Ashley Belanger

photo of Trump may leave TikTok’s algorithm under ByteDance’s control image It was apparently a busy weekend for key players involved in Donald Trump's efforts to make a deal to save TikTok. Perhaps the most appealing option for ByteDance could be if Trump blessed a merger between TikTok and Perplexity AI—a San Francisco-based AI search company worth about $9 billion that appears to…

photo of AI haters build tarpits to trap and trick AI scrapers that ignore robots.txt image Last summer, Anthropic inspired backlash when its ClaudeBot AI crawler was accused of hammering websites a million or more times a day. And it wasn't the only artificial intelligence company making headlines for supposedly ignoring instructions in robots.txt files to avoid scraping web content on certain sites.…

photo of Copying Musk, Trump admin offers federal workers buyouts to resign image Echoing Elon Musk's approach to thinning out Twitter's staff in 2022, Donald Trump's plan to significantly slash the government workforce now, for a limited time only, includes offering resignation buyouts. In a Tuesday email that the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) sent to nearly all federal employees,…

AI could help protect national security, detect diseases, and stabilize power grids, company says.

Most people think purely AI-generated works shouldn't be copyrighted, report says.

A website owner frustrated with the high rate of scraping that AI web crawlers were conducting on his site — 30 million hits from Facebook’s crawler

“A little pain”: Trump finally admits tariffs heap costs on Americans. Canadian and American flags are seen at the US/Canada border March 1, 2017, in Pittsburg, New Hampshire.

"What a 'nice' way to start a week!" Pavlov posted on Bluesky. "Our channel on YouTube has been deleted due to 'spam and deceptive policies.'

photo of Tariffs may soon spike cost of cars, household goods, consumer tech image Over the weekend, President Trump issued executive orders heaping significant additional tariffs on America's biggest trading partners, Canada, China, and Mexico. To justify the tariffs—"a 25 percent additional tariff on imports from Canada and Mexico and a 10 percent additional tariff on imports from…

Internet Archive makes it easier to track changes in CDC data online.