PayPal’s Honey browser extension has been lauded for years as an easy way to find coupons online. But some are calling it a “scam” after a deep dive from YouTuber MegaLag, who accused Honey of “stealing money from influencers,” and returned one year later with a second video that says Honey targeted minors, collected data […]
Google has filed a lawsuit against SerpApi, a company that offers tools to scrape content on the web, including Google’s search results. SerpApi is accused of violating the Copyright Act by using “deceptive means” to automatically access and take Google’s search results “at an astonishing scale” before selling the data to customers. Reddit also sued […]
Mozilla is in a tricky position. It contains both a nonprofit organization dedicated to making the internet a better place for everyone, and a for-profit arm dedicated to, you know, making money. In the best of times, these things feed each other: The company makes great products that advance its goals for the web, and […]
Today, I’m talking with Prashanth Chandrasekar, who is the CEO of Stack Overflow. I last had Prashanth on the show in 2022, one month before ChatGPT launched. While the generative AI boom had tons of impact on all sorts of companies, it immediately upended everything about Stack Overflow in an existential way. Stack Overflow, if […]
Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 109, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, hope you’re staying warm, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I’ve been reading about Google Maps and shopaganda and life as a pop […]
The Chrome team at Google recently built a new browser. It takes a query or prompt, opens a bunch of related tabs for you, and then builds you a custom app for whatever you’re trying to do. Ask it for travel tips and it’ll build you a planner app; ask it for study help and […]
Google is planning to update its AI-powered search feature, AI Mode, to include more in-line links to the sources it’s pulling information from. The company included the update as part of a broader change to the way it interacts with sources, saying it will also introduce the links embedded inside AI Mode with an AI-generated […]
An open licensing standard that aims to make AI companies pay for the content they vacuum up across the web is now an official specification. Really Simple Licensing 1.0 – or RSL for short – gives publishers the ability to dictate licensing and compensation rules to the web crawlers that visit their sites. The RSL […]
The more than 20,000 pages of Jeffrey Epstein emails released earlier this month by the House Oversight Committee have been enough to prompt more investigations into the convicted child sex offender and the people around him, like former Harvard president and OpenAI board member Larry Summers. Now, Luke Igel and Riley Walz have reformatted the […]
Let’s talk about AI and what I’ve been calling the “DoorDash problem.” This is about to define the next battle in AI, and it might completely transform not only how you order a sandwich — but also how the entire internet economy works in general. So what, exactly, is the DoorDash problem? Briefly, it’s what […]