Rogue Goodreads Librarian Edits Site to Expose ‘Censorship in Favor of Trump Fascism’

On Friday morning, Goodreads users who wanted to read reviews of the werewolf romance Mate by Ali Hazelwood were confronted by the cover of the new Eric Trump book Under Siege. One of the site’s volunteer moderators had gone rogue and changed Mate’s cover, added the subtitle “Goodreads Censorship in Favor of Trump,” and altered…

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ICE Is Using a University Building as a Deportation Office and the University Says It Can’t Do Anything About It

A university in Milwaukee is stuck with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as its tenant after the agency refused to leave a building the university intended to renovate into an architectural and civil engineering classroom building. Instead, the building is being used as an office for ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations, the main part of…

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Con Edison Refuses to Say How ICE Gets Its Customers’ Data

Con Edison, the energy company that serves New York City, refuses to say whether ICE or other federal agencies require a search warrant or court order to access its customers’ sensitive data. Con Edison’s refusal to answer questions comes after 404 Media reviewed court records showing Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), a division of ICE, has…

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AI Dataset for Detecting Nudity Contained Child Sexual Abuse Images

A large image dataset used to develop AI tools for detecting nudity contains a number of images of child sexual abuse material (CSAM), according to the Canadian Centre for Child Protection (C3P).  The NudeNet dataset, which contains more than 700,000 images scraped from the internet, was used to train an AI image classifier which could…

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a16z-Backed Startup Sells Thousands of ‘Synthetic Influencers’ to Manipulate Social Media as a Service

A new startup backed by one of the biggest venture capital firms in Silicon Valley, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), is building a service that allows clients to “orchestrate actions on thousands of social accounts through both bulk content creation and deployment.” Essentially, the startup, called Doublespeed, is pitching an astroturfing AI-powered bot service, which is in…

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Breathing Through Our Butts Declared Safe After First Human Trial

🌘 Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week. Hold onto your butts, because one day you might be breathing through them.  Scientists have tested out enteral ventilation—a possible method of administering oxygen with a liquid delivered through the rectum…

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