Something very strange is happening inside Super Nintendo (SNES) consoles as they age: a component you’ve probably never heard of is running ever so slightly faster as we get further and further away from the time the consoles first hit the market in the early ‘90s. The discovery started a mild panic in the speedrunning…
Last week, Aix Marseille University, France’s largest university, invited American scientists who believe their work is at risk of being censored by Donald Trump administration’s anti-science policies to continue their research in France. Today, the university announced that it is already seeing great interest from scientists at NASA, Yale, Stanford, and other American schools and…
A Saudi Arabian company that was created by the Saudi Arabian government just purchased Pokémon Go, the most popular augmented reality game of all time, with a collective worldwide player base of more than 100 million people and their locations in the real world. Niantic is selling Pokémon Go, Pikmin Bloom, and Monster Hunter Now…
Some Spotify employees are not happy that the audio streaming giant was, until this week, hosting and profiting from a course about “pimping hoes” by Andrew Tate, according to internal Spotify communications viewed by 404 Media. “Pretty vile that we’re hosting Andrew Tate’s content,” one Spotify employee said in a company Slack channel called #ethics-club,…
A contractor for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and many other U.S. government agencies has developed a tool that lets analysts more easily pull a target individual’s publicly available data from a wide array of sites, social networks, apps, and services across the web at once, including Bluesky, OnlyFans, and various Meta platforms, according to…
We start this week with Emanuel’s great investigation into Chinese AI video models, and how they have far fewer safeguards than their American counterparts. A content warning for that section due to what the users are making. After the break, Joseph explains how police are using AI to summarize evidence seized from mobile phones. In…
NASA paid for access to Clearview AI’s “Investigator Tool + Cloud Database,” according to a set of procurement documents obtained by 404 Media under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Clearview is a controversial facial recognition company which was the first to cross the rubicon of allowing third parties to search for someone’s face and…
Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University protester who was detained by ICE on Saturday, has been moved to a detention facility in Louisiana, according to ICE’s detainee locator system. Khalil was a key part of Columbia students’ protests last year against Israel’s indiscriminate bombardment of Gaza in response to the October 7 attacks. He is a…
Wikipedia is one of the most valuable repositories of information ever created by humanity. Having your own Wikipedia page has become a kind of status symbol—proof that someone is important enough to enter the historical record. But, ironically, having your face in a Wikipedia page is often not flattering at all. In fact, Wikipedia portraits,…
Welcome back to the Abstract! Let me start this column with a question: Are you a man or a mouse? Or a mammoth? Or a mammoth mouse? Okay, that was more than one question, but in my defense, scientists made a bunch of mammothy mice and I’m getting my taxonomical lines crossed. Then, hornet guts:…
