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  Objection, your honor You've probably heard, at this point, about the big changes coming to Meta's AI scraping terms for business accounts. Nieman Lab had that scoop, and since then, small businesses, journalists, and artists using Meta products like Instagram have been raising the alarm. But if you're in the EU or UK, you might be in luck and can object to that use of your data, as some users have pointed out. Images via Unsplash / collage via 404 MediaIf You're In the UK or EU...

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  If You're In the UK or EU, Here's How to Object to Meta's AI Training Earlier this month, Meta updated its commercial terms of use for business accounts to allow it to “use any content from such domains, web pages, or URLs to provide, develop, improve, research, train, and maintain the integrity of” Meta’s products.  Many artists and small business owners that rely on Instagram and Facebook are livid at Meta granting itself permission to use their content, including from websites s...

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  It's not the bots, Flock Flock CEO Garrett Langley says some interesting things to cops behind closed doors. He recently lied about his surveillance technology’s role in tracking a woman who had self-administered an abortion and 404 Media’s coverage of that incident, calling it “entirely false.” Now, in leaked audio obtained by 404 Media, Langley is saying the protests that have broken out around the country against his company, many of which have resulted in communities canceling their con...

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  Marissa Mayer Can’t Keep Pretending 'Gender Doesn't Matter' In Sunday’s edition of the New York Times, Marissa Mayer, former president and CEO of Yahoo, told her interviewer something so absurd it’s since gone viral.  Struggling with the “impossible task” of naming three things that she loves about her own 10 year old daughter, the New York Times reports, Mayer asked the AI assistant she just launched to do that thinking for her. It delivered the perfect answer, Mayer said: “It cam...

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  Proton To ‘Re-Interview’ Staff About AI To See Who Gets To Keep Their Job Proton, the company behind ProtonMail and other privacy-focused products, told staff on Monday it would be ‘re-interviewing’ staff across the company about how they use AI in their jobs, with the implication that the interviews may decide whether staffers have “continued employment,” according to an internal Proton email obtained by 404 Media. This post is for subscribers only Become a member to get access to all content...

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  In Leaked Audio, Flock CEO Tells Cops Backlash to the Company Isn’t Real 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, said he would prefer to never do interviews with the press again, and claimed without evidence that the social media o...

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  iPhone Duo Users Are Already Seeing a Big Old Crease in the Middle of Their $2,000 Foldable iPhone Apple’s $2,000 folding phone, the iPhone Duo, came out just two days ago and people are already seeing big fat creases down the middle of the folding screen, and some devices are cracked in the same specific spot too.  People waited in line overnight at Apple stores to get this thing, and now we’re seeing photos of heinous cracked and creased-up Duos all over social media. In some cases, the phon...

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  An Ancient Virus Explains Why the Human Brain Is Special 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 brains eat crow, an upcycled sarcophagus, and a trip to the starry Provençal summer of 1889. As always, for more of my wo...

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  Podcast: ‘Reverse-Engineer Anything’ Is the Next Wave of AI Slop 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 paid subscriber for access to this episode's bonus content and to pow...

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  Behind the Blog: Brute Forces 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 a recipe you found online, and realized it was AI generated?  I’m asking because I just saw that Etsy is banning certain kinds of AI slop, including AI-generated recipes and patterns....

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  Portal Texas Used to ‘Rubber Stamp’ Data Centers Down After 404 Media Reporting 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 Greg Abbott calling for a pause in September. On Monday, the watchdog groups FracTracker Alliance...

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  This Woman's Living a CashApp Scam Nightmare 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 thoughts from an autonomous weapons expert on the state of AI in war, what's going on with cybersecurity experts in the wake of the PHPocalypse, and more insights int...

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  AI Is Changing Everything About Hacking. No One Knows What Happens Next 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 AI agents and large language models more broadly to find and exploit previously unknown bugs.  The rhetoric has ranged from worried-but-m...

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  AI Is Already 'Amplifying the Destruction' of War 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 week to address the UN about all the things that are driving conflict across the planet. His prepared remarks include a statement on the illegal arm...

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  Cops Warned to Look for ‘Suspicious Behavior’ From People Opposing Flock at City Council Meetings A federal intelligence center warned police that city council meetings about Flock “may be viewed by extremists as a desirable target,” and told them to be on the lookout for “emotional confrontations” between people who oppose surveillance and government officials, according to a copy of the warning obtained by 404 Media. The warning, obtained by 404 Media, was issued by the Orange County Intelli...

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  Someone Opened a CashApp In Her Name. She Faces Years in Prison Amanda Smith answered the door one afternoon in April and came face to face with the local Sheriff’s department in upstate Pennsylvania. The officers said they had a warrant for her arrest for a crime she had allegedly committed more than a thousand miles away in Arkansas. “I was completely confused,” Smith recalled. For one, she had never been to Arkansas. Second, the warrant was for computer fraud. By her own admission, Smith wa...

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  The Chestnut Grove Caught in the Middle of A Years-Long Data Center Fight 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 former Clements State Nursery and the American chestnut trees still growing there.  For thousands of years...

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  DHS Said They Searched Man Who Wiped GrapheneOS Phone for Child Abuse Material. They Lied When a Department of Homeland Security official sent out an alert to stop Samuel Tunick, a Stop Cop City activist, at an airport in January 2025, they said the reason was because he was suspected of “terrorist activities,” according to new filed court records which include a screenshot of the alert and photos of Tunick’s interrogation. Tunick ultimately provided Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officia...

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  ‘Reverse-Engineer Anything’ Is the New Wild West of AI Over the weekend, it became fashionable to use AI to replace the operating systems on smart TVs with vibe coded or AI reverse-engineered ones to make them less bloated. People have taken proprietary internet-of-things devices that were bricked and abandoned by their creators and used AI to hack them and install new software on them, giving functionality the original developers took away.   In the last few days I have seen people hack smart...

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  Scientists Discover A Strange Particle Explains the Origin of Reality Scientists have discovered that an exotic particle that existed at the birth of the universe might solve one of the biggest mysteries in cosmology and help explain reality as we know it, according to a new study in Physical Review Letters. Our modern universe is dominated by matter, but it also contains fleeting amounts of antimatter, which is like a bizarro version of matter made of particles with the same mass, but opposit...

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  'It Ain't Right:' Texas Said It Would Halt Data Center Permits. The State is Pushing Ahead Anyway A group of Texans believe they’ve discovered evidence that the state’s environmental regulatory agency has continued to issue permits to data centers despite Governor Greg Abbott’s call for it to stop.  The nonprofits Public Citizen and FracTracker Alliance, working with local activists in Texas, looked through the public database of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ)...

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  Police Say Scammers Used AI to Clone a Sheriff’s Voice A Florida police department claims that scammers used AI to clone a sheriff’s voice, with scammers increasingly using voice clones that trick people into thinking they’ve missed jury duty or have a warrant out for their arrest are increasing. According to Florida news outlet News6, scammers cloned Osceola County Sheriff Steve Moser’s voice and left a voicemail with a resident.     “They cloned his voice and was using Steve’s picture as we...

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  This Might Be the Earliest Known Spear Murder In Earth’s History Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that lived and died by the spear, drew unequal lots, paged Fox Mulder, and peered at an alien moon. First, scientists discover a mortal spear wound in a Neanderthal who lived 75,000 years ago, possibly opening a window into the origins of hominid violence. Then: disparities from beyond the grave, an unexplained population of near-Earth objects, and the word from Jupiter...

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  Behind the Blog: Doing Whatever 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 a new pod setup, video games, and Elon's spending habits. JASON: Exciting news: I am building a podcast studio / riso printing room / place to film videos in. I believe all of my colleagues and many people in my life have been laughing at me about this, but this also may just be the narrative I’ve created...

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  Podcast: Cops Can Use AI to Pinpoint Your Home with Just One Photo We start this week with Joseph’s article about Raven, previously known as Geospy. This is an AI tool that can geolocate photos, and now says it can pinpoint a specific house based just on one photo taken inside. After the break, Jason explains why a judge ruled a particular Flock search as unconstitutional. In the subscribers-only section, we talk about the wild AI video that has derailed a manslaughter case. Listen to the...

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  Cops Used AI Generated Photos of a Child to Lure Out a Suspected Predator This article was produced in collaboration with Court Watch, an independent outlet that unearths overlooked court records. Subscribe to them here. Police arrested a Chicago area high school maintenance worker who attempted to meet a child for sex after investigators posed as a 15-year-old boy using AI generated images. Christopher Thomas Mertens started talking to who he thought was a child through a dating app in Septe...

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  Computers Made of Human Brain Tissue Identify Braille Letters In Breakthrough Scientists have made a breakthrough toward the mind-bending goal of creating computers made of brains by demonstrating that human neural tissue can classify letters of the Braille alphabet, according to a study published on Friday in Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence.   A team transmitted electrical signals corresponding to Braille letters to human brain organoids, which are living neural tissues derived from stem...

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  Nidal Hasan’s Public Execution Is Off, But Propagandists Are Still Using Him as a Martyr Last week, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced the Pentagon would livestream the execution of convicted killer Nidal Hasan. Today, Trump said the execution would move forward but that it wouldn’t be livestreamed. But the propaganda damage is already done. Experts who watch terrorist spaces online told 404 Media that Hasan is already turning up in memes, videos, and recruitment material for groups like A...

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  Accenture Tells Employees They Can Now Spend Only $29 on Claude Per Month Consulting giant Accenture has told many employees that the company will now only spend $29 a month per person on Claude. Employees subject to the cap, some of whom had been spending as much as $1,000 monthly, are scrambling to find ways to make sure they can keep spending as much as they already are. The news is a snapshot of what continues to play out across all sorts of industries: companies have spent heavily on AI t...

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  ChatGPT Ads Target Your Phone Number, Email There is a lot of stuff about how creepy ad targeting is in today’s newsletter. Our first story is one I did, about how advertisers — or really anyone with 5 minutes on their hands — can inject ads into your ChatGPT session based on your phone number or email address. This is pretty normal in the advertising world, but I seriously doubt that when most of ChatGPT’s many, many users see an ad, they realize that might be because someone, somewhere, uploa...