Notices by 404 Media (404mediaco@mastodon.social)

New: An open-source project called DeFlock has mapped thousands of license plate reader surveillance cameras all over the world. See if they're in your city. They also need help mapping more

https://www.404media.co/the-open-source-project-deflock-is-mapping-license-plate-surveillance-cameras-all-over-the-world/

FOIA docs obtained by @josephcox show the Secret Service talking about how they don't need a warrant to track phone locations because people "willingly" gave it away by agreeing to long terms of service docs for random apps

https://www.404media.co/fyi-a-warrant-isnt-needed-secret-service-says-you-agreed-to-be-tracked-with-location-data/

New: A leaked training presentation from a NY's largest hospital system shows how doctors are being encouraged to use AI for everything from writing emails to summarizing clinical evaluations to "diagnosing pancreatic cancer" and "parse" health records

https://www.404media.co/northwell-health-ai-hub-tool-chatgpt-doctors/

Years after Microsoft said it was killing its "gender detection" facial recognition AI, which has been shown over and over again to be inaccurate and weaponized against trans people, it turns out that, actually, it was still available and being used:

https://www.404media.co/microsoft-provided-gender-detection-ai-on-accident/

AI slop is being weaponized by the internet's worst grifters, who do not care that it's not real as long as it helps them further their political agenda

https://www.404media.co/hurricane-helene-and-the-fuck-it-era-of-ai-generated-slop/

Massive e-learning platform Udemy is training its AI on instructors' classes. It gave them a short "opt-out" window to reject this. Instructors are surprised to learn that time has passed.

https://www.404media.co/massive-e-learning-platform-udemy-gave-teachers-a-gen-ai-opt-out-window-its-already-over/

New: Steam has eliminated its forced arbitration clause, meaning gamers can now sue Valve over disputes. Seemingly this has happened bc a class action of gamers won a binding arbitration hearing arguing that forced arbitration is not enforceable

https://www.404media.co/steam-removes-forced-arbitration-clause-gamers-can-now-sue-valve/

Kind of a wild situation: One of the biggest private music torrenting sites has suffered a "massive peer scraping attack" where someone leveraged a vuln in the software to download all torrents and find out who is seeding them

https://www.404media.co/major-private-music-torrenting-site-suffers-massive-peer-scraping-attack/

Wordfreq, an open source tool that analyzed trends in human language usage in 40 languages, shut down because "generative AI has polluted the data" and there is so much AI spam that it is now very difficult to analyze broad trends in how people write

https://www.404media.co/project-analyzing-human-language-usage-shuts-down-because-generative-ai-has-polluted-the-data/

Experts we spoke to say that the lithium ion batteries in pagers would not cause explosions this large on their own, which suggests a supply chain attack in which additional explosive material was added

https://www.404media.co/experts-lebanon-pager-explosions-likely-not-lithium-batteries-alone/

A 120-year old newspaper in Hawaii is using the worst AI you've ever seen to make video versions of its articles. Must watch videos in here

https://www.404media.co/historic-newspaper-uses-janky-ai-newscasters-instead-of-human-journalists/

New: We got the pitch dek for the company that wants to target ads by listening to your devices. Google has cut them off in response to our reporting:

https://www.404media.co/heres-the-pitch-deck-for-active-listening-ad-targeting/

A year ago today we launched 404 Media.

Thanks to the overwhelming support of our subscribers, we're very proud and humbled to say that our business and company is sustainable and stable, and more scoops, investigations, stunts, etc are coming in year 2

https://www.404media.co/what-we-learned-in-our-first-year-of-404-media/

After months of digging and reporting, we have learned where Facebook's bizarre AI spam (like "Shrimp Jesus") comes from, who is making it, how it works, and how it is monetized.

Turns out Meta is directly paying people to spam FB with this stuff

https://www.404media.co/where-facebooks-ai-slop-comes-from/

Affected by CrowdStrike outage? Simply try rebooting 15 consecutive times, Microsoft suggests

https://www.404media.co/to-fix-crowdstrike-blue-screen-of-death-simply-reboot-15-straight-times-microsoft-says/

Beloved Apple blog TUAW was shut down in 2015, sold to private equity, then sold to a company in Hong Kong. It recently relaunched as an AI content farm using the stolen identities and bylines of its former human staff. A nightmare:

https://www.404media.co/a-beloved-tech-blog-tuaw-is-now-publishing-ai-articles-under-the-names-of-its-old-human-staff/

Adderall and Ozempic are getting so hard to find that a startup will let you pay $50 and their workers in the Philippines will call pharmacies until they find one with your meds in stock

https://www.404media.co/people-in-the-philippines-are-calling-us-pharmacies-to-help-americans-find-adderall/

We obtained an internal database of employee-reported privacy incidents at Google that shows the huge breadth of data it has and the run-of-the-mill and spectacular ways it mishandles it all the time

https://www.404media.co/google-leak-reveals-thousands-of-privacy-incidents/

Google's own researchers now say AI is a top vector of disinfo, in a paper that severely and obviously undercounts the problem

https://www.404media.co/google-says-ai-now-leading-disinformation-vector-and-is-severely-undercounting-the-problem/

A spy site is scraping users' Discord messages and activity across servers and selling them to anyone with $5:

https://www.404media.co/a-spy-site-is-scraping-discord-and-selling-users-messages/