On day one of his presidency, one of Donald Trump’s first acts in office was to sign an executive order declaring that there are only two sexes: male and female. The order is a transphobic, scientifically incorrect screed titled “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism And Restoring Biological Truth To The Federal Government” that mischaracterizes…
A pseudonymous coder has created and released an open source “tar pit” to indefinitely trap AI training web crawlers in an infinitely, randomly-generating series of pages to waste their time and computing power. The program, called Nepenthes after the genus of carnivorous pitcher plants which trap and consume their prey, can be deployed by webpage…
The viral AI-generated bread horse image that Mark Zuckerberg “loved” on Tuesday was originally created as a meme by a Polish news organization to warn about the dangers of AI-generated slop on social media. The image became a viral sensation on the Polish internet but broke containment and began going viral more widely; it was…
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg “loved” an AI-generated slop image of a horse made out of bread posted by a spam page on Facebook that also posts AI-generated images of children with amputations and regularly circumvents Facebook’s algorithm to link users offsite to ad-laden AI-generated content farms. The page, “Faithful,” is verified, operated out of Romania,…
Hundreds of subreddits are considering banning all links to X.com in response to Elon Musk’s salute at a Donald Trump inauguration rally that was celebrated by Nazis as being a Nazi salute. The moderators of dozens of those subreddits have said that they have decided they will ban all links to X. Here is a…
On Monday, a day after TikTok came back online for the U.S., people started noticing that the app would not let them comment “free palestine.” Several TikTok users posted screenshots on X and Bluesky showing the message they received after trying to comment “free palestine” under other people’s posts. TikTok users started reporting this on…
The manufacturer of a machine that costs six figures used during heart surgery has told hospitals that it will no longer allow hospitals’ repair technicians to maintain or fix the devices and that all repairs must now be done by the manufacturer itself, according to a letter obtained by 404 Media. The change will require…
We start this week with the TikTok ban: how we got here, what happened, and, most importantly, why it means we need more decentralized services. Jason runs us through it. After the break, Joseph breaks down a site called GeoSpy which is marketing geolocation technology to the cops. In the subscribers-only section, we all scroll…
If it wasn’t already obvious, the last 72 hours have made it crystal clear that it is urgent to build and mainstream alternative, decentralized social media platforms that are resistant to government censorship and control, are not owned by oligarchs and dominated by their algorithms, and in which users own their follower list and can…
Shortly after Donald Trump was sworn in as the 47th president of the United States on Monday, many Facebook users started to report that the social network automatically made them follow Trump’s Facebook page. I’ve seen several threads on this issue on Reddit, social media, and people I know personally have also asked me why…