🌘 Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week. Scientists are searching for signs of a “fifth force” at the center of our galaxy that could rewrite the rules of gravity and help to resolve some fundamental mysteries in the…
I am talking to Amina, an AI avatar that plays the role of a woman living in a refugee camp in Chad after she escaped violence in Sudan. “I’m hanging in there, yeah,” Anima tells me. “ It’s tough here in the camp, but we’re staying strong.” I ask her how she came to be…
Last month I put down $100 to pre-order the Trump Organization’s forthcoming mobile phone, the T1. Or, I tried to. As I wrote at the time, the website went to an error page, charged my credit card the wrong amount of $64.70, and sent a confirmation email saying I would receive another confirmation email when…
Agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have gained access to a massive database of health and car insurance claims and are using it to track down people they want to deport, according to internal ICE material viewed by 404 Media. The database, which contains details on more than 1.8 billion insurance claims and 58…
We’re back! We start this week with Emanuel’s article about Anubis, an open source piece of software that is saving the internet from AI bot scrapers. After the break, Joseph tells us about the new facial recognition app ICE is using and which he revealed. In the subscribers-only section, we do a lightning round runthrough…
Data preservationists and archivists have been working tirelessly since the election of President Donald Trump to save websites, data, and public information that’s being removed by the administration for promoting or even mentioning diversity. The administration is now targeting National Parks signs that educate visitors about anything other than “beauty” and “grandeur,” and demanding they…
You can trick AI chatbots like ChatGPT or Gemini into teaching you how to make a bomb or hack an ATM if you make the question complicated, full of academic jargon, and cite sources that do not exist. That’s the conclusion of a new paper authored by a team of researchers from Intel, Boise State…
Polymarket, an online betting marketplace that bills itself as the future of news, can’t decide whether or not Ukrainian president Volodomyr Zelenskyy wore a suit during a recent appearance in Europe. The gambling site is set to make a final judgement about the question in a few hours and more than $160 million in crypto…
For someone who says she is fighting AI bot scrapers just in her free time, Xe Iaso seems to be putting up an impressive fight. Since she launched it in January, Anubis, a “program is designed to help protect the small internet from the endless storm of requests that flood in from AI companies,” has…
For this week’s podcast, I’m talking to our friend Casey Johnston, a tech journalist turned fitness journalist turned independent journalist. Casey studied physics, which led her to tech journalism; she did some of my favorite coverage of Internet culture as well as Apple’s horrendous butterfly laptop keyboards. We worked together at VICE, where Casey was…