Welcome back to the Abstract! Beware: This week’s offerings are not for the faint of heart. There will be blood. There will be gore. There will be death. There will be…honeydew? First stop is a gladiator cemetery, which has got to be one of the most haunted varieties of burial ground. There is very bad…
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 cheating in job interviews, “scary good” surveillance tech, and prudes in payment processing. EMANUEL: First I want to say that the response to our piece about “economic…
Civitai, a hugely popular site for sharing AI models and a critical piece of infrastructure for AI-generated pornography across the internet, yesterday announced that it will now ban content depicting incest, self-harm, and fetishes featuring “bodily excretions” like urine, vomit, menstruation, and diapers. The site is also demonetizing content featuring the likeness of real people…
The lives of most Wii consoles ended sometime in the early 2010s, left to collect dust in dorm rooms and parents’ dens, having run their last Just Dance disc long ago. But at least one Wii is finding another life hosting a website. Security engineer Alex Haydock found a discarded “sacrificial Wii” at the 2024…
Adam Chace picked a pretty good time to create a data archiving product for turbulent times. I first saw an ad for PrepperDisk on Reddit soon after the election of Donald Trump: “Take lifesaving websites into any emergency,” and “Be SHTF (Shit Hits the Fan) Proof,” the ads read. PrepperDisk is a mini internet box…
Generative AI is a power and water hungry beast. While its advocates swear it’ll change the world for the better, the tangible benefits today are less clear and the long term costs to both society and the environment may be enormous. Even the federal U.S. government knows this, according to a new report published Wednesday…
Last month, Roy Lee was suspended from Columbia after he was accused of using AI to “cheat” on technical job interviews for Amazon, Meta, and TikTok. On Sunday, he announced that he raised $5.3 million to start Cluely, a new startup that aims to allow users to similarly “cheat on everything.” Cluely went viral when…
Adrian Basar did not want to become a distant-water fisherman. With 22-hour workdays and pay of around 450 dollars per month, it’s not the most glamorous—or fulfilling, or generally safe—job. But Basar took it to help support his seven-sibling family. One of them is currently in university, studying mathematics. “I support them so they can…
We start this week with Emanuel and Jason’s big story on Massive Blue, a company that is selling AI-powered undercover bots posing as protesters and children to the cops. After the break, Sam tells us about visiting the millennial saint. In the subscribers-only section, we talk business and the state of 404 Media. Listen to…
An exploit in Activision-Blizzard’s popular real-time strategy game StarCraft II is allowing people to inject disturbing videos into multiplayer matches and show them to other players without warning, according to several accounts in the StarCraft II community and one player who talked to 404 Media. Some of the videos people said they saw in game…
