We start this week with Joseph’s article about landlords and income verification companies demanding login details from potential renters so the companies can log in and scrape their paystubs. That has some potential legal issues for everyone involved! After the break, 18 lawyers tell us why they used AI. In the subscribers-only section, Emanuel breaks…
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has bought access to a surveillance tool that is updated every day with billions of pieces of location data from hundreds of millions of mobile phones, according to ICE documents reviewed by 404 Media. The documents explicitly show that ICE is choosing this product over others offered by the contractor’s…
Last week, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth called America’s Generals to Quantico to meet for an unknown reason. America’s top civilian military leader calling the generals home all at once is strange and unprecedented. It’s the kind of move that often presages something like a major war. But that’s not what he wanted. During a…
Earlier this month, an appeals court in California issued a blistering decision and record $10,000 fine against a lawyer who submitted a brief in which “nearly all of the legal quotations in plaintiff’s opening brief, and many of the quotations in plaintiff’s reply brief, are fabricated” through the use of ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Grok….
Google’s Ad Transparency tool no longer shows political online advertisements that ran on its platforms, in the past or present, from any countries in the European Union, making seven years of data from 27 different countries inaccessible. Liz Carolan, who publishes Irish technology and politics newsletter The Briefing, spotted the change on September 28. Carolan…
This article was produced in collaboration with Court Watch, an independent outlet that unearths overlooked court records. Subscribe to them here. Critics of YouTuber Ethan Klein are pushing back on subpoenas that would reveal their identities as part of an ongoing legal fight between Klein and his detractors. Klein is a popular content creator whose…
Landlords are using a service that logs into a potential renter’s employer systems and scrapes their paystubs and other information en masse, potentially in violation of U.S. hacking laws, according to screenshots of the tool shared with 404 Media. The screenshots highlight the intrusive methods some landlords use when screening potential tenants, taking information they…
For the past couple of weeks, a community of developers who use the programming language Ruby have been closely following a dramatic change in ownership of some of the most essential tools in its ecosystem with far reaching impacts for the worldwide web. If you’re not familiar with Ruby or the open source development community,…
Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that were lost at sea, lost in time, lost in space, and lost in translation. If you are househunting at the moment, have you considered living on a submerged pile of Nazi munition, or in a charming community of WWI-era ghost ships, or, if…
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 being journalism dorks, our new lawsuit against ICE, and working on bullshit. JASON: I’m writing this from sunny Athens, Greece, where I’ve been invited to talk about…