It’s nearly impossible not to be watched these days. It can start right at home with your neighbors and their Ring cameras—a company that sold fear to the American public and is now integrating AI to turn entire neighborhoods into networked, automated surveillance systems. Head out a bit further and you’ll likely be confronted by…
A Cybertruck owner in Texas is suing Tesla for $1,000,000 in damages for “ grossly negligent conduct” following an accident on a Houston highway that involved the vehicle’s self-driving feature. According to the lawsuit, Tesla is to blame for the crash because CEO Elon Musk has oversold the truck’s ability to drive itself. As originally…
🌘 Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week. Colorful feathers found in an ancient tomb on Peru’s coast once belonged to parrots captured deep in the Amazon rainforest, reports a study published on Tuesday in Nature Communications. The discovery…
Quittr, an app that promises to help men stop watching pornography, leaked intimate data on hundreds of thousands of its users, including their masturbation habits, and lied about its security issues, 404 Media can now reveal. I first reported about Quittr exposing user data in January, but was unable to name Quittr in the story…
Roblox is one of those games that is more popular than you can imagine, but unless you are of a certain age group and live in that world, you’ll rarely hear about it unless it makes the news for some terrible reason. More recently, for example, we wrote about the Tumbler Ridge shooter who created…
When David saw his friend Michael’s social media post asking for a second opinion on a programming project, he offered to take a look. “He sent me some of the code, and none of it made sense, none of it ran correctly. Or if it did run, it didn’t do anything,” David told me. David…
In the parking lot of Seven Oaks Element school in South Carolina on one of the first hot days of the year I watched an AI-generated George Washington talk about the American revolution. “Our rights are a gift from God, not a favor from kings or courts,” slop Washington told me. It spoke from a…
Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that moved the heavens, coveted crystals, dined on lunar legumes, and got a four-star review. First, humanity has permanently signed its name into the orbital dynamics of the solar system. Take the win! Then, we’ve got the origins of our obsession with sparkly rocks,…
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 a PC repair battle, a revealing comment from an FBI official, and a dangerously dumb narrative. EMANUEL: I want to update those who have been following the…
Clients of a long-running email marketing platform are getting targeted with a phishing campaign telling them that their emails would begin automatically inserting a “‘Support ICE’ donation button” into every email they send. The strategy suggests that scammers are trying to capitalize on people’s revulsion to ICE by coming up with strategies that would cause…
