As part of the company’s months-long obsession with catching employees leaking internal developments to the press, staff at WordPress parent company Automattic recently noticed individually-unique watermarks on internal sites, according to employees who spoke to 404 Media. Automattic added the watermarks to an internal employee communications platform called P2. P2 is a WordPress product other…
Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, thinks the internet’s default encyclopedia and one of the world’s biggest repositories of information could benefit from some applications of AI. The volunteer editors who keep Wikipedia functioning strongly disagree with him. The ongoing debate about incorporating AI into Wikipedia in various forms bubbled up again in July, when…
Six of the biggest porn studios in the world, including industry giant and Pornhub parent company Ayl o, announced Wednesday they have formed a first-of-its-kind coalition called the Adult Studio Alliance (ASA). The alliance’s purpose is to “contribute to a safe, healthy, dignified, and respectful adult industry for performers,” the ASA told 404 Media. “This…
📄 This article was primarily reported using public records requests. We are making it available to all readers as a public service. FOIA reporting can be expensive, please consider subscribing to 404 Media to support this work. Or send us a one time donation via our tip jar here. In February 2023, a brief national…
Most people probably have no idea that when you book a flight through major travel websites, a data broker owned by U.S. airlines then sells details about your flight, including your name, credit card used, and where you’re flying to the government. The data broker has compiled billions of ticketing records the government can search…
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is using a new mobile phone app that can identify someone based on their fingerprints or face by simply pointing a smartphone camera at them, according to internal ICE emails viewed by 404 Media. The underlying system used for the facial recognition component of the app is ordinarily used when…
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, is banning AI models designed to generate the likeness of real people, the site announced Friday. The policy change, which Civitai attributes in part to new AI regulations in the…
A Saudi Arabian company that was created by the Saudi Arabian government just purchased Pokémon Go, the most popular augmented reality game of all time, with a collective worldwide player base of more than 100 million people and their locations in the real world. Niantic is selling Pokémon Go, Pikmin Bloom, and Monster Hunter Now…
The flight manifests for three legally contested deportation flights from Texas to El Salvador contain dozens of additional, unaccounted for passengers than a previously published Department of Homeland Security (DHS) list of people deported from the United States on those flights, 404 Media has learned. The additional people on the flight manifest have not been…
On March 16, 2023, Paola Sanchez, the founder and administrator of Are We Dating the Same Guy?, a collection of Facebook groups where women share “red flags” about men, received a message from Christianne Burns, then fiancée of Tea CEO and founder Sean Cook. “We have an app ready to go called ‘Tea – Women’s…
