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 San Diego and Costa Rica reporting trips. SAM: Some weeks I feel like I’ve absorbed way too much internet to be able to formulate any more thoughts…

This article was produced in collaboration with Court Watch, an independent outlet that unearths overlooked court records. Subscribe to them here. A former CIA official and contractor, who at the time of his employment dug through classified systems for information he then sold to a U.S. lobbying firm and foreign clients, used access to those…

A union that represents university professors and other academics published a guide on Wednesday tailored to help its members navigate social media during the “current climate.” The advice? Lock down your social media accounts, expect anything you post will be screenshotted, and keep things positive. The document ends with links to union provided trauma counseling…

Reference librarian Eddie Kristan said lenders at the library where he works have been asking him to find books that don’t exist without realizing they were hallucinated by AI ever since the release of GPT-3.5 in late 2022. But the problem escalated over the summer after fielding patron requests for the same fake book titles…

A television channel run by Russia’s Ministry of Defense is airing a program it claims is AI-generated. According to advertisements for the show, a neural network is picking the topics it wants to discuss, then uses AI to generate that video. It includes putting French President Emmaneul Macron in hair curlers and a pink robe,…

We start this week with Joseph’s investigation into Nexar, a popular dashcam company that was catastrophically hacked. Nexar is also uploading user footage to a publicly available map without some drivers’ knowledge. After the break, Sam tells us about her trip to San Diego to cover the sentencing of someone she has covered for years….

The Department of Justice has removed a study showing that white supremacist and far-right violence “continues to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism” in the United States.  The study, which was conducted by the National Institute of Justice and hosted on a DOJ website was available there at least until September…

A bill introduced by Michigan lawmakers last week would ban pornography, ASMR, depictions of transgender people, and VPNs for anyone using the internet in the state. House Bill 4938, called the “Anticorruption of Public Morals Act,” would prohibit distribution of “certain material on the internet that corrupts the public morals,” the bill states. It was…

OpenAI has announced it is introducing new safety measures for ChatGPT after the a wave of stories and lawsuits accusing ChatGPT and other chatbots of playing a role in a number of teen suicide cases. ChatGPT will now attempt to guess a user’s age, and in some cases might require users to share an ID…

Some international sellers on large platforms like eBay and Etsy have jacked up their shipping costs to the United States to absurd prices in order to deter Americans from buying their products in an effort to avoid dealing with the logistical headaches of Trump’s tariffs. A Japanese eBay seller increased the shipping cost on a…