On September 27, several writers published obituaries about writer and photographer Kaleb Horton, who recently died. The obituaries were written by friends, acquaintances, and colleagues, but all of them revered him as a writer and photographer, whose work has appeared in GQ, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, and VICE. Some of these obituary writers were shocked…
Within moments of opening OpenAI’s new AI slop app Sora, I am watching Pikachu steal Poké Balls from a CVS. Then I am watching SpongeBob-as-Hitler give a speech about the “scourge of fish ruining Bikini Bottom.” Then I am watching a title screen for a Nintendo 64 game called “Mario’s Schizophrenia.” I swipe and I…
People are farming and selling invite codes for Sora 2 on eBay, which is currently the fastest and most reliable way to get onto OpenAI’s new video generation and TikTok-clone-but-make-it-AI-slop app. Because of the way Sora is set up, it is possible to buy one code, register an account, then get more codes with the…
Kodak announced two new stocks of color film on Wednesday, in a move that has excited the photography world and which indicates that the photography giant is directly distributing still photography film again. “To help meet the growing demand for film, Kodak is excited to announce the launch of two color-negative films, KODACOLOR 100 and…
Last week Freedom of the Press Foundation and 404 Media filed a lawsuit against the multiple parts of the U.S. government demanding they hand over a copy of an agreement that shares the personal data of nearly 80 million Medicaid patients with ICE. The data sharing marked a watershed moment for ICE and its access…
We start this week with Joseph’s article about landlords and income verification companies demanding login details from potential renters so the companies can log in and scrape their paystubs. That has some potential legal issues for everyone involved! After the break, 18 lawyers tell us why they used AI. In the subscribers-only section, Emanuel breaks…
The internet can be more physically vulnerable than you think. Last week, thousands of people in North and Central Texas were suddenly knocked offline. The cause? A bullet. The outage hit cities all across the state, including Dallas, Irving, Plano, Arlington, Austin, and San Antonio. The outage affected Spectrum customers and took down their phone…
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has bought access to a surveillance tool that is updated every day with billions of pieces of location data from hundreds of millions of mobile phones, according to ICE documents reviewed by 404 Media. The documents explicitly show that ICE is choosing this product over others offered by the contractor’s…
Last week, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth called America’s Generals to Quantico to meet for an unknown reason. America’s top civilian military leader calling the generals home all at once is strange and unprecedented. It’s the kind of move that often presages something like a major war. But that’s not what he wanted. During a…
Earlier this month, an appeals court in California issued a blistering decision and record $10,000 fine against a lawyer who submitted a brief in which “nearly all of the legal quotations in plaintiff’s opening brief, and many of the quotations in plaintiff’s reply brief, are fabricated” through the use of ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Grok….
