Category: 404 Media

Last week Apple fixed an issue that let the FBI forensically extract copies of incoming Signal messages from a defendant’s iPhone, even after the app had been deleted, because copies of those messages were stored in the iPhone’s notification database. The move comes directly in response to 404 Media’s coverage ...

Customs and Border Protection (CBP) plans to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to expand its fleet of high-powered surveillance drones, and other parts of the Department of the Homeland Security (DHS) may buy their own Predator-style drones, according to recently published procurement records. The news shows DHS’s continued investment ...

Days before thousands of researchers, academics, and human rights experts were set to convene in Lusaka, Zambia, the government of Zambia announced it was postponing RightsCon, one the largest and most important digital human rights conferences in the world. The announcement, which came as some participants and speakers were already ...

An AI-powered tool designed to target trademark violations on social media was used to silence critics of SXSW, the massive annual tech, music and film conference in Austin, Texas. Each year in March, SXSW takes over Austin. This year, thanks to the demolition of the city’s aging convention center, events ...

🌘 Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week. If you’ve ever visited a haunted house or a paranormal hotspot, you may have experienced a weird sense of unease that you couldn’t quite explain. While ...

Tweets containing an abstract, psychedelic 3D stock image have million and millions of views on X because it is supposedly the key to a superintelligent, time-traveling AI conspiracy that attempted to warn people about the shooting at the White House Correspondents Dinner.  I’m gonna try to explain the mind-numbing conspiracy ...

The number of pro se legal cases, meaning trials where a defendant or plaintiff represents themselves in court without an attorney, have increased dramatically since the wide adoption of generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude, according to a pre-print research paper.  The authors of the paper, titled “Access to ...

Arizona State University rolled out a platform called Atomic that creates AI-generated modules based on lectures taken from ASU faculty by cutting long videos down to very short clips then generating text and sections based on those clips.  Faculty and scholars I spoke to whose lectures are included in Atomic ...

A senior staff scientist at Google’s artificial intelligence laboratory DeepMind, Alexander Lerchner, argues in a new paper that no AI or other computational system will ever become conscious. That conclusion appears to conflict with the narrative from AI company CEOs, including DeepMind’s own Demis Hassabis, who repeatedly talks about the ...

This week Joseph talks to Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, a journalist at TechCrunch. Lorenzo has possibly the deepest understanding of one of the wildest cybersecurity stories in years: how an employee of Trenchant, a government malware vendor that is supposed to only sell to the ‘good’ guys, secretly sold a bunch of ...