Gloss Staff

Gloss Staff

Polygon continues Vox Media’s switch to Wordpress.

“This migration rests on Vox Media’s front-end platform, Duet — first seen on The Verge, and then Vox.com — coupled with a new, more flexible backend in WordPress VIP,” says Polygon publisher Chris Grant. “Beyond just a redesign, this new site represents a fundamental shift in our product strategy, and our continued investment and confidence in websites and loyal audiences.”
Powered by its migration to WordPress VIP and Vox Media’s front end platform, Duet, Polygon will continue to build out its homepage and website, with new community tools aimed at boosting user experience to follow the redesign.
Polygon Unveils Redesign Aimed at Making Its Homepage a Destination for Gaming Culture Consumers
Powered by its migration to WordPress VIP and Vox Media’s front-end platform, Duet, Polygon’s new homepage will unveil new editorial rubrics, with recommendations curated by staff and special guests.

"Photographer of Viral Trump Rally Shooting Pic Spills on Historic Moment".

“I shoot politics for a living, man. Every single photo I take people are going to argue about,” Vucci said with a laugh. “I spend my life around a very highly polarized part of our society, so no matter what I do, people are gonna hate it. People are gonna love it. Listen, as long as everyone hates me equally, I’m doing the job.”
AP Photographer Spills on Viral Trump Rally Shooting Pic
Evan Vucci told The Daily Beast how he managed to capture one of the most compelling images from the shocking event.

Gruber, Copyright and LLM scraping.

John Gruber, noted Apple access journalist, is back defending the company after its launch of Applebot-powered Apple Intelligence. There's some interesting treatment of Apple Intelligence and more specifically Applebot crawling the 'public web' and then 'transforming' that crawled content, via this post from Louie Mantia:

From John Gruber today:
It’s fair for public data to be excluded on an opt-out basis, rather than included on an opt-in one [...]
No, no it’s not. This is a critical thing about ownership and copyright in the world. We own what we make the moment we make it. Publishing text or images on the web does not make it fair game to train AI on. The “public” in “public web” means free to access; it does not mean it's free to use.

The idea that being on the public web means that content can be actually taken and recreated with no human contribution is bizarre. If a music video is published on YouTube, does that suddenly mean it is no longer a Copyrighted piece of work? Absolutely not. Does a paywall on a site, like Netflix for example, suddenly mean that the content is different? No.

It's insulting that Apple now claims its crawler is opt-out, after already training its AI on content without warning.

I guess Gloss republishing a quote from Mantia's blog above is also a recreation, maybe some might even say theft or copyright infringement. But I'm adding to it, linking back, and the original article is still its own viable piece. You might want to read the rest, in which case the original creator can receive pageviews.

Training AI

G/O Media sells Gizmodo.

Keleops publishes four consumer tech websites: Journal du Geek, 01net, Presse Citron and iPhon. Jean-Guillaume Kleis, the chief executive of Keleops, said in an interview on Tuesday that the company had been looking to make an acquisition in the United States for several years and Gizmodo was “an obvious choice.”

G/O Media, owned by private equity firm Great Hill Partners and comprised of former Gawker Media titles, doesn't actually own its namesake publications anymore. The O stood for Onion and the G stood for Gizmodo.

Over the past 4 years the firm has sold ClickHole to Cards Against Humanity, Lifehacker to Ziff Davis, Jezebel, The A.V. Club and Splinter News to Paste, Deadspin to Lineup Publishing, The Takeout to Static Media and The Onion to Global Tetrahedron. All that remains is:

business news site Quartz, African-American culture outlet The Root, gaming site Kotaku, gearhead publication Jalopnik, and commerce site The Inventory.

Resistance is futile: Microsoft will screenshot everything you do, whether you like it or not.

Microsoft Recall, the new AI feature that stores 30-days of screenshots, passwords and sensitive material-included, is enabled by default on new Copilot+ PCs. As in, there is no option to disable it when first setting up your computer.

Just wait for this option to be further buried by Microsoft, as the gradual decline of Windows 11 continues. You will subscribe to Microsoft 365 and Game Pass. You will use Microsoft Edge.

Microsoft stole my Chrome tabs, and it wants yours, too
Microsoft Edge is misbehaving.

You will buy a Zune and message your friends and family on Microsoft Teams (?).