We start this week with some news: we are suing ICE for access to its $2 million contract with a company that sells powerful spyware. Paragon sells tech for remotely breaking into phones and reading messages from encrypted chat apps without a target even clicking a link. After the break, we talk about a couple…
🌘 Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week. You may have noticed that the universe is pretty big—in fact, possibly infinite. These immense scales offer a challenge for scientists who seek to model the “cosmic web,” a network of…
A joint study by Stanford University researchers and a workplace performance consulting firm published in the Harvard Business Review details the plight of workers who have to fix their colleagues’ AI-generated “workslop,” which they describe as work content that “masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task.” The research,…
Florida is suing massively popular anime and hentai games platform Nutaku, as well as the payment processor Segpay, in two complaints that allege the companies ignored the state’s age verification law. Nutaku is owned by Aylo, which is also the parent company of Pornhub and some of the biggest porn platforms on the internet. Florida…
📄 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. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) flew…
A cancer patient lost $32,000 in crypto after installing a Steam game on his computer containing malware that drained one of his crypto wallets. Raivo Plavnieks is a 26 year old self-described “crypto degen” from Latvia who streams on the site Pump.fun under the name Rastaland. After a seven hour stream on September 20, Plavnieks…
Content warning: This article contains descriptions and images of AI-generated graphic violence. YouTube removed a channel that was dedicated to posting AI-generated videos of women being shot in the head following 404 Media’s request for comment. The videos were clearly generated with Google’s new AI video generator tool, Veo, according to a watermark included in…
On Monday 404 Media filed a lawsuit against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) demanding the agency publish its $2 million contract with Paragon, a company that makes powerful spyware that can remotely break into mobile phones without the target even clicking a link. The sale of the spyware to ICE has activists and lawmakers deeply…
Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that walked the walk, squeezed with ease, and became immortalized in amber. First, ancient artifacts in Turkey might rewrite the history of early human migrations into Europe. Then: a Cretaceous insectarium, badminton in space, a breakthrough in quantum sensing, and block parties for chimps….
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 San Diego and Costa Rica reporting trips. SAM: Some weeks I feel like I’ve absorbed way too much internet to be able to formulate any more thoughts…
