🌘 Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week. Hold onto your butts, because one day you might be breathing through them. Scientists have tested out enteral ventilation—a possible method of administering oxygen with a liquid delivered through the rectum…
A new analysis of synthetic intimate image abuse (SIIA) found that the tools for making non-consensual, sexually explicit deepfakes are easily discoverable all over social media and through simple searches on Google and Bing. Research published by the counter-extremism organization Institute for Strategic Dialogue shows how tools for creating non-consensual deepfakes spread across the internet….
The sound of power tools screech in what looks like a workshop with aluminum bubble wrap insulation plastered on the walls and ceiling. A shirtless man picks up a can of compressed air from the workbench and sprays it. He’s tinkering with a pair of Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses. At one point he squints at…
Apple has removed Tea, the women’s safety app which went viral earlier this year before facing multiple data breaches, from the App Store. “This app is currently not available in your country or region,” a message on the Apple App Store currently says when trying to visit a link to the app. Apple told 404…
Sleepers snoozing in Eight Sleep smartbeds had a bad night on Monday when a major outage of Amazon Web Services (AWS) caused their beds to malfunction. Some were left with the bed’s heat blasting, others were left in a sitting position and unable to recline. One woman said her bed went haywire and she had…
We start this week with Joseph’s articles about a hacking group that doxed DHS, ICE, FBI, and DOJ officials. The group then sent us the personal data of officials from the NSA and a bunch of other government agencies. After the break, Emanuel revisits Wikipedia’s AI problem. In the subscribers-only section, Sam explains OpenAI’s inevitable…
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has published a lengthy statement on the company’s site in which he promises Anthropic’s AI models are not politically biased, that it remains committed to American leadership in the AI industry, and that it supports the AI startup space in particular. Amodei doesn’t explicitly say why he feels the need to…
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman appeared on Cleo Abram’s podcast in August where he said the company was “tempted” to add sexual content in the past, but resisted, saying that a “sex bot avatar” in ChatGPT would be a move to “juice growth.” In light of his announcement last week that ChatGPT would soon offer erotica,…
On Saturday, millions of people across the U.S. attended “No Kings” protests—a slogan born in response to President Donald Trump’s self-aggrandizing social media posts where he’s called himself a king, including with AI-generated images of himself in a crown, and his continuous stretching of executive power. While Americans were out in the street, the president…
Next to technicolor neon signs featuring Road Runner, an inspirational phrase that says “everything will be fucking amazing,” and a weed leaf, Geovany Alvarado points to a neon sign he’s particularly proud of: “The Lost and Found Art,” it says. “I had a customer who called me, it was an old guy. He wanted to…
