Web

At the moment, if you type “from:realdonaldtrump” followed by a specific term in X’s search bar, you’ll get the same set of results, seemingly no matter what you type, according to a Mediaite story spotted by Engadget.

I experienced the same thing when I tried it, but could still search other accounts this way. X responded with an auto-reply when reached for comment.

You may need to close and reopen the app to see it, but according to Android expert Mishaal Rahman, Gemini is showing up for non-Google Workspace users.

Gemini can do things like summarize emails, suggest next steps, or draft replies. Before now, you’ve needed a Google AI premium subscription or a Workspace account for access to the AI assistant.

A new Canary test build of the Chrome browser (I see it in version 128.0.6611.0 in macOS) has a new performance alert to tell you when a tab is hogging resources, Windows Report spotted.

To try it, open the Canary Chrome browser, navigate to chrome://flags/#performance-intervention-ui, enable “performance intervention suggestions,” and restart. Now Chrome can complain about Chrome’s memory usage, too!

In the old days, running Disk Defragmenter in Windows took forever but was a welcome, meditative reminder that you can’t control everything.

I’m kidding, it was awful. Here’s a website that simulates it, hard drive sounds and all, from developer Dennis Morello. It’s nicer when it’s not keeping you from playing Starcraft.

Software engineer Robert Heaton wrote a tool that gives him “free, unbelievably stupid wi-fi” on planes, by... repeatedly updating fields in his Air Miles account without paying for in-flight Wi-Fi.

Go read this blog recounting how his PySkyWiFi tool uses data tunneled through the limited space of his Air Miles account information to a proxy computer on the ground. It’s apparently very slow. And it sounds a little familiar.

Microsoft announced an update to Edge’s clipboard allowing SVG files — space efficient vector images — to be copy and pasted into web apps without any complicated workarounds.

The company also contributed the updates to the open-source Chromium project so that other Chromium-based browsers can add streamlined SVG copying and pasting. Maybe Chrome will be next?

Fast Company asked him why his AI search engine is ripping content from paywalled news outlets like Wired, and... hoo boy. He attempted to shift blame to “third-party web crawlers,” refused to identify which ones, said it was too “complicated” to just stop doing that, and suggested it’s not technically illegal to ignore robots.txt. Sure.

Wired, June 19th: “Perplexity Is a Bullshit Machine.”

Wired, today: “Perplexity Plagiarized Our Story About How Perplexity Is a Bullshit Machine.”

These links are paywalled, but that’s part of the point: it’s subscription journalism. Wired even blocks Perplexity in its robots.txt file, yet Perplexity is scraping stories anyhow. Might not be the only one, but that’s no excuse.