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On the podcast this week, I talked to YouTuber Benn Jordan, who has done some of our favorite reporting on Flock, the automated license plate reader surveillance company. A couple months ago, he found vulnerabilities in some of Flock’s license plate reader cameras. I have been following Benn’s work for a while, and soon after…
Elon Musk, owner of the former social media network turned deepfake porn site X, is pushing people to pay for its nonconsensual intimate image generator Grok, meaning some of the app’s tens of millions of users are being hit with a paywall when they try to create nude images of random women doing sexually explicit…
The biggest AI story of the first week of 2026 involves Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot turning the social media platform into an AI child sexual imagery factory, seemingly overnight. I’ve said several times on the 404 Media podcast and elsewhere that we could devote an entire beat to “loser shit.” What’s happening this week with…
Billionaire Toby Neugebauer laughed when the Amarillo City Council asked him how he planned to handle the waste his planned datacenter would produce. “I’m not laughing in disrespect to your question,” Neugebauer said. He explained that he’d just met with Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who had made it clear that any nuclear waste Neugebauer’s datacenter…
A social media and phone surveillance system ICE bought access to is designed to monitor a city neighborhood or block for mobile phones, track the movements of those devices and their owners over time, and follow them from their places of work to home or other locations, according to material that describes how the system…
For the past two months I’ve been following a Telegram community tricking Grok into generating nonconsensual sexual images and videos of real people with increasingly convoluted methods. As countless images on X over the last week once again showed us, it doesn’t take much to get Elon Musk’s “based” AI model to create nonconsensual images….
Developers making mods and plugins for hentai games and sex toys say Github recently unleashed a wave of suspensions and bans against their repositories, and the platform hasn’t explained why. Developers I spoke to said the community estimated around 80 to 90 repositories containing the work of 40 to 50 people went down recently, with…
We start this week with Matthew’s story about an organization tracking the location of AI data centers around the U.S. and elsewhere in the world. After the break, Jason tells us all about what Grok got up to over the holiday break, and we ruminate on what the breakdown in the information ecosystem means. In…
🌘 Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week. Astronomers have discovered an ancient reservoir of gas that is too hot for cosmic models to handle, reports a study published on Monday in Nature. By peering over 12 billion years…
Book publisher HarperCollins said it will start translating romance novels under its famous Harlequin label in France using AI, reducing or eliminating the pay for the team of human contract translators who previously did this work. Publisher’s Weekly broke the news in English after French outlets reported on the story in December. According to a…
