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Cape, a privacy-focused telecommunications company, says it has introduced a feature that automatically deletes a user’s call data records, such as who they call and when, every 24 hours. These “disappearing call logs” as Cape describes them break with the telecom industry standard of keeping hold of call logs for months if not years. “One…
This week Joseph talks to Samuel Bagg, assistant professor of political science at the University of South Carolina. Bagg recently wrote a fascinating essay, linked below, about how the problem with lots of things might be knowledge-based (people believing stuff that’s wrong or dangerous) but the solution is not more knowledge. It’s all about social…
Moltbook is a “social media” site for AI agents that’s captured the public’s imagination over the last few days. Billed as the “front page of the agent internet,” Moltbook is a place where AI agents interact independently of human control, and whose posts have repeatedly gone viral because a certain set of AI users have…
Here is an email that Elon Musk, current world’s richest man and owner of a gigantic social media network that generated child sexual abuse material on demand, sent to sex offender Jeffrey Epstein on November 11, 2012: “What day/night will be the wildest party on your island?” At first glance, the latest Department of Justice…
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 a trip to Kenya, reconstructing images, and lying developers. JASON: Last week, I was in Kenya, a trip that turned out so overwhelmingly positive and left me…
A hacker demonstrated that the viral new AI agent Moltbot (formally Clawdbot) is easy to hack via a backdoor in an attached support shop.Clawdbot has become a Silicon Valley sensation among a certain type of AI-booster techbro, and the backdoor highlights just one of the things that can go awry if you use AI to…
Earlier this month we revealed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is using a Palantir tool called ELITE to decide which neighborhoods to raid. The tool lets ICE populate a map with potential deportation targets, bring up dossiers on each person, and view an address “confidence score” based on data sourced from the Department of Health…
Senators Mark Warner and Tim Kaine formally asked the inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to investigate and provide details on many of the surveillance technologies being used by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), according to a copy of the letter shared with 404 Media. The…
Chat & Ask AI, one of the most popular AI apps on the Google Play and Apple App stores that claims more than 50 million users, left hundreds of millions of those users’ private messages with the app’s chatbot exposed, according to an independent security researcher and emails viewed by 404 Media. The exposed chats…
Hackers claimed on Wednesday they’ve stolen a mass of internal data from Match Group, which runs dating apps Hinge, Match, and OkCupid. Match Group, the company that owns the targeted platforms as well as Tinder and other massively popular dating apps, says it is investigating the incident. 404 Media downloaded the data and reviewed portions…
