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

The 404 Media RSS feed is down at the moment. We’re trying to figure out what’s going on and how to fix it asap. We think this is likely an outage or misconfiguration with the provider who manages this service for us but we’re looking into it. Sorry for the inconvenience!!

"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/

This YouTuber painstakingly reverse-engineered the interior case of an iPhone, 3D printed his own, then released all the design files so you can do it too:

https://www.404media.co/how-and-why-a-reverse-engineer-3d-printed-an-iphone/

The currently viral Meta AI profiles are old and are already inactive because they were such a colossal failure and were indistinguishable from AI spam. This 'inevitable' future Zuckerberg is trying to shove down our throats is being completely rejected

https://www.404media.co/metas-ai-profiles-are-indistinguishable-from-terrible-spam-that-took-over-facebook/

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/

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/

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/

The surveillance and remote control techniques justified by a possible terror attack can, will, and are being normalized to use in more run-of-the-mill situations. What is rare today will be commonplace tomorrow

https://www.404media.co/elon-musk-uses-cybertruck-explosion-to-show-tesla-can-remotely-unlock-and-monitor-vehicles/

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/

nEw StuDY RePORtS thAt ThiS Is hOW YoU JaILBrEAK Ai

https://www.404media.co/apparently-this-is-how-you-jailbreak-ai/

Luigi Mangione fan art, merch, and photos are getting hit with bogus copyright takedown requests all over the internet. Artists and journalists affected. Very difficult to tell who is doing it, but one company says they received a request from United Healthcare:

https://www.404media.co/copyright-abuse-is-getting-luigi-mangione-merch-removed-from-the-internet/

New: At least 11 passenger planes were targeted with lasers above New Jersey last night amid drone panic, according to an analysis by @lemonodor and Air Traffic control audio we downloaded. Some audio snippets in article

https://www.404media.co/we-are-getting-lasered-nearly-a-dozen-planes-lasered-last-night-during-new-jersey-drone-panic/

good stuff out of wordpress, which is a very serious place

https://www.404media.co/wordpress-login-pineapple-on-pizza/

Artist makes website that lets you take selfies through NYC's network of traffic cameras. NYC Department of Transportation sends cease and desist. Artist nails cease and desist to a very very very long pole & holds it up to one of the cameras to take a photo of it

https://www.404media.co/traffic-cam-photobooth-cease-and-desist/

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/

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/

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/

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/

Pretty big deal: The FTC has banned one of the biggest companies powering the cell phone location tracking surveillance ecosystem from selling huge swaths of sensitive data and has ordered it to delete lots of data it has collected https://www.404media.co/ftc-bans-location-data-company-that-powers-the-surveillance-ecosystem/