404media.co

Here’s the corresponding youtube video by Benn Jordan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vU1-uiUlHTo

Archivists have saved and uploaded copies of the 60 Minutes episode new CBS editor-in-chief Bari Weiss ordered be shelved as a torrent and multiple file sharing sites after an international distributor aired the episode.

Archivists have saved and uploaded copies of the 60 Minutes episode new CBS editor-in-chief Bari Weiss ordered be shelved as a torrent and multiple file sharing sites after an international distributor aired the episode.

Archivists have saved and uploaded copies of the 60 Minutes episode new CBS editor-in-chief Bari Weiss ordered be shelved as a torrent and multiple file sharing sites after an international distributor aired the episode.

Flock left at least 60 of its people-tracking Condor PTZ cameras live streaming and exposed to the open internet.

Flock left at least 60 of its people-tracking Condor PTZ cameras live streaming and exposed to the open internet.

https://web.archive.org/web/20251222162741/https://www.404media.co/flock-exposed-its-ai-powered-cameras-to-the-internet-we-tracked-ourselves/

I am standing on the corner of Harris Road and Young Street outside of the Crossroads Business Park in Bakersfield, California, looking up at a Flock surveillance camera bolted high above a traffic signal. On my phone, I am watching myself in real time as the camera records and livestreams me—without any password or login—to the open internet. I wander into the intersection, stare at the camera and wave. On the livestream, I can see myself clearly. Hundreds of miles away, my colleagues are remotely watching me too through the exposed feed.

A hacker gained control of a 1,100 mobile phone farm powering covert, AI-generated ads on TikTok.

Users voted to restrict Anthropic’s Claude to its own channel, but Jason Clinton, Anthropic’s Deputy Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) and a moderator in the Discord, overrode them. According to members of this Discord community who spoke with 404 Media on the condition of anonymity, the Discord that was once vibrant is now a ghost town. They blame the chatbot and Clinton’s behavior following its launch.

Thursday afternoon House Democrats publicly released a new trove of photographs they’ve obtained from the estate of Jeffrey Epstein via Dropbox. They left the comments on so anyone who is signed into Dropbox and browsing the material can leave behind their thoughts.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to a company that makes “AI agents” to rapidly track down targets. The company claims the “skip tracing” AI agents help agencies find people of interest and map out their family and other associates more quickly. According to the procurement records, the company’s services were specifically for Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO), the part of ICE that identifies, arrests, and deports people.

A Discord community for gay gamers is in disarray after one of its moderators and an executive at Anthropic forced the company’s AI chatbot on the Discord, despite protests from members.

The first thing I saw this morning when I opened X was an AI-generated trailer for Avengers: Doomsday. Robert Downey Jr’s Doctor Doom stood in a shapeless void alongside Captain America and Reed Richards. It was obvious slop but it was also close in tone and feel of the last five years of Disney’s Marvel movies. As media empires consolidate, nostalgia intensifies, and AI tools spread, Disney’s blockbusters feel more like an excuse to slam recognizable characters together in a contextless morass.

Mark Russo reported the dataset to all the right organizations, but still couldn’t get into his accounts for months.

Mark Russo reported the dataset to all the right organizations, but still couldn’t get into his accounts for months.

https://archive.is/Nw6S8

https://web.archive.org/web/20251209151738/https://www.404media.co/man-charged-for-wiping-phone-before-cbp-could-search-it/

On a recent immigration raid, a Border Patrol agent wore a pair of Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses, with the privacy light clearly on signaling he was recording the encounter, which agents are not permitted to do, according to photos and videos of the incident shared with 404 Media.

Archive Link: https://archive.ph/t1EHY

Scientists are raising alarms about the potential influence of artificial intelligence on elections, according to a spate of new studies that warn AI can rig polls and manipulate public opinion.

One of the slides Bahran showed during the presentation attempted to quantify the amount of human involvement these new AI-controlled power plants would have. He estimated less than five percent “human intervention during normal operations.”

As of this week, half of the states in the U.S. are under restrictive age verification laws that require adults to hand over their biometric and personal identification to access legal porn.

Archive

The federal government claims that the day after it was sued for allegedly abusing detainees at an ICE detention center, a “system crash” deleted nearly two weeks of surveillance footage from inside the facility.

A massive cache of Flock lookups collated by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) shows as many as 50 federal, state, and local agencies used Flock during protests over the last year.

Chatbot roleplay and image generator platform SecretDesires.ai left cloud storage containers of nearly two million of images and videos exposed, including photos and full names of women from social media, at their workplaces, graduating from universities, taking selfies on vacation, and more.

Chatbot roleplay and image generator platform SecretDesires.ai left cloud storage containers of nearly two million of images and videos exposed, including photos and full names of women from social media, at their workplaces, graduating from universities, taking selfies on vacation, and more.

Rogan’s conspiracy-minded audience blame mods of covering up for Rogan’s guests, including Trump, who are named in the Epstein files.

The IRS accessed a database of hundreds of millions of travel records, which show when and where a specific person flew and the credit card they used, without obtaining a warrant, according to a letter signed by a bipartisan group of lawmakers and shared with 404 Media. The country’s major airlines, including Delta, United Airlines, American Airlines, and Southwest, funnel customer records to a data broker they co-own called the Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC), which then sells access to peoples’ travel data to government agencies.

A current pilot project aims to pay former law enforcement and military officers to physically track immigrants and verify their addresses to give to ICE for $300 each. There is no indication that the pilot involves licensed private investigators, and appears to be open to people who are now essentially members of the general public, 404 Media has learned.

Material viewed by 404 Media shows data giant Thomson Reuters enriches license plate data with marriage, voter, and ownership records. The tool can predict where a car may be in the future.

A Washington judge said images taken by Flock cameras are “not exempt from disclosure” in public record requests.

Archived page link: https://archive.is/8RLoS

Google is hosting a CBP app that uses facial recognition to identify immigrants, while simultaneously removing apps that report the location of ICE officials because Google sees ICE as a vulnerable group. “It is time to choose sides; fascism or morality? Big tech has made their choice.”

“Google’s decision to host CBP’s immigrant-hunting app while removing one designed to warn people about the presence of ICE has concerned free speech experts.”

Google is hosting a CBP app that uses facial recognition to identify immigrants, while simultaneously removing apps that report the location of ICE officials because Google sees ICE as a vulnerable group. “It is time to choose sides; fascism or morality? Big tech has made their choice.”

The flaw in OpenAI’s attempt to stop users from generating videos of Nintendo and popular cartoon characters exposes a fundamental problem with most generative AI tools: it is extremely difficult to completely stop users from recreating any kind of content that’s in the training data, and OpenAI can’t remove the copyrighted content from Sora 2’s training data because it couldn’t exist without it.

Google is hosting a CBP app that uses facial recognition to identify immigrants, while simultaneously removing apps that report the location of ICE officials because Google sees ICE as a vulnerable group. “It is time to choose sides; fascism or morality? Big tech has made their choice.”

Ypsilanti, Michigan has officially decided to fight against the construction of a ‘high-performance computing facility’ that would service a nuclear weapons laboratory 1,500 miles away.

Ypsilanti, Michigan has officially decided to fight against the construction of a ‘high-performance computing facility’ that would service a nuclear weapons laboratory 1,500 miles away.

Each person I spoke to for this article told me they could talk about the right-wing project to erode trust in expertise, and the way AI has amplified this effort, for hours. In writing this article, I realized that I could endlessly tie much of our reporting on attacks on civil society and human knowledge to the force multiplier that is AI and the AI maximalist political and economic project. One need look no further than Grokipedia as one of the many recent reminders of this effort—a project by the world’s richest man and perhaps its most powerful right-wing political figure to replace a crowdsourced, meticulously edited fount of human knowledge with a robotic imitation built to further his political project.

https://archive.ph/5QFkF

Can’t link to the full text because I can’t get to archive.is!!!

Archive links: * https://megalodon.jp/2025-1107-0645-35/https://www.404media.co:443/fbi-tries-to-unmask-owner-of-infamous-archive-is-site/ * https://archive.ph/nNYNA * https://ghostarchive.org/archive/uDoWf?wr=false

The app, called Mobile Identify and available on the Google Play Store, is specifically for local and regional law enforcement agencies working with ICE on immigration enforcement.

Archive: https://archive.is/XzIwr

Do you and your human family have interest in sharing an exciting IRL experience supporting your [team of choice] with other human fans at The Big Game? In that case, don the chosen color of your [team of choice] and head to the local [iconic stadium]; Ticketmaster has exciting ticket deals, and soon you and your human family can look as happy and excited as these virtual avatars:

The article itself is from August, but after seeing Flock cameras at a local Lowe’s store that were missing from the DeFlock map, I thought it’d be worth bringing increased attention to such companies contributing to the propagation of Flock cameras. If there’s a Home Depot or Lowe’s near you that’s not on the DeFlock map already, it might just not have been added yet.

The article itself is from August, but after seeing Flock cameras at a local Lowe’s store that were missing from the DeFlock map, I thought it’d be worth bringing increased attention to such companies contributing to the propagation of Flock cameras. If there’s a Home Depot or Lowe’s near you that’s not on the DeFlock map already, it might just not have been added yet.

The article itself is from August, but after seeing Flock cameras at a local Lowe’s store that were missing from the DeFlock map, I thought it’d be worth bringing increased attention to such companies contributing to the propagation of Flock cameras. If there’s a Home Depot or Lowe’s near you that’s not on the DeFlock map already, it might just not have been added yet.

Photos captured by Mobile Fortify will be stored for 15 years, regardless of immigration or citizenship status, the document says.

I am haunted by a pregnant bill in Andrew Cuomo’s new AI-generated attack ad against Zohran Mamdani.

Someone recently managed to get on a Microsoft Teams call with representatives from phone hacking company Cellebrite, and then leaked a screenshot of the company’s capabilities against many Google Pixel phones, according to a forum post about the leak and 404 Media’s review of the material.

Someone recently managed to get on a Microsoft Teams call with representatives from phone hacking company Cellebrite, and then leaked a screenshot of the company’s capabilities against many Google Pixel phones, according to a forum post about the leak and 404 Media’s review of the material.

The Milwaukee School of Engineering is largely powerless to kick ICE out of a building it wanted to turn into a new academic center, according to audio of a meeting obtained by 404 Media.

“The White House just marked the end of the console wars; DHS is posting deep fried Halo memes. We are somewhere else entirely.”

The Milwaukee School of Engineering is largely powerless to kick ICE out of a building it wanted to turn into a new academic center, according to audio of a meeting obtained by 404 Media.

Archive: https://archive.is/h0v5M

He also said “ICE officials have told us that an apparent biometric match by Mobile Fortify is a ‘definitive’ determination of a person’s status and that an ICE officer may ignore evidence of American citizenship—including a birth certificate—if the app says the person is an alien. ICE using a mobile biometrics app in ways its developers at CBP never intended or tested is a frightening, repugnant, and unconstitutional attack on Americans’ rights and freedoms.”

One of my favorite details was near the end of the article, where Meta plays dumb when asked about this issue, and feigning an inability to find the abusers of the glasses that 404 Media had identified:

Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses usually include an LED that lights up when the user is recording other people. One hobbyist is charging a small fee to disable that light, and has a growing list of customers around the country.

Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses usually include an LED that lights up when the user is recording other people. One hobbyist is charging a small fee to disable that light, and has a growing list of customers around the country.

Made my day.

Archive: https://archive.is/lP0lT

https://archive.is/MzruF