Tech critics’ least favorite law is under siege again, this time with a focus on its recommendation algorithms. On Wednesday Sens. John Curtis (R-UT) and Mark Kelly (D-AZ) introduced the Algorithm Accountability Act, which amends Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act to make platforms responsible for preventing their recommendation systems from causing certain foreseeable […]
A college student recently told me about the latest tech designed to help students cheat – and it wasn’t ChatGPT. It was an actual, physical gadget marketed in YouTube ads as the workaround to physical, hardcopy tests, which are back in vogue now as AI tears through higher education like a tornado. (One example is […]
I was starting to doubt it would ever happen, but I finally found a regular, helpful use for AI: vanlife travel planner. I’m not a student and I don’t code. I am, however, on day 48 of my van tour through Europe with my wife and dog. We travel without a specific itinerary, chasing the […]
Epic Games is teaming up with arguably its biggest game development rival, Unity, to bring games made using Unity’s engine into Fortnite. The change will mean that Unity games could sit alongside Epic’s own suite of experiences as well as those created by third-party developers using the Unreal Editor for Fortnite — and it opens […]
Cloudflare has become the latest web infrastructure giant to collapse in the span of a month, replacing entire sites, including X, ChatGPT, Spotify, Canva, and even the outage-tracking DownDetector, with an error message for hours this morning. It’s the latest in a string of outages that Mehdi Daoudi, CEO and co-founder of the internet performance […]
On December 11th, 2010, Jeffrey Epstein was fretting about what came up if you Googled him. By this time Epstein had already pleaded guilty to soliciting prostitution with a child and was a registered sex offender, and just a few days earlier he had been photographed in Central Park taking a stroll with Prince Andrew. […]
Are you a red wine drinker? A high spender? Or perhaps you’re a slow eater, the sort who takes up a restaurant’s table for longer than they’d like. You might not even know – but OpenTable does. Those are just a few of the notes that the reservation platform has started serving up to some […]
Less than two years ago, TikTok was a crisis situation on Capitol Hill. The chair of the House Select Committee on China called it “digital fentanyl” that brainwashes young Americans into supporting Hamas. A former national security adviser said letting TikTok remain in the US under its Chinese owner “would be akin to allowing Soviet […]
Hello, my friends. Have you been feeling too sane lately? Have I got something for you! It is a company called CoreWeave. You may not have heard of it because it’s not doing the consumer-facing part of AI. It’s a data center company, the kind people talk about when they say they want to invest […]
If you’re an indie rock fan of a certain age, the name Stereogum will probably conjure strong feelings. The site was launched “January 1st, 2002, on a whim,” founder Scott Lapatine told The Verge. Originally, this early staple of the music blog era was focused almost entirely on music discovery and posting MP3s. “It was […]