The tyranny of software is almost over. Since the first computer programmers wrote the first computer programs, we, the users of that software, have been forced to live in the worlds those programs create. The features are the features. The design is the design. Want something else, something better? Learn to code, I guess. Until […]
Microsoft Edge is adding a new feature that will allow its Copilot AI chatbot to gather information from all of your open tabs. When you start a conversation with Copilot, you can ask the chatbot questions about what’s in your tabs, compare the products you’re looking at, summarize your open articles, and more. In its […]
Hollywood actors and producers are standing behind a new AI licensing standard that will tell AI systems whether they’ll need to pay to use a person’s likeness, creative work, characters, and designs. With the Human Consent Standard, people can set terms for the use of their work or likeness, including giving AI systems full permission […]
Substack, the once buzzy newsletter platform, is losing a new swath of writers to rival platforms most people haven’t heard of. Just last month, The Ankler, one of Substack’s most popular publications, left for a platform that gives it more control over its site. Others who have departed Substack within the past year voiced similar […]
Cloudflare, the cloud provider that connects millions of sites to the internet, wants to “fix” another digital giant: WordPress. It announced a new open-source system, called EmDash, that’s supposed to address the “core problems that WordPress cannot solve” – and they want to do it by allowing AI agents to take control of your website. […]
Google’s Chrome browser is getting a couple of new features, both of them extremely welcome and wildly overdue. The first is a reading mode, which does what it already does in most other browsers: strip out a lot of website cruft to make pages easier to read. Reading mode is good, you should use it, […]
Archive of Our Own (AO3) is officially exiting beta. The Organization for Transformative Works – the nonprofit behind the fanfiction site – announced the update on Thursday, which comes 17 years after AO3’s launch in 2009. “Since 2009, AO3 has grown and changed a lot,” the announcement says. “We’ve introduced many features over the years […]
Surf is a slightly hard app to explain. It’s sort of three things: a client for fediverse apps like Bluesky and Mastodon; a feed reader that lets you subscribe to almost any website, podcast, or YouTube channel; and a tool for creating and following feeds of interesting content, a la Flipboard magazines. It’s a browser […]
A large-scale study has revealed that websites are unintentionally exposing API keys tied to services like AWS, Stripe, and OpenAI, with most leaks traced back to publicly accessible JavaScript files.