404 Media

Great question. The product is basically the same-- it's a cell phone network and we sell connectivity to it.

A helpful thing to keep in mind is that everyone has basically 2 use cases for their cell phones:

1. Send and receive calls and SMS
2. Connect to the internet

Whether you're a national security professional, an investigative journalist, or an average consumer who values privacy, that's what you do with your phone. So if we can build features that make you more secure and more private across those two use cases, we have a product that can help both government and consumer users.

Sometimes when people ask the "conflict" question they mean some version of "but doesn't the government then ask you for a backdoor to get all the data?" All we can really do here is stand by our privacy policy. We store the minimum amount of data possible, we promise not to sell your data to anyone, we notify our users if we receive legal process on their account that is not subject to a gag order, and we pledge to push back on any law enforcement request we receive that is not well formed and narrowly tailored as required by law.

The backdoor/honeypot fears are often related to the Anom story that came out a few years ago. It's not a perfect rebuttal, but the reporter that broke that story has written about Cape a couple of times. You can read those articles…

Of course they are. It’s everywhere, especially thr online retailers these days. [1]

Thankfully the resources at our local libraries are a) selected by a combination of librarian curation and public demand, b) often published before 2022, c) heavy things printed on paper or stored in a database and unlikely to suddenly change their content or disappear overnight when a new news cycle breaks.
Written works aren’t necessarily credible even if they aren’t slop, but thanks to curators who care, our libraries are significantly less susceptible (although definitely not immune [2]) to ai slop, and propaganda and manipulation efforts than a search engine. The internet continues to enshittify, and truth becomes further eroded by this coming wave of ai enabled propaganda, we are going to have to turn somewhere if we want to find trustworthy resources. Personally, if it gets to the point that verifying sources from public search results becomes too hard with all the new misinformation and slop, I’ll start propritizing human curation over SEO and start visiting my local library’s website a lot more.

[1] https://thenewthings.com/p/apple-big-ai-book-slop-problem

[2] https://www.404media.co/ai-generated-slop-is-already-in-your-public-library-3/

I know who you are. My main issue is your confident dismissal that it "won't help," when I've personally seen otherwise. A universal claim called into question by instances that directly contradict that.

Your involvement is with municipalities where Flock was still deployed and you think it's the best regulated version of that, when in reality other people have fought to block it completely! Beyond complaints regarding police accessing them to spy on children's playgrounds [0] (explore outside of your bubble and you'll find wine moms and boomers have widely shared and criticized that story) that they are now targets for destruction and vandalism is now being brought up as reasons to not deploy them. I'm saying you didn't have to appeal to readers as an "expert" when it's clear from your comments you simply dislike that action and your experience is removed from what's currently happening.

[0]https://www.404media.co/city-learns-flock-accessed-cameras-in-childrens-gymnastics-room-as-a-sales-pitch-demo-renews-contract-anyway/

Normally these type of news articles get recorded for posterity pretty quickly in a number of places from the IA to archive.today, etc.

It is interesting that when you search for this on IA, with the link shown (https://www.404media.co/email/f459caa7-1a58-4f31-a9ba-3cb53a5046a4/), it shows no snapshots (at all), and yet when you have them take a snapshot it always shows first that its a first archive, but then the archive never makes it to the index.

I've archived a lot of news over the years, because otherwise it just vanishes silently and having a factual history is important to society as a whole.

This situation seems extremely fishy because its a matter of resiliency design which IA has historically been great at, I've never seen this type of failure with IA in the past.

False success (in task completion), overall silent fail (in verification of completion of said task).

Ahh this one. Thanks for sharing, important point!

Basically this is just a random small-ish company trying to get new clients with a flashy feature. Ultimately they have to use the same data as everyone else, which I’m 99.99% sure doesn’t involve any intentional (much less “active”) recording by Google, Apple, or Meta. Maybe they have their own hardware partners that have networked microphones, maybe they’re really using incidental recordings from their “407 data partners”, or maybe it’s an empty promise - I sadly can’t read the original(ish) article https://www.404media.co/heres-the-pitch-deck-for-active-listening-ad-targeting/

It’s perhaps noteworthy that the intermediary source is the NYPost, which is most certainly junk! This story isn’t fake news, but it also isn’t presented in a honest way, IMHO

> You have to demonstrate it in some way. Providing half your content for free while keeping half behind a paywall seems like a perfectly reasonable strategy to address this discoverability problem.

I feel like 404media is doing a good job at that. They irritate me sometimes but they break a lot of great news with a tiny staff and have an indomitable social media presence (at least on bluesky) that really gets people talking about them. Don't get me wrong, I'll never pay for their work because I feel like they get a little user hostile sometimes[1], but people less curmudgeonly probably are subscribing.

[1] https://www.404media.co/we-dont-want-your-password-3/