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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

Exposing a web service with Cloudflare Tunnel (2022)

There are lots of ways to host a web service. You might want to rent a VPS, Dedicated Server, or embrace full serverless and write your application for a service like Cloudflare Workers You might want to use Docker, k8s, LXD, or any other manner of deploying your services. You might have a complex setup to proxy and serve traffic through your IP. But sometimes you might not have it all figured out. You might want to run your service in your home on that one old laptop you have lying around,

U.S. Lawmakers Blame Canada for Ruining Summer With Wildfire Smoke

The Canadian province of Manitoba is suffering through its worst wildfire season in its history, and to add insult to injury, several U.S. lawmakers are complaining that smoke wafting south is making it difficult for Americans to enjoy summer. Six Republican Congress members shared their concerns in a letter addressed to Canadian Ambassador Kirsten Hillman on Monday, July 7, asking for more information about how the government plans to mitigate wildfires and the smoke that travels south. Since

The New Internet Sheriff Takes a Shot at Google

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince didn’t make his biggest AI announcement in a press release or earnings call. He made it one X reply at a time. Earlier this month, Cloudflare launched what it called “Content Independence Day,” a policy change that blocks AI companies from scraping the websites it protects unless they compensate content creators. The move challenges the decades-old web economy where companies like Google could freely index content in exchange for traffic, and replaces it with a new

Cloudflare wants Google to change its AI search crawling. Google likely won’t.

After Cloudflare started testing new features that would allow websites to block AI crawlers or require payment for scraping, the tech company immediately faced questions over the logistics of the plan. In particular, website owners and SEO experts wanted to know how Cloudflare planned to block Google's bot from scraping sites to fuel AI overviews without risking blocking the same bot from crawling for valuable search engine placements. Last week, a travel blogger raised questions about the bl

Major Satellite Suddenly Disappears

A satellite designed to monitor human-made methane emissions has gone missing in space. Dubbed MethaneSAT, the $88 million spacecraft was launched into orbit aboard a SpaceX rocket in March 2024 and was expected to collect data on the potent greenhouse gas for at least five years. But for the past two weeks, the satellite's operators, the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund, have been unable to establish contact. Now, in a final blow, mission control says that MethaneSAT has lost power, crus

Lost in Space: A ‘Game-Changing’ Emissions Satellite Just Went Dark

An $88 million satellite backed by billionaire Jeff Bezos is lost in space. MethaneSAT, designed to sniff out sources of methane emissions across the globe, only survived about 15 months in Earth’s orbit before meeting its untimely end. The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), which launched the satellite in March 2024, announced its demise on July 1. The organization revealed that MethaneSAT suddenly went silent on June 20, and its mission operations team has been unable to re-establish contact e

Free Lunch Is Over for the AI That Broke the Web

The foundational deal of the modern web, a handshake agreement that powered two decades of search and content, is officially dead. Cloudflare just put a price on scraping the internet, and it’s coming for artificial intelligence’s free lunch. Almost 30 years ago, two Stanford grad students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, built Google on a simple bargain: content creators would let them copy the entire web in exchange for traffic. For years, that traffic powered ad revenue, subscriptions, and the g

Pay Up, AI Bot: That's the Message From a Key Company in How the Internet Works

AI companies might find it harder to access the entire web to train their large language models after the internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare said this week it would block AI data crawlers by default. It's the latest front to open in an ongoing fight between the creators of content and the AI developers who use that content to train generative AI models. In court, authors and content creators are suing major AI companies for compensation, saying copyrighted content was used without perm

Cloudflare Introduces Default Blocking of A.I. Data Scrapers

Cloudflare, a tech company that helps websites secure and manage their internet traffic, said on Tuesday that it had rolled out a new permission-based setting that allows customers to automatically block artificial intelligence companies from collecting their digital data, a move that has implications for publishers and the race to build A.I. With Cloudflare’s new setting, websites can block — by default — online bots that scrape their data, requiring the website owner to grant access for a bot

Cloudflare just changed the internet, and it's bad news for the AI giants

iStock / Getty Images Plus The major internet Content Delivery Network (CDN), Cloudflare, has declared war on AI companies. Starting July 1, Cloudflare now blocks by default AI web crawlers accessing content from your websites without permission or compensation. The change addresses a real problem. My own small site, where I track all my stories, Practical Technology, has been slowed dramatically at times by AI crawlers. It's not just me. Numerous website owners have reported that AI crawlers,

Cloudflare declares war on AI crawlers - and the stakes couldn't be higher

D-Keine/Getty The major Internet Content Delivery Network (CDN), Cloudflare, has declared war on AI companies. Starting July 1, Cloudflare now blocks by default AI web crawlers accessing content from your websites without permission or compensation. The change addresses a real problem. My own small site, where I track all my stories, Practical Technology, has been slowed dramatically at times by AI crawlers. It's not just me. Numerous website owners have reported that AI crawlers, such as Open

Millions of websites to get 'game-changing' AI bot blocker

Millions of websites to get 'game-changing' AI bot blocker 45 minutes ago Share Save Chris Vallance Senior Technology Reporter Share Save Getty Images Millions of websites - including Sky News, The Associated Press and Buzzfeed - will now be able to block artificial intelligence (AI) bots from accessing their content without permission. The new system is being rolled out by internet infrastructure firm, Cloudflare, which hosts around a fifth of the internet. Eventually, sites will be able to

Cloudflare experiment will block AI bot scrapers unless they pay a fee

Cloudflare has rolled out a couple of new measures meant to keep AI bot crawlers at bay. To start with, every new domain customer that signs up with the company to manage their website traffic will now be asked if they want to allow AI crawlers or to block them altogether. The company released a free tool in 2024 to block AI bots, but with this change, users can block them by default without having to tinker with their settings. Several big publishers, including Condé Nast, TIME and The Associat

Web giant Cloudflare to block AI bots from scraping content by default

In this article NET Follow your favorite stocks CREATE FREE ACCOUNT Jaque Silva | Nurphoto | Getty Images Internet firm Cloudflare will start blocking artificial intelligence crawlers from accessing content without website owners' permission or compensation by default, in a move that could significantly impact AI developers' ability to train their models. Starting Tuesday, every new web domain that signs up to Cloudflare will be asked if they want to allow AI crawlers, effectively giving them

Cloudflare will now, by default, block AI bots from crawling its clients’ websites

However, such systems don’t provide the same opportunities for monetization and credit as search engines historically have. AI models draw from a great deal of data on the web to generate their outputs, but these data sources are often not credited, limiting the creators’ ability to make money from their work. Search engines that feature AI-generated answers may include links to original sources, but they may also reduce people’s interest in clicking through to other sites and could even usher i

Pay up or stop scraping: Cloudflare program charges bots for each crawl

Cloudflare is now experimenting with tools that will allow content creators to charge a fee to AI crawlers to scrape their websites. In a blog Tuesday, Cloudflare explained that its "pay-per-crawl" feature is currently in a private beta. A small number of publishers—including AdWeek, The Associated Press, The Atlantic, BuzzFeed, Fortune, Gannett, and Ars Technica owner Condé Nast—will participate in the experiment. Each publisher will be able to set their own prices that bots must pay before sc

Cloudflare Is Blocking AI Crawlers by Default

Last year, internet infrastructure firm Cloudflare launched tools enabling its customers to block AI scrapers. Today the company has taken its fight against permissionless scraping several steps further. It has switched to blocking AI crawlers by default for its customers and is moving forward with a Pay Per Crawl program that lets customers charge AI companies to scrape their websites. Web crawlers have trawled the internet for information for decades. Without them, people would lose vitally i

Cloudflare will now block AI crawlers by default

The major internet architecture provider Cloudflare will now block known AI web crawlers by default to prevent them from “accessing content without permission or compensation,” according to an announcement on Tuesday. With the change, Cloudflare will start asking new domain owners whether they want to allow AI scrapers, and will even let some publishers implement a “Pay Per Crawl” fee. The Pay Per Crawl program will let publishers set a price for AI scrapers to access their content. AI companie

Cloudflare launches a marketplace that lets websites charge AI bots for scraping

Cloudflare, a cloud infrastructure provider that serves 20% of the web, announced Tuesday the launch of a new marketplace that reimagines the relationship between website owners and AI companies — ideally giving publishers greater control over their content. For the last year, Cloudflare has launched tools for publishers to address the rampant rise of AI crawlers, including a one-click solution to block all AI bots, as well as a dashboard to view how AI crawlers are visiting their site. In a 20

Gridfinity: The modular, open-source grid storage system

Gridfinity could be your workshop's ultimate modular storage system to keep you productive, organized, and safe. It is free, open source, and almost 100% 3D printable. Alexander Chappels Assortment System, licensed under CC-A-NC-SA, partly inspired Zack Freedman's initial designs of Gridfinity. The Gridfinity designs were first released in the video "Gridfinity: Your Ultimate Modular Workshop is FREE!" as a framework for the community to extend, released under the MIT license. Now Gridfinity i

Cloudflare open-sources Orange Meets with End-to-End encryption

Cloudflare has implemented end-to-end encryption (E2EE) to its video calling app Orange Meets and open-sourced the solution for transparency. The application has been available since last year when the internet giant launched it as a demo for Cloudflare Calls (now Realtime). With the introduction of E2EE and the resolution of various trust and verification issues, users interested in strong cryptographic assurances can explore Orange Meets as a foundation for secure video calling in research o

Sirius: A GPU-native SQL engine

Sirius is a GPU-native SQL engine. It plugs into existing databases such as DuckDB via the standard Substrait query format, requiring no query rewrites or major system changes. Sirius currently supports DuckDB and Doris (coming soon), other systems marked with * are on our roadmap. Performance Running TPC-H on SF=100, Sirius achieves ~10x speedup over existing CPU query engines at the same hardware rental cost, making it well-suited for interactive analytics, financial workloads, and ETL jobs.

Cloudflare blocks largest DDoS attack - here's how to protect yourself

oxygen/Getty Cloudflare is a robust content delivery network (CDN) that specializes in providing protection against distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. Last month, Cloudflare blocked the largest DDoS attack in internet history. This assault peaked at a staggering 7.3 terabits per second (Tbps). That's a data deluge, equivalent to streaming nearly 10,000 high-definition movies in under a minute. The attack targeted an unnamed hosting provider using Cloudflare's Magic Transit DDoS pro

Apple TV+ confirms return date for award-winning animated series ‘Stillwater’

Stillwater is one of the highest-rated Apple TV+ shows for kids, and it has snatched quite a few awards since it premiered in 2020. And after a two-year hiatus since the end of last season, Apple has officially confirmed the show’s return date for season 4. Stillwater returns for season 4 on August 1 For those unfamiliar, Stillwater is Apple’s gentle, mindfulness-focused animated series based on Jon J Muth’s bestselling Zen book collection. The show follows three siblings, Karl, Addy, and Mic