Web

In an article for Techdirt, Wayback Machine director Mark Graham raises concerns about the impact of publications preventing the site from archiving their content due to AI scraping:

Beyond part one’s exposure of affiliate revenue hijacking, MegaLag digs into Honey’s “extortion” by adding limited-use “friends and family” type discounts and lying to the store owners about never removing codes for unaffiliated businesses while trying to sign them up as partners.

For its 100th anniversary, The New Yorker put its entire magazine archive online. (For paid subscribers, anyway.) You can browse by issue, but the NYer is also using AI to make it easier to search for subjects and topics, and to summarize each article so you know what you’re getting into before you accidentally sign up for a million words about elevators. But honestly, read the elevator story. It rules.

It’ll cost $19.90 a month, though. Subscribers get access to top AI models and agents meant to streamline web surfing. When we tried it in October, Neon didn’t live up to the hype, though neither did other AI browsers. They’re cybersecurity nightmares, too.

I hadn’t heard about Lu Heng before today, and I doubt you had either. But he apparently owns 10 million African IP addresses, which he leases out for profit, creating a financial asset out of what was intended to be basic infrastructure. Classy!

The browser is now better at blocking “fingerprinters” that gather information about your system to ID you, even after clearing cookies or using private browsing. Mozilla says the improvements almost halve the number of Firefox users tracked by fingerprinting, preventing websites from obtaining details about hardware specifications, touchscreen support, and dock or taskbar dimensions.

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.