When tech entrepreneur Ian Leaman needed to buy a website address for his new artificial intelligence start-up he found that he had an expensive problem. One web address, npc.ai, was sold for $250,000 this year, while another, service.ai, went for $127,500, according to one report. Such head-turning figures are a side effect of the feverish buzz surrounding AI start-ups and technology.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-67284936
Omegle, a chat service that pairs users with a random person so they can talk via text or video, is shutting down. Leif K-Brooks, who launched the service when he was 18 years old, announced its closure and talked about its humble beginnings, as well as how it grew organically because "meeting new people [is] a basic human need." While he didn't delve into the specific reasons for Omegle's shutdown, he admitted that "some people misused [the service], including to commit unspeakably heinous crimes." In the end, he found the "existing stress and expense of operating Omegle, and fighting its misuse" to no longer be sustainable, both financially and psychologically. "Frankly, I don’t want to have a heart attack in my 30s," he added.
https://www.engadget.com/omegle-shuts-down-after-14-years-of-random-chats-125007355.html
Those not closely watching might be wondering: All this effort to save a bunch of porn? Seglegs, in their post on the matter, made it clear that, while there may be adult content in the mix, the real goal is to help save content from online communities like Something Awful and Reddit—non-explicit content that might have been uploaded anonymously and could disrupt large parts of the internet if deleted.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/ak3ew4/archive-team-races-to-save-a-billion-imgur-files-before-porn-deletion-apocalypse
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“[Google] came to us and said, the internet is broken, ads aren’t loading, blah blah, blah. We want to provide a better user experience to users by coming up with this clean standard,” says one magazine product executive. “My reaction was that the main problem is ads, so why don’t you fix the ads? They said they can’t fix the ads. It’s too hard.”
https://www.theverge.com/23711172/google-amp-accelerated-mobile-pages-search-publishers-lawsuit
If you want to test a free platform’s ability to protect content over the long haul, here’s a fun test: Upload an image, post it somewhere, then wait a decade to see if it sticks around. Odds are, it won’t. Which is why, perhaps, it’s not totally surprising to learn that Imgur, a popular photo-uploading service that has been informally tied to Reddit since its 2009 founding, will remove two types of content from its platform starting next month: explicit or pornographic imagery, and images uploaded anonymously—the latter with a lean on unused images, according to the company. While technically banned from Imgur for years through its community rules, adult content hasn’t been actively removed (and is incredibly popular). Until now.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/4a3vkq/the-imgur-apocalypse-is-going-to-break-large-parts-of-the-internet