Joseph Cox

Saudi Arabia just bought Pokemon Go, and probably all of your location data. Niantic (Pokemon Go creator) now spinning off their AI mapping business which was using Pokemon Go data to build an AI model

https://www.404media.co/saudi-arabia-buys-pokemon-go-and-probably-all-of-your-location-data/

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg “loved” an AI-generated slop image of a horse made out of bread posted by a spam page that also posts AI-generated images of amputated children and circumvents Facebook’s algorithm to link users offsite to ad-laden AI-generated content farms https://www.404media.co/zuckerberg-loves-ai-slop-image-from-spam-account-that-posts-amputated-children/

404 Media is back for the new year, and just *today* we have published multiple scoops with only four of us reporting, writing, editing.

First: Facebook is censoring its own employees' criticism of hire of UFC head, according to internal messages we got https://www.404media.co/facebook-deletes-internal-employee-criticism-of-new-board-member-dana-white/

Second: hackers have claimed a massive breach of location data company Gravy. This is a beating heart of worldwide phone monitoring, and provides data to the U.S. government. It's a "nightmare" scenario https://www.404media.co/hackers-claim-massive-breach-of-location-data-giant-threaten-to-leak-data/

Third today: police automatic license plate readers are accidentally exposing live feeds to the open internet. So a privacy advocate built a tool that automatically scans the plates and puts them in a spreadsheet to highlight the risk these cameras pose https://www.404media.co/researcher-turns-insecure-license-plate-cameras-into-open-source-surveillance-tool/

Fourth: People are using AI video generator Runway to post extremely violent Minionfied videos to social media. Unfortunately what people are actually using AI for! https://www.404media.co/minion-gore-videos-use-ai-to-post-murder-to-instagram-tiktok-and-youtube/

404 Media is primarily powered by paying subscribers. They get access to all of our articles, bonus podcast stuff every single week, FOIA trainings, more. $10 a month. Subscribe here if you like: http://404media.co/membership/

New from 404 Media: Facebook is deleting internal employee criticism of its new board hire UFC president and CEO Dana White. Facebook also deleting internal employee posts asking why the first ones deleted https://www.404media.co/facebook-deletes-internal-employee-criticism-of-new-board-member-dana-white/

(Medien: 1)

Since Friday, more health insurance companies (Kaiser Permanente, Aetna, and Humana) have scrubbed webpages which show their company leadership in the wake of the murder of UnitedHealth CEO https://www.404media.co/multiple-major-health-insurance-companies-take-down-leadership-pages-following-murder-of-united-healthcare-ceo/

Here @jasonkoebler writes his friend was filling out surveys/games to get few dollars off essential medication. People are outpouring their "horrendous, inhumane, heartbreaking experiences with a profit-driven, private American healthcare system" https://www.404media.co/behind-the-blog-healthcare-and-its-stakeholders/

(Medien: 1)

New from 404 Media: Bluesky may have said it won't use user data to train generative AI, but someone else just published a dataset of million Bluesky posts for "machine learning research". Already very popular dataset, your data may be scraped https://www.404media.co/someone-made-a-dataset-of-one-million-bluesky-posts-for-machine-learning-research/

Before we launched 404 Media, "allegedly very smart people" (as Emanuel calls them) told us to our faces it would take us years to build to one million views a month. We just crossed that. That's still relatively small, but independent media can work. Go do it.

New: some Wikipedia editors have formed WikiProject AI Cleanup, “a collaboration to combat the increasing problem of unsourced, poorly-written AI-generated content on Wikipedia.” https://www.404media.co/the-editors-protecting-wikipedia-from-ai-hoaxes/

New from 404 Media: an 'AI girlfriend' site was hacked, revealing the prompts people use to get the AI to fulfill sexual fantasies. All linked to their email address
- most concerning is explicit discussion of child abuse
- other prompts are kinks etc
https://www.404media.co/hacked-ai-girlfriend-data-shows-prompts-describing-child-sexual-abuse-2/