The Department of Justice left multiple unredacted photos of fully nude women or girls exposed as part of Friday’s dump of more than 3.5 million pages of files related to the investigations and prosecutions of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislane Maxwell. Unlike the majority of the images in the released files, both the nudity and the…

We are very proud to present 404 Media’s zine on the surveillance technology used by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. While we have always covered surveillance and privacy, for the last year, you may have noticed that we have spent an outsized amount of our attention and time reporting on the ways technology companies are powering…

Cape, a privacy-focused telecommunications company, says it has introduced a feature that automatically deletes a user’s call data records, such as who they call and when, every 24 hours. These “disappearing call logs” as Cape describes them break with the telecom industry standard of keeping hold of call logs for months if not years. “One…

This week Joseph talks to Samuel Bagg, assistant professor of political science at the University of South Carolina. Bagg recently wrote a fascinating essay, linked below, about how the problem with lots of things might be knowledge-based (people believing stuff that’s wrong or dangerous) but the solution is not more knowledge. It’s all about social…

Moltbook is a “social media” site for AI agents that’s captured the public’s imagination over the last few days. Billed as the “front page of the agent internet,” Moltbook is a place where AI agents interact independently of human control, and whose posts have repeatedly gone viral because a certain set of AI users have…

Here is an email that Elon Musk, current world’s richest man and owner of a gigantic social media network that generated child sexual abuse material on demand, sent to sex offender Jeffrey Epstein on November 11, 2012: “What day/night will be the wildest party on your island?”  At first glance, the latest Department of Justice…

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 a trip to Kenya, reconstructing images, and lying developers. JASON: Last week, I was in Kenya, a trip that turned out so overwhelmingly positive and left me…

A hacker demonstrated that the viral new AI agent Moltbot (formally Clawdbot) is easy to hack via a backdoor in an attached support shop.Clawdbot has become a Silicon Valley sensation among a certain type of AI-booster techbro, and the backdoor highlights just one of the things that can go awry if you use AI to…

🌘 Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week. Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that roamed a superocean, took to the skies, grabbed some grub, and watched alien auroras. First, check out some 512-million-year-old…