Thanks to Metafilter for introducing me to The Box. Wearable technology for women will never be the same.
Web



The head of the WordPress project on the WP Engine lawsuit, Automattic turning 20, and what’s next for the web.
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.


The company, which runs WordPress.com, paused contributions to the WordPress open-source project in January, citing the “significant time and money” it spent due to its ongoing legal battle with WP Engine.
In a post on Thursday, Automattic announced it’s ready to “return fully” to the WordPress project, where it will provide contributions across WordPress Core, Gutenberg, WordPress.org, and other parts of the ecosystem.
[automattic.com]
Mary Hubbard, the executive director of WordPress.org, said the group will work on “accelerating and coordinating artificial intelligence projects across the WordPress ecosystem.” The team will also maintain a public roadmap of its AI plans and plugins, which it will share on its new page for “Core AI.”

The head of Google discusses the next AI platform shift and how it could change how we use the internet forever.
After announcing its second browser, Dia, last year, the company stopped developing new features for original breakout Arc. Now CEO Josh Miller explains why, and admits he considered either selling or open-sourcing the software. Neither is on the table right now (because it would require giving up their custom development kit, or “secret sauce”), but “that doesn’t mean it’ll never happen.”
Dia is still in alpha testing, but will open up to Arc members next.
[browsercompany.substack.com]




Do you mourn the old world dying? Will you celebrate the new world’s struggle to be born? Write (or, in a few months, read) about it.

NLWeb starts by offering ChatGPT-level search to any site or app, with just a few lines of code. It’s a new vision for the web.


That means you can now organize bundles of tabs into groups labeled by name or color. Firefox is also testing an AI-powered tool that will suggest tab groups and names based on the pages you have open in the browser.
Mozilla says it introduced the feature after a request for tab groups became the most-upvoted post on its Connect forum, with more than 4,500 people showing support for the suggestion.
After posting to its blog for the first time in 8 years on Friday, 4chan published a new post explaining what took the site down on April 14th, as Engadget spotted. The social media site blames hackers uploading a “bogus PDF” that “exploited an out-of-date software package on one of 4chan’s servers.”
It’s back, but not all the way — as of this writing, images and the ability to post still haven’t returned.
[blog.4chan.org]
But the folks behind the mid-2000s anti-piracy campaign that once compared pirating software to stealing a car might have, reports Torrent Freak. A social media investigation suggests the campaign used a knockoff of a commercial font. Its creator, Just Van Rossum, told the outlet:
“I knew my font was used for the campaign and that a pirated clone named XBand-Rough existed. I did not know that the campaign used XBand-Rough and not FF Confidential, though. So this fact is new to me, and I find it hilarious,”
[torrentfreak.com]


































