404 Media
Jason Koebler, Samantha Cole, Joseph Cox, Emanuel Maiberg — Journalist-owned tech publication, founded after Vice/Motherboard
404 Media is an independent media company founded by technology journalists Jason Koebler, Emanuel Maiberg, Samantha Cole, and Joseph Cox.
404media.coIn a kleptocracy, there is no reason for a billionaire to own an adversarial news outlet.
Four journalists who covered tech at Vice's Motherboard went independent and built something sharper than what came before. 404 Media breaks stories on surveillance, hacking, AI abuse, and internet culture with genuine investigative muscle — their reporting has triggered telecom fines, congressional investigations, and platform policy changes. The tone is direct, occasionally darkly funny, and never hedges when something deserves to be called out.
Written by Jason Koebler, Samantha Cole, Joseph Cox, Emanuel Maiberg since 2023.
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Scientists Discover Hidden Symmetry on Earth That Nobody Can Explain
Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that balanced it out, performed evasive maneuvers, decorated a love shack, and bred inside bones.First, scientists discover a new “triple symmetry” on Earth that nobody can explain. Then: female dolphins keep tabs on coercive males, bowerbirds turn urban trash into urbane treasure, and the housing opportunities provided by dead dinos.As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsessi...
ICE’s Plan to Let Cops Around the Country Scan Faces to Verify Immigration Status
📄This article was primarily reported using public records requests. We are making it available to all readers as a public service. FOIA reporting can be expensive, please consider subscribing to 404 Media to support this work. Or send us a one time donation via our tip jar here.Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) plans to give potentially more than a thousand local law enforcement agencies a facial recognition app that would query a database of hundreds of millions of images to ver...
Behind the Blog: Dangerous Memes
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 controversial memes, good times at Meta, and more. EMANUEL: My recent story about Google employees internally sharing memes about how they hate the company’s AI product took a bit more time than it should because I had to recreate all the memes you see in that article. Rather than screenshot and repost the images Google employees shared...
The U.S. Military Quietly Turned GPS Into a Global ‘Numbers Station,’ Evidence Suggests
🌘Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week. The U.S. military has likely been quietly broadcasting codes for its global encryption network using public GPS for nearly 20 years, turning each satellite into a hidden “numbers station,” according to Steven Murdoch, an information security expert, who detailed his findings in a new article in Inside GNSS.That means every device that u...
K-pop Fans Are Calling Out Creepy Deepfakes of Idols
K-pop fans are well-known as a force to be reckoned with on the internet, with some fans holding fierce allegiances and passions when it comes to specific artists. On social media, some obsessive fans are using generative AI to create what is essentially self-insert fan-fiction—creepy videos and images of themselves kissing, cuddling and getting various kinds of lovey-dovey with their favorite idols. The result is a contemporary, tech-powered mutation of idol culture that takes fan art to...
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