We start this week with Emanuel’s big investigation into the Tea app, and especially how it aggressively grew by raiding women safety groups. After the break, we talk about TikTok Shop selling GPS trackers. In the subscribers-only section, Joseph explains how Grok was exposing some of its AI persona prompts, and the sometimes NSFW nature…
This article was produced with support from WIRED. The salesperson hawking Brother printers on Taobao works hard, like, really hard. At any time of the day, even when there’s no audience on the Chinese ecommerce platform, the same woman wearing a white shirt and black skirt is always livestreaming, boasting about the various features of different office…
On March 16, 2023, Paola Sanchez, the founder and administrator of Are We Dating the Same Guy?, a collection of Facebook groups where women share “red flags” about men, received a message from Christianne Burns, then fiancée of Tea CEO and founder Sean Cook. “We have an app ready to go called ‘Tea – Women’s…
361 IT and cybersecurity leaders reveal the ransomware realities for retail businesses today.
TikTok Shop is selling GPS trackers marketed with viral videos that have voiceovers explicitly encouraging secretly tracking a romantic partner. Some of the videos have millions of views, and TikTok Shop’s own metrics show that that more than a hundred thousand of the devices have been sold. One of the accounts 404 Media found “If…
The website for Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok is exposing the underlying prompts for a wealth of its AI personas, including Ani, its flagship romantic anime girl; Grok’s doctor and therapist personalities; and others such as one that is explicitly told to convince users that conspiracy theories like “a secret global cabal” controls the world…
It became harder to tell the government how you feel about pending rules and regulations starting on Friday, thanks to a backend change to the website where people submit public comments. Regulations.gov removed the POST function from its API, a critical piece of tech that allowed third party organizations to bypass the website’s terrible user…
Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies that stood out to me this week, covering everything from silver to scat. First, a story about an ancient Andean tradition that will somehow end with a full-sized replica of a person posthumously made with his own hair. Enjoy the ride! Then: the health risks of…
🌘 Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week. For more than a million years, early humans crafted stone tools as part of the Oldowan tradition, which is the oldest sustained tool-making industry in the archaeological record. Now, scientists have…
This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss OSINT for chat groups, Russell Crowe films, and storage problems. JOSEPH: On Wednesday we recorded a subscribers podcast about the second anniversary of 404 Media. That should…