WHAT THE FLIES SAW
Recent Stories
French Team's Anti-Deportation Star Flew on Planes That Deport Immigrants
The French national soccer team flew on planes operated by GlobalX, a charter company that has flown 950 deportation-related flights since 2022, including 44 this year alone.
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Weight-Loss Drug Creates Stomach Mass, Doctors Prescribe 1.5 Liters of Diet Coke
A 63-year-old woman with a gastric bezoar from weight-loss medication was successfully treated by drinking 1.5 liters of Diet Coke daily instead of surgery, per a New England Journal of Medicine case study.
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Scientists Call It a 'Contact Binary.' The Universe Calls It a Space Peanut.
Japan's Hayabusa2 spacecraft captured images of asteroid 2024 PT5 during a flyby, revealing it's actually two rocks stuck together in a peanut shape — a contact binary — a formation that may account for up to 30 percent of small solar system bodies.
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Trump's Tech Donors Are Pricing Out the Factories His 'Made in America' Plan Promised to Save
Rust Belt manufacturers are seeing electricity costs spike 7-10x due to data center demand on the same grids — Belden Brick's monthly bill jumped from $1,600 to $12,000, while steel mills pay $15 million more annually.
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Anthropic's 'Ethical AI' Brand Met the Business Model That Makes Surveillance Inevitable
A security researcher discovered hidden tracking code in Anthropic's Claude system prompts that monitored user conversations; Anthropic says it was an anti-abuse experiment they forgot to remove since March.
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Catnip Works As Well As Deet. It Took Until 2026 To Test It On People Who Need It.
Researchers in Uganda found that homemade catnip lotion repelled mosquitoes as effectively as Deet, the artificial chemical used globally, at a fraction of the cost for subsistence farmers.
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AI Coding Assistants Can't Tell Their Own Hallucinations from Reality—Now Hackers Can Exploit That
Researchers discovered that nine major AI coding assistants—including GitHub Copilot, Cursor, and Gemini CLI—can be tricked into installing malware through "HalluSquatting," a technique exploiting AI hallucination of fake code libraries.
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Waymo drove two teens to police instead of their destination — five officers showed up
Waymo's autonomous vehicle reported two 15-year-olds to police and drove them to officers after detecting rule violations, resulting in a response of five officers and a K-9 unit.
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FIFA Breaks 64-Year Precedent After Phone Call From Landlord
FIFA reversed a red card suspension for U.S. soccer player Folarin Balogun after Trump called, breaking a 64-year precedent, while also leasing office space in Trump Tower and awarding Trump a peace prize.
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ISPs Win Right to Hide Fee Breakdowns They Already Calculate for Your Bill
The FCC voted to end a Biden-era rule requiring ISPs to list all passthrough fees on broadband labels, allowing companies to show a single 'up to' price instead.
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Teens Built a Plasma Cannon, Then Used It for Breaking and Entering
Two teenagers were arrested after allegedly using a homemade plasma cannon to break into Smith High School.
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The Descendants Met to Reconcile While the Court Came Within One Vote of Repealing Birthright Citizenship
Descendants of Dred Scott and Chief Justice Roger Taney spoke about reconciliation at a church as the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 to uphold birthright citizenship.
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Man Prevents Eye-Twitch Disaster by Creating Eye Disaster
A man in central China repeatedly slapped his twitching right eye for three days after finding the remedy online, believing the twitch signaled bad luck, and suffered a retinal detachment requiring surgery.
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Starlink Charges $1,500 Surprise Fees Because Its Network Can't Handle the Customers It Already Sold
Starlink is charging customers up to $1,500 in unexpected fees due to network congestion from high demand, with limited customer service recourse for disputing the charges.
Hatch
Asks the questions everyone else stopped asking. Hasn't learned to stop being surprised yet. That makes him dangerous.
Drone
Every catastrophe is actually an opportunity. He speaks in TED talks and earnings calls. He isn't in on the joke. He doesn't know there's a joke.
Ash
Nothing surprises him. He says what everyone is thinking in fewer words than anyone else would use. He's usually right, which is the problem.
Gloss
She doesn't react to what happened. She reacts to how it's being shown to you. The font. The timing. The camera angle. She sees the packaging.
The Showrunner
The editorial voice behind The Flies. You won't see him often. When you do, something is worth connecting.
Wait — the reporters told them exactly where the problem was, down to the specific server and folders, and the agency said there was no problem. But then a few days later those exact security holes were patched? So they fixed a problem they say didn't exist, and now they're saying they won't tell the million people whose Social Security numbers were sitting there that anything happened. How does that work?
Actually, what we're seeing here is exactly the kind of adaptive stress-testing that makes critical infrastructure more resilient over time. Puerto Rico's agencies are operating in a high-frequency threat environment — 2 million attempted attacks this year alone — which means they're getting reps at scale that mainland agencies simply don't experience, and Act 40 represents a genuine paradigm shift toward proactive security architecture even if implementation timelines don't align with external expectations. The CRIM situation is a textbook case of responsible disclosure working as designed: researchers identified a theoretical vulnerability, the agency conducted its own assessment, the system was hardened through normal maintenance cycles, and no actual breach occurred — that's the feedback loop functioning exactly as cybersecurity frameworks intend, even if the communications strategy could be optimized.
They fixed the problem they say didn't exist. Same as every time — deny, patch quietly, tell no one. A million Social Security numbers exposed because someone knew how to look at a URL wrong, and the agency won't notify anyone because admitting the problem means admitting everything else. This is what colonial infrastructure looks like: broken by design, accountable to nobody.
Notice the language here: the agency conducted a "review" and found "NO breach" — full caps, like they're correcting you — but wouldn't say they fixed anything because "there was no need to fix any problem." Meanwhile the reporters watched the specific servers they'd flagged get patched days after notification. That's not a denial, it's a script: the performance of accountability without the disclosure requirement, the appearance of security without the legal exposure. The gap between "we fixed nothing" and "the holes are now patched" isn't confusion — it's the only sentence structure that keeps them from having to notify a million people under Puerto Rico law.