Web

Friend of The Verge Casey Newton has some thoughts on the Amazon v. Perplexity web browser battle about AI agents: Perplexity wants to encourage people to use their agents in order to build its own business, but this screws basically every business that runs on web pages, including Amazon. (Humans can look at ads, sign up for newsletters, engage in curiosity-oriented browsing, etc.) Perplexity is a known bad actor. I hope Jeff Bezos eats them alive.

A few years ago I wrote about a project to revive the early 3D virtual community Cybertown, and yesterday, I got an alert that Cybertown is “back and fully restored” as of this month. There’s a bit more detail on the Facebook page, including info about its mayoral race.

One year after the WordPress fight began, WordPress.com owner Automattic has filed counterclaims against third-party host WP Engine. Automattic accuses WP Engine of “engaging in sustained trademark misuse, deceptive branding, and broken community commitments” that allegedly harmed the WordPress ecosystem.

I could say more, but I think Aftermath’s Luke Plunkett has it just right: there’s nothing stopping you. Just click this link and try. At a time when buying video games is getting more confusing and expensive, it’s a breath of fresh air.

If you installed the new Google app for Windows, Google’s now telling you to remove it! To “keep receiving Google app updates,” you have to uninstall and reinstall from scratch. I wonder how many will skip the second step... particularly since it won’t uninstall until you dismiss this message and close the app.

Neal Agarwal has done it again, with a lovely little timewaster called I’m Not a Robot that parodies today’s pre-AI web gatekeeping experience. Will you NOPE right on out of there, or channel Silksong levels of spite like me? Here’s one of its tamer stages; good luck with Level 17.

(Emoji? Emojis? Plurals, how do they work.) The Unicode Consortium just released the latest version of its standard, with 164 new emojis and “several thousand additional non-emoji characters.” As we saw in the preview in July, there’s a lot of good stuff in here. But now comes the fun part: seeing how different platforms interpret, and occasionally totally ruin, the new characters. They better not screw up Fight Cloud.

After Google donned its hot dog suit in court to complain that the open web is in decline, one commenter argues that’s where we see Big Tech’s true colors:

Today I learned about comparesffpc.com, which effortlessly lets you compare small-form-factor cases on a virtual 3D desk, in your browser, using this impressive public dataset. It isn’t the only comparo tool, but it’s the cleanest and easiest I’ve used yet. (I’m thinking about swapping my Ncase, any desk-friendly recommends?)

California Senator Alex Padilla granted the Internet Archive federal depository status, allowing it to more easily access and share government documents with the public.