The 404 Media Podcast

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
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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.

1:19 - Iran Is Winning the AI Slop Propaganda War

26:37 - '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

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YouTube Version: https://youtu.be/_4buUas3tGs
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This week Joseph talks to Dhruv Mehrotra, a journalist and technologist at Bloomberg. Before that, Dhruv was at WIRED, where you probably saw a ton of his interesting work. Dhruv sits in a very unusual space in journalism: he is able to both write technical tools to dig through data, or collect information, or really anything else, and is also able to just write a damn good story. That is a very unique blend. The pair chat about Dhruv’s entry into journalism, how computational journalism has changed over the years, and how Dhruv uses AI too.


Jeffrey Epstein’s Island Visitors Exposed by Data Broker


‘They're Not Breathing’: Inside the Chaos of ICE Detention Center 911 Calls


Epstein’s Inbox

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This week we start with Emanuel’s crazy story about WebinarTV, a company that is secretly recording Zoom meetings and turning them into AI-powered podcasts. It’s nuts. After the break, Joseph tells us about the eccentric billionaire who tried to become a cocaine kingpin. In the subscribers-only section, we lament the lose of the metaverse.

1:06 - This Company Is Secretly Turning Your Zoom Meetings into AI Podcasts

25:58 - An Adrenaline Junkie Millionaire’s Quest to Become a Cocaine Kingpin

Sub's Story: RIP Metaverse, an $80 Billion Dumpster Fire Nobody Wanted

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This week, Sam talks to Emily Bender and Alex Hanna about the marketing ploys of “artificial intelligence,” why ridicule works to keep big tech’s claims in check, and what makes them hopeful for the future. They’re the authors of The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want.Dr. Alex Hanna is a writer and sociologist of technology, labor, and politics. She’s the Director of Research at the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR) and a Lecturer in the School of Information at the University of California Berkeley.

Dr. Emily M. Bender is a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Washington where she is also the Faculty Director of the Computational Linguistics Master of Science program and affiliate faculty in the School of Computer Science and Engineering and the Information School.They also host the The Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 podcast which “deflates AI hype and draws attention to the real harms of the automation technologies we call ‘artificial intelligence’.” 

Flood of AI-Generated Submissions ‘Final Straw’ for Small 22-Year-Old Publisher

The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want


Emily’s cartoon 

Questioning the Normalization of Surveillance by the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown

You Are Not a Parrot at NY Mag

YouTube Version: https://youtu.be/UwBZiuH-1QY
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