The IRS accessed a database of hundreds of millions of travel records, which show when and where a specific person flew and the credit card they used, without obtaining a warrant, according to a letter signed by a bipartisan group of lawmakers and shared with 404 Media. The country’s major airlines, including Delta, United Airlines,…
The Department of Homeland Security claimed in court proceedings that nearly two weeks worth of surveillance footage from ICE’s Broadview Detention Center in suburban Chicago has been “irretrievably destroyed” and may not be able to be recovered, according to court records reviewed by 404 Media. The filing was made as part of a class action…
A current pilot project aims to pay former law enforcement and military officers to physically track immigrants and verify their addresses to give to ICE for $300 each. There is no indication that the pilot involves licensed private investigators, and appears to be open to people who are now essentially members of the general public,…
Online survey research, a fundamental method for data collection in many scientific studies, is facing an existential threat because of large language models, according to new research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The author of the paper, associate professor of government at Dartmouth and director of the Polarization Research…
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) recently invited staff to demos of an app that lets officers instantly scan a license plate, adding it to a database of billions of records that shows where else that vehicle has been spotted around the country, according to internal agency material viewed by 404 Media. That data can then…
The video game industry has had a turbulent few years. The pandemic made people play more and caused a small boom, which then subsided, resulting in wave after wave of massive layoffs. Microsoft, one of the major console manufacturers, is shifting its strategy for Xbox as the company shifts its focus to AI. And now,…
Welcome back to the Abstract! These are the studies this week that reached back through time, flooded the zone, counted the stars, scored science goals, and topped it all off with a ten-course meal. First, scientists make a major breakthrough thanks to a very cute mammoth mummy. Then: the climate case for busy beavers; how…
Microsoft and nuclear power company Westinghouse Nuclear want to use AI to speed up the construction of new nuclear power plants in the United States. According to a report from think tank AI Now, this push could lead to disaster. “If these initiatives continue to be pursued, their lack of safety may lead not only…
This week, we discuss getting back on our AI slop bullshit, deepfakes in schools, and epistemic virtues.
Credential theft isn’t just an inconvenience. It’s often the first move in a chain reaction that ends in full-scale compromise. Beyond the dreaded password reset process, information stealers, as shown in several recent cyberattacks, can have far more consequential follow-on effects. For many small and mid-sized organizations, a single stolen identity can lead to…
