Some interesting things on the website.

https://freewebsearch.org/en/

https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/22/ai_training_data_shrinks/

Declare your AIndependence: block AI bots, scrapers and crawlers with a single click

https://blog.cloudflare.com/declaring-your-aindependence-block-ai-bots-scrapers-and-crawlers-with-a-single-click/

QuoteTo help preserve a safe Internet for content creators, we've just launched a brand new "easy button" to block all AI bots. It's available for all customers, including those on our free tier.

Interesting stuff in that post.

The AI war has begun.

Twitter/X alternative Mastodon appeals to journalists with new 'byline' feature

https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/02/twitter-x-alternative-mastodon-appeals-to-journalists-with-latest-byline-feature/

Overlaying Spanish Rail Network on Midwest, imagine Chicago to Detroit in 2 hours, or Chicago to Minneapolis in 3.5 hours.

https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckcars/comments/1dqqc6t/imagine_that/

The two areas are roughly comparable.  No pesky mountains in the Midwest.

Cricket might be gaining a foothold in the US.  We will see.  Also, I didn't know Canada played.

USA beat Canada in T20 World Cup opener

https://sports.yahoo.com/co-hosts-usa-beat-canada-044539671.html

Even if it catches on in the US at a grass roots level it will be decades before we can take on cricket superpowers UK, India and Australia.

Testing occidental search engines on site: again: Mojeek, Bing more normal

https://jackyan.com/blog/2024/05/testing-occidental-search-engines-on-site-again-mojeek-bing-more-normal/

I find the observation that Google prefers HTML pages vs. php, interesting.

Sources are a bit weak but the rumor is:

https://www.androidcentral.com/apps-software/openai-chatgpt-search-engine-rumored

Maybe even this month, May 2024.

A wild orangutan used a medicinal plant to treat a wound, scientists say

https://apnews.com/article/orangutan-medicinal-plant-self-medicate-68d4e94359ac95eaa873c64349d4abb7

Microsoft starts testing ads in the Windows 11 Start menu

https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/12/24128640/microsoft-windows-11-start-menu-ads-app-recommendations

When I get bored I browse through the comment spam on my WP blog.  It quite amusing.

So remember the old "Submit your URL to 1500 search engines" spam we used to get by email?  Well recently I got comment spammed to "Submit your URL to 2500 search engines".  1. Here +20 years later and with Google as the only search engine this spammy pitch is still making the rounds, 2. the alleged number of search engines is now at 2500 so we have search engine inflation.

It was interesting seeing this old old spam still making a rare appearance as a blast from the past.  Some others like time shares seem to have completely died out.

Segway brings a sub-$1,000 smart robot mower to the US

https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/19/24105936/segway-navimow-i-robot-mower-price-release-date-specs

Brave: Sharp increase in installs after iOS DMA update in EU

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/technology/brave-sharp-increase-in-installs-after-ios-dma-update-in-eu/

Quote"Maybe that's why Google still hasn't implemented a browser choice screen on Android."

Search for a pint by price.

https://www.pint-prices.com/search-by-pint

(With so many really good British beers, it shocked me that anyone in the UK would drink Bud Light.)

Bludit  -  https://www.bludit.com 

Create your own Website or Blog in seconds.  Simple, Fast, Secure, Flat-File CMS


It looks pretty complete.

Bubble Car EV.

https://www.theverge.com/24083014/microlino-lite-microcar-moped-license-price-specs

Europe only.  American's need not apply.  We are not allowed to have neat things.

Arc Search combines browser, search engine, and AI into something new and different

https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/28/24053882/arc-search-browser-web-app-ios

QuoteBasically, instead of returning a bunch of search queries about the Chiefs game, Arc Search built me a webpage about it. And somewhere in there is The Browser Company's big idea about the future of web browsers — that a browser, a search engine, an AI chatbot, and a website aren't different things. They're all just parts of an internet information finder, and they might as well exist inside the same app.

At least they are thinking outside of the box.

Laundry is a top source of microplastic pollution – here's how to clean your clothes more sustainably

https://theconversation.com/laundry-is-a-top-source-of-microplastic-pollution-heres-how-to-clean-your-clothes-more-sustainably-217072

If you are a small smartphone company, getting your phones accepted for use on one of the three Big Telecom Mobile networks is difficult.  It's a barrier to selling phones and makes it real hard to enter the US market.

Murena is the smartphone brand owned by non-profit e.foundation which produces their own fork of Android with all the Google spyware  removed.

So anyway "Murena" has started their own brand of MVNO network based on T-Mobile USA.

https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/23/murena-android-google-mvno-mobile-plans/

https://murena.com/america/murena-mobile/

I'm already on T-Mobile and my phone (Fairphone 4) works just fine so I'm unlikely to switch, but this tells me that /e/ foundation and Murena are serious about the US market which brings the fight against Google spying right to Google's heartland.

There is some precedent for this: the Librum 5 Linux phone by Purism started offering their own MVNO and I assume this was mainly because they had problems with US mobile carriers.

You were dying to know that.  Jimmy Wales (Boomis, Wikipedia) started a news oriented social network called WikiTribune which morphed with some changes into WT.social which morphed again into Trust Cafe which is kinda like Reddit with only a few users.  But it sounds all trusty like.

https://www.trustcafe.io/en

Trust Cafe (TC)  follows the Reddit model for news and discussion only subreddits are called branches.

Fairly clean interface, no advertising which is nice as XTwitter loads up with ads, and not too many gimmicks like post.news.

I'm not sure I want another Reddit because I was scouting for a XTwitter replacement in addition to Mastodon (which I like).  I get a lot of news on XTwitter but it's getting harder to stay on Elon's playground.