Category: 404 Media

This week we start with Emanuel’s crazy story about WebinarTV, a company that is secretly recording Zoom meetings and turning them into AI-powered podcasts. It’s nuts. After the break, Joseph tells us about the eccentric billionaire who tried to become a cocaine kingpin. In the subscribers-only section, we lament the ...

When Meta announced its plan to shut down Horizon Worlds last week a lot of us laughed.  Social scientist Dr Ruth Diaz was not one of them.  Diaz worked for Meta as a VR community design developer in the early days of the Horizon Worlds project and left in 2022. ...

A top result on Google for people searching for Claude plugins sent users to a site that recently contained malicious code in an apparent attempt to steal their credentials.  The news shows how the explosion of interest in generative AI tools is giving hackers new ways to attack users. The ...

A Serve Robotics food delivery robot crashed through the glass wall of a bus stop shelter in Chicago earlier this week, shattering the glass all over the sidewalk. The crash comes amid a protest against delivery robots in Chicago and a few weeks after a politician who represents part of ...

WebinarTV, a company that bills itself as “a search engine for the best webinars,” is secretly scanning the internet for Zoom meeting links, recording the calls, and turning them into AI-generated podcasts for profit. In some cases, people only found out that their Zoom calls were recorded once WebinarTV reached ...

On Monday a judge said videos of recent depositions from DOGE members can be published online once again. The ruling is something of an about face for Judge Colleen McMahon, who originally ordered plaintiffs in the DOGE-related lawsuit “claw back” the videos they had published to YouTube. The videos were ...

This week, Sam talks to Emily Bender and Alex Hanna about the marketing ploys of “artificial intelligence,” why ridicule works to keep big tech’s claims in check, and what makes them hopeful for the future. They’re the authors of The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create ...

Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that visited strange new worlds, broke the adorability scale, pigged out, and took in an alien light show. First, scientists sift through thousands of planets to find the best possible sites for life. Then: meet a Cretaceous cutie, check ...

The tiny township of Ypsilanti, Michigan, is worried about being a target for drone strikes thanks to a planned datacenter that the University of Michigan is building to support nuclear weapons research According to Douglas Winters, the township’s attorney, the University and Los Alamos National Laboratories (LANL) “have put a ...

This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss getting stories from Twitter, the metaverse, and the new game Marathon. EMANUEL: I think I’m addicted to Twitter again.  We haven’t written ...