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…
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…
The mother of a teenager who died by suicide is suing Roblox, accusing the company of worrying more about its investors than the children in its audience. The complaint, filed this month, claims Kleiner Perkins and Andreessen Horowitz, who’ve collectively invested hundreds of millions of dollars into the gaming company, fostered a platform that monetizes…
This post contains spoilers for the Netflix film ‘House of Dynamite.’ Netflix’s new Kathryn Bigelow-directed nuclear war thriller wants audiences to ask themselves the question: what would you do if you had 15 minutes to decide whether or not to end the world? House of Dynamite is about a nuclear missile hitting the United States…
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…
Zenni, an online glasses store, is offering a new coating for its lenses that the company says will protect people from facial recognition technology. Zenni calls it ID Guard and it works by adding a pink sheen to the surface of the glasses that reflects the infrared light used by some facial recognition cameras. Do…
Welcome back to the Abstract! These are the studies this week that were exhumed from their graves, worked scatological miracles, and drew inspiration from X-rays. First, a diagnosis 200 years in the making confirms, once again, that Napoleon’s retreat from Russia was a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad time. Then: crystal pee, life-giving poo, and…
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…
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…
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 Pavlovian Chartbeat response, when to say “cum,” and the wave of making things for humans, by humans. JOSEPH: Right now I’m in the midst of upgrading a…
