404 Media Suing ICE for its $2 Million Spyware Contract

404 Media: “On Monday 404 Media filed a lawsuit against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) demanding the agency publish its $2 million contract with Paragon, a company that makes powerful spyware that can remotely break into mobile phones without the target even clicking a link. 

The sale of the spyware to ICE has activists and lawmakers deeply concerned about what the agency, which continues to push the Trump administration’s mass deportation effort, may use the technology for. 

The contract and related documents 404 Media is suing for may provide more information on what ICE intends to do with the spyware.

 “404 Media has asked ICE to disclose agency records relating to its contract with a company known for its powerful spyware tool whose potential use in the agency’s ongoing mass-deportation campaign has prompted lawmakers, civil liberties organizations, and immigration groups to express deep concerns over potential civil rights abuses,” the lawsuit says…”

AI-Generated “Workslop” Is Destroying Productivity

Harvard Business Review: “A confusing contradiction is unfolding in companies embracing generative AI tools: 

while workers are largely following mandates to embrace the technology, few are seeing it create real value. Consider, for instance, that the number of companies with fully AI-led processes nearly doubled last year, while AI use has likewise doubled at work since 2023. Yet a recent report from the MIT Media Lab found that 95% of organizations see no measurable return on their investment in these technologies. 

So much activity, so much enthusiasm, so little return. Why? In collaboration with Stanford Social Media Lab, our research team at BetterUp Labs has identified one possible reason: Employees are using AI tools to create low-effort, passable looking work that ends up creating more work for their coworkers. On social media, which is increasingly clogged with low-quality AI-generated posts, this content is often referred to as “AI slop.”

 In the context of work, we refer to this phenomenon as “workslop.” We define workslop as AI generated work content that masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task. Here’s how this happens. As AI tools become more accessible, workers are increasingly able to quickly produce polished output: well-formatted slides, long, structured reports, seemingly articulate summaries of academic papers by non-experts, and usable code. 

But while some employees are using this ability to polish good work, others use it to create content that is actually unhelpful, incomplete, or missing crucial context about the project at hand. The insidious effect of workslop is that it shifts the burden of the work downstream, requiring the receiver to interpret, correct, or redo the work. In other words, it transfers the effort from creator to receiver…”

How to Access .onion Sites (Also Known as Tor Hidden Services)

How to Geek: “Website addresses that end in “.onion” aren’t like normal domain names, and you can’t access them with a normal web browser. 

Addresses that end with “.onion” point to Tor hidden services on the deep web. Lots of deep web sites contain very nasty things, and many of them are likely scams or illegal. You should probably avoid freely browsing .onion sites—instead, use this only if you have a specific site you want to access for a good reason. 

Sites that use the .onion top-level domain are privacy-focused websites that are only accessible using the Tor network. Tor—”short for the onion router”—is an anonymizing computer network. It’s partially funded by the US government, and is designed to help people in countries where Internet access may be censored or monitored. 

When you connect to Tor, your internet activity is sent through the Tor network, anonymizing your Internet activity so it can’t be snooped on, and so that you can access websites that may be blocked in your country. So, when you access Google.com through Tor, your request bounces from Tor relay to Tor relay before it reaches an exit node. That exit node then contacts Google.com for you, and it sends you back the data Google responded with. 

Google sees this as the exit node’s IP address contacting it instead of your IP address. But that means that “last mile” of traffic can be snooped on by an organization monitoring or even running the exit nodes—especially if your traffic is unencrypted. 

A .onion address points to a Tor hidden service, which is a server you can only access through Tor. This means that your browsing activity can’t be snooped on by someone watching the Tor exit nodes. It also means that someone hosting a website can hide that server using the Tor network, so no one can find it—in theory…”