Category: 404 Media

Flock taught cops how they could surveil the No Kings protests and “small parades” using a mix of Flock’s technology and law enforcement’s own databases in a webinar last year. As Flock publicly downplays the power of its automated license plate camera network and highlights its use to solve violent ...

An island that appeared to suddenly materialize, then vanish, on Williston Lake in British Columbia over the summer was rediscovered on the massive reservoir on Monday.  Once you’ve taken that all in, let’s ask the important question: How the heck did that happen?  The existence of the disappearing island—a floating ...

We start this week with Emanuel’s follow-up to his Amazon book scanning story, in which he spoke to someone who worked in the Amazon warehouse which destroys books to train Amazon’s AI products. After the break, Emanuel and Sam tell us about the same few names appearing in LLM output ...

Axon says cops are asking it to make its automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) look different from Flock cameras because Flock vandalism has become so widespread, according to comments Axon’s CEO made in a now deleted webinar. The comments highlight how Axon is trying to take advantage of sustained opposition ...

Bruce Blakeman, the Republican nominee for New York governor, posted an AI-generated video imagining New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Governor Kathy Hochul hanging out, bizarrely gardening together, riding bikes, and vaguely colluding about making the state unaffordable. “.@KathyHochul and @ZohranKMamdani think they can cure New York’s cost-of-living crisis ...

The Texas sheriff’s office that used Flock to search more than 80,000 cameras nationwide for a woman who had a self-administered abortion used Axon’s Draft One AI tool to help write a police report about the incident, documents shared with 404 Media show. The tool was used in part to ...

Yesterday a16z published an article in which NYU Professor of Design, AI and Media Theory Ruby Thelot argued that “enshittification,” or the concept that technology platforms get worse after they lock in users, isn’t real. In reality, Thelot says, people use social media more than ever and report that they ...

I am standing in front of a camera that’s streaming to a giant video screen. The image recognition AI running on the camera puts a big green box around me. “PERSON,” it says. Artist Simon Weckert hands me his newest creation, a button-down shirt with flowery, blurry globs of green ...

A city in Oklahoma tried to charge a farmer more than $17,000 to fulfill a public records request for information related to a proposed data center and the farmer’s arrest at a city council meeting. Now, in a win for the farmer, the State’s attorney general has stepped in and ...

This is an adaption of a podcast interview 404 Media recorded with Erin West and Paul Raffile. Check out the whole thing here on YouTube. Erin West and Paul Raffile stepped out of their van about 45 minutes outside Lagos, Nigeria, and walked down a muddy hill. At the bottom, ...