Welcome back to the Abstract! This week, we’re serving up some much-needed good news about global biodiversity! Well, it’s more like a silver lining, but in the Anthropocene you have to take what you can get. As you may have noticed, humans are highly annoying and deadly to many other lifeforms on Earth, a condition…
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 AI’s boom or bust, trying Github’s Copilot, and making time for good ideas. JASON: When we started 404 Media, I bought a macro lens for my camera and…
A group of men who sold Anom devices, the encrypted phone secretly backdoored by the FBI which led to the largest sting operation in history, pleaded guilty this month in San Diego. The defendants had been set to go to trial, in which the government was preparing to reveal the real identity of the confidential…
The FOIA Forum is a livestreamed event for paying subscribers where we talk about how to file public records requests and answer questions. If you’re not already signed up, please consider doing so here. Recently we had a FOIA Forum where we focused on getting information from federal government agencies. With any new administration there is…
At an all hands meeting inside Meta Thursday, Mark Zuckerberg did not address Meta’s $25 million settlement with Donald Trump that will see the company paying $22 million for the eventual establishment of the Trump Presidential Library. But Zuckerberg did say that he had to be increasingly careful about what he says internally at Meta…
Datasets aggregated on data.gov, the largest repository of U.S. government open data on the internet, are being deleted, according to the website’s own information. Since Donald Trump was inaugurated as president, more than 2,000 datasets have disappeared from the database. As people in the Data Hoarding and archiving communities have pointed out, on January 21,…
In 2015, a federal worker named Katherine Spivey gave colleagues a presentation about how to “write plainly,” so that the general public can more easily understand content on government websites. One of her pieces of advice, among many, was to “use pronouns” such as the word “you” to describe the reader rather than jargon like…
A declassified World War II-era CIA guide to “simple sabotage” is currently one of the most popular open source books on the internet. The book, called “Simple Sabotage Field Manual,” was declassified in 2008 by the CIA and “describes ways to train normal people to be purposefully annoying telephone operators, dysfunctional train conductors, befuddling middle…
Dario Amodei, the CEO of the AI company Anthropic, has responded to the current hysteria in his industry and the financial markets around a new and surprisingly advanced Chinese AI model called DeepSeek by saying it proves the United States needs export controls on chips to China in order to ensure China doesn’t “take a…
The narrative that OpenAI, Microsoft, and freshly minted White House “AI czar” David Sacks are now pushing to explain why DeepSeek was able to create a large language model that outpaces OpenAI’s while spending orders of magnitude less money and using older chips is that DeepSeek used OpenAI’s data unfairly and without compensation. Sound familiar?…
