New from 404 Media: Discord shut down a mass of accounts used by 'Spy Pet', the service that was scraping & selling Discord data/server messages for as little as $5. Spy Pet domain also down. Discord's actions come after we verified Spy Pet data was real 404media.co/discord-shuts-…

Good news: Facebook's bizarre engagement bait AI has made its way to LinkedIn:

404media.co/facebooks-biza…

Reels nation rise up

New from 404 Media: Telegram, Insta, Bitcoin, drive-by shootings. This is how one murder-for-hire ring in New York City allegedly operated. Made three attempts on a target's life and demanded 5BTC to stop trying to kill them 404media.co/inside-a-moder…

very odd open source LLM release from Microsoft, which was quickly deleted because it didn't get 'toxicity testing,' but is now all over the internet. Microsoft declined to answer any questions about this 404media.co/microsoft-dele…

If you add 'reddit' to the end of search terms so that you can find posts by a real person, I have bad news: AI is beginning to poison Reddit in an effort to game Google results

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If you want more behind-the-scenes of how I did this investigation (sneaking into a law enforcement conference; much more) I've written a long piece of bonus content. Preorder here, provide proof of purchase, you'll get it. *Only* if you preorder hachettebookgroup.com/titles/joseph-…

The culmination of that years long investigation is DARK WIRE: The Incredible True Story of the Largest Sting Operation. It reveals the true scale and stakes of this unprecedented operation through the agents and crooks who were there for the first time hachettebookgroup.com/titles/joseph-…

Junk AI tools and parasitic SEO practices are destroying one of the last remaining useful parts of the internet 404media.co/ai-is-poisonin…

Vintage typewriter hobbyists awaiting influx of Swifties

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study shows most people bust like this: youtube.com/watch?v=jzge_j…

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We've been reporting on a lot of bad Instagram ads over the last 6 months, and these are some of the worst yet. Obvious, explicit ads for nonconsensual AI generated nudes 404media.co/instagram-adve…

An employee asked me if he can WORK from HOME permanently. Here is what I told him. 404media.co/linkedin-work-…

My personal favorite WORK from HOME advice in this piece is about the Caterpillar 404media.co/linkedin-work-…

nine aggregations of Joseph Cox's scoop about a spy tool scraping and selling Discord chats are on Google News but our original article is not.

An AI generated content farm version is also still being indexed by Google News. Google lemme know if you're ever going to fix this

it took me less than 5 minutes to bypass Meta's guardrails and generate an image it's trying to prevent users from generating. good luck to them ai.meta.com/blog/meta-llam…

Emanuel Maiberg how does 404 even find these stories, it's incredible

The dystopia is already here etc…

Netflix using generative AI images in a true crime doc is extremely irresponsible and exactly what archivists are telling documentaries not to do 404media.co/netflix-doc-wh…

Gamers are being paid in Roblox gift cards to rent out their GPUs so they can generate AI porn 404media.co/gamers-are-ren…