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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
• Jason Koebler
Ads everywhere. Usage limits. Frustrating guardrails. Less model choice. Users of the Character.AI chatbot app are revolting after a series of changes they say have made the app worse.
404 Media
• Joseph Cox
How deepfakes rocked a high school; BusPatrol giving AI camera data to cops; and a big time crash out.
404 Media
• Joseph Cox
Joseph talks to Zack Whittaker all about stalkerware, the pervasive malware that ordinary people install on their partners' phones.
404 Media
• Joseph Cox
BusPatrol plans to scan the license plates of all vehicles the buses drive past, and then let law enforcement search that data. The plan would essentially turn school buses into roaming surveillance vehicles.
404 Media
• Matthew Gault
No one wants to live next to a noisy computer warehouse and communities across the country are successfully fighting them.
404 Media
• Becky Ferreira
Whalers buried in the Norwegian Arctic in the 1600s and 1700s are thawing out of the permafrost, underscoring the threat of climate change to archaeological sites around the world.
404 Media
• Matthew Gault
“Obviously I wasn’t thinking at all,” the driver told police, according to the footage.
404 Media
• Samantha Cole
This week, we discuss Spencer Pratt, bricking phones, and the FTC.
404 Media
• Samantha Cole
After five teen girls were targeted by AI-generated child sexual abuse material, Radnor Township High School in Pennsylvania has become a case study in how schools and police around the country grapple with how to response to deepfake crimes involving children.
404 Media
• Matthew Gault
The Library of Leng contains old usenet posts and forgotten articles from Magic: the Gathering's long history.
404 Media
• Becky Ferreira
Fossils unearthed in the Northwest Territories push the origins of animal sex back by 5-10 million years and reveal the earliest examples of locomotion in the fossil record.
404 Media
• Matthew Gault
"I can’t take it anymore. The threats," the treasurer said. The planned data center is part of OpenAI and Oracle's Stargate initiative.
404 Media
• Jason Koebler
A Texas councilmember will propose “a total ban on all cellular and GPS-capable devices for all operations within city limits" and"a total termination of all internet services."
404 Media
• Joseph Cox
Commencement speeches, poop images to train AI, and cameras stuck to preschool teachers also to train AI.
404 Media
• Emanuel Maiberg
The software, called Delulu, is marketed specifically to streamers and lets them easily transform into other people including George Floyd, Jeffrey Epstein, and other streamers.
404 Media
• Samantha Cole
The attorney for Nikko D’Ambrosio, who tried and failed to sue women for posting about him in an “Are We Dating the Same Guy” Facebook group, has apparently been using AI to file non-existent citations, according to a judge.
404 Media
• Joseph Cox
Only a couple vendors could likely fulfill what the FBI is after, namely Flock and Motorola.
404 Media
• Samantha Cole
Britt Paris's new book 'Radical Infrastructure: Imagining the Internet from the Ground Up' tells the story of the physical internet, and how it can benefit people, not corporations.
404 Media
• Joseph Cox
“With your permission, your child’s lead teacher may wear a small teacher-worn camera that captures the teacher's approximate first-person perspective, and/or we may place a fixed video camera in the classroom,” a document given to parents and later shared with 404 Media reads.
404 Media
• Becky Ferreira
A type of crystal lattice called a clathrate structure has been found for the first time in the fallout of a nuclear detonation.
404 Media
• Matthew Gault
The former Crown Prince of Iran is meeting with Iranian diaspora tech and business leaders on Saturday to discuss the future of the country. Attendees include the CEO of Uber.
404 Media
• Samantha Cole
The change comes as arXiv and others struggle to manage an influx of AI-generated materials masquerading as rigorous science.
404 Media
• Samantha Cole
This week, we discuss developers' AI woes, how the magic happens, and the Beach Boys.
404 Media
• Joseph Cox
Mayo Clinic's "Ambient Listening" has been around for a couple of years, but clearly not all patients know their interactions with nurses are being passively recorded and processed by AI.
404 Media
• Becky Ferreira
The dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is associated with measurable increases in Africa, especially in areas most dependent on the agency’s support.
404 Media
• Jason Koebler
"I hoarded a large database of something valuable, just not what you expect… 150k stools images."
404 Media
• Jason Koebler
Jeff Bezos learns being good at YouTube is not so easy.
404 Media
• Matthew Gault
Spools of cable are critical for internet infrastructure and jam-proof drones but skyrocketing costs are making it hard to field them.
404 Media
• Joseph Cox
We got Haotian AI, the Chinese-language deepfake software powering scams. We also talk about a man finding $1 million of Yu-Gi-Oh cards, and how the AI hard drive shortage is impacting internet archiving.
404 Media
• Emanuel Maiberg
“It's making me dumber for sure.”
