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 to hidden worlds 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. Gain access to that content at 404Media.co.

Joseph: 00:29

I'm your host, Joseph, and with me are two of the other four zero four media cofounders. The first is Sam Cole. Hello. And the other is Emmanuel Mayberg. Hello.

Joseph: 00:39

Emmanuel, you recently went on a podcast run by friends of ours, Remap Radio. Do you just

Emanuel: 00:48

wanna very briefly tell me what you did and maybe, you know, to direct them to it? Yeah. So our good friends at Remap who are the folks who used to run Waypoint back when we all worked at Vice, have a podcast about homeownership and home renovations and just kind of like that everyday life stuff. And you all know very well because you lived through this with me, but I went through a big unexpected renovation at my place because of a flood, and me and Rob just talked about for two hours, and it was really fun and very therapeutic for me. And hopefully, if you care about that sort of thing, there's some useful advice and emotional support in that podcast for you.

Joseph: 01:36

And the reason I like asked you to explain is because, yes, we're gonna talk about tech now like we do every week, and then we talk about all of this depressing stuff. And what you spoke about on Remap Radio was also very depressing in its own way. But sometimes if you just wanna escape from tech, I don't know. Here's another fun another fun podcast that one of us was on. So that's the reason I wanted to shout it out.

Joseph: 02:01

But should we start talking about this week's stories?

Sam: 02:04

Yeah. I and I really enjoyed that podcast just for another recommendation. Yeah. Let's get started with one of Joe's. The headline is the 200 plus sites an ICE surveillance contractor is monitoring.

Sam: 02:19

Yeah. So, obviously, the headline kind of explains what's going on, but I don't think you really grasp the breadth of the sites impacted here until you click through on the site. We have the list published in the story. It's a lot of sites. It's a it's a long ass spreadsheet.

Sam: 02:37

So yeah. And it's a lot of stuff that you probably use, and I definitely use a lot of these. So, yeah, Joe, what is Shadow Dragon just to kinda get us started here?

Joseph: 02:46

Yeah. So Shadow Dragon is a private US company. And I suppose you could well, I call it surveillance contractor. That's one way I phrase it. Another would be sort of a open source intelligence company.

Joseph: 03:01

Open source intelligence, the acronym being OSINT. And these are companies that really focus on gathering data that's out there in the public or the semi public Internet. So you can imagine social media networks, forums, websites, sometimes even apps as well. And I was about to say, I think people would be surprised about how much information is available about them out there. I don't think people are surprised by that anymore.

Sam: 03:31

Not the listeners of this podcast probably.

Joseph: 03:33

Right. Exactly. Definitely not the listeners of this podcast, but just in general. I mean, even ever since, I don't know, Cambridge Analytica, and I still think that was a massively over overblown story for various reasons, but it kinda put into people's minds the, oh, this stuff I'm doing on social networks can be acquired by third parties. So Shadow Dragon isn't in the Cambridge Analytica world of, you know, sort of political analysis, all

Sam: 03:59

of that. It is much more gathering data which could be useful to government clients and to private clients. So I

Joseph: 04:08

didn't even go into that in the story, but they do have private clients as well.

Sam: 04:13

Yeah. And they make a tool. Right? So they that's kinda like how they get a hold of this data. The tool is called SocialNet.

Joseph: 04:22

SocialNet.

Sam: 04:22

Sounds sounds innocuous. What does the tool do though? Like, how does it work?

Joseph: 04:29

Yeah. So this was actually something that was kind of complicated to figure out, and I think we'll hear about that when I bring up what some of the impacted companies said. But in one way, you could read it, the Shadow Dragon scrapes the Internet. That and I'm getting to the nuances in a second. But scraping, obviously, is where you access a service.

Joseph: 04:53

Maybe there's a public Twitter feed or maybe you have to log in to Blue Sky or something like that to then access information. But you're doing it in sort of a an automated way rather than just manually scrolling. What makes Shadow Dragon a little bit different is that you have this UI, you will type in say a username, know, just say Joseph Cox or whatever and then it will bring up, well, do you wanna search blue sky for that? Do you wanna search Twitter for that? And all of that sort of thing.

Joseph: 05:23

And the tool in this, you know, I presume pretty well, I've seen it. It's a pretty slick interface will then go and pull that data from those various websites. So you enter a phone number, you then see where else that phone number is being used. You enter an email address, you see maybe what sites has been signed up to, that sort of thing. But it isn't there there isn't like a big database of data that Shadow Dragon has already scraped.

Joseph: 05:50

It's not like Clearview AI, the facial recognition company, which has all of these billions or whatever of faces scraped from social media. Shadow Dragon SocialNet is much more live. It's like, oh, it goes grab it grabs the data when you want it to, which again, maybe they're gonna be maybe they're not gonna violate scraping terms of service with that, maybe they are. But the end result is that you have this tool for its customers and rather than them having to go, oh, man. So what social network do I wanna search?

Joseph: 06:22

And potentially, you know, accidentally revealing their identity if they like somebody's post or whatever and reveal that they're being monitored. This tool allows Shadow Dragon's clients to search the web in a really, really efficient manner that is explicitly designed to track targets, movements, behavior, relationships, all of that sort of thing. It's like OSINT streamlined on steroids, it seems like.

Sam: 06:54

Yeah. I mean, obviously, this is coming at a time that that I mean, it's that's a horrifying prospect anytime. But right now, because Shadow Dragon is an ice contractor. Right? And the main thing in the news lately as it should be is these promises slash threats of mass deportation by the new administration, by the Trump administration.

Sam: 07:19

And then, obviously, right after this story came out, we saw that ICE detained a lawful green card holder, and it's been happening more and more since then. So it's a really scary prospect to think that ICE, especially, which is trying to, like, hit these numbers, I guess, like, get some kind of quota that we don't know, to deport people essentially is using a tool like this that could just kinda dig through all of your online activity and find anything that could be construed or twisted or projected into being, you know, like, threatening or criminal or whatever it is or anti American or whatever you wanna call it, siding with Hamas, which is what they accused Mahboud Khalil of. So yeah. And there's a there's a really good quote in here in your story from Jermaine Scott Jeremy Scott. Sorry.

Sam: 08:16

He's at Electronic Privacy Information Center, their project on surveillance insight. He said, SocialNet is just one example of the unchecked surveillance ecosystem that lacks any meaningful transparency, oversight, or accountability that allows the government to circumvent constitutional and statutory protections to access sensitive personal data. So he's basically saying this is, like, this is one example of the the, you know, ridiculousness that is occurring, and it's great to bring that example to light. But Ice is not the only the only one using Shadow Dragon's services. Right?

Sam: 08:52

Like, who else are their clients?

Joseph: 08:53

Yeah. And then and then just before on that, you you mentioned Mahmoud Khalil stuff. There is also the state department's plan. I guess we don't really have many specifics right now. It was reported in Axios somewhat recently that they're planning to use AI to automatically detect that sort of sentiment on students' social media accounts.

Joseph: 09:18

Now there's no indication that Shadow Dragon is is part of that. If if anything, Shadow Dragon's actually quite explicit in this marketing that doesn't use AI. It's almost with the bespoke OSINT guys, and you don't need to worry about all of that sort of thing, but it definitely sits in that context. But yeah, as you say, it's not just ICE. You can go and find US public US government procurement data.

Joseph: 09:44

You just scroll through it and there's the state department again on there. There's the fish and wildlife service. It's really funny. Whenever you write about surveillance contractor, you'll find the normal ones, like all the federal law enforcement agencies, and then you'll find like a random one, like department of agriculture or some shit. And it's just like, what are they using that for?

Joseph: 10:05

And it must be well, I'm gonna speculate a little bit here. Fish and wildlife service, I don't know. Protecting wildlife, protecting the environment, something like that. Somebody doing dumb crap around areas that they're trying to protect, that sort of thing. But then you have the normal ones like DEA is in there as well.

Joseph: 10:22

And I think we previously reported when we first wrote about Shadow Dragon couple of years ago. At this point, they briefly mentioned that they've they've worked with or they've had, like, communications with the FBI as well. And we got some emails actually from Epic, the privacy organization you mentioned previously, and they showed that parts of DHS moved from another tool called Babblex made by Babble Street that we've spoken about before, and they moved over to Shadow Dragon in part for the price, which I think is funny because you you look all these emails, you call these capabilities, and all these surveillance contractors doing all these sorts of things. And then at the end of the day, sometimes it just comes down to, well, this one's like 10 k cheaper, so we're just gonna get that probably. But, yeah, they are I would say they're not like a massive US government contractor, but they're definitely picking up more customers in part with that DHS switch.

Joseph: 11:27

But, you know, I just check the databases every so often, and I and I see Shadow Dragon again and again.

Sam: 11:32

Yeah. So let's kinda get into, I guess, the specifics of the 200 plus websites that you mentioned in the headline. I mean,

Emanuel: 11:41

I

Sam: 11:42

don't know. It's like it's a lot. It's like if you ask me to list every website and app, this would be the list. It's everything from, like, OnlyFans and eBay to Fur Affinity, Gab, Duolingo, Bing, AllTrails, my precious AllTrails, my unproblematic AllTrails.

Joseph: 12:01

Well, it's funny. Yeah. It's funny you bring up AllTrails because I think that's one way of looking at it. It's like, when I first got the list, it's almost like overwhelming. Like, oh my god.

Joseph: 12:10

Well, obviously, always plans to publish the list because I think it's useful for people to see that either for their own activity or for, you know, policy experts or whatever. It's useful to see the specifics, but you can kind of pull it into brackets. And this is why I did in the article. With the oil the AllTrails one, I almost put that sort of in the in the bracket of hobbies and that sort of thing. So as well as AllTrails, I put book crossing, some book website, chess.com.

Joseph: 12:42

It's a pretty funny one. A cigar review site called Cigar Dojo. And like by themselves, you'll think, what? So they're gonna, like, know that I like cigars or I like chess or something? Yeah.

Joseph: 12:56

Sure. But then on the other side, the AllTrails one, I mean, maybe that could have some useful information about, oh, they like hikes in California or Southern California or Northern

Sam: 13:04

California whatever. Pinpointed location data too. I mean, that's it follows you all along a very specific path.

Joseph: 13:11

And this didn't come up specifically in this list, but it does remind me obviously of the Strava leak. Strava, I think that was it, the the running app? Yeah. Mhmm. And how that was revealing the location of sort of unpublished or undocumented US military bases and that sort of thing.

Joseph: 13:30

This isn't quite the same, because it's not so much about revealing locations as it is about tracking individual person. But if you know that somebody's using those sorts of hobby apps, maybe you can drill down and get some more information from them. And you mentioned OnlyFans as well. And I'd I'd really be interested to hear your thoughts on this, Sam. But, like, there's clearly some, like, sex worker sites in here.

Joseph: 13:55

Yeah. There's a lot

Sam: 13:56

of porn sites. There's, like, every major porn site is on here. Pornhub, x hamster, x videos. Yeah. Eporner.

Sam: 14:03

Yeah. It's a ton of them.

Joseph: 14:04

Now, to be fair to Shadow Dragon, they do explicitly talk about in lots of videos about combating child sexual abuse. I'm not saying that it's these sites specifically. You can see where there might be sexual sites in the list. That being said, you know, if ICE or DHS or whoever wishes to more aggressively go after sex workers, I mean, which they already do, right, for visa issues or anything else, they can just scrape OnlyFans or just for fans. Does does that sound right to you, Sam?

Sam: 14:40

Yeah. For sure. Yeah. I mean, it's it's something that, like, sex sex workers have been talking about for years, obviously, but and it's kind of come to light in various different other contexts too where tools are being tools like this are being used. But it's like someone will be denied an Airbnb booking because they suspect that, like, the host knows that they produce porn.

Sam: 15:05

Or, you know, it's like someone who's trying to, like, get a custody battle for their kids is on OnlyFans, and then it's like the the opposition finds out that they're on OnlyFans, and then they use that against them, and they can't get their kids. It's just or, like, even with, like, mortgages and things like that, it's it's something that sex workers deal with a lot. So it's definitely interesting to see porn sites on this list for sure. And it's also it's a conversation that's happening in the adult industry in general is, you know, how much data should we legally be forced to give sites in general, but especially adult sites because that's what's being targeted with the age verification stuff? It's like Mhmm.

Sam: 15:44

Uploading an ID or a license to Pornhub, for example. It's like, you know, these, like, leaks happen all the time, and then also you have, systems like this that can kinda pry in and see your activity. So, yeah, it's for sure super, super interesting to see.

Joseph: 16:01

Yeah. And then apart from the normal social networks, and I mentioned, like, Cambridge Analytica and Facebook and stuff is like, well, now there's Snapchat and TikTok and various meta platforms. And, like, obviously, they're all included in this list. Like, it'd be very surprising if they weren't. Then there's payment stuff, which I find especially interesting.

Joseph: 16:24

I can't remember if Venmo's on there. Like, it must be.

Sam: 16:26

It is.

Joseph: 16:27

Okay. So Venmo's on there and then PayPal, which I think owns Venmo. Right? And then stuff like Cash App or Buy Me a Coffee. Buy Me a Coffee is interesting because, like, wow, that's a relatively small one.

Joseph: 16:39

But I it's all these different brackets are sort of the OSINT that that they're trying to do. And then I guess sort of the last one is just like there are some super niche super niche sites or forums or whatever, which are very directed towards specific demographics. So there's Black Planet on there, which is geared towards black people. There is FetLife, which is a fetish forum, right, or or or website. And then I I think there's a some furry stuff on the There's

Sam: 17:16

a furry stuff on the air.

Joseph: 17:17

Okay. You for corroborating.

Emanuel: 17:20

It's more

Joseph: 17:20

just that yes. They will go to they will go to any community or any site that they think could provide some value at some point in the future to their government or private clients. And I I guess I would say like web scraping is pretty straightforward. You know, you can write a Python web scraper very, very quickly. You use use something called Beautiful Soup, you pass it, whatever.

Joseph: 17:47

But as I think I've said on an earlier episode, if you're selling to the government, they're gonna want the tool to be very reliable. So like Shadow Dragon is I think fairly, I'm assuming this, They're going in and they're making their scrapers quite dedicated and specific. It's like if I'm Ice or whoever and I click, wanna search this profile, I don't want it to fuck up. I want it to be accurate. I want it to get the data very, very reliably.

Joseph: 18:13

So that is presumably a lot of the work that Shadow Dragon is putting into this.

Sam: 18:20

Yeah. For sure. Yeah. You talked to or you got ahold of some of these companies that are on this list. Right?

Sam: 18:27

Like, lot of them I know did not reply, but what did the ones that did reply have to say for this?

Joseph: 18:32

Yeah. Maybe I'll bring up the list of the ones that didn't reply as well. I can read that out in a second. But sort of well, on one hand, not surprisingly, a lot of the companies said, hey, this probably violates our terms of service on scraping and we don't like it. Probably the one that gave me the best statement simply because it was detailed and on the record was actually chess.com, which said, you know, we were not previously aware that Shadow Dragon was scraping data from our sites and, you know, they say they do not permit the use of personal information from our users without a valid legal basis and compliance with applicable laws.

Joseph: 19:13

And they said, you know, if it's done legally, fine, but, like, we didn't know about this. Then you have Meta saying the normal stuff, which is more pointing to the terms of service, same with Snapchat as well, Pinterest. They they all just point to the terms of service, which says, don't scrape us. You're not allowed to do that. And again, that sort of brings me back to the thing I mentioned a little bit higher, which is like, is this in a legal sense scraping if it's not creating a database of the data?

Joseph: 19:45

And I need to brush up on the computer fraud and abuse act when it comes to scraping because, you know, there's been a few cases somewhat recently in the past few years. But I'd be interested to see what people do now with that argument because some of these companies clearly weren't that happy with it. You know? That being said, many didn't get back to me. There was a Twitch, OnlyFans, Tinder, MyFitnessPal, GitHub, FlightAware, Etsy, eBay, Duolingo, Blue Sky, Apple, Amazon, and Reddit.

Joseph: 20:22

And the last one I'll say is that ProtonMail got back to me because they're also in the list. I didn't include their statement because I found it a little bit potentially misleading. They were like, send to unencrypted so nobody can read your emails. It's like, sure, but that's not what's being alleged here. They're talking about scraping what's potentially publicly available.

Joseph: 20:45

My suspicion is that you enter an email address and it then checks whether you enter a username and then Shadow Dragon then checks, well, is there a username associated with an email address on ProtonMail? That's my assumption. But, you know, I don't have that solid enough to to put in a full article. But, yeah. I just thought it was interesting and important and a good time to get this sort of list out, basically.

Sam: 21:13

Yeah. And what did Shadow Dragon have to say for themselves?

Joseph: 21:17

So when I asked Shadow Dragon if this constitutes scraping and I, you know, sent the list of sites as well, they said Shadow Dragon doesn't log customer inquiries or the resulting data, so we can't provide information that violates the privacy settings of individual account owners using these platforms including data they've deleted. So as I say in the article, in other words, the search is performed live on the sites when the Shadow Dragon user requests it. And Shadow Dragon is saying, we're not violating terms of service terms of service because we're not, like, making this massive database of information. I don't know. I guess we'll see what people make of that.

Joseph: 22:02

You know?

Sam: 22:03

I'm sure this is not the end of

Joseph: 22:04

No.

Sam: 22:05

Shatter Dragon. No. Okay. Let's leave that there as Joe says. Yeah.

Sam: 22:10

And then we'll be back with a story by Emmanuel about marine drain. Cue the music.

Joseph: 22:31

Alright. And we are back. This story is written by Emmanuel. The headline is NASA, Yale, and Stanford scientists consider, quote, scientific exile, end quote, French university says. Sorry.

Joseph: 22:50

Emmanuel. This actually starts with another story you did. I can't remember we spoke about it on the poll, but you did this first story about this French university and then this new one. So just briefly, what is this French university and what did they previously announce?

Emanuel: 23:05

So in early March, I got a press release from this university in France called Aix Marseille University. It's the largest, I believe, research university in the country. And they announced this program called Safe Place for Science. It is something that they've done under other names in different forms over the years, but basically it exists to allow people, scientists, researchers in countries where they're no longer able to do their research because of the political situation and inviting them to this university in France in order to continue to do that research there, both to support the scientists and also to support this research, which, in many cases is about climate, health, things that will benefit all of humanity. And the difference is that this time the program is targeted specifically at American scientists who we have heard from since Trump got into office and started issuing all these executive orders that we've reported on that ultimately result in pulling funding from universities, from government agencies that do research for clearly political reasons.

Emanuel: 24:34

Know, we've done a lot of stories about how the administration is nuking the existence of any page or paper that mentions diversity because they have this crusade against DEI. And that has obviously affected researchers as well. If you're studying, let's say, how cancer treatment is impacting people in certain communities, certain minorities, I've heard from people who have had that type of research funding pulled. So the university is inviting American researchers to come do this research in France. And it is not just words, they have €15,000,000 allocated for this.

Emanuel: 25:23

And initially, the plan was to have 15 scientists from The US come and do this research in France.

Joseph: 25:33

Gotcha. So that's the context. That's what happened before in the broader climate in which, you know, scientists in The US are finding that they probably can't continue their work. What happens now? Basically, the university had an update.

Joseph: 25:51

Right?

Emanuel: 25:52

Yeah. So I wrote that story and honestly, the reason I wrote it is because the fact that a French university would offer this is just sort of humiliating to The United States in a way. I mentioned this in that initial story, but when we think about scientists moving to different countries to continue their research, like the two examples that come to mind is in Nazi Germany, a lot of Jewish scientists fled Germany to The US to continue doing their research. That plays a big part in Oppenheimer the movie, if you've seen that.

Joseph: 26:34

Thank you for making that current.

Emanuel: 26:37

It's good it's a good portrait of, like, that type of scientist and why they would move. And then the other example is obviously, like, the Cold War and Russian scientists defecting to the West. Like, that was a big thing that was happening at the time. It is not something that, as far as I know, we've seen happen, from The US to other countries. Like usually, people come here to do advanced research at private companies, at universities, at government agencies.

Emanuel: 27:13

Historically, America has been the draw for that type of thing and not pushing people away. That's why I thought it was notable, but I kind of wrote it and moved on. It seemed a little bit like if you read the wording of the French press release, there's a little bit of I don't know. It's hard for me not to read it as, like, mocking The US a little bit.

Joseph: 27:32

Yeah. And and you don't know you it is sometimes hard to tell that, yes, they they say they've put money on the line, but, like, have you like like, you don't know necessarily how seriously to take it, not from any fault of their own, just because I think we're pretty skeptical people, until this next story where I mean, it looks like people are interested. Right?

Emanuel: 27:54

Yeah. So two things happened. So I published this story and I immediately start hearing from scientists in The US who are like, hey, like, I just read your story, like, can I get more information? Like, is there somebody I can talk to and how do I get involved in this? Which was surprising.

Emanuel: 28:11

And, you know, I just pointed them at the university's website if if if if they were interested.

Joseph: 28:15

Surprising, especially because you don't work

Emanuel: 28:17

at the

Joseph: 28:17

university for a start.

Emanuel: 28:18

Yeah. But it just like it's a level of interest. Right? There was like a real level of interest. And I was like, notable.

Emanuel: 28:23

Like, I'll just make a note of that. But a week later, the university put out another press release and they were just clear about the fact that they've heard from a lot of scientists and that scientists at the leading American universities and agencies here. And I think they said they've heard from like 25 from researchers at 25 leading institutions and that they're already working, there's so much interest that they're working on expanding the program and working with the government to get more funding and arrange housing for these people, and then also possibly working with other European universities who can absorb all these scientists because the way they describe it is like there's so much interest that maybe some of them can go to other countries and do work at other universities.

Joseph: 29:19

Yes. So you managed to then actually speak to somebody who I'll let you correct my phrasing of it, but either they have expressed interest or they're considering it or they've at least reached out to the university, what did they have to say about this?

Emanuel: 29:38

So this is someone who this is one of those people who reached out to me shortly after I published the initial story. And when I started writing this story, both you and Sam gave me the very good note, which was like, okay, like this is an interesting press release, but it would be better if we heard from one of the people who is actually interested in doing this. So I reached out back to this person and I said, hey, are you one of the people who is doing this? And they are and they are in the middle of the application process of of of taking part in this program. And I'm unfortunately not able to say a lot about what they do and where because that they believe would endanger their current position before they secure this new position.

Emanuel: 30:29

But I would say that it is one of the top institutions at the country, and it is a very it's not like some obscure, weird, liberal arts field of study that this person is in. It's like it is a hard science important field of research that they're in, but their funding was pulled because the work overlaps with some concept of minority focus. And they're no longer able to do their research, their funding was pulled, they're kind of running on fumes, the money that they have already secured, and they're thinking about what's next. And for them, the only option is to, look for, you know, other countries, other universities that are still interested in doing this kind of research.

Joseph: 31:21

Yeah. So what are we seeing? Is it potentially, a brain drain? And I mean that in two ways. The first is that kind of what you spoke about with early historical cases, and I would add, you know, East Germany and the the Berlin Wall and and and there as as well.

Joseph: 31:41

That's one thing with, like, people leaving. And then almost the much more immediate one is just like, as you say, research being stopped. And it's like, well, okay. What am I doing? Even if they don't leave, the research is is being killed essentially.

Joseph: 31:58

Like, what do you think some of the impacts are that we've already seen of this? And, you know, what might we see in the the short to medium term of this?

Emanuel: 32:11

Yeah. So the immediate impact is real, and that is across agencies, across universities, there is a hiring freeze. And not only a hiring freeze, people who have already been accepted to PhD programs have had those offers rescinded. And these are not, again, not small universities that were already teetering on the edge of insolvency or something like that. It's like Harvard has a hiring freeze.

Emanuel: 32:43

There is a sorry, one of the Massachusetts schools, it's a UMass school I believe, but it's a big medical school, and they've had PhD offers rescinded. So these are people who have been accepted to research positions, and they thought they were going to start working there next year, and that's not happening.

Joseph: 33:04

Including cancer stuff. Yeah.

Emanuel: 33:06

Yeah. Yeah. And there's a big one of the I live next to one of the biggest children's hospitals in the country, one of the best ones in the world, and I know somebody who is like in neuroscience there that's doing very important research, and like her research was was pulled. Which I think is like so so there's the immediate economic job losses issue, but the thing that really freaks me out and I don't know, like the way things are going now, you can you can pick what you want to be freaked out about, there's no shortage, and it's hard to like say what is the worst thing, but I don't know, I'm pretty rocked by this idea that it's going to take us time to feel the fact that the administration has kind of sold the future away, like if we keep going like, things could still turn around, you know, maybe the midterms come around and they reverse course in some way and money comes back and funding comes back, but if this country doesn't have the draw for people to research cancer and anything, artificial intelligence, right, like a lot of that work is being done in private companies.

Emanuel: 34:19

Maybe that work for now continues to happen here, but a lot of it is also being done at government agencies and universities, like a lot of progress is being made at these places that are no longer getting funding. And I think because they talk about, because the administration talks a lot about the DEI aspect of it, maybe people find it easy to dismiss as, oh, we're just losing that stuff. But it's not just that stuff. It's like across the board, Harvard, one of the best schools in the world, no hires. That's not a good place to be.

Emanuel: 34:51

That's not like a world leading democratic country, scientific powerhouse. That's that's not where you wanna be as a country, and that's where we are right now.

Joseph: 35:02

Yeah. And sorry, just last thing. What what does your coverage maybe look like in the coming weeks, months? Is it speaking to more people who are considering leaving and that sort of thing? Like, what

Emanuel: 35:16

are you thinking? So there's already been a lot of coverage about the type of science that has lost funding, and unfortunately, there's so much of it that I imagine that I can probably do some of that as well and just focusing in focusing on some of the stuff that we're losing because of these executive orders. But then maybe also like what is what is the what is the future of this research? Where is it going to happen? Where are these people going to go?

Emanuel: 35:47

What does it look like for the rest of the world for for The US to not be like the center of of so much scientific progress? I'm definitely interested in that. Like, I hope that if these people can't get funding in other like here in The US, that they can go to France and continue that work there, but we don't know. Like, we haven't seen this kind of shift before, so it'll be it'll be definitely interesting to to follow how how this all shakes out. For sure.

Emanuel: 36:21

Well, on

Joseph: 36:22

that horrible note, we will leave it there. You're welcome. Well, that's why I said at the top of the show, go listen to the other podcast for a laugh and then because we're gonna talk about this sort of stuff. But if you were listening to the free version of the podcast, I'll now play us out. If you are paying for a full media subscriber, we're gonna talk about something that is actually very fun and very interesting, how Super Nintendo consoles are getting quicker as they age, as in the hardware ages and somehow the consoles are performing better slash faster.

Joseph: 36:57

Really interesting stuff. You can subscribe and gain access to that content at 404media.co. We'll be right back after this. Alright. We are back in the subscribers only section.

Joseph: 37:23

Sam, do you want to do this one? Or should I do it? I don't mind.

Emanuel: 37:26

I

Sam: 37:27

mean, we can have a loose discussion about the great Super Nintendo entertainment system.

Emanuel: 37:34

So you might have to have a loose discussion. To me, this is extremely serious. I've never been more stressed talking about a story I in the history of this podcast.

Sam: 37:42

I am like, Super Nintendo missed me. Like, I my parents had a NES, and I played Duck Hunt on it when I was very small. And then we went straight to being a PlayStation family immediately, but I'm also I have more experience with the one that's like, I'm gonna, like, show my gamer ass, but, like, the one with the prongs, you hold it like that. Like, all my friends had that one. It's the one right after SNES.

Emanuel: 38:07

The n 64?

Sam: 38:08

Yeah. The 64. N 64. Yeah. So yeah.

Sam: 38:11

What are The controller is, like, three prongs. You know what I mean?

Emanuel: 38:15

And I got it. I a

Sam: 38:17

it's a freak design. But yeah. So, anyway, I didn't play a whole lot of SNES, but I was curious if you guys did. Joe, it seems like you did not.

Joseph: 38:26

Well, yeah, I the Super Nintendo also skipped me. I think I saw one, but I was too young and poor to get one. So eventually, went to a family member's house, and they were playing Mario 64 on the n 64. And there was the bit when you swim down and you see the eel underwater. This was literally the first time I've seen three d graphics, and it, like, blew my fucking mind.

Sam: 38:53

Yeah. You were, like, not gonna get more realistic than this.

Joseph: 38:55

But there's an this is scary. There's an eel that's coming out and getting me, and, like, that's burned into my mind. But no. I've gone back and I think kinda, like, probably what Emmanuel would say. I've gone back and I've played some of the Super Nintendo games just because, you know, I love platformers and stuff, and then I also tried Metroid.

Joseph: 39:14

I need to do Castlevania. Wait. That's not even Super Nintendo. That's PlayStation. Right?

Sam: 39:18

That's that's PC for me.

Emanuel: 39:20

If you if you do a Supercut of my life Yeah. 1990 to 1994, it's 90% Super Nintendo. Okay. 90% me on the floor playing Super Nintendo. It was my life.

Emanuel: 39:32

Like, I remember little else from that era, but Super Nintendo was very, very huge for me. We got to Super Nintendo. We lived in Israel at the time. And sometimes in terms of consoles, it goes European, PAL, and sometimes it goes NTSC, which is The US version. And my parents got me somebody went to France and they got one.

Emanuel: 39:56

And I played Zelda in French and my parents sat there with like a French to English dictionary to like try and figure out how you play the game. That's insane. But then but then the country then like the market went NTSC and we couldn't get games because all the games were NTSC. So we ended up having to buy another Super Nintendo later, like I just waited a long time. All I had was I had I had Super Mario, Zelda, and Street Fighter two until we got the the other one.

Emanuel: 40:30

And then I then I went went ham and like rented games and played games and yeah. Love the Super Nintendo. Arguably one of the best consoles ever. Arguably the best one, probably.

Joseph: 40:40

And you never stopped going ham since then.

Emanuel: 40:44

That's right. Here I am today. Yeah.

Sam: 40:48

So you're the right reporter for the job. Yeah. Did we already say the headline? The headline is Super Nintendo hardware is running faster as stages. Yeah.

Sam: 40:56

I mean, so people notice that this thing is running faster, which is freaky. Like, why? So who first noticed, I guess? Like, how did you come about this this phenomenon?

Emanuel: 41:08

So everybody is familiar with the concept of speed running at this point, playing games as fast as possible to like break records who can finish Super Mario the fastest. There is an offshoot of speedrunning that is called tool assisted speedrunning, and the concept there is what if you take the human element out of the game playing and you just make a tool, like a piece of software that plays the game perfectly? What if you had frame perfect input for the entire playthrough of Super Mario? How fast would that be? And that's kind of a whole offshoot of speedrunning called tool assisted speedrunning.

Emanuel: 41:55

And one of the biggest names in that space is Alan Cecil, who is the maintainer of something called Taskbot, which is one of these tools that speedruns games. And in this community, in this world, the mechanical inner workings of the hardware matters very much because those are the limitations for the speedrun. If the input is done by software and you program it to perfectly play a game, you need to know how many frames, for example, it takes for a new room in Zelda to load up because you need to make it so the input comes at the right exact frame in order for it to do it fastest. And if it misses by a frame, it's not perfect, it's not as good as a tool assisted speedrun can be. And these people, for that reason, they kind of investigate exactly how fast a game is running, which requires understanding exactly how the hardware inside the Super Nintendo works.

Emanuel: 43:06

So they could figure all that out. They Alan, at some point, notices while he's looking at like the history of Super Nintendo emulation and other people doing other speed runs that there is a slight variation in the how fast the audio processor inside the Super Nintendo is running. So there's a CPU in the Super Nintendo and there is a separate chip that is just processing audio data. Not unlike, I don't know if you had a PC at the time, like a Sound Blaster, the people in that room was like, yeah, they were dedicated audio cards. So it's kind of like that.

Emanuel: 43:53

And the documentation that people in this community have gotten their hands on, like the documentation in the 1990 that Nintendo sends game developers says that this audio processor is supposed to run at 32,000 hertz. But over the years when people are kind of testing their hardware and testing how fast games are running, they notice that it's slightly higher. And whenever Alan finds a forum post from like 02/2007, '2 thousand '8, '20 '11, '20 '15, it's like every time it's measured, it's like ever so slightly higher. He comes up with this theory that the audio processor is running faster as it ages, which some documentation about like the components in the chip support, and he puts out this Blue Sky post where he's asking everyone with a Super Nintendo who has the right instruments to measure this to kind of like run their Super Nintendo, measure how fast the audio processor is running, and collect all this data so he can kind of chart whether it is actually getting faster as we get further and further away from the release of the Super Nintendo. And he has about, at this point, I think, a 40 responses.

Emanuel: 45:20

And they show that, yes, like, the Super Nintendo's audio processor runs ever so slightly faster since it was released.

Sam: 45:30

Okay. So we're talking

Emanuel: 45:31

through that. I don't think I fucked that up.

Sam: 45:33

Yeah. So we're talking about, like like, tiny increments of time. It's not something that you're gonna notice, like, your, like, your little character is running really fast.

Emanuel: 45:42

I I believe now I'm going from memory, but I believe that 32,000 hertz means that the chip is, like, checking for or collecting or sending data 32,000 times per second. And the difference that we're talking about is like, I think overall, it's like an extra 70, like the highest that we've seen it go is 32,070 hertz. So very, very, very, very, very small difference in the grand scheme of things.

Sam: 46:13

Yeah. I mean, it's just I mean, obviously, it's it's interesting because it's a 30 plus year old console at this point, but also it's just so interesting that there are people that pay this close of attention to this stuff. Like, it's the speed and the the hardware stuff is super fascinating, and obviously, that's the story. But, like, the real, like, kinda like, the meta story here is that this community is paying attention to, like, fractions of a fractions of a second of change in, you know, like, a console that nobody plays anymore, which is so cool to me. We all

Emanuel: 46:45

play it. We all really is Okay. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry.

Emanuel: 46:47

No. It's amazing. You're right. It's not just like there is the there is the understanding of the hardware, which is always amazing, like, I I we it's not something that I get to write about a lot, but, like, the science of microprocessors is fucking insane and magic and like incredible if you ever try to truly understand how we're making all this computer stuff. It's like really, really incredible and amazing.

Emanuel: 47:17

So like to understand it at that level is amazing, but I was really I was honestly so impressed by Alan, this person who's behind TaskBot, because the approach to the subject matter is so serious. Like he's cool, he's very chill, but he was very concerned, like, I've talked to you about this story for like two weeks before it was published, because I started talking to him as soon as he put that blue sky post out, but he was really encouraging me not to post anything. He was like, we need more data. I don't want you to, like, cause a panic in the speedrunning community because I want to make sure that we have a statistically significant data collection before we say anything about this actually being true.

Joseph: 48:04

Because I I edited the piece first, and it was great. And I was like, wow. This is awesome. Okay. Let's publish it.

Joseph: 48:10

And they were like, wait. We're getting more data.

Emanuel: 48:13

Yeah. We were waiting for another person in the community to basically go through all the data, and, like, that other person is more of a speedrunning expert than Alan is, or like more of a, I should say, like human speedrunning expert, and he kind of ran his own analysis of like how significant for the speedrunning community this can be, and Alan really encouraged me to wait and, you know, have another source verify the claim before before we run the thing. Though I really I I really respect the the scientific approach that people have to this subject matter, even though it seems like such an insignificant thing. And sorry, I'll add to this quickly. I wrote about this in my behind the blog last week, but there's the speedrunning consequences here, which are very minor to nonexistent.

Emanuel: 49:05

It's like the the conclusion is that even if the Super Nintendo is running a little faster, all the added performance would not add up for more than like a second during a speedrun of a game, so it's not likely to really screw anything up in that community. But the understanding of the software and how it ages and how it runs is exactly the type of work that people need to do in order to faithfully emulate these games. And it's like the reason we know this stuff is because people are trying to emulate these games and they're doing this really, really hard work that Nintendo isn't doing. Like Nintendo is trying to resell you all these games via their new digital services, and this community is trying to preserve it and understand it so they can emulate it faithfully forever. And that is just like really important work if you care about this stuff at all.

Emanuel: 50:06

This is this is how we're going to be able to play games in the future and the way it's like if if thirty years from now, somebody wants to play Super Mario and see what it was like at the time, it's these people doing this kind of work that will make that possible.

Joseph: 50:20

Yeah. And Nintendo is like back on the Wii, you had the shop where you could just buy all of these classic games. Right? And it would basically emulate it on the console. Now on the Switch, it's like you have to join Nintendo online, and here here is our selection whether we're gonna let you play for $10 a month or 10 or £5 a month, whatever it is.

Joseph: 50:44

Right? So it's not even just the emulation itself. It's like they are really drip feeding it, almost like the Disney vault or something at this point.

Emanuel: 50:54

Yeah. And that's their business model and, you know, God bless them. It's like they they they wanna make money, that's fine. But even even in that case, they've been busted a few times where the thing you buy from Nintendo is not is basically a pirated emulated game. Like, rather than them doing the work to make Super Mario run on a Switch, they just took a ROM and an emulator that was made in this community that they're constantly suing and sending cease and desist letter to, they're just taking their work anyway and putting it on the Switch.

Emanuel: 51:33

So god bless these nerds. God bless what they do. I love them.

Sam: 51:40

Okay. I mean, is that a good place to end it? Do we have anything any more respect to I mean, do we have I guess, did we cover why this is happening? It's a temperature thing. Right?

Sam: 51:49

Like, it has something to do with, like, the heat?

Emanuel: 51:51

Processing units have it it depends how you wanna do it, but it's like there's there's like a there's something in the in the processor that determines the processing rate, like the 32,000 hertz I was talking about. On an audio processing unit, it's a ceramic resonator, which is a cheaper component that you do this with. And basically, when electricity goes through the ceramic resonator, it pulses or vibrates in a way that determines that rate, and it just seems like it's aging and is unstable for that reason. And that's something that, you know, other people who other companies that make electronics have noted before, and I've read a bunch of manuals for ceramic resonators that show that this is a thing that they know happens. They are impacted by heat, by humidity, by vibrations, and also by age, it now seems.

Emanuel: 52:48

It's just it's an it's an unstable cheap component that Nintendo used because they were like, you know, we don't we don't need to use quartz crystal, I believe is like the more expensive, more accurate way to do this kind of thing.

Joseph: 53:01

Yeah. Yeah. I guess as Sam said, that's a good place to leave it. So I will play us out. As a reminder, four zero four media is journalist founded and supported by subscribers.

Joseph: 53:17

If you do wish to subscribe to four zero four media and directly support our work, please go to 404media.co. 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: 53:40

That stuff really helps us out. This has been four zero four Media. We will see you again next week.