Strobing light outside apartment. Video: Kristin Rose

Rose moved out in January of this year, which she says is “absolutely, 100 percent” because of the diner. “We were living through active construction six days a week from 7 a.m. to like 8 or 9 p.m.” she said. “Often that construction was starting at like 4 a.m. illegally.” She showed me several email chains where she discussed these issues with Tesla, the city of Los Angeles, her building management, and the construction company.

After construction started in 2023, she said, living in the building was “absolute hell.”

The strobing light was there for “about a week,” Rose told me, and was just one issue. Emails Rose shared with 404 Media show her going back and forth with Tesla and the building’s management about noise, flashing lights, and various other topics. “Our whole side of the building smells terrible from the emissions [from a generator],” one email she sent reads. “We're going not-so-slowly insane from the noise pollution. Requiring us to deal with this for 14 hours a day is actually insane.”

“At least 6 people in our building have called noise enforcement over the last few weeks,” she said in a March 2024 email. “It's hard to communicate just HOW CLOSE this construction is to our apartment building. Maybe 10 feet?,” another reads.

If you have more information about this story, please email rosie@404media.co or contact me on signal at romight.36

In one thread, building management told Rose “sorry about that generator, we know it's a problem … This is not the first time we've talked to them about issues. We explained that they need to move that generator to the other end of the lot … obviously they're not doing it.”

At one point, a Tesla employee apologized to Rose: “I sincerely apologize for the inconvenience and disruption caused by the construction near you and would like to assure you that the Tier 4, ‘WhisperWatt Super-Silent’ portable generator currently in use to provide temporary power to the construction site meets all pertinent standards and codes and was the quietest, least impactful unit we could locate.”

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Generator that was installed outside the building for several months. Video: Kristin Rose

I reached out for comment to Tesla, the city of Los Angeles, and the management company South Park Group, who did not respond.

At a protest against the Tesla Diner last weekend, I spoke to current tenants of the building, including Isabelle, who moved into Rose’s old apartment “about a week ago.” It had been empty for six months.

Rose had previously not talked publicly about the situation with the building because she was concerned that Tesla fans would know where she lived and she could face backlash for speaking out. 404 Media agreed to only use the first names of some of the current residents of the building for the same reason.

Neither of Isabelle’s apartment windows is blocked by a screen, so she didn’t think that noise would be a problem. However, she said, “I really don’t like it.” The diner operates 24/7, and “the sound goes on pretty much all night.” Now, “there’s always a line, there’s always crowds around. The traffic is horrendous.” She said she has begun sleeping with her AirPods in.

Isabelle’s apartment looks out over the supercharging parking lot, where cars are pulling up and people wait on foot to enter the diner in a line that I was told would take two-to-three hours.

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The view over the back car park lot from Isabelle's apartment

Another resident, Ashley, has lived in the building for around 20 years. Her apartment faces away from the diner, but she said that it has impacted the community, and the years of construction were tough. “Vibrating, they didn’t have regular construction hours… it was early in the morning, late at night, like bulldozers and graders in the back.” She said that the building message groups were busy; “everybody was like, everything's falling off the walls.” That said, she thinks things are worse now that it’s open. “I'd rather dust than this,” she said, waving at the Tesla lot. “Now it just smells like fried food out here.”

Ashley described herself as “pretty independent” politically, and doesn’t have any particular interest in Tesla. But she has suddenly found herself living next to a very politically contentious business. As we’re talking, a Tesla Takedown protest is ramping up on the other side of the lot.

“It’s been plenty of issues where people are trying to burn down Tesla and whatnot,” she said, “and it's like, I don't want to be living next to something that is so controversial.” In the week since my first trip to the diner, the gate of the building has been blocked and reinforced with metal.

Their street is a thoroughfare for diner guests. “You just try to even go to the gym in the morning and you can't get out of the driveway,” she said. “I don't think Tesla people are great drivers to begin with. Now there's just a bunch of them blocking the street on both sides.”

Rose is also not the only tenant who left. “The couple, two doors down from us—directly behind the screen—was an older Russian couple that had been there for probably 15, 20 years,” Rose said. “And they eventually [were] like, we can no longer do this.”

Ashley says the management company hasn’t been helpful, despite the number of long-term tenants moving out. “They didn't offer anybody any kind of incentives. I think Tesla should be paying our rent,” she said.

The gate to the apartment building has been reinforced for safety since our earlier reporting last week

Nilo, another new resident, said that she lives in one of the apartments behind the screen. She moved into the building two months ago. I met her when she came out onto the street to ask the protestors for an estimated end time.

She told me that construction had been “really hectic” since she’d moved in. “Now that it has opened, I understand, like, the protests, and, you know, people have the right to do that, but that's also kind of, like, disturbing our peace.”

She didn’t know if the previous residents of her apartment left because of the diner, but she and her roommate are considering moving out. She says the landlords haven’t done anything to the apartment to mitigate the almost 24-hour noise. “We just get a few hours of break and then it's back on again,” she said. “It feels like New York City.”

The movie screens don't have speakers; the audio plays inside the cars and on the diner rooftop. However, the back of the screens have fans, which operate all day and turn off at 11pm.

0:00/0:11 1×

The noise generated by the back of the diner screens, around 2pm on a Tuesday. Video: 404 Media

Noise also comes from people getting out of their cars, waiting in line, and sitting in the traffic generated by the diner entrance. “Everyone is, like, honking their horn all the time and all that. So, it’s a bit crazy,” she said. I watched cars crawl past from both directions to try to enter the Tesla lot via the Orange Drive entrance next to the building, where a guy in a hi-vis vest stops each car, talks to the driver, and waves people (in Teslas) through. Later, I saw a woman driving past yell out at him from her window. “You guys need to control this side better. You're holding up all the traffic.”

“We’re giving it some time because it's, like, opening week,” said Nilo. “But if it continues, we are going to eventually move out because it's not livable anymore.”

The front and back of the screen next to the Orange Drive building. Photo: 404 Media

The Zillow listing for the building describes it as "Next to a Tesla theater and drive-in charging station. Garage parking, gym and more!" Five of the building's 32 units are currently available. On Zillow, the building is offering a discount of a free month's rent on a 12-month lease for the last few months. Using my real name, I scheduled a tour of one of the vacant units. From the empty apartment I toured, I could see the back of the screen and hear the fans; about half of the balcony view was obscured. The crowd noise was quieter since it was a Tuesday afternoon.

The diner does have some fans in the building, however. Dean Barlage lives on the top floor of the Orange Drive building. He described the diner as “probably one of the best things that happened to Hollywood in the last, let's say 10 years or so.” One side of his apartment faces the screen and one faces the street. He thinks that a diner is a pretty good option, given all the possible neighbors one can have in a big city.

His wife Irina seems to agree, as she has recently posted similar sentiments on Instagram and X.

Irina Barlage, a resident of the building, is a fan of the diner and has been posting about it in the past week

“The ones right below us are still there. They're like, OK, we love our place,” he said, but he confirmed that several people had moved out. However, he said, the apartments were snapped up again quickly without problems. “It's a very hot building. I mean, they're large places. This is Hollywood.”

The construction hadn’t bothered him either. “It was peaceful before until they showed up,” he said, indicating to the protesters, “I cannot sleep with this. And luckily, this is just for a short time.” He hopes the diner will bring more tourism to the neighborhood. “I've never seen so many happy kids and so many happy families,” he said. “I'm actually closer to buying a Tesla than I was before… Not because of Elon, but I saw the joy over here.”

Dean Barlage on his balcony. Photos: 404 Media

“We see these people at 10 p.m. at night,” he said, “just happy, having their burger, putting some light show on in their Tesla and seeing some old school film. I mean, how can you not like that? This is the pinnacle of happiness and excitement.”

As I was leaving, I saw Dean up on his balcony, gazing out at the diner and the back of the screen. He waved and gave me a thumbs up.

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From 404 Media via this RSS feed

A user of women’s dating safety app Tea has filed a class action lawsuit after the app repeatedly exposed users’ sensitive data, including selfies, photographs of IDs, and more than a million direct messages sent by users. Both data breaches were first revealed by 404 Media.

The plaintiff, California resident Griselda Reyes, “seeks to hold the Defendant responsible for the harms it caused and will continue to cause” her and “thousands of other similarity situated persons in the massive and preventable cyberattack,” the lawsuit reads.

Tea aims to provide a space where women can anonymously sign up and safely share information about men they are dating. Tea skyrocketed to the top of the U.S. Apple App Store last week, after which members of the notorious troll forum 4chan found an exposed Tea database which contained tens of thousands of images of Tea users and identity documents. Tea requires users to take a selfie when making an account to ensure that only women can access the service.

The lawsuit says Reyes “submitted an image containing her PII [personally identifiable information] to Tea as part of the sign-up process.”

The lawsuit was filed by Cole & Van Note, a law firm that deals with data breaches almost exclusively.

“A lot of women went on the app with the express or implied promise that their information would be kept secure, that the information would only be used to verify their identity,” Scott E. Cole, one of the lawyers who filed the complaint against Tea, told us on a call. “I think that for people who are already in the segment of the population that is worried about online dating, the people that went to this site thought they were going to be treated with their information would be treated with anonymity, and that that trust was violated.”

Cole said he expects that more lawsuits against Tea will be filed across the country first, and that he hopes all of them will join the class action.

404 Media first reported that data exposure on Friday. On Monday, 404 Media revealed a second security issue that allowed unauthorized parties to download more than a million direct messages between Tea users. Many of those messages were highly sensitive, and included discussions around abortion, cheating, and other personal data like phone numbers.

The lawsuit points to both of these breaches and says that Tea has not notified individual victims, instead saying Reyes learned of the incidents from media reports. On Monday Tea said in a social media post it was temporarily stopping the direct messaging system.

Tea declined to comment for this story.

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From 404 Media via this RSS feed

A U.S. airman in Wyoming died last week after an incident involving an M18 pistol, the military version of the P320 handgun, a weapon long infamous among gun nerds. The incident, and other incidents where the M18 and the civilian version of it, the P320, have fired unexpectedly, have sent gun hobbyists into investigation mode, with guntubers dismantling the gun at the center of the controversy, running it through various stress tests and firing exercises in an attempt to discover the flaw that’s given the P320 a reputation for firing on its own.

Online gun nerd drama doesn’t typically bubble up into the mainstream, but what’s happening with the P320, which is made by Sig Sauer, is extreme. In the aftermath of the death of the airman at F.E. Warren Air Force Base last week, the Air Force’s Global Strike Command ordered an indefinite pause on the use of the pistol. On July 9, well before the airman died, ICE told its agents to stop using the handgun. Police departments across the country have banned officers from carrying the weapon. An FBI report published in 2024 and leaked online recently found that it’s possible for the weapon to discharge at random.

The most digestible breakdown for a non-gun-afficianado audience is this 40-minute epic from Wyoming Gun Project. In the video, host Matt Rittman shows that the slide (the top portion of the pistol) can wobble up and down. That’s not typical in these kinds of handguns, and he speculates that the instability of the slide does something to the striker (the internal firing pin that hits the back of a bullet and launches it from the gun) can make it discharge under certain conditions.

A gun shouldn’t fire without a full pull of its trigger, but Rittman demonstrates that the combination of a tiny amount of pressure on the trigger coupled with jostling of the slide can make the gun fire at random. The amount of pressure on the trigger in the video is light enough that it could be done by a rock, a piece of grit, or some other piece of debris.

Other videos in the genre are more technical in nature. Four Peaks Tactical dismantled several firearms to show the difference between safety mechanism and firing pins, explaining in detail how it all works and suggesting that a flaw with the safety may lead to the P320 firing on its own. LFD Research took the slide off the tops of several versions of the P320 and discussed how, exactly, the gun worked and why the safety doesn’t work as it should. Mongoose Guns got granular, dismantling a P320 completely and showing each individual piece screw, spring, and bolt moving individually.

But it was the Wyoming Gun Project that captured the imagination of the firearm enthusiasts and the wider public. In his video, he makes the gun discharge in his garage just by touching it and makes a soyface over the top of the pistol, creating the perfect YouTube thumbnail that others attached to their own reaction videos of his tests. Even MoistCr1TiKaL, a gaming streamer and gun enthusiast with 17 million subscribers, made a reaction video to Wyoming’s tests.

For the past few years, one of the biggest online feuds in this world has been between fans of the Sig Sauer P320 and everyone else. Guntubers and others had attempted to suss out the exact problem with the guns for years but had come to no satisfying conclusion.

In March, Sig Sauer made a long Instagram post about how safe the gun is. “It ends today,” the Instagram post said. “The P320 cannot, under any circumstances, discharge without a trigger pull—that is a fact. The allegations against the P320 are nothing more than individuals seeking to profit or avoid personal responsibility.”

“We can no longer stay silent while lawsuits run their course, and clickbait farming, engagement hacking grifters continue their campaign to hijack the truth for profit,” the post said. “What’s happening today to Sig Sauer with the anti-gun mob and their lawfare tactics will happen tomorrow at another firearms manufacturer, and then another.” The situation is so bad that Sig has a website, P320truth.com, dedicated to debunking claims about the guns safety and providing the “truth” about the handgun.

The statement was mocked by people in the firearms community. Many of the lawsuits Sig is facing were filed on behalf of police officers, U.S. military veterans, and gun enthusiasts who claimed the gun had a design flaw that made it fire when it’s not supposed to. The overwhelming majority of the P320 video content is from guntubers trying to replicate unintentional discharges and dismantling the gun to figure out what’s going on. The P320 fires by mistake so often that there are supercuts of it happening online pulled from body cam footage and CCTV. And, of course, now Air Force’s Global Strike Command and ICE have told its people to stop using the weapon.

People discussing guns online are like any other fandom or subculture. You can track what the community cares about through memes and shitposts, a collective received forum wisdom creates heroes and villains, and fans battle over their favorites with fierce tenacity. The P320 and its manufacturer Sig are, increasingly, a villain in the community.

There are a lot of anti-Sig memes. One of the most popular is a tourniquet kit with a Sig Sauer logo on it. “Free with the purchase of any new Sig Sauer P320,” it says. In another, Power from Chainsaw Man explains how the P320 never fires unless someone is pulling the trigger, before accidentally shooting herself in the head. There’s even a popular post on 4chan right now from a guy who claims he shot himself in the leg with his P320 and is considering switching to a Glock, complete with graphic photos.

Image via 4chan, blurred by 404 Media.

In the aftermath of the airman dying, Sig posted condolences to his family, but its response to government agencies banning the weapon has been to fight. In March, a police academy in Washington State banned the handgun. In response, Sig Sauer filed a lawsuit against the academy to get the ban lifted, saying that it had hurt the weapon’s manufacturer’s reputation.

Sig Sauer did not respond to 404 Media’s request for comment.

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From 404 Media via this RSS feed

A company called Germ is aiming to bring end-to-end encrypted messages to Bluesky’s AT Protocol, a feature that the social network doesn’t currently have.

The tool’s security is yet to be independently audited, but the company says it plans to seek that out soon. Mark Xue, a former privacy engineer at Apple and CTO of Germ, told 404 Media “We’ve been working for about two years on Germ, and on this integration for 6 months or so.”

Essentially, Germ is its own app which is integrating with the AT Protocol that powers Bluesky, according to an announcement post the company shared with 404 Media before it went live on Monday. It describes itself as the “first secure messaging service on the ATProtocol!”

To start an encrypted chat, users will click the magic link in a Bluesky user’s bio, the announcement says. A person’s Bluesky or AT Protocol handle acts as what German calls an “identity card.” This directs people to the Germ app, which in turn asks for the users’ Bluesky handle and credentials. The messaging itself then happens in the Germ app, not Bluesky’s own, but it still serves as a way to connect people who are trying to send encrypted messages to Bluesky users.

Screenshots provided by Germ.

Rianna Pfefferkorn, a policy researcher at Stanford and who told 404 Media she was an advisor to Germ, said “I believe they’ve got a great bench of expertise, between their CTO’s background at Apple and the outside advisors they’ve brought on who have very deep expertise in cryptography.” She said Tessa Brown, Germ’s CEO, reached out “because I had long been arguing, in my work at Stanford, that strong encryption is not incompatible with effective trust & safety.”

That has been a constant tension in private messaging apps and social networks. If a platform introduces end-to-end encrypted messaging in order to protect users’ privacy, does that potentially enable other bad behavior, because the platform will be unable to see it?

“By design, end-to-end encryption means Germ can’t analyze the content of people’s messages, just like Signal, iMessage, and WhatsApp. We will have abuse mitigation like those established systems do,” Xue said. He added “A key dimension of abuse in DM’s is unsolicited or unwanted contact. With our integration, users will be able to use their Bluesky handle as their messaging identity without opening up unsolicited DM’s. They can grant permission to contact by exchanging cards directly (by QR code or link), while still proving and using the ongoing binding between their private Germ Card and their public Bluesky profile.”

“We set out to build interoperable E2EE [end-to-end encrypted] DM’s, because we believe that people should be able to make independent choices of software and still be able to talk with each other. Diversity of interoperable apps and infrastructure is also a core value of Bluesky’s AT Protocol (motivated by Musk’s acquisition of Twitter and subsequent user exodus). There’s a community working group to develop interoperable BSky E2EE DM’s, and we think our implementation would be a great starting point,” he added.

In May 2024, Bluesky itself said encrypted DMs were coming “down the line.”

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From 404 Media via this RSS feed

Several Reddit communities dedicated to sharing news and media from conflicts around the world now require users in the UK to submit a photo ID or selfie in order to prove they are old enough to view “mature” content. The new age verification system is a result of the recently enacted Online Safety Act in the UK, which aims to protect children from certain types of content and hold platforms like Reddit accountable if they don’t.

Some of the Reddit communities that now include this age verification check include:

r/IsraelCrimes, which aims to “Spread awareness of what is happening in occupied Palestine.” The subreddit regularly features videos of Israeli bombs killing Palestinians, clashes between protesters, settlers, and the Israeli Defense Force in the West Bank, and images of dead Palestinians, but also links to articles from news publications and discussion of the subject without graphic images.r/UkraineWarFootage, which bills itself as “a politically neutral subreddit for posting combat footage of the Ukraine-Russian war.” The subreddit regularly features graphic war footage from the frontlines of the war, sometimes from soldiers wearing GoPro-type cameras, but also other footage that’s available in mainstream news sources. Two of the top posts at the time of writing were a video of bombs falling in Kyiv that was published by The Guardian and video of the notoriously heated meeting between Donald Trump, JD Vance, and Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office in February.r/CombatFootage, “A forum for combat footage, and photos, from historical to ongoing wars.” The top post on that subreddit at the time of writing is a video of a Russian fuel train targeted by a long range Ukrainian drone. Other top videos at the time of writing show consumer-grade drones dropping explosives on soldiers in Ukraine and Burma, and Israeli airstrikes in Syria.

“We’re not at all surprised the UK government is deploying this tactic now when the world is paying attention to the horrors unfolding, they’d rather silence the discussion than confront their own complicity,” the moderators of r/IsraelCrimnes told me. “By labeling brutally documented atrocities as ‘mature content’ and gate‑keeping access, they reveal themselves as hypocrites: preaching democracy and human rights abroad while trampling them at home.”

The Online Safety Act is fundamentally changing how people in the UK access the internet and adds a layer of verification that is incompatible with the concept of a free and open internet as we know it. It doesn’t guarantee children can’t view mature content. VPN usage in the UK is already skyrocketingand kids are easily bypassing the kind of age verification tech Reddit is using, but that friction makes some information inherently less accessible.

“Reddit was built on the principle that you shouldn’t need to share personal information to participate in meaningful discussions,” Reddit said in a post explaining how it’s going to verify users’ age in the UK when they want to view “mature” content in order to comply with the Online Safety Act. “Unlike platforms that are identity-based and cater to the famous (or those that want to become famous), Reddit has always favored upvoting great posts and comments by people who use whimsical usernames and not their real name. These conversations are often more candid and real than those that force you to share your real-world identity.”

Reddit explained that it will verify users' age by partnering with Persona, an identity verification company that raised $200 million in April in a series D round led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. Persona asks users to upload a selfie or photo ID in order to verify their age. Reddit says it does not have access to these images, and that Persona does not retain those photos for more than seven days.

Reddit told me in an email that it restricts certain mature content in the UK, and that it defines “mature content” for these purposes per the UK’s Online Safety Act, which includes violent ,graphic content, and porn.

As free speech advocates have argued, and as the new age verification on certain Reddit communities now show, the result of this policy in practice is also to limit access to important information across the board, regardless of the user’s age. Reddit declined to say whether it saw a drop in traffic to these communities, but the age verification system is likely to make some users turn away because they are worried about their privacy and don’t want to upload a selfie or picture of their ID, or because they just don’t want to jump through hoops. In the past few days we reported that Tea, a women’s dating safety app which required users to upload selfies in order to prove they were women, exposed all those images which are now being posted across the internet.

“If visibility of r/IsraelCrimes is being restricted under the Online Safety Act, it’s only because the state fears accountability,” the moderators said. “We stand by the need for unfettered access to information, and we’ll continue working to ensure these stories reach every corner of the internet.”

Even if they work exactly as intended, age verification laws are going to further skew the internet’s ability to reflect reality with a bias that diminishes how cruel, bloody, and inhumane that reality can be. I don’t think it’s good or necessary for children to have easy access to ISIS beheading videos, but I also don’t think it’s good that a piece of legislation that aims to protect children is making it much more difficult for internet users, even if they are younger than 18, to view the emaciated bodies of children in Gaza who are dying of starvation, and to discuss that fact with other people on Reddit.

Reddit users can get access to the basic facts of what is happening in Gaza or Ukraine on other news sites and Reddit communities that discuss the news, like r/worldnews. But the decision by lawmakers to make it harder to see the brutal reality behind the news isn’t neutral. The Pentagon for years banned the media from covering flag-draped coffins of war victims coming back from Iraq, which made it easier to forget how many Americans died there, not to speak of Iraqi civilians.

When should kids be allowed to see the world in its full horror and who is responsible for that are extremely complicated questions that I’m not sure anyone has a good answer for. I certainly don’t. But in the UK, that decision has already been made, and now it will take us time to see the consequences. The same restrictions are also increasingly present in the United States, with age verification laws are expanding state by state, the passing of the Take It Down act which forces platforms to actively monitor speech, and lawmakers advancing the even more aggressive Kids Online Safety Act.

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From 404 Media via this RSS feed

Tea, the viral women’s dating safety app, has turned off direct messages after 404 Media revealed that a vulnerability allowed unauthorized parties to gain access to users’ direct messages, including many in which women discussed their abortions, cheating partners, and phone numbers they sent to one another.

Kasra Rahjerdi, the independent security researcher who first flagged the issue to 404 Media, shared a cache of more than a million Tea direct messages that 404 Media then verified. He said the security issue lasted until late last week. Tea announced late Monday it was turning off direct messages altogether.

“Ladies of Tea,” the message from Tea’s Instagram account, called The Tea Party Girls, starts. “We have an update regarding the cyber incident that took place last week, and wanted to share it with you as soon as possible 💜.”

“We have recently learned that some direct messages (DMs) were accessed as part of the initial incident. Out of an abundance of caution, we have taken the affected system offline. At this time, we have found no evidence of access to other parts of our environment,” the statement continues.

💡Do you know anything else about the Tea breaches? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at joseph.404 or send me an email at joseph@404media.co.

404 Media first contacted Tea about the exposure of direct messages on Saturday. That request for comment included screenshots of some of the direct messages and asked if Tea was aware of their exposure. Tea declined to comment specifically, and instead said “We are continuing to work expeditiously to contain the incident and have launched a full investigation with assistance from external cybersecurity firms.” Tea only took the direct messaging system offline after 404 Media published an article about the exposure on Monday.

The direct messages obtained by 404 Media are incredibly sensitive in nature. Examples include a user discovering their husband being discussed on the app; another shows a woman contacting others about a man she is engaged to; and many of the messages discuss abortions. The chats also frequently include damning accusations against people named in the chats. 404 Media found it was possible to very easily determine the real identities of many of the people sending the messages or being discussed.

Tech companies often take systems offline in response to hacks or cybersecurity incidents revealed by the press. When 404 Media first reported a hacker had targeted TeleMessage, a Signal clone used by the U.S. government, the company suspended operations.

Tea is supposed to provide an anonymous space where women can exchange information about men in order to stay safe. It verifies that users are women by asking them to upload a selfie during the account creation process.

Tea recently topped the U.S. App Store. After that, members of the notorious troll forum 4chan found an exposed Tea database of user selfies and driver licenses and posted those photos online, as 404 Media first reported. Since then, someone has made a website where users can ‘rank’ the photos in order of perceived attractiveness.

A Tea spokesperson told 404 Media in an email on Tuesday “Our team remains fully engaged in strengthening the Tea App’s security, and we look forward to sharing more about those enhancements soon. In the meantime, we are working to identify any users whose personal information was involved and will be offering free identity protection services to those individuals. ”

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From 404 Media via this RSS feed

This article was producedwith support from WIRED.

Meta told employees that it is going to allow some coding job candidates to use an AI assistant during the interview process, according to internal Meta communications seen by 404 Media. The company has also asked existing employees to volunteer for a “mock AI-enabled interview,” the messages say.

It’s the latest indication that  Silicon Valley giants are pushing software engineers to use AI in their jobs, and signals a broader move toward hiring employees who can vibe code as part of their jobs.

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From 404 Media via this RSS feed

This article was produced in collaborationwith Court Watch, an independent outlet that unearths overlooked court records.Subscribe to them here.

A former content moderator for Chaturbate is suing the live-streaming porn platform for psychological trauma he claims he suffered after being exposed to “extreme, violent, graphic, and sexually explicit content” every day without industry-standard safeguards, according to a new lawsuit.

Neal Barber, who was hired by Bayside Support Services and Multi Media LLC—the parent company of Chaturbate—in 2020, filed a lawsuit on July 22 claiming that those companies “knowingly and intentionally failed to provide their content moderators with industry-standard mental health protections, such as content filters, wellness breaks, trauma-informed counseling, or peer support systems.” The lawsuit is a proposed class action for moderators hired in the last four years to moderate Chaturbate streams.

💡Do you know anything else about moderation at social media and adult websites? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at sam.404. Otherwise, send me an email at sam@404media.co.

“The company has not been served nor has it reviewed the complaint and therefore cannot comment on the matter at this time,” a spokesperson for Multi Media LLC told 404 Media. “With that said, it takes content moderation very seriously, deeply values the work of its moderators, and remains committed to supporting the team responsible for this critical work.”

Chaturbate hosts live cam shows by adult performers, and most shows also feature a live chat where users can tip performers, talk to each other, and request specific sex acts or pay to take a model “private” for short exclusive camming sessions.

“Because platforms like Chaturbate host vast amounts of live, unfiltered, and sexually explicit content, content moderators are essential to maintain compliance with legal standards, enforce platform rules, and prevent the dissemination of illegal or abusive material,” the lawsuit says. “They serve as the first line of defense against child exploitation, non-consensual content, violent content, obscene content, self-harm, and other violations. Without content moderators, Chaterbate.com would quickly become unmanageable, unsafe, and legally vulnerable.”

Barber claims Chaturbate doesn’t adequately protect moderators, which the lawsuit says the platform calls “Customer Service Risk Supervisors.” The lawsuit alleges that Chaturbate doesn’t use many of the industry-standard practices for protecting moderators against psychological harm, such as grayscaling content or muting auto-playing videos or mandating wellness breaks and offering trauma-informed supervision or psychological support.

“Without these safeguards, Mr. Barber eventually developed full-blown PTSD, which he is currently still being treated for,” Chris Hamner, an attorney representing the plaintiff in this case, told 404 Media. “The class action we have filed seeks redress for Mr. Barber and other content moderators like him who are battling the effects of this harmful content moderation work on the Chaturbate platform. It's a negligence argument based on breach of duty of care.”

The lawsuit alleges that moderators like Barber “continue to be routinely exposed to some of the most graphic, disturbing, obscene and psychologically damaging content found anywhere online. Their jobs require them to monitor live-streamed material which too often involves child sexual abuse imagery, self-harm and suicide threats, extreme violence, and highly obscene, degrading, or dehumanizing sexual acts. Much of this content is created to be intentionally shocking, often non-consensual, and designed to provoke trauma.”

Exposure to this content, the lawsuit claims, has resulted in “vivid nightmares, emotional detachment, panic attacks, and other symptoms consistent with PTSD for Chaterbate.com content moderators.”

The lawsuit is the latest in recent years where moderators have sued platforms for alleged lack of protections. In 2019, media reports including an expose by the Verge about Facebook brought light to the topic of moderation and the psychological trauma platform moderators can endure when working with user-generated content. In 2022, a former moderator for Pornhub’s parent company told the Verge about their time at the company a decade ago, which involved, in part, moderating assault videos. Also in 2022, Youtube paid $4.3 million to moderators to settle a lawsuit that alleged they didn’t receive proper protections from the platform while viewing disturbing content. And a 2024 report by the Intercept found that Brazilian moderators were paid pennies to moderate extreme content on X, with no psychological support. This is the first time Chaturbate has faced a lawsuit for its alleged moderation practices.

Last year, the state of Texas sued Chaturbate and several other porn sites, complaining that the sites were not complying with Texas' age verification law. Chaturbate paid $675,000 as part of a settlement. In May, a woman in Kansas sued Chaturbate, claiming that it was the site’s fault that her teenage son found her old laptop unlocked in a closet and used it to access porn without age verification in place.

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From 404 Media via this RSS feed

A second, major security issue with women’s dating safety app Tea has exposed much more user data than the first breach we first reported last week, with an independent security researcher now finding it was possible for hackers to access messages between users discussing abortions, cheating partners, and phone numbers they sent to one another. Despite Tea’s initial statement that “the incident involved a legacy data storage system containing information from over two years ago,” the second issue impacting a separate database is much more recent, affecting messages up until last week, according to the researcher’s findings that 404 Media verified. The researcher said they also found the ability to send a push notification to all of Tea’s users.

It’s hard to overstate how sensitive this data is and how it could put Tea’s users at risk if it fell into the wrong hands. When signing up, Tea encourages users to choose an anonymous screenname, but it was trivial for 404 Media to find the real world identities of some users given the nature of their messages, which Tea has led them to believe were private. Users could be easily found via their social media handles, phone numbers, and real names that they shared in these chats. These conversations also frequently make damning accusations against people who are also named in the private messages and in some cases are easy to identify.

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From 404 Media via this RSS feed

Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the climate warnings, cosmic apocalypses, and wolf tales that made an impression on me this week.

First, a dispatch from the northernmost settlement on Earth, where climate warming is completely reshaping the landscape. Then: a case of star-crossed companions, encounters with globular clusters, and some trophic cascades as a treat.

“Unseasonably warm” hits differently in Svalbard

Bradley, James et al. “Svalbard winter warming is reaching melting point.” Nature Communications.

Science journals are constantly packed with new alarms about human-driven climate change, but one dispatch in particular stood out to me this week. The authors report a freakish warm spell that occurred in Svalbard, a Norwegian Arctic archipelago, in February 2025, and include surreal accounts of how the normally frozen research outpost turned into a “melting ice rink,” according to the study.

“Svalbard is at the front line of the climate crisis, warming at six to seven times the global average rate,” said researchers led by James Bradley of Queen Mary University of London.

“Our winter-time field campaigns in Svalbard are conducted under the expectation of sub-zero temperatures and extensive snow cover—conditions that have historically been typical in Svalbard during winter,” the team continued. “However, in February 2025, we encountered air temperatures persistently above 0°C, as well as rainfall, exceptionally low snow cover, and pooling meltwater covering the tundra.”

Bradley and his colleagues were based around Ny-Ålesund, the world’s northernmost permanent settlement, which is about 750 miles from the North Pole. From 1961 to 2001, the town’s average air temperature in February hovered around -15°C (or 5°F). In February 2025, the average was -3.3°C (26°F), with the hottest day reaching 4.7°C (40°F).

All of us are now living with the effects of climate change, but the authors document the dizzying pace of change in this polar community and cite tangible differences as their familiar research haunt thaws out.

“Vegetation emerged through the melting snow and ice, displaying green hues typically associated with spring and summer,” the team said. “Blooms of biological activity were widespread across the thawing tundra. Surface soils, which are typically frozen solid during this time of the year, thawed such that they were soft enough to be directly sampled with a spoon, rather than digging snow pits to the soil surface and using drills and pickaxes to extract frozen soil samples (which has been necessary during our normal wintertime sampling operations).”

The researchers also note that Arctic communities and infrastructure are reeling from the changes, which include an increased risk of avalanches and unstable snowpack. New foundations have been installed in many buildings, including the team’s research bases, to keep up with instabilities from thawing permafrost.

The team concludes with a sentiment that is becoming more common in this field: It may be worse than we think. It’s not an uplifting thought, but one that should be confronted, especially since few people are able to travel to these remote communities to experience the changes for themselves.

“The thaw event of February 2025 was not an isolated occurrence,” the team warned. “Witnessing it in real time served as a reminder of the accelerating pace of change, and made us wonder if we have been too cautious with our climate warnings.”

In other news…

First sighting of the Betelbuddy

Howell, Steve B. et al. “The Probable Direct-imaging Detection of the Stellar Companion to Betelgeuse.” The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Betelgeuse, the supergiant star on Orion’s left shoulder, may have a Betelbuddy. Astronomers think they have directly spotted Betelgeuse’s companion star, provisionally called Alpha Ori B, which orbits the senescent giant every six years and has been predicted for years.

We “report the likely direct-imaging detection of a stellar companion to Betelgeuse,” said researchers led by Steve Howell of NASA Ames Research Center, who captured the images with an instrument on Hawaii’s Gemini North telescope. “The results presented here are not definitive as the detection is at the limit of the instrument capabilities. However, the results do present the most direct and substantive evidence for the existence of a stellar companion to Betelgeuse, as well as the properties of that companion.”

Gemini North direct image of likely companion star. Image: International Gemini Observatory/ NOIRLab/NSF/AURA Image Processing: M. Zamani (NSF NOIRLab)

Betelgeuse’s wild variations in radiance, especially the so-called Great Dimming of 2020, are seen by some stargazers as heralds of imminent supernova explosion. Astronomers ultimately showed that the Great Dimming was just some dust coughed out by the dying giant, but Betelgeuse could still blow at any time—and when it does, it will take its companion down with it.

Left alone, Alpha Ori B would mature into a main-sequence star similar to our Sun, but “it will likely never arrive at that stage as Betelgeuse is predicted to produce a much-anticipated supernova in the coming millennia,” the study noted.

The perils of supergiant siblings! At least the new star might get a cool name before it's blown to bits. Since Betelgeuse means “the hand of the giant” in Arabic, the new study suggests naming the star “Siwarha,” or “her bracelet.” But considering the future in wait for the star, I’d say it's more a handcuff than a bracelet.

Watch your back for globular clusters

Ishchenko, Maryna, and Berczik, Peter. “Gravitational influence of the globular cluster NGC 7078 (M 15) flyby of the Oort cloud system.” Astronomy & Astrophysics.

We move now from pyrotechnic stellar detonations to killer globular clusters. The universe is a dangerous place.

Using data from the Gaia telescope and next-generation simulations, scientists gamed out the probability that the Oort cloud, the spherical mass of icy bodies that surrounds our solar system, might be disrupted by passing globular clusters, which are clumps of stars wandering around the galaxy.

“We identified 35 globular clusters that could potentially experience close encounters with the Sun…throughout the Sun’s entire lifetime,” said the authors Maryna Ishchenko and Peter Berczik of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. “Comet activity influenced by these interactions could disrupt ecosystems or pose threats to life.”

Even if these clusters passed more than a hundred light years from the Sun, they could still have a major effect, possibly nudging a slew of comets into the inner solar system that could pelt Earth and spark mass extinction events.

While it’s hair-raising to imagine marauding star blobs nudging death snowballs toward Earth, there is zero threat of such an encounter happening within our lifetimes, as no cluster is currently nearby. But it’s a helpful heads-up to flag for Earthlings in tens of millions of years, whatever shape they might take.

Wolves at the table help aspens become stable

Painter, Luke E. et al. “Changing aspen stand structure following large carnivore restoration in Yellowstone.” Forest Ecology & Management.

Wolves continue to reshape Yellowstone National Park in the wake of their reintroduction to the historic range in the mid-1990s. During the long absence of the predators, which were wiped out by humans in this area by 1930, animals that would normally be wolf-chow, especially elk, spiraled ever upwards in numbers, putting pressure on many trees and plants.

Now, a study documents “the first new generation of overstory aspen trees in Yellowstone’s northern range in 80 years” mainly due to “increased predation [that] has caused a sustained reduction of elk numbers within the park, as well as changes in elk distribution, resulting in less browsing,” said researchers led by Luke Painter of Oregon State University.

New small trees are “present in 43 percent of stands and 22 percent of random plots in 2020–21, where none were found in 2012, beginning to replace an overstory in pronounced decline.”

One of the recovering aspen stands in northern Yellowstone that was documented in the study. Image: Photo provided by Luke Painter, OSU College of Agricultural Sciences.

“While a return to more extensive aspen stands will take time, and future conditions may not fully replicate the past, these new trees will help to ensure that aspen will persist into the future as a cornerstone of biodiversity in the northern Yellowstone landscape, and an example of widespread ecological change resulting from large carnivore restoration,” the team said.

To that end, movements to reintroduce carnivores—including bears, tigers, wolverines, and wolves—are ongoing around the world, in part because of observed ecosystem benefits. While these efforts must weigh risks to surrounding farms and communities, it is amazing to consider the far-reaching consequences that the 120-odd wolves that make up Yellowstone’s packs have had on its iconic landscape in just one generation.

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

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From 404 Media via this RSS feed

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 creeper glasses, Amazon comms, and a DIY 404 party.

SAM: Earlier this week, Chris Samra released this teaser video for Waves, smart glasses in the vein of Meta’s Raybans that he says “record in stealth.”

introducing Waves, camera glasses for creators.record in stealth. livestream all day.pre-order now. pic.twitter.com/mFyEiriAKx

— Chris Samra (@crsamra) July 23, 2025

You’ll have to watch the video for yourself and tell me what you think—and I’m sure Joe will do a  much smarter and more thorough writeup on these things, as he’s done about smart glasses in the past. But a few things immediately came to my mind when I watched this video. First: this looks like the 30 seconds of fun young carefree plot in the trailer for a horror movie before the power goes out and someone starts screaming. It’s shot and edited in such a nefarious style.

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From 404 Media via this RSS feed

Users from 4chan claim to have discovered an exposed database hosted on Google’s mobile app development platform, Firebase, belonging to the newly popular women’s dating safety app Tea. Users say they are rifling through peoples’ personal data and selfies uploaded to the app, and then posting that data online, according to screenshots, 4chan posts, and code reviewed by 404 Media. In a statement to 404 Media, Tea confirmed the breach also impacted some direct messages but said that the data is from two years ago.

Tea, which claims to have more than 1.6 million users, reached the top of the App Store charts this week and has tens of thousands of reviews there. The app aims to provide a space for women to exchange information about men in order to stay safe, and verifies that new users are women by asking them to upload a selfie.

“Yes, if you sent Tea App your face and drivers license, they doxxed you publicly! No authentication, no nothing. It's a public bucket,” a post on 4chan providing details of the vulnerability reads. “DRIVERS LICENSES AND FACE PICS! GET THE FUCK IN HERE BEFORE THEY SHUT IT DOWN!”

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From 404 Media via this RSS feed

Payment processors are rapidly changing what types of content can and can’t be easily accessed online. Mastercard, Visa, PayPal, Stripe, and other major players that process most of the money people earn on the internet have always had this power, and have long discriminated against sexual content and sex work, but they have been forcing more change recently.

Some of the content they've recently pushed to the margins, like AI image generation models on Civitai that were used to create nonconsensual sexual content of real people, were actively used to cause harm, as 404 Media has reported many times. Other media they’ve asked companies to remove, like exploitative “rape and incest” games on Steam, did not have many defenders, but did not actively harm any specific person.

But last night, when the independent game distribution platform Itch.io suddenly deindexed much of its adult content, creative works that people are ready to passionately defend became collateral damage.

Itch.io, an alternative to Steam that makes it easier for anyone to upload almost any game and charge anything for it, including not charging at all, has become a critical piece of infrastructure in video game development in the past decade. It’s where many aspiring game developers and students get their start and share their work, especially when it doesn’t fit into traditional ideas of what a video game can be. Which is precisely what makes Itch.io, and particularly many of its NSFW games so valuable: they allow small teams and individual creators to push the boundaries of the medium.

We're really hamstringing the future of arts and communication and creating meaningful culture if we adhere to the kind of position that says you can't make games about serious things.

In order to better understand what the impact of Itch.io’s policy changes will have on video games broadly, I called Naomi Clark, a game designer and chair of NYU Game Center, where many students share their first games on Itch.io.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

404 Media: Where do you think things with Steam and Itch stand right now?

Naomi Clark: It’s been a wild ride. Ever since the news first appeared about Steam removing some games there were glimmers that might herald bigger problems. At first it appeared to only be going after games in some very taboo sexual categories—incest, prison, some slaves and violence and things like that. And I haven't talked to anybody about this issue who is super hardcore about Steam absolutely needing to sell games about incest. That doesn't really seem to be the issue at hand.

The problem is that it wasn't clear what was in these forbidden categories. It's kind of whatever payment processors object to.

I think that's just extremely disturbing for a lot of people. Not because everyone's rushing to defend like a daddy/daughter incest game, number 12 or whatever. But because of the potential for it to be very nebulous and to spread to other categories, or any category that you can convince the CEO of MasterCard is objectionable and that his company should have no business with.

I think that playbook could be replicated in ways that could get really dangerous for LGBTQ communities, especially in this political environment, where anybody can weaponize the opinions of a banker or a payment processor against certain types of content, there are huge swaths of people who are in powerful positions who don't understand what games can potentially be about. Maybe they think like this is all garbage, or it's just for titillation or pure entertainment, no serious topics should be allowed.

I can't think of a more harmful position for the future of a creative form, which is already so, so influential for anybody under the age of 40. We're really hamstringing the future of arts and communication and creating meaningful culture if we adhere to the kind of position that says you can't make games about serious things. You certainly can't make games if there's anything that we wouldn't want a child to see because they want to protect the children.

Itch.io is a huge platform when it comes to accessibility for the maximum number of creators, where anybody can make a game and express themselves and find the audience for something that they've made. Every single student that I teach in the game program at NYU, where we have hundreds of students making games uses itch.io. They all put games on Itch. It’s where young and upcoming creators post games, but it's supported by a small team, and so we saw them trying to respond to this payment processors’ demands. Right now, every game that's flagged by creators or Itch moderators as having sensitive content, which includes games that are not sexual at all, that just have difficult topics, cannot be found by searching on Itch.

Some games, just as on Steam, have been removed for having content that payment processors object to and nobody is totally sure what that list includes right now. So it kind of leaves everybody floundering and a little bit disturbed and scared in the dark, especially people who are trying to build a career or trying to support themselves by expressing themselves with games that not everybody is going to like. When you have people in power who think games are not important and who can be persuaded that some category shouldn't be allowed, then we end up in this really bad, extralegal mess with no accountability or transparency.

What do you think about people who are mad at Itch.io for complying with credit companies’ demands and who are encouraging people to not support them, to not give them any money?

I can understand the anger there, especially yesterday, when the stuff was happening [without an explanation]. I just didn't know what was going on, and was really disturbed. I think that the fuller picture has become a little bit more clear. And I suspect a lot of people don't know exactly how to interpret the official announcement from Itch, but my read of it is that this is a small team. They're not as vast as Valve. They are trying to figure out what to do very quickly, without a lot of the same kind of resources and infrastructure that's in place for Steam, and they had to respond quickly, probably, seemingly to some sort of deadline from the payment processors. Like, ‘remove the stuff or have the relationship terminated.’ Which would be a huge disaster. That would basically make it impossible for anyone without a source of funds to support game development, to really publish a game online. It would leave a gigantic vacuum in the whole creative community. So I think I understand the upset and anger when it wasn't clear what was going on. But now I think I'm a little bit more inclined to agree with people who say Itch is facing annihilation here. You can't expect them to sacrifice the whole platform for adult games within certain categories.

I think some people maybe wanted it to “stand up against the fascists,” which it is not even exactly clear what that means. There are people who are already operating on the assumption that if Itch capitulates to this demand from Visa, MasterCard, and whoever else, that it's going to mean that they're also going to throw LGBTQ creators under the bus eventually, and have those games completely removed from their site. I'm hopeful that's not true. I really think that the first line of defending this creative industry has to be in the hands of people that are running platforms, and those are big businesses, and they have to sort of figure out how they negotiate with the even larger multinational financial corporations that they're beholden to.

I get why people are mad at Itch. They seem to be trying to create a path forward for people that are making various types of adult content and maybe allowing other types of payment processors, or not having games that fall into some categories. So we'll see how they do. It would be a heroic feat if they managed to get through it.

It seems to me that the payment processors don’t really want to negotiate.

That's my assumption of why Valve and Itch are trying to avert the apocalyptic scenario where they do get cut off from payment processing. I assume that’s why the Itch team kind of leaped to these very hasty and disturbing moves to make all these things unsearchable, and to show they're complying immediately with these orders.

When I say negotiating, I don't mean trying to get Visa or MasterCard to change their mind. It's more like, ‘Hey, let us show you, yes, we are in compliance with everything that you're saying.’ I don't think there's too much choice there, but I think maybe they are not fully considering there's a fair amount of latitude in how platforms show that they're complying. One approach would be a scorched earth approach, to completely annihilate all mature rated games from the website forever. And that would probably work and that would have horrendous costs for the business in other ways, because nobody would trust them anymore. I think people who play video games are still sensitive in a multi-generational way to the threat of censorship coming down and taking away games that have any amount of sex or violence or serious content in them.

The platforms have to find some way of threading this needle. They can't go all the way to one extreme. I don’t think they can reject the request outright. They have to figure out how far to go. Valve is somewhat experienced in this. It's noteworthy that Valve did not take an incredibly scorched earth approach. They got rid of hundreds of games, not thousands, and they are games that I haven't seen a lot of people rushing to defend.

I've seen some of the types of content that Itch removed completely from the site and I do not understand exactly what the logic is there. It seems to be some kind of intersection between violence and and sexual situations. There are a lot of visual novels, or even just straight up text novels that are about, I don't know, like two queer girls in giant mechs fighting each other, like very anime, and then they start to make out or have sex or something. It’s not clear why something like that would be removed.

Can you talk about some of the games on Itch that are affected by this? I think people know about Steam sex games, and people know that violence and sex can be parts of mainstream games, but there’s a different type of game that’s more common on Itch that’s impacted by this policy that I think a lot of people don’t know exists.

 For the past 15 to 20 years we've been in a period in games where there's been a massive explosion in what kinds of games can be made. And it's not really just about technology. It's about accessibility of tools, how quickly games can be made, how many people it takes to make a game, and it's just become much easier. It's sort of similar to the advent of home movie cameras. Suddenly, all sorts of people can make little films or document their everyday life, and we're in a period like that with games. We're seeing way more games that actually reflect people's lived experience. Some of the games that have been caught up in the last day’s changes on Itch are games that up-and-coming creators have made about their own experiences in abusive relationships, or dealing with trauma, or coming out of the closet and finding their first romance as an LGBTQ person. I think most notably, my own student,

Jenny Jiao Hsia, who won a bunch of awards at the Independent Games Festival this year for her game Consume Me. That is an autobiographical story about when she was a teenager struggling with eating disorders and her own relationship with her body, and she had it marked as sensitive content. I was one of the advisors on that project and I agree it’s sensitive content because there's some disturbing, difficult, teenage-girl-dealing-with-their-body stuff in there. It's the game equivalent of a Judy Blume novel, but it expresses that autobiographical truth in a very, very different way, a 21st Century way, rather than the 20th century way.

Judy Blume books were also subject to censorship in school libraries because they were about sexual topics and I think that this is a similar moment for games. What Consume Me does that a Judy Blume novel doesn't do is it sort of puts you very much inside of the mind of the main character, how she kind of systematizes food and starts thinking about it like a game that she has to win, how she sort of tricks herself into trying to over perform. This is something that no other medium could do.

Robert Yang uses a lot of the language of video games, but his pieces are often kind of interactive art experience where they don't resemble a traditional game in terms of trying to win or lose or get a score or complete a story experience. They kind of refer to and riff off of a lot of the language of games. I would probably compare them more to the work of a photographer like Robert Mapplethorpe, who was also subject to a lot of censorship in the 20th century because of the way that he was portraying the nude male form. Robert Yang is doing similar stuff and exploring the portrayal of male bodies and what that means in the age of the internet, in the way that bodies are now also 3D models, and then kind of also reflecting on queer history.

These games are very, very clearly artistic expressions, and they're caught up in this thing. They're delisted from search right now because they're clearly adult games, but they're meant for adults, who have a right to understand them and play them as art objects. I've seen over and over again that people who take this topic seriously, they play some games, or they experience something, and they kind of wake up and they're like, ‘Oh, wow. I didn't realize games could do all of this.’

I work in a larger art school where there are people who teach dance and music and film, and I get to see this happen a lot with people who have never played games, but who are artists, and they get it right away. But I think a lot of society has not reached that point yet. They don't understand that games can do all of this stuff. I'm hopeful that continued coverage and good criticism of games in all sorts of outlets shifts the conversation, but it's kind of a generational change, so maybe a while before everybody gets it.

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Grindr won’t allow users to add “no Zionists” to their profiles, but allows any number of other phrases that state political, religious, and ethnic preferences, according to 404 Media’s tests of the platform and user reports.

Several users received an error message that says “The following are not allowed: no zionist, no zionists,” when they tried to add the phrases to their bios on Thursday. I tested this myself on a new Grindr account, and received the same error message. I was able to add “Zionist” to my profile (without “no”), however, and could also add any phrase I could think of: “no Arabs,” “no Blacks,” “no Palestinians,” “no Muslims,” “no Christians,” “no Jews,” “no trans,” “no Republicans,” “no Democrats,” and so on. “No Zionist[s]” was the only phrase that was blocked in my testing.

Others have seen this message as early as May 2024. It’s not clear when Grindr started implementing this rule; “no Zionists” doesn’t appear anywhere in its terms of service.

Screenshot from Grindr showing "the following is not allowed: no zionist, no zionists" error

Its terms of service does state, however: “You will NOT post, store, send, transmit, or disseminate any information or material which a reasonable person could deem to be objectionable, defamatory, libelous, offensive, obscene, indecent, pornographic, harassing, threatening, embarrassing, distressing, vulgar, hateful, racially or ethnically or otherwise offensive to any group or individual, intentionally misleading, false, or otherwise inappropriate, regardless of whether this material or its dissemination is unlawful.”

In 2020, Grindr removed its ethnicity filter, writing in its announcement: “We will continue to fight racism on Grindr, both through dialogue with our community and a zero-tolerance policy for racism and hate speech on our platform. As part of this commitment, and based on your feedback, we have decided to remove the ethnicity filter from our next release.⁣” But the BBC and other outlets noticed that the app didn’t actually remove it for weeks and several updates after the announcement.

Grindr founder Joel Simkhai is Israeli and left the company in 2018 after it was sold to a Chinese gaming company. In September 2024, The Forward reported that “pro-Israel Jews” complained that they felt like they faced hostility on dating apps for displaying Israeli flag emojis or identifying as Zionist. In March 2025, the Association for LGBTQ Equality in Israel, known as the Aguda, reported “a significant uptick in attempted lynchings and stabbings that used the popular dating app Grindr to target LGBT people in the North,” the Jerusalem Post reported, where attackers allegedly created fake Grindr profiles to lure victims to them.

“It seems pretty explicitly pro-colonization and protecting of the ideology that genocide and ethnic cleansing are okay for certain groups to perform as long as it upholds your own personal or capitalistic interests,” Green, a Grindr user I spoke to who also saw this error message, told me. “It’s gross. And to put energy towards protecting a blatantly bigoted ideology and not put the same energy towards protecting minority groups is pathetic. So fuck Grindr and its inability to intersect queer oppression with the oppression of other groups.”

Grindr did not immediately respond to 404 Media’s request for comment.

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This article was produced in collaboration with Court Watch, an independent outlet that unearths overlooked court records. Subscribe to them here.

A lawsuit filed in California against Roblox and Discord alleged that the former hosted Sean “Diddy” Combs and Jeffrey Epstein themed content children could easily access.

The games had names like “DIDDY SURVIVAL,” “diddy party,” and “Nice Try Diddy” and often bore the musician’s face. A search for the terms “Diddy” and “Epstein” in Roblox currently returns no results, suggesting the games have since been removed.

According to the lawsuit, an 11 year old girl was groomed and sexually assaulted after meeting a stranger on Roblox and talking to them on Discord. The lawsuit is seeking damages related to both company’s alleged negligence. The 105 page lawsuit said Roblox includes digitized Diddy parties and games where players must escape from Epstein’s Island. Roblox’s games “trivialize and gamify serious criminal conduct, including rape,” the lawsuit said.

The court documents cited a 2024 report from the Hindenburg Research group that looked into valuations of the Roblox Corporation and checked allegations that the company wasn’t providing a safe place for children. “To test out the platform, we set up multiple accounts of various ages to see what content was accessible to children. Using an account registered as a 9-year-old, we searched for games that reference Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs,” Hindenburg said in its report. These Roblox games received little media attention at the time, and have been resurfaced by the lawsuit.

When Hindenburg put together its report, Combs had just been arrested and charged with several felony  sex crimes. A jury found him not guilty of all but two of them. But back in 2024, the allegations against Diddy were a hot topic online and researchers said they found more than 600 games referencing Combs. A screenshot of the search result included in both the lawsuit and the research showed a row of Roblox games featuring Combs. Other titles included “Survive THE DIDDY in Area51,” “Freaky Diddy Simulator,” “[NEW] Midnight at Diddy’s Party,” and “Diddy Survival.”

The lawsuit alleged that Epstein-related games were on Roblox. “This report also revealed that Roblox permitted more than 900 Roblox accounts displaying variations of convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein’s name, such as ‘JeffEpsteinSupporter,’ whose account Roblox actively permitted to be openly engaged in children’s games, ‘Escape to Epstein Island’—a title that directly references one,” it said.

A screenshot in both the lawsuit and the research showed a Roblox style avatar fleeing from an Epstein-faced demon amidst Hellish-flames. The game was titled “Escape to Epstein Island” and had zero players.

Roblox has a predator problem. The game has more than 70 million daily active users, many of them children. According to media reports and this lawsuit, the company doesn’t do enough to police the space where children play. According to the lawsuit, a child predator assaulted the 11-year-old Jane Doe after a long grooming process facilitated by Roblox and Discord. “This predator’s actions were possible only because of Defendants’ egregiously tortious conduct,” the lawsuit said.

“Roblox also hosts a staggering number of experiences centered on simulated sexual activity. For instance, children can play in ‘condo games—predatory digital environments, including houses, where users can remove their avatars’ virtual clothing, revealing nudity, and engage in disturbing simulated sexual activities with other Roblox users,” the lawsuit said. “They can also play games like ‘Public Bathroom Simulator Vibe,’ which allows access to users as young as nine years old and enables users to simulate sexual activity in virtual bathrooms, as well as virtual strip clubs, where child avatars perform sexually explicit acts, like giving lap dances to patrons.”

Roblox did not immediately return 404 Media’s request for comment.

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