Sen. Ron Wyden is seeking a privacy review report about the HIDTA license plate program.

This week, we discuss AI and spirituality.

Iowa city council debates proper time in meeting agenda to "undo the curse that was just put on our city."

Cops are getting around a very important iPhone security feature; someone made an LLM torture chamber; and lawyers going wild with ChatGPT.

We got the bodycam and in-car footage from the unconstitutional Flock search. Also now you can basically have sex with Claude Code?

"I saw her go by, and I just started running her info on Flock."

Jonathan, a 194-year-old Aldabra giant tortoise, was born before the Civil War. Scientists have now sequenced his genome to reveal what’s behind his extreme longevity, so we can live longer too.

AI-generated political slop, a farewell to a good bird, and more.

‘Chris’ sentiment does not change,’ said the sister who created an AI avatar of her slain brother Christopher Pelkey to speak in court.

And 404's Flock coverage cited in proposed legislation.

Senator Bernie Sanders, Representative Ocasio-Cortez, and Senator Jeff Merkley introduced the Ban Flock Act on Friday, which would stop federal agencies from using automatic license plate readers.

“Indiscriminate mass surveillance," a Meta Muse scoop, and more in today's daily newsletter.

The academic publisher said submissions have doubled in the past two years and moderators are having a hard time keeping up.

Flock’s nationwide network is quickly “approaching dragnet-type law enforcement practice” and the cop should have got a warrant, the judge wrote.

The massive FBI hack; a company wants to add facial recognition onto Flock; and Muse in some cases is actually just people.

This week, we discuss inbox slop, Claude cults, and more.

A look at the state of student journalism in light of the Cornell sexual assault case, and much more.

As the Cornell 7 case highlights the importance of student journalism, public records reveal how schools try to censor on-campus news outlets.

Magent Forensics, the owner of the GrayKey phone unlocking tool, says it can bypass an iPhone rebooting feature that was locking cops out.

The "AI Torture Chamber" has opened an upsetting and absurd window into the effective altruist obsession with "model welfare."

"Do you watch the news? Do you listen to the radio? Do you read anything about what's going on in the world?” one of the judges asked the lawyer, who submitted false testimony and witnesses after using ChatGPT.

USPS says the cameras, put on USPS truck dashboards, will scan roads, signs, and more.

Cloudflare, Google, and Proton were among the "dominant" infrastructure providers to sites dedicated to hosting abusive content, the study found.

How local cops are forced to feed their license plate data to the feds, the two loudest birds on the planet, and a very strange video from the FBI.

How the federal government built a massive database of license plate reader data through an anti-drug trafficking program.

The bare-throated bellbird and the red-legged seriema join the white bellbird in the winner’s circle of the loudest birds on Earth, with calls exceeding 120 decibels—louder than a chainsaw or jackhammer.

CEO who wants to add facial recognition to Flock cameras says it's "the way the world will have to be."

A surveillance company wants to "close the gap" that Flock won't do, by pitching facial recognition on its cameras.

The team used frontier LLMs with no prior training data navigate a simple parking lot course.

ShinyHunters, the group that stole data on “all FBI employees” including addresses and details on their spouses, told 404 Media on Monday “Since the very beginning we had made our decision that we would never publish this data. We have never intended to nor have we ever planned to.”

Facial recognition is everywhere now. Soon it's going to be right in your face, too.

Human contractors are reviewing Copilot users’ prompts and uploaded images, according to internal documents obtained by 404 Media. The contractors are also bombarded with users’ requests for sexual AI images.

Scientists have discovered that Earth-like microbes could potentially survive conditions inside Enceladus’s subsurface ocean, and that detecting signs of life on the moon may be easier than expected, according to a pair of studies.

"One’s like a happy or upbeat sad song if that makes any sense, and one’s a sad, sad song. I think one’s in a minor key, one’s in a major key, but I’m not a music professional."

This week, we discuss some small changes, an AI song, and internet soup.

Microsoft and OpenAI admit it; how we got AI slop onto a real band's Spotify page; and AI agent spam is here.

A former fan made a mod to silence the streamer’s followers who are spamming public spaces with slurs and hate.

Cops followed EJ Carrion home and arrested him in his drive way one week after he said 'bullshit' at a county meeting in Texas.

The FBI's Remote Operations Unit (ROU) is a highly secretive team of hackers making exploits and tools to break into target’s devices. Some of its members just got exposed.

Scientists discovered that diseased fruit flies lived longer when they were removed from Earth’s magnetic field, while healthy flies had shorter lifespans, in a first-of-its kind experiment with surprising results.

Citizens of Springfield, Missouri showed up to a city council meeting to discuss the city’s Flock contract. The mayor shut them down and arrested two people for ‘disruption of meetings of city council.’

Wealthy countries with many daily AI users tended to fear more for the future in what Gallup called the 'Paradox of the Worried West.'

"This has potential for so much negative PR. It could portray us as ‘their AI is not good enough so they still need humans’ kind of coverage for this launch."

OpenAI has thousands and thousands of contractors helping improve the company's AI models. Multiple contractors have been fired for using AI to train the AI.

Sherry Turkle's latest book, Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines, comes out on September 29.

404 Media is filing public records requests around the country to find out how cops are using Axon's ALPRs. Here is how you can do that too.

Some 600 million years ago, the supercontinent Gondwana produced a colossal mountain range that helped set the stage for all modern complex life, according to a new examination of tiny ancient rocks.

404 Media and The Intercept talk about how private companies empower government surveillance, and how AI is used in warfare.

This week, we discuss just doing it, machines that eat the internet, and an eavesdropping watch.

"Millions of people around the world will soon consider large models ‘hoovering up’ all their work to be an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions."