Fast Company asked him why his AI search engine is ripping content from paywalled news outlets like Wired, and... hoo boy. He attempted to shift blame to “third-party web crawlers,” refused to identify which ones, said it was too “complicated” to just stop doing that, and suggested it’s not technically illegal to ignore robots.txt. Sure.
Wired, June 19th: “Perplexity Is a Bullshit Machine.”
These links are paywalled, but that’s part of the point: it’s subscription journalism. Wired even blocks Perplexity in its robots.txt file, yet Perplexity is scraping stories anyhow. Might not be the only one, but that’s no excuse.
There are a lot of Arc fans here at The Verge, and I’ve come to like the Arc mobile app a lot as well. (Even if it is becoming a little too AI-y for my taste...) The latest update optimizes Arc for iPads, which, finally. Don’t expect fireworks — this is just straight-up the iPhone app on a bigger screen — but I’ll take it!
[The Browser Company]
Previously an experimental feature, WebXR support is on by default for Vision Pro beta testers, RoadtoVR wrote last week. The open standard allows for VR and AR experiences on the web, such as those listed on this GitHub page.
However, the outlet writes that AR experiences do not seem to work quite yet, limiting it to fully-VR ones for now.
It debuted on June 1st, 1999, and shut down two years later.
Its name lived on as a Best Buy brand, a re-named Rhapsody streaming service, and an attempt to cash in on NFT hype. But in my heart, it will always be a search engine for poorly-labeled, low-quality MP3s that take hours to download over AOL dial-up internet.
This Reddit user’s Midjourney images in the style of bad photos from Yelp reviews are surprisingly on point. The prompt they say they used:
iPhone photo of (food name) with many raisins on top. At a (type of) restaurant (or other location). —ar 3:4 —style raw —s 75
PLUS —sref of some bad food photos you find on Yelp! :)
Others gave it a shot on X.
A blog post says the attack has gone on intermittently for three days, making access to the archives inconsistent. However, founder Brewster Kahle says patrons should worry more about lawsuits from book publishers and the recording industry that “are trying to destroy this library entirely and hobble all libraries everywhere.”
While the issue seems fixed today, Reddit users reported that and other problems, like videos that couldn’t be unmuted, in a thread spotted by 9to5Google. The solution was apparently disabling ad blockers. We saw the same behavior at The Verge.
It’s not clear if this was related to YouTube’s ongoing crackdown on ad blockers, or problems with the ad blockers themselves.
The State Assembly has passed a bipartisan bill with zero votes against it. It has to pass the senate and governor next.
Louisiana passed its law in January, forcing Pornhub to scan government IDs. Pornhub told Gizmodo that traffic fell 80 percent in the state — claiming that seekers “migrated to darker corners of the internet that don’t ask users to verify age.”
Pew research found that more than a third of webpages from 2013 are now inaccessible. 23 percent of news webpages have at least one broken link, and 54 percent of Wikipedia articles have at least one reference link going to a page that doesn’t exist anymore.
As Google plugs AI into search, what happens to the web? Nilay Patel discussed that topic with Google CEO Sundar Pichai this week on the Decoder podcast. It quickly became a deeper discussion about the new AI Overviews results, but you can start with a small bite here.
Tedium has a tip for opting out of Google’s AI summarized answers: add “udm=14” to your default search URL, so it reads as “https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14” instead of Google dot com.
To set this up in Chrome, go into Settings, then Search engine > Manage search engines> Site search. In Arc, go to Arc > Settings > Profiles > Search settings > Add (Site search).
