The CEO seemingly having an affair with the head of HR at his company at the Coldplay concert is a viral video for the ages, but it is also, unfortunately, emblematic of our current private surveillance and social media hellscape. The video, which is now viral on every platform that we can possibly think of,…
ICE officers are able to point their smartphone’s camera at a person and near instantaneously run their face against a bank of 200 million images, then pull up their name, date of birth, nationality, unique identifiers such as their “alien” number, and whether an immigration judge has determined they should be deported from the country,…
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…
🌘 Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week. A major mystery about a long-lost legend that was all the rage in Medieval England but survives in only one known fragment has been solved, according to a study published on…
Steam, the dominant digital storefront for PC games operated by Valve, updated its guidelines to forbid “certain kinds of adult content” and blamed restrictions from payment processors and financial institutions. The update was initially spotted by Steam.DB, a platform that tracks and publishes data about Steam, and reported by the Japanese gaming site Gamespark. The…
We start this week with a series of articles from Emanuel about a crackdown in the AI industry. After the break, Sam tells us about the ‘Save Our Signs’ campaign which hopes to preserve the history of national parks. In the subscribers-only section, Jason rants about how AI will not save the media industry. Listen…
So-called 3D-printed ghost guns are untraceable firearms that can be assembled at home. But cutting edge work from a forensic expert in California and researchers at the University of Oklahoma may soon show investigators can trace a 3D printed object to the specific printer that made it. Weapons manufactured using 3D printers have been a…
Yesterday I ordered my lunch from an AI operating a drive-thru. It was fine. Banal. Boring even. A new experience that I think will become routine in the future. The AI drive-thru operator isn’t cutting edge tech deployed in an upscale market to win over high value consumers. I live at the edge of a…
For a while, I have said that the AI slop endgame, for social media companies, is creating a hyper personalized feed full of highly specific content about anything one could possibly imagine. Because AI slop is so easy to make and because social media algorithms are so personalized, this means that Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, or…
Yesterday, Silicon Valley trade publication The Information launched TITV, a live-streaming news program. For its first episode, the company’s founder Jessica Lessin interviewed Mark Zuckerberg about his recent attempts to hire AI executives away from other companies for huge sums of money. It is impossible to say what actually happened in the interview, however, because…
