Welcome back to the Abstract! It was a good week for the Fox Mulders among us. We want to believe, and a new study has given us some empirical grist along those lines. I shall say no more, and let the giant planet K2-18b speak for itself. Next, remember the time that Earth partied so…
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 Palantir scoops, coping mechanisms, and feeling God in this Samsung television. JOSEPH: I’m going to talk about how our Palantir leak story came about, Leaked: Palantir’s Plan…
We’re excited to share audio and video of our panel at SXSW, where Jason, Sam, and our friend Brian Merchant of Blood in the Machine discuss how AI slop has taken over the internet, how it is a brute-force attack against the algorithms that control what we see on social media, and what we can…
This article was produced in collaboration with Court Watch, an independent outlet that unearths overlooked court records. Subscribe to them here. A judge in Nevada has ruled that “tower dumps”—the law enforcement practice of grabbing vast troves of private personal data from cell towers—is unconstitutional. The judge also ruled that the cops could, this one time, still…
A near-miss episode of attempted defunding spotlights a need for a better way
Palantir, the surveillance giant, is taking on an increased role with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), including finding the physical location of people who are marked for deportation, according to Palantir Slacks and other internal messages obtained by 404 Media. The leak shows that Palantir’s work with ICE includes producing leads for law enforcement to…
This article was produced with support from WIRED. This reporting was also the product of dozens of public records requests. American police departments near the United States-Mexico border are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for an unproven and secretive technology that uses AI-generated online personas designed to interact with and collect intelligence on “college protesters,” “radicalized”…
The Los Angeles Police Department obtained video footage from a Waymo driverless car as part of its investigation into a hit-and-run in which a separate, human-driven car hit a pedestrian. The LAPD published the footage, which has a note on it that reads “Waymo Confidential Commercial Information,” on its YouTube page to ask the public…
As part of the company’s months-long obsession with catching employees leaking internal developments to the press, staff at WordPress parent company Automattic recently noticed individually-unique watermarks on internal sites, according to employees who spoke to 404 Media. Automattic added the watermarks to an internal employee communications platform called P2. P2 is a WordPress product other…
When I walked into the Shrine of the Renunciation in Assisi, I thought about going to my friends’ houses in high school to play Xbox, and how bizarre it would be if one of those teenagers became a saint. What if the kid from down the cul-de-sac died, and they put his face on keychains,…
