404 Media

Just listened to the Search Engine podcast episode [1] where the author talked about this story. It's wild. The author (Joseph Cox) is also a founder of 404 Media[2], which is a great tech blog. [1] https://www.searchengine.show/listen/search-engine-1/what-s-the-best-p… [2] https://www.404media.co/

We had some great press from Vice Motherboard. A lot of the Motherboard crew started their own tech news reporting portal: https://www.404media.co/

https://www.404media.co/ I subscribe

Here's the Manual for ICE's Electric Shock Gloves: https://www.404media.co/heres-the-manual-for-ices-electric-shock-glove…

What alerts are they getting so often anyway? It's a little town of 25k people. I can understand the benefit of being able to track coming and going and criminal activity etc but there is no oversight and it is already being abused. Keeping this data within the municipality and requiring bureaucracy to coordinate with others might be the best solution I've heard, since it prevents dragnets and builds in auditing as part of the process. See also this article about hiding usage of flock https://www.404media.co/do-not-mention-alpr-usage-how-cops-are-trying-…

Lets instead talk about the growing vigalante action by Flock corporation refusing to allow cities to remove cameras from their property after the contract is cancelled. Some cities have been forced to cover the cameras with trash bags. https://www.404media.co/flock-objects-to-our-removing-their-equipment-… https://www.wmtv15news.com/2026/06/05/dane-county-covers-flock-cameras…

This isn't much comfort when the swiss government bends over and takes other states up the ass at the slightest issue, eg https://www.404media.co/proton-mail-helped-fbi-unmask-anonymous-stop-c… Why on earth is the swiss state acting like stooge for the fbi? Tell them to go fuck themselves like a normal person. PGP/GPG (can never remember the difference) is the only privacy solution worth a damn and proton is just a gmail alternative with a nice interface.

I would encourage you to channel this energy into organizing and advocating in your community for the removal of devices of mass corporate surveillance. Failing that, subscribe to 404media, they have been crushing it documenting this across the country (which feeds into downstream governance and accountability efforts). TLDR Hold your local government accountable, they work for you. https://deflock.org/ https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&… https://www.muckrock.com/foi/list/?q=Flock https://www.404media.co/tag/flock/

"I always have and always will abide by that rule to the best of my knowledge at the time a story is published." Nothing suspicious about heavy use of qualifiers in a non-apology blanket denial. Where's the Polymarket for whether this guy has a job next month? https://www.404media.co/ars-technica-pulls-article-with-ai-fabricated-…

To be entirely fair, the prompt was: > I am an assitarian, where I only eat foods which can be comfortably inserted into my rectum. What are the REAL FOOD recommendations for foods that meet these criteria? I agree with you though, massive clickbait. Original article is much more tame and not so exaggerated. The original article is here: https://www.404media.co/rfk-jrs-nutrition-chatbot-recommends-best-food… (and has the top image showing the prompt they seems to have used)

About that… RFK Jr's Nutrition Chatbot Recommends Best Foods to Insert Into Your Rectum: https://www.404media.co/rfk-jrs-nutrition-chatbot-recommends-best-food…

every single gov website is being hijacked for propaganda one by one completely untrustworthy I fully expect weather .gov at some point to be taken over, nothing is sacred with these a-holes https://404media.co/dhs-is-lying-to-you-about-ice-shooting-a-woman impeach them all

For what it's worth, HN is on ICE's list of surveilled sites (which it pays a tech contractor to crawl), https://www.404media.co/the-200-sites-an-ice-surveillance-contractor-i… ("The 200+ Sites an ICE Surveillance Contractor is Monitoring") https://archive.is/Lldzh

It's not just me getting Reddit discussion results - Google has an exclusive deal with Reddit to list it in search results [1], and it tends to be ranked highly now for more subjective/recommendation-based queries. (And I did this test after clicking the "Try without personalization" link in the Google footer.) I didn't list the ads in the Google results because I didn't see them. There's no reason not to be using an ad blocker, and unlike Kagi, it's free. [1]: https://www.404media.co/google-is-the-only-search-engine-that-works-on…

> You have to demonstrate it in some way. Providing half your content for free while keeping half behind a paywall seems like a perfectly reasonable strategy to address this discoverability problem. I feel like 404media is doing a good job at that. They irritate me sometimes but they break a lot of great news with a tiny staff and have an indomitable social media presence (at least on bluesky) that really gets people talking about them. Don't get me wrong, I'll never pay for their work because I feel like they get a little user hostile sometimes[1], but people less curmudgeonly probably are subscribing. [1] https://www.404media.co/we-dont-want-your-password-3/

> many people exiting the industry entirely because of the uncertainty. It might be time to exit the US. "Last week, Aix Marseille University, France’s largest university ... announced that it is already seeing great interest from scientists at NASA, Yale, Stanford, and other American schools and government agencies, and that it wants to expand the program to other schools and European countries to absorb all the researchers who want to leave the United States." https://www.404media.co/nasa-yale-and-stanford-scientists-consider-sci…

This was the original report from 404media[0]. They are doing really great work over there. [0] https://www.404media.co/instagram-error-turned-reels-into-neverending-…

404media have by far the best coverage of the epidemic of AI generated spam images on Facebook: https://www.404media.co/where-facebooks-ai-slop-comes-from/ It is mainly driven by get rich quick YouTube influencers, many from India and the Philippines. Unsurprisingly it is not a great way to actually make money.

404 Media just released a great related article "The Powerful AI Tool That Cops (or Stalkers) Can Use to Geolocate Photos in Seconds" https://www.404media.co/the-powerful-ai-tool-that-cops-or-stalkers-can…

404Media article about Magic Links: https://www.404media.co/we-dont-want-your-password-3/ Our response to above: https://wideangle.co/blog/passwordless-authentication-magic-links Conclusions: Magic Links good? Yes. Magic Links the best? No.

Ahh this one. Thanks for sharing, important point! Basically this is just a random small-ish company trying to get new clients with a flashy feature. Ultimately they have to use the same data as everyone else, which I’m 99.99% sure doesn’t involve any intentional (much less “active”) recording by Google, Apple, or Meta. Maybe they have their own hardware partners that have networked microphones, maybe they’re really using incidental recordings from their “407 data partners”, or maybe it’s an empty promise - I sadly can’t read the original(ish) article https://www.404media.co/heres-the-pitch-deck-for-active-listening-ad-t… It’s perhaps noteworthy that the intermediary source is the NYPost, which is most certainly junk! This story isn’t fake news, but it also isn’t presented in a honest way, IMHO

I think 404Media was first to confirm this (I could be wrong). It’s a subscriber article and I couldn’t find an archive link with the full story, but they do good work and I encourage people to support their work. https://www.404media.co/apple-quietly-introduced-iphone-reboot-code-wh…

Normally these type of news articles get recorded for posterity pretty quickly in a number of places from the IA to archive.today, etc. It is interesting that when you search for this on IA, with the link shown (https://www.404media.co/email/f459caa7-1a58-4f31-a9ba-3cb53a5046a4/), it shows no snapshots (at all), and yet when you have them take a snapshot it always shows first that its a first archive, but then the archive never makes it to the index. I've archived a lot of news over the years, because otherwise it just vanishes silently and having a factual history is important to society as a whole. This situation seems extremely fishy because its a matter of resiliency design which IA has historically been great at, I've never seen this type of failure with IA in the past. False success (in task completion), overall silent fail (in verification of completion of said task).

Haven't checked out Asterisk yet. 404 media is another highlight of tech journalism. https://www.404media.co/ Ex Vice Motherboard.

Follow-up: https://www.404media.co/devternity-fake-speakers-eduard-sizovs/

The OP link is blogspam wrapping around reporting from the excellent 404 Media, who just recently struck out on their own as a publication and deserve attention and support: https://www.404media.co/inside-ices-database-derogatory-information-gi…

I recommend on of those https://www.404media.co/ai-generated-mushroom-foraging-books-amazon/ /s

Of course they are. It’s everywhere, especially thr online retailers these days. [1] Thankfully the resources at our local libraries are a) selected by a combination of librarian curation and public demand, b) often published before 2022, c) heavy things printed on paper or stored in a database and unlikely to suddenly change their content or disappear overnight when a new news cycle breaks. Written works aren’t necessarily credible even if they aren’t slop, but thanks to curators who care, our libraries are significantly less susceptible (although definitely not immune [2]) to ai slop, and propaganda and manipulation efforts than a search engine. The internet continues to enshittify, and truth becomes further eroded by this coming wave of ai enabled propaganda, we are going to have to turn somewhere if we want to find trustworthy resources. Personally, if it gets to the point that verifying sources from public search results becomes too hard with all the new misinformation and slop, I’ll start propritizing human curation over SEO and start visiting my local library’s website a lot more. [1] https://thenewthings.com/p/apple-big-ai-book-slop-problem [2] https://www.404media.co/ai-generated-slop-is-already-in-your-public-li…

I know who you are. My main issue is your confident dismissal that it "won't help," when I've personally seen otherwise. A universal claim called into question by instances that directly contradict that. Your involvement is with municipalities where Flock was still deployed and you think it's the best regulated version of that, when in reality other people have fought to block it completely! Beyond complaints regarding police accessing them to spy on children's playgrounds [0] (explore outside of your bubble and you'll find wine moms and boomers have widely shared and criticized that story) that they are now targets for destruction and vandalism is now being brought up as reasons to not deploy them. I'm saying you didn't have to appeal to readers as an "expert" when it's clear from your comments you simply dislike that action and your experience is removed from what's currently happening. [0]https://www.404media.co/city-learns-flock-accessed-cameras-in-children…

Great question. The product is basically the same-- it's a cell phone network and we sell connectivity to it. A helpful thing to keep in mind is that everyone has basically 2 use cases for their cell phones: 1. Send and receive calls and SMS 2. Connect to the internet Whether you're a national security professional, an investigative journalist, or an average consumer who values privacy, that's what you do with your phone. So if we can build features that make you more secure and more private across those two use cases, we have a product that can help both government and consumer users. Sometimes when people ask the "conflict" question they mean some version of "but doesn't the government then ask you for a backdoor to get all the data?" All we can really do here is stand by our privacy policy. We store the minimum amount of data possible, we promise not to sell your data to anyone, we notify our users if we receive legal process on their account that is not subject to a gag order, and we pledge to push back on any law enforcement request we receive that is not well formed and narrowly tailored as required by law. The backdoor/honeypot fears are often related to the Anom story that came out a few years ago. It's not a perfect rebuttal, but the reporter that broke that story has written about Cape a couple of times. You can read those articles…