Exhaust billows out of a car tailpipe on January 2nd, 2008, in San Francisco. | Photo: Getty Images
The Trump administration just eliminated the landmark finding that has underpinned federal regulations on planet-heating pollution since 2009.
For nearly the past two decades, the "endangerment finding" has allowed the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to craft rules limiting greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act. Rather than repealing those rules individually, the Trump administration can undermine them all at once by attacking the endangerment finding.
Today, the EPA finalized its plans to overturn the endangerment finding as part of its attempts to overhaul tailpipe pollution standards. The move could also affect efforts …
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The Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office (MDSO) and the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) have bought access to GeoSpy, an AI tool that can near instantly geolocate a photo using clues in the image such as architecture and vegetation, with plans to use it in criminal investigations, according to a cache of internal police emails obtained by 404 Media.
The emails provide the first confirmed purchases of GeoSpy’s technology by law enforcement agencies. On its website GeoSpy has previously published details of investigations it says used the technology, but did not name any agencies who bought the tool.
“The Cyber Crimes Bureau is piloting a new analytical tool called GeoSpy. Early testing shows promise for developing investigative leads by identifying geospatial and temporal patterns,” an MDSO email reads.
If you watched the Super Bowl on Sunday, you had your pick of dystopian advertising campaigns to fixate on, be they AI-generated spots for vodka or ads about how we’re all poor and unhealthy. Still, one campaign for Ring doorbells stood out. The ad purports to use AI and cameras across neighborhoods to help find lost dogs and surely not for any other sinister reason. Of course, this ad already generated a good bit of discussion online. Yesterday, one of the internet’s foremost dog experts, known on Bluesky, YouTube, X, and the rest as WeRateDogs, broke down how the ad is manufacturing consent for mass surveillance.
“Neither Ring’s products nor business model are built around finding lost pets, but rather creating a lucrative mass surveillance network by turning private homes into surveillance outposts, and well-meaning neighbors into informants for ICE and other government agencies,” says WeRateDogs’ Matt Nelson in a clip posted to Bluesky. “Ring has stated that it does not have a partnership with ICE. They do however have a partnership with Flock Safety, a private surveillance firm and license plate tracking system that provides data, including Ring footage, to law enforcement agencies through a warrantless and anonymous community request service, which is then turned over to ICE, the FBI, and even the Navy.” Nelson then goes on to cite a report from 404 Media, published in May,demonstrating how ICE has already been using this data. Another instance showed a Texas police department warrantlessly searching 83,000 cameras to look for a woman who had an abortion.
As the video also points out, it’s not even particularly good at finding dogs. The commercial claims to find one lost dog per day, which accounts for 0.03% of the lost dog reports filed to Ring annually. “If you are genuinely concerned about keeping your pets safe and maximizing your chances of finding them if they’re lost, get them microchipped,” the video concludes. “You can do this at any vet and even some shelters. Just make sure you register it with up to date info.” And maybe keep that info out of the hands of Ring.
An anonymous reader shares a report: The Food and Drug Administration has refused to start a review of Moderna's application for its experimental flu shot, the company announced Tuesday, in another sign of the Trump administration's influence on tightening vaccine regulations in the U.S. Moderna said the move is inconsistent with previous feedback from the agency from before it submitted the application and started phase three trials on the shot, called mRNA-1010. The drugmaker said it has requested a meeting with the FDA to "understand the path forward."
Moderna noted that the agency did not identify any specific safety or efficacy issues with the vaccine, but instead objected to the study design, despite previously approving it. The company added that the move won't impact its 2026 financial guidance. Moderna's jab showed positive phase three data last year, meeting all of the trial goals. At the time, Moderna said the stand-alone flu shot was key to its efforts to advance a combination vaccine targeting both influenza and Covid-19.
America, it’s time to refamiliarize yourself with Ring.
At Sunday’s Super Bowl, Ring advertised “Search Party,” a cute, horrifyingly dystopian feature nominally designed to turn all of the Ring cameras in a neighborhood into a dragnet that uses AI to look for a lost dog: “One post of a dog’s photo in the Ring app starts outdoor cameras looking for a match,” Ring founder Jamie Siminoff said in the Super Bowl commercial. “Search Party from Ring uses AI to help families find lost dogs.” Onscreen, an AI-powered box forms around a missing dog: “Milo Match,” it says. “Since launch, more than a dog a day has been reunited with their family. Be a hero in your neighborhood with Search Party. Available to everyone for free right now.”
It does not take an imagination of any sort to envision this being tweaked to work against suspected criminals, undocumented immigrants, or others deemed ‘suspicious’ by people in the neighborhood. Many of these use cases are how Ring has been used by people on its dystopian “Neighbors” app for years. Ring rose to prominence as a piece of package theft prevention tech owned by Amazon and by forming partnerships with local police around the country, asking them to shill their doorbell cameras to people in their neighborhoods in return for a system that allowed police to request footage from individual users without a warrant.
Chris Gilliard, a privacy expert and author of the upcoming book Luxury Surveillance, told 404 Media these features and its Super Bowl ad are “a clumsy attempt by Ring to put a cuddly face on a rather dystopian reality: widespread networked surveillance by a company that has cozy relationships with law enforcement and other equally invasive surveillance companies.”
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Do you know anything else about Ring? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at jason.404. Otherwise, send me an email at jason@404media.co.
Unlike, say, data analytics giant Palantir or some other high-profile surveillance companies, Ring is a surveillance network that homeowners have by and large deployed themselves, powered by fear mongering against our neighbors and unfettered consumerism.
After a lot of criticism in the late 2010s over its police contracts and its terrible security settings that resulted in hackers breaking into a series of indoor Ring cameras to terrorize children and families, Ring somehow found a way to more or less fly under the radar the last few years as a critical part of our ever-expanding surveillance state. It did this by scaling back police partnerships that were so critical to its growth but that received lots of scrutiny from journalists and privacy advocates. Siminoff left Ring in 2023, but returned last year; in his absence, Ring explicitly sought to take on a softer tone by branding itself as more or less as a device that could be used to film viral moments on people’s porches. It turned its owners into mini cops who would complain about delivery people who didn’t drop a package in the correct spot; who became hyperaware of the comings and goings of their friends, spouses, and children, or who might catch a potentially sharable moment when someone slipped on an icy porch or whatever. Part of this strategy included creating a short-lived reality TV show called Ring Nation, which consisted of precious little moments filmed through Ring cameras.
Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) using the LCARS in Star Trek: The Next Generation. | CBS via Getty Images
One of my pandemic hobbies that stuck was home automation. I discovered Home Assistant - the popular open source, extremely customizable home automation platform - and all the intricate things you can do with it to make your home work better.
I have ADHD and have found Home Assistant to be a valuable tool for managing executive dysfunction. I use it for audible calendar reminders, laundry reminders, timers, and monitoring my doorbell camera and my nanny cam for my dog. Its also a great source of pure nerdy joy for me. And I recently took the most joyously nerdy step yet in my home automation fixation.
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