For the past couple of weeks, a community of developers who use the programming language Ruby have been closely following a dramatic change in ownership of some of the most essential tools in its ecosystem with far reaching impacts for the worldwide web. If you’re not familiar with Ruby or the open source development community,…
Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that were lost at sea, lost in time, lost in space, and lost in translation. If you are househunting at the moment, have you considered living on a submerged pile of Nazi munition, or in a charming community of WWI-era ghost ships, or, if…
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 being journalism dorks, our new lawsuit against ICE, and working on bullshit. JASON: I’m writing this from sunny Athens, Greece, where I’ve been invited to talk about…
🌘 Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week. Have you noticed anything out of whack about Earth since 2015? I’m speaking, of course, about how our planet’s wobble started shrinking that year, a mysterious shift that scientists have been…
People on r/twinpeaks flooded the subreddit with AI slop images of FBI agent Dale Cooper and ChatGPT generated scripts after the community’s moderators opened the door to posting AI art. The tide of terrible Twin Peaks related slop lasted for about two days before the subreddit’s mods broke, reversed their decision, and deleted the AI…
Subscribe Join the newsletter to get the latest updates. Success Great! Check your inbox and click the link. Error Please enter a valid email address. Tuesday, the Secret Service said it “dismantled a network” of “300 co-located SIM servers and 100,000 SIM cards across multiple sites.” The Secret Service suggested that this network posed a…
In a blog post published in June, Garrett Langley, the CEO and co-founder of surveillance company Flock, said “We rely on the democratic process, on the individuals that the majority vote for to represent us, to determine what is and is not acceptable in cities and states.” The post explained that the company believes the…
With “Find My Parking Cops,” technologist Riley Walz reverse engineered San Francisco’s parking ticket system to place cops on a map seconds after they issue parking citations—in theory, helping people avoid spots where officers are handing out tickets. “I can see every ticket seconds after it’s written,” Walz wrote on X. So I made a…
We start this week with some news: we are suing ICE for access to its $2 million contract with a company that sells powerful spyware. Paragon sells tech for remotely breaking into phones and reading messages from encrypted chat apps without a target even clicking a link. After the break, we talk about a couple…
🌘 Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week. You may have noticed that the universe is pretty big—in fact, possibly infinite. These immense scales offer a challenge for scientists who seek to model the “cosmic web,” a network of…
