Tech

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.

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.

I just wanted the camera bump to go away.

I'm all for the new iPad Pro being thicker for battery life or for less processor throttling, but the camera bump? Ridiculous. Would love an iPad that can sit on a table and be used with an Apple Pencil without wobbling.

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