The woman who helped coerce other women into the clutches of sex trafficking ring GirlsDoPorn will spend two years in prison, a federal judge ordered on Friday. GirlsDoPorn operated for almost a decade; its owners and co-conspirators were indicted on federal sex trafficking charges in October 2019. Over the years, its content became wildly popular…
Welcome back to the Abstract! These are the studies this week that got hosed with star spray, mounted a failed invasion, declined to comment, and achieved previously unknown levels of adorability. First, a study about how the solar system wasn’t destroyed 4.5 billion years ago (phew!). Then: a human touch on an ancient boat, the…
This article is a partnership between Reveal and 404 Media. Jesus Gutiérrez, 23, was walking home one morning from a Chicago gym when he noticed a gray Cadillac SUV with no license plates. He kept walking, shrugging it off. Then the car pulled over and two men got out. The federal immigration officials told him…
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 conversational AI, a behind the scenes of the zine, and more. EMANUEL: I made the terrible mistake of looking at some Hacker News comments this week for…
The degenerate gamblers of Polymarket and Kalshi who bet that “AI” would win the Time Person of the Year are upset because the magazine has named the “Architects of AI” the person of the year. The people who make AI tools and AI infrastructure are, notably, not “AI” themselves, and thus both Kalshi and Polymarket…
The first thing I saw this morning when I opened X was an AI-generated trailer for Avengers: Doomsday. Robert Downey Jr’s Doctor Doom stood in a shapeless void alongside Captain America and Reed Richards. It was obvious slop but it was also close in tone and feel of the last five years of Disney’s Marvel…
Dozens of government and university websites belonging to cities, towns, and public agencies across the country are hosting PDFs promoting AI porn apps, porn sites, and cryptocurrency scams; dozens more have been hit with a website redirection attacks which lead to animal vagina sex toy ecommerce pages, penis enlargement treatments, automatically-downloading Windows program files, and…
🌘 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 made fires as early as 400,000 years ago, pushing the timeline of this crucial human innovation back a staggering 350,000 years, reports a study published on Wednesday in Nature. Mastery…
Google suspended a mobile app developer’s accounts after he uploaded AI training data to his Google Drive. Unbeknownst to him, the widely used dataset, which is cited in a number of academic papers and distributed via an academic file sharing site, contained child sexual abuse material. The developer reported the dataset to a child safety…
We start this week with news of our zine! We’re printing it very soon, and walk you through the process. Independent media is turning back to physical zines as a way to subvert algorithms. After the break, Emanuel tells us about some very weird Instagram changes. In the subscribers-only section, Joseph explains ICEBlock’s lawsuit against…
