California Senator Alex Padilla granted the Internet Archive federal depository status, allowing it to more easily access and share government documents with the public.
“By being part of the program itself, it just gets us closer to the source of where the materials are coming from, so that it’s more reliably delivered to the Internet Archive,” Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle told KQED.
They say Columbia is just one of five universities they’ve penetrated.
Aravind Srinivas on Perplexity’s new Comet web browser, the AI talent frenzy, and a future IPO.
A report about how much money these websites are making found that 62 of the 85 websites it examined had hosting or content delivery services provided by Amazon and Cloudflare. Google’s sign-on system was also used on 54 of the websites, alongside several other services and payment systems provided by mainstream tech companies.
“They should have ceased providing any and all services to AI nudifiers when it was clear that their only use case was sexual harassment,” said Indicator co-founder Alexios Mantzarlis.
Meaning founder and former Verge reporter Ellis Hamburger on the ethical vacuum in AI and what founders aren’t saying publicly.
Archive of our Own went down for a few days over the 4th of July weekend, upsetting the holiday fanfiction reading plans of the site’s millions of users before service was restored. AO3 goes down occasionally for all sorts of issues, but the reason for this outage was special and hilarious.
According to a post on Reddit, the site went down because someone tried to make 2,147,483,647th bookmark which was beyond the limit that specific database could support. And the bookmarked fic that caused all this: extremely graphic One Direction erotica.
[garbageday.email]
The head of the WordPress project on the WP Engine lawsuit, Automattic turning 20, and what’s next for the web.
Thanks to Metafilter for introducing me to The Box. Wearable technology for women will never be the same.
The tool, which is built into DuckDuckGo’s browser, displays a warning message when you click on potentially dangerous sites. In addition to blocking phishing sites, malware, and common online scams, DuckDuckGo has expanded the tool to protect against fake online stores, phony crypto exchanges, and those obnoxious sites that falsely claim your device has a virus.
This whole Trevor Noah / Jon Stewart pod is a good listen. But there’s a big chunk — starting about 13 minutes in — that turns into a really great chat about how we experience the internet. And Stewart makes a comparison I truly love:
We think [social media] is free speech, but it’s not speech. It’s ultra-processed speech. It’s speech in the way that Doritos are food — it’s something that has been designed by people in lab coats to get past the parts of your brain that protect you.”
Apparently, the very idea of colorblindness is hard to visualize. Take a shot at looking through my eyes.
Following a slew of complaints from editors, a Wikimedia Foundation spokesperson confirmed to 404 Media that it’s pausing the two-week test, which began on June 2nd.
The experiment put AI-generated summaries at the top of articles for users who opted in. One editor responded to the idea by saying, “Just because Google has rolled out its AI summaries doesn’t mean we need to one-up them.”
First, The Browser Company tried to overhaul the web browser. Now it aims to change the way we think about computers.
The New York Times surveyed the ecosystem of disinformation around the LA anti-ICE protests, and the results are striking for looking... pretty much exactly like the pre-AI world: old recirculated photos, fabricated quotes, and a shot from an ‘80s action movie. The Washington Post did its own social media look-around and found mostly people supporting dueling narratives with real footage. There’s still time for generated fakes to cause problems, but at the moment, reality seems to be eye-catching enough.
