Hoopla, a service that provides public libraries around the country with ebooks, announced that it will do more to prevent the spread of low quality AI-generated books after a 404 Media investigation showed that they were common on its platform. “At hoopla, customer satisfaction is at the core of everything we do, and we deeply…
This article was produced in collaboration with Court Watch, an independent outlet that unearths overlooked court records. To subscribe to Court Watch, click here. Meta is suing a scammer who allegedly and prolifically extorted people by banning and unbanning their Instagram accounts. The lawsuit, filed on Tuesday, is against Idriss Qibaa, who ran the “Unlocked…
Roughly 10 months after it was released, the Humane AI Pin, a terribly executed and terrible product is now officially a $700 brick of e-waste after the company sold its software to HP and told its dozens of customers that they are now out of luck. Every Humane AI Pin ever created will stop functioning…
This week we start with Jason’s story about anyone being able to push updates to DOGE.gov website. Then we talk about other stories with the DEI.gov and Waste.gov sites. After the break, Sam tells us all about some lawyers who get caught using AI in a case. In the subscribers-only section, we chat about a…
A worker at the General Services Administration told colleagues in a Slack message Tuesday that they have resigned in protest after Elon Musk ally Thomas Shedd requested “admin/root access to all components of the Notify.gov system,” which is a government system used to send mass text messages to the public that contains information the worker…
On January 24 we received a pretty unusual email. The sender, a procurement officer from government contractor Cirrus Systems, wanted to buy multiple licenses for Graykey, the iPhone and Android hacking technology widely used by U.S. law enforcement and agencies. “Hello sales Team, I hope this email finds you well,” the email started. “I would…
Welcome back to the Abstract, 404 Media’s weekly roundup of scientific studies to distract us from our present dystopia! This week, we are traveling back in time to 16th century Transylvania, so please make sure you are up to date on your bubonic plague shots. A study reconstructed wild weather events through the eyes of…
A German researcher captured the contents of the White House’s “DEI.gov” during a brief period when it was not password protected. The capture shows that the site contains a list of vague, alleged government-funded tasks and their costs, without sources or context, like “$1.3 million to Arab and Jewish photographers,” “$1.5 million for ‘art for…
After being forced by a court order to restore certain pages about gender and diversity to government websites, the Trump administration has added a note to the top of those pages saying “Any information on this page promoting gender ideology is extremely inaccurate, and disconnected from the immutable biological reality that there are two sexes,…
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 Apple’s iCloud, Wikipedia is a miracle of humankind, and good soup. JASON: After our relatively unhinged BTBs last week, many of you left extremely nice comments, reached out…
