News
Bodycam Shows Moment Cops Arrested a Man for Speaking Too Long at Data Center Meeting
We spoke to Darren Blanchard, the man arrested while speaking out against data centers at a community meeting. He's sharing the bodycam footage of his arrest for the first time with 404 Media.
Investing
You Probably Unwittingly Voted to Give Elon Musk a Huge Raise
The rise of passive investing in retirement has given firms like Vanguard a huge amount of power at companies like Tesla.
News
AI Images in Google Search Results Have Opened a Portal to Hell
Google image search results are turning up AI-generated images of celebrities and leading users to sites that host AI-generated nudes celebrities made to look like children.
Behind The Blog
Behind the Blog: Finding Meds and Hiding 'Likes'
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 getting people to talk to us, and collapsing civilizations on the internet.
Deepfakes
GOP Candidate Claims Incest Arrangement Audio Is a ‘Deepfake’ Meant to Smear Him
John Lee, a Trump-endorsed candidate for Congress, is suing his former opponent for defamation.
Amazon Rainforest
‘Remote’ Amazonian Tribes Have Been Using the Internet for a Long Time
The Marubo people written about by the New York Times have been using the internet—and grappling with its implications—long before Starlink came to their village.
FOIA
Cops Released a Car’s Travel History to a Total Stranger
In a rare instance of too much transparency, an Ohio police department released the precise movements of a particular vehicle in response to a public records request, showing just how invasive license plate reading technology can be.
Instagram Experiments With Injecting Pop Up Ads Into Your Friends’ Stories
Ads for a game called "Super Rumble" are popping up into Instagram users' stories as Meta experiments with more invasive types of ads.
Perplexity
A Question About Disputed South China Sea Sends Perplexity AI Into a Sanitized Infinite Loop
The answer shows a conversation between a "human" and an "AI" about the proper way to answer a sensitive question.
Podcast
Podcast: Hacking the Adderall Shortage
People in the U.S. are outsourcing the hunt for Adderall to people in the Philippines; an Apple AirTag stalking case; and the Gateway Pundit's (alleged) bankruptcy.
News
Hacker Accesses Internal ‘Tile’ Tool That Provides Location Data to Cops
A hacker broke into systems used by Tile, the tracking company, then stole a wealth of customer data and had access to internal company tools.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk Tweeted a Thing
Dozens of human journalists are writing the same blog to appease a search algorithm that wants to automate their jobs out of existence.
News
Hackers Target AI Users With Malicious Stable Diffusion Tool on GitHub to Protest 'Art Theft'
An extension for a popular Stable Diffusion graphical user interface on Github appears to have been stealing users’ login credentials.