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'War of the Worlds' Isn’t Just Bad. It’s Also Shameless Tech Propaganda

“Here we go” is both the first line of the 2025 Amazon Prime movie War of the Worlds and exactly what I said when I chose to watch it after the shitstorm of reviews that warned me not to. Directed by Rich Lee and shot exclusively through online calls and surveillance feed POVs, War of the Worlds centers around domestic terror analyst William Radford, played by Ice Cube, who is on a mission to save his family and the country from alien cyborgs who are deadset on eating our data. Literally. At f

Cloudflare Is Not a CDN

I love Cloudflare. I’ve always been a fan of their service and their generous free plan, which they’ve never backtracked from. They still offer unlimited bandwidth with very few limitations. Users have stories about serving terabytes of data per day without Cloudflare knocking on their door to upgrade. We, too, use Cloudflare under the hood, which enables us to offer unlimited bandwidth for our users as well. This might make people wonder: Why pay for a CDN when Cloudflare is free? When I star

OpenFreeMap survived 100k requests per second

I was about to post about how nice the last 10 months of OpenFreeMap have been. The architecture has really proven itself to be great, Cloudflare has agreed to sponsor the bandwidth, Hetzner servers are super stable as always, serving tiles from Btrfs proved to be a great choice, nginx is amazing, and life is good. Then, out of the blue, I'm getting reports that some tiles are not loading, which normally means tile generation bugs, but not this time. I look into the nginx logs and see this: 20

Wild Pigs in California Are Turning Neon Blue on the Inside, Officials Warn

Unexpected exposure to rodenticide is turning California’s wild pigs blue, state authorities say. “I’m not talking about a little blue,” Dan Burton, owner of a wildlife control company in Salinas, California, told The Los Angeles Times. “I’m talking about neon blue, blueberry blue.” Burton was one of the first trappers to discover that local wild pigs had turned blue on the inside. A subsequent investigation by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) found that the pigs had consu

Debugging a mysterious HTTP streaming issue

The Problem We recently encountered a frustrating issue with HTTP response streaming at Mintlify. Our system uses the AI SDK with the Node stream API to forward streams, and suddenly things stopped working properly. The symptoms were confusing: streaming worked perfectly with cURL and Postman, but failed completely with node-fetch and browser fetch. ‍ Initial Investigation Our first hypothesis centered around stream compatibility issues. We suspected the problem might be related to how the AI

The War for the Web Has Begun

A high-stakes war has just broken out over the future of the internet. In one corner is Cloudflare, a giant of web infrastructure that acts as a gatekeeper for a huge portion of online traffic. In the other is Perplexity, a darling of the AI world, a search engine threatening to upend Google’s dominance. The accusation is explosive: Cloudflare claims Perplexity is a bad actor, a rogue bot that ignores the internet’s oldest rules to secretly scrape data from websites that have explicitly told it

Digital Foundry, the most trusted name in game console analysis, is going independent

is a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CNET, Gizmodo, and Engadget. Over the past decade and a half, Eurogamer’s Digital Foundry has become the most knowledgeable and trustworthy place to find out just how powerful a new video game console might be, where the hottest new games run the best, and why they sometimes don’t! Even Sony and Microsoft often favor DF for exclusive access to technical details. But a

From tickets to brochures: Google Messages just stepped up with PDF support over RCS

Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority TL;DR Google has enabled PDF file sharing via rich cards in RCS Business Messaging through Google Messages. This addition enhances business-to-user communication by allowing flight tickets, passes, and documents to be sent through RCS, eliminating the need for email or other apps. However, the potential for an increase in spam remains a concern. PDF support has launched initially in India with a 100MiB attachment limit. Instant messaging apps took texting

Perplexity says Cloudflare's accusations of 'stealth' AI scraping are based on embarrassing errors

Elyse Betters Picaro / ZDNET ZDNET's key takeaways Cloudflare claims Perplexity ignores websites' wishes in its content hunt. Other AI companies, such as OpenAI, don't wipe content, Cloudflare says Cloudflare now offers services to block aggressive AI crawlers. Perplexity is denying Cloudflare's claims. Cloudflare, a leading content delivery network (CDN) company, has accused the AI startup Perplexity of evading websites' "no crawl" directives by stealthily deploying web crawlers to scrape

Some people are defending Perplexity after Cloudflare ‘named and shamed’ it

When Cloudflare accused AI search engine Perplexity of stealthily scraping websites on Monday, while ignoring a site’s specific methods to block it, this wasn’t a clear-cut case of an AI web crawler gone wild. Many people came to Perplexity’s defense. They argued that Perplexity accessing sites in defiance of the website owner’s wishes, while controversial, is acceptable. And this is a controversy that will certainly grow as AI agents flood the internet: Should an agent accessing a website on b

Perplexity is sneaking onto websites to scrape blocked content, says Cloudflare

Elyse Betters Picaro / ZDNET ZDNET's key takeaways Cloudflare claimed Perplexity ignores websites' wishes in its content hunt. Cloudflare said other AI companies, such as OpenAI, don't wipe content. Cloudflare now offers services to block aggressive AI crawlers. Cloudflare, a leading content delivery network (CDN) company, has accused the AI startup Perplexity of evading websites' "no crawl" directives by stealthily deploying web crawlers to scrape content from sites that have explicitly bl

Perplexity is allegedly scraping websites it's not supposed to, again

Web crawlers deployed by Perplexity to scrape websites are allegedly skirting restrictions, according to a new report from Cloudflare. Specifically, the report claims that the company's bots appear to be "stealth crawling" sites by disguising their identity to get around robots.txt files and firewalls. Robots.txt is a simple file websites host that lets web crawlers know if they can scrape a websites' content or not. Perplexity's official web crawling bots are "PerplexityBot" and "Perplexity-Us

AI site Perplexity uses “stealth tactics” to flout no-crawl edicts, Cloudflare says

AI search engine Perplexity is using stealth bots and other tactics to evade websites’ no-crawl directives, an allegation that if true violates Internet norms that have been in place for more than three decades, network security and optimization service Cloudflare said Monday. In a blog post, Cloudflare researchers said the company received complaints from customers who had disallowed Perplexity scraping bots by implementing settings in their sites’ robots.txt files and through Web application

Cloudflare says Perplexity’s AI bots are ‘stealth crawling’ blocked sites

is a news writer who covers the streaming wars, consumer tech, crypto, social media, and much more. Previously, she was a writer and editor at MUO. Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. The AI search startup Perplexity is allegedly skirting restrictions meant to stop its AI web crawlers from accessing certain websites, according to a report from Cloudflare. In the report, Cloudflare claims that when Perplexity encounters a block, the startup wi

Perplexity accused of scraping websites that explicitly blocked AI scraping

AI startup Perplexity is crawling and scraping content from websites that have explicitly indicated they don’t want to be scraped, according to internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare. On Monday, Cloudflare published research saying it observed the AI startup ignore blocks and hide its crawling and scraping activities. The network infrastructure giant accused Perplexity of obscuring its identity when trying to scrape web pages “in an attempt to circumvent the website’s preferences,” Cloudfl

Scientists shine a laser through a human head

For the most part, anyone who wants to see what’s going on inside someone else’s brain has to make a tradeoff when it comes to which tools to use. The electroencephalograph (EEG) is cheap and portable, but can’t read much past the outer layers of the brain, while the alternative, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), is expensive and the size of a room, but can go deeper. Now, a research group in Glasgow has come up with a mechanism that could one day provide the depth of fMRI using equi

Scientists Shine a Laser Through a Human Head

For the most part, anyone who wants to see what’s going on inside someone else’s brain has to make a tradeoff when it comes to which tools to use. The electroencephalograph (EEG) is cheap and portable, but can’t read much past the outer layers of the brain, while the alternative, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), is expensive and the size of a room, but can go deeper. Now, a research group in Glasgow has come up with a mechanism that could one day provide the depth of fMRI using equi

Perfecting anti-aliasing on signed distance functions

← index Doing anti-aliasing on SDF is not as straightforward as it seems. Most of the time, we see people use a smoothstep with hardcoded constants, sometimes with screen space information, sometimes cryptic or convoluted formulas. Even if SDFs have the perfect mathematical properties needed for a clean anti-aliasing, the whole issue has a scope larger than it appears at first glance. And even when trivial solutions exist, it's not always clear why they are a good fit. Let's study that together

So you want to parse a PDF?

Suppose you have an appetite for tilting at windmills. Let's say you love pain. Well then why not write a PDF parser today? The ideal world: how the specification should work Conceptually parsing a PDF is fairly simple: First, locate the version header comment at the start of the file Next you need to locate the pointer to the cross-reference Then you can find all object offsets Finally you locate and build the trailer dictionary which points to the catalog dicitionary Introduction to PDF

Hackers actively exploit critical RCE in WordPress Alone theme

Threat actors are actively exploiting a critical unauthenticated arbitrary file upload vulnerability in the WordPress theme 'Alone,' to achieve remote code execution and perform a full site takeover. Wordfence is reporting the malicious activity, saying it has blocked over 120,000 exploitation attempts targeting its customers. The WordPress security firm also reports that the attacks started several days before public disclosure of the flaw, indicating that threat actors are monitoring changel

TikTok gamifies mindfulness with 'well-being missions'

Or, hear me out: Put down your phone and breathe. TikTok’s latest answer to its addictiveness is gamified mindfulness tools. The app’s new Well-being Missions let you earn badges for completing challenges related to balanced digital habits. To be clear, mindfulness and dopamine-seeking mini-games are a contradictory pair. But hey, at least it’s healthier than doomscrolling. The first batch of TikTok’s "short, engaging missions" focuses on the platform’s existing digital well-being tools. (The

Indie App Spotlight: ‘Pics2PDF’ turns your best photos into a quick document, and more

Welcome to Indie App Spotlight. This is a weekly 9to5Mac series where we showcase the latest apps in the indie app world. If you’re a developer and would like your app featured, get in contact. As the name suggests, Pics2PDF lets you select a bunch of photos from your photos library, and convert it into a PDF. This can be great if you want to quickly print out photos from your photos library in one swift process, or if you’re otherwise trying to share multiple photos at once in a more formal ma

A Python tool to parse PDF statements from Poste Italiane

Poste Italiane Documents Parser agli sventurati che hanno un conto postale A Python tool to parse PDF documents from Poste Italiane and convert them into structured JSON or CSV data. It automatically identifies the document type and validates financial data to ensure integrity. Key Features Automatic Document Detection : Identifies the document type (e.g., BancoPosta statement, Postepay report) from the PDF content. : Identifies the document type (e.g., BancoPosta statement, Postepay report

(Python) Poste Italiane document parser

Poste Italiane Documents Parser agli sventurati che hanno un conto postale A Python tool to parse PDF documents from Poste Italiane and convert them into structured JSON or CSV data. It automatically identifies the document type and validates financial data to ensure integrity. Key Features Automatic Document Detection : Identifies the document type (e.g., BancoPosta statement, Postepay report) from the PDF content. : Identifies the document type (e.g., BancoPosta statement, Postepay report

PDFgear Scan is an AI-powered, feature-packed scanning app – and it’s completely free

We don’t talk enough about the amount of paperwork we come across every day. From essential bank documents, work contracts, tax notices, and bills to invoices, application forms, IDs, letters, and more, keeping everything organized can be a chore. And even more so if there’s a mix of physical and digital paperwork to deal with. Scanning your documents and organizing them digitally is a smart idea. But while there are plenty of scanner apps, any features you might need beyond basic scanning are

Cloudflare says 1.1.1.1 outage not caused by attack or BGP hijack

To quash speculation of a cyberattack or BGP hijack incident causing the recent 1.1.1.1 Resolver service outage, Cloudflare explains in a post mortem that the incident was caused by an internal misconfiguration. The outage occurred on July 14 and impacted most users of the service all over the world, rendering internet services unavailable in many cases. “The root cause was an internal configuration error and not the result of an attack or a BGP hijack,” Cloudflare says in the announcement. T

Google Drive could get seamlessly smarter about your PDF documents (APK teardown)

Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority TL;DR Google is working on bringing automatic PDF summaries to Google Drive’s PDF viewer on Android. The summary will appear at the top of the document pane without user interaction. Users can provide feedback on summaries and interact with Gemini for more answers. We’ve previously spotted that Google Drive on Android could soon serve PDF summaries through the PDF viewer. While the control given to users is excellent, there was potential to streamline the

Cloudflare Starts Blocking Pirate Sites for UK Users

Cloudflare has become the first internet intermediary beyond local residential ISPs, to block access to pirate sites in the UK. Users attempting to access certain pirate sites are greeted with 'Error 451 - Unavailable for Legal Reasons'. In theory, ISP blocking should prevent UK users from even seeing this notice, but a combination of Cloudflare's blocking mechanism and choices made by some VPN users results in a piracy dead end. Internet service providers BT, Virgin Media, Sky, TalkTalk, EE, a

It’s not just you: a Cloudflare issue is breaking websites for some users [U]

Update 7:57 p.m. ET: The issue has been solved, and Cloudflare’s status page says that all systems are operational. If you’ve noticed some internet slowdowns or trouble reaching websites tonight, you’re not alone. Cloudflare has confirmed an issue affecting its popular 1.1.1.1 public DNS resolver, which many people rely on for fast and private internet browsing. What’s going on? The company first acknowledged the problem at 22:13 UTC, and began rolling out a fix just minutes later. According

It’s not just you: a Cloudflare issue is breaking websites for some users

If you’ve noticed some internet slowdowns or trouble reaching websites tonight, you’re not alone. Cloudflare has confirmed an issue affecting its popular 1.1.1.1 public DNS resolver, which many people rely on for fast and private internet browsing. What’s going on? The company first acknowledged the problem at 22:13 UTC, and began rolling out a fix just minutes later. According to Cloudflare, the issue only affects users relying on 1.1.1.1. Their Gateway and Authoritative DNS services are stil