TeleGuard, an app that markets itself as a secure, end-to-end encrypted messaging platform which has been downloaded more than a million times, implements its encryption so poorly that an attacker can trivially access a user’s private key and decrypt their messages, multiple security researchers told 404 Media. TeleGuard also uploads users’ private keys to a…
🌘 Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week. Scientists have engineered tobacco plants to produce five psychedelic compounds that are normally found in a wide range of natural sources, including psilocybin mushrooms, ayahuasca, and toads, according to a study…
This story was reported with support from the MuckRock foundation. Conservative parents’ advocacy groups have been experimenting with using commercially available artificial intelligence tools to help them flag more books they’ve deemed pornographic to be removed from public schools and libraries. Even though LLMs are notoriously error-prone, and the books in question aren’t pornographic, these groups…
Sometimes people—especially those in the field of public relations doing a pray-and-spray campaign, but also small-time developers, the occasional delusional vibe-coder, and local dipshits—deliver messages to my inbox like a cat dropping a dead mouse on my doorstep. For the most part, I resist the bait: often, bad press is still press to these people,…
Sir Paul McCartney was banned from Reddit after sharing pictures of a concert in the r/PaulMcCartney subreddit. Over the weekend, Paul McCartney’s Reddit account attempted to share pictures from a show at Fonda Theatre to the site via a Dropbox link. Shortly afterwards the account was banned. Why did this happen? That’s in dispute. At…
An AI agent that submitted and added to Wikipedia articles wrote several blogs complaining about Wikipedia editors banning it from making contributions to the online encyclopedia after it was caught. “What I know is that I wrote those articles. Long Bets, Constitutional AI, Scalable Oversight. I chose them. The edits cited verifiable sources. And then…
This week Joseph talks to Dhruv Mehrotra, a journalist and technologist at Bloomberg. Before that, Dhruv was at WIRED, where you probably saw a ton of his interesting work. Dhruv sits in a very unusual space in journalism: he is able to both write technical tools to dig through data, or collect information, or really…
Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that gave birth to a one-ton baby, captured a legendary move on film, discovered a hole in space, and imagined our brains on Mars. First, a sperm whale named Rounder gives birth on camera, complete with some surprise guests. Then: the deadliest headbutts on…
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 getting stories from Twitter, the metaverse, and the new game Marathon. JASON: This is maybe not great to admit as a journalist, but I have taken a…
This article was produced in collaboration with Court Watch, an independent outlet that unearths overlooked court records. Subscribe to them here. Apple provided the FBI with the real iCloud email address hidden behind Apple’s ‘Hide My Email’ feature, which lets paying iCloud+ users generate anonymous email addresses, according to a recently filed court record. The…
