Last week Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) paid contracting giant Palantir tens of millions of dollars to make modifications to a powerful ICE database and search tool to allow “complete target analysis of known populations” and to update the tool’s targeting and enforcement priorities, according to procurement records reviewed by 404 Media. The records show…

This week we start with a couple of Jason and Joseph’s stories about the tool ICE uses to lookup an incredible amount of information about people. After the break, Joseph explains how he tested an AI service that calls your parents in case you can’t be bothered. In the subscribers-only section, our new regular contributor…

The notorious imageboard 4chan is down following what appears to be a major hack of its backend. The hackers claim to have exposed code for the site, the emails of moderators, and a list of mod communications. This happened, it seems, as part of a five year long, inter-image board beef between users of 4chan…

Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is using various artificial intelligence tools, including ones that can quickly identify people of interest by pulling data from social media, according to documents published by the agency last week and marketing material from the contractors. The documents follow others that 404 Media has previously obtained and published through the…

None of the frontier AI research labs have presented any evidence that they are on the brink of achieving artificial general intelligence, no matter how they define that goal, but Google is already planning for a “Post-AGI” world by hiring a scientist for its DeepMind AI lab to research the “profound impact” that technology will…

A version of this piece originally ran on DexDigi, Dexter Thomas’s newsletter, and a video version ran on his YouTube. Please consider subscribing to both. The Hollywood sign was on fire; or at least, it was online. Those images and videos were fake and AI-generated. Maybe you already knew this. But people made money off…