News
Iran Is Winning the AI Slop Propaganda War
“White House videos—AI or otherwise—are like group-chat in-jokes aimed at keeping cohesion.”
repair
DIY Tinkerer Invents MacBook Tool That Breaks Apple’s Repair Locks
“To whoever it is at Apple who decided to not make this available to technicians, ‘Fuck you, we win.’”
Bing Is Generating Images of SpongeBob Doing 9/11
Microsoft's Bing Image Creator lets beloved characters fly planes toward tall buildings, illustrating the struggles of generative AI models have with copyright and filtering.
‘Some of You Lied About Your Gender:’ Men Swamp Tech Conference for Women
At a conference meant to give women and non-binary technologists networking and career opportunities, male attendees reportedly swarmed the career fair and took over recruiter lines.
Features
Credit Card Point Maxers Are Secretly Buying Tickets for Olivia Rodrigo Resellers
Ticket resellers are turning members of a credit card churning "buyers club" into their personal ticket-buying army for the Taylor Swift and Olivia Rodrigo tours.
News
People Exploited YouTube Bug to Upload “Undeletable” Porn Videos
Communities of YouTube hackers and YouTube porn searchers discovered a bug that broke the platform's interface and kept hardcore porn on the site for weeks.
Impact
Taylor Swift Facial Recognition TikTok Deletes Videos After 404 Media Investigation
A viral account was using facial recognition tech to dox random people on the internet, causing distress to victims. The account has now deleted its dozens of videos.
Lost Lyft Cat Tux Found After Driving Entire Company, City, and Internet Into Frenzy
Tux went on a wild ride in a Lyft, and the rest of us went with him.
News
I Joined an Exclusive Club of YouTube Porn Hunters
Porn is hiding on YouTube in plain sight. You just have to know how to search for it.
Behind The Blog
Behind the Blog: TikTok Doxing, the Roman Empire, and Alien ‘Encounters’
This week, we discuss chain smoking through Rome: Total War, the audacity of TikTok doxing accounts using facial recognition, and a big new documentary about aliens on Netflix.
News
$260 Million AI Company Releases Undeletable Chatbot That Gives Detailed Instructions on Murder, Ethnic Cleansing
Mistral, an AI company founded by former Google and Meta alums pushed an “unmoderated” model into the world that will readily tell users how to kill their wives or restore Jim Crow-style discrimination.
News
I Tested an HDMI Adapter That Demands Your Location, Browsing Data, Photos, and Spams You with Ads
The cord is detected as a "computer" and tracks “favorite videos, videos watched, and bookmarks,” as well as “Location Data, Sensor Data, Tracking Cookies Data, and Installed Apps Data.”
FOIA
Food Delivery Robots Are Feeding Camera Footage to the LAPD, Internal Emails Show
Serve Robotics, which delivers food for Uber Eats, provided footage filmed by at least one of its robots to the LAPD as evidence in a criminal case. The emails show the robots, which are a constant sight in the city, can be used for surveillance.