The Trump administration is throwing various hobbies enjoyed by Americans into chaos and is harming small businesses domestically and abroad with its ever-changing tariff structure that is turning the United States into a hermit kingdom. It has made buying and selling things on eBay particularly annoying, and is making it harder and more expensive to,…
The front page of Imgur, a popular image hosting and social media site, is full of pictures of John Oliver raising his middle finger and telling MediaLab AI, the site’s parent company, “fuck you.” Imugrians, as the site’s users call themselves, telling their business daddy to go to hell is the end result of a…
An app developer has jailbroken Echelon exercise bikes to restore functionality that the company put behind a paywall last month, but copyright laws prevent him from being allowed to legally release it. Last month, Peloton competitor Echelon pushed a firmware update to its exercise equipment that forces its machines to connect to the company’s servers…
Popular chatbots offered direct responses to questions about self-harm methods while hesitating to answer questions seeking therapeutic help directly, according to a new study that looked at how ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini handled suicide-related questions. Of “particular concern” was that ChatGPT provided direct answered to high-risk questions 78 percent of the time, and both ChatGPT…
This article was produced in collaboration with Court Watch, an independent outlet that unearths overlooked court records. Subscribe to them here. 4chan and Kiwi Farms sued the United Kingdom’s Office of Communications (Ofcom) over its age verification law in U.S. federal court Wednesday, fulfilling a promise it announced on August 23. In the lawsuit, 4chan…
🌘 Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week. Scientists have made a major breakthrough in the mystery of how life first emerged on Earth by demonstrating how two essential biological ingredients could have spontaneously joined together on our planet…
Flock, the surveillance company with automatic license plate reader (ALPR) cameras in thousands of communities around the U.S., is looking to integrate with a company that makes AI-powered dashcams placed inside peoples’ personal cars, multiple sources told 404 Media. The move could significantly increase the amount of data available to Flock, and in turn its…
We start this week with Joseph’s investigation into people selling custom patches for the Flipper Zero, a piece of hacking tech that car thieves can now use to break into a wide range of vehicles. After the break, Jason tells us about the new meta in AI slop: making 80s nostalgia videos. In the subscribers-only…
If you or someone you know is struggling, The Crisis Text Line is a texting service for emotional crisis support. To text with a trained helper, text SAVE to 741741. A new lawsuit against OpenAI claims ChatGPT pushed a teen to suicide, and alleges that the chatbot helped him write the first draft of his…
Forty-four attorneys general signed an open letter to 11 chatbot and social media companies on Monday, warning them that they will “answer for it” if they knowingly harm children and urging the companies to see their products “through the eyes of a parent, not a predator.” The letter, addressed to Anthropic, Apple, Chai AI, OpenAI,…