In short fashion, the names of the two sureties were revealed in court filings: Larry Kramer, dean emeritus of Stanford Law School, and Andreas Paepcke, a senior research scientist at Stanford University.

After the U.S. Department of Justice charged Bankman-Fried with eight counts related to the collapse of FTX, including wire fraud and campaign finance regulation violations, in December, the matter of the founders bail has been a point of tension between his defense attorneys and media organizations.  

Despite the massive size of Bankman-Frieds $250 million bond, he did not have to front the money. Instead, his parents put up their Palo Alto home as collateral. He also had to find two non-family members to sign on as guarantors.

Two people agreed to sign $500,000 and $200,000 bonds, although Bankman-Frieds lawyers sought to redact their names and identifying information, citing privacy concerns and threats faced by Bankman-Frieds family.

Media organizations disagreed, with prominent outlets including Bloomberg and Reuters filing petitions to oppose the redaction in January. Judge Lewis Kaplan, who is overseeing the trial, ultimately sided with the media organizations, deciding that the publics right to know outweighed the arguments for confidentiality.

After allowing an appeal from Bankman-Frieds lawyers, Kaplan ordered the names to be unsealed on Wednesday. In a court filing, he said that defense lawyers had filed a notice of appeal but had not submitted an application for a further stay, which is why he instructed the court clerk to file the unrestricted public orders.

The first, Larry Kramer, signed the larger bond of $500,000. Kramer was the dean of Stanford Law School from 2004 to 2012, where both of Bankman-Frieds parents were professors. In December, Kramer was quoted in a New York Times piece focusing on the role that Bankman-Frieds parents played in FTXs collapse.

I had a friend who said, You dont want to be seen with them, Kramer told the Times. I dont see how this doesnt bankrupt them.

Paepcke signed the $200,000 bond. Like Kramer, Paepcke is also associated with Stanford University, where an online biography describes him as a senior research scientist focused on computer science. His connection with the Bankman-Fried family is not immediately apparent, although he appears to have attended Harvard University at the same time as Bankman-Frieds mother, Barbara Fried.  

Kramer shared a statement with The Block, writing that he and his wife have been close friends with Bankman-Frieds parents since the mid-1990s.

My actions are in my personal capacity, and I have no business dealings or interest in this matter other than to help our loyal and steadfast friends, he said.  

A listed phone number for Paepcke went to voicemail. He didnt respond to an emailed request for comment from Fortune.

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But it was an ad paid for by the Dawn Project, a safety advocacy group, that will likely trigger a fleet of ads this year to reassure consumers that EV technology is safe.

In it, Teslas self-driving cars run down child-sized mannequins. Tesla CEO Elon Musk shrugged off the ad, tweeting that even bad publicity would end up promoting Teslas self-driving cars.

As a media scholar interested in how cultures deal with disruptive technology, I see similarities between todays concerns over EVs and the early days of cars.

Back then, the public conversation usually contained a mix of optimism and fear. Then automakers turned to advertising to allay those fears.

Sound signals and safety

As it happens, advertising safer technology is as old as the automotive industry.

Because automobiles can endanger human life, engineers have long been trying to solve their safety problems. In the early 20th century, along with better brakes, headlights and steering wheels, engineers promised that advances in sound signaling technology  the car horn would make driving safer by letting people know a car was coming.

In my new book, Danger Sound Klaxon! The Horn That Changed History, I tell the story of early sound signals. At first, engineers adapted the bells, gongs and whistles from other types of conveyances to automobiles. But eventually the industry settled on the squeeze bulb horn the kind that makes a honk honk noise.

The only issue? In crowded streets, they werent loud enough to hear.

So in 1909, a new horn from the Lovell-McConnell company called the Klaxon solved that problem, promising drivers the ability, with just the touch of an electric button, to let loose a metallic aaOOga sound so loud that no one could miss it. They quickly set to work to convince the public that their patented noisy technology made driving safer.

Klaxons ad campaign used a new technique called situational advertising that put readers in imaginary situations where they were given a choice. Many of these ads, run in some of the eras most popular magazines, asked readers to consider the best way to protect themselves from other peoples carelessness.

One Klaxon ad from a 1910 issue of the Saturday Evening Post portrays a distracted pedestrian stepping in front of a car in New York Citys Herald Square with the tag line You Cant Change Human Nature.

The auto must have a signal that really warns, reads the copy. If all minds were always alert if children could protect themselves if the weak were strong, there would be no need of any auto signal.

And so the ad suggests that the only responsible solution for car owners is to own a Klaxon, because its distinctive noise said AUTO COMING! LOOK OUT! NOW!

Quieter tech to keep drivers safe

People bought the medium and the message. For two decades, Klaxon dominated the global car horn market and pumped its technocentric safety message into the media ecosystem.

But reliance on loud signaling technology to keep people safe became an odious proposition after the traumas of World War I, when Klaxons were used in the trenches as a gas alarm. In the postwar period, a transnational culture war against noise took off.

So societies everywhere turned to different forms of technology, like traffic lights, to solve the safety problem that noisy car horns could not. The Klaxon went into diminuendo as engineers turned their attention to the problems of quieting automobile noise with muffling technologies such as closed cabins and silent gearwheels.

Yet though their focus changed, the underlying message did not: Emerging technologies could always solve the problems caused by existing ones.

Smart technology promising less thinking

Flash forward to today and you can see that the more things change in technology advertising, the more they stay the same.

Consider a recent commercial for the Volkswagen Atlas that ran during football games all season and which eerily echoes the Klaxon ad from 1910.

Titled Those Guys, the clever ad shows a wired-in zoomer, transfixed by his smartphone and oblivious to the world around him, walking the streets while Doris Days Its a Lovely Day Today plays in the background. Like the man in the 1910 Klaxon ad, this guy steps right in front of a moving Atlas. But, thanks to its Standard Front Assist and Pedestrian Monitoring technology, the car brakes automatically and everyone is safe.

Obviously, the situation portrayed in the ad has changed. Todays new quiet technology protects both pedestrian and driver from harm by sensing movement and automatically braking, so it doesnt really matter whether either is warned.

But the subtext remains the same: Since you cant change human nature and there will always be those guys, rest assured that emerging technology built with safety in mind can protect us.

And no matter what gadget the advertisers are trying to sell, that underlying technocentrism a civic religion in American consumer culture that is practically as important as football is a constant you can count on.

So whether its noisy horns, self-driving cars, smart speakers or cryptocurrency, people are bombarded with messages encouraging them to adopt new technology without stopping to consider if they really need what companies are selling.

Matthew Jordan is the associate professor of Media Studies at Penn State

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The survey, released Wednesday by Gallup and the Knight Foundation, goes beyond others that have shown a low level of trust in the media to the startling point where many believe there is an intent to deceive.

Asked whether they agreed with the statement that national news organizations do not intend to mislead, 50% said they disagreed. Only 25% agreed, the study found.

Similarly, 52% disagreed with a statement that disseminators of national news care about the best interests of their readers, viewers and listeners, the study found. It said 23% of respondents believed the journalists were acting in the publics best interests.

That was pretty striking for us, said Sarah Fioroni, a consultant for Gallup. The findings showed a depth of distrust and bad feeling that go beyond the foundations and processes of journalism, she said.

Journalists need to go beyond emphasizing transparency and accuracy to show the impact of their reporting on the public, the study said.

Americans dont seem to think that the national news organizations care about the overall impact of their reporting on the society, said John Sands, Knights senior director for media and democracy.

In one small consolation, in both cases Americans had more trust in local news.

The ability of many people to instantly learn news from a device they hold in their hand, the rapid pace of the news cycle and an increased number of news sources would indicate that more Americans are on top of the news than ever before.

Instead, an information overload appears to have had the opposite effect. The survey said 61% of American believe these factors make it harder to stay informed, while 37% said its easier.

Like with many other studies, Knight and Gallup found Democrats trust news more than Republicans. Over the past five years, the level of distrust has particularly spiked among independents. Overall, 55% of respondents said there was a great deal of political bias in coverage, compared to 45% in 2017.

In a finding reflected in the financial struggles of some news organizations and declining ratings of television news networks, the survey found 32% of Americans said they pay a great deal of attention to local news, compared to 56% in early 2020. That was at the outset of a presidential election year and the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak.

In a picture of how people get their news, 58% said online, 31% said television, 7% said radio and 3% mentioned printed newspapers or magazines.

For members of Gen Z, aged 18- to 25-years-old, 88% said they got their news online, the survey found.

In one olive branch, if Americans believed local news organizations didnt have the resources or opportunities to cover the news, they would be more likely to pay for it.

The results are based on a Gallup study of 5,593 Americans aged 18 and older conducted between May 31 and July 21, 2022.

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Using a 13-foot pencil-shaped robot that swam under the grounding line where ice first juts over the sea, scientists saw a shimmery critical point in Thwaites chaotic breakup, where its melting so quickly there, theres just material streaming out of the glacier, said robot creator and polar scientist Britney Schmidt of Cornell University.

Before, scientists had no observations from this critical but hard-to-reach point on Thwaites. But with the robot named Icefin lowered down a slender 1,925-foot (587-meter) hole, they saw how important crevasses are in the fracturing of the ice, which takes the heaviest toll on the glacier, even more than melting. Thats how the glacier is falling apart. Its not thinning and going away. It shatters, said Schmidt, lead author of one of two studies in Wednesdays journal Nature.

That fracturing potentially accelerates the overall demise of that ice shelf, said Paul Cutler, the Thwaites program director for the National Science Foundation who returned from the ice last week. Its eventual mode of failure may be through falling apart.

The work comes out of a massive $50 million multi-year international research effort to better understand the widest glacier in the world. The Florida-sized glacier has gotten the nickname the Doomsday Glacier because of how much ice it has and how much seas could rise if it all melts more than 2 feet (65 centimeters), though thats expected take hundreds of years.

The melting of Thwaites is dominated by whats happening underneath, where warmer water nibbles at the bottom, something called basal melting, said Peter Davis, an oceanographer at British Antarctic Survey who is a lead author of one of the studies.

Thwaites is a rapidly changing system, much more rapidly changing than when we started this work five years ago and even since we were in the field three years ago, said Oregon State University ice researcher Erin Pettit, who wasnt part of either study. I am definitely expecting the rapid change to continue and accelerate over the next few years.

Pennsylvania State University glaciologist Richard Alley, who also wasnt part of the studies, said the new work gives us an important look at processes affecting the crevasses that might eventually break and cause loss of much of the ice shelf.

The good news: Much of the flat underwater area they explored is melting much slower than they expected. The bad news: That doesnt really change how much ice is coming off the land part of the glacier and driving up sea levels, Davis said.

Davis said the melting isnt nearly the problem at Thwaites that glacier retreat is. The more the glacier breaks up or retreats, the more ice floats in water. When ice is on ground as part of the glacier it isnt part of sea rise, but when it breaks off land and then goes onto water it adds to the overall water level by displacement, just as ice added to a glass of water raises water level.

And more bad news: This is from the eastern, larger and more stable part of Thwaites. Researchers couldnt safely land a plane and drill a hole in the ice in the main trunk, which is breaking up much faster. And they also found staircase-like steps, those crevasses, in parts of the more stable eastern side where the break-up is far faster and worse.

The key to seeing exactly how bad conditions are on the glacier would require going to the main trunk and looking at the melting from below. But that would require a helicopter to land on the ice instead of a heavier airplane and would be incredibly difficult, said studies co-author Eric Rignot of the University of California Irvine.

The main trunks glacier surface is so messed up by crevasses it looks like a set of sugar cubes almost. Theres no place to land a plane, NSFs Cutler said.

Ted Scambos of the National Snow and Ice Data Center, who wasnt part of the studies, said the results add to understanding how Thwaites is diminishing.

Unfortunately, this is still going to be a major issue a century from now, Scambos said in an email. But our better understanding gives us some time to take action to slow the pace of sea level rise.

When the skinny robot wended its way through the hole in the ice made by a jet of hot water the cameras showed not just the melting water, the crucial crevasses and seabed. It showed critters, especially sea anemones, swimming under the ice.

To accidentally find them here in this environment was really, really cool, Schmidt said in an interview. We were so tired that you kind of wonder like, am I really seeing what Im seeing? You know because there are these little creepy alien guys (the anemones) hanging out on the ice-ocean interface.

In the background is like all these sparkling stars that are like rocks and sediment and things that were picked up from the glacier, Schmidt said. And then the anemones. Its really kind of a wild experience.

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