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Days before thousands of researchers, academics, and human rights experts were set to convene in Lusaka, Zambia, the government of Zambia announced it was postponing RightsCon, one the largest and most important digital human rights conferences in the world. The announcement, which came as some participants and speakers were already en route to the conference,…

Customs and Border Protection (CBP) plans to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to expand its fleet of high-powered surveillance drones, and other parts of the Department of the Homeland Security (DHS) may buy their own Predator-style drones, according to recently published procurement records. The news shows DHS’s continued investment in drone surveillance technology, and…

This week, Jason explains the conspiracy theory circulating behind a trippy stock image that went viral after the White House Correspondents’ Dinner—was it sent here by a time traveler? (Spoiler: No.) Then Sam unpacks what’s happening at Arizona State University with a messy rollout of a new AI-powered tool that generates lessons by scraping professors’…

Last week Apple fixed an issue that let the FBI forensically extract copies of incoming Signal messages from a defendant’s iPhone, even after the app had been deleted, because copies of those messages were stored in the iPhone’s notification database. The move comes directly in response to 404 Media’s coverage of a case in which…

An AI-powered tool designed to target trademark violations on social media was used to silence critics of SXSW, the massive annual tech, music and film conference in Austin, Texas. Each year in March, SXSW takes over Austin. This year, thanks to the demolition of the city’s aging convention center, events sprawled to more locations than…

🌘 Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week. If you’ve ever visited a haunted house or a paranormal hotspot, you may have experienced a weird sense of unease that you couldn’t quite explain. While it’s tempting to imagine that…

Arizona State University rolled out a platform called Atomic that creates AI-generated modules based on lectures taken from ASU faculty by cutting long videos down to very short clips then generating text and sections based on those clips.  Faculty and scholars I spoke to whose lectures are included in Atomic are disturbed by their lectures…

The number of pro se legal cases, meaning trials where a defendant or plaintiff represents themselves in court without an attorney, have increased dramatically since the wide adoption of generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude, according to a pre-print research paper.  The authors of the paper, titled “Access to Justice in the Age of…

Tweets containing an abstract, psychedelic 3D stock image have million and millions of views on X because it is supposedly the key to a superintelligent, time-traveling AI conspiracy that attempted to warn people about the shooting at the White House Correspondents Dinner.  I’m gonna try to explain the mind-numbing conspiracy theory that has taken over…