Mr. Deepfakes, the go-to site for nonconsensual deepfake porn, says it’s shutting down and not coming back because it lost a service provider and data. “A critical service provider has terminated service permanently. Data loss has made it impossible to continue operation,” a notice that appears when visitors go to the site now says. The…
A hacker has breached and stolen customer data from TeleMessage, an obscure Israeli company that sells modified versions of Signal and other messaging apps to the U.S. government to archive messages, 404 Media has learned. The data stolen by the hacker contains the contents of some direct messages and group chats sent using its Signal…
Welcome back to the Abstract! The news is so often dominated by big egos and noxious personalities, so I’m genuinely excited to lead the column with this chill lass who just seems like a good hang! What’s her secret? She’s not a human being. That goes a long way these days. Next, researchers have once…
U.S. Central Command, the part of the Pentagon that oversees its wars in the Middle East, denies that the United States military bombed a target in Yemen based on posts on X from an anonymous open source intelligence account which identified it as a Houthi base before the bombing and apologized for their posts after…
The competition is fierce, but no one can paint quite as vivid a picture of the future technofeudalist dystopia the Trump administration is trying to build as Howard Lutnick, the Secretary of Commerce, of “the army of millions and millions of people screwing in little, little screws to make iPhones, that kind of thing is…
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 eyebrow-raising apps, more media mess, and lovingly gazing at AI slop. JASON: I was planning on BTBing about the Reddit AI experiment, but today is my birthday…
Mike Waltz, who was until Thursday U.S. National Security Advisor, has inadvertently revealed he is using an obscure and unofficial version of Signal that is designed to archive messages, raising questions about what classification of information officials are discussing on the app and how that data is being secured, 404 Media has found. On Thursday…
A new memo from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is calling on defense contractors to grant the Army the right-to-repair. The Wednesday memo is a document about “Army Transformation and Acquisition Reform” that is largely vague but highlights the very real problems with IP constraints that have made it harder for the military to repair…
Polygon, Vox Media’s video games website, has been acquired by Valnet, a company founded and helmed by Hassan Youssef, a former pornography mogul and the co-founder of the popular adult entertainment site Brazzers. The news, which broke first on social media via various Polygon writers and editors saying that they suddenly don’t have a job,…
In a newly-released podcast, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg says society just hasn’t found the “value” in AI girlfriends and therapists yet, apparently clueless that his own company hosts deceptive and harmful AI companions on its own platform. For a little over an hour, podcaster Dwarkesh Patel sets Zuckerberg up to say whatever he wants sans-pushback,…
