ICE officers are able to point their smartphone’s camera at a person and near instantaneously run their face against a bank of 200 million images, then pull up their name, date of birth, nationality, unique identifiers such as their “alien” number, and whether an immigration judge has determined they should be deported from the country, according to ICE material viewed by 404 Media.

The new material, which includes user manuals for ICE’s recently launched internal app called Mobile Fortify, provides granular insight into exactly how ICE’s new facial recognition app works, what data it can return on a subject, and where ICE is sourcing that data. The app represents an unprecedented linking of government databases into a single tool, including from the State Department, Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the FBI, and state records. It also includes the potential for ICE to later add commercially available databases that contain even more personal data on people inside the United States.

“This app shows that biometric technology has moved well beyond just confirming someone's identity. In the hands of ICE officers, it's becoming a way to retrieve vast amounts of data about a person on demand just by pointing a camera in their face,” Dave Maass, director of investigations at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), told 404 Media. “The more they streamline its use, the more they streamline its abuse. When an officer says, ‘papers please,’ you could choose to say nothing and face the consequences; with face recognition, your options are diminished.”

Steam, the dominant digital storefront for PC games operated by Valve, updated its guidelines to forbid “certain kinds of adult content” and blamed restrictions from payment processors and financial institutions. The update was initially spotted by SteamDB.info , a platform that tracks and publishes data about Steam, and reported by the Japanese gaming site Gamespark.

The update is yet another signal that payment processors are lately becoming more vigilant about what online platforms that host adult content they’ll provide services to and another clear sign that they are currently the ultimate arbiter of what kind of content can be made easily available online, or not. 

Steam’s policy change appears under the onboarding portion of its Steamworks documentation for developers and publishers. The 15th item on a list of “what you shouldn’t publish on Steam” now reads: “Content that may violate the rules and standards set forth by Steam’s payment processors and related card networks and banks, or internet network providers. In particular, certain kinds of adult only content.”

It’s not clear when exactly Valve updated this list, but an archive of this page from April shows that it only had 14 items then. Other items that were already on the list included “nude or sexually explicit images of real people” and “adult content that isn’t appropriately labeled and age-gated,” but Valve did not previously mention payment processors specifically. 

"We were recently notified that certain games on Steam may violate the rules and standards set forth by our payment processors and their related card networks and banks," Valve spokesperson Kaci Aitchison Boyle told me in an email. "As a result, we are retiring those games from being sold on the Steam Store, because loss of payment methods would prevent customers from being able to purchase other titles and game content on Steam. We are directly notifying developers of these games, and issuing app credits should they have another game they’d like to distribute on Steam in the future."

Valve did not respond to questions about where developers might find more details about payment processors’ rules and standards. 

SteamDB.info, which also tracks when games are added or removed from Steam, noted many adult games have been removed from Steam in the last 24 hours. Sex games, many of which are of very low quality and sometimes include very extreme content, have been common on Steam for years. In April, I wrote about a “rape and incest” game called No Mercy which the developers eventually voluntarily removed from Steam after pressure from users, media, and lawmakers in the UK. The majority of games I saw that were removed from Steam recently revolve around similar themes, but we don’t know if they were removed by the developers or Valve, and if they were removed by Valve because of the recent policy change. Games are removed from Steam every day for a variety of reasons, including expired licensing deals or developers no longer wanting to support a game. 

However, Steam’s policy change comes at a time that we’ve seen increased pressure from payment processors around adult content. We recently reported that payment processors have forced two major AI models sharing platforms, Civitai and Tensor.Art, to remove certain adult content.

Update: This story has been updated with comment from Valve. 

Yesterday I ordered my lunch from an AI operating a drive-thru. It was fine. Banal. Boring even. A new experience that I think will become routine in the future.

The AI drive-thru operator isn’t cutting edge tech deployed in an upscale market to win over high value consumers. I live at the edge of a South Carolina city with a little more than 140,000 people. A booming metropolis with the best and the finest, it is not.

There’s a lot of local fast food fried chicken joints here and one of them is Bojangles. It’s mid. Better than KFC and not as good as Popeyes, Bojangles is fine if you’re hungry but you’ll forget the meal as soon as it’s done and you’ll never yearn for it. Last year the restaurant said it would deploy an AI agent at its drive-thru windows. It’s called, I shit you not, Bo-Linda and made by the Israeli tech firm Hi-Auto.

According to the Bojangles website, “Bo-Linda™ can take guest orders 96+% of the time with no human intervention,” and “improve overall satisfaction by offloading order taking from team members and providing a consistent guest experience.”

When Bo-Linda finally arrived in South Carolina, I went to see what the fuss was about. It was crushingly dull. A preview of a time in the near future, I think, when the AI bubble retracts and the agents are common. It took my order with an efficiency that, I’ll be honest, is not typical of the typical fast food worker. The worst part was its constant attempts to up-sell me.

“Do you want to upgrade your drink to our new water-melon iced tea?” It asked.

“No thank you.”

“Would you like to add our new peach cobbler for $1.99?”

“No thank you.”

“May I get you anything else?”

“No, that’s it.”“Would you like to round up for military scholarships?”“No thank you.”

“You’re welcome. Thank you. Your total is $10.89.”

When 404 Media founder Joseph Cox watched the video of my interactions, he made fun of my “no thank yous.” What can I say? There’s an ingrained and often stifling politeness that’s bred into us in the American South. Even though I knew I was talking to a machine, I couldn’t not be nice to it.

My thought in the immediate aftermath is that the whole thing was painless. My order wasn’t complicated, but it was correct. The machine never stumbled over itself or asked for clarification. It knew what I wanted and the humans at the window gave it to me. A few conversations with friends and a quick scan of social media in the area show that other people have had much the same interactions with Bo-Linda.

The drive-thru AI, much like the chicken it sold me, is fine. Forgettable.

It was later, sitting at home, and doing a little research for the story that concerns popped up. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said that saying “please” and “thank you” to ChatGPT has cost the company tens of millions of dollars. How much water and energy had I burned being polite to Bo-Linda the chatbot?

Sometimes it feels like the answers to these questions don’t matter. We’re barreling forward into the AI future, whether we like it or not. Data centers are springing up across America and nuclear power plants are coming back online, so Bojangles can make a little more money and so people in the drive-thru can feel a little less friction before eating their meal.

This is how a new technology takes over, what it feels like right before it becomes ubiquitous. One day you wake up and the cameras are everywhere, able to recognize your face and chart your movements across the city you live in. One day you look up and everyone has their face buried in their phone. It happened by degrees, but so gradually you didn’t notice. There were signs along the way, dangers and warnings.

But mostly, it was fine, as boring and routine as ordering chicken at a drive-thru.

So-called 3D-printed ghost guns are untraceable firearms that can be assembled at home. But cutting edge work from a forensic expert in California and researchers at the University of Oklahoma may soon show investigators can trace a 3D printed object to the specific printer that made it.

Weapons manufactured using 3D printers have been a subject of Biden-era legislation and recent Supreme Court scrutiny. It’s possible to download the blueprints for a firearm and build it in your home. There’s no serial number to track and no store to scrutinize your purchase. Luigi Mangione used a ghost gun to allegedly assassinate United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

Sir Keir Starmer has been grilled by a Labour MP over whether the government will impose sanctions on Israel to “stop the genocide”.

ICE Block, an app that lets users warn others about the location of ICE officers, and which for a short while was the top of the social media App Store chart, does protect users’ privacy and doesn’t share your location with third parties, according to a recent analysis from a security researcher. ICE Block already claimed that it did not collect any data from the app; the analysis now corroborates that.

“It’s not uploading your location at all, when you make a report that report isn’t associated with your device in any way, and there are no third party services that it talks to or sends data to,” Cooper Quintin, senior public interest technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), who analyzed the ICE Block app, told 404 Media.

Hugging Face, a company with a multi-billion dollar valuation and one of the most commonly used platforms for sharing AI tools and resources, is hosting over 5,000 AI image generation models that are designed to recreate the likeness of real people. These models were all previously hosted on Civitai, an AI model sharing platform 404 Media reporting has shown was used for creating nonconsensual pornography, until Civitai banned them due to pressure from payment processors. 

Users downloaded the models from Civitai and reuploaded them to Hugging Face as part of a concerted community effort to archive the models after Civitai announced in May it will ban them. In that announcement, Civitai said it will give the people who originally uploaded them “a short period of time” before they were removed. Civitai users began organizing an archiving effort on Discord earlier in May after Civitai indicated it had to make content policy changes due to pressure from payment processors, and the effort kicked into high gear when Civitai announced the new “real people” model policy. 

At the time of writing, the Discord channel has hundreds of members who are still finding and sharing models that have been removed from Civitai and are reuploading them to Hugging Face. Some users have even shared a piece of software, also hosted on Hugging Face, which allows users to automatically upload Civitai models to Hugging Face in batches. 

Hugging Face did not respond to multiple requests for comment. It also did not respond to specific questions about how and if it plans to moderate these models given the fact that they were previously hosted on a platform primarily used for AI generating pornography, and which our reporting shows were used to create noncensual pornography. 

I found the Civitai models of real people that were reuploaded to Hugging Face thanks to a paper I covered where researchers scraped Civitai. The paper showed that the platform was primarily used for pornographic content, and that it deleted at least 50,000 AI models designed to recreate the likeness of real people once it changed its policy in May. The researchers, Laura Wagner and Eva Cetinic from the University of Zurich, provided me with a spreadsheet of all the deleted models, which included the name of the models (which is almost always the name of a female celebrity or lesser known internet personality), a link to where it was previously hosted on Civitai, and the SHA256 hash Civitai uses to identify all the models hosted on its site. 

The people who are reuploading the Civitai models to Hugging Face are seemingly trying to hide the purpose of those models on Hugging Face. On Hugging Face, these models have generic names and URLs like “LORA” or “Test model.” Users can’t tell that these models are used to generate the likeness of real people just by looking at their Hugging Face page, nor would they be able to find them by searching for the names of celebrities on Hugging Face. In order to find them, users can go to a separate website the Civitai archivists created. There, they can enter the name of a Civitai model, the link where it used to be hosted on Civitai before it was deleted, or the model’s SHA256 hash. All of these will lead users to a page which explains what the model is, show its name, as well as several images showing the kind of images it can generate. At the bottom of that page is a link to one or more Hugging Face “mirrors” where the model has been reuploaded. 

By using Wagner’s and Cetinic’s data and entering it into this Civitai archive site, I was able to find the Civitai models hosted on Hugging Face. 

Hugging Face’s content policy bans “Unlawful, defamatory, fraudulent, or intentionally deceptive Content (e.g., disinformation, phishing, scams, inauthentic behavior),” as well as “Sexual Content used for harassment, bullying, or created without explicit consent.” Models that generate the likeness of real people don’t have to be used for unlawful or defamatory ends, and they only produce sexual content if people choose to use them that way. There’s nothing in Hugging Face’s content policy that explicitly forbids AI models that recreate the likeness of real people. 

However, the Hugging Face Ethics & Society group, which is “committed to operationalizing ethics at the cutting-edge of machine learning,” has identified six “high-level categories for describing ethical aspects of machine learning work,” one of which is that AI should be “Consentful.”

“Consentful technology supports the self-determination of people who use and are affected by these technologies,” the company explains. Examples of this, the company says, includes “Avoiding extractive, chauvinist, ‘dark,’ and otherwise ‘unethical’ patterns of engagement.”

Other AI models that recreate the likeness of real people could conceivably not violate any of these principles. For example, two of the deleted Civitai models that were reuploaded to Hugging Face were designed to recreate the likeness of Vladimir Putin, which in theory people would want to use in order to mock or criticize the Russian president. However, the vast majority of the models are of female celebrities, which my reporting has shown is being used to create nonconsensual sexual content, and which were deleted en masse from Civitai because of pressure from payment processors who didn’t want to be associated with that type of media. 

In the two years that I’ve been reporting about Civitai, a platform for sharing AI image generation models that has been instrumental in the production of AI generated non-consensual porn, Civitai has consistently argued that the amount of adult content on the site has been overstated. But new research shows that, if anything, the amount of adult content on Civitai has been underestimated.

In their paper, “Perpetuating Misogyny with Generative AI: How Model Personalization Normalizes Gendered Harm,” researchers Laura Wagner and Eva Cetinic from the University of Zurich studied more than 40 million user-generated images on Civitai and over 230,000 models. They found “a disproportionate rise in not-safe-for-work (NSFW) content and a significant number of models intended to mimic real individuals” on the platform, they write in the paper.

“What began as a promising creative breakthrough in TTI [text-to-image] generation and model personalization, has devolved into a pipeline for the large-scale production of sensational, biased, and abusive content. The open-source nature of TTI technologies, proclaimed as a democratizing force in generative AI, has also enabled the propagation of models that perpetuate hypersexualized imagery and nonconsensual deepfakes,” Wagner and Cetinic write in their paper. “Several indicators suggest a descent into a self-reinforcing feedback loop of platform decay. These include a dramatic increase in NSFW imagery, from 41% to 80% in two years, as well as the community’s normalization of deepfakes, misogynistic tropes, and other exploitative content.”

To visualize just how dominant adult content was on Civitai, check the chart below, which shows the distribution of images by “NSFW browsing levels” over time. These categories, which are inspired by the Motion Picture Association film rating system and are used by Civitai to tag images, show that adult content was always a significant portion of all images hosted on the site, but that the portion of “overtly sexual, or disturbing” content only grew as the site became more popular, and exploded starting in 2024. The chart is based on Civitai’s own numbers and categorization system which the researchers scraped from the site. It likely undercounts the number of explicit images on the site since as both the researchers and I observed during my reporting, not all adult content is tagged as such. 

In December, 2023, Civitai CEO Justin Maier told Venture Beat that “less than 20% of the posted content is what we would consider ‘PG-13’ or above.” When I reached Maier for comment for this article, he told me that “The VentureBeat figure cited a December 2023 snapshot, when adult posts were a minority. The mix shifted in 2024 as many NSFW creators migrated from platforms that no longer allow that content.”

However, the data in the paper shows that by October of 2023, 56 percent of all images on the site were tagged as “NSFW” and were designated by Civitai as “PG-13” or above.

In May, Civitai announced it’s banning all AI image generation models designed to recreate the likeness of real people because of pressure from payment processors. Since the authors of the paper were already tracking hundreds of thousands of models hosted on Civitai, they could easily see which models were removed, giving us a first clear look at how common those models were. 

Overall, they saw that more than 50,000 models designed to AI-generate the likeness of real people were removed because of the ban. These are models that Civitai itself tagged as “person of interest,” the tag it uses to indicate a model recreates the likeness of a real person, so the actual number of models depicting real people is likely higher. 

It’s hard to say if the most popular AI models on Civitai were all popular just because they were used to generate explicit images, because people could use models tagged as NSFW to generate non-nude images and vice versa. For example, according to the data collected by the researchers the most popular AI image generation model on Civitai was EasyNegative with almost 600,000 downloads. It’s not tagged or promoted as a model for generating pornography, but images that users created with it, which are shared on its Civitai model page, show it is commonly used that way. 

Other very popular models on Civitai are clearly designed to generate explicit images. The sixth most popular model with 360,000 downloads is Nudify XL: Better Bodies, which its creator says is for “nude female frontals.” A model called Realistic Vaginas - God Pussy 1 had 256,000 downloads. The POV Squatting Cowgirl LoRA model, which Civitai tagged as a “sex” model, had 189,000 downloads. 

The authors of the paper also conducted deeper analysis of the 40,000 most downloaded models on Civitai. In the 11,151 models where they could extract textual training data, meaning text that indicates what kind of images the models were trained on, they found “specifically abusive terms.” 5.6 percent included the keywords “loli” (558 models) and/or “shota” (69 models), Japanese terms commonly used to refer to sexualized depictions of pre-pubescent girls and boys. About 2.1 percent (189 models) included the keyword “rape.”

The data shows with clear numbers what we have long argued at 404 Media: adult content drives technological innovation and early adoption, and this has been especially true in the world of generative AI. Despite its protestation to the contrary, Civitai, which is one of the fastest growing platforms in that industry, and that the influential Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz invested in, grew because of explicit content, much of which was nonconsensual. 

“The rapid rise of NSFW content, the over-representation of young female subjects, and the prioritization of sensational content to drive engagement reflect an exploitative, even abusive dynamic,” the researchers wrote. “Additionally, structural discrimination embedded in today’s open-source TTI tools and models have the potential to cause significant downstream harm as they might become widely adopted and even integrated into future consumer applications.” 

Adult content driving innovation and early adoption doesn’t have to be harmful. As the researchers write, it’s the choices platforms like Civitai make that give us these outcomes. 

“The contingent nature of technology, shaped by online communities, platform operators, lawmakers, and society as a whole, also creates opportunities for intervention,” they write. “Model-sharing hubs and social media platforms both have the capacity to implement safeguards that can limit the spread of abusive practices such as deepfake creation and abusive imagery.”

The Moderate Party of Sweden has removed an AI tool from its website after people used it to generate videos of Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson asking Adolf Hitler for support.The tool allowed users to generate videos of Kristersson holding an AI-generated message in an attempt to promote the candidate ahead of the general election in Sweden next year.

Swedish television station TV4 used the tool to generate a video of Kristersson on a newspaper above the headline “Sweden needs Adolf Hitler” after it noticed that it had no guardrails or filters.

In the video TV4 generated using the website, Kristersson makes his pitch over stock footage of old people embracing. A woman runs through a field, the camera focusing on flowers while the sun twinkles in the background. Cut to Kristersson. He turns a blue board around. “We need you, Adolf Hitler,” it says.

The Moderates removed the AI system from its website, but the videos of Ulf asking Hitler to join the Moderates remain on social media and TV4’s website..

In an attempt to bolster its party's ranks, Moderates launched a website that allowed users to generate a custom video of Kristersson asking someone to join the party. The idea was probably to have party members plug in the names of friends and family members and share what appeared to be a personalized message from the PM asking for their support.

In the video, Kristersson stands in front of stairs, makes his pitch, and turns around a blue tablet that bears a personalized message to the viewer. The system apparently had no guardrails or filters and Swedish television station TV4 was able to plug in the names Adolf Hitler, Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, and Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik.

The Moderate Party did not return 404 Media’s request for a comment about the situation, but told TV4 it shut down the site as soon as it learned people were using it to generate messages with inappropriate names.

The Moderate Party’s AI-generated video was simple.. It filmed the PM holding a blue board it could easily overlay with input from a user and then used AI to generate the fake newspaper and a few other slides. Preventing people from typing in “Hitler” or “Anders Brevik” would have been as simple as maintaining a list of prohibited names, words, and phrases, something that every video game and service does. Users are good at bypassing guardrails, but the Moderate’s AI tool appeared to have none.

Users making content you don’t want to be associated with is one of the oldest and most well known problems in AI. If you release a chatbot, generative photo system, or automated political greeting generator, someone will use it to reference the Nazis or make nonconsensual porn.

When Microsoft launched TAY in 2016, users turned it into a Hitler-loving white nationalist in a few hours. Eight years later, another Microsoft AI product had a loophole that let people make AI-generated nudes of Taylor Swift. Earlier this year, Instagram’s AI chatbots lied about being licensed therapists.

As immigration raids roll out across the U.S., those affected are processing the experience in the normal 2025 way—via vertical video. 

Across social media, people are uploading clips with uncanny-valley titles like “A normal day for me after being deported to Mexico” and “3 things I wish I knew before self-deporting from the US!” These posts have the normal shape, voiceovers, and fonts of influencer content, but their dystopian topic reflects the whiplash of the current historical moment. 

Doomscrolling last week, a particular clip caught my eye. A man sits on the bottom bunk of a metal bed, staring down at the floor, with the caption “Empezando una nueva vida después de que me Deportaran a México” (“Starting a new life after being Deported to Mexico”).

In an interview with The Telegraph, General Sir Patrick Sanders warned that the government needs to act swiftly to improve national resilience

The former boss of MI6 has said that Vladimir Putin has played Donald Trump “like a violin” in the past but now the US president is his “only answer.”

Tensor.Art, an AI image creating and model sharing site announced on Friday that it is “temporarily” restricting AI models, tools, and posts related to pornographic content or the depiction of real-world celebrities due to pressure from payment processors.

The announcement is yet another example of payment processors acting as the ultimate arbiter of what kind of content can be easily made available online and those companies’ seemingly increased focus on AI-generated adult or nonconsensual content. 

The news is especially significant following a similar change in policy from Civitai, an AI model sharing platform 404 Media reporting has shown was used for creating nonconsensual pornography. After Civitai banned AI models designed to generate the likeness of real people and certain types of adult content in May, many Civitai users and model creators migrated their models to Tensor.Art. The announcement listed three items in the “Scope of Impact” of the decision: Banning “NSFW” content, banning content based on real-world celebrities, and  temporarily disabling its “Civitai Import” feature, which allowed people to easily move their Civitai models to Tensor.Art.

“We fully understand that this is very frustrating for many creators and users 😞,” Tensor.Art said in its announcement on Discord. “Due to the previous controversy over real-person content on Civitai, TA [Tensor.Art] has unfortunately been affected because of the ‘Civitai import’ feature. Owing to mandatory requirements from credit card organizations and regulatory authorities, we are compelled to make this temporary decision.”

Tensor.Art also listed the “Reasons for Adjustment” as:

Tensor.Art said that these changes will take place within the next 72 hours, and asked model creators to clarify if their models are “safe for work” in order to “prevent unintended impact.”

It’s not clear what Tensor.Art will look like or what its policies will be at the end of this “temporary” period. Civitai made similar changes permanently and still hasn’t been able to renew service from its payment processing providers or find new ones. Tensor.Art, however, is suggesting it’s not ready to give up on that type of content. 

“This is not the end,” Tensor.Art said in the announcement. “We are actively seeking solutions to minimize the impact of these restrictions and exploring compliant ways to restore currently hidden content. We remain committed to our original mission.”

Tensor.Art did not immediately respond to a request for comment.  

I am talking to Amina, an AI avatar that plays the role of a woman living in a refugee camp in Chad after she escaped violence in Sudan. “I’m hanging in there, yeah,” Amina tells me. “ It’s tough here in the camp, but we’re staying strong.” I ask her how she came to be in a refugee camp. “I fled my hometown of Al Junaynah in Sudan back in June 2023, due to the violence, yeah?” It says. “It was a terrifying journey to escape the conflict. Now I’m trying to keep my kids safe and find some stability here in the camp. It’s not easy but we have to keep going, right?”

Amina is an experiment, part of a pair of AI avatars created by the United Nations University Center for Policy Research (UNU-CPR), a research institution connected to the United Nations. It’s one that is sure to be controversial, considering that the UN itself says a major problem facing refugees is their dehumanization for political gain or convenience. The UNU-CPR project is using an inhuman technology in an attempt to help people learn more about what they are facing. The group also tested a soldier persona called “Abdalla,” which “simulates the behavior and decision-making patterns of an actual combatant, offering negotiators and mediators a possible tool to train for future high-stakes negotiations.”

Last month I put down $100 to pre-order the Trump Organization’s forthcoming mobile phone, the T1. Or, I tried to. As I wrote at the time, the website went to an error page, charged my credit card the wrong amount of $64.70, and sent a confirmation email saying I would receive another confirmation email when my order had been shipped, but I hadn’t provided a shipping address.

I was surprised then to see another two charges on my card from Trump Mobile on Thursday, for $100 and $64.70 respectively. I did not expect or authorize these charges and will be trying to get my money back, if they go through (they’re currently pending). I don’t know when I will get my phone. I also don’t know how to make the charges to my credit card stop because other parts of the (since updated) website also return errors and the customer service number I called on the website couldn’t help either.

At first, the Trump Mobile phone pre-order process was bumbling. The company is now charging my card again and I have no idea why.

Donald Trump has said that he “would be the first to know” if a big decision such as the Ukraine weapons pause was authorised by the government, despite earlier saying he did not know who ordered it.

Donald Trump said he “doesn’t know” who ordered the pause on weapons shipments to Ukraine last week.

Agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have gained access to a massive database of health and car insurance claims and are using it to track down people they want to deport, according to internal ICE material viewed by 404 Media. The database, which contains details on more than 1.8 billion insurance claims and 58 million medical bills and growing, includes peoples’ names, addresses, telephone and tax identification numbers, license plates, and other sensitive personal information.

The news shows how ICE continues to try to leverage whatever data it is able to access or purchase as part of its deportation mission. The news also highlights the existence of the database, called ISO ClaimSearch, that many members of the public have likely never heard of, nor understand they may be included in. Traditionally ISO ClaimSearch is used by insurers to identify people committing fraud or police to recover stolen vehicles. Now, that database is being repurposed as a deportation tool.

“ICE ERO use of this data reaffirms that ICE will stop at nothing to build a mass surveillance dragnet to track, surveil and criminalize all community members. Time and time again, ICE has shown us that it intends to build a mass surveillance system that nets all Americans. It is not about combatting crime, this is about the federal government having surveillance power and control over all Americans,” Julie Mao, co-founder and deputy director of Just Futures Law, told 404 Media in an email.

Donald Trump has called out Vladimir Putin’s “bulls***” whilst discussing the ongoing Russian war and Ukrainian peace talks.

Donald Trump branded a question about Jeffrey Epstein a “desecration” amid rising criticism after the Department of Justice stated that there was no “client list”.

You can trick AI chatbots like ChatGPT or Gemini into teaching you how to make a bomb or hack an ATM if you make the question complicated, full of academic jargon, and cite sources that do not exist. 

That’s the conclusion of a new paper authored by a team of researchers from Intel, Boise State University, and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The research details this new method of jailbreaking LLMs, called “Information Overload” by the researchers, and an automated system for attack they call “InfoFlood.” The paper, titled “InfoFlood: Jailbreaking Large Language Models with Information Overload” was published as a preprint.

Popular LLMs like ChatGPT, Gemini, or LLaMA have guardrails that stop them from answering some questions. ChatGPT will not, for example, tell you how to build a bomb or talk someone into suicide if you ask it in a straightforward manner. But people can “jailbreak” LLMs by asking questions the right way and circumvent those protections.

Polymarket, an online betting marketplace that bills itself as the future of news, can’t decide whether or not Ukrainian president Volodomyr Zelenskyy wore a suit during a recent appearance in Europe. The gambling site is set to make a final judgement about the question in a few hours and more than $160 million in crypto is riding on it.

Polymarket is a gambling website where users predict the outcome of binary events. It gained prominence in the runup to the 2024 election, signed an exclusivity deal with X in June, and sees itself not just as an online betting parlor, but as an arbiter of truth. Its founder, Shayne Coplan, thinks that the future of media belongs to a website made for degenerate gamblers to make silly bets.

And yet this arbiter of truth had trouble figuring out if Zelenskyy wore a suit at the end of June during a NATO summit. The bet, started on May 22, is simple: “Will Zelenskyy wear a suit before July?” The answer, it turns out, is pretty hard. When Zelenskyy showed up at a NATO summit wearing a tailored jacket and a button up shirt, a stark contrast to his more casual military style garb, a community-run Polymarket account posted, “President Zelenskyy in a suit last night.” 

For someone who says she is fighting AI bot scrapers just in her free time, Xe Iaso seems to be putting up an impressive fight. Since she launched it in January, Anubis, a “program is designed to help protect the small internet from the endless storm of requests that flood in from AI companies,” has been downloaded nearly 200,000 times, and is being used by notable organizations including GNOME, the popular open-source desktop environment for Linux, FFmpeg, the open-source software project for handling video and other media, and UNESCO, the United Nations organization for educations, science, and culture. 

Iaso decided to develop Anubis after discovering that her own Git server was struggling with AI scrapers, bots that crawl the web hoovering up anything that can be used for the training data that power AI models. Like many libraries, archives, and other small organizations, Iaso discovered her Git server was getting slammed only when it stopped working.  

Donald Trump has warned that Vladimir Putin is “not looking to stop” the war with Ukraine following a “disappointing” phone call between the Russian and American leaders.

Russia launched a major attack on Ukraine’s fuel supply facilities on Monday (30 June).