🌘 Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week. Çatalhöyük, a settlement in Turkey that dates back more than 9,000 years, has attracted intense interest for its structural complexity and hints of an egalitarian and possibly matriarchal society. But it’s…
On one side of the world, a very online guy edits a photo of then-Vice President Nominee JD Vance with comically-huge and perfectly round chipmunk cheeks: a butterfly flaps its wings. A year later, elsewhere on the planet, a Norwegian tourist returns home, rejected from entry to the U.S. because—he claims—border patrol agents found that…
The Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC), a data broker owned by the country’s major airlines which sells travellers’ detailed flight records in bulk to the government, only just registered as a data broker with the state of California, which is a legal requirement, despite selling such data for years, according to records maintained by the California…
This article was produced in collaboration with Court Watch, an independent outlet that unearths overlooked court records. Subscribe to them here. This article contains references to sexual assault. An Ohio man made pornographic deepfake videos of at least 10 people he was stalking and harassing, and sent the AI-generated imagery to the victims’ family and…
Flock, the automatic license plate reader (ALPR) company with a presence in thousands of communities across the U.S., has stopped agencies across the country from searching cameras inside Illinois, California, and Virginia, 404 Media has learned. The dramatic moves come after 404 Media revealed local police departments were repeatedly performing lookups around the country on…
A software engineer in Michigan has coded a version of Balatro that runs off playing cards. The un-released demake of the popular video game is a prototype meant to run on the Gameboy Advanced through an e-Reader, a 2000s era accessory that loaded games onto the console via a strip of dot code printed onto…
We start this week with Emanuel and Joseph’s coverage of ‘FuckLAPD.com’, a website that uses facial recognition to instantly reveal a LAPD officer’s name and salary. The creator has relaunched their similar tool for identifying ICE employees too. After the break, Jason tells us about a massive AI ruling that opens the way for AI…
Young people have always felt misunderstood by their parents, but new research shows that Gen Alpha might also be misunderstood by AI. A research paper, written by Manisha Mehta, a soon-to-be 9th grader, and presented today at the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency in Athens, shows that Gen Alpha’s distinct mix of meme-…
A federal judge in California ruled Monday that Anthropic likely violated copyright law when it pirated authors’ books to create a giant dataset and “forever” library but that training its AI on those books without authors’ permission constitutes transformative fair use under copyright law. The complex decision is one of the first of its kind…
Fansly, a popular platform where independent creators—many of whom are making adult content—sell access to images and videos to subscribers and fans, announced sweeping changes to its terms of service on Monday, including effectively banning furries. The changes blame payment processors for classifying “some anthropomorphic content as simulated bestiality.” Most people in the furry fandom…