Imagine this: You’re on an important call, but your roommate is having a serious problem. Do you leave the meeting to go and help?  Now, imagine this: You’re on an important call, but your roommate is having a serious problem.  Do you stay in the meeting rather than help? If you answered “no” to both…

Nathan’s friends were worried about him. He’d been acting differently lately. Not just quieter in his high school classes, but the normally chatty teen was withdrawn in general. Was he sick, they wondered? He just didn’t get a good night’s sleep, he’d tell them. That was partially true. But the cause for his restless nights…

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is using a new mobile phone app that can identify someone based on their fingerprints or face by simply pointing a smartphone camera at them, according to internal ICE emails viewed by 404 Media. The underlying system used for the facial recognition component of the app is ordinarily used when…

On one side of the world, a very online guy edits a photo of then-Vice President Nominee JD Vance with comically-huge and perfectly round chipmunk cheeks: a butterfly flaps its wings. A year later, elsewhere on the planet, a Norwegian tourist returns home, rejected from entry to the U.S. because—he claims—border patrol agents found that…

🌘 Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week. Çatalhöyük, a settlement in Turkey that dates back more than 9,000 years, has attracted intense interest for its structural complexity and hints of an egalitarian and possibly matriarchal society. But it’s…

The Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC), a data broker owned by the country’s major airlines which sells travellers’ detailed flight records in bulk to the government, only just registered as a data broker with the state of California, which is a legal requirement, despite selling such data for years, according to records maintained by the California…

This article was produced in collaboration with Court Watch, an independent outlet that unearths overlooked court records. Subscribe to them here. This article contains references to sexual assault. An Ohio man made pornographic deepfake videos of at least 10 people he was stalking and harassing, and sent the AI-generated imagery to the victims’ family and…

Flock, the automatic license plate reader (ALPR) company with a presence in thousands of communities across the U.S., has stopped agencies across the country from searching cameras inside Illinois, California, and Virginia, 404 Media has learned. The dramatic moves come after 404 Media revealed local police departments were repeatedly performing lookups around the country on…

A software engineer in Michigan has coded a version of Balatro that runs off playing cards. The un-released demake of the popular video game is a prototype meant to run on the Gameboy Advanced through an e-Reader, a 2000s era accessory that loaded games onto the console via a strip of dot code printed onto…