As part of the company’s months-long obsession with catching employees leaking internal developments to the press, staff at WordPress parent company Automattic recently noticed individually-unique watermarks on internal sites, according to employees who spoke to 404 Media. Automattic added the watermarks to an internal employee communications platform called P2. P2 is a WordPress product other…
When I walked into the Shrine of the Renunciation in Assisi, I thought about going to my friends’ houses in high school to play Xbox, and how bizarre it would be if one of those teenagers became a saint. What if the kid from down the cul-de-sac died, and they put his face on keychains,…
Last week Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) paid contracting giant Palantir tens of millions of dollars to make modifications to a powerful ICE database and search tool to allow “complete target analysis of known populations” and to update the tool’s targeting and enforcement priorities, according to procurement records reviewed by 404 Media. The records show…
This week we start with a couple of Jason and Joseph’s stories about the tool ICE uses to lookup an incredible amount of information about people. After the break, Joseph explains how he tested an AI service that calls your parents in case you can’t be bothered. In the subscribers-only section, our new regular contributor…
The notorious imageboard 4chan is down following what appears to be a major hack of its backend. The hackers claim to have exposed code for the site, the emails of moderators, and a list of mod communications. This happened, it seems, as part of a five year long, inter-image board beef between users of 4chan…
Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is using various artificial intelligence tools, including ones that can quickly identify people of interest by pulling data from social media, according to documents published by the agency last week and marketing material from the contractors. The documents follow others that 404 Media has previously obtained and published through the…
None of the frontier AI research labs have presented any evidence that they are on the brink of achieving artificial general intelligence, no matter how they define that goal, but Google is already planning for a “Post-AGI” world by hiring a scientist for its DeepMind AI lab to research the “profound impact” that technology will…
A version of this piece originally ran on DexDigi, Dexter Thomas’s newsletter, and a video version ran on his YouTube. Please consider subscribing to both. The Hollywood sign was on fire; or at least, it was online. Those images and videos were fake and AI-generated. Maybe you already knew this. But people made money off…
An AI startup promises to call your elderly parents for you if you don’t have time, or simply don’t want to, and we tested out the service. Called inTouch, the service uses an AI generated voice so your parent receives a phone call in which they can talk to the AI about, for example, how…
Welcome back to the Abstract! Whatever else you think of this past week, it sure served up some ridiculously good science. I’m talking about a real boffin buffet, with all the fixings. There were studies about trees spying on illegal mines. Or, an eerie rhino graveyard buried in ash 12 million years ago. Or, the…