Jason Koebler

1 week ago | 404media.co | Jason Koebler

The competition is fierce, but no one can paint quite as vivid a picture of the future technofeudalist dystopia the Trump administration is trying to build as Howard Lutnick, the Secretary of Commerce, of “the army of millions and millions of people screwing in little, little screws to make iPhones, that kind of thing is going to come to America” fame.

2 weeks ago | 404media.co | Jason Koebler

I live close to the famous Venice Beach boardwalk in Los Angeles, one of the most popular tourist spots in California and, by extension, the United States. The Venice Beach boardwalk is so famous, in fact, that it is one of just a few stops on Sandra & Dennis’s German-language bus tours.

2 weeks ago | 404media.co | Jason Koebler

“You Wouldn’t Steal a Car,” one of the most infamous anti-piracy campaigns of all time, used a pirated font to spell out its slogan. The creator of the real font, called FF Confidential, told 404 Media “the irony is extremely funny indeed.” “Piracy. It’s a Crime” was a series of PSAs that in 2024 was a joint project between the Intellectual Property Office of Singapore and the Motion Picture Association, and has been widely parodied in the two decades since.

2 weeks ago | 404media.co | Jason Koebler

Reddit’s top lawyer, Ben Lee, said the company is considering legal action against researchers from the University of Zurich who ran what he called an “improper and highly unethical experiment” by surreptitiously deploying AI chatbots in a popular debate subreddit. The University of Zurich told 404 Media that the experiment results will not be published and said the university is investigating how the research was conducted.

2 weeks ago | 404media.co | Jason Koebler

A team of researchers who say they are from the University of Zurich ran an “unauthorized,” large-scale experiment in which they secretly deployed AI-powered bots into a popular debate subreddit called r/changemyview in an attempt to research whether AI could be used to change people’s minds about contentious topics.