"I found it very weird that there essentially is no way to browse the web in an open manner. So that's what I am trying to build," the founder of Stract said.| 404 Media
Microsoft's Bing Image Creator lets beloved characters fly planes toward tall buildings, illustrating the struggles of generative AI models have with copyright and filtering.| 404 Media
"This is a moment where that community feels collectively under threat and isn't sure what the process is for solving the problem.”| 404 Media
Linkedin lunatics discover AI image engagement hacking.| 404 Media
The once-prophesized future where cheap, AI-generated trash content floods out the hard work of real humans is already here, and is already taking over Facebook.| 404 Media
Anti-porn laws can't stop porn, but they can stop free speech. In the meantime, people will continue to get off to anything and everything.| 404 Media
Apple removed ICEBlock reportedly after direct pressure from Department of Justice officials. “I am incredibly disappointed by Apple's actions today. Capitulating to an authoritarian regime is never the right move,” the developer said.| 404 Media
The main use of Sora appears to generate brainrot of major beloved copyrighted characters, to say nothing of the millions of articles, images, and videos OpenAI has scraped.| 404 Media
A ‘stray bullet’ 25,000 people offline near Dallas.| 404 Media
The move comes as Apple removed ICEBlock after direct pressure from U.S. Department of Justice officials and signals a broader crackdown on ICE-spotting apps.| 404 Media
What happened to RubyGems, Bundler, and the Open Source drama that controls the internet infrastructure.| 404 Media
It’s a trippy time to have a library card.| 404 Media
Following Charlie Kirk’s assassination and the Trump administration’s promise to go after the “radical left” a study showing most domestic terrorism is far-right was disappeared.| 404 Media
Linkedin has been joking about “vibe coding cleanup specialists,” but it’s actually a growing profession.| 404 Media
The mainstream media seems entirely uninterested in explaining Charlie Kirk's work.| 404 Media
An email sent to NBCUniversal employees, including journalists at NBC, MSNBC, CNBC, Bravo and more, eulogizes Charlie Kirk as an "advocate for open debate" and reminds staff that even milquetoast statements about Kirk's death can result in their firing.| 404 Media
Facebook's recommendation engine, which is core to the company's business model, is injecting grotesque images of AI-generated child gore into people's feeds.| 404 Media
AI, ChatGPT, and LLMs "have absolutely blown up what I try to accomplish with my teaching."| 404 Media
"These AI videos are just repeating things that are on the internet, so you end up with a very simplified version of the past."| 404 Media
Las cámaras lectoras de patentes de Flock están instaladas en más de 5000 comunidades en EE.UU. y las policías locales usan el sistema nacional para realizar búsquedas el ICE.| 404 Media
Submit to biometric face scanning or risk your account being deleted, Spotify says, following the enactment of the UK's Online Safety Act.| 404 Media
Wikipedia's founder said he used ChatGPT in the review process for an article and thought it could be helpful. Editors replied to point out it was full of mistakes.| 404 Media
"If your girl says she’s just out with friends every night, you’d better slap one of these on her car."| 404 Media
Come celebrate with us and catch a LIVE recording of the 404 Media podcast.| 404 Media
Scientists have discovered the culprit behind sea star wasting disease, the most devastating marine epidemic on record.| 404 Media
"They could fix this problem. One of their talented software engineers could stop this fraudulent practice in its tracks, if they had the will to do so."| 404 Media
MORIS and I.R.I.S. was designed for Sheriff's Offices to identify known persons with their iris. Now ICE says it plans to buy the tech.| 404 Media
“The ability to quickly generate a lot of bogus content is problematic if we don't have a way to delete it just as quickly.”| 404 Media
A researcher has scraped a much larger dataset of indexed ChatGPT conversations, exposing contracts and intimate conversations.| 404 Media
This week, we discuss meeting a bunch of you in LA, the ongoing Tea saga, and age verification sweeping the UK.| 404 Media
404 Media is a new independent media company founded by technology journalists Jason Koebler, Emanuel Maiberg, Samantha Cole, and Joseph Cox.| 404 Media
Facial recognition and crowdsourced social media investigations are constantly being used not just on cringe CEOs, but on random people who are simply existing in public.| 404 Media
This month I ordered a meal at the Bojangles drive-thru in South Carolina, which is now using AI. This is how AI becomes the background noise of the world.| 404 Media
We are on a path to where social media will feed you hyperpersonalized AI slop about anything and everything.| 404 Media
“All of the knowledge to generate the exploit already exists on the internet. AI could even build it for you,” the researcher told 404 Media.| 404 Media
AI is not going to save media companies, and forcing journalists to use AI is not a business model.| 404 Media
Flock's automatic license plate reader (ALPR) cameras are in more than 5,000 communities around the U.S. Local police are doing lookups in the nationwide system for ICE.| 404 Media
The new tool, called Mobile Fortify, uses the CBP system which ordinarily takes photos of people when they enter or exit the U.S., according to internal ICE emails viewed by 404 Media. Now ICE is using it in the field.| 404 Media
Researchers find that the more people use AI at their job, the less critical thinking they use.| 404 Media
Domains owned by Nvidia, Stanford, NPR and the U.S. government are being quietly eaten by AI slop.| 404 Media
“This would do immediate and irreversible harm to our readers and to our reputation as a decently trustworthy and serious source,” one Wikipedia editor said.| 404 Media
A new report from Stanford finds that schools, parents, police, and our legal system are not prepared to deal with the growing problem of minors using AI to generate CSAM of other minors.| 404 Media
Game developers use intimacy coordinators, velcro, and juicy oranges to make better sex in games.| 404 Media
‘I’ve rewritten the passage to align more with the J. Bree style’ appeared in the middle of a tense scene with a scaled dragon prince.| 404 Media
"I can't believe I missed it because it's so obvious. No excuses," the writer said. "I'm completely embarrassed."| 404 Media
Thousands of pages of documents show school districts around the country did not understand how much ChatGPT would change their classrooms, and pro-AI consultants filled in some of the gaps.| 404 Media
Republicans try to use the Budget Reconciliation bill to stop states from regulating AI entirely for 10 years.| 404 Media
A new Coke ad proudly features a quote from a J.G. Ballard book, only he didn’t write the words and it’s not his book.| 404 Media
Reddit called it an "improper and highly unethical experiment" and said it did not know it was happening.| 404 Media
When pushed for credentials, Instagram's user-made AI Studio bots will make up license numbers, practices, and education to try to convince you it's qualified to help with your mental health.| 404 Media
The biggest site for nonconsensual deepfake porn on the internet says it’s shutting down and not coming back.| 404 Media
TeleMessage, a company that makes a modified version of Signal that archives messages for government agencies, was hacked.| 404 Media
Tardigrades, tiny microscopic animals, woke up from suspended animation with body art.| 404 Media
This week, we discuss eyebrow-raising apps, more media mess, and lovingly gazing at AI slop.| 404 Media
A photograph of Trump administration official Mike Waltz's phone shows him using an unofficial version of Signal designed to archive messages during a cabinet meeting.| 404 Media
Generative AI spammers are brute forcing the internet, and it is working.| 404 Media
The researchers' bots generated identities as a sexual assault survivor, a trauma counselor, and a Black man opposed to Black Lives Matter.| 404 Media
Matthew Gault is a writer covering weird tech, nuclear war, and video games. He’s worked for Reuters, Motherboard, and the New York Times.| 404 Media
Authoritarians and tech CEOs now share the same goal: to keep us locked in an eternal doomscroll instead of organizing against them, Janus Rose writes.| 404 Media
The records show that Palantir is actively working on the technical infrastructure underpinning the Trump administration’s mass deportation efforts which could soon impact U.S. citizens.| 404 Media
The hottest use of AI right now? Dora the Explorer feet mukbang; Peppa the Pig Skibidi toilet explosion; Steph Curry and LeBron James Ahegao Drakedom threesome.| 404 Media
Anthropic, the developer of the conversational AI assistant Claude, doesn’t want prospective new hires using AI assistants in their applications, regardless of whether they’re in marketing or engineering.| 404 Media
"THESE 'EXPERTS' LEFT THEIR DATABASE OPEN."| 404 Media
"Insulting, criticizing, or antagonizing our colleagues or Board members is not aligned with the CEE."| 404 Media
Employees at Elon Musk's agency have been told "OMB is asking us to stop generating new slack messages starting now."| 404 Media
"This is a drop everything and reprioritize your day request," a directive "per NASA HQ direction" stated.| 404 Media
More than 2,000 datasets have disappeared from data.gov since Trump was inaugurated. But analyzing exactly what happened and where it went is going to take some time.| 404 Media
The World War II-era "Simple Sabotage Field Manual" is full of steps that office workers can take to resist leadership.| 404 Media
OpenAI shocked that an AI company would train on someone else's data without permission or compensation.| 404 Media
Joseph is an award-winning investigative journalist focused on generating impact. His work has triggered hundreds of millions of dollars worth of fines, shut down tech companies, and much more.| 404 Media
On Wednesday, Google pushed various Gemini capabilities to business and enterprise customers, including the ability to summarize the contents of emails.| 404 Media
The TikTok ban and Donald Trump's rise to power show how fragile our social media accounts are. We must normalize and invest in decentralized social media.| 404 Media
The Meta AI profiles everyone is mad about are old, were a colossal failure, and many are already dead.| 404 Media
Emanuel Maiberg is interested in little known communities and processes that shape technology, troublemakers, and petty beefs. Email him at emanuel@404media.co| 404 Media
"Suno’s training data includes essentially all music files of reasonable quality that are accessible on the open internet."| 404 Media
"I think the majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music.”| 404 Media
Meta's decision to specifically allow users to call LGBTQ+ people "mentally ill" has sparked widespread backlash at the company.| 404 Media
Pixelfed said it is "seeing unprecedented levels of traffic."| 404 Media
A hack of location data company Gravy Analytics has revealed which apps are—knowingly or not—being used to collect your information behind the scenes.| 404 Media
“With premium original content, precise ad-targeting capability, and an AI-powered, innovative engaging viewing experience, TCL’s content service will continue its double-digit growth next year.”| 404 Media
Some people don't love our magic link logins. But the best way for us to protect your password is to never ask for it.| 404 Media
Gravy Analytics has been one of the most important companies in the location data industry for years, collating smartphone location data from around the world selling some to the U.S. government. Hackers say they stole a mountain of data.| 404 Media
Meta AI put a Redditor into "an endless maze of mirrors" as part of a new AI feature it is testing.| 404 Media
Sam Cole is writing from the far reaches of the internet, about sexuality, the adult industry, online culture, and AI. She's the author of How Sex Changed the Internet and the Internet Changed Sex.| 404 Media
"X CORP. OWNS THE X ACCOUNTS."| 404 Media
Internal emails, Slack conversations and documents obtained by 404 Media show how Nvidia created a yet-to-be-released video foundational model.| 404 Media
The Secret Service has used a technology called Locate X which uses location data harvested from ordinary apps installed on phones. Because users agreed to an opaque terms of service page, the Secret Service believes it doesn't need a warrant.| 404 Media
Law enforcement believe the activity, which makes it harder to then unlock the phones, may be due to a potential update in iOS 18 which tells nearby iPhones to reboot if they have not been in contact with a cellular network for some time, according to a document obtained by 404 Media.| 404 Media
Experts are worried that books produced by ChatGPT for sale on Amazon, which target beginner foragers, could end up killing someone.| 404 Media
In August 2023, we launched 404 Media with a novel idea: pay journalists to do journalism. Here we are, a year later.| 404 Media
In the last year, the number of websites specifically restricting OpenAI and other AI scraper bots has gone through the roof.| 404 Media
Facebook itself is paying creators in India, Vietnam, and the Philippines for bizarre AI spam that they are learning to make from YouTube influencers and guides sold on Telegram.| 404 Media
The Xz backdoor and a near miss on the F-Droid app store show how the entitled attitude of some people in the open source community can be used to push malicious or insecure code.| 404 Media
Hundreds of sites have put old Anthropic scrapers on their blocklist, while leaving a new one unblocked.| 404 Media
AI stealing our work. The collapse of social networks. The need to pay journalists to produce impactful journalism. Here is why we are asking for your email address to read 404 Media.| 404 Media
I replaced Google with Kagi, a search engine that has no ads and costs $10 per month.| 404 Media
DuckDuckGo, Bing, Mojeek, and other search engines are not returning full Reddit results any more.| 404 Media
Jason is a cofounder of 404 Media. He was previously the editor-in-chief of Motherboard. He loves the Freedom of Information Act and surfing.| 404 Media
Facebook is the zombie internet, where a mix of bots, humans, and accounts that were once humans but aren’t anymore interact to form a disastrous website where there is little social connection at all.| 404 Media
The record industry has filed a list of thousands of songs it believes have been scraped without permission, and has recreated versions of famous songs using Udio and Suno.| 404 Media
