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Behind the Blog: How to Talk About AI Doom
This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week…
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Automattic’s Matt Mullenweg Claims He’s Back 'In Control'
Less than 48 hours after announcing he was forcibly placed on a leave of absence by the Automattic board on Wednesday, Automattic’s Matt Mullenweg posted in a company-wide Slack channel claiming that he’s back “in…
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404 Media
‘We Did Not Invite You.’ Citizens Rage at Town Hall Over Proposed Nuclear AI Data Center
Representatives from the University of Michigan faced tough questions and a lot of vitriol from the citizens of…
404 Media
Expert Witness to ChatGPT: "Show how 3M is 0 percent at fault"
An expert witness testifying in a lawsuit about liability for a Houston explosion that killed three people and…
404 Media
ICE to Pay LexisNexis Millions for Data to Feed to Palantir
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) plans to pay LexisNexis millions more dollars for continued access to data…
404 Media
The Mayor Who Said 'No' When Flock Came to Town
Norman, Oklahoma is a Flockless outpost on the outskirts of the Oklahoma City metro area. As you drive south down I-35…
404 Media
Mark Zuckerberg Posts Deranged 6,500-Word Essay About Giving Everyone AI Superintelligence
Mark Zuckerberg has posted a 6,500-word essay outlining his vision for AI superintelligence, which he believes will be…
404 Media
The Roboguard Revolution is Short-Circuiting
404 Media is publishing this article in partnership with Proof News, a new nonprofit media outlet investigating the…
404 Media
Crab Odyssey: Crustacean Wandered the Seas in a Bottle for Months, Scientists Find
Welcome back to another special edition of the Abstract! With that said, here are the studies this year that hit the…
404 Media
The Tokenpocalypse Is Here: Companies Are Scrambling to Stop Spending on AI
Consulting giant Accenture is trying to figure out how to stop non-technical workers from blowing through companies’…
404 Media
Behind the Blog: Rare Books and Baseball Brain
This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week…
404 Media
City That Arrested Person for Clapping at Data Center Meeting Moves to Virtual Townhalls for 'Public Safety'
“In the interest of public safety, the Emporia City Commission meetings scheduled for Wednesday, August 5, 2026, and…
404 Media
Flock Pitched a Plan To Turn Uber and Lyft Drivers Into Roaming Surveillance Vehicles
404 Media first revealed the intended partnership last August when multiple sources provided information on the plan.…
404 Media
Software Giant SAP Stops Most Travel and Hiring Because of AI’s Soaring Cost
SAP, one of the world’s biggest software companies, suspended most travel and hiring last month because of AI’s…
404 Media
Scientists Designed a Virtual Alien Lifeform to Hunt for Extraterrestrials
Predicting the impacts that methanogens might have on their environments could help scientists recognize potential…
404 Media
Cities Are Ditching Flock, Immediately Replacing It With Axon License Plate Readers
A handful of cities across the U.S. have ditched Flock’s automatic license plate reader (ALPR) cameras and immediately…
404 Media
Cops Used Flock to Track a Man Across State Lines to Create Pretext to Search His Car for Weed
Police in Wisconsin used Flock to determine that a man “travels to Michigan frequently,” where marijuana is legal,…
404 Media
Podcast: This Man Might Go to Prison for Wiping His Phone
We start this week with Joseph’s article about Samuel Tunick, the man charged with allegedly wiping his phone before…
404 Media
Apple's ‘Private Relay’ Is Exposing Users' Real IP Addresses
A series of issues in Apple’s web browser engine — the tech underlying all browsers on iOS — means that Apple’s iCloud…
404 Media
The SCREEN Act is a Christian Nationalist Nightmare
On Wednesday morning, Ted Cruz’s Senate Commerce Committee will convene on five bills aimed at age verification and…
404 Media
Microsoft Tells Engineers ‘Tokenmaxxing Is Not What We Are Optimizing For’
Microsoft has introduced new limits to how much its engineers can spend on AI tools at work and told employees that…
404 Media
‘DO NOT MENTION ALPR USAGE’: How Cops Are Trying to Hide Their Use of Flock
Police in Wapello County, Iowa, have been instructed not to mention the use of Flock, an automated license plate…
404 Media
The SEC Bought Airline Data to Monitor Flights Worldwide
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has purchased access to over a billion airline ticketing records,…
404 Media
‘Own the Narrative’: Leaked Flock Guide Shows How It Teaches Cops to Promote Its Tech
Many leaders instinctively respond by attempting to refute the claim. Flock's Jamie Hudson recommends a different…
404 Media
Why a Flock Worker Quit: ‘They Lied’
This is an adaption of a podcast interview 404 Media recorded with Jonathan Paz, a former Flock employee who is now…
404 Media
We Need to Quarantine Aliens on the Moon, Scientists Propose
Scientists have proposed building a lunar biocontainment facility to quarantine extraterrestrial samples before they…
404 Media
Behind the Blog: Silent Retreat
This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week…
404 Media
Google Earth’s New AI Lets Anyone Fabricate Completely Bullshit Satellite Images
Now, Google Earth can easily be used as a tool for disinformation. In 404 Media’s tests, we were able to add…
404 Media
A Hidden 'Dark Dimension' Could Rewrite Our Understanding of the Universe
Physicists have proposed a fifth “dark dimension” that could govern both dark energy and dark matter, extending ideas…
404 Media
YouTube Bans Popular ASMR Artists, Accusing Them of Making 'Sexually Gratifying' Videos
YouTube banned a wave of ASMR artists this week for violating the platforms’ rules against “sexually gratifying”…
404 Media
Company Offering Printed Books to Train AI Stops After 404 Media Coverage
ISBNdb, a book database company, has stopped offering a service to source printed books for AI training after 404…
404 Media
Inside an AI TikTok Shop Slop Factory That Shills Supplements Recalled By the FDA
In Google’s VEO 3, he created an AI-generated Black woman wearing a surgical mask in the foreground of the video,…
404 Media
LinkedIn Introduces a 'Seems Like AI Slop' Button
Often these posts take some sort of news event, and opine on how this relates to thought leadership, or some other…
404 Media
“Clapping Is a First Amendment Right:” An Interview With the Person Arrested for Clapping at a Data Center Meeting
Lux Claridge was arrested at an Emporia, Kansas city commission meeting after repeatedly clapping during speeches…
404 Media
Podcast: Flock Came to My Town. Here’s What I Did
We start this week with Matthew’s experience of what happened when Flock came to his small town. It’s a microcosm of…
404 Media
Data Centers Are Easy to Build. Powering Them Is Complicated, Slow, and Expensive
On Wednesday the power flickered in homes from Washington DC to Chicago. The cause was a data center disconnecting…
404 Media
‘The Government Hopes To Set a Precedent’: An Interview With the Man Charged for Allegedly Wiping His GrapheneOS Phone
404 Media first broke news of the case in December. Last week, The Guardian reported additional details including from…
404 Media
'I Would Never Do This To You:' Protesting Flock, Arizona Man Presents Plan to Surveil Government Officials
On July 20, Jacob Petrosky stood in front of the Casa Grande, Arizona City Council during a public comment session and…
404 Media
Substackers Say New AI Detection Tool Is a ‘Witch Hunt’
“I’m not going to apologize for using AI in the creation process. I wrote for 20 years without AI, I could do it again…
404 Media
Apple’s iMessage Scanning Flagged a Video of My Friend's Dog as Nudity
In a video my friend’s dog is laying on her back, her little paws in the air, while my friend rubs the dog’s chest.…
404 Media
Wikimedia Will Not Voluntarily Recognize Union a Supermajority of Its Workers Want
For example, the FAQ includes a long section about the benefits that Wikimedia Foundation already offers its staff,…
404 Media
Person Opposing Data Center Arrested for Clapping at City Meeting
Police arrested a high school physics teacher for clapping during a city council meeting last Wednesday. Teacher Lux…
404 Media
This Man Bought Phone Location Data from Around the World (with Mike Yeagley)
Joseph talks to Mike Yeagley, a man who bought phone location data from around the world. He spent hundreds of…
404 Media
Tons of Peoples’ Claude Chats and Creations are Exposed on Google
Exposed chats reportedly include private cryptocurrency wallet keys and personal information like peoples’ addresses…
404 Media
Spotify's AI Problem Is So Bad Random People Are Stepping In to Track the Slop
Slime Dot, a young R&B artist from Las Vegas, currently has over 100,000 monthly listeners on Spotify. In an interview…
404 Media
Being a Luddite Is Fun Again
“Fuck, fuck, fuck AI,” the Luddite gnomes – people in colorful, pointy homemade hats – chant as we march, urging the…
404 Media
Court Reporter Submitted AI-Generated Errors in Official Court Transcript
A court reporter was found to have submitted a transcript containing AI-generated errors in an official court…
404 Media
Scientists Uncover Lost ‘Golden Age’ of Languages That Ended 1,000 Years Ago
Here are the studies this week that spoke in tongues, sought forbidden love, orbited an orbiter, and performed ritual…
404 Media
Behind the Blog: No Spoilers
The article discusses the behind-the-scenes process of creating top stories, including topics such as astrology and…
404 Media
Flock's CEO Says its ALPRs Don't Do Video After Repeatedly Announcing They Can
After the Los Angeles Police Department allowed its contract with Flock to expire, the surveillance company’s CEO,…
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