The 404 Media Podcast

Take control of your data footprint risk-free with a 30-day money-back guarantee. Go to incogni.com/404Media and use code 404MEDIA for 60% off an annual plan. That's code 404MEDIA at incogni.com/404Media. This week, we talk about Jason's dive into the world of LARPing, where hustlebros and influencers use fake YouTube, OnlyFans, and Stripe dashboards as "pro...

Remap Radio’s Rob Zacny and Emanuel dive deep into their current favorite game, Marathon, and what its middling success says about the future of games. If you listen to the 404 Media podcast by now you probably realized that Joe and I are a little obsessed with a game called Marathon. I’m embarrassed to say that I’ve played it for almost 300 hours since it was released in March. But as much as we’...

Go to surfshark.com/404Media to get 4 extra months of Surfshark VPN, with the reassurance of a 30-day money-back guarantee, or just use code 404MEDIA at checkout. That's surfshark.com/404Media. We start this week with Joseph’s story about the Tokenpocalypse, which is companies scrambling to stop spending so much on AI after providers started charging per AI token. After the break, Joseph and Emanu...

This week, we're doing a deep dive into how marketing companies are poisoning AI search results by manipulating Reddit. You may remember when Google’s AI search results first launched, it recommended that people put glue on their pizza. Well that happened because it scraped a 10 year old Reddit comment. We’ve learned over the last year or so that this sort of thing can be done on purpose, and bran...

Take control of your data footprint risk-free with a 30-day money-back guarantee. Go to incogni.com/404Media and use code 404MEDIA for 60% off an annual plan. That's code 404MEDIA at incogni.com/404Media. Our listeners can buy one pair of glasses and get 20% off any additional pairs at WarbyParker.com/404 — and using our link helps support the show. We start this week with Matthew’s story about a...

Go to surfshark.com/404Media to get 4 extra months of Surfshark VPN, with the reassurance of a 30-day money-back guarantee, or just use code 404MEDIA at checkout. That's surfshark.com/404Media. Our listeners can buy one pair of glasses and get 20% off any additional pairs at WarbyParker.com/404 — and using our link helps support the show. This week Joseph speaks to Jake Hanrahan, creator of the in...

Go to surfshark.com/404Media to get 4 extra months of Surfshark VPN, plus there’s a 30-day money-back guarantee—or just use code 404MEDIA at checkout! We start this week with Joseph’s story about the FCC’s wild proposal to require peoples’ government ID numbers to even get a phone plan. The FCC is doing it to curb robocalls, but also said it would be useful for a bunch of other stuff. After the br...

This week, I’m thrilled to be joined by Imani Thompson. Imani is a digital security trainer and host of a series of events called Cache Me Outside, where she and partner orgs help people understand their personal security, divest from big tech platforms, and learn how to stay safe online. She recently hosted a “de-Googling” party and a self-doxxing rave. We get into how platforms have tried to mak...

We start this week with Emanuel’s story about the internal memes Google employees are making all about AI. Definitely check out some of the examples in the article or on YouTube. After the break, Jason tells us how Microsoft explicitly wants to “make people addicted” to its new AI assistant, according to an internal document. In the subscribers-only section, Jason explains how companies are using...

Emanuel talks to Devindra Hardawar about AI in Hollywood and the state of the movie industry. Take your personal data back with Incogni! Use code 404MEDIA at the link below and get 60% off an annual plan: https://incogni.com/404media I didn’t plan it this way, but it’s a good coincidence that my interview with Devindra Hardawar is coming out on the week that the first Star Wars movie in years is b...

Go to surfshark.com/404Media to get 4 extra months of Surfshark VPN, plus there’s a 30-day money-back guarantee—or just use code 404MEDIA at checkout! We start this week with Jason’s story about one of the wildest hacking stories in a while. Hackers simply asked Meta’s AI to change the email address on a target Instagram account, and the chatbot did so. Insane. After the break, Emanuel tells us ab...

Go to https://surfshark.com/404Media to get 4 extra months of Surfshark VPN, plus there’s a 30-day money-back guarantee—or just use code 404MEDIA at checkout! Ursa Ag is an Alberta, Canada-based company that is selling a repairable, no tech tractor. It’s not often we have companies on this podcast, but listeners of the show will know we have been covering the right to repair movement for years. On...

Sponsor: Take your personal data back with Incogni! Use code 404MEDIA at the link below and get 60% off an annual plan: https://incogni.com/404media We start this week with Sam’s deeply reported story on how deepfakes rocked a high school, and how those kids were failed at each step. After the break, Joseph tells us about BusPatrol, a company that plans to turn school buses into roaming surveillan...

This week Joseph speaks to Zack Whittaker, an editor at TechCrunch. Zack has been leading coverage into the spouseware or stalkerware industry. This is malware sold to ordinary people, which they then often install on their girlfriend’s or someone else’s phone. Zack talks about the crazy scope of this problem. Behind the stalkerware network spilling the private phone data of hundreds of thousands...

We start this week with Sam telling us all about the commencement speeches where speakers have been praising AI, including former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. That did not go down well! After the break, Jason tells us how he was offered the chance to buy a bunch of images of poop to train AI (really). In the subscribers-only section, Joseph explains how researchers planned to stick cameras onto presch...

This week, I’m delighted to be joined by Britt Paris. Britt is a critical informatics scholar and Associate Professor of Library and Information Science at Rutgers University’s School of Communication & Information. Her work focuses on Internet infrastructure, artificial intelligence-generated information objects, digital labor, civic data, and social epistemology. She’s also a fellow with AI Now....

We start this week with Joseph’s story about how we obtained Haotian AI, a sought-after piece of realtime video deepfake software that lets you turn into anyone else during Microsoft Teams, WhatsApp, or Zoom calls. After the break, Matthew tells us about some insane Yu-Gi-Oh trading card drama. In the subscribers-only section, Jason explains how the hard drive shortage is impacting those archiving...

The logic behind Polymarket, Kalshi and sports betting apps can be traced back to the inner workings of the slot machine.  How did we get to a point where it’s legal for anyone to bet on anything? Be it the results of a baseball game or a land war in Europe, if you have access to a credit card and a computer you can try to predict the outcome of anything that’s happening in the world and win a lit...

This week we start with Jason's story about Flock accessing cameras in a children's gymnastics room as a sale pitch demo. After the break, Emanuel tells us why Nature retracted a paper about the alleged benefits of ChatGPT in education. In the subscibers-only section, we talk all about the cancellation of RightsCon after pressure from the Chinese government. City Learns Flock Accessed Cameras in C...

This week, we talk to Brian Merchant, author of Blood in the Machine, about a rash of people physically destroying AI and surveillance infrastructure. Brian puts this wave of attacks in the historical context of the Luddites, who are notoriously misunderstood and fought for worker protections against automation during the Industrial Revolution. Over the last few months, we have seen people in San...

This week, Jason explains the conspiracy theory circulating behind a trippy stock image that went viral after the White House Correspondents’ Dinner—was it sent here by a time traveler? (Spoiler: It was not.) Then Sam unpacks what’s happening at Arizona State University with a messy rollout of a new AI-powered tool that generates lessons by scraping professors’ lectures without their knowledge. In...

This week Joseph talks to Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, a journalist at TechCrunch. Lorenzo has possibly the deepest understanding of one of the wildest cybersecurity stories in years: how an employee of Trenchant, a government malware vendor that is supposed to only sell to the ‘good’ guys, secretly sold a bunch of hacking tools to a Russian company. Those tools, it looks like, then ended up wit...

This week Sam unpacks how social media algorithms manipulate our emotions around everything from engagement rings to wedding dresses to babies, and what it feels like getting lost in the #Weddingtok sauce, and Emanuel breaks down a satirical but functional AI tool that rips off open source software. There’s a long history in “clean room” software that’s really interesting. In the section for subsc...

This week, Sam is joined by Maddy Myers, editor-in-chief of Mothership. She’s also a co-host of the video games podcast Triple Click.  Maddy launched Mothership with co-founder Zoë Hannah in January. It’s a queer and women-owned independent publication that focuses on gender and games. They discuss Maddy’s early days of games journalism via a (print!) alt-weekly in Boston and then at the Mary Sue,...

We start this week with Joseph’s story on the inherent friction between secure chat apps like Signal and the phone they’re running on. Incoming message content can be stored in a phone’s internal notification database. After the break, Matthew tells us the latest about the data center pushback. Then in the subscribers’ only section, Emanuel tells us all about Marathon and its player numbers. (00:0...