In 2020 and 2021, the social media world seemed to be on the verge of complete change. A new app called TikTok was ascendant, bringing a whole new kind of vertical video to phones everywhere. And another app – not as popular, but growing fast, and already hugely influential among the tech set – looked […]
Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 119, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, hope your agents are well, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I’ve been reading about Pixar’s future and flight MH370 and sports gambling […]
WordPress.org is launching a new tool that lets you create a private website directly in your browser, according to an announcement on Wednesday. You can access the tool by heading to my.WordPress.net, which opens up a workspace where you can start building a website without signing up to WordPress, choosing a hosting plan, or selecting […]
Downdetector and Speedtest – the free platforms that allow people on the web to quickly check internet speeds or see if an online platform may be down – will soon have a new owner. On Tuesday, the consulting and IT services provider Accenture announced that it has agreed to acquire the Ookla-owned platforms from Ziff […]
Engadget, the long-running tech news website, has a new owner. Yahoo sold the publication to Static Media in a deal that was signed in early February and is scheduled to close later this March. (Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.) The deal hasn’t yet been publicly announced, but a source familiar with the publication says […]
Today, I’m talking with Hank Green, a longtime friend of Decoder and the cofounder and now former owner of Complexly, an online education company he started with his brother John in 2012. I say former owner because Hank and John have just converted Complexly into a nonprofit and given up their ownership of the company […]
SerpApi, a company that offers tools to scrape content on the web, is fighting back against Google’s copyright lawsuit that accuses it of vacuuming up search results “at an astonishing scale.” In a motion to dismiss filed on Friday, SerpApi argues that Google doesn’t hold a copyright on its search results, alleging that the engine […]
Unlike many of the companies stuffing AI into their browsers, Mozilla will soon give you a way to turn all of these features off. An update coming on February 24th will add a new “AI control” option to Firefox’s settings menu, allowing you to disable or enable the browser’s individual AI features, including access to […]
Yahoo’s big AI play is, in many ways, actually a return to the company’s roots. Three decades ago, Yahoo was known as “Jerry’s guide to the world wide web,” and was designed as a sort of all-encompassing portal to help people find good stuff on an increasingly large, hard-to-parse internet. In the early aughts, the […]