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  Come and Take It AI companies are trying to take the only cool thing their tech has ever done, making me vaguely interested for the first time ever in the concept of open weight models, local AI, etc. Time to take out a second mortgage on the house I don't have to finance a graphics card. Anyways, let's get into it: ‘Reverse Engineer Anything’: AI Companies Crack Down on the Coolest Thing People Were Doing With AI It was a fun few weeks while it lasted. People using both Anthropic’s Cla...

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  'Reverse Engineer Anything': AI Companies Crack Down on the Coolest Thing People Were Doing With AI It was a fun few weeks while it lasted. People using both Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s Codex to do AI-powered “reverse-engineering” or decompiling are now hitting guardrails or having their accounts limited while trying to do things like unbrick their internet-of-things devices or remove surveillance ads from their smart TVs.  Several people have reported triggering “safety checks” in...

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  Dad Asked 6-Year-Old Daughter if ‘She Had the Gun’ Before He Left Her in Line for Pokémon Cards Pokémon released its Mega Evolution Delta Region cards this week and one man in Charleston, South Carolina wanted them so badly that he left his 6-year-old daughter in line at Target at 1 am with a pillow and a blanket.  According to the incident report obtained by 404 Media, the person next to the little girl in line heard the father ask if his daughter “had the gun” before he left her alone at Tar...

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  Bad news for kinky Brits Good Monday morning. Last week, the UK imposed one of the strictest, most vague (and therefore overly broad) new laws around pornography in recent memory. Recording yourself having consensual kinky sex in private could come with jail time, as could watching other people do it. And sex workers are the ones to feel the repercussions of bad laws like these first, of course, with many reporting content disappearing from their online stores en masse. Keep reading to learn mo...

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  How Earth Lost a Billion Years of Its History Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that drew a blank, felt the squeeze, played the queen, and made donkey-bull love. First, scientists shed new light on how Earth ended up losing more than a billion years of its geological record, a puzzle that has resisted explanation for decades. Then: octopuses in tight spots, a topless spear-brandishing Celt, and a tale of unlikely tail. As always, for more of my work, check out my bo...

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  Behind the Blog: Dam's Bursting This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss election outcomes and code as a human endeavor. JOSEPH: This week I got a real wave of ‘oh man this fucking sucks’ regarding AI. I won’t link to it because it’s just a rando person, but scrolling Reddit I saw someone who said they used Claude to build stuff with Max. Max, or Max/MSP, is a visual programmin...

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  UK Sex Workers Wake Up to Sites Purging Their Content Following Porn Ban Immediately after the UK banned a wide range of porn fantasies involving choking, breath-restriction, and relative roleplay, adult creators watched platforms remove hundreds of their videos — even when the creators thought they were in compliance with the law. These creators say they were blindsided by the removals, since the content didn’t seem to violate the law at all. Creators are reporting one platform in particular,...

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  Everyone Everywhere Hated Meta’s New AI Training Terms. Now, They’re On Pause Following widespread backlash, Meta announced earlier this week it’s putting a planned update of its commercial terms of use on pause. The terms would have required business accounts to allow Meta to “use any content from such domains, web pages, or URLs to provide, develop, improve, research, train, and maintain the integrity of” Meta’s products.  The new terms were initially set to go into effect on October 30, but...

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  Oldest Evidence of Getting High on Cannabis Discovered In 2,800-Year-Old Tomb: ‘Absolutely Crazy’ Archaeologists have discovered the oldest direct evidence of psychoactive cannabis use in a Siberian tomb that dates back 2,800 years and was the site of human and horse sacrifices, according to a study published on Thursday in Science.  During excavations of the tomb, a team found more than 1,400 cannabis seeds scattered around the remains of several Iron Age individuals, and even identified cann...

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  In the UK, Face Sitting Porn Might Land You in Jail “I adore breath play. I love being strangled, suffocated and drowned, and I love strangling and suffocating others. Waterboarding: that’s my favourite,” Melissa Todd, a UK-based writer and sex worker, told me. “Many women do: it really isn’t only horrid men forcing us to do these dreadful depraved acts. Interrupting oxygen supply produces the most intense sensation of euphoria. I enjoy it in my private life, and I offer it in sessions too.”...

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  Podcast: Proton’s CEO Is Putting AI Before Security We start this week with Joseph’s investigation into Proton’s culture of fear and the company’s massive push towards AI. A lot to unpack there. After the break, Sam tells us about the AO3 outage and its fallout. In the subscribers-only section, Jason explains: we’re not tech support. Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for access to this episode's bonus content and to power our...

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  Republicans Learn X Is the Echo Chamber There's a BlazeTV YouTube video whose thumbnail shows the presenter with his arms around Anakin Skywalker and a gender-flipped Draco Malfoy called Malfoid. “Total Chud Victory?” It says. The video's title: “Young Right is Reclaiming Culture and Liberals Are Mad About it.” BlazeTV posted the video on November 2, the day before Democrats swept the midterms and started a political realignment in America so overwhelming that Republicans lost control...

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  An AI Fraud Kingpin’s Confessions For months I’ve been speaking to an AI fraud kingpin. You might remember in 2024 we revealed the existence of OnlyFake, an underground site that let anyone generate realistic photos of fake IDs using ‘neural networks’. The creator of that site went by the handle John Wick. A while later, the creator was arrested. Turns out there was a lot more to that story. Yuriy Nazarenko, the creator of OnlyFake, told me his side of it. How when I published my initial artic...

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  American Voters Overwhelmingly Reject AI Data Centers People across America rejected data centers during last night’s midterm election. Proposals related to data centers were explicitly on the ballot in more than 40 races across 13 states. People voted against data centers in 38 of them and counting. Six cities voted to ban data centers outright and 12 put limits on the amount of megawatts such buildings could draw. In addition to specific ballot measures, candidates who supported data centers...

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  World of Warcraft: Forever Is Already Overrun with AI Slop World of Warcraft: Forever, a re-imaginging of the legendary MMO, comes out Wednesday. The idea is to recapture the feeling of discovery and wonder players had when adventuring across its world for the first time back in 2004. But 2026 is a very different time. Subreddits dedicated to the game are already overrun with AI-generated addons that rip off longtime developers’ work, and a company that helps players track their damage output...

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  Vibe Coded AO3 Clone Site Down After Fanfic Authors Buried It With 2,000 Takedown Notices in a Single Day A vibe-coded site that scraped Archive of Our Own (AO3) fanfiction works, reuploaded them and charged for audiobook versions is down now after the creator said they received over 2,000 takedown requests from authors in the single day it was up. ao3.life, a website that sprung up following last week’s announced weeks-long outage of fanfiction repository AO3, scraped the internet for works t...

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  Voting in 2026 Is Getting an AI Slop 'I Voted' Sticker It’s a small pleasure, but receiving an “I Voted” sticker after casting my ballot is one of my favorite parts of the whole voting process. I slap the sticker on my chest and spend the rest of the day feeling like I accomplished a little something. I participated in democracy and everyone who sees me will know it. Artificial intelligence robbed me of that small joy this year and replaced it with a small horror. My “I Voted” sticker i...

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  Reaping and sowing, CEO edition It’s rare to see an executive go from fucking around to finding out so quickly. That’s what happened last week when Proton CEO Andy Yen announced he was canceling a planned re-interview process for almost all current employees that would have checked if they’re using AI enough. This follows extreme backlash from Proton users and workers against the company's aggressive pivot to AI. It’s been a wild ride internally, several employees past and present have shar...

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  People Used to Drink Wine Made From Ground-Up Mummies. Now, Scientists Are Studying It Welcome back to the Abstract—and Happy Halloween! Here are the studies this week that smashed into Earth, put aliens on ice, drank mummy wine, and hugged it out. First, a century-old theory that comets enriched Earth with the stuff of life is upended by new models of ancient impacts. Then: the case for life in extraterrestrial sea ice, a Halloween-coded medieval concoction, and a scientific embrace. As alwa...

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  ‘Wake Up Call:’ Fanfiction Writers and Readers React to AO3 Outage In the wake of fanfiction repository Archive of Our Own (AO3) announcing a weeks-long security incident outage, readers and writers are reflecting on why the site is important to the fanfiction community, and how they’re coping with the downtime.   On Thursday, the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), the non-profit organization that runs AO3, posted that the site was down for maintenance, eventually updating to say the...

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  Scientists Analyzed Thousands of Psychedelic Trips. They Found Something Disturbing Researchers have amassed a trove of more than 25,000 calls to a support hotline for people during and after psychedelic trips, making it “the largest dataset of psychedelic support interactions ever assembled—exceeding the combined sample sizes of all published psychedelic clinical trials by an order of magnitude,” according to a study published on Friday in Science Advances. Despite the popularity of psychedel...

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  Proton’s CEO Cancels AI ‘Re-Interviews’ On Friday, Andy Yen, the CEO of Proton, cancelled a series of nearly company-wide ‘re-interviews’ that would have forced employees to explain how they are using AI, with the clear intention that they may be fired if not using it enough in the eyes of Proton leadership, according to six current Proton employees and audio of an around two hour all-hands meeting obtained by 404 Media. The move came after 404 Media published an investigation on Thursday, whi...

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  Behind the Blog: Tech Support This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss customer service and Proton fallout. JASON: Since I wrote about ChatGPT turning me into tech support for people’s random problems, I have gotten many more AI-generated emails from people asking me to solve their tech support problems. So, mission accomplished I guess. I think and hope it was clear in the article...

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  Apple Is Entering Its Slop Era My ears perked up when I heard Apple’s new foldable phones were cracking. I licked my lips when the company announced it’s releasing a touch-screen laptop. This was a company that once charged $19 for a polishing cloth, asked $200 for a VESA mount, and sold $700 wheels for the Mac Pro. Now it’s borrowing tired ideas from its competitors and launching hardware its previous leaders rejected. The once dominant company is struggling to find its feet in an AI-driven p...

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  Massive Fanfic Site Archive of Our Own Says It’s Going Down for 'Up to 4 Weeks' Archive of Our Own (AO3), a massive repository for fanfiction and creative writing, might be down for as long as a month after going down for "maintenance" on Thursday. The Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), the non-profit organization that runs AO3, posted on its status page early Thursday morning that the site was down for maintenance. A few hours later, it updated the status to say th...

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  Podcast: Flock CEO Says the Backlash Isn’t Real We start this week with Jason and Joseph’s article about leaked audio from a private police conference. In that audio, Flock’s CEO made all sorts of wild claims about the backlash to his company not being real, and his wife’s advice to never apologize. After the break, Sam tells us why former Yahoo CEO Marrisa Mayer can’t keep pretending ‘gender doesn’t matter.’ In the subscribers-only section, Joseph tells us about a woman who is facing years in...

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  Manifestos, Fear, and ‘Loser Thinking’: Inside Proton’s AI Reckoning Andy Yen, the CEO of Proton, had a message for an employee in the company’s security Slack channel who urged the company to at least take a few days to pentest newly written code before pushing it live. “That’s bullshit and loser thinking. Of course it’s possible to be fast and secure,” Yen wrote in the channel at the end of August. “Stop thinking always of how to be slower, and focus more on how to be faster.” In a follow-up...

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  Senators Demand Meta Answer for 'Pervert Glasses' Following 404 Media Investigation Oregon Senator Ron Wyden and Massachusetts Senator Edward Markey sent a letter to Meta on Wednesday demanding the company answer for the privacy concerns its smart glasses pose to the public.  The letter cites 404 Media’s October 2025 investigation into how people use Meta’s smart glasses to harass massage parlor workers. That investigation found Instagram accounts with hundreds of thousands of follower...

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  Objection, your honor You've probably heard, at this point, about the big changes coming to Meta's AI scraping terms for business accounts. Nieman Lab had that scoop, and since then, small businesses, journalists, and artists using Meta products like Instagram have been raising the alarm. But if you're in the EU or UK, you might be in luck and can object to that use of your data, as some users have pointed out. Images via Unsplash / collage via 404 MediaIf You're In the UK or EU...

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  If You're In the UK or EU, Here's How to Object to Meta's AI Training Earlier this month, Meta updated its commercial terms of use for business accounts to allow it to “use any content from such domains, web pages, or URLs to provide, develop, improve, research, train, and maintain the integrity of” Meta’s products.  Many artists and small business owners that rely on Instagram and Facebook are livid at Meta granting itself permission to use their content, including from websites s...