Vue normale

Reçu aujourd’hui — 11 septembre 2025

Democrats Want JPMorgan and Other Banks to Testify Over Epstein Ties

11 septembre 2025 à 12:04
Ten Democratic senators called on the Senate Banking Committee to hold hearings into the role that financial institutions may have played in enabling Jeffrey Epstein’s sex crimes.

© Kenny Holston/The New York Times

Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, led a group on senators calling for JPMorgan Chief Executive Jamie Dimon and other bank leaders to testify before a committee.
Reçu avant avant-hier

James Walkinshaw, Democrat of Virginia, Wins House Special Election

9 septembre 2025 à 20:27
James Walkinshaw will fill a seat left open by the death of his former boss, Gerald Connolly, and shrink the Republicans’ majority in the chamber.

© Kevin Wolf/Associated Press

James Walkinshaw is the first Democrat to win a House special election since President Trump took office in January.

James Talarico Joins Senate Campaign in Texas

9 septembre 2025 à 05:02
State Representative James Talarico, who is studying to become a Presbyterian pastor, has sparred with Fox News hosts and bantered with Joe Rogan. Now he wants Senator John Cornyn’s seat.

© Eric Gay/Associated Press

State Representative James Talarico, a seminary student who entered the race for the seat currently held by Senator John Cornyn, believes Texas and the country want a return to decency.

President of Peace, Department of War. A New Name Sends Mixed Signals.

6 septembre 2025 à 20:36
President Trump’s renaming of the Defense Department comes amid his campaign for a Nobel Peace Prize. On Saturday, he wrote on social media that Chicago was “about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR.”

© Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times

President Trump signed an executive order on Friday to change the name of the Defense Department to the Department of War. Without congressional approval, the new name will be only ceremonial.

Trump to Sign Order Renaming the Defense Department as the Department of War

5 septembre 2025 à 06:29
The president is turning back the clock to the name the agency held until shortly after World War II.

© Tierney L. Cross/The New York Times

The Pentagon, headquarters of the Defense Department.

Vetements Takes Its Trademark Fight to U.S. Supreme Court

4 septembre 2025 à 10:42
Why does Veuve Clicquot get a U.S. trademark while Vetements — home of the packing-tape minidress, no less! — does not? Its lawyers are asking the Supreme Court.

© Peter White/Getty Images

Travis Scott and Gigi Hadid walking the runway during the Vetements show at Paris Fashion Week last year.

N.Y. Attorney General Sues Far-Right Group VDARE for Misusing Funds

3 septembre 2025 à 12:35
The suit says the nonprofit’s leaders — who helped bring anti-immigrant ideas into the G.O.P. mainstream — used donor money to buy a castle-like home.

© Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post, via Getty Images

Peter and Lydia Brimelow, leaders of the anti-immigration nonprofit VDARE, are being sued by Letitia James, New York’s attorney general, for allegedly misusing funds to purchase a medieval-style castle in West Virginia.

Trump’s Allegations Against Lisa Cook in Some Ways Echo His Own Legal Fight

26 août 2025 à 13:21
President Trump, during his campaign for a second term, was accused of fraudulently inflating his net worth in order to get better rates on bank loans.

© Doug Mills/The New York Times

President Trump had been accused of a decade-long practice of fraudulently inflating his net worth in order to get better rates on bank loans.

Babe Ruth (Not That One) Stole Baseball Players’ Identities, U.S. Says

25 août 2025 à 21:01
George Herman Ruth, a Tennessee man with the same full name as the Yankees slugger, used the names of retired and dead players to commit fraud, prosecutors said.

© Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

Babe Ruth in 1931. A Tennessee man with the same full name as the Hall of Fame slugger used the identities of former baseball players as part of a fraud scheme, federal prosecutors said.
  • ✇404 Media
  • AI at the World’s Biggest Games Event Booked Random Meetings for Attendees
    Gamescom, one of the biggest video game industry trade shows in the world, used AI to book meetings for attending publishers, developers, and media even if they didn’t want them. Attendees complained about random meetings showing up on their calendars, prompting Gamescom to turn off the feature and apologize. Gamescom is a video game trade fair and convention in Germany that brings together journalists, developers, and studio executives for a week of networking and announcements. Since the de
     

AI at the World’s Biggest Games Event Booked Random Meetings for Attendees

20 août 2025 à 09:50
AI at the World’s Biggest Games Event Booked Random Meetings for Attendees

Gamescom, one of the biggest video game industry trade shows in the world, used AI to book meetings for attending publishers, developers, and media even if they didn’t want them. Attendees complained about random meetings showing up on their calendars, prompting Gamescom to turn off the feature and apologize. 

Gamescom is a video game trade fair and convention in Germany that brings together journalists, developers, and studio executives for a week of networking and announcements. Since the death of E3, Gamescom is now the biggest video game convention in the world.

It’s a place where people take a lot of meetings, but usually ones they requested and set up weeks in advance by talking directly to human public relations represenatives. Those plagued by AI-generated meetings shared their frustration on social media. “I’ve got 9x AI-created meetings that have all been ‘accepted’ by the other attendee… but after speaking to one they’ve confirmed they didn’t know about it either,” Graham Day, a Twitch partner, said on X.

Screenshots of Day’s Gamescom app showed a block of 30 minutes 1-on-1 meetings had been confirmed and that the meeting had been "generated based on profile similarities.”

Anyone else’s #gamescom app booked in meetings without your knowledge?

I’ve got 9x AI-created meetings that have all been “accepted” by the other attendee… but after speaking to one they’ve confirmed they didn’t know about it either.

How do I stop this @gamescom?! pic.twitter.com/DvHnbHF91k

— Graham Day @ gamescom (@Graham_Day) August 18, 2025

“The Gamescom app AI-generating meetings you have to manually decline is absolutely heinous shit,” Chris Schilling, the editorial director of Lost In Cult, said on Bluesky

Developer JC Lau shared screenshots of the message she received from the app. “Our meeting generator has sent you a meeting suggestion with a person who matches your interests,” the app said in the screenshot. “Don’t miss an opportunity—accept requests!”

The message implied that guests would need to accept the AI-generated meetings to confirm them. But a follow up from Lau showed that wasn’t the case. One of their friends had 9 different push notifications from the app, all for confirmed AI-generated meetings.

Yuppppp one of my friends shared this, mine wasn’t that bad but I don’t know how Informa keeps getting stacks of money for a conference and roll out something this screwed up

JC Lau 🔜 Dev/Gamescom! (@drjclau.bsky.social) 2025-08-18T16:06:57.323Z

“Gamescom's app added an AI feature this year and it did not go well. Folks were overwhelmed with automatically generated meeting requests that they did not want. It generated a lot of stuff, but not value,” freelance product and UX designer Robin-Yann Storm said on Bluesky. AI is on Storm’s mind. He’s giving a talk at Gamescom Congress titled: Old news, new package: AI, Procedural Generation, UGC, In-Game Trading, Crypto, and the Metaverse. “It's targeted towards games-adjacent folks, not just game-devs, in how to recognize, discuss, and prevent the 'bamboozle' of things that sound new, but are actually much older,” he told 404 Media.

On Bluesky, Henry Stockdale, a senior editor at UploadVR, said that the AI-generated meetings gave him a minor panic attack as he was boarding his plane. “Two meetings were scheduled that already clashed with appointments made outside of the Gamescom platform, so I would not have attended them,” he told 404 Media. “I don't use generative AI and am actively put off by platforms forcing that functionality in.”

Gamescom backtracked. It disabled the AI and sent attendees an apology. It’s unclear how long the service was active and generating unwanted meetings and Gamescom did not return 404 Media’s request for comment. “We tested a new feature today—the AI meeting generator. The Aim was to suggest suitable business contacts based on your profiles and make it easier for you to plan your trade fair contacts,” Gamescom follow up said. 

“However, your honest feedback shows us that this feature does not provide the desired value. We have therefore decided to completely remove the automatically generated meetings from your profiles,” it added. “We apologize for any inconvenience caused.”

Many of the affected attendees posted copies of the apology across X and Bluesky. “I think they handled it well, quickly realising this was a bad idea and apologising, though the fact they even thought to try this days before the event is, put politely: poor,” Stockdale said.

Right now, companies are forcing generative AI into everyone’s life, whether they want it or not. It might be a bubble, one so big that it’s propping up the U.S. economy, but we’re stuck with it until it bursts.

Gamescom attendees who escaped AI-generated meetings will not be escaping AI during their time in Germany. NVIDIA is there with Project G-Assist, an AI assistant it says will let PC users dial in their gaming settings. Chris Hewish, the CEO of payment company Xsolla, told Variety that AI would be one of the big focuses of the conference. And Microsoft will host a roundtable for developers about how AI can make them more efficient. 

  • ✇404 Media
  • Archivists Let You Now Read Some of the First Ever Reviews of Mario and Zelda
    Some of the first reviews ever written for the original Legend of Zelda and Super Mario Bros. have been digitized and published by the Video Game History Foundation. The reviews appeared in Computer Entertainer, an early video game magazine that ran from 1982 to 1990. The archivists at the Foundation tracked down the magazine’s entire run and have published it all online under a Creative Commons license. Computer Entertainer has a fascinating history. It was one of the only magazines to cover
     

Archivists Let You Now Read Some of the First Ever Reviews of Mario and Zelda

7 août 2025 à 11:51
Archivists Let You Now Read Some of the First Ever Reviews of Mario and Zelda

Some of the first reviews ever written for the original Legend of Zelda and Super Mario Bros. have been digitized and published by the Video Game History Foundation. The reviews appeared in Computer Entertainer, an early video game magazine that ran from 1982 to 1990. The archivists at the Foundation tracked down the magazine’s entire run and have published it all online under a Creative Commons license. 

Computer Entertainer has a fascinating history. It was one of the only magazines to cover video games during the market crash of the mid 1980s. “Simply put, there weren't other video game magazines in this era, at least in the United States,” Phil Salvador, the Library Director at the VGHF, told 404 Media. “In many cases, this is the only American coverage we have for this period.”

❌