Had a very nice time on this pod talking about Google and the decaying discovery mechanisms we have on an AI-dominated internet with Lizzie O'Leary

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On this week's behind the scenes content for 404 Media, I wrote about how I eavesdrop on hacker/criminal chat rooms, and the importance of being there, in the moment, rather than just reading logs later

Also Jason on science journalism/Sam on travel
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The 'world's lamest content farm' was written with a 100-line PERL script “in an afternoon.' OpenAI's training crawler was stuck pinging it millions of times over the last few days.
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New: A money laundering crew cleaned millions of dollars through FanDuel, the FBI alleges. Widespread sports gambling ...... what could go wrong?

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New from 404 Media: a money laundering ring allegedly washed millions of dollars through the popular betting service FanDuel. As sports betting has opened to fans in U.S., it's also a money laundering risk. Wild story with connection to hackers too 404media.co/how-a-money-la…

Sports betting has become increasingly popular in the U.S. But it has also introduced a greater attack surface for money laundering, as one crew allegedly moved millions through one sports betting platform.
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OpenAI's training bot crawled a nonsensical set of sites set up by the author of The Internet for Dummies 3 million times in a day

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Google’s AI outfit DeepMind claimed it discovered 'millions of new materials' with deep learning. But researchers who analyzed a subset of those materials say many of them are 'clearly nonsensical.'
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Google announced its AI discovered 'millions of new materials.' This was v hyped.

A new analysis argues it actually 'does not report any new materials.' One researcher said 'there are many examples of predicted materials that are clearly nonsensical'

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Instagram says you will soon no longer be able to send nudes via DM. also, at the same time, Instagram is flooded with AI deep-fakes of actual people and catfishing romance scams. 404media.co/instagram-will…

hackers may be able to intercept two-factor authentication phone calls for services like Gmail by tricking targets into setting up call forwarding from their own number to the hacker's phone.
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Inspiring: The half-measure policy change announcement comes the same day Colorado is considering a bill to do the same thing as Oregon.

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Democracy in action: Apple announced it magically figured out how to do something it argued it couldn't do weeks after Oregon passed a law banning its current repair practices illegal

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Apple has suddenly announced that it will ease some of its “parts pairing” iPhone repair restrictions. Oregon banned this practice last week, and Colorado is considering doing the same.
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Instagram is rolling out nude detection in private DMs; will automatically blur images it believes are nudes, including in end-to-end encrypted chats because the processing is done on device, Meta says 404media.co/instagram-will…

Meta continues to lead the way on nipple detection while seemingly being incapable of doing anything more complicated than that

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Instagram plans to start auto-blurring nudes in direct messages, even if they're end-to-end encrypted, in an attempt to protect teenagers from sextortion schemes. 404media.co/instagram-will…

In a crude but potentially effective attack, a hacker sends a malicious link which quickly sets up call forwarding for a target’s phone number. The result is the interception of two-factor authentication calls. 404media.co/how-hackers-ca…