In the old days, running Disk Defragmenter in Windows took forever but was a welcome, meditative reminder that you can’t control everything.
I’m kidding, it was awful. Here’s a website that simulates it, hard drive sounds and all, from developer Dennis Morello. It’s nicer when it’s not keeping you from playing Starcraft.
Software engineer Robert Heaton wrote a tool that gives him “free, unbelievably stupid wi-fi” on planes, by... repeatedly updating fields in his Air Miles account without paying for in-flight Wi-Fi.
Go read this blog recounting how his PySkyWiFi tool uses data tunneled through the limited space of his Air Miles account information to a proxy computer on the ground. It’s apparently very slow. And it sounds a little familiar.
The FCC’s new broadband labels make it easier to compare internet plans, if you’re lucky enough to have options.
Microsoft announced an update to Edge’s clipboard allowing SVG files — space efficient vector images — to be copy and pasted into web apps without any complicated workarounds.
The company also contributed the updates to the open-source Chromium project so that other Chromium-based browsers can add streamlined SVG copying and pasting. Maybe Chrome will be next?
CEO Nicholas Thompson discusses the deal: ‘AI is coming. It is coming quickly. We want to be part of whatever transition happens.’
Here’s what the SCOTUS decision might mean for everything from kids online safety laws to the TikTok ‘ban.’
If you have a large collection of hardcover and paperback books, it can be hard to get rid of them — but not impossible.
To her, AI is just an extension of what Canva has always done: make accessible design tools that cost less than Adobe’s.
Moving often means downsizing, and fast. Enter: Facebook Marketplace and Buy Nothing.
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.
