Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is looking to buy iris scanning technology that its manufacturer says can identify known persons “in seconds from virtually anywhere,” according to newly published procurement documents. Originally designed to be used by sheriff departments to identify inmates or other known persons, ICE is now likely buying the technology specifically for…
Congress’ website for the U.S. Constitution was changed to delete the last two sections of Article I, which include provisions such as habeas corpus, forbidding the naming of titles of nobility, and forbidding foreign emoluments for U.S. officials. The last full version of the webpage, archived by the Internet Archive on July 17, still included…
Scientists have discovered million-year-old artifacts made by a mysterious group of early humans on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, according to a breakthrough study published on Wednesday in Nature. The extraordinary find pushes the archaeological record of Sulawesi back by about 800,000 years, and confirms that hominins, the broader family to which humans belong, crossed…
Hundreds of AI-powered automated license plate reading cameras paid for by Lowe’s and Home Depot and stationed in the hardware stores’ parking lots are being fed into a massive surveillance system that law enforcement can access, according to records obtained using a public records request. The records, obtained from the Johnson County, Texas Sheriff’s Office…
Sitting in my office in NYC, I sent a CNC machine in a guy’s workshop in Wisconsin a 40 by 25 pixel drawing and watched it flip hand painted wooden blocks across a grid, one by one, until the glorious smiling 404 Media logo appeared—then watched it slowly erase, like a giant Etch A Sketch,…
We start this week with Joseph’s story about nearly 100,000 ChatGPT conversations being indexed by Google. There’s some sensitive stuff in there. After the break, Emanuel tells us about Wikipedia’s new way of dealing with AI slop. In the subscribers-only section, Sam explains how we got to where we are with Steam and Itch.io; that history…
The state of Florida is suing some of the biggest porn platforms on the internet, accusing them of not complying with the state’s law that requires adult sites to verify that visitors are over the age of 18. The lawsuit, brought by Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, is against the companies that own popular porn…
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is urgently looking for a company to help it “dominate” digital media channels with advertisements in an attempt to recruit 14,050 more personnel, according to U.S. government contracting records reviewed by 404 Media. The move, which ICE wants to touch everything from social media ads to those played on popular…
Wikipedia editors just adopted a new policy to help them deal with the slew of AI-generated articles flooding the online encyclopedia. The new policy, which gives an administrator the authority to quickly delete an AI-generated article that meets a certain criteria, isn’t only important to Wikipedia, but also an important example for how to deal…
A researcher has scraped nearly 100,000 conversations from ChatGPT that users had set to share publicly and Google then indexed, creating a snapshot of all the sorts of things people are using OpenAI’s chatbot for, and inadvertently exposing. 404 Media’s testing has found the dataset includes everything from the sensitive to the benign: alleged texts…
