The Biden administration and the states of Illinois and Minnesota sued tractor and agricultural manufacturer John Deere Wednesday, arguing that the company’s anti consumer repair practices have driven up prices for farmers and have made it difficult for them to get repairs during critical planting and harvesting seasons. The lawsuit alleges that Deere has monopoly…
The Oscars of porn and the industry’s largest trade show will begin in one week, on January 22 at Virgin Hotels in Las Vegas. Inside, adult performers, producers, directors and crew will find out whether they’ve won the prestigious AVN Award in categories including “Best All-Girl Group Sex Scene” and “Best Big Butt Movie or…
We’ve got much more on what is happening inside Meta with the company’s recent speech policy changes. Jason runs us through it. After the break, Joseph explains how thousands of apps have been hijacked to steal your location data, possibly without the app developers’ knowledge. In the subscribers-only section, we talk about various stories intersecting…
An AI app for creating nonconsensual nude images of anyone is getting the vast majority of its traffic directly from Meta platforms, where the app is buying thousands of explicit ads featuring nonconsensual nudity of celebrities and influencers. The blatant and repeated violation of Meta’s policies over the course of months is making a mockery…
It’s that time again! We’re planning our latest FOIA Forum, a live, hour-long or more interactive session where Joseph and Jason will teach you how to pry records from government agencies through public records requests. We’re planning this for Thursday, 23rd January at 1 PM Eastern. Add it to your calendar! So, what’s the FOIA Forum?…
Meta is deleting links to Pixelfed, a decentralized Instagram competitor. On Facebook, the company is labeling links to Pixelfed.social as “spam” and deleting them immediately. Pixelfed is an open-source, community funded and decentralized image sharing platform that runs on Activity Pub, which is the same technology that supports Mastodon and other federated services. Pixelfed.social is…
Mikey Shulman, the CEO and founder of the AI music generator company Suno AI, thinks people don’t enjoy making music. “We didn’t just want to build a company that makes the current crop of creators 10 percent faster or makes it 10 percent easier to make music. If you want to impact the way a…
Ali Riley, a professional soccer player for the Angel City Football Club, lost her home in Los Angeles’s Palisades Fire. The last image she saw of her house standing was an Amazon package delivery confirmation photo, sent after the neighborhood’s mandatory evacuation order. Friday morning, Riley posted a screenshot of an Amazon delivery confirmation photo….
A hacker compromised an administrative account on the website for popular game Path of Exile 2, which allowed them to reset the passwords on dozens of players’ accounts, according to comments from developer Grinding Gear Games (GGG) made during a podcast on Sunday. This access would have given the hacker the ability to steal powerful…
Welcome back to the Abstract! This week, it’s time to demand a new planet. Don’t we deserve it? Haven’t we been good? Fortunately, we may be on the cusp of finally discovering whether the solar system has, indeed, been hiding a massive world up its sleeve. Can you imagine the fight over naming this world,…