Category: 404 Media

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) plans to pay data broker giant Thomson Reuters $125 million for access to its databases of personal data — which includes peoples’ names, addresses, Social Security numbers, ethnicity, social media posts, and geolocation information — to help Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) investigate what ...

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 AI music, slop bowls, and the endless quest for optimization. EMANUEL: We’ve used Behind the Blog a few times at this point ...

404 Media is turning three years old! We’ve come a long way with your support, so let’s hang out. We’re throwing TWO separate events to celebrate: A live taping of the podcast and a special night of talks on Sept. 3, and a big open-bar party on Sept. 4. Subscribers ...

Police departments around the country have used Flock cameras at least hundreds of times to search for specific people, not cars, using searches such as “heavy-set male with a black and white hat,” “person on skateboard,” and “person wearing orange vest and construction hat,” according to data reviewed by 404 ...

🌘 Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week. Astronomers have detected an atmosphere around a rocky exoplanet in the habitable zone of its star for the first time in history, signalling a major breakthrough ...

The AI music generation tool Suno scraped millions of songs and lyrics from YouTube Music, Deezer, and Genius, as well as from the stock music libraries Pond5, Jamendo, Freesound, the International Music Score Library Project, and podcasts via RSS feeds, according to a hacker who breached the company and shared ...

We start this week with Jason’s story about the ChatGPT flyer pandemic. They’re everywhere! Thank you to the readers and listeners who sent in their own examples. After the break, Sam tells us how Waymo snitched on kids and drove them to a group of waiting cops. In the subscribers-only ...

Freya Holmér’s had this idea in her head for a long time—Tetris, but the whole board rotates. The game developer and Unity tool maker started making the idea real and built out a prototype. Holmér posted a 50-second clip of it to social media in mid-March and asked: “Is this ...

If you listen to the 404 Media podcast by now you probably realized that Joe and I are a little obsessed with a game called Marathon. I’m embarrassed to say that I’ve played it for almost 300 hours since it was released in March. But as much as we’re enjoying ...

Is your sex life as private and personal as you think it is? Or is it shaped by – and constantly shaping, in turn – the society and systems you exist in?  This week we’re joined by Dr. Angela Jones, who asks these questions and much more in their new ...