It's not news that "AI" crawlers are an ongoing plague and that broadly the plague is getting worse. There seem to be more and more crawlers, and they're getting past more precautions. One possible future for the web in the face of this is websites with less features, at least for the general public, because fewer features means less to crawl and less crawler impact. Another possible web future is one of pervasive gatekeepers that must be satisfied to allow you access to many or most websites.
Internet
Everyone’s Packing Up – Thoughts 💭 of Widdershins
I don't think the big platforms are going anywhere. But the people who made them interesting in the first place keep quietly walking out the side door, and writing a post about it on their way out. Which, I suppose, is what we're all doing here.
The Ethernet spec was first drafted on this day in 1980 — DEC, Intel, and Xerox defined the standard several years before the internet existed | Tom’s Hardware
On this day in 1980, version 1.0 of the Ethernet specification was published by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), Intel, and Xerox. This ‘DIX’ standard was established at a time still nearly three years before the modern internet existed. Nevertheless, Ethernet would become the default technology for connecting computers to each other in local networks – and all around the world. However, we must point out that Ethernet had existed in experimental form at Xerox PARC in the 1970s.
This Was News: a time capsule of yesterday’s headlines | Disruptive Library Technology Jester
That project is This Was News, a website and social media bot that encourages people to reflect on the news that was. It seems (to me, at least) that the news cycle is winding faster and faster, which makes it easy to forget what the most important story of the day when it happened. One reasonable reaction to this is to tune out the news entirely. Another reaction would be to get periodic reminders of those stories, then be able to think about their impact after time has passed.
‘Here, There and Everywhere’: The Beatles have permeated research papers across academic disciplines
More than 3,000 scientific article titles across disciplines have made use of Beatles song titles and lyrics, according to a study published in PLOS One by Gabriel Budel of Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and colleagues. This analysis is an unprecedentedly large-scale, cross-disciplinary account of how the Beatles have left their mark on scientific writing.
The View From RSS
What the web looks like when you subscribe to 2,000 RSS feeds.
Somehow, still using RSS, which is a beautifully simple bit of tech from the early days of the web, makes you part of a community of like-minded strangers. When I’ve spent hours scrolling through my never-ending stream of text that nobody else ever sees, I feel a warm glow when I come across something that was written just for me.
Books are inefficient, and the internet is training us to expect optimized experiences.
If You Quit Social Media, Will You Read More Books?
Does that mean that people are less literate in general? Counterintuitively, there has never been a time in history when people have spent more time reading words, even if it’s just text messages on their phones. We can agree that most of this reading is less edifying than books are, but I do wonder if the downturn in book reading, and its relationship to our online habits, might be more complicated than we are inclined to conclude. It is, for instance, much easier to find information now—information we might once have looked for in books, say, and also information about the books we might consider reading. Maybe, in the age of the internet, many of us, as informed readers, only want to read one book, tailored very specifically to our interests, every couple of years.
Requiem for Early Blogging
Early blogging was slower, less beholden to the hourly news cycle, and people were more inclined to talk about personal enthusiasms as well as what was going on in the world because blogs were considered an individual enterprise, not necessarily akin to a regular publication.
A nationwide internet age verification plan is sweeping Congress
A nationwide internet age verification plan is sweeping Congress
The bill is set to be discussed in a hearing before a powerful House committee that’s considering the large package of kids online safety bills. It comes just as the bill has picked up a new industry supporter, Pinterest. “We need to ensure that our kids are safe and parents have peace of mind from the moment their device is first turned on,” CEO Bill Ready says in a statement. “By making app stores the center for age verification, the App Store Accountability Act sets a clear standard for youth online safety.” Companies like Meta, Snap, and X have also expressed broad support for the app store approach and applauded the federal bill when it was introduced.
Requiem for Early Blogging
Early blogging was slower, less beholden to the hourly news cycle, and people were more inclined to talk about personal enthusiasms as well as what was going on in the world because blogs were considered an individual enterprise, not necessarily akin to a regular publication. One of my early blogs was mostly about economics, a Ukrainian punk band called Gogol Bordello, politics, and a bar on Canal street that turned into an Eastern European disco every night around midnight.
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