404 Media

How the MAGA-ification of Mark Zuckerberg and Meta relates to the TikTok ban Full story on 404media.co #meta #Facebook #instagram #donaldtrump #markzuckerberg #TikTok #tech #news

Thousands of ordinary apps are being hijacked to steal your location! See the list here https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/2/d/1Ukgd0gIWd9gpV6bOx2pcSHsVO6yIUqbjnlM4ewjO6Cs/htmlview And the article here https://www.404media.co/candy-crush-tinder-myfitnesspal-see-the-thousands-of-apps-hijacked-to-spy-on-your-location/

Facebook’s secret master plan with replacing user created content with generative AI accounts Full podcast in our story #Facebook #ai #Instagram #markzuckerberg #tech #news

People are shooting lasers at planes, creating dangerous situations for pilots amid the panic over drones in New Jersey. We obtained audio of a pilot contacting Air Traffic Control while dealing with this issue in the air #drone #drones #pilot #conspiracy #newjersey #flying #aliens #new #tech

Have you ever wanted to take a selfie with a NYC traffic camera? Full story on 404media.co #nyc #newyork #traffic #camera #selfie #urbanism

All the companies we found that took down their leadership pages following the UHC assassination. #healthcare #uhc #unitedhealthcare #health #humana #bluecross #aetna #tech #news

Like nearly everyone else on the internet, yesterday the staff of 404 Media learned the name “Luigi Mangione” and sprung into action. This ritual is now extremely familiar to journalists who cover mass shootings, but has now become familiar to anyone following a news story that has captured this much attention. We have a name. Now: Who is this person? Why did they do what they did? In an incredibly fractured internet where there is rarely a single story everyone is talking about and where it is impossible to hold anyone’s attention for more than a few minutes at a time, the release of the name Luigi Mangione sparked the type of content feeding frenzy normally only seen with mass tragedy and reminiscent of an earlier internet age when people were mostly paying attention to the same thing at once. The ritual goes like this. You have a name. You try to cross-reference officially-known details released by authorities with what you are able to glean online. Have you identified the correct “Luigi Mangione?” Then you begin Googling and screenshotting his accounts before some of them are inevitably taken down. Did he have a Twitter account? An Instagram? A Facebook? A Substack? Did he post about the [tragedy and/or news event]? What were his hobbies and beliefs? Who did he follow? What did he post? Did what they post align with the version of a person who would do [a thing like this]? What are his politics? Is he gay or straight or trans or religious or rich or poor? Does he seem mentally ill? Is there a manifesto? Writing about the problem with writing about the killer is not new. It is also easy because it is easy to criticize the work of others. We also have written about the UnitedHealthcare shooting because it is an incredibly important news event where there is an extreme vacuum of information. The assassination, as we have all written, speaks to the horrifying state of healthcare and capitalism in this country and has been a uniting force between left an

The code that runs Redbox DVD rental machines has been dumped online, and, in the wake of the company’s bankruptcy, a community of tinkerers and reverse engineers are probing the operating system to learn how it works. Naturally, one of the first things people did was make one of the machines run Doom. As has been detailed in several great articles elsewhere, the end of Redbox has been a clusterf**k, with pharmacies, grocery stores, and other retailers stuck with very large, heavy, abandoned DVD rental kiosks. To many people’s surprise, many of the kiosks remain operational even with the bankruptcy of Redbox’s parent company, which has led some people to “liberate” DVDs from the abandoned kiosks. Reddit is full of posts by people who say they have taken dozens of DVDs from kiosks all over the country. #redbox #chickensoupforthesoul #hacking #hack #tech #technology #nostalgia #hacker #news

Now that the seal is broken on scraping Bluesky posts into datasets for machine learning, people are trolling users and one-upping each other by making increasingly massive datasets of non-anonymized, full-text Bluesky posts taken directly from the social media platform’s public firehose—including one that contains almost 300 million posts. Last week, Daniel van Strien, a machine learning librarian at open-source machine learning library platform Hugging Face, released a dataset composed of one million Bluesky posts, including when they were posted and who posted them. Within hours of his first post—shortly after our story about this being the first known, public, non-anonymous dataset of Bluesky posts, and following hundreds of replies from people outraged that their posts were scraped without their permission—van Strein took it down and apologized. #bluesky #Twitter #x #Facebook #socialmedia #tech #technews #technology

Joseph explains how he avoids not having a phone number/normal phone service. #phone #security #privacy #tech #technology

A Niantic executive said that he “could definitely see” governments and militaries purchasing the company’s newly announced AI model for navigating the real world, which would be based on scan data generated by Pokémon Go players, but that if the use case is specific to the military and “adding amplitude to war, then that’s definitely an issue.” The comment was made by Brian McClendon, Niantic’s Senior Vice President of Engineering and formerly the co-creator of Google Earth, Street View, and Google Maps, at the investigative journalism group Bellingcat’s Bellingfest event on November 14. McClendon was giving a talk titled “Coordinates of tomorrow: Why spatial computing needs a new map,” which covered his history in the industry, his work at Google and Niantic, and some details on Niantic’s Large Geospatial Model, or LGM, that the company announced two days earlier. Full story on 404media.co #pokemon #pokemongo #niantic #gaming #tech #news