We start this week with Emanuel and Jason’s big story on Massive Blue, a company that is selling AI-powered undercover bots posing as protesters and children to the cops. After the break, Sam tells us about visiting the millennial saint. In the subscribers-only section, we talk business and the state of 404 Media. Listen to…
A new analysis of synthetic intimate image abuse (SIIA) found that the tools for making non-consensual, sexually explicit deepfakes are easily discoverable all over social media and through simple searches on Google and Bing. Research published by the counter-extremism organization Institute for Strategic Dialogue shows how tools for creating non-consensual deepfakes spread across the internet….
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 the economy and the state of 404 Media, the need for robot umpires, and bringing on a new regular contributor to the site. EMANUEL: Something that I…
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…
Analysis of the tradecraft evolution across 6 months and 11 incidents
A powerful Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) database, parts of which have been seen by 404 Media, allows the federal government to search for and filter people by hundreds of different, highly specific categories. Surveillance experts say the database is a tool that could possibly be helping ICE identify, detain, and deport people who are…
Datasets aggregated on data.gov, the largest repository of U.S. government open data on the internet, are being deleted, according to the website’s own information. Since Donald Trump was inaugurated as president, more than 2,000 datasets have disappeared from the database. As people in the Data Hoarding and archiving communities have pointed out, on January 21,…
Cyber security expert warns of new PayPal scam
Welcome back to the Abstract! Here’s some of the most intriguing studies I came across this week: We’ll lead with a nostalgic trip down memory lane—so far down the lane, in fact, that we’ll end up in the Sun’s infancy 4.6 billion years ago. Most of us didn’t have to deal with supernovas exploding in…
Chinese startup DeepSeek’s launch of its latest AI models, which it says are on a par or better than industry-leading models in the United States at a fraction of the cost, is threatening to upset the technology world order.
