As I do most nights, I was listening to YouTube videos to fall asleep the other night. Sometime around 3 a.m., I woke up because the video YouTube was autoplaying started going “FEEEEEEEE.” The video was called “Boring History for Sleep | How Medieval PEASANTS Survived the Coldest Nights and more.” It is two hours…
The Federal Trade Commission announced Wednesday that Pornhub and its parent company Aylo settled a lawsuit filed by the Federal Trade Commission and the state of Utah. The FTC and Utah’s attorney general claimed that Pornhub and its affiliates “deceived users by doing little to block tens of thousands of videos and photos featuring child…
A listing on ultra-fast-fashion e-commerce site Shein used an AI-generated image of Luigi Mangione to sell a floral button-down t-shirt. Mangione—the prime suspect in the December 2024 murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson—is being held at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, last I checked, and is not modeling for Shein. I first saw…
🌘 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 have long been puzzled by the sturdy glaciers of the mountains of central Asia, which have inexplicably remained intact even as other glaciers around the world rapidly recede due to…
We start this week with our articles about Trump’s tariffs, and how they’re impacting everything from LEGO to cameras to sex toys. After the break, Emanuel explains how misfired DMCA complaints designed to help adult creators are targeting other sites, including ours. In the subscribers-only section, we do a wrap-up of a bunch of recent…
An old school ransomware attack has a new twist: threatening to feed data to AI companies so it’ll be added to LLM datasets. Artists&Clients is a website that connects independent artists with interested clients. Around August 30, a message appeared on Artists&Clients attributed to the ransomware group LunaLock. “We have breached the website Artists&Clients to…
It’s now illegal in Michigan to make AI-generated sexual imagery of someone without their written consent. Michigan joins 47 other states in the U.S. that have enacted their own deepfake laws. Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer signed the bipartisan-sponsored House Bills 4047 and its companion bill 4048 on August 26. In a press release, Whitmer specifically…
The internet is becoming harder to use because of unintended consequences in the battle between adult content creators who are trying to protect their livelihoods and the people who pirate their content. Porn piracy, like all forms of content piracy, has existed for as long as the internet. But as more individual creators who make…
Welcome back to the Abstract! What an extreme week it has been in science. We’ve got extreme adaptations and observations to spare today, so get ready for a visually spectacular tour of deep seas, deep time, and deep space. First up, a study with an instant dopamine hit of a title: “Extreme armour in the…
Add LEGO to the list of hobbies that Trump has made more expensive and worse with his tariff policy. Thanks to America’s ever shifting trade policies, LEGO has stopped shipping more than 2,500 pieces from its Pick a Brick program to both the United States and Canada. Pick a Brick allows LEGO fans to buy…
