Jason Koebler

ICE has recently bought the capability of monitoring the location histories of entire neighborhoods worth of phones. The data is likely harvested from apps that sell your data, which filters up through data brokers and eventually to companies that sell to ICE:

404 Media

Inside ICE’s Tool to Monitor Phones in Entire Neighborhoods

404 Media has obtained material that explains how Tangles and Webloc, two surveillance systems ICE recently purchased, work. Webloc can track phone...

404 Media is making a print zine! About the surveillance technologies used by ICE. 16 pages, riso printed. Shipping early January. Features reworked versions of our best reporting and a few new things. We're very excited! And hope to do more if people like it:

404 Media

404 Media Is Making a Zine

We are publishing a risograph-printed zine about the surveillance technologies used by ICE.

New: A judge in Washington has ruled images from Flock surveillance cameras are public records and that anyone can request them. Highlights the pervasiveness of this tech and just how much surveillance is being done. Very notable ruling

404 Media

Judge Rules Flock Surveillance Images Are Public Records That Can Be Requested By Anyone

A Washington judge said images taken by Flock cameras are "not exempt from disclosure" in public record requests.

New: The FBI filed a subpoena trying to unmask the person or people behind archive.is/archive.today, which have been running anonymously for 13 yrs. Site was widely used by GamerGate, and then to bypass paywalls but has become kind of core archiving infrastructure

404 Media

FBI Tries to Unmask Owner of Infamous Archive.is Site

The FBI has subpoenaed the domain registrar of archive.today, demanding information about the owner.

The end of Windows 10 support is going to be an environmental and security disaster, an egregious example of planned obsolescence that doesn't have to be this way:

404 Media

The End of Windows 10 Support Is an E-Waste Disaster in the Making

In an example of egregious planned obsolescence, as many as 400 million computers will soon hit the waste stream.

Some exciting news: 404 Media just won a grant via Muckrock to investigate book bans and educational censorship in the U.S. The plan is to file hundreds of public records requests around the country and to report on and archive all the documents for public use:

404 Media

Help Us Investigate Book Bans and Educational Censorship Around America

404 Media has gotten a grant to unearth public records about systematic censorship of books, schools, and libraries in the U.S.

The much-hyped SIM farm the Secret Service seized uses readily available off the shelf tech that, very interestingly, has also become critical to ticket scalping. I, like others, am extremely not buying the idea that this was intended to take down the cell network

404 Media

The SIM Farm Hardware Seized by the Secret Service Is Also Popular With Ticket Scalpers

The tech the Secret Service claims can be used to "disable cell phone towers" is very commonly used by ticket scalpers to game Ticketmaster.

Buying anything from overseas is about to get more expensive, more logistically complicated, slower, and overall more annoying. Film photography community, retro games community, people into skincare already seeing chaos on eBay. eBay sellers locking US buyers out.

404 Media

Trump Tariffs Cause Chaos on Ebay as Every Hobby Becomes Logistical Minefield

Buying cameras, retro games, board games, skincare, flashlights, sex toys, watches, and anything else from overseas just became far more complicate...

Today is the two year anniversary of 404 Media, which is hard to fathom. We wrote about how it's going, what we've done, what we're going to do, and what we've learned. We cannot do this without the support of our subscribers and for that we are endlessly thankful:

404 Media

404 Media at Two Years: How We've Grown, and What's Next

We're reflecting on the impact our journalism had in year two, how we've grown with your support, and what we aspire to accomplish in year three.

All American trains have a vulnerability where a hacker can remotely trigger the brakes over radio frequency. A single researcher has been warning about this for 13 years and the government has FINALLY acknowledged it’s real and is making train companies fix it:

404 Media

Hackers Can Remotely Trigger the Brakes on American Trains and the Problem Has Been Ignored for Years

“All of the knowledge to generate the exploit already exists on the internet. AI could even build it for you,” the researcher told 404 Media.