We start this week with a rant from Jason about how the latest dump of Epstein emails were released. It would be a lot easier to cover them if they were published differently! After the break, we talk about Joseph’s piece about a contractor hiring essentially randos off LinkedIn to physically track immigrants for $300….
🌘 Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week. Kissing is one of humanity’s most cherished rituals—just think of the sheer variety of smooches, from the “wedding kiss” to the “kiss of death.” Now, scientists have discovered that the origins…
Lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) sued the city of San Jose, California over its deployment of Flock’s license plate-reading surveillance cameras, claiming that the city’s nearly 500 cameras create a pervasive database of residents movements in a surveillance network that is essentially impossible to avoid. The lawsuit…
The legendary hacker conference Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) says that it has been “banned” from St. John’s University, the venue where it has held the last several HOPE conferences, because someone told the university the conference had an “anti-police agenda.” HOPE was held at St. John’s University in 2022, 2024, and 2025, and was…
Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC), a data broker owned by the U.S.’s major airlines, will shut down a program in which it sold access to hundreds of millions of flight records to the government and let agencies track peoples’ movements without a warrant, according to a letter from ARC shared with 404 Media. ARC says it…
The IRS accessed a database of hundreds of millions of travel records, which show when and where a specific person flew and the credit card they used, without obtaining a warrant, according to a letter signed by a bipartisan group of lawmakers and shared with 404 Media. The country’s major airlines, including Delta, United Airlines,…
A current pilot project aims to pay former law enforcement and military officers to physically track immigrants and verify their addresses to give to ICE for $300 each. There is no indication that the pilot involves licensed private investigators, and appears to be open to people who are now essentially members of the general public,…
The Department of Homeland Security claimed in court proceedings that nearly two weeks worth of surveillance footage from ICE’s Broadview Detention Center in suburban Chicago has been “irretrievably destroyed” and may not be able to be recovered, according to court records reviewed by 404 Media. The filing was made as part of a class action…
Online survey research, a fundamental method for data collection in many scientific studies, is facing an existential threat because of large language models, according to new research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The author of the paper, associate professor of government at Dartmouth and director of the Polarization Research…
The video game industry has had a turbulent few years. The pandemic made people play more and caused a small boom, which then subsided, resulting in wave after wave of massive layoffs. Microsoft, one of the major console manufacturers, is shifting its strategy for Xbox as the company shifts its focus to AI. And now,…
