New: We talked to the anonymous memecoin millionaires who bought access to Trump. "Ice," part of a Singaporean crypto collective, hopes the dinner will be Big Macs. "Ogle" says he'll only unmask when the gala doors close. “The most corrupt thing a president has ever done" wapo.st/4kgR4mg

The comment section of old jazz performances on youtube may be the last wholesome place left on the internet www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEJf...

Gonna be that annoying AI bro stereotype for a minute, but fellow journalists: do yourself a favor and pay for Gemini 2.5 Pro. Gemini was really bad for a long time, but guess what, it's good now! Why? Larger context window, chain-of-thought by default, and it doesn't always agree with you!

Vibe coded* an app to help sift through changes in the JFK docs. It loads two PDFs side-by-side, then uses OpenCV to visually compare every page - no OCR - to highlight differences like newly unredacted text. *I hate that I said vibe coded as much as you do

Here's what I know after 2 years at WaPo: despite shooting ourselves in the foot every 2.5 months by announcing weird changes to Post Opinions, the newsroom has remained laser focused on holding power to account. I haven't seen or heard anything that makes me think that's going to change. 1/2

I obtained documents revealing DOGE’s private plans to soon eliminate at least hundreds of government workers and offices they somehow tag as related to diversity, equity and inclusion. Help us keep doing this kind of reporting: message me on Signal at (202) 580-5477. wapo.st/4jVWqEd

The Washington Post obtained documents laying out step-by-step how DOGE plans to dramatically expand its purge of "DEI-related" initiatives and employees across the federal government in the coming months. www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2025/... by @hannahnatanson.bsky.social & @chrisd9r.bsky.social

My colleagues @hannahnatanson.bsky.social & @chrisd9r.bsky.social obtained documents showing how DOGE staffers developed plans to purge diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives (and employees who implement them) from the federal government. www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2025/...

dei.gov was registered yesterday. Why? who.is/whois/dei.gov

and @drewharwell.com wrote a much more comprehensive and reported piece! www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

Anyone who knows anything about our elections apparatus knows how absolutely and utterly impossible this would be from a logistics perspective. No voting machines created in the past several decades have online capability. You can't "hack" the election.

Somehow just now noticing Maltego Community Edition updated their license last August to allow commercial use. docs.maltego.com/en/support/s...

We don't know what Elon Musk meant with that hand gesture but we do know he's reinstated Hitler apologists on X, praised an extreme far-right German political party and endorsed the claim that Jews push "hatred against whites" www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

Going to watch the son of former secretary of labor Robert Reich do improv @samreich.bsky.social

This Substack is making the rounds purporting to be from an "X Whistleblower" that claims X knowingly planted fake news stories and used bots to influence discourse. Unfortunately they don't provide much evidence - and some of what they do share, is wrong. For starters-

Important deep dive into cops' "outrageously dystopian" use of facial recognition by @douglasmac.bsky.social @davidovalle.bsky.social @aaronschaffer.com. A wrongfully arrested father of four was jailed for *16 months* before his charges were dropped: www.washingtonpost.com/business/int...

We had to evacuate Los Angeles. Most people I know there have also had to leave. We are safe in San Diego and our apartment is unlikely to burn down. We are very lucky. But alongside the visceral horror of the wildfires there is also the mundanity of dystopia www.404media.co/were-fine-lo...

i think after this particular disaster the “misinformation is rampant” stories about X are going to start feeling a bit redundant. it’s just the baseline. like rain in the pacific northwest.

I’m on site at the Sunset Fire in Runyon Canyon. Water drops are happening. Im not sure it’ll be enough to stop the spread of these fires into the neighborhood south of the canyon.

This Hollywood hills fire is a nightmare. Evacuation area covers an incredibly dense area. Thousands (tens of thousands) of residences (a lot of the buildings on hollywood are apartment buildings built in around the 1950s). Also includes the Hollywood Bowl, and Grauman’s Chinese Theater.

Here's our full story on the Meta news today, which goes far beyond an end to fact-checking and heralds a wider pullback from content moderation as Zuckerberg repositions the company for the Trump era. Gift link: wapo.st/4h223hP

I feel this one in my bones. I have no idea why I struggle with texting in 2025 - I was *constantly* on AIM (lol & RIP) in my teens and 20’s, and modern texting is basically the same…so why am I so bad at it? apple.news/ABsJRkG9XSFC...

More than 3,100 students died at Indian boarding schools between 1828 and 1970. @washingtonpost.com found 3x times as many deaths and nearly 2x as many graves sites as the Interior Department after scouring hundreds of thousands of documents and speaking to dozens of sources.

When Greg Kinnear says computers are the "end of western civilization as we know it" in the beginning of You've Got Mail.... ...he may have been right.

Everyone’s trying to be Jeff Goldblum in Independence Day but they’re actually Randy Quaid (I know, I know…this falls apart because Quaids character saves the planet )

"This thing this thing is going to haunt me for the rest of my life", Fmlk told us. She was also in contact with the german member "White Tiger" who has already been raided by german law enforcement agencies. More about him and the whole tragedy (€) www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/web...

A deep dive into the dark world of so-called 'COM'/'764' chat groups, which push vulnerable individuals toward self-harm, animal cruelty, and even suicide: Samuel Hervey died a horrific death in front of a camera, encouraged and even cheered on by members of these chat groups.

hey look, a starter pack of Visual Forensics reporters at @washingtonpost.com go.bsky.app/7WK1tFG

wrote about the ritual of rifling through a suspect's internet accounts and pretending that any and all morsels of information are "news" www.404media.co/luigi-mangio...

Our latest investigation started with a video I found online. It was a Discord chat. Someone appears to self-immolate on cam as others watched. Some in voice chat laugh, another says "shoutout fmlk" Using OSINT evidence, we tracked down and interviewed "Fmlk" www.washingtonpost.com/investigatio...

No idea if that substack manifesto is real or not but I do know that account was created today at 5:59PM EST, so I would be skeptical.

New favorite use case for AI: having it narrate court transcripts with alternating voices, so it (almost) sounds like you're listening to a recording.

Incredible OSINT reporting here

I will never stop posting goofy apple intelligence summaries

Subscriptions for journalism are good, actually, and this one was a no-brainer. www.theverge.com/2024/12/3/24...

I've only used Sill for a couple days but it seems really promising. It collects the top-shared articles from your Bluesky timeline -- for when you want to read good stuff without getting sucked into social media www.niemanlab.org/2024/11/reme...

Musk admitted X throttles links, and Threads is only a little better. But social media's quiet war on links has been going on for years. I wrote about how big tech has been draining the open web's lifeblood and giving us "news influencers" instead of the news. www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

Before we launched 404 Media, "allegedly very smart people" (as Emanuel calls them) told us to our faces it would take us years to build to one million views a month. We just crossed that. That's still relatively small, but independent media can work. Go do it.

If you want to escape the holiday insanity with a different type of insanity, I can’t recommend fever house (and its sequel!) enough. Fun reads that will get the adrenaline pumping after your turkey.

Here's my latest (free!) Digital Investigations newsletter. It's got: 📍 Useful Bluesky tools & tips 📍 New tools for YouTube, AI prompts, username search & more! 📍 Webinars and articles to help with research and reporting Read/subscribe: digitalinvestigation...

I try to avoid repping paid tools, but if you need to intercept/monitor network traffic and don't want to shell out the $450/yr for Burp Suite, ProxyMan (proxyman.io) has a lot of the same functionality at $69/yr. ps: this is not an ad, I'm just a nerd and really like proxyman

Let's make a more diverse osint starter pack - a 50/50 m/f split and a move away from westerners would be great. I've made a start (and yes, it's currently lots of men/westerners - help me shift the balance!) Can the community help me crowd source this? go.bsky.app/36JpUBi

With a fully remote team of just 20 employees, Bluesky has surpassed 20 million users in its first year since opening to the public and is stealing thunder from rivals hundreds of times its size. At a time when conventional wisdom among bosses is that workers must be in-person to be productive.

Lotta new @washingtonpost.com journalists just joined: * @erinmcunningham.bsky.social * @nickmiroff.bsky.social * @ndungca.bsky.social * @mattbaidc.bsky.social * @megkelly.bsky.social * @annamphillips.bsky.social * @jb1prod.bsky.social 100+ more in this starter pack bsky.app/starter-pack...

Inside me are two wolves

Cloud nothings, the independent, 4/12/2015

Rust!!! This is a good and smart decision

New from 404 Media: we've obtained and published the list of iPhone and Android devices secretive phone unlocking tech Graykey was able, or unable, to get data from recently. Unprecedented leak, we've never seen this granularity from Graykey before www.404media.co/leaked-docum...