The Department of Justice has removed a study showing that white supremacist and far-right violence “continues to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism” in the United States. The study, which was conducted by the National Institute of Justice and hosted on a DOJ website was available there at least until September…
This story was reported with support from the MuckRock foundation. As prices for streaming subscriptions continue to soar and finding movies to watch, new and old, is becoming harder as the number of streaming services continues to grow, people are turning to the unexpected last stronghold of physical media: the public library. Some libraries are now…
Some Spotify employees are not happy that the audio streaming giant was, until this week, hosting and profiting from a course about “pimping hoes” by Andrew Tate, according to internal Spotify communications viewed by 404 Media. “Pretty vile that we’re hosting Andrew Tate’s content,” one Spotify employee said in a company Slack channel called #ethics-club,…
Analysis of attacks originating from Iran-linked threat groups reveals a preference for certain techniques Categories: Threat Research Tags: Iran, initial access
A new startup backed by one of the biggest venture capital firms in Silicon Valley, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), is building a service that allows clients to “orchestrate actions on thousands of social accounts through both bulk content creation and deployment.” Essentially, the startup, called Doublespeed, is pitching an astroturfing AI-powered bot service, which is in…
Welcome back to the Abstract, and Happy New Year! Here are the studies this week that stoked the flames, cooled off, then went feral and rogue. First, the ashy remains of a cremation pyre reveal a rare glimpse of an ancient ritual. Then: Uranus is chilling, ham on the lam, and a Saturn without a…
The internet can be more physically vulnerable than you think. Last week, thousands of people in North and Central Texas were suddenly knocked offline. The cause? A bullet. The outage hit cities all across the state, including Dallas, Irving, Plano, Arlington, Austin, and San Antonio. The outage affected Spectrum customers and took down their phone…
Senator and Ranking Member of the Senate Judiciary Committee Dick Durbin has sent a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg asking about his company’s role in directing traffic to apps that use artificial intelligence to generate nonconsensual nude images. Specifically, Durbin’s letter cites 404 Media’s reporting about Crushmate, a so-called “nudify” app that has repeatedly…
Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies that caught my eye this week. First up, a bummer! NASA is facing devastating cuts to Earth science, and science in general, which is pretty important for an agency tasked with understanding the universe. I try to keep this newsletter relatively downer-free, but current events are…
🌘 Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week. After a decade-long excavation at a remote site in Kenya, scientists have unearthed evidence that our early human relatives continuously fashioned the same tools across thousands of generations, hinting that sophisticated…
