With robots.txt preferences widely ignored, the AI Preferences Working Group is developing a new way for publishers to shield content from AI bot scraping. For web publishers, stopping AI bots from scraping their best content while consuming valuable bandwidth must feel somewhere between futile and nigh impossible. It’s like throwing a cup of water at a forest fire. No matter what you try, the new generation of bots keeps advancing, insatiably consuming data to train AI models that are...

Users on both platforms will soon be able to use RCS 3.0 to communicate with one another securely. Imagine a world of the near future where Android and Apple iOS users can message one another with the certainty that their communication is secured against eavesdropping by end-to-end encryption (E2EE). And it would not only be for one-to-one chats, but across large groups of employees and users, something that is impossible to guarantee today without resorting to standalone apps such as...

Spying a profitable new sector, the cloud giant looks set to consolidate multiple agentic AI tools and services under one mega-unit. Amazon Web Services customers can expect to hear a lot more about agentic AI in future with the news that the company is setting up a dedicated unit to promote the technology on its platform. The division will be headed by Swami Sivasubramanian, until now Amazon’s VP of AI and data services. “I’m excited about leading a new organization focused on advancing the...

Access by unauthorized staff broke Administrative Procedure Act (APA) and risks “irreparable damage.” The US Treasury Department’s payment servers hold the tax returns, social security data and bank account numbers of every adult citizen of the United States. They are, one would assume, among the most highly secured servers on earth and yet it seems that all the employees of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) needed to do to access these systems after January 20 was to...