Tech

The Verge introduces metered paywall.

Update: The paywall has launched. Via Semafor:

Editor-in-chief Nilay Patel told Semafor that the move was intended to drive additional revenue and insulate The Verge from changes made by social media platforms[...]
“I think it’s a tragedy that garbage is free and news is behind paywalls. I don’t want to make that worse,” Patel said. “I think that The Verge homepage and our news coverage serves a central utility function in our ecosystem.”

The website also hints at future integrations with ActivityPub and Bluesky in an effort to take the focus away from SEO and social-media traffic and make The Verge homepage a platform of its own.

Early benefits include unlimited access to posts, such as paywalled newsletters and metered product reviews and features, limited ads on all Verge content and a physical limited edition magazine. Also the original decentralised solution, RSS, is available to subscribers, with unabridged posts available through RSS readers.

Original post:

According to Semafor, Vox Media's technology website The Verge is going behind a paywall. Some content will remain free:

Beginning this week, the Verge will charge $7/month or $50/year for comprehensive access to the site as well as the already-paywalled newsletters Command Line and Notepad.
Some content and the publication’s homepage, which was redesigned in 2022 to resemble a social feed, will remain free. The Verge is Vox Media’s third major subscription push behind New York and Vox, which launched a membership program earlier this year.

Everything old is new again at Vox Media, which will also be introducing an app for its publication New York Magazine, focused on digital NY Mag subscribers:

It will be the magazine’s second crack at a mobile app; New York first launched an iPhone app in 2016. 

New: AirPods Max in new colours and USB-C.

From Apple:

AirPods Max are available in five beautiful new colours, including midnight, starlight, blue, orange, and purple, and offer complementary finishes alongside other Apple products like Mac and iPad. Additionally, AirPods Max now feature USB-C charging capabilities, making them more convenient than ever to charge at home or on the go.

The AirPods Max are up for pre-order today for $899 AUD, or you can pick them up in-store starting next Friday, September 20.

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.

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