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404 Media is an independent media company founded by technology journalists Jason Koebler, Emanuel Maiberg, Samantha Cole, and Joseph Cox.
404 Media
• Joseph Cox
Joseph speaks to Jake Hanrahan all about Patreon, YouTube, and getting journalism in front of people.
404 Media
• Claire Woodcock
Books written for younger audiences are being relocated to adult sections at alarming rates. We asked experts to predict what that means for the rest of us.
404 Media
• Becky Ferreira
A seismic wave from the 2011 Tohoku-Oki earthquake bounced off the Earth’s core and hit Japan from below, shifting the entire mainland a quarter-inch eastward.
404 Media
• Samantha Cole
This week, we discuss questionable analysis, mysterious parcels, and the Knicks (sorta).
404 Media
• Becky Ferreira
For 150 years, paleontologists assumed that the first vertebrates to leave the sea for land evolved a tadpole phase, similar to modern frogs. Immaculately-preserved fossils disprove that, scientists say.
404 Media
• Matthew Gault
“The point of the paper is to formally show that we anthropomorphise too readily."
404 Media
• Joseph Cox
The leaderboard, sorted by executive and the teams underneath them, has a feature that shows users which employees have not earned the badges. “click to see who 👀,” the leaderboard says.
404 Media
• Joseph Cox
A $10 million procurement reviewed by 404 Media indicates ICE is buying records related to immigrants’ tax identifiers. “It looks for all the world like Trump is trying to skirt the law and a court order to fuel his mass-deportation campaign,” Senator Ron Wyden said.
404 Media
• Joseph Cox
The FCC's proposed changes to getting a phone plan; cops keep stalking with Flock; and a software update changes the AC in Amazon vans.
404 Media
• Joseph Cox
The data contains a list of "talent," including former Knicks players and coaches, and whether other celebrities are considered "Low Risk" or "High Risk." The data also contains emails between customers and MSG.
404 Media
• Joseph Cox
Whereas Roblox hackers were previously focused on stealing players' high value items, some have taken over entire Roblox games, stealing their ownership and Robux in the process.
404 Media
• Jason Koebler
The only plausible response to videos of aliens on television, at this point, would be cries of “that’s AI,” “fake,” and propaganda flowing in all directions.
404 Media
• Emanuel Maiberg
The judge found that Meta’s attempt to blame the pirating of thousands of Vixen.com and Tushy.com porn videos on rogue employees “strains credulity.”
404 Media
• Jason Koebler
"We show that a tiny snippet—just 13 words—of retrieved text on a UGC website like Reddit, Wikipedia, Quora, or Facebook can change AI agents to output spam / scam content pretty consistently."
404 Media
• Samantha Cole
We get into how platforms have tried to make surveillance cute, why that damn Duolingo owl emotionally manipulates you, and why learning about privacy best practices when surrounded by community works.
404 Media
• Becky Ferreira
A massive whale graveyard in the Indian Ocean contains the remains of hundreds of extinct whales dating back more than five million years, along with recent carcasses that support hotspots of seafloor life.
404 Media
• Jason Koebler
"I’ve spoken. I’m not debating this."
404 Media
• Samantha Cole
This week, we discuss Trump fucking up the World Cup, some thoughts on ICE coverage, and movies.
404 Media
• Emanuel Maiberg
A new software update is turning off the AC in Amazon delivery vans after 10 minutes or 30 seconds under certain conditions.
404 Media
• Roshan Abraham
Three Amazon data centers are still under construction, but local residents are already paying at least $10.60 extra per month for them, according to a new study.
404 Media
• Joseph Cox
Flock, the automatic license plate reader (ALPR) company, exposed some of the license plate cops were looking for and the reason for doing so.
404 Media
• Samantha Cole
LLMs including ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude are obsessed with telling stories about lighthouse keepers and clockmakers, and one character named 'Elias Thorne' has made his way from chatbots to Amazon books. Researchers are trying to discover why.
404 Media
• Becky Ferreira
Researchers report a "serendipitous" discovery while watching videos of crowds: an inexplicable bias toward counterclockwise turning that may be rooted in biology.
404 Media
• Joseph Cox
Memes at Google; Microsoft wants to make its new AI assistant addictive; and manipulating Reddit.
404 Media
• Jason Koebler
There have been more than a dozen cases around the country where police use Flock to obsessively and illegally stalk people.
404 Media
• Joseph Cox
The FCC wants to legally force telecoms to collect new and renewing customers’ government issued identity number and physical address, impacting everyone from the privacy-conscious to domestic abuse survivors. “We never thought that would happen here.”
404 Media
• Jason Koebler
When two AIs argue against each other, the legal system loses.
404 Media
• Emanuel Maiberg
Amazon employees have a Slack channel for memes where the mock and commiserate about the company’s faulty AI coding product.
404 Media
• Joseph Cox
SignalTrace "links devices that regularly travel together, correlating them to license plate." It is a surveillance product that will sweep up and add all sorts of Bluetooth and other data to license plate readers, linking specific devices—and people—to cars.
404 Media
• Joseph Cox
Microsoft took the highly unusual step of shutting down more than 70 of its own GitHub repositories after hackers pushed malware that would steal credentials from AI coding agent users.
