Telegram
How Telegram's Founder Pavel Durov Became a Culture War Martyr
Conservatives have spent months championing Telegram as an app that more closely aligns with their values than Signal.
Court Watch
FBI Uses January 6 Rioter’s Self-Published Amazon Book as Evidence Against Him
The Kindle book has been taken down by Amazon but the author's children's books remain up.
Announcements
What We Learned In Our First Year of 404 Media
In August 2023, we launched 404 Media with a novel idea: pay journalists to do journalism. Here we are, a year later.
Ticketmaster
Ticketmaster Used Revolving Barcodes to Control Ticket Resale Market and Surveil Customers, DOJ Alleges
"We now not only know the person that bought the ticket, but we’re going to know those three people that you are taking to the show, which we have not known historically."
AI
Where Facebook's AI Slop Comes From
Facebook itself is paying creators in India, Vietnam, and the Philippines for bizarre AI spam that they are learning to make from YouTube influencers and guides sold on Telegram.
AI
AI Music Generator Suno Admits It Was Trained on ‘Essentially All Music Files on the Internet’
"Suno’s training data includes essentially all music files of reasonable quality that are accessible on the open internet."
Rabbit
Rabbit Says Breach 'Not Caused by a Breach,' Is Fault of Malicious Employee, 'Hacktivists,' Journalists
The AI assistant company is blaming everything but its own security practices for a June security breach.
Court Watch
DHS Cracks Large-Scale Apple Counterfeiting ‘Refund Fraud’ Ring
A traffic stop in Alabama led to the discovery of a large-scale counterfeiting ring.
News
AI ‘Friend’ Company Spent $1.8 Million and Most of Its Funds on Domain Name
AI companion Friend appears to have spent most of its funds on buying friend.com.
AI
Websites are Blocking the Wrong AI Scrapers (Because AI Companies Keep Making New Ones)
Hundreds of sites have put old Anthropic scrapers on their blocklist, while leaving a new one unblocked.
AI
Anthropic AI Scraper Hits iFixit’s Website a Million Times in a Day
“We're just the largest database of repair information in the world, no big deal if they take it all without asking and swamp our servers in the process.”
AI
The Backlash Against AI Scraping Is Real and Measurable
In the last year, the number of websites specifically restricting OpenAI and other AI scraper bots has gone through the roof.