News
ICE Is Using a New Facial Recognition App to Identify People, Leaked Emails Show
The new tool, called Mobile Fortify, uses the CBP system which ordinarily takes photos of people when they enter or exit the U.S., according to internal ICE emails viewed by 404 Media. Now ICE is using it in the field.
AI
Inside the Economy of AI Spammers Getting Rich By Exploiting Disasters and Misery
How AI spammers monetized the LA fires and other natural disasters.
News
I Tested The AI That Calls Your Elderly Parents If You Can't Be Bothered
inTouch says on its website "Busy life? You can’t call your parent every day—but we can." My own mum said she would feel terrible if her child used it.
The Abstract
The Ocean Spectacle that Has Entranced Sailors for Centuries
“It was like we were in the ‘Twilight Zone’ and peering at a negative of the real world,” said one mariner.
Behind The Blog
Behind the Blog: The Economy, Robot Umpires, and Monsters
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.
News
New 'Rape and Incest' Game Tests the Limits of Steam’s Sex Policy
“No Mercy” is shocking people who are not familiar with Steam’s adult game ecosystem, but it’s mostly just shovelware.
Interviews
How a $2,000 'Made in the USA' Phone Is Manufactured
"You could count the number of skilled electronics engineers on US soil, and there's probably a million in Shenzhen alone."
News
Scammers Used OpenAI to Flood the Web with SEO Spam
A new report from SentinelOne exposed the inner workings of AkiraBot, a program that bypassed CAPTCHAs and used AI-generated messages to target 420,000 websites.
News
Facebook Pushes Its Llama 4 AI Model to the Right, Wants to Present “Both Sides”
Meta’s Llama 4 model is worried about left leaning bias in the data, and wants to be more like Elon Musk’s Grok.
ICE
Inside a Powerful Database ICE Uses to Identify and Deport People
The database allows filtering according to hundreds of different categories, including visa status, “unique physical characteristics (e.g. scars, marks, tattoos),” “criminal affiliation,” license plate reader data, and more.
News
U.S. Army Says It Could Acquire Targets Faster With ‘Advanced AI’
The Pentagon is working to incorporate AI into everything and it has given investigators a status update.
Podcast
Podcast: The FBI Secretly Ran a Massive Money Laundering Ring
How the FBI secretly ran a money laundering ring to catch hackers; a bunch of news on how the tariffs will impact the world; and the most illuminating book on Facebook in a long while.
iPhone
A 'US-Made iPhone' Is Pure Fantasy
"The army of millions and millions of people screwing in little, little screws to make iPhones, that kind of thing is going to come to America."