Category: 404 Media

In a move that should surprise zero people but is worth noting nonetheless, three felony charges against a man who destroyed a police officer’s “decoy” 3D-printed Flock camera have been reduced to misdemeanors after the police admitted the fake camera was not worth more than a thousand dollars. In August, ...

OpenAI is hiring hundreds of contractors who read a massive stream of real users’ ChatGPT prompts, with the prompts sometimes including sensitive personal information, 404 Media has learned. The prompts these people review can include whole conversations between users and the chatbot, conversations that most of ChatGPT’s more than 900 ...

This week we’re joined by Jennie Rose Halprein, executive director of Library Futures, a non-profit that advocates for a fair digital future for libraries and the communities they serve. We have written a bunch of stories about libraries over the years, and I have talked to Jennie a few times ...

Last summer, a cop with the Lake County, Indiana Sheriff’s Department used Flock’s surveillance search engine to look for a license plate across more than 19,000 cameras in 1,558 cities and towns. The cop’s stated reason for the search, according to a record of Flock’s system, was “LMAO.”  The cop ...

The New York District Attorney announced on Monday that it has seized 12 websites hosting AI-generated non-consensual intimate imagery, primarily of celebrities and public figures.  The DA’s office said it believes that this marks the largest seizure of such sites in history. The people using and running these sites who ...

Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that got dumped, went high, shrank in size, and got the blues. First, you’ve heard of getting a feather in your cap, but what about a feather in some crap? That’s the upshot of a new study about rare ...

Representatives from the University of Michigan faced tough questions and a lot of vitriol from the citizens of Ypsilanti Township Wednesday night. The University partnered with America’s nuclear weapons scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratories (LANL) to build a hyperscale data center in the Township and residents are pissed.  On ...

Less than 48 hours after announcing he was forcibly placed on a leave of absence by the Automattic board on Wednesday, Automattic’s Matt Mullenweg posted in a company-wide Slack channel claiming that he’s back “in control” of the company.  💡 Have something to share? I would love to hear from ...

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 doomers, 9/11 posting, and Barbie. JOSEPH: I do always get emotional on 9/11 because it’s the moment everything changed. Rather than ...

Doctor Doom took the podium at a Public Safety Committee meeting on Tuesday to thank the council for covering the city in surveillance cameras. “Doom took over Axon enterprises […] and now Doom will be watching you. Your continued cooperation expanding Doom’s surveillance network is required,” the Marvel supervillain said. ...