TUAW, a site that was shut down 10 years ago, was sold to a private equity firm, then to a company in Hong Kong, and has now stolen its old workers' identities and is running their old work through AI summarizers.
What’s unusual is for a small publisher like 404 to demand an email address before letting you view their articles.
That’s not how 404 started, though. For the first five months it allowed people to view its articles for free. Then it was discovered people were using bots to scrape the articles, paraphrase them with AI and then republish them elsewhere without giving credit. So they introduced an email subscription to counter this. This was explained in great detail on their website at the time.
That’s not how 404 started, though. For the first five months it allowed people to view its articles for free. Then it was discovered people were using bots to scrape the articles, paraphrase them with AI and then republish them elsewhere without giving credit. So they introduced an email subscription to counter this. This was explained in great detail on their website at the time.