Category: 404 Media

Ypsilanti Township in Michigan passed a six month moratorium on “major electric utility infrastructure” on Tuesday night. The moratorium is a delaying tactic, the latest in the Township’s long fight to stop the construction of a $1.2 billion data center that’s backed by the University of Michigan and the Pentagon’s ...

I can clearly remember the first time I saw a deepfake. I was waiting for the train on my way to the Vice office in 2017 when I got a Twitter DM from someone who saw it posted to Reddit. It was a short .gif from the start of a ...

During the public comment portion of a recent San Diego city council meeting, the council called for the next comment to take the podium: “Darth Vader?” As he approached the microphone in his black helmet and cape, his heavy breathing reached the mic before he did. At the Public Safety ...

We start this week with Emanuel’s big story about Amazon buying, and destroying, masses of books to train AI. After the break we talk about a couple of wild cases where people are using AI. In the subscribers-only section, we talk about Meta’s new smart glasses patent and research into ...

Body camera footage obtained by 404 Media shows a police officer explaining why he used police databases and license plate reader cameras to research, stalk, and pull over a woman he met on the set of a TV show. “I mean, I saw a shiny thing, teasing and all that,” ...

🌘 Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week. Microbes from Earth could survive on parts of the Moon for at least a week, a discovery that suggests that the lunar surface is not as ...

The National Park Service (NPS), the agency tasked with managing the U.S. national parks and monuments, has purchased Flock cameras and had them installed at parks including in Yosemite. Current and former NPS rangers are not happy about it. “Flock protects property, not people or parks. People should be free ...

X’s algorithm learns what you hate and shows you more of it, according to a new study just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The paper, titled Value misalignment of X’s feed algorithm is a reflection of value tensions in engagement, found that the site’s ...

Earlier this month, Anthropic announced that future versions of Claude will generate text that includes watermarks showing it was AI-generated. At the time, Anthropic did not explain how this would work, leaving us to speculate on the podcast: Would it somehow encode this into the text? Include invisible characters? Do ...

Pornhub’s parent company will pay $120 million to settle claims that its platforms violated federal sex trafficking and child sexual abuse imagery laws. The deal settles two 2021 class action lawsuits in California and Alabama that claim Mindgeek, which has since rebranded to Aylo, profited off of child abuse material ...