The 404 Media Podcast

We start this week with Joseph’s story on the inherent friction between secure chat apps like Signal and the phone they’re running on. Incoming message content can be stored in a phone’s internal notification database. After the break, Matthew tells us the latest about the data center pushback. Then in the subscribers’ only section, Emanuel tells us all about Marathon and its player numbers. (00:00) Intro (01:21) FBI Extracts Suspect’s Deleted Signal Messages Saved in iPhone Notification Database (26:01) Maine Is Close to Passing a Moratorium on New Datacenters (33:21) Farmer Arrested for Speaking Too Long at Datacenter Town Hall Vows to Fight Subscriber's Story: I Wish I Didn’t Care About 'Marathon' Player Numbers, But I Do Subscribe at 404media.co Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

‘The Ambivalent Intent’ and ‘The Shadow Gospel’ author Whitney Phillips on how online got so bad Why does the internet feel like it’s getting worse every single day, and why does it feel like the political landscape is getting worse in response? The answer might seem obvious, especially if you read 404 Media on a regular basis, where we’ve been documenting this decline, but it’s important to occasionally zoom out and ask the big questions.  That’s why this week on the podcast I’m joined by Whitney Phillips. Phillips is the author of several books about internet culture and ethics, including This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things and The Ambivalent Internet. She’s a professor of information politics and media ethics at the University of Oregon, and also one of my favorite people to talk to and listen to because she’s a genius when it comes to the kind of internet culture and platform dynamics we report on every day at 404 Media.  I wanted to talk to Whitney today because it’s been a few years since we talked in depth about the state of the internet and so much has changed in that time, sadly for the worst, and I really wanted some help in understanding the current state of things, as bad as they are. We also spent quite a bit of time talking about her upcoming book, The Shadow Gospel: How Anti-liberal Demonology Possessed U.S. Religion, Media, and Politics. YouTube Version: https://youtu.be/gp_n6vDmFfc Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week we start with Jason’s story about how wildlife cops are doing Flock lookups for ICE. It shows that ICE is gaining access to this sort of information through pretty unexpected ways. After the break, Emanuel tells us all about the AI ban at Wikipedia. In the subscribers-only section, Joseph breaks down a set of vulnerabilities in the ‘secure’ chat app TeleGuard.  Wildlife Conservation Police Are Searching Thousands of Flock Cameras for ICE  Wikipedia Bans AI-Generated Content  An AI Agent Was Banned From Creating Wikipedia Articles, Then Wrote Angry Blogs About Being Banned Subscriber's Story - A Secure Chat App’s Encryption Is So Bad It Is ‘Meaningless’ Youtube Version: https://youtu.be/YrHYwCb5aM8 Subscribe at 404media.co Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week Jason brings you an interview he did with The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s executive director Cindy Cohn, who recently announced she would be stepping down from the legendary digital rights nonprofit after decades of service. Cindy's new book “Privacy’s Defender,” is a memoir of her work to protect Americans’ privacy and fight government surveillance.Privacy’s Defender weaves Cindy’s life story through three incredibly important court cases. Rather than being a dry recounting of three complicated and technical cases, Cindy recounts her strategies in each case, the trials and tribulations she was going through during each period, and the stakes of each case. A quick backgrounder — the cases are Bernstein vs Department of Justice, decided in 1996, which established code and encryption as protected speech under the first amendment, a lasting decision that became critical in Apple’s lawsuit against the FBI in the aftermath of the San Bernardino shooting. It also follows EFF’s lawsuit against AT&T for building a secret backdoor in its internet data centers that gave data to the NSA for warrantless surveillance against American citizens, a case that was built in part around testimony and documents shared by Mark Klein, who showed schematics and design documents for secret surveillance rooms in AT&T’s offices. And finally it follows the Alphabet Cases, which were lawsuits against FBI gag orders for national security letters, which are secret demands for customer information that came with gag orders against internet companies that prevented them from disclosing the fact that the FBI approached them for information. Those cases concerned both Cloudflare and a telecom company called CREDO, and went on for many years. Our interview with Cindy shows that the fight for privacy happens in fits and spurts, and is rarely linear. Cindy's Book Privacy Defender: https://www.eff.org/Privacys-Defender Youtube Version: https://youtu.be/2OwH_XyfEhs Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week Matthew Gault joins us to discuss his article about Iran’s AI slop and LEGO-focused propaganda, and why the creators chose LEGO. After the break, Jason tells us all about the new automated system in baseball and the drama it’s causing. In the subscribers-only section, Sam walks us through perhaps one of the worst sex apps of all time. Iran Is Winning the AI Slop Propaganda War 'You Can't Defeat the Robots!': Baseball's AI Strike Zone Is Must-Watch Television Subscriber's Story - I Tried to Find the ‘Arousal Intelligence’ In An Animated, Augmented Reality Porn Star YouTube Version: https://youtu.be/_4buUas3tGs Take your personal data back with Incogni! Use code 404MEDIA at the link below and get 60% off an annual plan: https://incogni.com/404media Subscribe at 404media.co Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices