Activity

Posted:

This is happening to me, but with "tips" about a huge range of crypto-related issues (or perceived issues) people are personally struggling with. The volume is genuinely challenging to deal with.

It takes fairly little effort for a person to tell their AI bot to research and draft an email, but it takes the recipients real time to dig into these tips and separate hallucinations from tips that might actually have some basis. They're basically DDOSing journalists.

I've basically had to start ignoring tips that come in with clearly AI-written emails, even though I know I risk missing stuff. I just don't have the capacity.

“ChatGPT Says 404 Media Is Tech Support for Huge Corporations”.
Jason Koebler in 404 Media.
Over the last few months, 404 Media has gotten dozens of clearly AI-generated story leads and tips, many of which appear to have been copy pasted directly from ChatGPT or other chatbots into an email client by a real human. Some of these tips are (or could be) of legitimate public concern and we are happy to get them and to look into them. Many, though, are not.This morning, for example, an Italian painter told me he “loses professional Meta accounts despite contradictory reinstatement email,” and said, in English, that he had “attached a nine-screenshot evidence dossier prepared on 16 October 2026.” When I emailed the painter back asking how he found me, he said “ChatGPT suggested contacting you. I was looking for journalists who investigate technology companies, particularly Meta and issues involving account suspensions and platform accountability.”  Last night, someone emailed me, Joseph, Sam, Emanuel, the Washington Post, CBS News, NBC News, The Markup, The Information, the Los Angeles Times, and the Chicago Sun Times asking for an “independent investigation” into why their Verizon cell phone service wasn’t working on their iPhone. 
Finished reading:
Cover image of A Darkness More Than Night
Harry Bosch series, book 7.
A Darkness More Than Night
by Michael Connelly.
Published . 470 pages.
crime, thriller
Started ; completed October 24, 2026.
Published an issue of Citation Needed:

On Meidas Defense: cryptocurrency, sanctions, and Trump quid pro quo

A still from a split-screen video of Joe Plenzler interviewing Molly White

Last week I joined Joe Plenzler on the Meidas Defense podcast to talk about crypto. Meidas Defense is the MeidasTouch Network’s national security show, so we spent more time than I usually do on crypto as a geopolitical problem, in addition to a consumer protection one. The full episode and transcript are up on the Meidas newsletter, and there’s a shorter cut on YouTube.

Read:
“AI Is Changing Everything About Hacking. No One Knows What Happens Next”.
Jason Koebler in 404 Media. Published .
So much is happening, and so quickly, that it has been difficult for me — someone who has been reporting and editing stories on security and hacking for a decade — to fully understand what’s going on, to have a sense of what could happen next, or predict where this is going. And I think that that is largely where we are at the moment, as I am writing this.  But it has become clear that AI, broadly defined, has fundamentally changed both offensive hacking and defensive cybersecurity. This is not because AI has become sentient or because human beings have lost control of it or because of “swarms” of “rogue agents,” but because AI is proving something that we have always known: much of the software that runs the internet, our devices, our accounts, and our lives is vulnerable, or out of date, or has security flaws that human beings never noticed, or was installed by someone at a company who left the company six years ago and has been replaced four times and no one knows how to find them now or how to update it.
Posted:

truly a wild time to be alive when the cryptography world is split between those worried about quantum computers and those whose private key is “4”

“The Internet goes on high alert after discovery of 8 compromised TLS certs”.
Dan Goodin in Ars Technica.
“That is extremely in the ‘this should not be possible’ category,” Valdorda said. “Maybe some horribly dangerous key generation interface has a ‘size’ parameter and they set it to 1 by mistake???”
Posted:

i’ve been writing about crypto for a while now, but this new addition to the $TRUMP memecoin website fine print may be the most blatant “lol you suckers are our exit liquidity” i’ve seen so far

Screenshot of text: activities, leaderboard competitions, events, or other benefits offered through the Coin Club are independent of, and are not designed to influence the timing or execution of, any token disposition program that may be in effect. [begin highlight] The existence of a Coin Club promotion or event does not indicate that Fight Fight Fight LLC, CIC Digital LLC or their respective affiliates are not contemporaneously disposing of $TRUMP coins [end highlight] pursuant to a pre-announced plan, and you should not acquire or accumulate $TRUMP coins based on any expectation that promotional activity will increase or maintain the market price of $TRUMP coins. You