Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that mounted a defense, felt out of place, found new life, and resurrected the gods of yore. First, a tale of pregnant stinkbugs, parasitic wasps, and fungi weapons that is fit for a rebooted Aesop fable. Then, a fast food stop for an errant…
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 crowdsourced resistance and a big government data dump. SAM: I don’t want to say it’s rare that we publish positive stories. We post more of those than…
This issue of the Counter Threat Unit’s high-level bimonthly report discusses noteworthy updates in the threat landscape during July and August
In 2022, Jason Allen outraged artists around the world when he won the Colorado State Fair Fine Arts Competition with a piece of AI-generated art. A month later, he tried to copyright the pictures, got denied, and started a fight with the U.S. Copyright Office (USCO) that dragged on for three years. In August, he…
A group of hackers from the Com, a loose-knit community behind some of the most significant data breaches in recent years, have posted the names and personal information of hundreds of government officials, including people working for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). “I want my MONEY MEXICO,” a…
The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization that hosts Wikipedia, says that it’s seeing a significant decline in human traffic to the online encyclopedia because more people are getting the information that’s on Wikipedia via generative AI chatbots that were trained on its articles and search engines that summarize them without actually clicking through to the…
Reddit’s conversational AI product, Reddit Answers, suggested users who are interested in pain management try heroin and kratom, showing yet another extreme example of dangerous advice provided by a chatbot, even one that’s trained on Reddit’s highly coveted trove of user-generated data. The AI-generated answers were flagged by a user on a subreddit for Reddit…
Three victims of sex trafficking ring GirlsDoPorn brought a complaint against multiple companies that processed payments for the criminal organization, claiming that without their payment services, GirlsDoPorn would never have existed. GirlsDoPorn was a criminal enterprise that coerced primarily high-school and college aged women with no experience in the adult industry into appearing in pornographic…
A number of easy to access websites use facial recognition to let partners, stalkers, or anyone else uncover specific peoples’ Tinder profiles, reveal their approximate physical location at points in time, and track changes to their profile including their photos, according to 404 Media’s tests. Ordinarily it is not possible to search Tinder for a…
A division of ICE, the Secret Service, and the Navy’s criminal investigation division all had access to Flock’s nationwide network of tens of thousands of AI-enabled cameras that constantly track the movements of vehicles, and by extension people, according to a letter sent by Senator Ron Wyden and shared with 404 Media. Homeland Security Investigations…
