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Tag: web

  • AI haters build tarpits to trap and trick AI scrapers that ignore robots.txt – Ars Technica

    But to Aaron, the fight is not about winning. Instead, it’s about resisting the AI industry further decaying the Internet with tech that no one asked for, like chatbots that replace customer service agents or the rise of inaccurate AI search summaries. By releasing Nepenthes, he hopes to do as much damage as possible, perhaps spiking companies’ AI training costs, dragging out training efforts, or even accelerating model collapse, with tarpits helping to delay the next wave of enshittification.

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  • The tangled tale of The Times’s URL – The New York Times

    In 1985, the Times editors A.M. Rosenthal and Arthur Gelb gathered a task force, which included Mr. Lewis, to work on a project called The New York Times in the Year 2000. … Then an editor for the Science section and a personal computers columnist, Mr. Lewis recalled predicting that by the millennium, Times articles would be read on personal computer screens, in cyberspace. “I recall Artie dismissing me with a wave,” Mr. Lewis wrote of Mr. Gelb.

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  • Did OpenAI just spend more than $10 million on a URL? – The Verge

    People hoarding “vanity domains” is a tale as old as the Internet itself. Just a few months ago, AI startup Friend spent $1.8 million on the domain friend.com after raising $2.5 million in funding. Having just raised $6.6 billion, OpenAI dropping more than $10 million —in cash or stock — is just a drop in the bucket.

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  • Leon Eckert

    Hallo! I am a German programmer, researcher and artist focusing on the critical discussion of technology and its impact on society. My work is inspired by the psychological, cultural and geopolitical processes at play in a time of large-scale data collection and analysis.

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  • ‘We were wrong’: An oral history of WIRED’s original website – WIRED

    Ian: Back in those days, we’d say, The nice thing about the internet is how safe it is. Everybody’s there to help you, and everybody just wants to do good things. People asked, Why require passwords for stuff, because who’s going to do anything terrible on the internet?

    Kevin: Today, a new thing comes along and people immediately say, “I don’t know what it is, but it’s going to hurt me. It’s going to bite me.” That’s definitely a change that wasn’t present when we were starting.

    Jeff: But nostalgia can be dangerous. It was really hard what we did, and stressful, and we didn’t know what we were doing. When people say, “If we could only go back to then,” I’m like, no, we only had modems. It was terrible.

    John P: As a business, HotWired failed. But all that stuff that we were doing, it was scientific investigation.

    Jonathan: We thought the internet was going to be good for people. We were wrong.

    Jeff: I still feel like literally anybody with an idea can start hacking on the web or making apps or things like that. That’s all still there. I think the nucleus of what we started back then still exists on the web, and it still makes me really, really happy.

    John: We were lucky with WIRED. With HotWired there was no choice, and we couldn’t do it differently if we went back and tried. But we were unlucky to be first.

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