great news: YouTube comment sections set to get even better with AI-generated comments that get stuff wrong. v lifelike experience

404 Media

YouTube “Enhances” Comment Section With AI-Generated Nonsense

YouTube’s rollout of AI tools shows nonsensical AI-generated audience engagement and AI slop thumbnails.

Artist makes website that lets you take selfies through NYC's network of traffic cameras. NYC Department of Transportation sends cease and desist. Artist nails cease and desist to a very very very long pole & holds it up to one of the cameras to take a photo of it

404 Media

Traffic Camera 'Selfie' Creator Holds Cease and Desist Letter in Front of Traffic Cam

Traffic Cam Photobooth lets you take a capture from NYC surveillance camera. The city's Department of Transportation does not like that.

The New Jersey drone panic of 2024 is following the exact path as the Colorado drone panic of 2020:

404 Media

WTF Is Going on With the New Jersey Mystery Drones? Maybe Mass Panic Over Nothing

The New Jersey drone situation is very interesting. We've also seen this story before.

Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg changed his Slack name to "Gone💀" and posted that he didn't want to work on WordPress anymore after a court injunction in the WP-Engine case

404 Media

WordPress CEO Rage Quits Community Slack After Court Injunction

Automattic is ordered to undo several of the actions of its CEO Matt Mullenweg in its ongoing legal battle with WP Engine. “It's hard to imagine ...

New: Texas AG Ken Paxton has subpoenaed 404 Media for confidential reporting about an internal Google privacy incident database we published in June. If Paxton wants the database, he can get it directly from Google. Our lawyers have formally objected to the subpoena:

404 Media

404 Media Objects to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton's Subpoena to Access Our Reporting

404 Media's reporting on an internal Google privacy violation database has been subpoenaed by the State of Texas. We are fighting it.

The most popular type of deleted post on Reddit over the last 48 hours is about the UnitedHealthcare CEO. Dozens of posts that had reached the top 100 most popular on the site have been deleted by Reddit the company or by mods (a mix of both)

404 Media

Moderators Across Social Media Struggle to Contain Celebrations of UnitedHealthcare CEO’s Assassination

While Reddit mods and admin try to keep up with the site's "no violence" terms of use, Facebook and LinkedIn is reacting with tens of thousands of ...

Many major health insurance companies have purged or deleted the pages where they show executive names and bios in the last 24 hours:

404 Media

Major Health Insurance Companies Take Down Leadership Pages Following Murder of United Healthcare CEO

Following the shooting of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, multiple major health insurance companies have taken their executive leadership pag...

In the aftermath of an LGBT hate incident, the then-CEO of cloud computing giant Digital Ocean told upset staff his mentor was a member of the KKK as an attempt to explain why they must bend their values because "we love the company"

404 Media

CEO Attempted to Navigate Anti-LGBT Hate Incident By Telling Employees His Mentor Was a KKK Member

Recordings show that while he was the CEO of Digital Ocean, Yancey Spruill told staff that they should bend their values because "we love the compa...

Pretty big deal: The FTC has banned one of the biggest companies powering the cell phone location tracking surveillance ecosystem from selling huge swaths of sensitive data and has ordered it to delete lots of data it has collected

404 Media

FTC Bans Location Data Company That Powers the Surveillance Ecosystem

Venntel is a primary provider of location data to the government or other companies that sell to U.S. agencies. The FTC is banning Venntel from sel...

X's legal filing in the InfoWars bankruptcy case is both batshit crazy and also what you'd expect. It asserts that X owns every account, can do whatever it wants with them, and can inject itself into legal proceedings that have nothing to do with it. This is why it's incredibly important that people invest in platforms that they own, and move toward federated/decentralized/portable, noncorporate social media as rapidly as possible

404 Media

X's Objection to the Onion Buying InfoWars Is a Reminder You Do Not Own Your Social Media Accounts

"X CORP. OWNS THE X ACCOUNTS."