Category: 404 Media

Microsoft has introduced new limits to how much its engineers can spend on AI tools at work and told employees that maximizing AI use internally is not the company’s goal.  This makes Microsoft one of the last major companies to rein in its employees’ expensive AI use. Scaling back maximalist ...

On Wednesday morning, Ted Cruz’s Senate Commerce Committee will convene on five bills aimed at age verification and “child safety.” The bills each have their own issues when it comes to privacy, data collection, parental rights, and free speech. But one bill, the partisan Republican SCREEN Act, is a Christian ...

This is an adaption of a podcast interview 404 Media recorded with Jonathan Paz, a former Flock employee who is now running running for Congress in Massachusetts’ 5th District. Check out the whole thing here on YouTube. Jonathan Paz was initially nervous when he started working at the surveillance company ...

404 Media has obtained a coaching guide that Flock surveillance gives to police about “how to speak to city councils about public safety technology.” The handbook highlights how Flock and police team up to convince cities to buy and keep its automated license plate reader technology, even when there is ...

Welcome to a special edition of the Abstract! I’m out on vacation for the next two weeks, which means it’s time to break out all of the weird and wild studies that have come out so far in 2026, but that slipped through the cracks for one reason or another. ...

On Thursday, Google introduced a new AI feature into Google Earth which lets anyone fabricate all sorts of misleading or straight up inaccurate satellite imagery, from making it look like a specific place has suffered a drone strike to manifesting a nuclear plant in Iran. Usually, Google Earth is an ...

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 going into the woods, a “he admit it” moment, and a tofu sandwich. JOSEPH: Thank you to everyone who came to Thursday’s ...

Scientists have proposed the existence of a fifth “dark dimension” that governs the behavior of both dark energy and dark matter—and which may be observationally detected in the near future, according to a recent preprint study.  The dark dimension hypothesis could potentially provide an elegant solution to some of the ...

Following 404 Media’s reporting that book database company ISBNdb claimed to source printed books to then sell to AI companies for AI training, the company deleted the part of its website offering the service and walked back claims that it would train AI models, and instead called it “a test ...

YouTube banned a wave of ASMR artists this week for violating the platforms’ rules against “sexually gratifying” content, leaving creators confused and angry. Several creators received the same notice from YouTube about their channels being removed on Wednesday and Thursday. “We have reviewed your content and found severe or repeated ...