Category: 404 Media

Border Patrol is running secretive predictive policing units that analyze Americans’ financial activity and other data, then feed that intelligence to local police who pull people over who are not suspected of any specific crime, but which the government thinks may be worth searching, 404 Media has found. The units, ...

When we launched 404 Media in August 2023, it was a leap of faith. We were leaving the world of big, corporate media — where we worked for years alongside exceptionally brilliant colleagues, but also under the constant turmoil of investor whims, executive decisions we had no say in, and ...

Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that transcended realms, switched sexes, went south, and expanded their range. First, scientists break new ground in trying to get the universe to fit nicely together into a little package for once. Then: a frog sex party, an invasion ...

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 ...