Category: 404 Media

Garrett Langley, the CEO of automatic license plate reader company Flock, told an audience of police chiefs at a private police conference Sunday that anti-Flock protests around the country are not real, according to leaked audio obtained by 404 Media. He also said his wife advised him to never apologize, ...

Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that invaded our brains, thought fast, swapped coffins, and hit the art gallery. First, an ancient viral pandemic that afflicted many of our primate relatives—but somehow missed humans—may help explain how we got so smart (relatively speaking). Then: mammal ...

We start this week with Jason’s article about how everyone is apparently reverse-engineering everything. After the break, Joseph tells us about a big AI shakeup at consulting giant Accenture. In the subscribers-only section, Sam and Jason discuss the Character[.]ai bankruptcy. Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube. Become 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 reverse engineering and some wild court docs. SAM: I’m using my btb to shamelessly ask for sources: Have you ever started making ...

Texas has shut down the web portal for its automated construction permit filing system and suspended construction permits of 17 data center projects. The change came after 404 Media reported that a group of Texans discovered the state had continued to issue construction permits related to data centers despite Governor ...

The UN met this week to discuss, among other things, the threat of autonomous weapons. “The technology is developing at a pace that is very concerning,” Laurent Gisel, the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross’s (ICRC) legal warfare team, told 404 Media. Gisel was in NYC this ...

For much of the last month, many of the cybersecurity experts I talk to and follow have been posting like they are very scared. Many have been warning of an AI-powered “Black Swan” event, have been alarmed by the number of vulnerabilities suddenly discovered, and of the apparent power of ...

GM! We have a few bangers for you today. First: Can you imagine sitting in jail for days without knowing why, and then finding out that it’s because someone hacked CashApp to impersonate you? I would be kind of mad! And elsewhere on 404 this morning, we have some prescient ...

Near the bank of the Ohio River, a historic American chestnut grove in Mason County, West Virginia has become the epicenter of a fight against a planned 2,250 acre data center campus. Plans for the UK-based startup Nscale’s Monarch Compute Campus, with clients including Anthropic, Nvidia and Microsoft, encompass the ...

An endangered American chestnut grove faces a new threat: A massive data center. ...