Joseph Cox

@josephcox

Hacking/crime/privacy journalist. Author of DARK WIRE, buy here: Co-founder of 404 Media. Signal: joseph.404 Email: joseph@

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Joseph Cox@josephcox· 25d

It's pretty clear from this document that 1) ICE is emphasizing voter fraud at a key time 2) ICE is using Thomson Reuters' data for all sorts of things despite the company's repeated statements trying to distance itself from immigration www.404media.co/ice-to-pay-t...

Joseph Cox@josephcox· 27d

New: the highly controversial AI music generator Suno was hacked. The hacker sent us Suno source code; it shows the company scraped YouTube Music, Deezer, and Genius. In all, Suno scraped *decades* worth of music from the internet. Obviously didn't pay artists www.404media.co/hack-reveals...

Joseph Cox@josephcox· 27d

your AI-generated flyer for your business is trash and no one likes it and it makes people not want to come to your restaurant watch more, subscribe here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pc_u...

Joseph Cox@josephcox· 29d

supportive people www.404media.co/i-bought-the...

Joseph Cox@josephcox· Jul 1

Companies are scrambling to stop spending so much on AI after it turns out people are just using it to convert PDFs to presentations. This is the tokenpocalypse. Watch here and subscribe for more every single week: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sia4...

Joseph Cox@josephcox· Jun 30

I tried out the tool that makes Claude, Codex, Gemini etc talk like caveman to lower token spend. It seems to work; I got much more to the point responses; caveman provides stats on how many tokens you've apparently saved www.404media.co/companies-ar...

Joseph Cox@josephcox· Jun 30

Buy 404 Media's course: www.404media.co/how-i-bought...

Joseph Cox@josephcox· Jun 29

This is how easy it is to poison Google's AI search with Reddit comments Watch here and subscribe for more of this every single week: www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uG8...

Joseph Cox@josephcox· Jun 29

404 Media went to Cannes, the advertising industry's biggest party where essentially every ad space you can imagine is for sale. This is what we saw, it's overwhelming how every pixel of attention is for sale: www.404media.co/inside-canne...

The entire conference is an advertisement for different types of advertising, and everything that can be turned into an ad has been. The Cannes trolley cars that run up and down the beach have been bought out by Strava (“Ads don’t get people active. Strava Sponsored Challenges do. Reach over 195 million active people on Strava,” the ads on the trolleys say.) About half of the cars navigating the winding Cannes streets have been wrapped with ads for advertising on Uber or Lyft or some other platform. DoorDash took over a store directly next to Versace, PayPal took over a patisserie. There are billboards for billboard ads, though every billboard advertising employee I spoke to insisted their job was “boring” and that the buzz had moved from “outdoor” (a euphemism for billboard ads) to “IRL,” a euphemism for events that have video billboard ads at them. KARGO’s drone ad was advertising drone advertising. Serve Delivery robots were driving around advertising the fact you can advertise on the robots; the United Arab Emirates was advertising the fact that its government is willing to do ideas others “said no to.” Life360, the app that lets parents surveil their kids, threw a full week of programming which included tips about advertising on Life360. The JW Marriott had information about how to advertise via the Marriott BonVoy rewards program; United Airlines had information about how to advertise on United flights; Chase had a building about how to advertise to Chase cardholders. OpenAI and Reddit had big presences, explaining how to advertise to Redditors and ChatGPT users; Reddit’s executives tried to tow a careful line about how Reddit is “the most human place on the internet” but is also widely scraped by LLMs, while OpenAI tried to explain that humans make decisions based on what its robots say. I wandered into Meta’s beach compound and caught a portion of a panel about using Gen Z influencers to advertise in which the video sign said “Cringe or Cool? Creators who ed…

Joseph Cox@josephcox· Jun 25

If AI is conscious, then so is Age of Empires II Here's how someone built the fundamentals of an LLM in the classic video game, breaking down the whole 'are LLMs conscious' debate Watch and subscribe here for more every week: www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlWJ...

Joseph Cox@josephcox· Jun 22

Popular Front is an outlet that has repeatedly been stymied by big tech platforms like YouTube. It's ended up in a situation where journalists are having to tweak what they say so they don't get booted off or demonetized Watch, subscribe here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yf51...

Joseph Cox@josephcox· Jun 18

The screenshots we saw showed that Salesforce's own agentic AI, Agentforce, is down dramatically across multiple teams at the company, sometimes as much as 70 percent www.404media.co/salesforces-...

One part of the dashboards viewed by 404 Media shows that use of Agentforce, Salesforce’s own platform for building AI agents, is down dramatically across various teams. Various teams all dropped use of the tool by more than 60 percent, and sometimes 70 percent. Slackbot, the AI agent in Slack, which Salesforce owns, use is much higher though, according to the screenshots. ChatGPT is also more popular with many teams than, say, Gemini, according to the screenshots.

Joseph Cox@josephcox· Jun 17

The U.S. government wants to kill anonymity on phones by requiring all users to provide government ID numbers Watch more and subscribe here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=hP53...

Joseph Cox@josephcox· Jun 10

Here's how we got a bunch of internal Google memes that mock how bad Google's AI actually is Watch and subscribe here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSKK...

Joseph Cox@josephcox· Jun 8

"You want to snatch it from us again?" Here is how a farmer donated land to a city to be turned into a park. Instead, the city sold the land and its now being turned into a massive data center www.404media.co/a-farmer-don...

Joseph Cox@josephcox· Jun 8

ACLU says giving this facial recognition app to cops who can enforce immigration law "is a recipe for disaster and for terrorizing members of communities across the country." www.404media.co/ices-plan-to...

“This embarrassingly cursory document utterly fails to acknowledge the harms that will flow from putting a flawed face recognition app in the hands of many thousands of local police,” Nate Wessler, deputy director with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, told 404 Media. “Sending local cops out to indiscriminately scan our faces, with a system that is known to generate false matches, that saves our data for 15 years, and that ensnares police into making immigration decisions that they are untrained for and that will undermine community safety efforts, is a recipe for disaster and for terrorizing members of communities across the country. DHS’s privacy regulators fell down on the job. Now it’s up to lawmakers to ensure this dangerous technology stays off our streets.”

Joseph Cox@josephcox· Jun 5

ICE acknowledges that this app may be used on U.S. citizens as well www.404media.co/ices-plan-to...

Joseph Cox@josephcox· Jun 5

Here is what the app will do: scan someone's face and run it against a database of 250 million images held by DHS and Department of State. It then gives local cops a message: release this person or contact ICE www.404media.co/ices-plan-to...

Joseph Cox@josephcox· Jun 4

New: we've seen a bunch of internal Google memes that employees are making about how Google's AI sucks. While Google CEO Sundar Pichai tells the world 75% of all new code at Google is AI-generated, Google employees memeing about how AI is bad at that exact task. More: www.404media.co/google-emplo...

Joseph Cox@josephcox· Jun 3

We spoke to the creators of a repairable, no tech tractor, which is a direct response to agriculture giant John Deere making it essentially impossible for farmers to repair the tractors themselves. This puts power back in their hands Watch more and subscribe here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqwd...

Joseph Cox@josephcox· Jun 3

New from 404 Media: companies are using Reddit manipulate ChatGPT and Google AI Search. The strategy is to systematically manipulate answers provided by chatbots by manipulating the underlying source material those chatbots scrape—in this case, a popular subreddit www.404media.co/companies-ar...

“As AI search engines increasingly pull answers from Reddit, companies are using us for AEO. On top of that, there's been an explosion of peptide interest and AI usage flooding the sub. Together, this has put serious pressure on content quality,” a post by the moderators read.
AEO is AI-engine optimization, and it is an evolution of search engine optimization where brands and marketing companies attempt to create content that they hope will be scraped by large language models. Manipulating Reddit with bots, sock puppet accounts, and human accounts that are paid to promote brands has become a core strategy of firms that do AEO, because Reddit has become one of most-often cited sources by popular AI tools like ChatGPT and Google’s AI search. For example, a company called RedRover offers AEO and SEO for companies; on its home page, it says “rank #1 on Search and get cited by AI: AI agents that mass publish content to help you rank on Google, ChatGPT, and Reddit—driving traffic to your site from every corner of the internet.”
“An army of agents publishing blog content & reddit posts that solves both SEO & AEO at scale,” RedRover advertises.

Joseph Cox@josephcox· Jun 3

In one of the craziest hacks recently, here's how hackers tricked Meta's AI into giving them access to a wave of Instagram accounts. They simply asked. Watch more and subscribe here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsAt...

Joseph Cox@josephcox· Jun 1

We have published the documents we received here: www.documentcloud.org/documents/28...

Joseph Cox@josephcox· Jun 1

We've sued ICE and received documents about its $2 million spyware contract. But there's more to come. Read the documents here: www.404media.co/we-sued-ice-...

Joseph Cox@josephcox· May 27

Here's how a company plans to turn school buses into roaming surveillance vehicles, constantly scanning the license plates of all vehicles they pass and make that searchable data available to law enforcement Watch the full conversation and subscribe here: youtu.be/5bWevtJjlkc?...

Joseph Cox@josephcox· May 26

Axon owns Fusus, a system that links together different camera feeds into one place for cops. Axon has said it is working with BusPatrol, but doesn't say how. Our reporting now indicates what the relationship is: turning buses into ALPRs and giving data to cops www.404media.co/buspatrol-pu...

BusPatrol is already figuring out how to integrate with Axon, the source explained. Axon sells its own ALPR cameras and in 2024 acquired Fusus. Fusus lets law enforcement bring in camera feeds and data from disparate sources into a single interface, and add AI features such as scanning for people wearing certain clothes to live footage.
Axon’s website has a page that says “BusPatrol Works with Axon [Coming in 2025],” and Axon mentioned a partnership with BusPatrol in an April press release, but publicly neither company has said what that partnership means in practice. The source with knowledge of the plan said that originally the Axon partnership was for “full fleetwide realtime camera access,” but the cost was too high. Instead, BusPatrol plans to add an AI accelerator to its school bus devices to facilitate the ALPR feature.

Joseph Cox@josephcox· May 26

BusPatrol is fully aware of how controversial license plate reading tech is, pointing specifically to concerns around the data being shared with ICE. BusPatrol has also already taken concrete steps to share the collected data with Axon, who would in turn give to cops www.404media.co/buspatrol-pu...

BusPatrol has already taken steps to share the collected data with law enforcement contracting giant Axon, according to leaked BusPatrol documents and a source with knowledge of the plans. Internally, BusPatrol has acknowledged how controversial its plan to collect and share this data is, pointing specifically to concerns about ICE using license plate data, but emphasizes the likely success of selling the angle of protecting children.

Joseph Cox@josephcox· May 26

millions of people are using malware to spy on their partners' phones. I spoke with @zackwhittaker.com about the truly staggering scale of the stalkerware/spouseware problem Watch, subscribe here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLb4...

Joseph Cox@josephcox· May 20

The owner of an app that uses AI to scan peoples' poop is now trying to sell the database of peoples' poop Watch, subscribe here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=VE0E...

Joseph Cox@josephcox· May 18

People are winning the fight against AI data centers Watch, subscribe here for more conversation like this every single week www.youtube.com/watch?v=5twr...