Notices by Jason Koebler (jasonkoebler@mastodon.social)

The simple truth is that nonconsensual porn AI "nudify" apps are viable because they get almost all of their traffic from social media ads. One of the largest one is getting *90 percent* of its traffic from Instagram ads. 90 percent! This is only going to get worse

https://www.404media.co/instagram-ads-send-this-nudify-site-90-percent-of-its-traffic/

New: The FTC has formally sued John Deere over its tractor repair monopoly, which is the strongest punitive action the federal government has ever taken against a company over restricting right to repair

https://www.404media.co/ftc-sues-john-deere-over-its-repair-monopoly/

Meta is deleting links to Pixelfed, a decentralized, open source Instagram competitor that has had skyrocketing signups in recent days:

https://www.404media.co/meta-is-blocking-links-to-decentralized-instagram-competitor-pixelfed/

Beautiful stuff: "It’s not really enjoyable to make music now… it takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of practice, you have to get really good at an instrument... I think the majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of time they spend making music."

https://www.404media.co/ceo-of-ai-music-company-says-people-dont-like-making-music/

New: Meta has deleted trans and nonbinary Messenger themes, as well as the blog posts announcing them. Happens the same week that it has changed its rules to allow users to say LGBTQ+ people are "mentally ill"

https://www.404media.co/meta-deletes-trans-and-nonbinary-messenger-themes/

New: Meta employees are furious about a new policy that allows users to call LGBTQ+ people "mentally ill." Some have resigned in protest. Some LGBTQ+ employees have started saying they if they are 'mentally ill' they should get leaves of absence from work

https://www.404media.co/its-total-chaos-internally-at-meta-right-now-employees-protest-zuckerbergs-anti-lgbtq-changes/

We had to evacuate Los Angeles. Most of my friends have also had to leave. We are safe in San Diego and our apartment is unlikely to burn down. We are very lucky. But alongside the visceral horror of the wildfires there is also the mundanity of dystopia

https://www.404media.co/were-fine-los-angeles-wildfires/

NEW: On the same day Mark Zuckerberg announces Meta's new commitment to "Free Expression," internal employee dissent and criticism is being censored

https://www.404media.co/facebook-deletes-internal-employee-criticism-of-new-board-member-dana-white/

Hundreds of police license plate cameras are misconfigured to stream unencrypted to the open internet.

A privacy researcher took these streams and turned them into a real-time database that tracks car movements & information, highlighting how invasive this tech is

https://www.404media.co/researcher-turns-insecure-license-plate-cameras-into-open-source-surveillance-tool/

Sentences I did not think I would write: Videos of mass shootings, suicides, and gore are being run through Runway's AI, turned into Minions, and then posted to social media to evade content moderation

https://www.404media.co/minion-gore-videos-use-ai-to-post-murder-to-instagram-tiktok-and-youtube/

New: Days after Meta had to kill its AI-generated profiles due to backlash, some Instagram users are now being shown AI-generated images of themselves that are being automatically created by Instagram and put in their feeds

https://www.404media.co/instagram-begins-randomly-showing-users-ai-generated-images-of-themselves/

As of today, Pornhub is now blocked in almost all of the American South. The only place where it is still freely available is Georgia, where it will be blocked in July

https://www.404media.co/pornhub-is-now-blocked-in-almost-all-of-the-u-s-south/

Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg changed his Slack name to "Gone💀" and posted that he didn't want to work on WordPress anymore after a court injunction in the WP-Engine case

https://www.404media.co/wordpress-wp-engine-preliminary-injunction/

When people talk about Kash Patel and Trump "going after" journalists it doesn't just mean suing or trying to arrest them. It also means filing demands for information about their reporting and embroiling them in legal proceedings they have nothing to do with.

New: Texas AG Ken Paxton has subpoenaed 404 Media for confidential reporting about an internal Google privacy incident database we published in June. If Paxton wants the database, he can get it directly from Google. Our lawyers have formally objected to the subpoena:

https://www.404media.co/404-media-objects-to-texas-attorney-general-ken-paxtons-subpoena-to-access-our-reporting/

Many major health insurance companies have purged or deleted the pages where they show executive names and bios in the last 24 hours:

https://www.404media.co/multiple-major-health-insurance-companies-take-down-leadership-pages-following-murder-of-united-healthcare-ceo/

In the aftermath of an LGBT hate incident, the then-CEO of cloud computing giant Digital Ocean told upset staff his mentor was a member of the KKK as an attempt to explain why they must bend their values because "we love the company"

https://www.404media.co/ceo-attempted-to-navigate-anti-lgbt-hate-incident-by-telling-employees-his-mentor-was-a-kkk-member/

ChatGPT breaks not just when you ask it about "David Mayer" but also when you ask it about AI researcher/law professor Jonathan Zittrain and also law professor Jonathan Turley. ChatGPT once defamed Turley by inventing fake sexual harassment claim:

https://www.404media.co/not-just-david-mayer-chatgpt-breaks-when-asked-about-two-law-professors/

X's legal filing in the InfoWars bankruptcy case is both batshit crazy and also what you'd expect. It asserts that X owns every account, can do whatever it wants with them, and can inject itself into legal proceedings that have nothing to do with it.

This is why it's incredibly important that people invest in platforms that they own, and move toward federated/decentralized/portable, noncorporate social media as rapidly as possible

https://www.404media.co/xs-objection-to-the-onion-buying-infowars-is-a-reminder-you-do-not-own-your-social-media-accounts/

Pokemon Go players have been training an AI model of the world for its parent company, Niantic. These models may be sold to the military, an exec said at a conference. Said it would be "an issue" if they were used in active war

https://www.404media.co/pokemon-go-data-adding-amplitude-to-war-is-obviously-an-issue-niantic-exec-says/