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Emma Roth

Emma Roth

News Writer

News Writer

    More From Emma Roth

    Spotify gives up on trying to charge for song lyricsSpotify gives up on trying to charge for song lyrics
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    Amazon must recall dangerous products properly — even ones sold by third partiesAmazon must recall dangerous products properly — even ones sold by third parties
    Pixel Watch 3 leak shows thinner bezels and new 45mm modelPixel Watch 3 leak shows thinner bezels and new 45mm model
    Lime tests two new e-bikes you don’t have to pedalLime tests two new e-bikes you don’t have to pedal
    Emma Roth
    Emma Roth
    The Starbucks app’s online ordering feature is back after some downtime.

    A little over a week after the CrowdStrike outage brought down mobile orders at Starbucks, the app had some trouble again today.

    For most of the morning, around the globe weren’t been able to place orders, with the app saying, “We’re having trouble with store locations right now.” It looks like the feature is back online now though, so we won’t have to wait in line for our drinks.

    Update, July 30th: Noted that mobile ordering works again.

    A screenshot showing an error in the Starbucks app
    The Starbucks app couldn’t pull up nearby locations.
    Image: The Verge
    Emma Roth
    Emma Roth
    Google is adding a version of Circle to Search to Chrome on desktop.

    A new option spotted in the Chrome 128 beta lets you search with Google Lens by clicking and dragging a box around the area of a website you want more information about. Google will then pull up search results based on the image or text you’ve highlighted — sort of like Circle to Search.

    The feature matched our image of a Motorola Razr Plus to related search results.
    The feature matched our image of a Motorola Razr Plus to related search results.
    Image: The Verge
    Meta’s Quest 3 ‘Layout’ app lets you take measurements in mixed realityMeta’s Quest 3 ‘Layout’ app lets you take measurements in mixed reality
    Emma Roth
    Emma Roth
    Getty upgrades its AI image generator.

    The text-to-image generator, which is trained on Getty’s stock pictures, now uses an upgraded version of Nvidia’s Edify AI model, making it faster and more accurate. It also comes with new features to control the “camera settings” used in an AI-generated image, such as depth of field or focal length.

    Image: Getty
    Emma Roth
    Emma Roth
    Many sites are struggling to keep up with AI data scrapers.

    A report from 404 Media reveals how AI companies like Anthropic are bypassing a website’s robots.txt file by deploying new web crawlers with different names. This makes it more difficult for websites to block crawlers, as they constantly need to update their files to include the new bots:

    Anthropic’s current and active crawler is called “CLAUDEBOT.” Neither Reuters nor Condé Nast, for example, blocks CLAUDEBOT. This means that these websites—and hundreds of others who have copy pasted old blocker lists—are not actually blocking Anthropic.

    Websites are Blocking the Wrong AI Scrapers (Because AI Companies Keep Making New Ones)

    [404 Media]

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