404 Media, which has been all over ICE’s spying ways, has two pieces worth reading this week. Yesterday, it documented how the agency is gleaning personal information from credit card applications. Today, it has a an eye-popping piece on the scale of the agency’s surveillance tools. As always this stuff reminds me of Glenn Grohe’s 1942 poster: “He’s Watching You.”
Felicia Day’s shortform web series, The Guild, is about to celebrate its 20th anniversary. Now the cast has something else to celebrate: its new movie getting funded on Kickstarter. As of writing, Codex & company are about to hit $2 million on the first day. Not bad for the “Knights of Good!”
[Felicia Day (Kickstarter)]
Joel Feder at The Drive reported a frightening story about how Flock cameras, recently suspended by the LAPD, tracked him in Minnesota and sent police after him over “stolen plates.” (They were not.) Flock says its cameras worked “correctly” in the lead-up to a potentially deadly incident. But here we are in our new era of computer policing.
As reported by The Wrap, A24 says it won’t, after all, go after a creator for using a Backrooms-adjacent wallpaper. You know, the generically yellow one. Smart move. After a Reddit user reported getting a complaint on behalf of A24, Backrooms director Kane Parsons said it “should not be happening.” A24 then said in a statement it “makes no claim over ownership over the yellow wallpaper.”
the need for speed brand partnerships. EA’s original live-action trailer for Battlefield 6 immediately killed off celebrities like Zac Efron as a joke, but now the game is embracing Hollywood. Battlefield is partnering with Paramount to include Top Gun heroes (Tom Cruise excluded) as part of its upcoming season 4 update. I might just hop back in to fly the F-14 Tomcat.
I love that we’ve got dueling MMO stories on The Verge this week. First, from Kallie, about the EverQuest revival: a wild comeback for one of the biggest and most important MMOs ever. Then, from Andrew, about the world’s tiniest MMO, called PointlessQuest. Are the quests endless or pointless? You decide.
Buying a home in the US has been wild for years, with buyers in incredibly competitive markets offering all-cash transactions well above asking prices. Now there’s a new twist: sellers tempting people who have AI stocks to offer. Definitely still a better trade than giving up bitcoin for pizza.
[The New York Times]
As reported by Electrek, the latest recall is for a “faulty differential unit that may fracture, resulting in a loss of drive power,” affecting more than 42,000 vehicles between 2021-2023 RWD models. The car has been previously recalled at a similar scale for battery safety issues. A poster on the Mach-E forum notes Ford says “a remedy is not yet available” but is expected later this year.
The trillionaire’s legacy of death under DOGE had a spotlight put on it recently, including from us. Musk responded with threats, including a threat to sue Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) for citing the same study we did. Now he’s in a losing war against the reality of his ghastly conduct. The Guardian explains the saga so far:
