404media.co

https://archive.ph/bSQhD

https://archive.ph/2026.04.09-132952/https://www.404media.co/fbi-extracts-suspects-deleted-signal-messages-saved-in-iphone-notification-database-2/

https://web.archive.org/web/20260407201258/https://www.404media.co/data-center-tech-lobbyists-fearmonger-in-attempt-to-retroactively-roll-back-right-to-repair-law/

https://web.archive.org/web/20260406142222/https://www.404media.co/floridas-wildlife-cops-are-searching-thousands-of-flock-cameras-for-ice/

https://web.archive.org/web/20260331185244/https://www.404media.co/how-thomson-reuters-powers-ice-and-palantir/

Archive

North Oaks, Minnesota is the only city in the United States that is not on Google Maps Street View. YouTube documentarian Chris Parr, who grew up not too far from North Oaks, set out to change that earlier this year. For a brief few days, he literally put North Oaks on the map. And then it was gone again.

https://archive.ph/2026.03.27-163203/https://www.404media.co/iran-is-winning-the-ai-slop-propaganda-war/

An AI-generated LEGO movie out of Iran depicting Trump as a war hungry pedophile has gone viral online. The video is the work of Iran-based propagandists called the “Explosive News Team” and is just the latest in a long line of AI-generated LEGO videos aimed at mocking Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu. LEGO-themed propaganda isn’t new and the Iranian video plays on familiar wartime propaganda themes. What’s different in 2026 is speed and scale.

An AI-generated LEGO movie out of Iran depicting Trump as a war hungry pedophile has gone viral online. The video is the work of Iran-based propagandists called the “Explosive News Team” and is just the latest in a long line of AI-generated LEGO videos aimed at mocking Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu. LEGO-themed propaganda isn’t new and the Iranian video plays on familiar wartime propaganda themes. What’s different in 2026 is speed and scale.

The move isn’t surprising, but shows what data is available to authorities when paying Apple customers use the Hide My Email feature.

One of the more fucked up business models I’ve seen.

https://web.archive.org/web/20260326162031/https://www.404media.co/wikipedia-bans-ai-generated-content/

https://web.archive.org/web/20260326162031/https://www.404media.co/wikipedia-bans-ai-generated-content/

https://web.archive.org/web/20260326162031/https://www.404media.co/wikipedia-bans-ai-generated-content/

https://archive.ph/20260326162202/https://www.404media.co/wikipedia-bans-ai-generated-content/

https://web.archive.org/web/20260326162031/https://www.404media.co/wikipedia-bans-ai-generated-content/

Who could have possibly predicted this, besides everyone?

There is no associated website yet, but the move comes after Trump ordered the release of files related to UFOs.

Over the last few months, various academics and AI companies have attempted to predict how artificial intelligence is going to impact the labor market. These studies, including a high-profile paper published by Anthropic earlier this month, largely try to take the things AI is good at, or could be good at, and match them to existing job categories and job tasks. But the papers ignore some of the most impactful and most common uses of AI today: AI porn and AI slop.

To cross the paywall gap, here is a mirror

The DOGE deposition videos a judge ordered removed from YouTube on Friday after they had gone massively viral have since been backed up across the internet, including as a torrent and to the Internet Archive. The videos included DOGE members unable or unwilling to define DEI; discussing how they used ChatGPT and terms such as “black” and “homosexual” to flag grants for termination but not “white” or “caucasian,” and acknowledgements that despite their aggressive cuts they failed to achieve the stated goal of lowering the government deficit.

https://web.archive.org/web/20260314170122/https://www.404media.co/the-removed-doge-deposition-videos-have-already-been-backed-up-across-the-internet/

“DOGE deposition videos in Depositions for MLA-ACLS-AHA Lawsuit About the NEH,” the title of the page on the Internet Archive reads. The page says the files were uploaded on Saturday. On the Data Hoarder subreddit, multiple users said they had downloaded a torrent of the videos. Once a torrent of files has been shared, it becomes much harder to fully delete off of the internet because its distribution has been decentralized. 404 Media verified that the torrent did contain the DOGE deposition videos.

The government asked a judge to stop the spread of the videos on YouTube. The judge agreed and ordered their immediate removal.

A couple of 20-year-old developers make $500,000 a month promising to help men to stop watching porn, but exposed their private porn watching habits.

[The Kenyan Michael Geoffre] Asia eventually hit a breaking point and stopped working for AI companies. He is now the secretary general of a Kenyan organization called the Data Labelers Association (DLA) and the author of “The Emotional Labor Behind AI Intimacy,” a testimony of his time working as the real human labor behind AI sex bots. As part of the DLA, Asia has been working to organize workers to fight for better pay, better mental health services, an end to draconian non-disclosure agreements, and better benefits for a workforce that often earns just a few dollars a day. Data labelers train, refine, and moderate the outputs of AI tools made by the largest companies in the world, yet they are wildly underpaid and haven’t benefitted from the runaway valuations of AI companies.

Every day, Michael Geoffrey Asia spent eight consecutive hours at his laptop in Kenya staring at porn, annotating what was happening in every frame for an AI data labeling company. When he was done with his shift, he started his second job as the human labor behind AI sex bots, sexting with real lonely people he suspected were in the United States. His boss was an algorithm that told him to flit in and out of different personas.

https://web.archive.org/web/20260312154107/https://www.404media.co/ai-is-african-intelligence-the-workers-who-train-ai-are-fighting-back/

Kenyan workers are still the underpaid labor behind AI training, moderation, and sex chatbots. The Data Labelers Association is fighting back.

Copilot “can help with routine Senate work, including drafting and editing documents, summarizing information, preparing talking points and briefing material, and conducting research and analysis,” the memo says.

To better understand what exactly we’re looking at in this dystopian surveillance hellscape, 404 Media’s Jason Koebler and Joseph Cox joined Reddit’s r/technology for an Ask Me Anything session.

A couple of 20-year-old developers make $500,000 a month promising to help men to stop watching porn, but exposed their private porn watching habits.

In the parking lot of Seven Oaks Element school in South Carolina on one of the first hot days of the year I watched an AI-generated George Washington talk about the American revolution. “Our rights are a gift from God, not a favor from kings or courts,” slop Washington told me. It spoke from a screen that stretched floor to ceiling, trimmed by a fancy frame.

Mental health experts say identifying when someone is in need of help is the first step — and approaching them with careful compassion is the hardest, most essential part that follows.

The ‘Freedom Trucks’ will haul AI slop George Washington on a tour across 48 American states.

Mental health experts say identifying when someone is in need of help is the first step — and approaching them with careful compassion is the hardest, most essential part that follows.

Wikipedia editors have implemented new policies and restricted a number of contributors who were paid to use AI to translate existing Wikipedia articles into other languages after they discovered these AI translations added AI “hallucinations,” or errors, to the resulting article.

Crossposted from https://lemmy.world/post/43905111

they handed over payment info with the real name

Is this true??

A court record reviewed by 404 Media shows privacy-focused email provider Proton Mail handed over payment data related to a Stop Cop City email account to the Swiss government, which handed it to the FBI.

What a complete idiot. You create a protest email account linked to your credit card?

I saw this over on reddit and people complaining that they “betrayed” their user base. It’s amazing how many people think just because they’re privacy based that means they won’t respond to a lawful court order.

Awesome…

AI translated articles swapped sources or added unsourced sentences with no explanation, while others added paragraphs sourced from completely unrelated material.

https://archive.md/N3BZV

Archive post: https://archive.is/9vUoQ

Fake war footage is a problem as old as social media. AI has just supercharged it.

AI is a “game changer” for what the FBI calls remote access operations, an FBI official said in response to a 404 Media question on Tuesday.

Customs and Border Protection (CBP) bought data from the online advertising ecosystem to track peoples’ precise movements over time, in a process that often involves siphoning data from ordinary apps like video games, dating services, and fitness trackers, according to an internal Department of Homeland Security (DHS) document obtained by 404 Media.

The main bet on the front page of Polymarket right now is “Will the Iranian regime fall by June 30?” The site has this at a 41 percent chance of happening as I write this.

On Wednesday, the government stopped supporting FPDS.gov, an indispensable resource for finding what ICE, the FBI, and every other agency is buying. Its replacement site completely sucks.

Amazon is telling people who use its wishlists feature to switch to post office boxes or non-residential delivery addresses if they want to ensure their home addresses remain private, as part of a change in how it processes gifts bought from third-party sellers. The change is especially concerning to many sex workers, influencers and public figures who use Amazon wishlists to receive gifts from fans and clients.

Amazon is telling people who use its wishlists feature to switch to post office boxes or non-residential delivery addresses if they want to ensure their home addresses remain private, as part of a change in how it processes gifts bought from third-party sellers. The change is especially concerning to many sex workers, influencers and public figures who use Amazon wishlists to receive gifts from fans and clients.

The FBI got a search warrant for X to provide details on the Grok prompts a man allegedly used to create more than 200 nonconsensual sexual videos of a woman he knew in real life, according to court records.

They just keep coming up with even dumber ideas.