175273131
submission
samleecole writes:
After an exodus of employees at Automattic who disagreed with CEO Matt Mullenweg’s recently divisive legal battle with WP Engine, he’s upped the ante with another buyout offer—and a threat that employees speaking to the press should “exit gracefully, or be fired tomorrow with no severance.”
Earlier this month, Mullenweg posed an “Alignment Offer” to all of his employees: Stand with him through a messy legal drama that’s still unfolding, or leave.
“It became clear a good chunk of my Automattic colleagues disagreed with me and our actions,” he wrote on his personal blog on Oct. 3, referring to the ongoing dispute between himself and website hosting platform WP Engine, which Mullenweg called a “cancer to WordPress” and accusing WP Engine of “strip-mining the WordPress ecosystem. In the last month, he and WP Engine have volleyed cease and desist letters, and WP Engine is now suing Automattic, accusing Mullenweg of extortion and abuse of power.
“I'm certain that Matt hasn't eliminated all dissenters, because I'm still there, but I expect that within the next six to twelve months, everyone who didn't leave but wasn't ‘aligned’ will have found a new job and left on their own terms,” a current employee told 404 Media. “My personal morale has never been lower at this job, and I know that I'm not alone.”
Mullenweg himself, in internal screenshots viewed by 404 Media, acknowledged that his first “Alignment Offer” did not make everyone who disagreed with him leave the company.
On Wednesday Mullenweg posted another ultimatum in Automattic’s Slack: a new offer that would include nine months of compensation (up from the previous offer of six months).
“We have technical means to identify the leaker as well, that I obviously can't disclose,” he continued. “So this is their opportunity to exit gracefully, or be fired tomorrow with no severance and probably a big legal case for violating confidentiality agreement.”
174740254
submission
samleecole writes:
Michael Pratt hid a massive sex trafficking ring in plain sight on PornHub. On the run from the FBI, an unexpected crew of ex-military, ex-intelligence officers and a lawyer tracked him down using his love of rare sneakers and crypto. For the first time, the group tells their story.
Pratt fled the U.S. in the middle of a massive civil trial in 2019—where 22 victims sued him and his co-conspirators for $22 million—and just before being charged with federal counts of sex trafficking by force, fraud and coercion. (Today, there are more than 100 women who’ve come forward in lawsuits as victims of Girls Do Porn.) Facing life in prison, Pratt was a fugitive, but investigators hadn’t been able to apprehend him. He’d been wanted by the FBI for two years when the small team of open-source and human intelligence experts—who called themselves OP Phoenix Fury, after DeBarber’s investigative firm—decided to try to find Pratt themselves. They had traced Pratt to Barcelona, Spain.
174645468
submission
samleecole writes:
Microsoft and Reddit are offering conflicting explanations for why Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, is currently blocked from crawling Reddit and offering links from the site in its search results.
Reddit, which now demands payment from anyone crawling the site and using its data to train AI products, claims that Bing’s crawler is being used to power AI products. Microsoft claims it has made it easy for any site to block its crawler that’s used for AI products, while still allowing a crawler that is only used for search results, and that Reddit’s decision to block Bing is “impacting competition” in the search engine space.
The conflicting reasonings behind the block are further proof that the massive, indiscriminate scraping of the internet to create AI training data in a way that violates long-respected norms about how to access information on the web are eroding trust, making the internet less open, and causing tech companies to beef about this issue in public.
174590580
submission
samleecole writes:
A leaked document obtained by 404 Media shows company-wide effort at generative AI company Runway, where employees collected thousands of YouTube videos and pirated content for training data for its Gen-3 Alpha model.
The model—initially codenamed Jupiter and released officially as Gen-3—drew widespread praise from the AI development community and technology outlets covering its launch when Runway released it in June. Last year, Runway raised $141 million from investors including Google and Nvidia, at a $1.5 billion valuation.
The spreadsheet of training data viewed by 404 Media and our testing of the model indicates that part of its training data is popular content from the YouTube channels of thousands of media and entertainment companies, including The New Yorker, VICE News, Pixar, Disney, Netflix, Sony, and many others. It also includes links to channels and individual videos belonging to popular influencers and content creators, including Casey Neistat, Sam Kolder, Benjamin Hardman, Marques Brownlee, and numerous others.
173955929
submission
samleecole writes:
In exchange for selling them repair parts, Samsung requires independent repair shops to give Samsung the name, contact information, phone identifier, and customer complaint details of everyone who gets their phone repaired at these shops, according to a contract obtained by 404 Media. Stunningly, it also requires these nominally independent shops to “immediately disassemble” any phones that customers have brought them that have been previously repaired with aftermarket or third-party parts and to “immediately notify” Samsung that the customer has used third-party parts.
"Company shall immediately disassemble all products that are created or assembled out of, comprised of, or that contain any Service Parts not purchased from Samsung,” a section of the agreement reads. “And shall immediately notify Samsung in writing of the details and circumstances of any unauthorized use or misappropriation of any Service Part for any purpose other than pursuant to this Agreement. Samsung may terminate this Agreement if these terms are violated."
The contract also requires the “daily” uploading of details of each and every repair that an independent company does into a Samsung database called G-SPN “at the time of each repair,” which includes the customer’s address, email address, phone number, details about what is wrong with their phone, their phone’s warranty status, details of the customer’s complaint, and the device’s IMEI number, which is a unique device identifier. 404 Media has verified the authenticity of the original contract and has recreated the version embedded at the bottom of this article to protect the source. No provisions have been changed.
The use of aftermarket parts in repair is relatively common. This provision requires independent repair shops to destroy the devices of their own customers, and then to snitch on them to Samsung.
173869613
submission
samleecole writes:
For the last decade, farmers have been warning that John Deere, a company celebrated by farmers, country musicians, and politicians, has been doing something else very American: Concentrating power, stripping away the ownership rights of people who buy their products, and adding a bevy of artificial, software-based repair restrictions that have effectively created a regime in which farmers can no longer fix their own tractors, combines, harvesters, and other agricultural equipment. Farmers have resorted to pirating John Deere’s software and firmware on underground forums and torrent sites, and have used software cracked by Ukrainian pirates in order to simply fix the things they own. Farmers often have to wait days or weeks for an “authorized” John Deere dealership to come to their farms to repair their equipment, meanwhile their crops die on the vine.
For years, very little happened to slow down John Deere’s march toward total control of the repair market. But interviews with farmers, activists, and lawyers, and a review of court records reveal a turn in the story: There is increased scrutiny on Deere’s repair practices not just in this class action lawsuit, but from state legislators, the White House, and a series of federal agencies. The walls on Deere’s repair monopoly may finally be closing in.
173717904
submission
samleecole writes:
Utah set up an online form for people to accuse other citizens and public establishments of violating the state’s recently-enacted transphobic “bathroom bill.” The submission form is being flooded with memes and troll comments, and the auditor also left the submissions database open to the public—without a password, authentication, or any other protections that would keep anyone from viewing other people’s submissions.
After 404 Media contacted the auditor's office for comment, they changed the permissions to require authentication.
The form link has been posted to Twitter, and people have repeatedly posted screenshots of themselves uploading memes. In the database, those included photos of Barry Wood, characters from Bee Movie, and Shutterstock images of bull testicles.
Twitter users have also found a link to the database that the form is connected to, which is hosted on a public Google cloud console bucket that as of Thursday, required no authentication to view. I tested the form, and found that my submission—a photo of the yelling table cat meme—appeared instantly in the Google Console bucket. The submission form offers anonymity with the option for the state auditor to contact submitters for more details. I haven’t seen names and contact information shared in the database, but comments and image attachments were easily viewable.
173380193
submission
samleecole writes:
In Texas, Montana, North Carolina, Virginia, Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Utah, age verification laws require sites with more than one third adult content to force users to upload their driver’s license, passport, or other government-issued ID. Indiana and Idaho’s age verification laws will take effect on July 1, and bills are progressing in several more states.
The legislators passing these bills are doing so under the guise of protecting children, but what’s actually happening is a widespread rewiring of the scaffolding of the internet. They ignore long-established legal precedent that has said for years that age verification is unconstitutional, eventually and inevitably reducing everything we see online without impossible privacy hurdles and compromises to that which is not “harmful to minors.”
The people who live in these states, including the minors the law is allegedly trying to protect, are worse off because of it. So is the rest of the internet.
173331317
submission
samleecole writes:
Last month, the surveillance company Flock Safety published a study and press release claiming that its automated license plate readers (ALPR) are “instrumental in solving 10 percent of reported crime in the U.S.” The study was done by Flock employees, and given legitimacy with the “oversight” of two academic researchers whose names are also on the paper. Now, one of those researchers has told 404 Media that “I personally would have done things much differently” than the Flock researchers did.
The researcher, Johnny Nhan of Texas Christian University, said that he has pivoted future research on Flock because he found “the information that is collected by the police departments are too varied and incomplete for us to do any type of meaningful statistical analysis on them.”
Flock is one of the largest vendors of ALPR cameras and other surveillance technologies, and is partially responsible for the widespread proliferation of this technology. It markets its cameras to law enforcement, homeowners associations, property managers, schools, and businesses. It regularly publishes in-house case studies and white papers that it says shows Flock is instrumental in solving and reducing crime, then uses those studies to market its products.
173074146
submission
samleecole writes:
A trove of leaked emails shows how administrators of one of the most prestigious awards in science fiction censored themselves because the awards ceremony was being held in China.
The emails, which show the process of compiling spreadsheets of the top 10 works in each category and checking them for “sensitive political nature” to see if they were “an issue in China,” were obtained by fan writer Chris M. Barkley and author Jason Sanford, and published on fandom news site File 770 and Sanford’s Patreon, where they uploaded the full PDF of the emails. They were provided to them by Hugo Awards administrator Diane Lacey. Lacey confirmed in an email to 404 Media that she was the source of the emails.
“In addition to the regular technical review, as we are happening in China and the *laws* we operate under are different...we need to highlight anything of a sensitive political nature in the work,” Dave McCarty, head of the 2023 awards jury, directed administrators in an email. “It's not necessary to read everything, but if the work focuses on China, taiwan, tibet, or other topics that may be an issue *in* China...that needs to be highlighted so that we can determine if it is safe to put it on the ballot of if the law will require us to make an administrative decision about it.”
172767047
submission
samleecole writes:
A food delivery robot company instructed a public university to promote its service on campus with photographs and video featuring only students who “have a healthy-looking BMI,” [body mass index] according to emails and documents I obtained via a public records request. The emails also discuss how ordering delivery via robot should become a “habit” for a “captured” customer base of students on campus.
These highly specific instructions show how universities around the country are going to extreme lengths to create a welcoming environment on campus for food delivery robots that sometimes have trouble crossing the street and need traffic infrastructure redesigned for them in order to navigate campus, a relatively absurd cache of public records obtained by 404 Media reveals.
Starship delivery robots are currently semiautonomously performing the critical public service of driving orange chicken from Panda Expresses, Wendy’s, and other restaurants on campus to dorm rooms at 32universities across around America: “Over 5 million autonomous deliveries now completed! Thousands of Starship delivery robots are operating globally, every day,” the company’s website notes.
172538355
submission
samleecole writes:
The LAION-5B machine learning dataset used by Google, Stable Diffusion, and other major AI products has been removed by the organization that created it after a Stanford study found that it contained 3,226 suspected instances of child sexual abuse material, 1,008 of which were externally validated.
LAION told 404 Media on Tuesday that out of “an abundance of caution,” it was taking down its datasets temporarily “to ensure they are safe before republishing them."
According to a new study by the Stanford Internet Observatory shared with 404 Media ahead of publication, the researchers found the suspected instances of CSAM through a combination of perceptual and cryptographic hash-based detection and analysis of the images themselves.
“We find that having possession of a LAION5B dataset populated even in late 2023 implies the possession of thousands of illegal images—not including all of the intimate imagery published and gathered nonconsensually, the legality of which is more variable by jurisdiction,” the paper says. “While the amount of CSAM present does not necessarily indicate that the presence of CSAM drastically influences the output of the model above and beyond the model’s ability to combine the concepts of sexual activity and children, it likely does still exert influence. The presence of repeated identical instances of CSAM is also problematic, particularly due to its reinforcement of images of specific victims.”
The finding highlights the danger of largely indiscriminate scraping of the internet for the purposes of generative artificial intelligence.
172251871
submission
samleecole writes:
People who paid to speak to an AI girlfriend modeled after real life 23-year-old influencer Caryn Marjorie are distraught because the service they paid for, Forever Companions, no longer works. It appears that the service stopped working shortly after Forever Companion CEO and founder John Meyer was arrested for trying to set his own apartment on fire.
404 Media tested CarynAI today as well as other AI bots and confirmed the service is not working. According to what we saw in the Telegram channel where Forever Companion users start conversations with CarynAI, the service has not been working since October 23.
“I terminated my relationship with Forever Voices due to unforeseen circumstances,” Marjorie told 404 Media in an email. “I wish the best for John Meyer and his family as he recovers from his mental health crisis. We didn't see this coming but I vow to push CarynAI forward for my fans and supporters."
On October 30, Marjorie also announced that she’s making a similar AI companion, “CarynAI 2.0,” with another company called Banter AI.
On social media for the last few weeks, the official Forever Voices Twitter account has been posting bizarre videos and statements about the CIA, Donald Trump, and the FBI. According to Austin NBC affiliate KXAN, Meyer was arrested on October 22 for trying to set fire to the building where he lived, causing an estimated $360,000 in damages.
In addition to those arson charges, 404 Media obtained an affidavit for an arrest warrant for charges of “Terroristic Threats” against the headquarters of a company called Cloud Kitchens, which provides software to restaurants. The affidavit states “On October 14th 2023 AT 9:06 PM John Heinrich Meyer posted on Twitter "@travisk get ready for me to literally blow up Cloud Kitchens." This post was posted under the twitter handle for John H. Meyer.” An employee for Cloud Kitchens sent this and additional tweets to the FBI, which is working with Austin police on the case. “Meyer has a history of being an emotionally disturbed person, which is consistent. with the behavior he displayed during this incident,” the affidavit notes.
171957327
submission
samleecole writes:
4chan users are coordinating a posting campaign where they use Microsoft Bing’s AI text-to-image generator to create racist images that they can then post across the internet. The news shows how users are able to manipulate free to access, easy to use AI tools to quickly flood the internet with racist garbage, even when those tools are allegedly strictly moderated.
“We’re making propaganda for fun. Join us, it’s comfy,” the 4chan thread instructs. “MAKE, EDIT, SHARE.”
A visual guide hosted on Imgur that’s linked in that post instructs users to use AI image generators, edit them to add captions that make them seem like political campaigns, and post them to social media sites, specifically Telegram, Twitter, and Instagram. 404 Media has also seen these images shared on a TikTok account that has since been removed.
People being racist is not a technological problem. But we should pay attention to the fact that technology is—to borrow a programming concept—10x’ing racist posters, allowing them to create more sophisticated content more quickly in a way we have not seen online before. Perhaps more importantly, they are doing so with tools that are allegedly “safe” and moderated so strictly, to a point where they will not generate completely harmless images of Julius Caesar. This means we are currently getting the worst of both worlds from Bing, an AI tool that will refuse to generate a nipple but is supercharging 4chan racists.
171957299
submission
samleecole writes:
Tickets for rapper Travis Scott’s upcoming tour sold out fast. Check StubHub right now, however, and you can find thousands of tickets to “sold out” shows in many cities for between $10 and $20, far below the face value for his cheapest tickets at $61.50 before fees when they first went on sale.
In ticket reseller lingo, Scott’s tour is a “bloodbath,” the result of overzealous brokers and noobs “overbuying” tickets based on a miscalculation of the likely value of his tickets on the secondary market. Many brokers now stand to lose a lot of money on Scott’s shows. At least part of this buying frenzy was fueled by a bet placed by PFS Buyers Club, a credit card maxing site I wrote about earlier this week that has recently pivoted from buying rare coins to buying concert tickets. PFS told its members to buy as many tickets to Scott’s shows as possible, according to emails viewed by 404 Media. PFS itself stands to lose more than $1 million on Travis Scott alone when all is said and done, it told members.
The entire situation, which has become a complicated mess, sheds light on a little-known segment of the ticket broker industry, where resellers partner with credit card “buyers clubs” to obtain tickets. The fiasco also highlights the risks associated with ticket reselling and shows how Ticketmaster profits from the secondary market, helping it sell out artists even before their ability to sell out venues is guaranteed, and passing that risk on to resellers.
