The first envelope looked innocuous enough. A sticker on the white cardboard sleeve said it came from Hangzhou City in the east of China. Opening it up revealed something more ostentatious: a second blue envelope with a regal gold stamp. “Welcome to the Metaverse on Earth!” the letter inside read. Attached was my new identity…
Welcome back to the Abstract! How’s your mental state these days? Feeling burnt out? Well, have I got a story for you about a guy whose mind was so blown by the events of his time that we can see his actual neurons 2,000 years later. I’m not trying to trivialize anyone’s legitimate feelings of…
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 stunt blogging, Signal pains, and murderous Reels. EMANUEL: Yesterday Jason wrote about Instagram delivering users reels showing murder, gore, and extreme violence. It’s hard to say exactly…
Amazon’s recent decision to stop allowing people to download copies of their Kindle e-books to a computer has vindicated some of my longstanding beliefs about digital media. Specifically, that it doesn’t exist and you don’t own it unless you can copy and access it without being connected to the internet. The recent move by the…
On Tuesday, Chinese tech giant Alibaba released a new “open” AI video generation model called Wan 2.1 and shared the software on Github, allowing anyone with the technical know-how and hardware to use and modify freely. It took about 24 hours for the model to be adopted by the AI porn hobbyist community, which has…
Content warning: this article contains graphic descriptions of violence against people and animals. An “error” in Instagram Reels caused its algorithm to show some users video after video of horrific violence, animal abuse, murders, dead bodies, and other gore, Meta told 404 Media. The company said “we apologize for the mistake.” Sometime in the last…
Research reveals that the value of cyber insurance claims made by organizations using MDR services are, on average, 97.5% lower than those made by organizations that rely on endpoint protection alone.
A U.S. soldier who recently pleaded guilty to hacking AT&T and Verizon communicated with an email address that he believed belonged to a foreign country’s military intelligence service and attempted to sell the service stolen data, according to newly filed court records reviewed by 404 Media. The court document also says that the soldier searched…
The surveillance company Flock sent the creator of a website that maps its license plate-reading cameras a cease and desist letter demanding that he immediately stop using the name “DeFlock” on his website. 404 Media previously wrote about DeFlock, an open source mapping project created by Will Freeman that tracks the locations of automated license…
Bluesky deleted a viral, AI-generated protest video in which Donald Trump is sucking on Elon Musk’s toes because its moderators said it was “non-consensual explicit material.” The video was broadcast on televisions inside the office Housing and Urban Development earlier this week, and quickly went viral on Bluesky and Twitter. Independent journalist Marisa Kabas obtained…
