Hacking
Hacker Compromises a16z-Backed Phone Farm, Tries to Post Memes Calling a16z the ‘Antichrist’
Doublespeed uses a phone farm to flood social media with AI-generated influencers. A hacker managed to get into a backend system of the company.
Podcast
How the Internet Became Hell (with Whitney Phillips)
‘The Ambivalent Internet’ and ‘The Shadow Gospel’ author Whitney Phillips on how online got so bad.
News
WebinarTV Secretly Scraped Zoom Meetings of Anonymous Recovery Programs
WebinarTV scraped and shared 12 steps-based anonymous meetings for people recovering from addiction and other private support groups.
Behind The Blog
Behind the Blog: Smoking the Whole Carton
This week, we discuss gun violence and chatbots and acceptance of depravity.
Games
I Wish I Didn’t Care About 'Marathon' Player Numbers, But I Do
Marathon is a great game for uncs. As signs of a crash change the video game industry, there might not be a lot of those left.
News
Multiple Hackers Warned Anti-Porn App Quittr About Security Issue for Months
At least three different people notified the popular app that wants to help men stop watching porn that it was jeopardizing user data.
News
An AI Agent Was Banned From Creating Wikipedia Articles, Then Wrote Angry Blogs About Being Banned
The incident is yet another example of volunteer Wikipedia editors fighting to keep the world’s largest repository of human knowledge free of AI-generated slop.
News
Wikipedia Bans AI-Generated Content
“In recent months, more and more administrative reports centered on LLM-related issues, and editors were being overwhelmed.”
News
A Top Google Search Result for Claude Plugins Was Planted by Hackers
Hackers paid to make a malicious link the top Google Search result.
News
This Company Is Secretly Turning Your Zoom Meetings into AI Podcasts
WebinarTV hosts 200,000 “webinars.” A Zoom call you may thought was private might be one of them.
Behind The Blog
Behind the Blog: Marathon and the Metaverse
This week, we discuss unfortunately checking Twitter for news, the closure of the metaverse, and being vulnerable in Marathon.