tonytins

Press photographers were reportedly barred from Pentagon press briefings after Pete Hegseth‘s staff became irked over unflattering photos of the defense secretary. The office of the notoriously vain Cabinet member — a former Fox News host who had a hair and makeup studio built in the Pentagon shortly after being confirmed — should probably have more important things on his mind, chiefly the war in Iran, and, perhaps, the elementary school there that the United States appears to have bombed.

According to a Wednesday report from The Washington Post, press pool photographers were banned from briefings on March 4 and March 10 after taking and publishing what sources described as “unflattering” images of Hegseth. The Post noted that the White House had declined to comment on the decision to exclude the photographers. The White House took exception, with Deputy Press Secretary Anna Kelly sharing an email reply to the publication with an off-topic quip over the newspaper’s recent layoff of more than 300 journalists, but no actual response to the Post’s question about the concern over Hegseth’s image.

The National Press Club responded on Wednesday, with President Mark Schoeff Jr. writing that the Pentagon’s decision “is deeply troubling and runs counter to the fundamental principles of transparency in a democratic society,” adding that “when the government decides which images the public is allowed to see, transparency is replaced by control.” PEN America also responded, calling the decision to bar photographers a “petty act of retaliation.”

Amazon’s ecommerce business has summoned a large group of engineers to a meeting on Tuesday for a “deep dive” into a spate of outages, including incidents tied to the use of AI coding tools.

The online retail giant said there had been a “trend of incidents” in recent months, characterized by a “high blast radius” and “Gen-AI assisted changes” among other factors, according to a briefing note for the meeting seen by the FT.

Under “contributing factors” the note included “novel GenAI usage for which best practices and safeguards are not yet fully established.”

Wikipedia editors have implemented new policies and restricted a number of contributors who were paid to use AI to translate existing Wikipedia articles into other languages after they discovered these AI translations added AI “hallucinations,” or errors, to the resulting article.

The new restrictions show how Wikipedia editors continue to fight the flood of generative AI across the internet from diminishing the reliability of the world’s largest repository of knowledge. The incident also reveals how even well-intentioned efforts to expand Wikipedia are prone to errors when they rely on generative AI, and how they’re remedied by Wikipedia’s open governance model.

The issue in this case starts with an organization called the Open Knowledge Association (OKA), a non-profit organization dedicated to improving Wikipedia and other open platforms.

https://web.archive.org/web/20260307182752/https://www.404media.co/ai-translations-are-adding-hallucinations-to-wikipedia-articles/

Elon Musk’s xAI has lost its bid for a preliminary injunction that would have temporarily blocked California from enforcing a law that requires AI firms to publicly share information about their training data.

xAI had tried to argue that California’s Assembly Bill 2013 (AB 2013) forced AI firms to disclose carefully guarded trade secrets.

The law requires AI developers whose models are accessible in the state to clearly explain which dataset sources were used to train models, when the data was collected, if the collection is ongoing, and whether the datasets include any data protected by copyrights, trademarks, or patents. Disclosures would also clarify whether companies licensed or purchased training data and whether the training data included any personal information. It would also help consumers assess how much synthetic data was used to train the model, which could serve as a measure of quality.

The assistance suggests the rapidly expanding war now includes the involvement of one of Washington’s key nuclear-armed rivals with advanced intelligence capabilities, The Caspian Post reports, citing The Washington Post.

Since the conflict began on Saturday, Russia has reportedly shared the locations of U.S. military assets with Iran, including warships and aircraft, the officials said. They spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.

The Russian Embassy in Washington did not respond to requests for comment.

Moscow has previously called for an end to the war, describing it as an “unprovoked act of armed aggression.”

Customs and Border Protection (CBP) bought data from the online advertising ecosystem to track peoples’ precise movements over time, in a process that often involves siphoning data from ordinary apps like video games, dating services, and fitness trackers, according to an internal Department of Homeland Security (DHS) document obtained by 404 Media.

The document shows in stark terms the power, and potential risk, of online advertising data and how it can be leveraged by government agencies for surveillance purposes. The news comes after Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) purchased similar tools that can monitor the movements of phones in entire neighbourhoods. ICE also recently said in public procurement documents it was interested in sourcing more “Ad Tech” data for its investigations. Following 404 Media’s revelation of that ICE purchase, on Tuesday a group of around 70 lawmakers urged the DHS oversight body to conduct a new investigation into ICE’s location data buying.

This sort of information is a “goldmine for tracking where every person is and what they read, watch, and listen to,” Johnny Ryan, director of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL) Enforce, which has closely followed the sale of advertising data, told 404 Media in an email.

https://web.archive.org/web/20260303141140/https://www.404media.co/cbp-tapped-into-the-online-advertising-ecosystem-to-track-peoples-movements/

The opposition appeared overwhelming: Tens of thousands of emails poured into Southern California's top air pollution authority as its board weighed a June proposal to phase out gas-powered appliances. But in reality, many of the messages that may have swayed the powerful regulatory agency to scrap the plan were generated by a platform that is powered by artificial intelligence.

Public records requests reviewed by The Times and corroborated by staff members at the South Coast Air Quality Management District confirm that more than 20,000 public comments submitted in opposition to last year's proposal were generated by a Washington, D.C.-based company called CiviClick, which bills itself as "the first and best AI-powered grassroots advocacy platform."

A Southern California-based public affairs consultant, Matt Klink, has taken credit for using CiviClick to wage the opposition campaign, including in a sponsored article on the website Campaigns and Elections. The campaign "left the staff of the Southern California Air Quality Management District (SCAQMD) reeling," the article says.

Amazon is telling people who use its wishlists feature to switch to post office boxes or non-residential delivery addresses if they want to ensure their home addresses remain private, as part of a change in how it processes gifts bought from third-party sellers. The change is especially concerning to many sex workers, influencers and public figures who use Amazon wishlists to receive gifts from fans and clients.

First spotted by adult content creators raising the alarm on social media, the changes open anyone who uses wishlists publicly to increased privacy risk unless they change how they receive packages.

In an email sent to list holders, Amazon said beginning March 25, it will reveal users’ shipping addresses to third-party sellers. The platform added that gift purchasers might end up seeing your address as part of this process, too.

https://web.archive.org/web/20260225203949/https://www.404media.co/amazon-wishlist-address-private-third-party/

The FBI got a search warrant for X to provide details on the Grok prompts a man allegedly used to create more than 200 nonconsensual sexual videos of a woman he knew in real life, according to court records.

The details of the investigation are contained in an FBI affidavit about the alleged actions of Simon Tuck, who is accused of extensively harassing and threatening the woman’s husband. Tuck regularly worked out with and texted with the woman and, according to the affidavit, secretly filmed her while she was working out in his garage. Over the course of the last several months, Tuck swatted their home, made a series of anonymous reports to the man’s employer claiming that he was a child abuser and a drug addict, posed as the man and made a series of mass shooting and suicide threats. Tuck also made a series of other threats and bizarre actions, which included reaching out to a funeral home to say that the man would be dead soon and sending threats to the man while posing as a member of Sector 16, a Russian hacking crew.

The affidavit notes that, in January, the FBI got a search warrant for the man’s conversations with Grok. The FBI says that it received “prompts provided to GrokAI that generated approximately 200 pornographic videos of a woman who closely resembled VICTIM’s wife’s physical appearance.”

https://web.archive.org/web/20260225192408/https://www.404media.co/fbi-subpoenaed-x-to-get-grok-prompts-used-to-create-nonconsensual-porn/

If you were watching the State of the Union address, and you’re an iPhone user, then toward the end of the speech, during President Trump’s recounting of the story of Chief Warrant Officer Eric Slover, you might have had Siri triggered—assuming you have voice activation turned on.

This feature once required the user to say “Hey Siri” but now only requires “Siri.”

At least one other Bluesky user confirmed that she experienced the same thing. A user on X said the erroneous Siri trigger word was “serious” not “searing,” but the timing of the post suggests it was the same moment.

Another Bluesky user (whose posts are off-limits to those who are not logged into Bluesky), posted a Google results page Siri pulled up following the Siri-triggering line, featuring a bunch a results about bullets going through legs.

The French foreign ministry says US envoy Charles Kushner should be blocked from access to the government, after he failed to explain comments about an alleged "rise" of violence in France.

Kushner, father of Donald Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, had been summoned to meet French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot on Monday evening, but he did not attend.

Instead, he said he had a prior engagement and sent a deputy from the US embassy.

This prompted an angry response from the ministry, which accused Kushner of an "apparent failure to grasp the basic requirements of the ambassadorial mission" and said Barrot had requested Kushner "no longer be allowed direct access" to government ministers.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth jokingly said any surge in takeout deliveries to the Pentagon — a phenomenon that has accurately predicted the start of major geopolitical events — could be him ordering pizza “just to throw everybody off.”

Asked about the “Pentagon Pizza Report,” an account on X that tracks activity at local pizza joints near the U.S. military hub, Hegseth said he was aware of the account.

“I’ve thought of just ordering lots of pizza on random nights just to throw everybody off,” he said Sunday on Fox News. “Some Friday night when you see a bunch of Dominos orders, it might just be me on an app, throwing the whole system off so we keep everybody off balance. We look at every indicator.”