The 404 Media Podcast (Premium Feed)

Joseph: 00:04

Hello, and welcome to the 404 Media Podcast, where we bring you unparalleled access to hidden worlds, both online and IRL. 404 4 Media is a journalist founded company and needs your support. To subscribe, go to 404media.c0, as well as bonus content every single week. Subscribers also get access to additional episodes where we respond to their best comments. Gain access to that content at 404media.c0.

Joseph: 00:30

I'm your host, Joseph. And with me are 404 Media cofounders, Sam Cole

Sam: 00:35

Hey.

Joseph: 00:36

Emmanuel Mayberg Hello. And Jason Kebler.

Jason: 00:40

What's up? What's up?

Joseph: 00:42

Very brief bit of housekeeping. We are running our latest FOIA forum. This is a live stream event, where me and Jason teach you how to file freedom of information requests, public records requests. This is, you know, local, state, and federal agencies. We do these, whenever we can.

Joseph: 01:06

The last one is about court records. This one's going back to FOIA. And I think especially about the federal government. Just with a new administration coming in, I think there are a lot of things that people may want to find out about. So we're gonna talk about how to get records related to the federal government, even if you might FOIA, you know, a state or a local agency.

Joseph: 01:27

Enough of that ramble. The timing is Thursday, 23rd January at oh, my god. I gotta say the right time. Is it 1 PM EST? Give me one second.

Joseph: 01:40

1 PM Eastern on Thursday, 23rd January. If you're a paying subscriber, I'm gonna email out the livestream link. It's actually already paywalled on the site, but I'm gonna email this out on the morning of. So if you're listening to this and you're not already paying and you think that'd be something you would like to join, please try to sign up, sign up as soon as possible just because it might get a little bit messy. Try and get the livestream link, you know, on the day.

Joseph: 02:08

But if for whatever reason you're hearing this later or you can't make it, it will be recorded and it will be archived onto the website. We have a ton of stuff to talk about for that. We have a ton of foyers to do as well. So we're looking forward to that. Alright.

Joseph: 02:25

Let's get into the news. The first story, Jason wrote this, and it's broadly about, you know, the TikTok ban and everything that happened there. Basically, the biggest story in tech. Decentralized social media is the only alternative to the tech oligarchy. Super quickly, Jason, do you want to run us through the TikTok ban?

Joseph: 02:49

And I mean super quick, because I could you go all the way back to when Trump initially wanted this ban? Because k pop stans, were basically mocking him on the platform. Can you go from there, and we'll run through why he got banned?

Jason: 03:05

Yeah. I will try to speed run it. I think back in 2017, maybe 2018, Trump issued an executive order that was trying to ban TikTok for the reasons you said, more or less. There's sort of been a bipartisan poll political agreement that the Chinese government is using TikTok in some form to either influence youth and or spy on Americans, but they have not made really any of this public whatsoever. But the Biden administration picked up the idea of potentially doing a ban last year, and then it was pushed through congress in a very interesting way, which is there wasn't enough support to kind of push it through, like, on its own, more or less.

Jason: 04:05

And so it got added to a budget bill. I believe it was the Defense Reauthorization Act, which funds the military. I think it was that one. Yeah. It was tacked on, and that's kind of how congress does legislation these days where many, many, many laws get jammed into one specific law, which is usually a budget bill.

Jason: 04:28

And it passed both houses of government, and it essentially put this deadline for ByteDance to disinvest from TikTok in the United States or to face a ban. And that deadline was January 19th, which was the day before Donald Trump was inaugurated. So Saturday, 19th comes around, and the everyone starts panicking. The Biden administration says that they are not going to enforce this law. Trump sort of starts saying that he doesn't want to enforce the law.

Jason: 05:11

Shu Chu, who is the CEO of TikTok, says that he's working with the Trump administration to figure out how to keep TikTok online. And meanwhile, as some of as part of some of the earlier threats to ban TikTok, ByteDance put American data into Oracle servers in this big thing called Project Texas, where, basically, like, American's data is hosted in, on Oracle servers and then also is mirrored in Singapore. And so Oracle at some point says that they are not willing to risk running afoul of this law. And so TikTok like, ByteDance shuts down TikTok on Saturday evening. Then Sunday rolls around.

Jason: 06:01

Sunday rolls around. Yeah. Go ahead.

Joseph: 06:03

Just before we get into that, so it's banned. And look, I I know that some people think, TikTok is a silly app. I don't know if many of our listeners think that, but, you know, plenty of lawmakers or just other members of the public think that, oh, it's just this silly little thing, you know, even if it poses a theoretical threat from China, it's not even really a big deal. But there are tons of business on businesses on there, small American business owners, as you go into the piece a little bit, Jason. I know people who have found communities and people they can really relate to on the app, and they just can't do that necessarily on other social media platforms or discovery platforms.

Joseph: 06:47

TikTok is much more about discovering sort of small creators that you just wouldn't on Instagram or or elsewhere. So I just wanted to ask, like, when it's banned on that day and and we we all know it comes back. But when it was banned, what were you seeing? Because, you know, the people I know who enjoy that app perhaps more than others, I mean, they were devastated. Right?

Jason: 07:12

Yeah. Well, a peek behind the curtain, I was drunk at a bar when this occurred.

Joseph: 07:16

No way.

Jason: 07:17

Yeah. Way. But I was I mean, I was scrolling through and you got basically, you got this pop up saying, you know, TikTok is has taken down the United States, and we're working with the administration to get it back online, which was very quickly replaced by where president Trump has indicated that he is potentially willing to work with us to get TikTok back online. And it was offline, I believe, for, like, 13 hours or so. It was not offline for that long.

Jason: 07:50

I will say that I've spent a lot of time recently trying to figure out where people would go. I think that the obvious answer is Instagram reels, YouTube shorts, more or less, and that that's what a lot of TikTok creators were telling people to go do. I will say, as we've talked about before, these places are cesspools, and they're disasters. And I think one reason why TikTok does feel more human and different is because whatever ByteDance is doing with the algorithm is keeping out a lot of, like, obvious spam type stuff. It's not perfect, but I was scrolling YouTube shorts and Instagram reels on Sunday morning hungover, as I might scroll TikTok what while I was banned, and it was just horrifying, the stuff I was seeing.

Jason: 08:39

I mean, it was nothing that was even remotely related to my interest, nothing that I would have wanted possibly wanted to see. But, anyways, TikTok more or less seems to have cut a deal with the Trump administration, and the Trump administration seems like they are willing to basically look the other way in the short term, and so TikTok is back online now.

Joseph: 09:03

Yeah. And to sort of bring it back to the piece that you just wrote, again, it's more talking about the need almost to move away from all of these. Right? And you touched on it there, that some of these other platforms have turned into complete cesspools, basically. You mentioned Meta.

Joseph: 09:22

You mentioned Twitter slash x. Just very briefly, sort of what are the problems with that that they are bending to whatever coming administration is? Like, what what's your issues with them in the context of this piece?

Jason: 09:37

Yeah. I mean, you look at the inauguration on Monday, and you have Mark Zuckerberg there. You have Sundar Pichai there. You have Shu Chiu there. You have Jeff Bezos there.

Jason: 09:47

Tim Cook is also there, and you sort of had this, you know, tech oligarchy that we've been talking about for months at this point. And all of these platforms, every major corporate social media platform is now beholden to the Trump administration in some way. You have TikTok whose existence in this country literally depends on them staying in Donald Trump's good graces. You have Meta where Mark Zuckerberg has made a shift right, because Trump once threatened to put him in jail. You have x, which is literally being run by someone who's now in the administration because Elon Musk is, you know, part of this Doge group, which is now formally a real ish organization within the, federal government.

Jason: 10:35

And I think this is a drum that we've been beating for a while. But if you are making a living on any of these social media platforms, which includes YouTube, you need to find ways to have some resiliency and to to make sure that your audience can find you elsewhere. And that doesn't just mean for journalists and for creators. It also means for, like, your friends and family and stuff like that for the average user, in my opinion. And we're actually in this situation now where there are technologies and there has been groundwork laid that is allowing for resilient decentralized social media platforms.

Jason: 11:20

And that's a long way of saying that Blue Sky and Mastodon exists. They are working social media platforms. They're very small when compared to TikTok or to Twitter or to Facebook or Instagram, but they are getting bigger. They're getting more usable. They're getting more interoperable.

Jason: 11:39

And I think that's that's a very good thing, and that's something that creators who are worried about suddenly losing their platform overnight should definitely be thinking about.

Joseph: 11:49

Yeah. It kinda reminds me of stuff with YouTube where, this was kind of before my time when it came to content moderation. It wasn't so much the platform shut down or anything because, obviously, YouTube is still there. But, you know, there's been the adpocalypse and stuff where advertisers have pulled money out and lots of creators, you know, either rightly or wrongly, it really depends on the individual creator and the content. Right?

Joseph: 12:13

But they suddenly have a massive slice of their revenue gone overnight or whatever. And that's very, very similar here, just in that the very existence of the entire platform, now rests on whether Trump basically feels like it or not. Or, of course, there are the legal stuff as well. Like, we don't fully know how the executive order actually is really gonna gel with, like, the law that banned it in the first place. But you I

Jason: 12:39

think that the future of TikTok is still very much in the up up in there. Apple like, it's not on either App Store anymore. So if there's some sort of problem with it where it needs to be updated, you know, the current version could start degrading. It's not clear whether Trump is gonna continue to fight for this, and ByteDance has made no indication that it actually wants to sell. And so in the past, when there have been ban threats, the national conversation has just kind of changed, and TikTok has continued to be able to exist.

Jason: 13:17

But now there's a deadline again. I feel like everyone is probably sick of talking about this. I I know that other journalists who cover TikTok are really they're just saying ban it or don't ban it. Like, I'm sick of this shit. I'm sick of the back and forth.

Jason: 13:33

And I think that that is actually a fair thing to think because you have this platform that 100 of millions of Americans use that is being used as a political football in in a lot of ways, and it's being used as as a scapegoat when something like Luigi Mangione happens and, you know, Republicans can point to TikTok and say, look. They're celebrating this person who killed a CEO, or, TikTok was being used by a lot of leftists and young people to talk about, you know, free Palestine and things like that. And that that was being used by lobbyists in DC as a a reason that it should be banned. So it wasn't just that it's a Chinese app. It's also that it is, like, more or less poisoning the minds of the youth, which I wholeheartedly disagree with that take, and think that it's sort of an unconstitutional take despite, you know, this going through it, the the Supreme Court.

Jason: 14:31

I don't think that the proper I don't think that the I think that the people whose speech is being limited here are Americans who use the platform and who are being, you know, pushed to these other platforms. At the same time, I think that putting all of your eggs in the TikTok basket, thinking that this is now over is a big mistake.

Joseph: 14:50

Yeah. So you do have these alternatives, Blue Sky, Mastodon. There's a separate one. Was it is it pick pixel? PixelFed.

Joseph: 14:58

And that is that based on Blue Sky or something? I haven't followed that.

Jason: 15:02

PixelFed is based on Activity Pub, which is what Mastodon runs on, and it's an Instagram competitor. It's incredibly small. But Yes. It's notable because links to it were being blocked by Facebook, which led to, you know, a Streisand effect where even more people were going to download it. And then Blue Sky said that it's gonna launch an Instagram competitor soon.

Jason: 15:31

So I think that it's like as well. Yeah. I I think that it's very early, and I think that one thing that TikTok and Instagram have is that they have straightforward ways for people to have businesses on these platforms, whereas the decentralized social media ecosystem doesn't really have advertisements. A lot of the people who are there are, you know, anti advertisements, anti surveillance capitalism for reasons that I totally understand and and broadly support. But like on TikTok, if you go viral, you can get direct payments through a creator's program.

Jason: 16:10

You can I keep getting ads for this gum this chewing gum company that sells its products directly and only on TikTok shop? You know, on Instagram, it's like clothes companies are able to buy ads there, and then you can kind of launch a whole business there. And and that's not really an ecosystem that exists on the decentralized social media world, but I think that, nonetheless, people need to start building platforms elsewhere. And I I guess very quickly to explain what this all means, it's for it to be decentralized, it means that you can create an account on Mastodon or on Blue Sky, and and the dream is not fully here yet, but, like, let's say that Blue Sky corporate does something really shitty. You can take your followers, port them over to another instance of Blue Sky run by a different company or a different server or a different person, and that won't really affect your day to day life.

Jason: 17:14

You you will be able to take those followers directly with you and continue posting because the underlying protocol can't be easily censored, and it it it's not going to be controlled by just one entity. So it makes doing things like banning a technology very hard or banning a company or social media platform very hard, but it also protects people in case the owner of it becomes, you know, like, and it to a point where you don't feel comfortable being there anymore.

Emanuel: 17:46

One of one of the reasons we picked Ghost as a platform for ourselves as well, just the idea that if Ghost makes some disastrous decision, The technology is such that we can pick it up and leave with our business and and take it somewhere else.

Joseph: 18:06

Do you just wanna explain that briefly, Emmanuel? Like, why especially when it comes to distribution, why do we have so much of an emphasis on email? That's almost like I know it's not quite the same, but that's almost like our protocol that we're relying on because we don't necessarily have to deal with the sort of, you know, a social website a social media network shutting down overnight, that sort of thing at least as much. Like, why can you just talk about that a bit? Like, why would I mean,

Emanuel: 18:32

I think it is it is very similar. Like, one of the most valuable things we have, as a business, maybe the most valuable thing we have is being able to contact our readers directly without going one of through one of these platforms and that's via email. And that's one of the things that we can take with us if we leave Ghost and decide to build our own website or go to a different service, which is obviously not something you can do if you're on TikTok. Right? It's like if you have 3,000,000 followers on TikTok and that's your livelihood and they shut down TikTok as they did over the weekend, then that's it.

Emanuel: 19:14

It's over. You can beg people to follow you, and they might or some portion of them might, but you you can't just take your audience with you. And I I think this is one of the main things Jason says we should pursue, and I agree. And it's definitely something that we practically, you know, totally separate from this TikTok question just as practically thinking about how to run a business, we we we said, we have to own this audience. We have to have more control over our business than, I don't know, a sub stack would give us, for example.

Joseph: 19:50

Yeah. Or or just even throwing back to the the years old when all of these new media companies were posting onto Facebook and, you know, what we're gonna put all of our resources there, and then it turns out that the Facebook pivot to video thing was just an entire grift based on fake numbers, basically. Right? And they're just kinda screwed with that.

Sam: 20:13

So

Joseph: 20:14

I think well, it it's just harder though. Right? Because if if you're then a TikTok creator or something and you would need to then pivot to email I mean, it's not straightforward, but I agree with everything Jason says that it's worthwhile doing. I guess just to well, not wrap it up because then I have another question for Jason. But just one thing I wanna say about, like, the risk and the TikTok ban.

Joseph: 20:34

It it it's still important to remember that TikTok has done some weird stuff. Like, it did spy on journalists. Forbes did some really good reporting on this, and the reporter there has a book coming out. You know, it followed their location through IP addresses, that sort of thing. But there is no evidence of what is alleged and what is sort of the theoretical fear, which is that China is gonna turn the app into a massive propaganda machine pushing what it wants to tens of millions of users and sway public opinion in the US.

Joseph: 21:08

And I think a really good post about this came from Kevin Collier, NBC News. And he posted the Blue Sky, presumably other decentralized networks as well. I just happened to see it on Blue Sky. He said, just before the ban, this TikTok ban, Eve, it's worth remembering how much the Biden administration declassified on foreign bad actors. You know, there was Russia's plans on Ukraine, RT funding conservative influences, you know, Russia Day, the the Russian channel, Chinese, Iranian, and North Korean hacking operations.

Joseph: 21:40

It makes it even more striking. It never gave evidence of TikTok being a PII suck or a propaganda machine. It basically was a theoretical risk. And, you know, there is the risk there. But I think many people would agree that you don't ban an entire social media platform and app and violate the constitutional rights of tens, if not 100 of 1,000,000 of Americans because of a theoretical threat.

Joseph: 22:10

But just to wrap this up, Jason, you actually wrote a piece way back in March back when this sort of ban was going through the motions. And you had a piece called the US wants to ban TikTok for the sins of every social media company. And maybe I'll try to paraphrase this. But you said the situation is an untenable mess. You know, a ban will have the effect of further entrenching and empowering gigantic, monopolistic monopolistic American social media companies that have nearly all of the same problems that TikTok does.

Joseph: 22:42

We highlight again the using mainstream social media platforms run by corporations do not actually own their followers or their audiences, etcetera, etcetera, including for businesses. That was in March 2024. Do you think that all played out?

Jason: 22:56

I mean, I think that that is very much the case where I've not seen anything like this happen in the United States before. I think it is without precedent besides Sam's reporting on what's happening with Pornhub in several states, a a third of the United States now. But having a platform that was accessible one minute and then unaccessible to, you know, Americans the the next minute is, I think, pretty chilling and I think pretty scary, and we can make fun of the influencers who were crying about losing their platforms and losing their their monetization and saying, like, they're taking it too seriously. But it's pretty crazy that this happened, I think, even though it was only for a few minutes. I think that we are used as Americans to being able to access pretty much anything on the Internet.

Jason: 23:52

And I call this an untenable mess, and I think I was talking about the uncertainty surrounding this. But I will also say that the ban itself, while it was enacted, was really interesting in that a VPN couldn't get around it. It wasn't something where, you could just turn on a VPN and access TikTok if you were in the United States. It seemed to have something to do with where your account was created. It had, like, a little some metadata that suggested you were you were an American user, meaning a friend that I have in Japan was locked out, for example.

Jason: 24:36

You can also tie accounts to Apple IDs, which is not as easy to circumvent. You can tie it to phone numbers and things like that. So I think that this did show that there's various ways that Internet censorship can occur and that it's not always it's not as easy as turn on a VPN to circumvent it. And I think that the technical details of how this ban was implemented are pretty interesting.

Joseph: 25:07

Yeah. And I don't have a fully enough time to dig into it before TikTok came back, but, we should definitely look into that more to see if it does get banned again or if they start banning other platforms. Who knows? Alright. We'll leave that there.

Joseph: 25:23

When we come back, we're gonna talk about a story I wrote about a new AI tool that can geolocate photos in seconds and is being marketed to law enforcement. We'll be right back after this.

Emanuel: 25:47

We're back. This next story is from Joe. The headline is the powerful AI tool that cops or stalkers can use to geolocate photos in seconds. Joe, maybe very quickly geolocate. Let's explain what we we do it a lot, but maybe to readers who don't know what that is.

Emanuel: 26:06

What what what is geolocating?

Joseph: 26:08

Yeah. So it's when you'll take a photo and maybe on clues inside it such as, there's a road sign. I I imagine it's at this intersection. Or maybe there's very distinctive architecture and you could get a sense of what country it's in, or the vegetation. Or then even more advanced ones where, you know, the open source, collective organization, Bellingcat, you know, they'll look at shadows and then figure out the exact points where American journalists were beheaded by ISIS, all of that sort of thing.

Joseph: 26:43

There's a massive spectrum of techniques and sophistication, but it's basically using clues inside a photo to figure out where and potentially when, it was taken as well. I mean, you say we do it a lot. Like, I do it to, I think, find where criminals may be and and and that and that sort of thing. Is that what you're thinking?

Emanuel: 27:05

Yeah. Whenever there's a viral video or just something that we wanna report on that starts with a video on social media and you wanna figure out is this real, when did it take place, you start looking at the image and trying to see where it took place, when it took place, and so on. It's it's it is one of the techniques, as you say, that fall under the, umbrella of open source intelligence. And to simplify it even further, we'll circle back around to this, but I'm sure people have seen the very viral, geoguesser champ, Rainbolt. When you watch him do his thing.

Emanuel: 27:41

He's geolocating. That's what he's doing. But this company, GeoSpy, how did you first hear about it? And, maybe tell us what it does.

Joseph: 27:51

Yeah. So I heard about GeoSpy actually months ago, and it was sort of on the back burner and I'll I'll cover that later. That sounds interesting. I saw people posting on, I think, Twitter and definitely LinkedIn, and that was the recent sort of impetus to kick me into gear to finally write about it. So GeoSpy is this company that basically automates the geolocation process.

Joseph: 28:20

So instead of a human looking at the soil, the architecture, the buildings, that sort of thing, it's an AI doing it. And rather than, open source intelligence investigator or journalist or researcher or whoever spending months or years building up sort of the muscle necessary to quickly identify photos. This AI, obviously built on a massive data set of millions of images. We don't know exactly what images, but millions of images. It can do that, in seconds, you know, which is, obviously very interesting if you were not if you don't have the capability to do it yourself.

Joseph: 29:02

You know? And the thing that finally pushed me over the edge to finally write about it was that I saw they were more explicitly, at least I remember, more explicitly marketing to law enforcement and governments. And when when an AI tool pivots from consumer access, which is you can just sign up and until very recently, just start using GeoSpy and lots of people are doing that. When any company pivots from consumer to law enforcement, I'm obviously gonna be interested.

Emanuel: 29:31

What are some examples that you saw of people how did how did they use GeoSpy? And also as someone who has geolocated images the old fashioned way, what is your assessment of how well it works? Are you impressed with the results?

Joseph: 29:47

Yeah. I guess the fur I'll I'll say the examples I did first, which is that I went to geospy dotai. I made a free account. And at the time, it allows you to do 5 or 6 lookups a day. And you upload a photo.

Joseph: 30:05

It thinks for a few seconds, does it sing. And then it provides, a Google Maps style interface of where it believes that photo was taken or, you know, approximately where that photo was taken. And then a, a description of how it's analyzed, the photo, as well. So one, I took a photo from a story that Sam wrote several months ago about a man who was harassing a woman in a Waymo, like jumping in front of it and, like, not letting the autonomous vehicle pass. We know that's in San Francisco, just through the nature of writing the article.

Joseph: 30:44

But I just wanted to see, like, this photo of a guy standing in front of a car, will Geospire be able to pick up on that? And I uploaded it. And it replies with, you know, this particular motel sign is in the background. So it indicates the sound is in San Francisco. The architecture of the buildings is very similar, all of that sort of thing.

Joseph: 31:06

I think the ultimate location to put on the map was not one to 1. It was like in that area, but it wasn't exactly on the intersection. But it still picked out, you know, a missable landmark in the background. And if you were doing this manually, if you have this photo, and you're trying to figure out where it was, this is exactly what you'd be doing. You're looking for a business or something in the background that you could then figure out.

Joseph: 31:29

So that there's that, and that's kind of on the lower end. I uploaded some inside public transit systems as well. It still got those based on, like, the style of the chairs and that sort of thing. Jason gave me one from the LA wildfires, which he took, which is interesting because that's obviously a very, very current event. And it's not gonna be the same as Google image reverse image search, where you upload that.

Joseph: 31:57

It's just gonna send you photos of other fires, not necessarily this fire. Although it could do, depending on timing, but it's not gonna tell you where it is, probably. And this said, based on the architecture of the buildings, this looks like, I think it's at Huntington Beach or something, which is actually south of LA. It's not perfect, but it's clearly looking at the content of the image and, like, giving it context, which I found quite, amazing. And and then just the last couple of ones I'll say is that I went into the GeoSpy community Discord, and the founder, there had uploaded examples that he apparently run.

Joseph: 32:36

And it was stuff like, oh, these cobblestones are very distinctive to Boston, or this these trees are very distinctive to Boston as well. And the way he phrased it was something like, well, you've gone from the entire world where this photo could be, and then you've narrowed it down to just a few kilometers, essentially. Now I don't think anybody would disagree with the fact that that just saved a bunch of time for sort of anybody use

Emanuel: 33:04

Yeah. There's another example in the story that I thought was the most, impressive, and it's not one that we uploaded. I think it's something you found in the community, and it's just a dirt road, like a rural dirt road. And it was able to identify that I think it's in Thailand, which, I mean, is obviously a big country. It's not a very specific location, but there's really no landmark.

Emanuel: 33:30

It's just dirt and trees. And the fact the AI is able to narrow it down to a country even, I thought was really impressive. And also very similar if you watch Rainbow play, he'll see an image and be like, oh, that dirt, that's Iceland. You know what I mean? This tree, that's that's that's, Hawaii.

Emanuel: 33:48

So it's doing something very similar. And it's it's one of those AI things where it's at once mind blowing. You can't believe that the AI can do this, but then you think about the data and you're like, oh, well, obviously, somebody built this and obviously, it works pretty well and it will you can imagine Google, for example, that has all the street view data and every street view image is pinpointed to a geographical location. They could probably build something like this fairly easy and much more accurate.

Jason: 34:18

One thing I wanted to say about the GeoGuessr and, you know, rainbow being able to see some dirt and say, oh, this is Mongolia or whatever, one thing I learned that maybe listeners know, maybe they don't, is that there are a lot of tells in that game where they are not necessarily identifying that that dirt could be from Botswana, but there are essentially eras of Street View cameras that maybe they had a certain resolution, and you would then know based on based on something in the image that Google was serving the continent of Africa during the era when this, like, image artifact would be in there. So it's a mix of people both knowing a lot about geography, but also a lot about Google Street View in particular.

Emanuel: 35:11

Yeah. Sometimes it's a specific car in front of the Google car, and he's like, oh, I know what road this is exactly just because of something specific like that.

Joseph: 35:19

Super briefly. Just because you bring that up, Jason. And I did I didn't know that. That that's really interesting. But I did also upload to GeoSpy the CCTV footage of the murder of the UnitedHealthcare CEO.

Joseph: 35:30

I mean, we all know that was in New York City. Like, that's not the point. It's just like I wanted to see if the GeoSpy AI system would know that. And, yes, it did based on the vehicles and the street and that sort of thing. But it did say, this appears to be CCTV footage.

Joseph: 35:44

So it's picking up, you know, not to the same degree as sort of your GeoGuesser, like, Google Street View artifacts, but it is picking up something about, oh, what sort of photo this is as well. Yeah.

Jason: 35:57

I bring that up not just because I find it to be very interesting, but also because the AI may be picking up specific metadata in addition to analyzing what it sees in the images,

Sam: 36:13

perhaps.

Emanuel: 36:15

So what why does this exist? Who who who made this and and how?

Joseph: 36:20

Sure. So Daniel Heinem is the founder of Greylark Technologies. That's the company behind it, They're their mate, GeoSpy. And didn't respond to my requests for comment, unfortunately. I'm always interested in hearing directly from the people who develop these tools.

Joseph: 36:42

So I went and I found a really interesting YouTube video, where he's speaking to the head of another company, called the Social Proxy, which nobody steal this, but we should probably look into them as well because they facilitate the scraping for AI companies, which I find very interesting. And they seem to have some sort of relationship based on their YouTube video. But in there, Daniel Heinen explains that, initially, they were building a tool more around profile photos and trying to trying to do something with that. Like, they don't specify what exactly, but scraping a bunch of profile photos. Because, you know, often people will in their profile photo, it'll be a location that's important to them.

Joseph: 37:25

You know? Maybe it's in their city or something like that. But what they were finding is that those photos often have the metadata removed. You know? As as many people know, when you take a photo on an iPhone or an Android or whatever, it will often be coupled with the geolocation data.

Joseph: 37:41

If you upload that file raw to your computer and you go in the command line or use it all to look at the metadata, it will still contain the GPS coordinates probably. If you upload it to Twitter or, I presume, some of our other social media sites, the site removes that metadata. So they were kinda stumped. Like, well, it's removed this useful information. So what are we gonna do?

Joseph: 38:04

So Hynin then says, the team came across this research paper talking about picking out important things from the photo itself. They decided to build a proof of concept to say, hey, look. This is what's possible by sort of implementing that research. And that's how you end up with GeoSpy, picking up on the soil, picking up on the architecture, the space between buildings, all of this, sort of thing. And, you know, it's, I don't know exactly when he made it, but last year at some point, he quit his job to then work on it full time and, you know, selling it as a enterprise, and a pro product with the free access stuff until very recently.

Joseph: 38:53

And it's definitely, may maybe popular is not the right word. They said they had a a 1000000 unique visitors, at some point on on the site. But it's been getting more and more attention. And, at least maybe I'm I don't wanna put words in his mouth, but

Emanuel: 39:11

I believe he said something like they were, you know, surprised by how popular it became. So one way it's getting popular is it has a discord where this guy who made Geospy is in, Daniel, and then, I don't know, you would assume maybe potential customers who are interested in it. But then also just a bunch of people who are playing with it. What did you see them do with Geospy when when they could still use it?

Joseph: 39:40

Yeah. So you go into the Discord and Hainan's in there talking about product stuff, giving updates, what you would expect from many sort of AI project that uses Discord, exceptionally common. I then started searching for evidence of what people were using the tool for or wanted to use the tool for. And in a handful of cases, I found people uploading, like, a photo of a house that belonged to a specific YouTuber. And in one case, you know, it's a group of, like, 3 young women.

Joseph: 40:10

I'm not familiar with the YouTuber, but I looked at their channel and it looks like it's 3 young women. And this person was asking for help trying to find that house. So, obviously, they're trying to stalk this person in some capacity, and I found multiple examples of that. I should say that they immediately got shot down. Like, there wasn't anybody going, oh, yeah.

Joseph: 40:32

I'm gonna help you stalk. They were, like, making jokes. Like, did you get lost? You're clearly in the wrong server. And the founder, Hynan as well, pushes back when somebody says they're getting a job as a or a job interview to PI firm.

Joseph: 40:46

Maybe they'll be paid to stalk people soon. He's like, bro, what the fuck? Not in my server. All of that being said, you can still push back against stuff while facilitating stuff or potentially facilitating it as well. And I guess for as for what else appears in that server, often YouTubers well, over the past several months, lots and lots of YouTubers have been making videos about GeoSpy, either because they're marvelling at the technology and, like, look at this, or maybe they're saying this is creepy, or some will use it to test it against professional geoguesses.

Joseph: 41:24

So there was one YouTuber who is very, very good at geolocating photos. And he looks at something. He's, oh, I think it's in this country. He then tries out GeoSpy. And he, like, gets it immediately.

Joseph: 41:36

So there's been a lot of social media hype about this tool. And then Heinem will take those videos and then paste them into the Discord, because I mean I mean, it shows how powerful and effective the tool is. You know?

Emanuel: 41:49

So I can't think of a legitimate use case for this unless you're the police trying to get information about a crime or a suspect or something like this. How are they marketing it to police? And also, do they have any other industry or client in mind for this?

Joseph: 42:16

Yeah. So we we've been dancing around this, but I guess I'll just say that when I reached out to GeoSpy for comment, the first was via, I think, the contact form on Greylark Technologies website. And then I DM ed the founder, Daniel Heinem. Never got a response. But the day after that, they closed public access to the tool.

Joseph: 42:37

Whereas, you used to just sign up and, as I said, you know, do 5 or 6 lookups per day. That got closed off. I saw people complain in the Discord saying, woah, what the hell? There's no more free GeoSpy. I don't have a clear explanation on why exactly it was closed.

Joseph: 42:54

Obviously, I've asked. I haven't received a response. So people could use this. Obviously, the YouTubers are doing it. As I just said, they were doing all these, like, demo videos and stuff.

Joseph: 43:03

Right? But now it's closed and you have to request access. And it says, you know, it's open only to, I think, specific enterprises or government law enforcement agencies. And if you go on the website and after seeing this, this is what made me decide to finally cover it. It says, for government and law enforcement, GeoSpy Pro is an advanced AI platform integrating powerful AI location models for your city or country, delivering up to meter level accuracy, state of the art computer vision models, all in an easy to use interface for government and enterprise.

Joseph: 43:37

So obviously, marketing it to the cops. And I, I mean, I can't think of other use cases. Let's say, you're the New York Times visual investigations desk with some very, very good people there and you wanna use this tool. I can see them paying for it, and presumably, they would be responsible with it. At least you would hope so.

Joseph: 43:53

I can also see why the police would want it. Absolutely. Another sort of area using it is I spoke to, or rather I just shot some emails with Christopher Alberg, who is the CEO of Recorder Future. And they're a cybersecurity slash threat threat intelligence company. Lots of different stuff like scraping dark web, also directly interfacing with threat actors, all of that sort of thing.

Joseph: 44:24

And they invested into Geospy. So, obviously, just take any comments with a normal grain of salt with that in mind, where they said the tool is amazing. They use it, and it gets passed to their customers as well. So there's not just government. There's sort of private, investigative companies as well, is what I would say.

Joseph: 44:44

Yeah. But I don't know if any, police are buying this yet. I didn't see any federal contracts, at least initially. But I guess, we'll wait and see. You know?

Emanuel: 44:57

Yeah. I don't know if we'll hear a ton more about GeoSpy. We might. But this strikes me as one of those ideas that is too appealing, and the cat is out of the bag and someone will build this. Maybe it's another company.

Emanuel: 45:15

Maybe people make something that is open source, but I think, it's too compelling of an idea to to not be available to people in some way.

Joseph: 45:27

Yeah. And they happen with facial recognition as well. Yeah. We had ClearView for the cops, and then we have is it is it PIM eyes, for normal people and all that sort of thing. Alright.

Joseph: 45:39

Thank you for grilling me about my article, Emmanuel. We'll leave that there. If you're listening to the free version of the podcast, I'll now play us out. But if you are a paying 4 or 4 media subscriber, Sam is gonna tell us all about these incredible images from the phone maker, Nokia. We're gonna scroll through them, laugh, cry, maybe other various motions showing all of their early designs.

Joseph: 46:02

There's some really, really wild stuff in there. You can subscribe and gain access to that content at 404media.c0. We'll be right back after this. Alright. We're back in the subscribers only section.

Joseph: 46:29

This is a fun one, obviously. The headline is Nokia's weird y two k deva designs show the future we could have had. Sam, before we scroll through it and just see what we're dealing with, and I will, obviously, the article will be linked in the show notes. I don't know if you put them on Doc Cloud or something, but people can view them there as well. Before we get to that, what are these photos, and how are they here, and why are they here, and how do we have them to laugh about the podcast?

Sam: 46:57

Yeah. I guess, just to say from the top, like, this is gonna be on YouTube. So if you want to if we wanna try to figure out how to share our screen and, like, look at them, it's a audio format, so this is gonna be kinda weird. But, we can describe, I guess.

Joseph: 47:13

We will figure that out in post,

Emanuel: 47:15

I think.

Sam: 47:16

Yeah. We'll figure it out in post. But we'll do it live for now. So, yeah, I mean, this is, a story is about, something called the Nokia design archive, which of course, an ambulance is coming by my house right now because I started talking for the first time.

Joseph: 47:32

It's all good. It's subscribe it's subscribers only, so they don't mind.

Sam: 47:36

Do not geolocate me based on the sound of that ambulance. I bet somebody out there could do that. But yeah. So this is about the Nokia design archive, which, just came out this week, from Alto University in Finland. And it's about 20,000 items individual items and, like, something like 950 gigs of actual files of just like y 2k era Nokia design documents, sketches, prototype photos, videos of advertisements that I'm not sure ever ran.

Sam: 48:17

Yeah. Just like weird weird stuff that they were working on in the early 2000. Like, I think it goes from, like, mid mid nineties to into, like, 2017. But, yeah, I mean, I I like have us all sought for Nokia. Joseph had to do the story and made me put in there that they're a surveillance company, which is true.

Sam: 48:38

But I just enjoy them a lot because they didn't live long enough as a phone company to become evil, truly evil as a phone company. But, you know, they how this archive came about in the first place was that they the company sold its whole, like, mobile phone business to Microsoft in 2016. So they had this guy who, I'm not truly sure, but I assume he worked for Nokia and was part of this, kind of design team or was at least adjacent to it. He had this whole archive. He had access to all this stuff.

Sam: 49:16

But he was like, I'm moving, and I have it physically, and someone needs to come get it before I move, or it's gotta go, and which that's, like, such a classic story.

Joseph: 49:28

What is it? Is it photos or CDs?

Sam: 49:30

Yeah. It's like photo CDs. It's like, you know, like, storage media, I assume. I think they digitized a ton of stuff, especially, like, the early, like, sketches and things like that, to make it part of this archive. But, yeah, I just like I love that as, like, a such, like, a classic archivist move is to be like, I have this trove of old shit, and I need you to get here with a truck tomorrow or tonight.

Sam: 49:58

And if you don't, it's gone forever, which happens all the time. And stuff just gets lost that way. So that's what happened here. And he he knew someone at Alta University in Finland. This professor named Anna Valtonen, and she said, I'm coming to get it.

Sam: 50:19

Don't move. And, they also the university had, like, 24 hours to reach an agreement with Microsoft's lawyers to get ownership of the archive in the first place, which is also, like, a crazy deadline.

Joseph: 50:32

Yeah. I've read that. As you said, I edited the piece, and then I read that line, and I was like, obviously, we don't have time to get more information on that. And I don't think they would probably tell you, but I wanna know I wanna know the contours of that agreement. Because micro Microsoft could have just gone fuck off.

Joseph: 50:50

You know?

Sam: 50:50

Yeah. But yeah. I mean, I assume Microsoft's lawyers decided that there was nothing worth a shit in this archive because it's all I can't really express how goofy this stuff is. Like, if you think about what we were doing with phones in early 2000, we said, like we were, like, doing, like, keyboard phones, phones, slide phones. You know, the actual, like, form factor of the phone was still very much up for debate.

Sam: 51:18

Like, it was lots of different stuff people were doing with phones. It wasn't just like, here's your rectangle.

Emanuel: 51:23

Can I can I make a Yeah? A counterargument celebrating Nokia? Of course. The last good phone company. I don't know if they're really good.

Emanuel: 51:32

But I

Sam: 51:32

mean, I don't really know either. But Yeah. But,

Jason: 51:35

it's goofy for sure,

Emanuel: 51:37

and the aesthetic in terms of design is very y two k. It's chrome and silver and egg shaped and rounded as opposed to everything being an iPhone type, glass square. And, that's all true. But I'm looking at some of the concepts here, and a lot of them are spot on. Foldable phones have not really caught on, but there's one in here.

Emanuel: 52:06

That's what it is. It's a foldable phone. It's called a wallet. It has a very goofy ad where a husband is asking his I suppose wife if he can use her fancy phone wallet, and she's, like, not wearing a shirt for some reason.

Joseph: 52:20

Yeah. I don't I don't really get that. Yeah. That she's wearing a blazer with nothing underneath, which, you you do you. I don't understand why it's a knock your design.

Joseph: 52:30

Like future fashion Yeah.

Emanuel: 52:31

Is is the is the idea there.

Sam: 52:33

And they're all gutter. Shirts.

Joseph: 52:34

Wait. That's they're trying to design a phone and fashion at the

Jason: 52:37

same time.

Joseph: 52:38

Is that just just pick a lane? I don't know. They're trying to do both.

Emanuel: 52:41

Yeah. Then there's something called the webpad, which is just an Apple Watch, which is not the most original idea. Like, that's been in Dick Tracy. That's a familiar sci fi concept. That's that's fine.

Joseph: 52:56

But but it looks like he's wearing an, a a a pillow that you wear in a plane.

Emanuel: 53:00

That's a parrot.

Joseph: 53:02

Oh my god.

Emanuel: 53:02

That's a parrot.

Joseph: 53:03

Oh my

Sam: 53:04

god. He's just cool

Emanuel: 53:06

once again. Just teacher fashion. I didn't drop it. And teacher people have parrots on their shoulder if they're cool. Fashion.

Emanuel: 53:11

And the pattern also.

Joseph: 53:12

No. It's I thought it was a pillow.

Sam: 53:14

So did I So

Joseph: 53:15

Nokia, man. Fucking pushing down. This is crazy.

Emanuel: 53:19

There's a device, which I assume is a phone, which in the images we see, it can be worn as a necklace. It can be worn around your ankle, which doesn't really make sense, but it seems further down there are other images on it of it where the basic technology of it is basically like a Google Glass. It kinda goes near your temple, and there's a piece of glass in front of your eye, and it projects the image onto it, which is highly specific, and a thing that, again, Google Glass didn't really, take over the world, but that idea of, like, projecting an image onto glass and not being the display is still something that we use today. And then finally, there's a video that it just brings all this stuff together, and it's like Nokia's vision for the future, and it's pretty spot on. It's like a woman leaving her office.

Emanuel: 54:06

She has a smartphone. She basically calls an Uber on her smartphone. I don't know. They saw it. Maybe maybe the future was obvious back then, but, like, the the video kinda nails where we are.

Emanuel: 54:18

It just everything looks it's like bizarre world, which I think is what is interesting about this and what's interesting about the story. Like, we don't see a lot of the Apple designs that didn't make it. So that's always interesting to see in a tech company what they were thinking about doing and never did.

Joseph: 54:36

And and also with Google Glass and stuff as well. I mean, as you say, they didn't take off, but there's gotta be other iterations that didn't even get out the door. Right?

Emanuel: 54:43

Yeah. And then the other thing is just like, industries or businesses tend to be more interesting when there's more competition. Everything is so uniform at technology now, and this is a throwback to a time where people have different takes about phones and the n Gage was the thing, and, they had other weird ideas as we can see.

Jason: 55:05

I'm glad you mentioned the Ngage. As part of this, there was some leaked documents about what Nokia initially thought of the iPhone, and Mhmm. They basically were like, oh, fuck. It's kind of what the, presentation says. Essentially, it said iPhone will capture the coolness in US media.

Jason: 55:29

There's not much coolness left for us. So that's

Emanuel: 55:34

so sad.

Jason: 55:35

That's very sad. And it said that they really needed to push, very quickly on touch screens and and some other things. So I think it's a it's a bummer. Obviously, Nokia is very famous for creating snake. Not not inventing snake, but putting snake on a phone, and sort of having indestructible brick phones.

Jason: 55:56

But, yeah, I was really wondering why we didn't get the the future. We did get the future that Nokia imagined in some ways, Emmanuel, but I I I wonder why Nokia wasn't the one that gave it to us.

Joseph: 56:10

Did did anybody ever have an n gage? Do you have 1, Jason?

Jason: 56:14

I didn't have 1. No.

Emanuel: 56:16

I've held 1 at the time. Like, someone got an n gage. Okay. I played, like, Tomb Raider on it or something, I believe was came out on it.

Jason: 56:24

Top of

Emanuel: 56:24

the phone. It was garbage. It wasn't good. But it was kinda mind blowing because it was 3 d and polygonal and all that.

Joseph: 56:30

To be fair, you call the Nintendo Switch a a a shit Android tablet. So I'm not really gonna listen to your opinion when it comes to handhelds, to be honest. Because it I don't know. Maybe you're not the target audience for them or something. But, yeah.

Joseph: 56:41

I didn't know you could play Tomb Raider with it. Sam, what was sort of your favorite one that jumped out jumped out about this? Was it one of the ones Immanuel mentioned, like the par the paratude or

Sam: 56:51

I mean, the parrotude's like that's blowing my mind now because I did not notice that that was a bird. Now I'm questioning everything that I've ever seen, but this one that's, like, midway through the article, is do you know if there's old I guess they still sell them, and I'm just old, but, like, there's kids' toys that you get at, like, a checkout or something, and it's like a squish thing, where, like, you squeeze it. No. It's like a tube.

Emanuel: 57:15

It's a tube that folds on itself, and you squeeze it in. It jumps out of your hand.

Jason: 57:18

It's a wonderful toy.

Sam: 57:19

Great toy. It's really good. I it's like I'm having I'm having a hard time describing it, but it's basically like a doughnut but long. And then you squeeze it and it kinda yeah. You kinda eat, like, infinitely squeezes.

Sam: 57:32

But then they have one here where they just I guess, I'm assuming some board designer at Nokia picked one up and was like, I'm a play with this, like, basically, like a stress ball toy. And what he did was he put the he put a little screen on the tube, and then he puts a piece a long piece of paper inside the tube so that when you squeeze the tube, the screen comes out. But when you release pressure on it, it goes back in.

Emanuel: 57:58

Yeah. I believe water wiggler water wiggler is the toy that we're referring to.

Sam: 58:02

Water wiggler. Water wiggler. Even knew they had a name. I

Emanuel: 58:06

Just Google it.

Sam: 58:08

Just the idea that your phone is, like, this squishy, like, liquid thing, I think, is so interesting and weird. I like it a lot. You know? Again, it's like that it would never actually work in real life.

Joseph: 58:24

Why why do we think we're so uniform with designs now? Is it that just the app was so astronomically successful that everybody needed a copy of the form factor, or multiple companies figured out that you can't have a phone that squishes, like, whatever you just said, like water or whatever. That sounds fucking stupid. So what do you think, Jason?

Jason: 58:45

I feel like there have been a few attempts to stand out, and they just simply haven't worked. I think the closest thing has been, you know, Samsung's foldable note phone, which is pretty popular, I think. But in terms of, you know, foldable phone versus regular rectangle phone, there's no competition. I think that every few years, there's an attempt to bring back a tactile keyboard in some way, and it it just doesn't work for whatever reason. And then it probably has a little bit to do with the form factor of LCD screens and and things like that.

Jason: 59:26

It's, like, a pretty mature industry at this point, but I'm not fully sure

Joseph: 59:33

Yeah. What he thinks.

Sam: 59:34

Muscle memory is, like, part of this. It's like everyone has one of these now, so it's not like a a thing that you use occasionally. It's like something you're using constantly all day long. So, like, to not have to think about where the stuff is on my phone is important. And, like, if my phone was shaped like an Engage, I probably would have to.

Sam: 59:51

If I was gonna upgrade in 4 years, my phone would be totally different. And, like, you know I mean, I do think Apple probably showed up and totally created such a good product that people were like, you know, we all have to do exactly this forever until the end of time, which I think I don't know. I'm not a big fan of, but I'm also I'm the only Android user here. So I'm I'm not one of you Apple sheeple.

Joseph: 01:00:13

But also It destroyed the BlackBerry QWERTY keyboard as well, just thinking about that. Emmanuel.

Emanuel: 01:00:19

What was the AI PIN called?

Jason: 01:00:22

Humane PIN.

Sam: 01:00:22

Oh, humane.

Emanuel: 01:00:24

So so that was obviously a disaster that didn't work, but I feel like that is the only way out. Like, the only interface

Sam: 01:00:29

Yeah.

Emanuel: 01:00:30

That is more efficient is one without a screen or has, like, some sort of heads up display and is voice activated or is a neural implant. Like, the only way to make the iPhone more efficient is to go post screen.

Sam: 01:00:47

Yeah. I feel like part of you, part of your body, not like this other cool thing. Yeah. Yeah. Gross.

Emanuel: 01:00:52

Right. I think that's the only way out of the current paradigm, personally. You can fold your screen to have it be a an 80 inch TV. It just it doesn't help, but it's not a it's not what people want.

Joseph: 01:01:04

Yeah. Yeah.

Jason: 01:01:04

Can can we quickly play a Nokia pop quiz game?

Joseph: 01:01:08

Sure. I mean, if you yeah. If you're asking the question, that's

Jason: 01:01:10

good for you. What what year was Nokia founded?

Sam: 01:01:14

Like, the whole company or the mobile division?

Jason: 01:01:17

The whole company.

Sam: 01:01:17

The whole company was, like, late 1800.

Jason: 01:01:20

18/65. Yeah. What what country is Nokia from?

Sam: 01:01:25

Finland. Finland.

Jason: 01:01:26

Okay. Good. What does Nokia do now?

Joseph: 01:01:30

Say people, like, run the moon. Run surveillance infrastructure for the Russian government.

Sam: 01:01:35

They made the first cell phone network on the moon.

Joseph: 01:01:37

They do some

Jason: 01:01:38

of that. They do they do telecom infrastructure and 5 g stuff. They're still a very, very, very rich company. The the reason that I ask all of this is for this last question, which is, well, I guess it's not really a question, but they are the biggest provider of undersea cables as well.

Sam: 01:01:59

They they have, like crazy.

Jason: 01:02:01

Yeah. Nokia Subsea is one of the largest.

Sam: 01:02:05

Holy fuck.

Jason: 01:02:06

They, like, both lay and maintain Subsea Internet cables, which

Sam: 01:02:13

is pretty wild. Like, a long line of 33 tens. Just like, that's how strong they are.

Emanuel: 01:02:19

Made out of the phone.

Joseph: 01:02:20

That's why

Emanuel: 01:02:21

it's indestructible. Yeah.

Joseph: 01:02:22

That's good. I I was gonna say that that's crazy because, like, that's where the snakes are now. They're just going through those underground.

Jason: 01:02:29

Yeah. Yeah.

Sam: 01:02:30

That's what snake was. It was training data for the undersea tubes. I, I had this in the story, and I I cut it smartly. Joseph was like, what's your beef with Finland? But I was like, Nokia is older than Finland itself because Finland didn't gain independence until a day late until the early 1900.

Sam: 01:02:47

So Nokia was making, like, toilet paper. It was like a paper mill. And then

Jason: 01:02:52

In what country was it then?

Sam: 01:02:54

Don't ask me that. That's as far as my I don't know. What was Finland before it was Finland?

Joseph: 01:02:59

We're assuming that Sam is

Sam: 01:03:02

a deep I don't know anything about

Joseph: 01:03:04

countries that

Sam: 01:03:04

aren't US and barely that.

Joseph: 01:03:06

Deep Nokia.

Sam: 01:03:07

I assume it was, like, owned by France or something.

Joseph: 01:03:11

Right. Yeah. Well, that was really, really fun. Again, we'll figure out if we can show these in the YouTube one. But if if not, or if you wanna go through the archive yourself, go to the article, and then there is a link to, some long URL that I'm not gonna read out.

Joseph: 01:03:27

But you can, like, ping through and click through all of the different models and stuff. I didn't see this, before, but it is really, really cool. It's really, really well presented. So if you have any interest like, I'm already looking at stuff that we didn't even talk about. So I definitely encourage people to go have a look at that.

Jason: 01:03:44

It was part of the kingdom of Sweden.

Joseph: 01:03:47

Thank you.

Sam: 01:03:47

I was looking that up too. It was a Russian grand duchy. What? I gotta I gotta go read some of my computer. So we don't

Joseph: 01:03:55

take the article? Like, in big correction big correction. So even though it's not a correction, a clarification. I just wanna I'm

Sam: 01:04:03

glad she hasn't looked that up because I was embarrassed.

Joseph: 01:04:05

Yeah. Thank you. Alright. Let's leave that there, and I will play us out. As a reminder, As a reminder, 404 Media is journalist founded and supported by subscribers.

Joseph: 01:04:22

If you wish to subscribe to 404 Media and directly support our work, please go to 404media.c0. You'll get unlimited access to our articles and an ad free version of this podcast. You'll also get to listen to the subscribers only section where we talk about a bonus story each week. This podcast is made in partnership with Kaleidoscope. Another way to support us is by leaving a 5 star rating and review for the podcast.

Joseph: 01:04:45

That stuff really helps us out. Leave some more of those, and I will read them out at the end. This has been 404 Media. We will see you again next week.