Joseph Cox

The Financial Times calls DARK WIRE, my book on how the FBI secretly ran its own tech company to wiretap the world, one of the best books of 2024: ft.com/content/67a336… You can buy your copy, audiobook, etc, here: hachettebookgroup.com/titles/joseph-…

New from 404 Media: anyone can push updates to the Doge.gov site. Two sources independently found the issue, one made their own decision to deface the site. "THESE 'EXPERTS' LEFT THEIR DATABASE OPEN." 404media.co/anyone-can-pus…

New from 404 Media: Employees working at DOGE have been ordered to stop using Slack while lawyers attempt to transition the agency to one that is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act. Means DOGE will be even more secretive and unaccountable 404media.co/doge-employees…

New from 404 Media: the CDC website is being actively purged to comply with Trump's DEI order. CDC employee tells us they were ordered to have their preferred pronouns deleted from their email signatures 404media.co/the-cdcs-websi…

New from 404 Media: Musk's DOGE has brought in HR consultant focused on "non-woke" DEI "aligned with our faith." Stephanie Holmes association with DOGE not previously reported. Says DEI should not be about critical race theory but "diversity of thought" 404media.co/musks-doge-bri…

scoop: Musk's DOGE has brought in Stephanie Holmes, an HR consultant & attorney focused on "non-woke" HR and a version of DEI "aligned with our faith." Has spoken at Federalist Society, with members of Heritage Society, at religious conferences: 404media.co/musks-doge-bri…

A bug in Cloudflare (and just the nature of how CDNs work) let an attacker learn the broad location of Discord, Signal, Twitter users by just sending them an image, according to a researcher. It works because you check which data center cached the image 404media.co/cloudflare-iss…

For months, YouTubers and random people have been using GeoSpy, marvelling at its results. Some people in its Discord ask for help stalking specific women. The founder said "the real work is the law enforcement models." 404media.co/the-powerful-a…

New from 404 Media: meet GeoSpy, a powerful AI tool that lets cops (& stalkers) geolocate photos in seconds. Trained on millions of images, it picks out soil, architecture, etc. GeoSpy closed public access after asked for comment, now marketing to police 404media.co/the-powerful-a…

Just ordered restock of 404 hoodies, crew necks, and horse t-shirts. We were sold out of most sizes. Available to order now, will ship these out in early February. Am so stoked with how the first batch turned out 404media.myshopify.com

New from 404 Media: you may have seen a "summarize this email" button in your business Gmail. Some will love it, others will hate it. Here's how you opt out. We think? I don't know, it's a mess and I'm the admin. Google told me it will get clearer 404media.co/opting-out-of-…

Huh, would you look at that nytimes.com/2025/01/16/us/…

New from 404 Media: Meta is laying the narrative groundwork for Trump's mass deportations. Meta now says users can call migrants pieces of trash, vomit, etc. Multiple experts drew parallels to when Facebook contributed to a genocide in Myanmar. Now U.S. 404media.co/meta-is-laying…

Everything Zuckerberg is doing must be seen in context of TikTok ban, the greatest gift govt could give Meta. I went through years of his testimony about China; he has been planting seeds for this for years, now desperately needs Trump to side with him: 404media.co/a-tiktok-ban-i…

How the MAGA-ification of Mark Zuckerberg and Meta relates to the TikTok ban 🔗404media.co/a-tiktok-ban-i…

Dear Alito: We read pornhub for the articles ok 404media.co/why-this-onlyf…

New: this OnlyFans model publishes her machine learning explainers to both YouTube and Pornhub. Although YouTube may get a million views, that'll generate around $300. The same content posted to Pornhub, with ~30k views, makes $1000. We spoke to her 404media.co/why-this-onlyf…

New: The FTC has formally sued John Deere over its tractor repair monopoly, which is the strongest punitive action the federal government has ever taken against a company over restricting right to repair 404media.co/ftc-sues-john-…

Breaking: FTC is suing tractor maker John Deere over its repair monopoly. For years we've reported how farmers unable to do many repairs due to software locks, and takes days for Deere to do anything, impacting working farmers. FTC now acting 404media.co/ftc-sues-john-…

The simple truth is that nonconsensual porn AI "nudify" apps are viable because they get almost all of their traffic from social media ads. One of the largest one is getting *90 percent* of its traffic from Instagram ads. 90 percent! 404media.co/instagram-ads-…