Apple removed an app for preserving TikToks, Instagram reels, news reports, and videos documenting abuses by ICE, 404 Media has learned. The app, called Eyes Up, differs from other banned apps such as ICEBlock which were designed to report sightings of ICE officials in real-time to warn local communities. Eyes Up, meanwhile, was more of an aggregation service pooling together information to preserve evidence in case the material is needed in the future in court.

The news shows that Apple and Google’s crackdown on ICE-spotting apps, which started after pressure from the Department of Justice against Apple, is broader in scope than apps that report sightings of ICE officials. It has also impacted at least one app that was more about creating a historical record of ICE’s activity during its mass deportation effort.

“Our goal is government accountability, we aren’t even doing real-time tracking,” the administrator of Eyes Up, who said their name was Mark, told 404 Media. Mark asked 404 Media to only use his first name to protect him from retaliation. “I think the [Trump] admin is just embarrassed by how many incriminating videos we have.”

Mark said the app was removed on October 3. At the time of writing, the Apple App Store says “This app is currently not available in your country or region” when trying to download Eyes Up.

The website for Eyes Up which functions essentially the same way is still available. The site includes a map with dots that visitors can click on, which then plays a video from that location. Users are able to submit their own videos for inclusion. Mark said he manually reviews every video before it is uploaded to the service, to check its content and its location. 

“I personally look at each submission to ensure that it's relevant, accurately described to the best I can tell, and appropriate to post. I actually look at the user submitted location and usually cross-reference with [Google] Street View to verify. We have an entire private app just for moderation of the submissions,” Mark said.

The videos available on Eyes Up are essentially the same you might see when scrolling through TikTok, Instagram, or X. They are a mix of professional media reports and user-generated clips of ICE arrests. Many of the videos are clearly just re-uploads of material taken from those social media apps, and still include TikTok or Instagram watermarks. Mark said the videos are also often taken from Reddit or the community- and crime-awareness app Citizen too.

Many of the videos from New York are footage of ICE officials aggressively detaining people inside the city’s courts, something ICE has been doing for months. Another is a video from the New York Immigration Coalition (NYIC), which represents more than 200 immigrant and refugee rights groups. Another is an Instagram video showing ICE taking “a mother as her child begs the officers not to take her,” according to a caption on the video. The map includes similar videos from San Diego, Los Angeles, and Portland, Oregon, which are clearly taken from TikTok or media reports, including NBC News.

“Our goal is to preserve evidence until it can be used in court, and we believe the mapping function will make it easier for litigants to find bystander footage in the future,” Mark said.

Apple removed ICEBlock, another much more prominent app, on Thursday from its App Store. The move came after direct pressure from Department of Justice officials acting at the direction of Attorney General Pam Bondi, according to Fox. A statement the Department of Justice provided to 404 Media said the agency reached out to Apple “demanding they remove the ICEBlock app from their App Store—and Apple did so.” Fox says authorities have claimed that Joshua Jahn, the suspected shooter of an ICE facility in September in which a detainee was killed, searched his phone for various tracking apps before attacking the facility.

Joshua Aaron, the developer of ICEBlock, told 404 Media “we are determined to fight this.”

ICEBlock allowed people to create an alert, based on their location, about ICE officials in their area. This then sent an alert to other users nearby. 

Apple also removed another similar app called Red Dot, 404 Media reported. Google did the same thing, and described ICE officials as a vulnerable group. Apple also removed an app called DeICER.

Yet, Eyes Up differs from those apps in that it does not function as a real-time location reporting app. 

Apple did not respond to a request for comment on Wednesday about Eyes Up’s removal.

Mark provided 404 Media with screenshots of the emails he received from Apple. In the emails, Apple says Eyes Up violates the company’s guidelines around objectionable content. That can include “Defamatory, discriminatory, or mean-spirited content, including references or commentary about religion, race, sexual orientation, gender, national/ethnic origin, or other targeted groups, particularly if the app is likely to humiliate, intimidate, or harm a targeted individual or group. Professional political satirists and humorists are generally exempt from this requirement.”

The emails also say that law enforcement have provided Apple with information that shows the purpose of the app is “to provide location information about law enforcement officers that can be used to harm such officers individually or as a group.”

The emails are essentially identical to those sent to the developer of ICEBlock which 404 Media previously reported on.

In an appeal to the app removal, Mark told Apple “the posts on this app are significantly delayed and subject to manual review, meaning the officers will be long gone from the location by the time the content is posted to be viewed by the public. This would make it impossible for our app to be used to harm such officers individually or as a group.”

“The sole purpose of Eyes Up is to document and preserve evidence of abuses of power by law enforcement, which is an important function of a free society and constitutionally protected,” Mark’s response adds.

Apple then replied and said the ban remains in place, according to another email Mark shared.

The app is available on Google's Play Store.

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Sora, OpenAI’s new social media platform for its Sora 2 image generation model, launched eight days ago. In the first days of the app, users did what they always do with a new tool in their hands: generate endless chaos, in this case images of Spongebob Squarepants in a Nazi uniform and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman shoplifting or throwing Pikachus on the grill.

In little over a week, Sora 2 and OpenAI have caught a lot of heat from journalists like ourselves stress-testing the app, but also, it seems, from rightsholders themselves. Now, Sora 2 refuses to generate all sorts of prompts, including characters that are in the public domain like Steamboat Willie and Winnie the Pooh. “This content may violate our guardrails concerning similarity to third-party content,” the app said when I tried to generate Dracula hanging out in Paris, for example. 

When Sora 2 launched, it had an opt-out policy for copyright holders, meaning owners of intellectual property like Nintendo or Disney or any of the many, many massive corporations that own copyrighted characters and designs being directly copied and published on the Sora platform would need to contact OpenAI with instances of infringement to get them removed. Days after launch, and after hundreds of iterations of him grilling Pokemon or saying “I hope Nintendo doesn’t sue us!” flooded his platform, Altman backtracked that choice in a blog post, writing that he’d been listening to “feedback” from rightsholders. “First, we will give rightsholders more granular control over generation of characters, similar to the opt-in model for likeness but with additional controls,” Altman wrote on Saturday. 

But generating copyrighted characters was a huge part of what people wanted to do on the app, and now that they can’t (and the guardrails are apparently so strict, they’re making it hard to get even non-copyrighted content generated), users are pissed. People started noticing the changes to guardrails on Saturday, immediately after Altman’s blog post. “Did they just change the content policy on Sora 2?” someone asked on the OpenAI subreddit. “Seems like everything now is violating the content policy.” Almost 300 people have replied in that thread so far to complain or crash out about the change. “It's flagging 90% of my requests now. Epic fail.. time to move on,” someone replied.

“Moral policing and leftist ideology are destroying America's AI industry. I've cancelled my OpenAI PLUS subscription,” another replied, implying that copyright law is leftist.

A ton of the videos on Sora right now are of Martin Luther King, Jr. either giving brainrot versions of his iconic “I have a dream” speech and protesting OpenAI’s Sora guardrails. “I have a dream that Sora AI should stop being so strict,” AI MLK says in one video. Another popular prompt is for Bob Ross, who, in most of the videos featuring the deceased artist, is shown protesting getting a copyright violation on his own canvas. If you scroll Sora for even a few seconds today, you will see videos that are primarily about the content moderation on the platform. Immediately after the app launched, many popular videos featured famous characters; now some of the most popular videos are about how people are pissed that they can no longer make videos with those characters.

OpenAI claimed it’s taken “measures” to block depictions of public features except those who consent to be used in the app. “Only you decide who can use your cameo, and you can revoke access at any time.” As Futurism noted earlier this week, Sora 2 has a dead celebrity problem, with “videos of Michael Jackson rapping, for instance, as well as Tupac Shakur hanging out in North Korea and John F. Kennedy rambling about Black Friday deals” all over the platform. Now, people are using public figures, in theory against the platform’s own terms of use, to protest the platform’s terms of use.

Oddly enough, a lot of memes for whining about the guardrails and content violations on Sora right now are using LEGO minifigs — the little LEGO people-shaped figures that are not only a huge part of the brand’s physical toy sets, but also a massively popular movie franchise owned by Universal Pictures — to voice their complaints. 

In June, Disney and Universal sued AI generator Midjourney, calling it a "bottomless pit of plagiarism" in the lawsuit, and Warner Bros. Discovery later joined the lawsuit. And in September, Disney, Warner Bros. and Universal sued Chinese image generator Hailuo AI for infringing on its copyright.

“Music isn’t just something you listen to,” says industrial designer Jang Woojin. “It’s something you want to play yourself and with others.” A new multi-device speaker system and app, Hotcake, makes the potential of an impromptu – or scheduled – jam session a lot simpler. Bypassing the expensive fees of renting a studio or buying clunky equipment, not to mention getting everyone together in the same space, this new solution harnesses the power of digital communication and increasingly compact electronic technology to make the experience smoother and intuitive.

Developed with UX designer Hyeryoung Jeong, BX specialist Chaeeun Kim, visual designer Ilyeo Lee, and fellow industrial designer Eunhye Jang, project lead Woojin’s innovative solution comprises the streamline-configured and boldly colored Cake mechanism – a base woofer with three detachable speakers – and the clip-on Butter earpiece – syncing haptic vibrations into one’s body as they play an instrument.

Easily positioned around a room for full immersion, all of the elements are connected to the Hotcake Jam Session app – which also operates as a social media platform. One can choose to connect with friends or make new ones; find a keyboardist and bassists to fill out a set. Collectively, they can choose what songs they want to play based on similar music libraries. It’s almost as if everyone is in the same room but could actually be thousands of miles away. This multiprong innovation puts the haphazardly programmed interactive games many played on Zoom during the COVID-19 pandemic to shame.

The session is recorded, and thanks to integrated AI, is turned into a dynamic music video at its culmination. “Perfect timing is very important for online jam sessions,” Woojin explains. “Cake makes sure there is no delay or freezing, so everything feels smooth. It stays connected through a wired Ethernet, delivering real-time audio no matter the distance. Each module picks up the live sound from the station via a 2.4GHz RF channel, making sure your online jam feels smooth and perfectly in sync.”

When it came to the styling of Cake and Butter, the designers opted for a trend-conscious orange and a sleek cubic formal vocabulary that accentuated how far the technology has come. Dieter Rams, eat your heart out. The modular elements fit together with the three detachable speakers propped-up by fully collapsible stands. Integrated rings within the speaker head light up as they mimic the pulsations of the music being played.

Though it might seem like there are a lot of components, it all seems manageable, especially when considering how cumbersome traditional band equipment setups can be. Hotcake is also a lot more realistic and true to form than say the Nintendo Wii Music game many played – manipulating a fake guitar with clumpy nobs and levers – in the late aughts.

To learn more about Hotcake, visit behance.com.

Photography by Dokyum Lee.

We noted in August how Deloitte Australia did a report for the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations (DEWR) that looked extremely chatbot. It was full of fake references, and some of the academics named in those references were not happy.

Deloitte finally admitted the incredibly obvious — they wrote the report with ChatGPT. And they’ll be refunding part of their fee. Vibe compliance. [AFR]

DEWR put a new version of the report on its website last thing on Friday, just before a long weekend. [DEWR, PDF, archive]

Deloitte removed a pile of fake references, fake footnotes, and a faked quote from a High Court judge, put in a rewritten references list, and fixed a pile of typos.

The methodology now says:

Traceability and Documentation Gaps – Assessed whether system code state can be mapped to business requirements and compliance needs, which included the use of a generative AI large language model (Azure OpenAI GPT-4o) based tool chain licensed by DEWR and hosted on DEWR’s Azure tenancy.

That is, Deloitte used DEWR’s own GPT installation. It’s hard to believe DEWR had no idea this was going on.

DEWR says the report is fine, because these are the conclusions they paid for. They told the AFR: “The substance of the independent review is retained, and there are no changes to the recommendations.”

Deloitte certainly won’t be pulling this nonsense with ChatGPT again! That’s because they’ve just done a worldwide deal with Anthropic. So next time it’ll be Claude. [CNBC]

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When biologists can't explain cubic wombat poop, why don't THEY call it a singularity?