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.
