Independent technology journalism founded by Jason Koebler, Emanuel Maiberg, Samantha Cole and Joseph Cox. Covers tech, AI, privacy and internet culture.
In plain terms: 404 Media is an independent media company founded by technology journalists Jason Koebler, Emanuel Maiberg, Samantha Cole, and Joseph Cox.
Why I recommend it: Some articles may be behind a membership paywall; the homepage and many stories are free to read.
Read / subscribe freeAn independent online news publication on technology and the internet, covering AI, hacking, online communities and right-to-repair.
Owned by its reporters, it works as a journalism cooperative.
2024
Received an EFF Pioneer Award.
Our own read, not the publication's.
Background from Wikipedia, checked October 5, 2026.
404 Media on a Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon study finding that the more people rely on AI at work, the less critical thinking they report using.
Why I recommend it: The study is based on workers describing their own habits, not tests of their thinking, so it shows a link rather than proof that AI causes the decline.
Reporting on tools people build to slow down or frustrate unwanted AI scraping of their sites.
Why I recommend it: Small-scale technical resistance, explained plainly.
404 Media reports on leaked internal documents showing that human reviewers read ChatGPT prompts to improve OpenAI's models — including chats that hold sensitive personal information. Useful context before you paste private details into a chatbot.
Other resources that share this publication's topics.
Original Digital News Report 2026 chapter by Amy Ross Arguedas analyzing who uses AI chatbots for news, what they ask for and whether they follow links to publishers. Survey-based research; the chapter does not claim that chatbot use causes changes in news trust or traffic.
A KDnuggets guide by Vinod Chugani that goes round by round through current data science hiring processes, including AI-assisted coding rounds and generative AI evaluation questions, and lists ways candidates can prepare.
A Built In survey of job seekers on how AI tools shape which employers they find and consider. Among respondents who use AI for employer research, 66% say they applied to a company they had not considered and 53% say they decided not to apply somewhere because of what AI showed them. Built In sells employer branding services.
Claroc security research on apps made with Grok's Build mode. The researchers report that publishing defaulted to anyone-with-the-link access, that most of 37,571 reachable app addresses opened without sign-in, and that open apps held internal data from dozens of organizations. Findings are the researchers' own.
Artificial Analysis reports Muse Ember benchmark scores and task-cost estimates, including an Intelligence Index score of 36 and $0.14 per task in its evaluation. These are evaluator-specific results, not a verified Meta launch announcement or evidence of free model access.
Epoch AI explains an Inference Performance Index for estimating chip capacity across agentic workloads and output-speed requirements. Its modeled comparisons, expressed in GB300 equivalents, depend on workload and hardware assumptions and are not universal real-world performance guarantees.
