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tech · the day's top 10 · june 8th
storyflo · tech
Jun 8, 2026 · 2 min listen
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tech · the day's top 10 · june 8th
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Google has quietly been offering to buy access to code written by developers who have released Android apps on the Play Store in order to help the company train its AI coding tools, 404 Media has learned. Google has emailed some app developers with an offer to “join a confidential content offer pilot,” that will allow developers to “generate additional revenue from your apps,” according to an email sent to the developer of an Android app that has millions of downloads.
404 Media is an independent website whose work is written, reported, and owned by human journalists and whose intended audience is real people, not AI scrapers, bots, or a search algorithm. Sign up to support our work and for free access to this article. Learn why we require this here. The moderators of the biohacking subreddit say that peptide and hormone replacement therapy companies have been surreptitiously spamming Reddit in an attempt to get their posts scraped by AI chatbots.
We start this week with Jason’s story about one of the wildest hacking stories in a while. Hackers simply asked Meta’s AI to change the email address on a target Instagram account, and the chatbot did so. Insane. After the break, Emanuel tells us about Amazon’s internal leaderboard for tracking AI usage and how it was cheated. In the subscribers-only section, we provided an update on our lawsuit against ICE. Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for access to this episode's bonus content and to power our journalism.
The secondary market for decades old, low-tech John Deere tractors has been booming for years as farmers have sought reliable tractors that they can actually fix without having to deal with John Deere’s repair monopoly. A Canadian company has seen that demand and came up with a radical thought: What if they made a new, repairable, “no-tech” tractor to solve what has become a gigantic pain point for farmers? Alberta’s Ursa Ag says that it has been inundated with demand after announcing its tractor, which costs roughly half as much as a Deere and has the benefit of not being a repair nightmare.
While Google CEO Sundar Pichai proudly tells the world that 75 percent of all new code at the company is AI-generated, internally Google employees are sharing memes about how AI is bad at that exact task and makes their job harder.
In the last few years, we’ve heard case after case where attorneys used generative AI and were caught including fake citations, quotes, and other major errors in their filings. This generally plays out in dockets, where their opponents or judges spot them and, in the polite language of the courts, scold them for wasting everyone’s time and being a disgrace to the legal profession. Sometimes, this results in serious sanctions.
An immigrant rights and advocacy group has filed a lawsuit against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) seeking records related to the agency’s use of Palantir tools. 404 Media first revealed a tool called ELITE and its links to Palantir in January, based in part on a leaked user guide for ELITE.
This week, I have been buried under a series of story tips and reporting leads that I’m excited about, that I think are important, and that I am anxious to get into the world. But I woke up today and realized that I could simply no longer ignore a simmering drama that has been on my radar for weeks that is now breaking containment and demands attention: The YouTube LEGO drama, aka Bricks & Minifigs scandal. It is, unfortunately, impossible to succinctly or fully explain the YouTube LEGO drama, for I believe it is impossible for one to fully understand or suss out every angle of what is going o
On Tuesday, we published an article about an internal Microsoft strategy document that explained the company wanted to “make people addicted” to its new AI assistant, Scout. Thursday, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told staff that he was “not sure what this document is or who is writing and leaking this nonsense,” according to a message obtained by The Information. The document we reported on was not some random document. As we wrote at the time, the strategy document was written by Microsoft executives Omar Shahine, Jakob Werner, and some sort of AI writing tool.
K-pop fans are well-known as a force to be reckoned with on the internet, with some fans holding fierce allegiances and passions when it comes to specific artists. On social media, some obsessive fans are using generative AI to create what is essentially self-insert fan-fiction—creepy videos and images of themselves kissing, cuddling and getting various kinds of lovey-dovey with their favorite idols.
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