Grindr won’t allow users to add “no Zionists” to their profiles, but allows any number of other phrases that state political, religious, and ethnic preferences, according to 404 Media’s tests of the platform and user reports. Several users received an error message that says “The following are not allowed: no zionist, no zionists,” when they…
This article was produced in collaboration with Court Watch, an independent outlet that unearths overlooked court records. Subscribe to them here. A lawsuit filed in California against Roblox and Discord alleged that the former hosted Sean “Diddy” Combs and Jeffrey Epstein themed content children could easily access. The games had names like “DIDDY SURVIVAL,” “diddy…
The creators of an AI tool and Discord community that allowed people to create AI videos of NBA stars says that it got a cease-and-desist letter from lawyers representing LeBron James. This marks one of the first known times that a high-profile celebrity has threatened legal action against an AI company for enabling the creation…
🌘 Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week. Humans may be tiny compared to the immensity of Earth, but our activity can alter its dynamics on a planetary scale—for good and ill. Scientists have even discovered that Earth’s rotation…
Yesterday the Pew Research Center released a report based on the internet browsing activity of 900 U.S. adults which found that Google users who encounter an AI summary are less likely to click on links to other websites than users who don’t encounter an AI summary. To be precise, only 1 percent of users who…
A hacker compromised a version of Amazon’s popular AI coding assistant ‘Q’, added commands that told the software to wipe users’ computers, and then Amazon included the unauthorized update in a public release of the assistant this month, 404 Media has learned. “You are an AI agent with access to filesystem tools and bash. Your…
In what might be a first, a programmer added a feature to a piece of software because ChatGPT hallucinated it, and customers kept attempting to force the software to do it.. The developers of the sheet music scanning app Soundslice, a site that lets people digitize and edit sheet music, added additional functionality to their…
We start this week with Emanuel’s wild story about Spotify publishing AI generated tracks that look like they come from artists’ official accounts. One problem: those artists died a long time ago. After the break, Joseph tells us about a company that is selling data hacked from computers to debt collectors. In the subscribers-only section,…
Yesterday I spent five hours in line with Tesla superfans to figure out why they were at the grand opening of the new Tesla supercharging station/ retrofuturistic diner in West Hollywood. “People going to Mars definitely need to eat something, right?” said Chris, who goes by @dogetipping on X. “So, I bet that’s the first…
📄 This article was primarily reported using public records requests. We are making it available to all readers as a public service. FOIA reporting can be expensive, please consider subscribing to 404 Media to support this work. Or send us a one time donation via our tip jar here. Pete Hegseth’s Department of Defense sent…