Behind the Blog: Feeling Wowed, Getting Cozy
This week, we discuss the benefits of spending 14 hours a day on the internet, getting cozy for AI slop, and a what a new law in Sweden means for the rest of us.
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ChatGPT Told a Violent Stalker to Embrace the ‘Haters,’ Indictment Says
This article was produced in collaboration with Court Watch, an independent outlet that unearths overlooked court records. Subscribe to them here. A Pittsburgh man who allegedly made 11 women’s lives hell across more than five states used ChatGPT as his “therapist” and “best friend” that encouraged him to continue running his misogynistic and threat-filled podcast…
Cryptocurrency wallet drainers stole $494 million in 2024
Scammers stole $494 million worth of cryptocurrency in wallet drainer attacks last year that targeted more than 300,000 wallet addresses. […]
Data Center Tech Lobbyists Fearmonger in Attempt to Retroactively Roll Back Right to Repair Law
Lobbyists for major tech firms like Cisco and IBM are trying to push through legislation in Colorado that would drastically roll back a groundbreaking right to repair law under the guise of protecting national security and data centers. The legislation, which passed through a Colorado state senate committee on Thursday, would exempt hardware from the…
Podcast: Ring Is Just Getting Started
This week we start with Jason’s follow up to Ring launching its ‘Search Party’ feature. It turns out, according to a leaked email he got, the feature is only starting with finding lost dogs. After the break, Emanuel explains why we’ve learned nothing about amplification when it comes to the recent looksmaxxing trend. In the…
Elon Musk’s Waste.gov Is Just a WordPress Theme Placeholder Page
A government website created by the Trump administration to “track government waste” has been left unupdated with a default WordPress sample page that includes language about an imaginary architecture firm. “Waste.gov: Tracking government waste,” the tagline for the website, archived here, says. The rest of the webpage, however, is about an imaginary architecture firm called…
LinkedIn Removes Accounts of AI ‘Co-Workers’ Looking for Jobs
LinkedIn has removed at least two accounts that were created for AI “co-workers” whose profile images said they were “#OpenToWork.” “I don’t need coffee breaks, I don’t miss deadlines, and I’ll outperform any social media team you’ve ever worked with – Guaranteed,” the profile page for one of these AI accounts called Ella said. “Tired…
Podcast: The (Hacked) Spy In Your Car
We start this week with Joseph’s investigation into Nexar, a popular dashcam company that was catastrophically hacked. Nexar is also uploading user footage to a publicly available map without some drivers’ knowledge. After the break, Sam tells us about her trip to San Diego to cover the sentencing of someone she has covered for years….
App for Quitting Porn Leaked Users’ Masturbation Habits
An app that purports to help people stop consuming pornography has exposed highly sensitive data, including its users’ masturbation habits. Some of the data exposed includes the users’ age, how often they masturbate, and how viewing pornography makes them feel. According to the data, many of them are minors. An example of the personal data…
Massive, Unarchivable Datasets of Cancer, Covid, and Alzheimer’s Research Could Be Lost Forever
Almost two dozen repositories of research and public health data supported by the National Institutes of Health are marked for “review” under the Trump administration’s direction, and researchers and archivists say the data is at risk of being lost forever if the repositories go down. “The problem with archiving this data is that we can’t,”…