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 companies’ responses to being monitored by an ICE contractor, caring about the little things, weight loss drug ads, and how our SXSW shindig went. JOSEPH: This week…
🌘 Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week. Scientists are searching for signs of a “fifth force” at the center of our galaxy that could rewrite the rules of gravity and help to resolve some fundamental mysteries in the…
📄 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. The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD)…
Next to technicolor neon signs featuring Road Runner, an inspirational phrase that says “everything will be fucking amazing,” and a weed leaf, Geovany Alvarado points to a neon sign he’s particularly proud of: “The Lost and Found Art,” it says. “I had a customer who called me, it was an old guy. He wanted to…
On Monday 404 Media filed a lawsuit against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) demanding the agency publish its $2 million contract with Paragon, a company that makes powerful spyware that can remotely break into mobile phones without the target even clicking a link. The sale of the spyware to ICE has activists and lawmakers deeply…
An Instagram account with almost 400,000 followers is promoting racist and antisemitic t-shirts, another sign that Meta is unable or unwilling to enforce its own policies against hate speech. 404 Media flagged the account to Meta as well as specific racist posts that violate its hate speech policies, but Meta didn’t remove the account and…
Attack matches three-year long pattern of ScreenConnect attacks tracked by Sophos MDR as STAC4365.
As expected, President Donald Trump repealed his predecessor Joe Biden’s 2023 artificial intelligence (AI) regulations on his first day in office. The
Police departments and officials from Border Patrol used Flock’s automatic license plate reader (ALPR) cameras to monitor protests hundreds of times around the country during the last year, including No Kings protests in June and October, according to data obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). The data provides the clearest picture yet of how…
Collective Shout, an organization “for anyone concerned about the increasing pornification of culture,” based its claim that Steam and Itch.io host “hundreds of rape and incest games” on user-generated tags, and the organizations that co-signed Collective Shout’s open letter to payment processors did not respond to 404 Media’s questions about whether they tried to verify…
