The Mozilla Foundation is calling upon 30 technology companies, social networks, and websites to block web scraping by an ICE surveillance contractor called ShadowDragon after 404 Media published a list of sites that the contractor pulls data from. “The thorniest concern here is the meticulous targeting such data enables—putting the lives of protesters, researchers, immigrants,…
Welcome back to the Abstract! You are all in for a treat this week. Scientists have opened up a new book of genomes and discovered a swashbuckling saga for the ages written inside. I don’t even want to say anything more to spoil it. I’m excited for you! Then, microplastics are in the air you…
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 doxed Teslas, the concept of “amplification,” and how we’d much rather be looking at cooking videos than all this mess. EMANUEL: This week I published one of…
Federal law enforcement agencies have turned to a variety of techniques and surveillance capabilities to identify people who have allegedly set fire to Tesla vehicles and property, including automatic license plate readers and social media crawling, according to newly unsealed court records obtained by 404 Media. The documents come from cases that Attorney General Pamela…
Not all authentication is equal to the task in 2025, but there is a best choice within reach
The 2025 Australian federal election will take place in May, and Meta has vowed to combat all forms of misinformation, including deepfakes, on its platforms ahead of voting in an attempt to prevent election interference. Ironically, Meta announced that it plans to do this with the help of the exact methods CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced…
Controversial facial recognition company Clearview AI attempted to purchase hundreds of millions of arrest records including social security numbers, mugshots, and even email addresses to incorporate into its product, 404 Media has learned. For years, Clearview AI has collected billions of photos from social media websites including Facebook, LinkedIn and others and sold access to…
A network of Instagram accounts is using AI to steal content from human creators and deepfake their faces to make them look like they have Down syndrome. 404 Media was able to determine the accounts are linked because they reuse Instagram bios, videos, and in some cases link to the same OnlyFans competitors pages where…
We start this week with Joseph’s story about the 200+ sites an ICE contractor called ShadowDragon is monitoring. A lot of surprising ones on there. After the break, Emanuel explains why NASA, Yale, and Stanford scientists are considering leaving the U.S. for France. In the subscribers-only section, Emanuel breaks down the fascinating reason why Super…
Sophos X-Ops’ research, presented at Virus Bulletin 2024, uses ‘multimodal’ AI to classify spam, phishing, and unsafe web content