The 404 Media Podcast (Premium Feed)

Joseph: 00:03

Hello, and welcome to the four zero four Media Podcast where we bring you unparalleled access in the world both online and IRL. Four zero four Media is a journalist founded company and needs your support. To subscribe. Go to 404media.co, as well as bonus content every single week. Subscribers also get access to additional episodes where we respond to their best comments.

Joseph: 00:26

Gain access to that content at 404media.co. I'm your host, Joseph, and with me are the other four zero four media cofounders, the first being Sam Cole.

Sam: 00:35

Hello.

Joseph: 00:37

Emmanuel Mayberg. Hey. And Jason Kebler.

Jason: 00:41

What's up?

Joseph: 00:42

Alright. Before we get into our last podcast of the year I mean, there are still gonna be podcasts in the feed. We'll explain this in post on the site, that sort of thing. Jason, we're doing a gift subscription thing for the next few days as a potential last minute Christmas or holiday gift. Can you just explain what the deal is then?

Jason: 01:06

Yeah. 25% off of gift subscriptions. I don't have the link in front of me, which is not helpful.

Joseph: 01:13

Well, I put it in the show notes. Have. I got it. I have done that.

Jason: 01:16

It's in the show notes. Yeah. So that's that's pretty much it. It's last minute Christmas slash holiday gifts, or I think can give it to yourself if you want, if you wanna be clever. But, yeah, do that, please.

Joseph: 01:30

I didn't realize you could do that. So if it's like well, maybe I don't

Jason: 01:34

You can be like a gift from Joseph to Joseph. I see. Yeah. I mean, I think you may need two different email addresses. I'm not exactly sure how it works because it uses a third party system because Ghost doesn't have GIF subscriptions native, but it does work.

Jason: 01:50

We've been using it for a long time.

Joseph: 01:52

Yeah. So if you wanna take advantage of that, scroll down in the show notes, copy that link, click that link, whatever, and you'll be able to get a a GIF for a loved one or yourself if you really feel like it. We're gonna do the first segment about a story we just published as normal. Then the second section is gonna be more of a year in review, some of our biggest and best and favorite stories and that sort of thing. This first story, Jason, this is one you worked on with Sam as well who did some additional reporting.

Joseph: 02:26

The headline was, Flock exposed its AI powered cameras to the Internet. We tracked ourselves. A lot of fun stuff going on here, a lot of insight into Flok and how it does track people, not just license plates, and there's a bit of sort of misunderstanding and miscommunication about that. But this starts with a tip that you got. What was that tip, and who gave it to you?

Jason: 02:53

Yeah. So the YouTuber Ben Jordan, who has done some really amazing research and reporting into Phlox discovered this essentially. And he published a YouTube video about this earlier this week. Some of my reporting is in that YouTube video, and then, you know, I spoke to him for this story. But essentially and I encourage you to check it out if you haven't seen it already.

Jason: 03:19

Although the video has, like, many, many views, so maybe you have seen it already. It's very good. But basically, Ben Jordan discovered that at least 60 Condor cameras were streaming directly to the Internet. And Condor cameras are Flux pan tilt zoom cameras. They're called PTZ cameras.

Jason: 03:44

And what pan tilt zoom means is kind of in the name, but they are surveillance cameras that can move and track people. And so they can pan, they can go like left to right, they can like go up and down, and they can zoom in on specific subjects.

Joseph: 04:00

And they're different to the license, the normal license plate reader cameras that everybody knows for? It's like a variation of their camera problem.

Jason: 04:07

Yeah. So FLoC has a few different types of cameras. It has a few different types of automated license plate reader cameras. Its main one is called Falcon, and those are ALPR cameras. And what those do is they are specifically, like, targeted at license plates.

Jason: 04:24

They take photos for the most part of cars as they drive by, whereas these Condor cameras are recording twenty four seven three sixty five and they're recording video. And their vantage point for the most part is a lot wider than a Falcon ALPR camera, so they're capturing like an entire scene, whereas an ALPR camera is largely just capturing, like, cars as they drive by. I say largely because, you know, they are taking footage and and photos and so, you know, you can see other things on the other types of cameras and you can sometimes see license plates on the Condor cameras and it's part of this like holistic flock surveillance ecosystem. So what Ben Jordan found was 60 of these exposed directly to the Internet. What I mean by that is you just need an IP address.

Jason: 05:25

It was not HTTPS. They were all HTTP, which I think is an important distinction just in terms of, like, the actual URL. And if you clicked it, you went to a flock administrative portal, and on that portal, could see live footage that was being filmed and streamed as it like, you know, live, obviously. You could see thirty one days of archived footage and download that footage. You could, you know, grab different clips.

Jason: 05:59

It was possible to change settings on these. You could see information about the cameras, like what type of camera it was, what software it was running. You could see logs, so, you know, access logs, things like uptime and downtime, like some of them would would be knocked off the Internet and then they would be back on, like, later that day, and there would be, like, a history of that more or less. And then also, you know, you could the the big the big thing was that the footage was there.

Joseph: 06:36

And all without a password. Yeah. As you say, like, it's not like it's not like there was some vulnerability in the admin panel that was then exploited and hacked inside. Like, this is not hacking. This is just a panel completely exposed to the wider Internet.

Joseph: 06:52

You just visit it, and it's like, damn. I'm now looking through a Flock camera.

Jason: 06:57

Yeah. You you you click a link and it's like you immediately see the footage and and or you see the administrative panel from which you can click another link to get to the footage, but there was no login, no password, no none of that, which suggests a huge, like, misconfiguration because this is not supposed to happen. And the way that Ben Jordan and John Gaines, who goes by Gainsec, he's a security researcher who found some vulnerabilities that Ben Jordan previously worked on, the way that he found these was through a commercial search engine called Shodan, and it is essentially an Internet of Things search engine that has led to a lot of different stories that we've written over the years because security researchers use it to find Internet of Things devices that are streaming directly to the Internet. So, like, off the top of my head, in the past, people have found, like, smart billboards that have been streaming to the Internet without an admin password, and so you can go in and you can, like, change what the billboard says or the image that it displays. Sometimes you see, like, road signs, like automated road signs that they put up in, like, work zones, and people often hack those.

Jason: 08:21

And sometimes they find them through Shodan, and they either have no password or they have, like, a password that's, like, AdminAdmin, and you can then change what they say.

Joseph: 08:32

You're able to basically search for very particular devices because you can search by show me all of the servers or devices that have a certain port open, and if there is something particularly unique about the products you're looking at, oh, maybe they have a weird port open that's only specific to that sort of service. You can sort of identify them. I don't know how the pair here identified these ones, but presumably, they found some sort of fingerprint of flock cameras and then just search showdown for that. I mean, think you could probably even search showdown for flocksafety.com, but their domains or something like that, very similar to census as well, which basically does the same thing.

Jason: 09:16

Yeah. I think it was a mix of of those few things. Right. Because I know that some of them were. You could just type in flock and they showed up.

Jason: 09:25

I do know that, but then there was like they iterated and they were able to find more just by doing, like, better searches. Let me talk about what we did. Yeah. So we see this footage that's streaming to the Internet, and we try to discover, like, where are these cameras located because all of them had IP addresses that gave us, like, a general geographic location, but it was still a very wide, like, margin for where something would be. For example, the cameras that I ended up going to see were in Bakersfield, California, which is about two hours north of LA with no traffic, which I got lucky.

Jason: 10:09

And I went up and and I saw them. But their IP addresses matched to Sacramento, which is six hours north of LA. And so

Joseph: 10:19

How did you figure that out? Because that's a that's a big discrepancy.

Jason: 10:22

Yeah. I mean, so I played GeoGuesser. I played the GeoGuesser guy, basically. And so, for example, one of the ones that I found was, at this Big O, tire shop. It wasn't owned by a Big O Tires, like, it was on a traffic light, but the intersection, I could see the name of one street, and I could see big o tires.

Jason: 10:48

And so I just used Google Maps and a lot of searching. And luckily, there was a time stamp of the footage in the top left corner of all this. I could see the time zone that things were in because, like, bizarrely, for some of these, like, some of the businesses would match or, like, the street names would match, but they would be in, like, different random cities across the country. And then I could sort of, like, figure things out via time zone, and then I used Street View, and I clicked around a lot through street view. Sam also did a lot of this for, for us, which was, like, extremely helpful.

Jason: 11:29

And she can talk a little bit more about what she saw, but but we were, like, clicking through a lot of these. There are about 60 of them. Again, I think we were able to geolocate about maybe 10. The others were just super nondescript. So they would be filming, like, a parking lot at an apartment complex where there was no visible, like, street signs or businesses or anything.

Jason: 11:55

There was one at, like, a skate park. There was one at a playground where children were playing, which is really, like, quite alarming.

Joseph: 12:02

Right.

Jason: 12:03

That that that that's there. And then I think the craziest one for me was the Peachtree Creek Greenway in Brookhaven, Georgia, which is in a suburb of Atlanta. And there were at least three exposed cameras there. And, like, one, these cameras zoom in on people who are walking by. So there was a woman walking her dog, and it just, like, zoomed in on her as she was, you know, walking the dog.

Jason: 12:36

And then it would follow her around. And then, I don't know, Sam, do wanna talk about the rollerblader?

Sam: 12:41

Yeah. Yeah. This was a really crazy camera feed to look at because, like, again, these these cameras are not looking at cars specifically in a lot of cases. They're looking for people, and there were no cars in this park, obviously. So, like, these cameras are put here to watch people.

Sam: 12:59

But this guy, we were able to watch him rollerblading up and down this one path. So you can click on one feed, see him come into view. The camera zooms in on him, watches him rollerblade away, like, with a friend sometimes, and then you can click on another feed and watch him coming through a different part of the park in almost real time, and his friend drops off eventually. And then we did this for a while. We just watched him, like, go around the park, and, obviously, he has no idea that these cameras are here, but he rollerblades up at one point, and the camera zooms in on his face, and then he passes a woman.

Sam: 13:37

It zooms in on her face, and she kinda turns around and looks she's on the phone. She's like turns around, like, kinda seems like she's saying to her friend, like, this dude just rollerbladed past me really fast. And then he comes up to the camera where the camera the pole that the camera is on stops directly underneath the camera, and the camera has followed him all the way to that point. And now it's looking directly down at the ground where he's standing, like, zooming in on his face and his phone. And he's standing there stopped on his phone watching footage of himself with he's been recording rollerblading.

Sam: 14:14

I was just like, this is, like, so yeah. That's how clear it is. Like, you can see I mean, this camera's probably, nine feet off the ground or something. It's not that high, but it zooms all the way down on his face, and then you can see him holding his camera or holding his phone, and he's watching, like, replays of himself. Obviously, he's, like, recording content or something or, like, watching his own form or something.

Sam: 14:37

But it's just so it's it was so bizarre because, like, we write about this stuff all the time. We understand that these cameras are everywhere. And knowing that they're everywhere and going about your day and not thinking really that much about them, but being, like, intellectually aware that they're everywhere and you're being watched is one thing. But then being able to look at the view from the camera, from the point of view of the flock camera watching everyone in this park very closely all day long is such a different experience. And you're like, woah.

Sam: 15:08

These people have no idea that these cameras are here or that they're being watched. Just really strange feeling.

Joseph: 15:15

Yeah. So there's you were watching that footage of sort of these random people, and obviously, we didn't publish any identifying information about these random passersby. But as you said, Jason, you then, with Sam's help, geolocated some. You drove to a couple, and the the benefit of that, I suppose, was, well, to confirm their flock cameras. I mean, we already knew it because flock is, like, in the configuration information, but you can look at it and go, Well, that's a flock condor camera, or whatever.

Joseph: 15:47

They are very, very distinct looking branding wise. Then also, of course, it's just in the same sort of way we do some of our other pieces where like, I've bought phone location data from a bounty hunter, blah blah blah. It's just there's something about putting yourself and almost testing it yourself and maybe that gets it across to the reader in a more tangible way. Was that like the benefit of doing this? Like, because you didn't have to drive two hours.

Joseph: 16:16

It's very good

Jason: 16:16

you did. I definitely I definitely didn't have to. I'm very glad that I did for the reasons that you said. One, I knew exactly what I was doing because I had watched that footage already of that intersection, but then it was quite weird and and, like, sort of it's sort of affecting to myself to to drive to that corner, see the camera that I had been watching online, get out of the car and walk into the intersection, and then see myself show up on the feed, which is obviously what would happen. And yet, for some reason, it made it feel a lot more real to me.

Jason: 16:58

And then I was also just able to, you know, I was able to watch myself on the feed. Sam was watching the feed as well, and so she saw me and texted me. I was like, here's you. Here's like, she took a screenshot and sent me, you know, a screenshot of myself walking in the middle of the street in random Bakersfield, you know, Sam sitting 3,000 miles away. And then I also could see the cameras, so I I was able to just make sure that it was flat cameras.

Jason: 17:30

I could sort of figure out, like, how they were situated. In this case, it's like the camera's really high off the ground, like, at the very top of the pole. I don't think anyone would notice it. Like, it it's very like, it's not hidden by any stretch, but it's, like, 40 feet off the ground. And if you're driving or walking by, like, unless you're just staring up into the sky, you're not gonna see it.

Jason: 17:56

And then another notable thing is that it was outside of a mall, outside of a Macy's was one of the corners of the intersection. And they had a bunch of flock ALPR cameras, the Falcon cameras at the entrance to this mall. And so it does sort of it it showed me that it's like part of a more holistic surveillance situation, like, in this area. And then I went from that one, I drove five minutes and I I found another one. And, you know, I only know of two that were exposed in Bakersfield, but Bakersfield has, like, dozens and dozens of these cameras.

Jason: 18:32

The other thing that I would say is that I then went and did more reporting. I pulled contracts about these cameras. I watched a flock webinar that they gave to police introducing these cameras a few years ago. And I do think that our work over the last year has been really important as has the work of a lot of other journalists in sort of explaining how FLoC works and how pervasive it is. But our work has almost entirely focused on its automated license plate reader cameras, which again is the dominant product that Phlox sells.

Jason: 19:12

But it's very clear that this company wants to be a lot more, and they want to be a holistic surveillance system for American cities that is networked in all the ways that we've talked about before. But but, basically, like, the footage from these cameras, at least as FLoC presents it to police, can be streamed directly to something called FLoC OS, which you've written about, and it's basically like a police operating system for all of their flock cameras and you can also sometimes put other devices in there as well.

Joseph: 19:47

Bring cameras now? Restock?

Jason: 19:49

Mhmm. And so like you can if you're a cop sitting in a command center or whatever, you can pull up these these cameras and their footage, and you can control the cameras. Like, you can pan tilt zoom them. You can you know, they can also be automated. So last year, they introduced AI that automatically tracks people.

Jason: 20:14

We have no idea whether these cameras that we saw were being operated manually or whether the AI was operating them. It's just like we have no way of knowing, but they were a lot of them were zooming in on people. But, anyways, in this webinar, they were like, well, if you have an an ALPR hit, like, you have a plate hit, you can then just pull up the surveillance camera and then you can, like, click from camera to camera to camera and you can operate them and and all of this. And it just sort of shows that FLoC, again, is not just tracking cars. It is tracking people, pedestrians.

Jason: 20:50

And then, of course, by tracking cars, it's tracking the people who are in the cars. But it's it's just like they have a much bigger surveillance network than I think most people realize.

Joseph: 21:05

Yeah. I guess just to round it out, what did Flock say when you approached them for comment about this misconfiguration?

Jason: 21:13

Well, I asked them a lot of questions about how this happened and they just sent a very short statement in which they said this was a misconfiguration that affected a small number of cameras. They didn't say what the misconfiguration was or how many cameras it ultimately affected, and they said that it has been fixed, which it has been fixed, thankfully. Yep. And, yeah, I I mentioned this at the top, but the YouTube video by Ben Jordan is really good on this. You know, he he made it and sort of, like, took I I gave him some of my footage because, like, he was a he was a researcher on on this story for him, and he found the initial thing.

Jason: 22:00

And so I was like, well, I'm gonna go check it out, and I'll let you know. But he did he showed some of the stuff that is possible with this type of footage. We didn't do this because I don't know. It just seemed we we didn't wanna do it. But but I think it's good that he did, which is, like, he used facial recognition on some

Emanuel: 22:23

of

Jason: 22:23

the footage that he saw, and he was able to determine who individual people were. And then he did, like, open source intelligence on some of them and, like, learned a lot about people who were at different sites who who were on these cameras. And, like, of course, he anonymized it and he changed some details and and that sort of thing. But he basically showed, like, with this footage streaming insecurely, like, you can learn a lot about a person depending on sort of, like, what they're doing, and I thought that that was pretty shocking.

Joseph: 22:59

Yeah. Just to be clear, To clarify, FLoC itself does not have facial recognition that they've said repeatedly, like, we don't have that capability. Maybe that changes in the future. I don't know. But right now, they don't do that.

Joseph: 23:15

I guess what he did is kind of similar to what those students did where they took those metal ray bands, which at the time didn't have facial recognition in them either, but sort of glued that on. But, yeah, the footage is incredibly crisp and very, very detailed, and I can imagine it'd be very, very easy to identify people in that footage.

Jason: 23:36

Yeah. He ran it through a third party facial recognition system.

Joseph: 23:39

Like PIM Eyes or something probably.

Jason: 23:41

I assume PIM Eyes. I'm not sure which one, but, yeah, like, through a, like, a a non flock related one, but took the footage itself Yeah. Exported it, put it put it through a different system, and then using Google and social media and, like, all that once you knew it's like, oh, this is what this person was actually doing at the Lowe's, like, parking lot, or this is what the person was doing at this Christmas market that where another camera was. It's pretty crazy.

Joseph: 24:12

Alright. We'll leave that there. When we come back after the break, we're gonna run through some of our major stories of the past year. We'll be right back after this. Alright.

Joseph: 24:34

And we are back. I don't really have headlines for this one. Sam, you've written sort of preemptively is it this this Friday, next Friday, like a sort of year in

Sam: 24:45

Two Fridays from now.

Joseph: 24:47

Two Fridays. I'm kind of already losing all sense of time. But you've done something you've written something that kinda looks back over the year. How did you pick out these stories? They just jumped out to you, or these were the ones that most people read?

Joseph: 25:00

Or

Sam: 25:00

No. These are so in lieu of the usual, like, weekly roundup on the second, on January 2, because we'll all be out and not, like, publishing heavily that week, I put together just like a roundup instead of the weekly roundup. It's just a yearly roundup. It's pretty short, but it'll hold you over if you're in need of the the roundup that day. But I looked at just like analytics for the site, like top stories that we have traffic wise for the last year.

Sam: 25:29

And then also just, like because a lot of the the top stories are kind of, like, one off, like, not really part of a bigger beat, but people they went viral for whatever reason. But then there were quite a few stories that were, like, part of, like, a consistent beat that altogether make it, like, the most important or, like, most impactful beats of of the year for that specific topic. So that's kind of the the thinking for that. It's a mix of, like, here's some stuff that people really liked to click on this year, which we can go over. But then there are just, like, bigger, broader topics that all altogether can make up something that really resonated with people.

Joseph: 26:15

Yeah. Let's let's run through some of these. The first one is the Doge website, which I think anybody could push data to it or, well, or emojis or or or whatever they wanted really. Jason, I think this is one you wrote. People were very interested in this because, I mean, this is way back when Doge Doge was the news every day, like, earlier in the year.

Joseph: 26:38

Right?

Jason: 26:38

Yeah. And I mean, for good reason. I think that the damage that Doge did to our federal government and programs, obviously, like USAID and NIH, etcetera, like, cannot be overstated. But, yeah, there was basically, like, few days early in the year, if I'm remembering correctly, so much has happened this year, where the Fed where where Elon Musk was tweeting that Doge was saving, like, all this money and it was saving, you know, billions of dollars, I assume. It it was a lot of money.

Jason: 27:13

And he was it actually wasn't a lot of money, but Elon Musk was saying that it was a lot of money. Let me be clear. And so they were saying, like, we've killed all these programs. Also, we're super transparent. They weren't being transparent.

Jason: 27:29

And so they were like, we're making a website where we are going to explain everything that we've done and how much money it's saved and blah blah blah. And so they slapped together this, like, really shitty website that I believe was being run on a WordPress that was not fully hosted on government servers because they spun it up so quickly. And, like, not only did it first have, like, a weird templatized thing that they put up publicly, like, that was one of the stories that we did. When it did finally go truly live, the database that they were using was vulnerable to, like, an SQL injection, I believe, like a SQL injection. And so it was, like, a very rudimentary type of, like, basically very in a very simple way for people who know what they're doing, they could add and delete things from this website or specifically they could add to it.

Jason: 28:27

And so people were, like, adding their own, like, projects that they had cut more or less. And so some of the hackers, like, sent us the entries that they had pushed onto the live site that said, like, rude things about Elon Musk, and we wrote about that. And it was during a period where there was such intense interest in this that it was, like, very viral story for us. I mean, it was a very bad situation altogether, but, like, compared to the actual damage that the government was doing, like, this was largely just like a really shoddy, like, website configuration situation.

Joseph: 29:08

It was emblematic of the damage they were doing, as you said.

Jason: 29:11

Yeah. And, they Reminds me of the Epstein files dump just in terms of, like, how shoddy and, like, things were showing up, and they were disappearing, and they were showing up again. And

Joseph: 29:22

Failed redactions.

Jason: 29:24

Yeah. Yeah.

Joseph: 29:25

Yeah. We don't need to get into all of that, but we've all been I won't. Looking we'll be looking into that in in in various ways. The redaction one is really funny. The second one was the tele message hack.

Joseph: 29:38

This is one I did. I worked with Michael Lee, the security researcher on and journalist on this as well. Basically, there was a photo where a Trump administration official was using something that looked like Signal, and of course, coming after Signal Gate where, you know, The Atlantic editor in chief was accidentally added to a group chat with Yemen strike plans, SIGNAL was very, very hot at the moment then, so I zoom in onto the photo and find out that's not SIGNAL. That's something else. I can't remember exactly what it was, but I think it was definitely something in the UI.

Joseph: 30:13

It's like, that is not quite SIGNAL. I look around, and it's this Signal clone from a company called TeleMessage. The idea is that it claims to be able to provide the protection of Signal, which it doesn't, to be clear, but they say that, while also archiving messages for compliance or regulatory reasons or legal issues or whatever. Lots of these products exist. I remember Wicca is sort of this It was a consumer end to end messaging app they shut down after it was being used by child abusers way too much, and NBC News reported on that.

Joseph: 30:47

I think we did a little bit as well. But they had a product where Customs and Border Protection, for instance, could use the app and then also archive the messages for later. Anyway, Tally Message is one of those. We've reported that, hey. Look.

Joseph: 31:01

You know, the the government is using this particular tool, which I'd never heard of. You go on YouTube, at the time, it had, like, a couple 100 views. It seemed like a very, very small shop and operation. I mean, it was actually owned by a larger company, but the app itself didn't seem to be that well known. Then very shortly after, it was hacked, sent a bunch of information, including data on CPP officials to verify it.

Joseph: 31:29

I'm just going through the phone numbers of these officials and calling them and asking, hey. Is that blah blah blah from CPP? They say yes. I'm like, I'm a journalist, there's been a breach. I'm trying to verify and usually, they hang up at that point, and one definitely did do that.

Joseph: 31:43

But we verified the data, published that, and then it was like twenty four or forty eight hours later, very soon after, another hacker got in and apparently got more data, and NBC reported that. Obviously, this was a massive security failure. The hackers managed to get a bunch more data about other government agencies. Senator Ron Wyden sent a letter to the DOJ about it. Honestly, I kind of almost forgot about the story because it has been such a crazy year, and I think people might sort of conflate it with SignalGate.

Joseph: 32:24

I mean, they are related, but I imagine people may even forget about this hack as well because, I mean, signal gate signal gate was so significant when we were sharing those Yemen attack plans. But, yeah, that went crazy. And I I

Jason: 32:38

mean, what they have in common is that it just shows how, like, people in high up at the administration just, like, don't understand how signal works. Like, they they don't, like, take you know, it's only as secure as any of the endpoints, and it's just, like, they're super reckless about it. Yeah. Including up to the point that it's just like they didn't vet this, you know, this offshoot to this this fork of of signal.

Joseph: 33:03

I remember while it was happening, I had a lot of sources well, not sources. I'll say tipsters reaching out. They were, like, sending me alleged photos from a security conference that was happening at the same time, and I didn't write this up in an article at the time, but it was pretty interesting. The TeleMessage was being or rather, think it was Smash, the parent company. They were at a security conference displaying the product, and they had some sort of tagline about, oh, we're the most secure messaging product or something along those lines, and then someone took a photo.

Joseph: 33:36

Then the day later, that had actually been taken off the stall because then we broke news of the hack, so I don't know. I thought that was pretty funny. And I'm just, like, looking through contracts now which mention tele message. There's one from 09/22/2025 with some agency, and then there's one September 11 with another another agency there. So the government's still using this tool.

Joseph: 34:05

They haven't got rid of it, so who knows? Maybe we'll see another hack in the future. Speaking of hacks, Emmanuel, you wrote a lot about tea. It started with a hack, then another hack, and then your broader story. Just walk us through that, sort of well, what is tea, first of all, and what and what was the first hack?

Emanuel: 34:28

Yeah. So I would say that tea's story begins in the media before we actually step into it, and that is back in July, I believe. Sometime during the summer, Tee shot up in the App Store ranking, and Tee is an app where women could log in and share information about men that they dated or want to date, and other women would chime in and share what we call red flags or green flags, saying, oh, this man is someone you shouldn't date because he cheated, or sometimes more severe accusations like he was physically abusive, sometimes relatively benign things like, he's rude, he ghosted, things like that. And that became very popular and got some coverage in the news with the framing that this was a way for women to come together and fight back against men who are, you know, nasty that a lot of women run into on the dating apps. And I think this was on July 25.

Emanuel: 36:06

I woke up in the morning, and I got a frenzied call from basically a good Samaritan Right. Who said that all the data from the T app, namely the selfies and photos of IDs that women uploaded to the app in order to verify that they are actually women, which was like one of the selling points of the app, were being leaked on 4chan, and this person had tried reporting it to Tee, he tried reporting it to Google, which is where all this data was leaking from, there's this thing called Google Firebase, which is a platform where you can kind of deploy your mobile app, and that was misconfigured and allowed anyone to dig through its data. And I think, Joe, at that point, I kind of I got in touch with you, and we started to

Joseph: 36:58

write You that sent me a frenzy text, I think.

Emanuel: 37:01

Yeah. I was like, oh, this seems actually like because we get a lot of tips about leaks, and sometimes they're from, like, cybersecurity companies, sometimes they're just from people who know this stuff, but it's like, this one seemed like really bad, and I think we both recognize that because of the intimate nature of the data. Like, lot of the time, it's text and addresses and emails, and you have to sort through it, but we kind of took like one look, and we were like, okay, well, here's thousands of images of women's faces and their IDs, and we were like, okay, well, this seems bad, let's verify it. We had some But

Joseph: 37:35

it was also the 4chan connection.

Emanuel: 37:36

Right, and the 4chan like, it wasn't just that the data leaked, it leaked with like malicious intent, right? Like these guys on 4chan, you know, the framing in the media was this was a way for women to fight back against bad men, and then, like, the misogynist community on 4chan was like, fuck that, and we're going to fight back against that, and like, really embarrass and make these women's lives hell. We had some interesting, very quick methods for verifying that the hack was was real, and we published about that, and that was a huge story. Think that was like the most clicked on thing that I published this year, with the exception of like, there was like an Alibaba AI video model that was released, and I noticed it was immediately turned into like a porn producing machine. Never wrote that in, five minutes, and I think that maybe got a little bit more.

Emanuel: 38:35

Anyway

Joseph: 38:36

That's just how it is sometimes.

Emanuel: 38:37

Yeah. Right? Yeah. But we we we wrote that up, and I think that was, like, a big enough story as is. But then things got much worse, like amazingly as bad as that was.

Emanuel: 38:51

The more we reported on it, the worse the story got, and there's two big beats there. One is we immediately find out that there was another vulnerability, and we had good reason to believe that people took advantage of it, and this one was a leak of the direct messages that women were sending each other on the app and discussing, like, extremely personal, extremely volatile things about each other, about things that happened to them, about accusations about men that they've been with.

Joseph: 39:29

Personal data, phone numbers,

Emanuel: 39:31

addresses, like really, really terrible hack just because of how specific the data is, and also the context of the conversations there, you know, because of the subject of the app and what women are there to talk about is not the kind of thing you want leaked. Especially since the app is advertising itself, it's like, this is a safe space for you to discuss these things. So we wrote about that, and then a lot of people came out of the woodwork to tell me about the origin of the TEApp, like how this whole thing got started and who was behind it. And the short version there is that there's this practice online that is most popular on Facebook, there's but there's one group in particular called Are We Dating the Same Guy that Sam had covered previously, which does basically the exact thing that the tea app does, only it's on Facebook, and it's free, and it's like a grassroots community managed thing.

Joseph: 40:43

And it came a it came a long time before tea.

Emanuel: 40:46

Yeah. It came years before, and the person behind that, Paula Sanchez, would say, who I talked to for the story, would say, you know, this is currently like the biggest one, but she would admit that she's not the first person to do it, it's just one that was well organized and caught on. And basically, the guy who founded T, Sean Cook, he essentially kind of stole that idea, tried to recruit Paolo Sanchez, who is the founder of Are We Dating? The same guy, to be the face of the app, and once she made it clear that she is not going to do that, he essentially just started poaching her audience and her community by false advertising and trying to blur the lines between what is the are we dating the same guy community on Facebook, and what is the T app?

Joseph: 41:42

By making these fake groups, is fake fair to say?

Emanuel: 41:45

Fake Facebook profiles and just jumping into every conversation and telling women to join the tea app, because they'll find information about the man that they're asking about there, whether that was true or not, and just a lot of shady practices, which I know now by like, because I've continued to talk to people about this story, and people are still reaching out about it, and I am working on like a longer term follow-up to something about tea. And I know for a fact now that this is something that worked, and it did confuse people in the Are We Dating the Same Guy community, and caused them to join T, and then that resulted their information being leaked. And I guess the other thing about the story that I think we will continue to report on in some fashion is that it touches on something that we've all written about at some point. Joe, the thing that always comes to mind is the story that you wrote about this account on TikTok that was doxxing people randomly and using Pymize, Pymize or Pymize? Pymize.

Emanuel: 43:03

We talked about on this podcast, that it's like a facial recognition thing that anyone can pay for and use online to find people. We're just in this point with surveillance tech, and how accessible it is, and how knowledgeable the average person is about how it works and how to use it and how to access it, that anyone can docs anyone and anyone can find anyone, and that's just created a new normal online that we, I don't think, fully adapted to yet. And that is just like, I think, a core component of the story. It's like, you have these women coming together for good reason, they want to share information. In doing so, they're using all the surveillance tech online, and then that backfires, and that's used against them, and it's just like, it's really, really messy, I guess, in a new and upsetting upsetting way.

Emanuel: 44:09

And I'm sure that will come up next year also.

Joseph: 44:13

Yeah. I think that's a very, very good takeaway. We live in a very, very strange world when it comes to surveillance by ordinary people who think it's like a good thing to just unmask strangers for seemingly no reason and all that sort of stuff. Sam, to round us out, we touched on this, I think, a couple of episodes ago, but you've been doing a ton on the age verification laws, which now cover half of The United States. I mean, also related to people uploading their IDs or at least potentially in some cases.

Joseph: 44:43

Right? What's sort of been your takeaway this year after doing that that coverage for, yeah, for the past year?

Sam: 44:53

Yeah. So the first story that I wrote on the first of the year, last year, was that Pornhub was now blocked in almost all of The US South, and that comprised 17 states at the time. And then, you know, when you look at a map, it's just like the entire South Of The United States was not able to go to Pornhub without a VPN. Let me put it that way, I guess, because Pornhub had blocked access in all these states that have age verification legislation in place. This all started it started a long time ago, obviously, as these things do.

Sam: 45:35

But as far as legislation getting passed, it started about two years ago where Louisiana passed the first law to require platforms, specifically porn platforms and doll platforms that contain more than a third god. What's the word they use? It's not I don't even think that they say obscenity. They say harmful material

Joseph: 45:57

or something.

Sam: 45:58

It's material harmful to minors, I think, in both in most of the laws, but they do vary. It's like there is a different word for this depending on what state you're in a lot of times. But, you know, quote unquote material harmful to minors, and then they define material harmful to minors as porn. And then in some states, material harm for the minors is also, like, queer content, content with trans people in it, stuff like that. So this has been something that I've been following since since then and since a little bit before then with the passage of these laws.

Sam: 46:32

And this year, as of a couple weeks ago, we're now looking at about half of The United States is we just passed the halfway mark is under age verification law. So that means that in most of these states not every state, but in most of the states, PornHub has decided to not service those states. So you can't access them. You hit a wall. You see Charitable giving a very eloquent speech about why they're not Charitable Charitable is a porn performer, about why they're not come they're complying with the law by shutting down access to their site because Pornhub has the stance that the laws are censorship.

Sam: 47:19

This is also our stance, just to be clear. Censorship chilling effect on adult speech and is also privacy risky. There's implications for users' privacy when you're collecting something like licenses and IDs and passports in some cases and, you know, like biometric data and things like that that are required by the law. So most people have gone around this by using VPNs, and now VPNs are up for debate. There's, you know, pushes here and there by people in power to oppose or even make VPNs illegal.

Sam: 48:02

I mean, there's nothing, like, actually in the books about this yet because it would be crazy, but obviously crazier

Joseph: 48:10

than have been. Would they do that? I mean, maybe it's not clear yet, but is it like we're gonna tell the app stores you can't sell or deliver a VPN app in x y z state? Like, how does that even work?

Sam: 48:23

I mean, it's like it wouldn't work. Like, the only way that it would work, it would be to, like, crush a lot of the actual good uses of VPNs that lots of people and companies use VPNs for. So I don't know. It's like I'm I'm not ruling that out, but it would be a big deal if that happened. There are places where I think the the law is that and I don't know if this is past law yet or if it's just it's still kind of in, like, the the stage of moving through toward being an act of legislation.

Sam: 49:00

But adult sites might not be able to recommend BBNs, which is something that, you know, is what some sites are getting around this with. They're saying, you know, use a VPN to access our content. Yeah. It's it's something that I've been following for a long time, and it it starts to feel very incremental and, like, we're repeating ourselves over and over when we report on this stuff. But every time I write about something like this passing in a new state, like, you know, it's we write a blog about how it passed in Mississippi, passed in Wyoming, passed in South Dakota separately every time it happens.

Sam: 49:36

And I'm like, god. I'm repeating myself over and over. But then someone will reply and say, I didn't know that my state was one of these states. I didn't know I was in a state where this was happening, which I think is, like, a big deal. I think you should know what the law is in your state in order to, like, decide whether or not you oppose it.

Sam: 49:58

So, yeah, it's it's something that we're gonna keep covering, obviously. It's a huge part of a huge part of the Internet and being able to access it is being able to access it freely for adults. And now especially we have increasing pressure on totally repealing and disbanding section two thirty, which is definitely all related. So we're gonna be following that into the New Year as well.

Joseph: 50:25

Yeah. Sound I mean, I don't ever wanna think about New Year just yet. But

Sam: 50:29

Me neither.

Joseph: 50:29

Yes. I just

Sam: 50:30

wanna think about

Joseph: 50:30

the next weeks. We we yeah. We will be doing that. Alright. We'll leave that there.

Joseph: 50:36

If you're listening to the free version of the podcast, I'll now play us out. But if you are a paying four or four media subscriber, we're gonna talk about a bunch of our fun recommendations. Well, mine mine is fun. I haven't actually looked to your others because I wanna be surprised for the next segment, but I'm going say they're fun. You can subscribe and gain access to that content at 404media.co.

Joseph: 50:56

We'll be right back after this. Alright. We're back in the eSubscribers only section. I've deliberately just put our names here and what we wanna recommend. Who wants to go first?

Jason: 51:19

Can I rudely go first? I have a doctor's appointment somewhat soon. We've talked we've talked we've talked too long. I'm sorry.

Joseph: 51:28

I'm also getting water, so you start and I will Okay.

Jason: 51:31

Yeah. You don't need to listen. So I I recommended a bunch of items, which I said in in the little thing that I wrote. I I try not to buy that much stuff normally, but this year was I I failed and once I started failing, I just kept failing. I got married this year which is very exciting and you spend a lot of money when you get married and I just went to like fucking mode.

Jason: 51:53

I'm just gonna buy whatever I want for like a you know, give myself permission to do that. I bought a lot of printers, many many printers. The first one that I would recommend is a thermal label printer, just any sort of thermal label printer. If you mail any packages or any gifts or anything of any sort ever. I got a Rolo wireless one a few days ago that has been immediately life changing.

Jason: 52:23

I had I already had one for not a Rolo, but a one that printed two by seven inch labels. This one prints four by six inch labels, which is important because you can do UPS, FedEx, and international USPS in addition to regular USPS. And it's just like it makes mailing stuff so much easier. If you have one of these and you don't have to wait in line at the post office, like, even one time, I feel like it's worth it. And it makes you feel like you work at, like, a fulfillment center in a in a cool way.

Jason: 52:56

I really like it. Very cool.

Joseph: 52:58

Makes sense. Jason, do you have time to stay for my rec, or do you have to go right now?

Jason: 53:03

Oh, we're doing only one rec. Okay. That's Well,

Joseph: 53:05

I thought I thought we're doing one each, but, like, what do you wanna do? Do you wanna

Jason: 53:09

do I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna and then so some some shows I like, like Silo, I Pluribus, watched this movie called Heretic with Hugh Grant. I really like the band Hot Mulligan. Check them out. The Peaches or the Beaches, not the Peaches, the Beaches. Primer, which is the band of Alyssa Midcalf, is our podcast producer, very good.

Jason: 53:35

Some books, Loud and Clear by Brian Anderson, Physical Education by Casey Johnston, Careless Fuel by Sarah Williams, and then all of our indie media colleagues, The Handbasket, Aftermath, Freemap Radio, listen to their HOA series, Defector, Blood and the Machine, Read Max, LA Taco, Hellgate, the fifty first, Taylor Lorenz's newsletter, Usermag, Garbage Day, and then probably a lot more that I'm forgetting right now. I'll leave it there.

Joseph: 54:05

That's cool. So I'm gonna recommend one video game selfishly. And I just wanna do it quickly so Jason's here in case, like because I know he feels a little bit differently about it. But as I wrote in the BTB that you'll probably see, it is Hades two, and that is a roguelike game. It's on Switch.

Joseph: 54:27

It's on PC. I don't think it's on anything else yet, but I've been waiting for this for years and years and years. I played the first Hades for something like three sixty hours. I don't have the number front of me, but I played it an absolute fuck ton. I played the new one for $70.80 maybe.

Joseph: 54:44

Again, it's in the BTB, I did check it on Switch. But it's a game set in Greek mythology, and you are constantly doing a run over and over and over again. The combat is really, really clicky responsive and dynamic. You have all of these different weapons like a huge axe that feels really weighty. There's some quick knives which suck until you unlock a particular variant for them.

Joseph: 55:15

But what made the original Hades so good was that usually when you die in a video game, it feels like a failure, obviously, and that's by design. It's meant to be a failure state. Hades made it so every time you die and you go back to a little hub world, there's always new story. There's always new dialogue, so you never felt bad dying and then having to go again because there's always something to look forward to, and I think Hades two builds on that in every single way except the story. The story sucks, and I think that's kind of a a generally held belief.

Joseph: 55:49

I think Aftermath said much the same thing as well. And this will get to what I think me and Jason disagree with. I like Hades and Hades two because it's not just a rogue like, it's a rogue lite, as in you get these permanent upgrades that actually do make the game easier, and if if you want to challenge yourself, you turn those off or you don't unlock them. But I love that feeling of progression. So even though I've died, I'm like, well, I'm gonna be better this run.

Joseph: 56:17

I'm gonna be able to progress, and I need that in one of these games where you're doing the same thing over and over again. Jason, you feel differently about, like, permanent unlocks. Right?

Jason: 56:29

No. No. I liked Hades two and I beat Hades two and I played it for, twenty hours and I think it's good, but it's not my favorite of these types of games because of some of these unlocks. Basically, Hades two feels very linear to me in that each run is a little bit easier than the last, and also it's very hard to be at the beginning, possibly impossible because it is forcing you to fail for part of the story. And I think that's cool, but I much prefer games like Enter the Gungeon is my favorite, where there's a little bit more randomness in between the runs.

Jason: 57:09

There's more variety in between the runs. I felt like in Hades two, I just started doing the same thing over and over and over again, which you don't necessarily have to do. Like, you can you can choose different weapons and choose different boons and stuff like that, But I found I found it to be like each run, was a little bit better than the time before, whereas in enter the gungeon, you do unlock things, you do become more powerful over time, but there is a bigger variance between each run. So you you might beat the game, like, on your fifth run and it's entirely possible because you get something that's, like, so overpowered and you just, like, blast through it. And then you might lose on your five hundredth run after you've unlocked everything because you just like get shitty stuff.

Jason: 58:04

And I prefer that because I feel, forgive me, I feel like it's way more skill based because you have to become much better at making do with what you get. And you have to get really good at, like, avoiding damage and not getting hurt. Whereas in Hades two and games like it, you basically, like, unlock stuff, you get more powerful, and each run, you get a little bit better. I don't know if that's, like, the case once you've unlocked everything and you're, like, adding different, like, variances. Like, I I didn't do that.

Jason: 58:46

I just beat the story and then I stopped, but I know that you can, like, make the enemies harder and, like, all that, and I assume it makes the game harder and maybe I would like that more, but I lost interest by that point.

Joseph: 58:55

Yeah. I did all of the challenges where you put on something like 30 modifiers and just like, it's a different game, and I love that stuff. And I think I mean, don't go if obviously, don't go back if the time has moved on. But, like, to me, that's like, oh, I have to really understand the weapons. I have to really understand the enemies because I have all of these modifiers.

Joseph: 59:17

If I screw up, it's, oh, that's the run over. You know? And I did that in the first one. I enjoyed that in the second one. Sam, do you wanna go next?

Sam: 59:27

I played Hades for about two hours, and it was hard.

Joseph: 59:31

Nice stuff. Hades two.

Sam: 59:33

Yeah. Two. Yep. So that's my Hades take. It was very pretty.

Sam: 59:39

It was nice to look at, and it was a little horny, which I liked.

Joseph: 59:44

Nowhere near as horny is the first one, to be clear. I was constantly complaining about this to my mom, Jason. It's nowhere near.

Sam: 59:50

Okay. I need to go back. My Switch is having a thing that I think is common to Switches, but I it gets to a point where it stops charging. Like, it dies completely, and then I plug it in and it doesn't charge anymore. And, like, I leave it plugged in for, like, forty eight hours, and then eventually it starts to charge.

Sam: 01:00:08

Anyway, if you know anything about what's going on with that, let me know. I think the answer is just like I have to play my Switch more so that it remembers to be alive. And then my recommendations for the year were things to buy, which I already got clowned on by Jason who has bought a billion things this year and recommended all of them, and all of them are very good. I've also bought a billion things this year and don't recommend any of them. My recommendation for the podcast is hard to choose.

Sam: 01:00:36

I mean, I guess I would recommend getting into a really good fiction series, which is hard for me to do, not because I'm some kind of big brain, but, like, I just I really have to be into a fiction book just to read it past, like, the first half chapter. Like, I will put a book down so fast and never return to it. And people are always like, you should stick with it. It's like, I don't want to because it bored me in the first 10 pages, and I'm not learning

Joseph: 01:01:04

anything. None of it happens.

Sam: 01:01:06

And what?

Joseph: 01:01:08

None of it happens. It's all made

Sam: 01:01:09

up. Exactly. Not learning anything. So, like, I'm like, there's no reason to really stick with it if I'm not entertained by it because the only purpose for me reading it is to be entertained by it. And I read a lot of nonfiction that doesn't entertain me or grip me, but I'm at least learning something.

Sam: 01:01:22

So, anyway, my recommendation is to get into something that's really, like, engrossing. And for me right now, very cringily is the Anne Rice Vampire Chronicles, the first three books. I'm on the third book right now, so no spoilers. I'm on Queen of the Damned, which is also something that Matthew Gault has called me about, But he gave up over the first book, I think. So, anyway, I I would say that's my recommendation because that's probably what I'm gonna be doing over the break is continuing that series.

Sam: 01:01:52

And I also would recommend starting a series that has, like, a billion books in it or, like, an author that you like that has written a ton of books. I would say my last year's that for me last year was authors who did, like, historical fiction. So I was reading, like, all of Jennifer Saint's books. She did, like, Hera and Atalanta and a bunch of others, Elektra. And I just could, like, go directly to the next one and not have to think about what my next book would be.

Sam: 01:02:32

Anyway, I guess that's something to buy. You could go to the library for that, though, but I bought them on Kindle because I'm a Kindle freak, but, yeah, those are mine.

Joseph: 01:02:40

Oh, I didn't know that. That's funny.

Emanuel: 01:02:41

Sam, can I ask, when do you read? Like, when in the day?

Sam: 01:02:46

I read a little bit if I'm up early. If I'm up early enough to do it, I will read in the morning with coffee or something because it's something to do that's not directly start consuming Internet. And then after work, like, as I wind down, I'll read, like, for a little bit before dinner or something. I read before bed. I read in bed, but then I fall asleep within a page, so I can't really do that.

Emanuel: 01:03:08

Right. Exactly. Okay.

Joseph: 01:03:11

When's it you, Emmanuel?

Emanuel: 01:03:13

I try to read before bed, but I I fall asleep, like, after a paragraph, which is great. It's a good it's a good way to fall asleep. Actually, lately, I think I've mentioned on the podcast that we try really hard in my house not to pull out the phone when the the baby is with us. So recently, we just started to, like, read in the living room while he is playing. We don't have a TV in there, so it's like if he's entertaining himself, I'll just sit down and like read something, but I've been doing it like kind of scattershot, just like reading a magazine or pulling something off the shelf and like reading an old book that I like, but I feel like now that I've realized that it's actual a block of time where I can read, I'll I'll maybe try to be more deliberate about it and and read a novel.

Joseph: 01:04:01

Yeah. That's good. I I picked I up a physical copy of the New Yorker just as something to read over the break because I don't I don't have a novel or anything right now, but, like, I'm gonna try and slot in the same way that Sam does. Like, I don't wanna wake up and then be immediately consuming Internet, which is what I do really, during working weeks. And when you go to bed, that is prime watching YouTube for two hours on my side's time.

Joseph: 01:04:28

Know? That's my fun videos. Yeah. That's my fun time to watch an hour and a half video essay about some Doom variant from, like, 1997. Also, I'm not even joking.

Joseph: 01:04:40

That's literally what I watch right now. Emmanuel, what's what's your rec?

Emanuel: 01:04:47

As you guys were talking, I actually thought a bit more about what I consumed this year, and there's two things I want to mention that are actually not on the list that I wrote down that we'll publish later. Just in terms of, like, what I spent the most time on, without a doubt, it is the Cars movies and the extended Cars universe because

Joseph: 01:05:14

You do not shut up about this.

Emanuel: 01:05:16

My son is obsessed, and it's like, it's the only thing that he wants to watch, and I have seen, really without exaggerating, I have seen all the movies, like, probably a dozen times, and then there's a bunch of, like, shorts that Pixar made starring the Cars characters. And on the one hand, this is for, like, the Pixar fans and I I guess, like, the parents who are listening. It's like, it's Pixar, so there's like a certain level of quality, which I really appreciate. There's so much garbage for kids, and this is not that, you know. It's like, it's not Cocomelon, which I I will not give in on, like, don't want Cocomelon in the house, I don't want like, I don't know, Paw Patrol.

Emanuel: 01:06:05

A lot of just like low quality or like for the Internet, YouTube style content for kids I don't want. It's like Sesame Street, Pixar, Disney is kind of like the bar that we have set, and it meets that bar. But in terms of Pixar quality stuff, it's just, like, not their best work. And as an adult who has to sit there and, like, sort of, like, half watch it, you know, the more you watch it, the more crazy I get. Like, Angela, my wife and I, we have spent, like, hours talking about the logic of the Cars universe, and it's it's madness.

Emanuel: 01:06:53

It's insane. It's like, what I really love like, what people really love about a toy story, it's like, it's the secret life of toys, and here's how that would work, you know what I mean? It's like, what do they do when you close the doors and leave? And it's really fun to think about, because it's like, it obviously doesn't make sense, but it has like an internal logic of how it works. And cars is just like lunacy, you know what I mean?

Emanuel: 01:07:15

It's just like For example, right, it's like, are there animals in the world, right? Is there biological life in the cars world? It's like, well, there's plants, right? So it's like, you'll see trees and cacti and shit like that, but it's like when there's flies, they're like tiny little cars, you know what I mean? Right.

Emanuel: 01:07:36

And then it's like Or if there's no cows, but there's like trackers that move, basically. So it's like, how do you slice the difference between what is a sentient, you know, human equivalent being, and what is an animal if they're all cars, you know? Or then it's like they're all cars and things are made for cars, like they sleep in garages and stuff like that, but then it's like they'll use the radio, and the radio will have knobs for human fingers and stuff. It's madness. It's all we can talk about is like, how does this world work?

Emanuel: 01:08:06

So my Cars specific rec or ranking, I would just say, is Cars two is the best Cars movie because it's like a James Bond spoof, and ultimately, the Pixar animators are very talented animators, and it just has, like, cool looking action scenes and stuff, and also, Larry the Cable Guy is a is a Trump guy, and I don't like him, and I don't like his politics, but Mater is like a very funny character, and he's like the star of that movie. So it's fun for that reason. And that's just realistically what I've

Joseph: 01:08:39

been thinking about from the time.

Sam: 01:08:42

Four adults Crazy that the flies are tractors? Hang on. I wanna back up. No. Wait.

Sam: 01:08:47

Flies are but Mater is

Emanuel: 01:08:49

a tractor. It it's madness. I I don't don't give me I can't we can't

Joseph: 01:08:54

it's like

Sam: 01:08:54

I don't like that.

Emanuel: 01:08:55

It's yes. He's a tractor, but combines are cows and and and, like, tractors that are used in the fields are cows and and some of them are bulls and some of I don't know, man. You know what I mean? It's like, it's just it's it's really once you start thinking about it, you can really go nuts, which obviously is what happened to me. For adults, I actually thought about this, and I forgot while I was writing my list, is I watched I always forget the name because it's not a good name.

Emanuel: 01:09:25

It's Escape from Dannemora that is the I believe it's the first TV thing that Ben Stiller directed. Ben Stiller

Joseph: 01:09:35

Oh, you told me. You told me.

Emanuel: 01:09:37

Ben Stiller, director of Severance, which is like this huge hit. I like the show, I think it's great show, great acting, fun mystery and all that. Escape from Dannemora is based on a real story that you might remember, I think it was like 2015, 2016, and it was like a prison in Upstate New York where these two guys escaped, and shortly after they escaped, it became clear that they did it with the help of a woman working at the prison that they both had a romantic relationship with,

Joseph: 01:10:13

and

Emanuel: 01:10:13

that was obviously very sensational, and a lot of people made fun of it, and, you know, it was in the news, those guys were caught, and, you know, I think we all kind of moved on. And this is, I think, like an eight episode miniseries, and it goes into great detail about what happened there, and it just looks super interesting. I think it does have some overlap with Severance in that it is mostly like a workplace drama, but the workplace is a prison, and some of the people who work there are inmates and some of them are not, and it's about that dynamic. It has, like, a really crazy cast. It's Patricia Arquette, Benicio Del Toro, Paul Dano what's his name?

Emanuel: 01:11:01

Michael Imperioli from The Sopranos plays Andrew Cuomo for like a few scenes, and that's really fun. He does a really good Andrew Cuomo because he was governor at the time, and he went to the prison to find out what happened. It also is like a great procedural about like, how do you escape, like, big prison, and it's like, how they did it is really wild.

Joseph: 01:11:23

Don't spoil it, because I'll definitely watch It's

Emanuel: 01:11:25

super, super good. It's shot amazingly. It's like, Ben Stiller, great comedian, I think people totally understand that he's like a real visionary and an artist when you see Severance, it's such like a beautiful looking show with big ideas, and this is that also, but it's applied to a real story, and I just like it's one of the favorite things, one of my favorite shows ever, and I think it's on Netflix, so it's super easy to access. It also does a really, really cool thing where the show is chronological for the first six episodes, think, and it's about, like, how did they decide to escape, how did they do it, what is the romantic relationship there, and then it shows you there's an episode just about like, why are they in jail, and that really messes with your perception of people, and like, why you empathize with people on screen even if they're bad, and it's just like a really, really amazing, like, master level TV show that everyone should watch.

Joseph: 01:12:28

Yeah. I'm definitely, definitely gonna check that out. Probably that that period between Christmas and New Year.

Emanuel: 01:12:35

Are you gonna watch Cars two, though?

Joseph: 01:12:38

Well, no. Is that on Netflix? I'm not trying to send this to Yeah. Oh, right. Yeah.

Joseph: 01:12:46

Of course. Yeah. That's

Sam: 01:12:47

seems to be or escape Adam Morris seems to be on Hulu, not Netflix anymore.

Joseph: 01:12:51

Oh, and I just tried to

Emanuel: 01:12:52

find it. Okay.

Joseph: 01:12:53

That's it's so funny that that's just constantly the case. Yeah. It's like

Sam: 01:12:57

Everything's moving.

Joseph: 01:12:57

You have to follow well, if you're watching halfway through and it moves, you're like, fuck. Well, I didn't have that anyway. Sorry. Last thing I'll say. I had that with the game control where I was playing it on a PlayStation Plus service or something.

Joseph: 01:13:13

Was, oh, wow. This is really good. Getting towards the end, and then it got removed from the service. I was like, the fuck? I was in the middle

Emanuel: 01:13:18

of So another thing I've been doing this year, I've been watching a lot of old movies, and I've been streaming them from various streaming services. And like with books, like, I'll start a movie, and if it's good actually, I'm more likely to fall asleep. I don't know. I'm lulled to sleep on, like, a movie I'm really into. And I was watching it was like a spy thriller, I forget the name of it, but it took me so long to finish it.

Emanuel: 01:13:41

It's like, I watched it like two nights in a row, then the third night I went to finish it, and I was like, we're done streaming this. And it's like, I never I never finished it.

Joseph: 01:13:49

I had that with ex machina. Oh, yeah. I've tried to watch that movie, like, four times. Even though it's like all the the themes I would love, I'm just like, I can't. And I've given I'm not gonna watch it.

Joseph: 01:13:59

I'm just not.

Emanuel: 01:13:59

Interesting. It's weird.

Sam: 01:14:01

They fall in love at the end, and they run away together.

Joseph: 01:14:06

Tend to have lot, and it's

Sam: 01:14:07

very nice. It's a lovely ending. It's beautiful.

Joseph: 01:14:09

Okay. Cool. Yeah. I'm gonna believe that. Yeah.

Joseph: 01:14:11

Okay. I'm I'm gonna I'm gonna choose, so that's the ending. Alright. Let's leave that there, and I'll play us out. As a reminder, four zero four Media is journalist founded and supported by subscribers.

Joseph: 01:14:27

If you wish to subscribe to four zero four Media and directly support our work, please go to four zero four media dot c o. 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 five star rating and review for the podcast.

Joseph: 01:14:52

That stuff really helps us out. This has been Horrorful Media. We'll see you again next time. Maybe not next week.