A data sharing agreement between the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), which was designed for ICE to receive the personal data of nearly 80 million Medicaid patients, was published as part of a lawsuit earlier this year, with the public now able to see the exact…
A Hilton branded hotel that originally declined to host guests because they were with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has backpedalled, saying in a statement Monday it does “not discriminate against any individuals or agencies and apologize to those impacted.” The episode started earlier on Monday when the official DHS X account posted what…
Over the last week, users of X realized that they could use Grok to “put a bikini on her,” “take her clothes off,” and otherwise sexualize images that people uploaded to the site. This went roughly how you would expect: Users have been derobing celebrities, politicians, and random people—mostly women—for the last week. This has…
An abridged version of this story appeared in 404 Media’s zine. Get a copy here. The same sort of algorithms that use your face to unlock your phone are being used by cops to recognize you in traffic stops and immigration raids. Cops have access to tools that have scraped billions of images from the…
Welcome back to the Abstract, and Happy New Year! Here are the studies this week that stoked the flames, cooled off, then went feral and rogue. First, the ashy remains of a cremation pyre reveal a rare glimpse of an ancient ritual. Then: Uranus is chilling, ham on the lam, and a Saturn without a…
🌘 Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week. Mysterious bones that date back seven million years likely belong to the oldest known human ancestor, according to a study published on Friday in Science Advances. For years, scientists have debated…
A team of researchers at Epoch AI, a non-profit research institute, are using open-source intelligence to map the growth of America’s datacenters. The team pores over satellite imagery, building permits, and other local legal documents to build a map of the massive computer filled buildings springing up across the United States. They take that data…
This post originally ran on Tedium, our zine designer Ernie Smith’s wonderful website and newsletter about the Dull Side of the Internet. Check it out here. I write a lot these days, but my path into journalism, going way back to J-School, was through layout. For years, I was a graphic designer at a number…
Joseph speaks to Craig Silverman, one of the co-founders of Indicator. Indicator is a new, independent media company that Craig runs with Alexios Mantzarlis. For years Craig has covered the world of ad fraud and disinformation using all sorts of open source intelligence (OSINT) techniques. Definitely check out Indicator at Indicator.media. The site publishes its…
“This is so fucking stressful,” Jason said. On a group call, all four of us—Jason, Sam, Emanuel, and me—were bidding on something that had long eluded us. 404media.com. Not the .co domain we launched with two years ago because that’s all we could afford. But a fully-fledged .com. That September day I was on holiday…
