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404 Media is an independent, subscription-funded news outlet covering technology, cybersecurity, hacking, and digital rights.
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Customs and Border Protection accessed more than 80,000 Flock cameras in a 2025 pilot, one police department's without its knowledge. The cities and campuses that pay for the cameras are left answerable for searches they may never see.
Reality
Magnet Forensics tells police in a leaked video that GrayKey can hold seized iPhones in After First Unlock state through Apple's 72-hour reboot. If it holds, police need only reach a seized phone before the reboot and can unlock it on their own schedule.
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VIDIZMO pitched Johnson City, Tennessee police in May on facial recognition across Flock and Axon footage in one platform. Flock's pledge against face recognition covers its own devices; VIDIZMO's route starts with clips an agency exports itself.
Reality
Dartmouth and Lancaster researchers tie 88 non-consensual deepfake sites to five mainstream web providers led by Cloudflare, Google and Namecheap. The sites surfaced in keyword searches and every provider already bans illegal use, so the gap the study points to is enforcement.
Reality
White House drug program HIDTA, with 33 regional programs covering every state, pulls local Flock and Axon plate data onto federal servers, 404 Media reports. The outlet calls it an end-around to the limits cities are now placing on how Flock data is used.
Reality
Contractors hired to grade Copilot's image edits see each user's original photo, faces uncensored, beside the request and two AI outputs, 404 Media reported. Microsoft did not say whether users can keep their uploads out of those reviews.
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ShinyHunters told 404 Media it will never publish its FBI haul, which it claims is 2 to 3 terabytes covering all employees and applicants. Keeping the files unpublished limits public exposure, but agents' home addresses, spouses' names and medical records are still with the group.
Reality
At least hundreds of human contractors grading Microsoft's Copilot see users' prompts and uploaded images, internal documents seen by 404 Media show. For employers, anything staff send the assistant now counts as data handed to an outside party.
Reality
A pro se plaintiff hid instructions for an AI reviewer in white-on-white type. What caught him was odd whitespace on the page, not any model's refusal to comply.
Reality
A bookseller's tracker ended up at a Las Vegas warehouse where Amazon staff cut books off their spines. The rumour publishers could not price now has a named party.
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4 publishersReality
404 Media tracked a rare-book order to an Amazon warehouse in Las Vegas where spines are cut off to feed a scanner. The destruction is not a quirk. It is a compliance expense.
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3 publishersReality
Community Not Cameras wants Seattle's council to rein in surveillance procurement. The account one of its members gives of the police fusion room points instead at credential control and session logging.
Reality
OpenAI's outside reviewers read real conversations with account names masked. The 404 Media documents show some review tasks also carry a summary of what ChatGPT has remembered about the user, including location.
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Hackers pulled a camera off a roadway, recovered the encryption key stored inside it, and handed the files to 404 Media and WIRED. The joint analysis found a person detector inside an automatic license plate reader.
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3 publishersReality
DDoSecrets published filesystem images taken from a working Flock ALPR camera. The Android build inside them carries a hard-coded API key and a security patch level seven years older than the build itself.
Reality
The FBI says it is investigating unauthorized activity affecting FBIjobs.gov. 404 Media reports the intruders came in through an Oracle PeopleSoft applicant server and then reached a government cloud holding agent data.
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4 publishersReality
The extortion crew defaced apply.fbijobs.gov on September 22 and told reporters it got remote code execution from a new Oracle PeopleSoft flaw, the same one it says it is now using against Fortune 500 targets. No technical details are public.
Perspective Coverage
14 publishersReality
Two ChatGPT users are suing OpenAI to make human review of chats opt-in, a change that would reach more than 900 million weekly users. Until a court rules, companies should assume staff chats on consumer ChatGPT, with the default setting on, can reach a staffing-firm contractor.
Reality
Instinct, an AI agent people text with, is reportedly in talks to raise $1 billion at a $10 billion valuation, according to The Information. A Wired tester credits its habit of proposing errands, but the public numbers so far count installs and investor money, with retention unreported.
Reality
The group told 404 Media it reached apply.fbijobs.gov through Oracle's PeopleSoft, and the FBI says the point of breach is still undetermined. Three of the bureau's recruiting pages have been serving error screens.
Reality
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