Internet infrastructure firm Cloudflare is launching a suite of tools that could help shift the power dynamic between AI companies and the websites they crawl for data. Today it’s giving all of its customers—including the estimated 33 million using its free services—the ability to monitor and selectively block AI data-scraping …
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The Vaporwave album Conditions at Hickory begins with static, as if you’re tuning in to a 1940s radio broadcast. First and second tracks “Foothills” and “Daily Commute” start out humdrum and benign enough. Then, the mood shifts. Sounds come like warnings, cautions of something sinister to come. Beeping sounds and …
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The social network X has been largely inaccessible in Brazil since Saturday, after the country's Supreme Court ordered all mobile and internet service providers to block the platform. The court order followed a months-long dispute between Judge Alexandre de Moraes and X CEO Elon Musk over the company's misinformation, hate …
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No matter how hard movies like Hackers, Blackhat, and Unfriended may work to convince you otherwise, there’s nothing especially cinematic about using the internet. As immersive and time-consuming as “being online” can be, when you zoom out, it’s mostly just people with bad posture hunched over computer terminals, clicking and …
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Jazmin Jones knows what she did. “If you’re online, there’s this idea of trolling,” Jones, the director behind Seeking Mavis Beacon, said during a recent panel for her new documentary. “For this project, some things we’re taking incredibly seriously … and other things we’re trolling. We’re trolling this idea of …
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The death of the US government's Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) is starting to result in disconnection of internet service for Americans with low incomes. On Friday, Charter Communications reported a net loss of 154,000 internet subscribers that it said was mostly driven by customers canceling after losing the federal discount. …
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Long-distance internet cables in France have been cut in an act of sabotage, causing disruption to internet services across the country. This is the second disruption during the Olympic Games in Paris, after high-speed train lines were targeted in a series of arson attacks hours before the Games kicked off. …
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An international vacation is a nice opportunity to cut down on your excessive smartphone screen time and be present to soak up all those adventures. (Don’t let life pass you by!) But even if you’re spending less time doomscrolling and more time exploring a new city, you’ll probably still want …
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The original proposal for the World Wide Web, written by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989, is an important piece of internet history. It also can't be opened on modern computers. John Graham-Cumming, a British software engineer and writer, attempted to open the Word document containing the proposal. Modern versions of Microsoft …
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Jessamyn West used to describe Metafilter as a social network for non-friends, a description belied in part by the tight-knit camaraderie that emerges in an online group of only a few thousand people. West herself is an example: She met her partner on the site. She also describes the Metafilter …
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