Valve has removed a game from Steam in the UK that puts players in the shoes of a Palestinian fighter raiding Israeli Defense Force positions on October 7, 2023 at the request of the UK’s  Counter-Terrorism Internet Referral Unit, which is tasked with removing extremist content from the internet. 

The game, Fursan al-Aqsa: The Knights of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, is still available to buy in the U.S., and was originally released on Steam in 2022. The game made some headlines last year when it was highlighted by the conservative Twitter account LibsOfTikTok, which was appalled that it “allows players to simulate being a Hamas te*ro*ist who k*lls Jews in the Old City of Jerusalem while shouting “‘Allahu Akbar.’”

Earlier this month, the game’s Brazilian developer Nidal Nijm released the “Operation al-Aqsa Flood Update,” which allows players to recreate some aspects of Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel. A trailer for that update hosted on Mega opens with the white on black text on the screen that says “Where are those who carry the explosive belts? Where are them? Come here, I want an explosive belt to blow up myself over the Zionists!!!” It then shows Hamas fighters landing motorized paragliders into an Israeli Defense Force base and killing Israeli soldiers. The trailer also shows Hamas fighters executing a female Israeli soldier on her knees by shooting her in the back of the head, something Nijm later told me players can’t do and are actually penalized for in the game. 

The game’s Steam page does not mention Hamas, but the player character has the recognizable green headband associated with the organization, and the game is clearly suggesting players are Hamas or another Palestinian armed group by referencing the name of the operation and the paragliders.

On October 22, Valve contacted Nijm to inform him it had removed the game from sale in the UK, according to emails viewed by 404 Media. 

“We've received a request from authorities in the UK to block the game and have applied such country restrictions,” the Valve representative said in the email to Nijm. 

“It's sad to hear this, because, as we all know, my game is not too much different than any other Shooter Game on Steam, like Call of Duty, in example,” Nijm replied. “But did they give you a specific reason?”

The same Valve representative responded that: “We were contacted by the Counter Terrorism Command of the United Kingdom, specifically the Counter Terrorism Internet Referral Unit (CTIRU).  As with any authority for a region the [sic] oversees and governs what content can be made available, we have to comply with their requests. Unfortunately, I don't have a contact available to refer you to.”

CTIRU, which is run by the Metropolitan Police, was set up in 2010 to investigate and remove “extremist online material” by reporting it to internet platforms. In 2018, the agency said it had worked to get 310,000 pieces of extremist online material removed since it was founded. Many of these removals are initially reported to CTIRU by the public, with CTRIU saying that between January to November of that year it received almost 1,300 reports from the public.

 “The CTIRU works closely with a range of technology, social media and online service providers, but we do not comment on specific content or any communication we may have with specific platforms or providers," a Counter Terrorism Policing spokesperson told me in an email.

Valve did not respond to a request for comment.

This isn’t the first time Fursan al-Aqsa has been blocked in certain regions. It’s blocked in Germany and Australia because it doesn’t have an age rating, which Nijm said that, due to the currency conversion rate in Brazil, is too expensive for him to obtain at 5,000 Euros and 2,000 Australian dollars. The block in the UK, he said, is different. 

“The region lock of my game in the UK was clearly due to political reasons (they are accusing my game of being ‘terrorist’ propaganda), Nijm told me in an email. 

He said he is “forever grateful to Valve for allowing the publishing of my game on Steam in the first place,” that it is one of the few companies that “truly respect freedom of creativity,” and that he understands the company removed the game because it has to comply with local laws. 

“So I do not blame Valve nor Steam, the blame is on the UK Government and Authorities that are pissed off by a videogame,” Nijm said. “On their flawed logic, the most recent Call of Duty Black Ops 6 should be banned as well. As you play as an American Soldier and go to Iraq to kill Iraqi people. What I can say is that we see clearly the double standards.”

I’ve played Fursan al-Aqsa and, just as a game, it sucks. It feels like Nijm bought some assets from a 3D model marketplace, sprinkled in some Israeli flags, and constructed a few plain, uninteresting levels for players to shoot their way through. It’s a functional shooter at the most basic level, but removed from its subject matter it does nothing new or interesting and feels like the lowest form of shovelware, which Steam is filled with. 

Speaking about the decision to show Hamas fighters executing Israeli soldiers but penalizing players for killing unarmed soldiers in the actual game, Nijm said “I have made this cutscene just to ‘trigger’ zionists and to piss them off, and as well to bring into the table what means freedom of speech in reality? Why was everyone ok with the infamous mission ‘No Russian’ in Call of Duty Modern Warfare but they can't tolerate my game?”

“No Russian,” to the uninitiated, is an infamous mission from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 in which the player takes part in a brutal terrorist attack at a Russian airport where dozens of civilians are killed in a mass shooting. It was, famously, not “ok” with everyone. The level leaked prior to release and caused a stir in the games and mainstream press. The level was not included in the Russian release of the game, and in the Japanese and German version of the game players were penalized for shooting civilians. 

Fursan al-Aqsa tries very hard to be edgy—literally labeling itself as the “Most BASED game of all times!!!”—which mostly comes off as pathetic but at times is also darkly hilarious. The first mission starts with a cutscene of you parachuting into Camp Ariel Sharon, a real IDF military base named after the country’s former prime minister, cutting off an IDF soldier’s head with a sword, kicking the head into the air, then throwing the sword and impaling it through the face. If playing the game felt this over the top and absurd it might actually be fun, but it feels like a canceled Max Payne clone from 2001 that didn’t make it out of the prototype phase. 

However, I have also played Call of Duty Black Ops 6 and Nijm is definitely making a fair point. His description of how the game treats Iraqi soldiers doesn’t even convey how fully dehumanized they are in that game, which seems especially in bad taste now that it is widely agreed upon that what the U.S. military did to Iraq was one of the worst mistakes in the history of foreign policy. This is not to mention countless other Call of Duty and other first-person shooter games in which Arabs, Russians, and other nationalities are treated as nothing more than canon fodder. If you, like me, played video games your entire life you probably have killed hundreds of thousands of Arab video game NPCs. Fursan al-Aqsa’s violation and the reason the UK appears to have deemed it “extremist” is that in this case the player character is a Palestinian and the enemies are Israeli soldiers. 

Another notable difference is that while Call of Duty has increasingly flirted with referencing real and current conflicts (the first Modern Warfare, which has levels that resemble the U.S. invasion of Iraq but takes place in a fictional country, came out only four years after the invasion), the Operation al-Aqsa Flood Update is referencing a shocking attack that is just over a year old, and is now still an active war.

Again, my professional opinion as someone who reviewed video games for many years is that Fursan al-Aqsa sucks, and also in bad taste if you choose to judge it in that way. As Nijm points out, the same is true for Call of Duty. Valve so far has not made the distinction between the two, but the UK government has. 

A Niantic executive said that he “could definitely see” governments and militaries purchasing the company’s newly announced AI model for navigating the real world, which would be based on scan data generated by Pokémon Go players, but that if the use case is specific to the military and “adding amplitude to war, then that’s definitely an issue.” 

The comment was made by Brian McClendon, Niantic’s Senior Vice President of Engineering and formerly the co-creator of Google Earth, Street View, and Google Maps, at the investigative journalism group Bellingcat’s Bellingfest event on November 14. McClendon was giving a talk titled “Coordinates of tomorrow: Why spatial computing needs a new map,” which covered his history in the industry, his work at Google and Niantic, and some details on Niantic’s Large Geospatial Model, or LGM, that the company announced two days earlier. 

During a questions and answers portion after his talk, Bellingcat’s open source analyst and ex-British Army officer Nick Waters said that LGMs would be “unbelievably useful” to the military and asked if McClendon could see governments and militaries purchase LGMs from Niantic. 

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

A money laundering organization allegedly connected to large seizures of cocaine inside the United States and works with cartels in Mexico and Colombia has moved at least tens of millions of dollars using a string of front businesses, cash drop-offs, and massive transfers of cryptocurrency, according to recently unsealed court records reviewed by 404 Media.

The court records provide deep insight into how alleged drug traffickers have turned to cryptocurrency, and in particular Tether (USDT), as a way to quickly move wealth across borders in recent years. 404 Media also reviewed other recently unsealed court documents which appear to describe another money laundering organization doing much the same thing for Mexican drug cartels including the Sinaloa, showing that cryptocurrencies have become a normal part of large scale drug trafficking in the 21st century. One of the documents even highlights that Tether is sold for cheaper in Mexico because it is known to be from drug proceeds.

One confidential source told investigators “the current trend was to purchase USDT from Mexico-based groups at a cheaper rate than the market price, and then sell the USDT in Colombia at Casa de Cambios [currency exchanges], virtual currency exchanges, over-the-counter (OTC) transactions, or peer-to-peer transactions (P2P). The USDT was sold at a cheaper rate in Mexico because it was known to be drug proceeds.” 

Welcome back to the Abstract! 

As snow begins to fall and chilly weather becomes the norm, let’s mentally sink into the hot baths that existed on the surface of ancient Mars. Scientists presented unprecedented evidence of these Martian hydrothermal systems inside an ancient crystal found in the Sahara. Of course, all ancient crystals from the Sahara are special, but it turns out this extraterrestrial one is particularly full of wisdom.  

Then, indulge in the world's thinnest pasta, and discover the ultimate algae dream home, complete with fiber optic cables. Last, an update from the cosmic jellyfish beat.  

Ancient Mars Was in Hot Water, and That’s Good News for Life 

Gillespe, Jack et al. Zircon trace element evidence for early hydrothermal activity on Mars, Science Advances

In 2011, nomads traveling across the Sahara Desert came across an entrancing black rock from outer space. As it exchanged hands through dealers and found its way into laboratories, the rock was identified as one of the oldest chunks of Mars ever to end up on Earth. The meteorite, nicknamed “Black Beauty,” is about 4.45 billion years old, dating back to a time when Mars was a newborn world (Gender reveal: Red).

Now, scientists have discovered an unprecedented glimpse of early Mars in a zircon crystal from this fascinating space rock. Geochemical analysis of the zircon grain revealed the textural and mineral signatures of thermal water systems that existed on the planet when this meteorite formed the earliest epoch in Martian history, known as the Pre-Noachian period. 

In other words, this grain preserves the oldest direct evidence of hot water on Mars. As such, it reveals important insights about the habitability of rocky planets, both because water is an essential for life as we know it on Earth, and because hydrothermal systems can shape magnetic fields. Mars had a stronger magnetic field in the past, but it collapsed some 3.9 billion years ago, a shift that played a role in its transition into the parched and irradiated world we see today. 

“Hydrothermal systems are considered critical for the development of life, and so understanding the origin, distribution, and duration of such environments in the geological record of Mars is of primary interest,” said researchers led by Jack Gillespie of the University of Lausanne. 

“Hydrothermal systems have also been implicated in the generation of strong remnant magnetization of the martian crust, which preserves a record of the existence of a geodynamo in the early part of martian history,” the team continued. “A better understanding of the timing of hydrothermal activity is critical, therefore, not only for a better understanding of surface hydrology but also for the deep structure of Mars.”

The team examined the microscale zircon crystal with a host of techniques, including scanning electron microscopy, time-of-flight–secondary ion mass spectrometry, transmission electron microscopy, and atom probe tomography. The results revealed the presence of elements like iron, aluminum, and sodium, as well as an iron oxide called magnetite. 

These features are analogous to ancient grains found on Earth known to be shaped by hot water, suggesting that similar hydrothermal systems existed on Mars 4.45 billion years ago. The study also bolsters the hypothesis that Black Beauty, which is officially known as NWA7034, came from the Terra Cimmeria-Sirenum province in the southern highlands of Mars, which “is the most highly magnetic region of the martian crust” and “preserves evidence of extensive hydrothermal alteration.”

“Hydrothermal alteration has long been suggested as a possible cause for the highly magnetic properties of parts of the martian crust, a hypothesis supported by evidence for early (pre-Noachian or Noachian) hydrothermal activity preserved in the unusually water-rich and highly magnetic lithology of NWA7034,” the team concluded.  

The World’s Thinnest Pasta Is 200 Times Smaller than Human Hair 

Britton, Beatrice et al. “Nanopasta: electrospinning nanofibers of white flour.” Nanoscale Adfancs

Scientists have broken the record for the world’s thinnest pasta with a new “nanopasta” that measures just 372 nanometers, which is 200 times thinner than a strand of human hair. 

“By dissolving 17 wheat flour in warm formic acid and cooling, a dope can be created which can be electrospun into porous mats of 372 nm fibers of pasta,” said researchers led by Beatrice Britton of University College London. “The pasta was made by applying an electric charge to a starch solution which is ejected towards a grounded substrate while drying during flight.”

Yum, what kind of sauce would you like on your flight-dried electrospun porous mats? The new nanopasta has genuine applications as a biodegradable nanofiber, but my favorite part is that it is literally about throwing spaghetti at a wall, just in a very high-tech way, as shown in the above figure.

My Dream Home Is a Heart Cockle

McCoy, Dakota et al. “Heart cockle shells transmit sunlight to photosymbiotic algae using bundled fiber optic cables and condensing lenses.” Nature Communications. 

Heart cockles, a group of marine molluscs, contain little communities of algae in their shells as part of a symbiotic relationship; the algae get shelter and protection, and the cockles get algae-processed nutrients. 

Now, scientists have discovered that cockle shells have a host of mind-boggling adaptations to keep these algae happy, including windows that offer “the first example of fiber optic cable bundles in a living creature.”

“We show that the fibrous prismatic crystals act like parallel bundles of fiber optic cables in the shell windows, not just transmitting light but projecting high-resolution images through the window,” that have “a resolution of >100 lines/mm,” said researchers led by Dakota McCoy of the University of Chicago. 

In addition, the windows in the cockle shells can filter out damaging UV light while letting regular sunlight through to the algae. This allows the cockle to keep its shell closed while still providing light to its algae inhabitants. The upshot? Heart cockles are lux and it’s okay to be jealous of the algae that get to live in them.

All Hail the Galactic Jellyfish

Sparre, Martin et al. “Comparing the interstellar and circumgalactic origin of gas in the tails of jellyfish galaxies,” Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Galaxies come in a variety of shapes and sizes, but few are as strange as the “jellyfish galaxies” named for long “tails” of star-forming gas that extend out from the main galactic center like tentacles. The tails are formed when galaxies in clusters encounter patches of diffuse gas that act like a cosmic headwind, but the exact dynamics that shape the stunning features are not well-understood.

 To get a better sense of these mysteries, scientists ran models of jellyfish galaxies interacting with the environment inside galaxy clusters. The team found that the circumgalactic medium (CGM), which is the gas that surrounds the exterior of these galaxies, probably plays a bigger role in their formation than the gas that exists between stars in the galaxies, which is called the interstellar medium (ISM).

“We find—contrary to popular opinion—that the majority of the gas in the tail originates in the CGM,” said researchers led by Martin Sparre of the University of Potsdam. “Prior to the central passage of the jellyfish galaxy in the cluster, the CGM is directly transported to the clumpy jellyfish tail that has been shattered into small cloudlets. After the central cluster passage, gas in the tail originates both from the initial ISM and the CGM.”

The study’s findings advance our understanding of the complicated processes that create these cosmic tentacles, but they are mostly an excuse to cleanse our eyes with mesmerizing jellyfish galaxies. 

Thanks for reading!

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 talk about conjuring gaming memories, AI-generated Birkin bags, and a rejection of a certain type of criticism.

JOSEPH: Yesterday I did something unthinkable. Deranged. Sordid. I played World of Warcraft.

On Thursday Blizzard launched fresh servers for the Classic version of the massively multiplayer online roleplaying game. Basically this means that, although World of Warcraft is still going strong (its recent expansion, The War Within, has got pretty good reviews and player counts), and despite there already being World of Warcraft Classic (which started at the original, or ‘vanilla’, state of the game and has steadily progressed through its expansions), there is now a third, maybe fourth parallel strand of the game which has gone right back to the beginning.

I played World of Warcraft a lot back in the day. I joined during The Burning Crusade, the first expansion which came out in January 2007. The idea was to keep in touch with a best friend at the time who had moved away. I was absolutely playing it for social reasons rather than anything about the game itself. But I got heavily invested. I became one of the best PvP (player versus player, where players kill each other) players on my server. I will never forget the moment I crossed the threshold of a particular ranking which meant I unlocked the final piece of PvP armor in the game.

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

Six men have been indicted for allegedly stealing trucks full of expensive electronics from Meta and Microsoft, including a truck hauling $1.5 million-worth of Oculus headsets, according to court documents.

According to the indictment, the six men traveled from various locations across the United States to Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio, Tennessee and other states “to steal products that were shipped in interstate commerce”. The co-conspirators allegedly surveilled distribution facilities “used by various national companies to distribute their products” and followed semi-tractor trailers leaving those distribution facilities. When those truck drivers stopped to rest or refuel, the co-conspirators would steal the entire semi-tractor and trailer, hook up the trailer to their own semi, and abandon the stolen tractor. 

In many cases, the co-conspirators “would paint over any logos and/or identifying numbers on the stolen trailer, and use different license plates in an effort to conceal the identity of the trailer and evade law enforcement detection.” In many cases, they transported the stolen goods to Dade County, Florida, where they sold it to another buyer “for a fraction of the stolen load’s retail value.”

According to the indictment, one of the facilities the thieves monitored in Louisville, Kentucky was a distribution facility used by Meta. On May 6, 2022, two of the co-conspirators “located a semi-tractor trailer that left the Louisville, Kentucky facility laden with Oculus reality goggles valued at approximately $1.5 million.” The two stole the truck from a Pilot truck stop in Haubstadt, Indiana and drove it to Vanderburgh County, where they abandoned the tractor and trailer. 

Meta wasn’t the only big tech company hit by the truck thieves. On August 31, 2022, they stole a truck “laden” with unspecified Microsoft products valued at approximately $940,000. On November 7, they stole two trucks: One hauling unspecified Sony products (the indictment didn’t approximate the value of these), and another hauling Harmon-JPL audio products valued at approximately $530,000.

The spree continued into 2023, when the thieves stole semi-tractors hauling Logitech products valued at $180,000, more JBL products, Meta electronics, and Bose audio speakers. 

While it sounds like the defendants here were accumulating enough stolen goods to open their own Best Buy, their truck-stealing spree didn’t focus on tech products only. Over the course of 2023, they also stole trucks transporting CF Moto ATVs and Victoria’s secret and BGath and Body Works Products valued at $1 million.

Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

People are using Spotify playlist and podcast descriptions to distribute spam, malware, pirated software and cheat codes for video games. 

Cybersecurity researcher Karol Paciorek posted an example of this: A Spotify playlist titled “*Sony Vegas Pro*13 Crack Free Download 2024 mysoftwarefree.com” acts as a free advertisement for piracy website mysoftwarefree.com, which hosts malicious software.

“Cybercriminals exploit Spotify for #malware distribution,” Paciorek posted on X. “Why? Spotify has a strong reputation and its pages are easily indexed by search engines, making it an effective platform to promote malicious links.”

"The playlist title in question has been removed,” a spokesperson for Spotify told 404 Media in a statement. “Spotify's Platform Rules prohibit posting, sharing, or providing instructions on implementing malware or related malicious practices that seek to harm or gain unauthorized access to computers, networks, systems, or other technologies."

But as BleepingComputer reported, piracy on Spotify isn’t limited to this one playlist, but is a widespread problem across the streaming platform. “Vbucks generators,” for generating more in-game currency in Fortnite, are easy to find all over Spotify. 

Sites offering “license key cracks,” which provide license keys for pirated software, are also all over Spotify in the form of podcast episodes and playlists. As Paciorek noted, Spotify links are indexed by search engines, making it easy to find these listings through Google even if Spotify blocks the keywords from being searched. Searching for “license key cracks” on Spotify, for example, doesn’t return the malicious titles, but searching it on Google shows Spotify hosts many of these links.

The audio in these episodes are often noise or text-to-speech nonsense about clicking the link in the description. A “podcast” called forlinks, for example, is just a bunch of three second “episodes” with descriptions that link to Turkish gambling sites. A user called “soupiz” is just uploading 22 second text-to-speech clips that all say the same thing in broken English about audiobooks and clicking the link. Podcast episode titles for these spam accounts often contain popular keywords about TikTok personalities or porn, boosting their search engine reach.

I haven’t owned a cellphone since around 2017. For years I used an iPod Touch to send emails or encrypted text messages. When Apple discontinued that iPod in 2022, I moved to a WiFi-only iPad Mini, which requires me to either carry a small bag or a jacket with pockets that can fit the not-so-mini communications device. 

This was an extreme way to live in the previous decade, and arguably it’s even more extreme in 2024. But every time I inch closer to finally buying a phone, some cybersecurity incident happens that reminds me why I made this radical choice: telecoms and data brokers selling location data to bounty hunters or other third parties; hackers (repeatedly) stealing peoples’ sensitive personal information from T-Mobile; stalkers tricking Verizon into handing over a target’s address by haphazardly posing as a cop; and AT&T storing the call and text metadata of “nearly all” of its customers inside a Snowflake instance that young, reckless hackers gained access to. 

Then there is the constant threat of SIM swapping, where hackers trick a telecom into transferring the victim’s cell service from their normal SIM card to one the attacker controls. Another lesser but still relevant concern is SS7, where private surveillance companies, governments, and even financially motivated hackers can tap into the telecommunications backbone to track a device’s location or intercept calls and texts (I’ve been called up by the owner of an SS7 surveillance company after I wrote about them). 

We start this week with Emanuel's story on how AI-powered ads on Buzzfeed are recommending people buy things like a hat worn by a person who died by suicide. After the break, Joseph talks about an unprecedented leak out of phone forensics tech Graykey. In the subscribers-only section, Sam tells us about HarperCollins' AI deal and how MIT Press is exploring one too.

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.

• AI-Powered Buzzfeed Ads Suggest You Buy Hat of Man Who Died by Suicide
• Leaked Documents Show What Phones Secretive Tech ‘Graykey’ Can Unlock
• HarperCollins Confirms It Has a Deal to Sell Authors' Work to AI Company
• AI Companies Are Trying to Get MIT Press Books

This article was produced with support from WIRED.

Instagram is flooded with hundreds of AI-generated influencers who are stealing videos from real models and adult content creators, giving them AI-generated faces, and monetizing their bodies with links to dating sites, Patreon, OnlyFans competitors, and various AI apps. 

The practice, first reported by 404 Media in April, has since exploded in popularity, showing Instagram is unable or unwilling to stop the flood of AI-generated content on its platform and protect the human creators on Instagram who say they are now competing with AI content in a way that is impacting their ability to make a living. 

According to our review of more than 1,000 AI-generated Instagram accounts, Discord channels where the people who make this content share tips and discuss strategy, and several guides that explain how to make money by “AI pimping,” it is now trivially easy to make these accounts and monetize them using an assortment of off-the-shelf AI tools and apps. Some of these apps are hosted on the Apple App and Google Play Stores. Our investigation shows that what was once a niche problem on the platform has industrialized in scale, and shows what social media may become in the near future: a space where AI-generated content eclipses that of humans.

Elaina St James, an adult content creator who promotes her work on Instagram, said she and other adult content creators are now directly competing with these AI rip-off accounts, many of which use photographs and videos stolen from adult content creators and Instagram models. She said that while there may be other changes to Instagram’s algorithm that could have contributed to this, since the explosion of AI-generated influencer accounts on Instagram her “reach went down tremendously,” from an average of one to 5 million views a month to not cracking a million in the last 10 months, and sometimes coming in under 500,000 views. 

“This is probably one of the reasons my views are going down,” St James told us in an interview. “It's because I'm competing with something that's unnatural.”

Alexios Mantzarlis, the director of the security, trust, and safety initiative at Cornell Tech and formerly principal of Trust & Safety Intelligence at Google, compiled a list of around 900 accounts 404 Media reviewed in its investigation. Mantzarlis, who stumbled on one of these accounts while casually using Instagram, said he started researching the AI-generated influencer accounts because it might show us where AI-generated content is taking social media and the internet more broadly, where he sees a “a rising blended unreality.” Mantzarlis believes he could have easily found 900 more accounts, and that the only reason he didn’t get more is that Instagram restricted the account he used to scrape the platform. 

As several major publishers sell their authors’ works to tech giants for large language model fodder, MIT Press is asking authors for their input before any training deals are made, and claims that it’s been approached by AI companies to do so. 

On November 7, MIT Press emailed its authors with the subject line “Response Requested: MIT Press author views on LLM training data and licensing.” In it, MIT Press says that it has been approached by “several AI companies and data brokers for training generative AI tools in exchange for payment.” It goes on to say that it has not entered into any such deal “thus far” but recognizes that MIT Press content is “already being used for training purposes.” 

The full email is below: 

“Dear MIT Press authors,

Niantic, the company behind the extremely popular augmented reality mobile games Pokémon Go and Ingress, announced that it is using data collected by its millions of players to create an AI model that can navigate the physical world. 

In a blog post published last week, first spotted by Garbage Day, Niantic says it is building a “Large Geospatial Model.” This name, the company explains, is a direct reference to Large Language Models (LLMs) Like OpenAI’s GPT, which are trained on vast quantities of text scraped from the internet in order to process and produce natural language. Niantic explains that a Large Geospatial Model, or LGM, aims to do the same for the physical world, a technology it says “will enable computers not only to perceive and understand physical spaces, but also to interact with them in new ways, forming a critical component of AR glasses and fields beyond, including robotics, content creation and autonomous systems. As we move from phones to wearable technology linked to the real world, spatial intelligence will become the world’s future operating system.”

By training an AI model on millions of geolocated images from around the world, the model will be able to predict its immediate environment in the same way an LLM is able to produce coherent and convincing sentences by statistically determining what word is likely to follow another. 

Doing graphic design for ISIS was the passion of a 28-year-old Houston man who was arrested last week, according to a legal filing by the Department of Justice. 

Anas Said was arrested last week in a chaotic scene in Houston after allegedly telling an undercover FBI agent that he wanted to conduct an “operation like 9/11.” But the legal filing contains a few incredibly interesting passages about ISIS’s propaganda workflow in Said’s alleged communication with an ISIS designer nicknamed “The Nightmare.”

According to the filing, which was first reported by our friends at Court Watch, Said was an aspiring ISIS graphic designer who was working with ISIS’s second-in-command graphic designer. That person told Said that ISIS’s chief designer gave him the nickname  The Nightmare because of the extensive notes and revisions that were required before any piece of propaganda he worked on was pushed out. The DOJ document suggested that The Nightmare himself had many revisions for Said’s graphic design work. 

The Graykey, a phone unlocking and forensics tool that is used by law enforcement around the world, is only able to retrieve partial data from all modern iPhones that run iOS 18 or iOS 18.0.1, which are two recently released versions of Apple’s mobile operating system, according to documents describing the tool’s capabilities in granular detail obtained by 404 Media. The documents do not appear to contain information about what Graykey can access from the public release of iOS 18.1, which was released on October 28.

The leak is unprecedented for Grayshift, the highly secretive company which made the Graykey before being acquired by Magnet Forensics, another digital forensics company. Although one of its main competitors Cellebrite has faced similar leaks before, this is the first time that anyone has published which phones the Graykey is able, or unable, to access. 

The documents, which also break down the Graykey’s capabilities against Android devices, provide never-before-seen insight into the current cat-and-mouse game between forensics and exploit development companies like Magnet and phone manufacturers Apple and Google. 

HarperCollins, one of the biggest publishers in the world, made a deal with an “artificial intelligence technology company” and is giving authors the option to opt in to the agreement or pass, 404 Media can confirm. 

A spokesperson for HarperCollins told 404 Media in a statement: