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Kids say they are using pictures of Trump, YouTuber Markiplier, and the G-Man from Half-Life to bypass newly integrated age restriction software in the VR game Gorilla Tag. Gorilla Tag is a popular game with a global reach and a young audience, which means it has to comply with complicated and contradictory laws aimed at…
Researchers published a massive database of more than 2 billion Discord messages that they say they scraped using Discord’s public API. The data was pulled from 3,167 servers and covers posts made between 2015 and 2024, the entire time Discord has been active. Though the researchers claim they’ve anonymized the data, it’s hard to imagine…
Not content with attacking retailers, this aggressive group is fighting a turf war with other ransomware operators
We start this week with Jason’s couple of stories about how the Chicago Sun-Times printed a summer guide that was basically all AI-generated. Jason spoke to the person behind it. After the break, a bunch of documents show that schools were simply not ready for AI. In the subscribers-only section, we chat all about Star…
The U.S. has one of the largest nuclear arsenals in the world. Its dream has long been that it could launch these nukes and suffer no repercussions for doing so. Ronald Reagan called it the Strategic Defense Initiative. His critics called it Star Wars. Trump is calling it the “Golden Dome.” Scientists who’ve studied the…
Another adversary picks up the email bombing / vishing Storm-1811 playbook, doing thorough reconnaissance to target specific employees with fake help desk call—this time, over the phone.
The “Heat Index” summer guide newspaper insert published by the Chicago Sun-Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer that contained AI-generated misinformation and reading lists full of books that don’t exist was created by a subsidiary of the magazine giant Hearst, 404 Media has learned. Victor Lim, the vice president of marketing and communications at Chicago Public…
Civitai, an AI model sharing site backed by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) that 404 Media has repeatedly shown is being used to generate nonconsensual adult content, lost access to its credit card payment processor. According to an announcement posted to Civitai on Monday, the site will “pause” credit card payments starting Friday, May 23. At that…
Subscribe Join the newsletter to get the latest updates. Success Great! Check your inbox and click the link. Error Please enter a valid email address. The Chicago Sun-Times newspaper’s “Best of Summer” section published over the weekend contains a guide to summer reads that features real authors and fake books that they did not write…
Civitai, an AI model sharing site backed by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), is allowing users to AI generate nonconsensual porn of real people, despite the site’s policies against this type of content, increased moderation efforts, and threats from payment processors to deny Civitai service. After I reached out for comment about this issue, Civitai told me…
