Category: 404 Media

We start this week with Joseph’s story on how cops are using Flock to track actual people, not just cars, with searches like “male with tattoos.” After the break, Emanuel tells us all about the company that is explicitly selling mountains of books to AI companies and promising to keep ...

As AI companies search for more training data to improve their models, one company is offering old, printed books as an ideal source because they are guaranteed to be free of the very AI slop AI companies are producing.  “The world’s best AI training data is sitting on a shelf,” ...

Apple says it has fixed a vulnerability in its Hide My Email feature which let essentially anyone figure out a user’s real email address which was supposed to be protected by the feature. Apple only fixed the vulnerability after 404 Media wrote about it at the start of July, despite ...

When I was 20 years old, I went to my hometown Olive Garden with one goal in mind: For less than $10, I would attempt to eat so much bottomless pasta in their so-called Never-Ending Pasta deal that either the staff would be forced to stop me and my idiot ...

🎉 YOU’RE INVITED! 404 Media is turning three, and we’re throwing TWO separate events in NYC to celebrate: A live taping of the podcast with a special night of talks on Sept. 3, and an open-bar bash on Sept. 4. Subscribers at the Supporter level get free and discounted access ...

Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that loosed arrows, made sacrifices, prepared for battle, and took the hit. First, a bunch of ancient princesses were buried with weapons. Did they know how to use them? You bet! Then: a deadly Inca ritual, animal war games, ...

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) plans to pay data broker giant Thomson Reuters $125 million for access to its databases of personal data — which includes peoples’ names, addresses, Social Security numbers, ethnicity, social media posts, and geolocation information — to help Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) investigate what ...

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 music, slop bowls, and the endless quest for optimization. EMANUEL: We’ve used Behind the Blog a few times at this point ...

404 Media is turning three years old! We’ve come a long way with your support, so let’s hang out. We’re throwing TWO separate events to celebrate: A live taping of the podcast and a special night of talks on Sept. 3, and a big open-bar party on Sept. 4. Subscribers ...

Police departments around the country have used Flock cameras at least hundreds of times to search for specific people, not cars, using searches such as “heavy-set male with a black and white hat,” “person on skateboard,” and “person wearing orange vest and construction hat,” according to data reviewed by 404 ...