Wednesday night, ABC News reported that Secretary of State Marco Rubio “has been the acting archivist” at the National Archives and Records Administration “since shortly after President Trump’s inauguration.” The idea that Rubio might be their new boss—and has been their boss, apparently, for weeks—is news to National Archives employees and apparently to its current…
If there’s one thing I’d hoped people had learned going into the next four years of Donald Trump as president, it’s that spending lots of time online posting about what people in power are saying and doing is not going to accomplish anything. If anything, it’s exactly what they want. Trump’s second presidential term has…
A New York state senator is trying to introduce the same age verification legislation that has resulted in massive porn sites—including Pornhub and its network of sister sites—going dark across much of the U.S. south and midwest. The bill, introduced by Republicans Jake Ashby and Assemblywoman Mary Beth Walsh, is almost identical to every other…
Employees working for the agency now known as DOGE have been ordered to stop using Slack while government lawyers attempt to transition the agency to one that is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act, 404 Media has learned. “Good morning, everyone! As a reminder, please refrain from using Slack at the moment while…
We dedicate the whole free section of this episode to Musk’s takeover of the federal government. We got audio from a meeting in which a Musk ally laid out their plans for AI across the government, and revealed who is now the head of HR for DOGE. In the subscribers only section, we talk about…
Thomas Shedd, a Musk-associate and now head of the General Services Administration’s Technology Transformation Services (TTS), told government tech workers in a meeting this week that the administration plans to widely deploy AI throughout the government. Shedd also said the administration would need help altering login.gov, a government login system, to further integrate with sensitive…
NASA personnel were told to “drop everything” to scrub public sites of mentions of DEI, indigenous people, environmental justice, and women in leadership, according to a directive obtained by 404 Media. The directive, sent on January 22 and obtained by 404 Media, states: “Per NASA HQ direction, we are required to scrub mentions of the…
A 404 Media reader has reformatted the Simple Sabotage Field Manual to be more legible as a PDF and shared it with us, so we’re going to share it with you. Last week, I wrote about the “Simple Sabotage Field Manual,” a World War II era guide to resisting fascism for normal people. At the…
Low quality books that appear to be AI generated are making their way into public libraries via their digital catalogs, forcing librarians who are already understaffed to either sort through a functionally infinite number of books to determine what is written by humans and what is generated by AI, or to spend taxpayer dollars to…
The Republican Senator from Missouri Josh Hawley has introduced a new bill that would make it illegal to import or export artificial intelligence products to and from China, meaning someone who knowingly downloads a Chinese developed AI model like the now immensely popular DeepSeek could face up to 20 years in jail, a million dollar…