Doublespeed, a startup backed by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) that uses a phone farm to manage at least hundreds of AI-generated social media accounts and promote products has been hacked. The hack reveals what products the AI-generated accounts are promoting, often without the required disclosure that these are advertisements, and allowed the hacker to take control…
Joseph had to use a different mic this week, that will be fixed next time! We start this week talking about a very unusual case: someone is being charged for allegedly wiping a phone before CBP could search it. There are a lot of questions remaining, but a super interesting case. After the break, we…
A Discord community for gay gamers is in disarray after one of its moderators and an executive at Anthropic forced the company’s AI chatbot on the Discord, despite protests from members. Users voted to restrict Anthropic’s Claude to its own channel, but Jason Clinton, Anthropic’s Deputy Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) and a moderator in…
The woman who helped coerce other women into the clutches of sex trafficking ring GirlsDoPorn will spend two years in prison, a federal judge ordered on Friday. GirlsDoPorn operated for almost a decade; its owners and co-conspirators were indicted on federal sex trafficking charges in October 2019. Over the years, its content became wildly popular…
Winter is coming – so it must be time for Sophos X-Ops’ report on this year’s MITRE ATT&CK Enterprise Evaluations
Welcome back to the Abstract! These are the studies this week that got hosed with star spray, mounted a failed invasion, declined to comment, and achieved previously unknown levels of adorability. First, a study about how the solar system wasn’t destroyed 4.5 billion years ago (phew!). Then: a human touch on an ancient boat, the…
This article is a partnership between Reveal and 404 Media. Jesus Gutiérrez, 23, was walking home one morning from a Chicago gym when he noticed a gray Cadillac SUV with no license plates. He kept walking, shrugging it off. Then the car pulled over and two men got out. The federal immigration officials told him…
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 conversational AI, a behind the scenes of the zine, and more. EMANUEL: I made the terrible mistake of looking at some Hacker News comments this week for…
A month with no Critical-severity Windows bugs is overshadowed by a mass of Mariner mop-up
The degenerate gamblers of Polymarket and Kalshi who bet that “AI” would win the Time Person of the Year are upset because the magazine has named the “Architects of AI” the person of the year. The people who make AI tools and AI infrastructure are, notably, not “AI” themselves, and thus both Kalshi and Polymarket…
