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We start this week with Joseph’s very weird story about Apple Podcasts. The app is opening by itself, playing random spirituality podcasts, and in one case directing listeners to a potentially malicious website. After the break, Matthew tells us how it sure looks like a map of Ukraine was manipulated in order to win a…
As of this week, half of the states in the U.S. are under restrictive age verification laws that require adults to hand over their biometric and personal identification to access legal porn. Missouri became the 25th state to enact its own age verification law on Sunday. As it’s done in multiple other states, Pornhub and…
A live map that tracks frontlines of the war in Ukraine was edited to show a fake Russian advance on the city of Myrnohrad on November 15. The edit coincided with the resolution of a bet on Polymarket, a site where users can bet on anything from basketball games to presidential election and ongoing conflicts….
We’re having a Cyber Monday sale! You can get 25% off an annual subscription. With that, you get access to all of our articles (including today’s piece about how surveillance company Flock is using overseas gig workers to review and classify footage); bonus podcast content every week where we talk about an extra story; bonus…
Joseph speaks to Michael Bobbitt, a former FBI official who worked directly on Operation Trojan Shield. In this operation the FBI secretly ran its own encrypted phone company for organized crime, backdoored the phone, and collected tens of millions of messages. Michael and Joseph discuss how Michael handled intelligence sourced from the phones, how to…
This article was produced with support from WIRED. Flock, the automatic license plate reader (ALPR) and AI-powered camera company, uses overseas workers from Upwork to train its machine learning algorithms, with training material telling workers how to review and categorize footage including images people and vehicles in the U.S., according to material reviewed by 404 Media that…
🌘 Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week. An astronomer has reported a possible new signature of dark matter, a mysterious substance that makes up most of the universe, according to a study published on Tuesday in the Journal…
We start this week with Sam’s piece about a massive leak of an AI chatbot, and how it showed that people were taking ordinary women’s yearbook photos and using them to make AI porn. After the break, Jason explains how a recent change on X exposed a bunch of grifters all around the world. In…
The FOIA Forum is a livestreamed event for paying subscribers where we talk about how to file public records requests and answer questions. If you’re not already signed up, please consider doing so here. Recently we had a FOIA Forum where we focused on our reporting about Flock. This includes how to file public records requests…
Because we run 404 Media on Ghost, an open source and privacy-forward stack, we actually know very little about who reads 404 Media (by design). But we’re hoping to learn a bit more so we can figure out how people are discovering our work, what our readers do, and what other projects people might want…
