This week we discuss our coverage of the U.S.-Israel strikes against Iran, specifically how Polymarket and Kalshi are letting people profit from death, and that Amazon data centers were on fire after missiles hit Dubai. Then Emanuel talks about how AI translations are adding ‘hallucinations’ to Wikipedia articles. In the subscribers-only section, Sam tells us…
For a few hours on Tuesday, Polymarket hosted a bet about the possibility of nuclear war in 2026. The market asked the question “Nuclear weapon detonation by …?” and racked up close to a million dollars in trading volume before Polymarket took the unusual step to remove the market from its website. It did not…
Wikipedia editors have implemented new policies and restricted a number of contributors who were paid to use AI to translate existing Wikipedia articles into other languages after they discovered these AI translations added AI “hallucinations,” or errors, to the resulting article. The new restrictions show how Wikipedia editors continue to fight the flood of generative…
The FBI is using artificial intelligence in what it describes as “remote access operations,” FBI parlance for hacking, according to an FBI official. The comments, given at a national security and AI conference 404 Media was attending, give an unusually candid admission of the FBI’s use of hacking tools, which are often shrouded in secrecy….
Mr. Deepfakes was the biggest website in the world for sharing AI-generated abuse imagery, swapping tips and tricks for more realistic results, and posting endless, fake, nonconsensual videos of everyone from celebrities to everyday people. In a new podcast by the CBC, I got to tell the tale of how deepfakes started, what targets go…
Customs and Border Protection (CBP) bought data from the online advertising ecosystem to track peoples’ precise movements over time, in a process that often involves siphoning data from ordinary apps like video games, dating services, and fitness trackers, according to an internal Department of Homeland Security (DHS) document obtained by 404 Media. The document shows…
The main bet on the front page of Polymarket right now is “Will the Iranian regime fall by June 30?” The site has this at a 41 percent chance of happening as I write this. On Polymarket, more than $5 million has been spent gambling on this question. On Kalshi, a competing prediction market where…
Amazon’s cloud services are down in some of the Middle East after “objects” hit data centers in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) causing “sparks and fire.” Around 60 services tied to AWS are down in the region, affecting web traffic in the UAE and Bahrain. The outage comes following Iranian attacks on the UAE as…
Joseph speaks to Cooper Quintin, a security researcher and senior public interest technologist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). Quintin is one of the people behind Rayhunter, an easy to install tool that can detect nearby IMSI-catchers. This tech, sometimes known as Stingrays, poses as a fake cellphone tower to track a phone’s location, intercept…
A group of more than a dozen Democratic lawmakers have demanded the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) provide its definition of “domestic terrorist,” after the agency labelled U.S. citizens Renée Good and Alex Pretti, which DHS officers killed, as such. The move also comes as DHS and its various components purchase and deploy a wide…
