Hacking/crime/privacy journalist. Author of DARK WIRE. Co-founder of @404mediaco. Signal: joseph.404 Email: joseph@404media.co
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The Financial Times calls DARK WIRE, my book on how the FBI secretly ran its own tech company to wiretap the world, one of the best books of 2024: ft.com/content/67a33609-ab0d…
You can buy your copy, audiobook, etc, here: hachettebookgroup.com/titles…
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New: the DHS officials who tried to search the man who wiped his GrapheneOS phone lied. They pushed him about having child abuse images. Documents reveal that was a pretext; he wasn't suspected of this at all. He's a Stop Cop City activist 404media.co/dhs-said-they-se…
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'Reverse-engineer anything' is new Wild West of AI. People are using AI to remove bloatware from their TVs, ads from baby monitors, etc. But it's software wave that may contain malware. You're not going to be able to avoid this even if you don't like AI 404media.co/reverse-engineer…
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A group of Texans believe they’ve discovered evidence that the state’s environmental regulatory agency has continued to issue permits to data centers despite Governor Greg Abbott’s call for it to stop.
404media.co/it-aint-right-te…
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New case against a Jaden John Read for allegedly threatening to shoot President Trump.
Court doc: documentcloud.org/documents/…
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New: Chinese hackers broke into Staples. Staples has an internal customer support tool called Nexus, Chinese hackers got into that, issued millions of dollars of gift cards. Mules then went on a spending spree across the U.S. Gang made $100 million+ 404media.co/how-a-massive-ch…
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Authorities say the wife of Alfozan, the OpenAI employee who allegedly bugged an OpenAI exec conference room, was to leave the U.S. on one flight, then a "member of the Saudi military booked and paid" for another one-way flight to Saudi Arabia for the wife and son.
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Cops used AI images to pose as a kid to lure out a suspected child predator. Was done by a unit called the Livonia Undercover Resistance to Exploitation Unit, or LURE.
404media.co/undercover-cops-…
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Here's how exactly Telegram provides user data to U.S. authorities. A letter recently filed in court shows how Telegram transfers that data, such as IP address and phone number.
More: 404media.co/heres-what-teleg…
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A video game reverse engineering community is shutting down entirely because AI has completely hollowed out the community. What used to take talented decompilers many weeks or months of work is now done immediately by AI
404media.co/video-game-rever…
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New: Accenture has told employees it will only fund $29 per month of Claude use. Meaning that employees who often spend as much as $1,000 a month are now scrambling to find ways to keep access to the tool. A sign of the continuing crack down of AI 404media.co/accenture-tells-…
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OpenAI continues to enshittify ChatGPT: OpenAI allows advertisers—or really anyone, I tested myself in 5 minutes—upload raw phone numbers or email addresses to OpenAI to then target those specific people and inject specific ads into their ChatGPT session 404media.co/how-chatgpt-targ…
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Here is my beautiful ad I pushed into peoples' ChatGPT sessions, telling them ChatGPT is not private, and human contractors are hired to read users' ChatGPT prompts. I targeted the ad to people asking ChatGPT about privacy, AI, whether chats are private
404media.co/how-chatgpt-targ…
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Character[.]ai financials:
- $13.8m on compute a month, then $10m a month
- bringing in $2.8m in subscriptions, sometimes less than $1m
- revenue from all sources $5.3m a month
Its bankruptcy shows the economics of AI don't work: 404media.co/character-ais-ba…
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HSI tried to plant a tracker on a Tesla but were unable to due to the Tesla's "security protocols," according to a warrant we saw 404media.co/teslas-security-…
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New: an AI company now lets cops identify specific houses, using data from Zillow/Airbnb, based on a single photo. It's part of Raven, previously called Geospy. Company previously demoed its tools to catch people vandalizing Flock cameras or protesters
404media.co/ai-company-lets-…
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We got the bodycam and in-car footage related to the Flock search that a judge ruled was "indiscriminate mass surveillance" and unconstitutional. Ton of wild stuff in here
More here: 404media.co/watch-footage-of…
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Cops are able to break into locked iPhones, including those that have been rebooted by Apple's own reboot security feature
Watch more, subscribe here: piped.video/watch?v=fpzCH0mX…
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Law enforcement investigation in two people with magazines saying "I hate the police" and "Are we free yet." Cops also found dozens of 3D printed pistol frames and 3D printed grenade housings.
documentcloud.org/documents/…
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New: in the immediate lead up to Muse's launch, Meta scrambled to fix serious vulnerabilities in the AI agent, including a VM escape that could have let a hacker break out of Muse and into Meta's own sensitive databases. It was escalated to Zuckerberg 404media.co/meta-rushed-to-f…
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This is huge: a judge ruled a Flock search was 'indiscriminate mass surveillance' and unconstitutional. Says the search by a cop violated the driver's Fourth Amendment rights. Meaning, Flock should require a warrant 404media.co/federal-judge-ru…
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