Eine Dokumentation aus einer Zeit, in der elektronische Musik noch Neuland war.

This documentary explores the evolution of music in the technological age, focusing on how electronic synthesizers and computers have revolutionized sound creation. The narrator explains that electronic music offers composers unprecedented creative freedom, allowing them to produce complex rhythms, unique pitches, and innovative sound qualities that traditional instruments cannot replicate. By manipulating fundamental elements such as waveforms, envelopes, and filters, musicians can synthesize entirely new textures or imitate natural and traditional sounds. Ultimately, the film highlights how electronic equipment and computer-assisted composition serve as powerful tools, acting as a bridge between the precision of technology and the artistic vision of the composer.

(Direktlink)

Thursday afternoon, millions of students at thousands of universities and K-12 schools were locked out of Canvas, a piece of catch-all education technology software that has become the de facto core of many classes. ShinyHunters, a ransomware group, hacked Canvas’s parent company and apparently stole “billions” of messages and accessed more than 275 million individuals’ data, according to the hacking group. The group also locked students out of Canvas. 

Later Thursday, Instructure, which makes Canvas, was able to mostly put Canvas back online; it is not clear if the company paid a ransom or not. The breach demonstrates the danger in centralizing the educational and personal data of millions of students in a single service. Canvas is essentially a portal where teachers post assignments and lectures, have discussion boards, and students can message with each other and their teachers and connect with other pieces of education tech software. 

Instructure noted on an incident update page that the stolen data includes “certain personal information of users at affected organizations. That includes names, email addresses, student ID numbers, and messages among Canvas users.” Instructure also noted that it was breached twice—once on April 29 and again on Thursday.

Soon after the hack, I called up Ian Linkletter, a digital librarian specializing in emerging education tech, to talk about the implications of the breach. Linkletter has worked in education tech for 20 years and over the last few years has become known for exposing privacy concerns in Proctorio, a remote test proctoring software that rose to prominence during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Linkletter was sued by Proctorio but eventually the case was dropped.

Linkletter told me the Canvas hack is “the biggest student data privacy disaster in history” in part because of its scale and the sensitive nature of what was stolen. This is my conversation with Linkletter, which has been lightly condensed.

404 Media: What do we know about the hack so far?
Linkletter: At about 1:20 PM [Pacific, Thursday], people started posting screenshots to Reddit of this breach message that they got. Some institutions were cautioning people to change their passwords if they were logged in, right now it just seems like people are in panic mode, some senior administration at schools are in meetings talking about whether they need to cancel finals next week. It’s just the implications are on everything because schools are reliant on this learning management system for everything—communications, grading, finals, everything.

In your email to me, you said you've worked in EdTech for 20 years and you said this is the biggest student data privacy disaster in history. I'm curious what sort of made you frame it that way.
I supported Blackboard [a similar piece of tech] way back in the day and I supported Canvas from about 2017 to 2022 when I worked at the University of British Columbia. And what I was there for when we switched to Canvas in 2017 was the shift from like these scrappy little self-hosted learning management system apps that would be on Canadian servers to this  centralized, all eggs-in-one basket faith in a U.S. tech company. This idea that our data would be just as safe with them as it was when we had it. And because this move to the cloud happened so suddenly about 10 years ago, all of a sudden data got centralized. The only way that I can think of that this type of hack where everything went down, where so much was stolen would be if Instructure had access to everybody's data, which doesn't seem necessary. For it to be just so widespread across every customer is something that, like, [we’ve] never seen before.

Because the contents of messages got leaked, it’s really easy for phishing attacks to get customized. Like, Canvas got hacked [...] and continuing our conversation type of thing, you can get some really personal information from people. And that's also new.

I can also imagine messages between students and teachers to be pretty sensitive.
I supported instructors that used Canvas. And so I would hear these stories like, and they're on like the professor’s subreddit and stuff too, like students are telling you that people died [to explain absences]. There's personal circumstances, medical circumstances, accessibility accommodations, disputes, sexual assault allegations, like all sorts of stuff would be getting reported to the instructor using Canvas. If that information is out across hundreds of millions of people, there's a lot of harm that's going to happen. 

What will you be kind of monitoring as this plays out?
My biggest concern right now is monitoring the institutional response. I feel very strongly that students should have been warned about this like days ago. And it just took this second hack where students got something in their face notifying them that really made schools respond. So I believe that students need to be warned or else they're going to get harmed. And the longer schools wait to tell students about what’s going on, even the little that they know, the more stress and chaos and potential risk to student privacy and safety is at stake.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is exploring developing a pair of smart glasses that would “supplement” the agency’s facial recognition Mobile Fortify application, which lets officers scan someone’s face to verify their citizenship, according to a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official. Another person who attended a conference where a senior ICE official spoke about the plans also described them to 404 Media.

The smart glasses, if they came to fruition, would be yet another technological escalation in the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign. 404 Media previously revealed ICE and Customs Border Protection (CBP) were using the internal app Mobile Fortify to scan peoples’ faces, and instantaneously query a wide range of government databases to decide whether to detain the person or not.  

Matthew Elliston, assistant director of Law Enforcement Systems & Analysis at ICE, said in a meeting the plan to create smartglasses was to “supplement Mobile Fortify,” the DHS official said. 404 Media granted the official anonymity as they weren’t permitted to speak to the press.

Separately, during the 2026 Border Security Expo which took place this week, Elliston was speaking. A participant asked Elliston what technologies the agency was looking for, according to Kenny Morris from the American Friends Service Committee who attended the conference. Elliston’s answer included “wearable heads up displays,” Morris said.

Elliston then said that assaults against ICE officials were up 1400 percent (similar figures have been disputed in press reports), and that smartglasses would let officers be hands-free to respond to any threats, Morris said.

404 Media first heard about ICE’s plan to use smart glasses to supplement Mobile Fortify several months ago from the DHS official. At the time, no written documentation of the plan was available. Last month, independent journalist Ken Klippenstein published a budget document which mentioned DHS’s plan to “deliver innovative hardware, such as operational prototypes of smart glasses, to equip agents with real-time access to information and biometric identification capabilities in the field.” 

404 Media first revealed the existence of Mobile Fortify using leaked ICE emails. It is installed on DHS officials’ work phones, and performs facial recognition on somebody after an ICE official points their phone camera at a person. User manuals for the tool showed the app instantaneously runs a subject’s face against a bank of 200 million images, then pulls up their name, nationality, date of birth, unique identifiers such as their “alien” number, and whether an immigration judge has determined they should be removed from the country. 

404 Media has documented ICE and CBP officials using the smartphone app on American streets, found ICE believes people cannot refuse to be scanned by the app, and that the app misidentified one woman, twice. 

A DHS spokesperson told 404 Media in an email “At this time, no funds have been committed to any form of ‘smart glasses.’”

“The Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) is constantly assessing the needs of ICE and other DHS components to assist law enforcement officers in the field. These discussions involve privacy offices, chief information officers, and attorneys to ensure that any technology that DHS utilizes is within the full scope of the law,” the spokesperson added.

As we’ve reported, CBP officials have been seen multiple times wearing Meta’s Ray-Ban smartglasses during immigration operations. This is despite a ban on personal recording devices. A CBP spokesperson told 404 Media in an email “Recordings may only be done on government sanctioned devices. Officers and agents may wear personally purchased sunglasses.”

Dave Maass, senior investigative researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), told 404 Media that “DHS has been funding research into face-mounted surveillance goggles for quite some time, including Hololens systems designed to help CBP to supposedly ‘see terrorists.’ As the technology advances, it's not surprising that so has DHS's ambitions.” 

“But at worst, we're talking about a technology that invades your privacy if an ICE or CBP officer even looks at you, but even at best, we're looking at a project that, like lots of DHS tech, just wastes taxpayer money on shiny gadgets,” he added.

Move over, coked-up salmon. Fish dosed with psilocybin, the psychoactive component found in magic mushrooms, showed less aggression toward peers compared to their normal behavior in laboratory experiments, according to a study published on Thursday in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience.

Scientists have studied the effects of psilocybin on humans and a variety of other mammals, but fish offer unique insights into the effects of this compound due to their wide varieties of social structures and activity levels. The research is the first to “demonstrate that psilocybin reduces aggression in any animal model,” according to the study, and opens the door to future studies that might pin down the neural mechanisms that underlie these behavioral changes.

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The mangrove rivulus fish (Kryptolebias marmoratus) is particularly intriguing as a highly aggressive fish with incredible adaptations, including the ability to survive out of water for months at a time. It is also a rare hermaphroditic species that reproduces mainly through self-fertilization, producing clones that remove genetic variation as a factor in experiments. 

“Each lineage that we have is essentially genetically identical, and between lineages, they are genetically distinct,” said Dayna Forsyth, a research associate at Acadia University in Nova Scotia who led the study, in a call with 404 Media. “So, we eliminate the genetic factor, and just focus on the behavioral effect.”

To determine how psilocybin influences behavior in these fish, Forsyth and her colleagues placed two undosed fish on opposite sides of a tank with a fiberglass mesh barrier that allowed the fish to see and smell each other, but prevented physical interactions. Then, the “focal fish” was removed and exposed to a low psilocybin dose in a separate tank for 20 minutes, and was later transferred back to the partitioned tank where its responses to the undosed “stimulus fish” were observed.

“We really had no idea what we were getting ourselves into,” Forsyth said. “We didn't have much to go off of before. My research question throughout was just: ‘does psilocybin affect fish behavior?’ We had no idea when we first started this, because there weren't too many papers out there on fish.”

As it turned out, psilocybin had a noticeable impact on the behavior of these fish. Mangrove rivulus fish express aggression by suddenly darting at peers in swimming bursts, but these charges were noticeably reduced in the psilocybin-treated fish. However, the fish still interacted in less overtly hostile ways—such as performing lateral and head-on displays meant to size up  peers—regardless of whether they had been dosed.  

“We definitely predicted that all aggressive behaviors, including those lateral and head-on displays, would be decreased,” Forsyth said. “We really did not expect it to just target that highly aggressive and more energetically costly behavior, rather than the low-energy behaviors. That was definitely a surprise.” 

The study adds to a growing body of research about the impacts of psychoactive compounds on fish, including a recent study in Current Biology about salmon that were exposed to cocaine.

Similar experiments could eventually yield insights about the effects of psilocybin, and other substances, on humans, given that we share some neural anatomy with fish. Forsyth is also interested in how an increased dose might affect fish, or whether they might develop a long-term tolerance to the compound that might shift their behavior back to a normal aggressive state.

“In terms of toxicology studies and exposing fish to a compound for a medicinal aspect, you always want the lowest dose that creates the outcome,” she said. “But it would be interesting to increase that dose and see if it almost reverses the effects. We don't know, but it would be interesting to see what that tolerance is for the dose, maybe even with repeated exposures over time.”

The simple pleasures of life are defined personally – ice clinking in a glass of water on a hot summer’s day, a fresh bar of nice-smelling soap – certainly, not everything is for everyone, yet there are usually things that modern adults can agree upon. A clean home is usually one of those, and for those of us with pets or kids, it sometimes seems impossible to stop the  neverending flow of spills and messes. Operating like a self-driving car, Matic is a robot vacuum that doesn’t require you to remove obstacles beforehand. No more tangled wires or spinning out over a throw carpet, the cute little device switches automatically between sweep and mop functions, for a cleaner and more healthful home.

Security is essential to the Matic system, all mapping and information stored on the device itself. With an option to connect to wi-fi, the included app controls where, when, and how the device cleans – even remotely. These systems are end-to-end encrypted, ensuring the information gathered inside your home is safe and secure.

Ultra-quiet, Matic’s normal run volume is low enough to run at night. This allows more to get done while you sleep, and perhaps take advantage of those hours where dust can settle enough to be cleaned efficiently.

With a low profile and large, grippy wheels, Matic is meant to navigate wood, tile, and carpet with ease. Even a playroom with toys and pencils is no match for Matic, understanding what stays and what goes efficiently.

Dynamic movement is sometimes the downfall of an otherwise successful vacuum cycle, pets and robots not necessarily on the same page. With a creature around, brushes and all rotating elements are situated on the bottom of the device, with protective covering to keep things contained. Simply pop the lid, replace the bag, and you’re on your way to a cleaner home once again.

Ever dropped a bowl of soup, or perhaps a bottle of olive oil? An instance as such has the power to ruin a whole day. Save some time and sanity with a vacuum that truly can handle it all, and values your privacy as well. Just set it up once, and let it do its job, so you can go do yours.

To learn more about the Matic robot vacuum, visit maticrobots.com.

Photography courtesy of Matic.