News
‘Things Are Going to Get Intense:’ How a Musk Ally Plans to Push AI on the Government
404 Media has obtained audio of a meeting held by Thomas Shedd, a Musk-associate who is now heading a team of government coders. In the call one employee pushed back and said one of the planned moves is an “illegal task.”
TikTok
TikTok Says It’s Not Censoring ‘Free Palestine’ Comments. Users See Something Different
When TikTok returned after being pulled from the U.S., hours before President Trump’s inauguration, users reported “free palestine” comments were being instantly removed.
Right to Repair
Medical Device Company Tells Hospitals They're No Longer Allowed to Fix Machine That Costs Six Figures
Hospitals are increasingly being forced into maintenance contracts with device manufacturers, driving up costs.
Podcast
Podcast: TikTok and the Tech Oligarchy
Why it's more important than ever to have decentralized social networks; the geolocation AI tool being marketed to cops; and Nokia's newly discovered archive of whacky ideas.
Social media
Decentralized Social Media Is the Only Alternative to the Tech Oligarchy
The TikTok ban and Donald Trump's rise to power show how fragile our social media accounts are. We must normalize and invest in decentralized social media.
News
Facebook Says It’s Not Forcing You to Follow Trump
Some Facebook users were shocked to see Trump in their feeds yesterday, but that’s likely because they were already following official administration accounts.
News
Cloudflare Issue Can Leak Chat App Users' Broad Location
A security researcher made a tool that let them quickly check which of Cloudflare's data centers had cached an image, which allowed them to figure out what city a Discord, Signal, or Twitter/X user might be in.
News
The Powerful AI Tool That Cops (or Stalkers) Can Use to Geolocate Photos in Seconds
For months members of the public have been using GeoSpy, a tool trained on millions of images that can find the location a photo was taken based on soil, architecture, and more. It's GeoGuesser at scale.
News
The Moon Got Obliterated and Lost a Bunch of Craters
That’s my secret Captain…I’m always traumatized.
Behind The Blog
Behind the Blog: The TikTok Ban and Joyless AI
This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss joylessness in the AI industry and the TikTok ban.
Opting Out of Gmail's Gemini AI Summaries Is a Mess. Here's How to Do It, We Think
On Wednesday, Google pushed various Gemini capabilities to business and enterprise customers, including the ability to summarize the contents of emails.
TikTok
Donald Trump Has Mark Zuckerberg By the Balls
A TikTok ban is a massive prize that Zuckerberg has been laying the groundwork on for years. Will Trump let him have it?
retro
Nokia’s Weird Y2K Designs Show the Future We Could Have Had
The Nokia Design Archive contains thousands of designs, pitch decks, presentations and prototypes from the turn of the millennium.