In a ‘Test’, Google Is Automatically Rewriting News Headlines in Its Search Results ⇥ searchengineland.com

Sean Hollister, the Verge:

Since roughly the turn of the millennium, Google Search has been the bedrock of the web. People loved Google’s trustworthy “10 blue links” search experience and its unspoken promise: The website you click is the website you get.

Now, Google is beginning to replace news headlines in its search results with ones that are AI-generated. After doing something similar in its Google Discover news feed, it’s starting to mess with headlines in the traditional “10 blue links,” too. We’ve found multiple examples where Google replaced headlines we wrote with ones we did not, sometimes changing their meaning in the process.

As I noted when I linked to Hollister’s article about Discover back in December, this is not new in search results; it has been happening for years.

Danny Goodwin, Search Engine Land:

Dig deeper. Google changed 76% of title tags in Q1 2025 – Here’s what that means […]

According to the Google Search Central section on title links, originally published in 2021:

I am not arguing this is good or normal — the examples Hollister shows are extremely poor reflections of the articles in question — but I do not understand why it is only gaining traction now, nor how it meaningfully differs from what Google has been doing all along. It is indeed frustrating.

Many of the results you see in Google Search misrepresent the source material and are misleading. But that has been true for a while — which is a problem unto itself. People should not trust the results they see as represented by Google Search. The visual tone Google has maintained, however, is that it is a neutral directory. The summaries in A.I. Overview are delivered with an unearned dry authority, and the ten links below it are there because of a tense truce between Google’s goals and those of search optimization professionals.

Also, I had no idea that Search Engine Land had been acquired at some point by Semrush which, in turn, was bought by Adobe.

Lobbying Firms Funded by Apple and Meta Are Duelling on Age Verification ⇥ bloomberg.com

Emily Birnbaum, writing for Bloomberg in July:

Meta is also helping to fund the Digital Childhood Alliance, a coalition of conservative groups leading efforts to pass app-store age verification, according to three people familiar with the funding.

The App Store Accountability Act is based on model legislation written by the Digital Childhood Alliance. The lobbying group also publishes marketing pieces, including one (PDF) that calls Apple’s age verification frameworks “ineffective”. Specifically, it points to the lack of parental consent required “for kids to enter into complex contracts”, with “no way to verify that parental consent has been obtained”.

Meta, for its part, requires users to self-report their birthday and click a button that says “I agree” to create an Instagram account. In fairness, the title of that page says “read and agree to our terms” and, on the terms page, Meta does say you need to be 13 years old. This is pretty standard stuff but, if Meta actually cared about this, it could voluntarily implement the stricter controls at sign-up without a legislative incentive.

Though this article was published last year, I am linking to it now because something called the TBOTE Project recently resurfaced these findings and added some of its own in an open source investigation. Unlike similar investigations from sources like Bellingcat, it does not appear that the person or people behind TBOTE have editors or fact-checkers to verify their interpretation of this information. That does not mean it is useless; it is simply worth exercising some caution. Regardless, their findings show a massive amount of lobbyist spending on Meta’s part to try and get these laws passed.

Birnbaum continues:

The App Association, a group backed by Apple, has been running ads in Texas, Alabama, Louisiana and Ohio arguing that the app store age verification bills are backed by porn websites and companies. The adult entertainment industry’s main lobby said it is not pushing for the bills; pornography is mostly banned from app stores.

This is obviously bad faith, but also flawed in the opposite direction: the porn industry wants device-level verification.

Tech CEOs and Investors Are Just Saying Stuff ⇥ businessinsider.com

Jacob Silverman, Business Insider:

The growing bloat of popular tech rhetoric could serve as evidence for how the tech industry, having conquered so much of daily life, work, and entertainment, has begun to exhaust its imaginative capacities. Industry leaders promised that the mammoth capital for AI outlay would lead to the creation of a smarter-than-human intelligence that would serve as a universal solvent, fixing climate change, poverty, and even the problem of death itself. But that horizon — which we are supposed to reach by pumping out more fossil-fuel emissions and destabilizing labor and education — remains impossibly far away.

Gallup’s polling on views of different business sectors has, frustratingly, no ability to permalink to a particular industry and its historical rankings; so, you will need to go down to “Industry and Business Sector Ratings, B Through E” and then click the pagination arrow to get to “Computer Industry” on the second page. Once there, you will find what seem at first glance to be some remarkably stable figures.

Look a little closer, though, and the numbers tell a different story. Summing the “very” and “somewhat” figures for each type of response shows a marked decline in positive reception since a high in 2017, and a steady climb in negative reception. There are lots of reasons for this; many of them I have written about. But I do not think these loudmouth executives are doing the industry any favours by bullshitting their way through interviews and promising nonsense.

That is the data-driven answer. These guys also just sound really stupid when they say stuff like “it also takes a lot of energy to train a human” or “the long-term vision is to […] create a tradeable asset out of any difference in opinion” or “I bought Twitter […] to try to help humanity, whom I love”. I know I am writing this on a website called Pixel Envy and I am, well, me, but these barons sound comical and dorky.

Adobe Pays Early Termination Fee, or ‘Settlement’, in U.S. Lawsuit Over Hidden Fees ⇥ pcmag.com

When the United States Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice jointly filed a lawsuit in 2024 against Adobe, I commented on the similarities between that complaint and the one against Amazon. Both are about the ease of entering into subscriptions that are later difficult or expensive to leave, both had alleged personal liability by executives — and, now, both have been settled out of court.

Michael Kan, PC Magazine:

Adobe has settled a 2024 lawsuit from the US government that alleged the company used hidden fees to trap users into paying for subscriptions.

On Friday, Adobe “finalized” an agreement with the Justice Department, which accused the software vendor of failing to inform new customers about payment terms or early termination fees. “While we disagree with the government’s claims and deny any wrongdoing, we are pleased to resolve this matter,” Adobe says.

I am sure Adobe has learned its lesson. Let us go and check its work. In its statement, Adobe says it has “made [its] sign-up and cancellation processes even more streamlined and transparent”. Here is how it describes its annual pricing, billed monthly, on its U.S. website:

Fee applies of half your remaining annual commitment if you cancel after Mar 31.

This is not the most direct sentence, but it is an accurate explanation of how much the fee will be, and when that fee takes effect — fourteen days from when I am writing this. It is followed by a little “i” informational icon. Clicking on it will display a callout noting when service will be cut off. For comparison, here is the equivalent disclaimer on its Canadian site:

Fee applies if you cancel after 14 days.

Here, too, there is a little informational icon. When you hover over it, Adobe says the same thing about cancellation, and adds that cancelling will incur an early termination fee. It is the same on the U.K. site.

What is the answer here? Does each country need to sue Adobe for its billing flow to disclose a reasonable amount of information?

Meta Realizes Horizon Worlds on Quest Never Had Legs, Will Shut It Down in June ⇥ communityforums.atmeta.com

A few weeks ago, Meta published an update from Samantha Ryan, of Reality Labs, announced a “renewed focus” and a “doubling down” on virtual reality. It planned to achieve this by “almost exclusively” betting its future on the smartphone Horizon Worlds app.

In an announcement today, Meta shifted its definition of “almost exclusively” to simply “exclusively”:

Earlier this year, we shared an update on our renewed focus for VR and Horizon. We are separating the two platforms so each can grow with greater focus, and the Horizon Worlds platform will become a mobile-only experience. This separation will extend across our ecosystem, including our mobile app. To support this vision, we are making the following changes to streamline your Quest experience throughout 2026.

This opening paragraph is opaque and, though the announcement goes on to explain exactly what is happening, it is not nearly as clear as the email sent to Horizon Worlds users. I really think Meta is looking to exit from its pure V.R. efforts, especially with the sales success of the perv glasses.

As I write this, the Horizon app for iOS is the sixty-ninth most popular free game in the Canadian App Store, just behind Wordscapes and ahead of Perfect Makeover Cleaning ASMR. Nice?

A Roadmap for Currency Symbol Implementation ⇥ blog.unicode.org

The Unicode Consortium would like to remind you to work closely with them if you are introducing a new symbol for your currency:

Such public usage leads to a need for the symbol to be encoded in the Unicode Standard and supported in commercial software and services. Standardization of a new character and subsequent support by vendors takes time: typically, at least one year, and often longer. All too often, however, monetary authorities announce creation of a new currency symbol anticipating immediate public adoption, then later discover there will be an unavoidable delay before the new symbol is widely supported in products and services.

I had no idea so many currency symbols had been introduced recently. Then again, before I read this, I had not given much thought to the one we use: $.

Hephzibah Anderson, for the BBC, in 2019:

The most widely accepted theory does in fact involve Spanish coinage, and it goes like this: in the colonies, trade between Spanish Americans and English Americans was lively, and the peso, or peso de ocho reales, was legal tender in the US until 1857. It was often shortened, so historians tell us, to the initial ‘P’ with an ‘S’ hovering beside it in superscript. Gradually, thanks to the scrawl of time-pressed merchants and scribes, that ‘P’ merged with the ‘S’ and lost its curve, leaving the vertical stroke like a stake down the centre of the ‘S’. A Spanish dollar was more or less worth an American dollar, so it’s easy to see how the sign might have transferred.

Not only the explanation for why all the world’s dollars have the same symbol, but also why we share it with the peso.

A Friendly Wager on the Future of Repairability and Performance ⇥ dithering.passport.online

On a recent episode of “Dithering”, Ben Thompson and John Gruber discuss the Tech Re-Nu teardown of the MacBook Neo and what it reveals about the supposed trade-offs of repairability. Thompson says at about 5:48 into the paywalled episode:

The MacBook Neo is a perfect counterpoint to the iFixit perspective. It’s like: you can get repairability, but what it’s going to cost you is a less capable computer with lower battery life.

And that’s fine. We’re at the stage where these iPhone chips are so good — it’s still a very good computer. But it’s quite handy to have the MacBook Air next to the MacBook Neo. They weigh the same. One has much more performance than the other, and that’s the price.

To summarize: “the price”, it is implied, is that the MacBook Air must be less repairable for it to have good battery life and better performance.

I am less certain. You can complain as I did about the adhesive-attached batteries and unrepairable keyboards in the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro, but the most recent updates are effectively speed increases with few other changes. If Apple would like to bring the same repairability advantages of the Neo to the Air and the Pro, it would do so when it redesigns those computers.1 And I think Apple could bring at least some of those repairability improvements — battery or keyboard, perhaps? — to those products in the next major hardware revision.

Call this a friendly wager which I will only be making in internet points. Also, this might be wishcasting — but I think this is the way the winds are blowing. My impression of Apple’s approach to repairability is that it was not a high priority for a long time — particularly for products nearer the beginning of their development cycle — and that it argued for trade-offs that were ultimately irrelevant. That is not only Apple’s approach; there are plenty of companies with poor track records on this stuff. But a patchwork of right-to-repair legislation around the world is helping make devices easier to fix. Also, if assembly costs are indeed reduced by using screws instead of glue — something I am skeptical of but which Thompson and Gruber posit — surely Apple would want to do the same in other products.

  1. I am giving myself a little exit ramp in this footnote for the MacBook Ultra, or whatever Apple ends up calling the rumoured touch laptop. I assume that thing will be full of glue. ↥︎

Trump Administration to Receive $10 Billion Kickback for TikTok Deal ⇥ wsj.com

Miriam Gottfried and Amrith Ramkumar, Wall Street Journal:

The Trump administration is set to receive a roughly $10 billion fee from investors in the recently completed deal to take control of TikTok’s U.S. business, delivering it a windfall for keeping the popular social-media app alive in America.

The payment is part of the agreement through which investors friendly with the administration gained control of TikTok’s U.S. operations from Chinese parent ByteDance, people familiar with the matter said. It comes in addition to the investments made to create a new entity to run the app in the U.S.

Over five years ago, during the first Trump administration, he floated the possibility of getting “key money” for the U.S. Treasury, something he later bemoaned was apparently illegal. So much for that, where by that I mean respect for the law. This is a 70% commission rate to be given to — well, exactly where it will be booked seems like a mystery because it is not like there is a U.S. Department of Bribery.

Karl Bode, Techdirt:

Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal goes to comical lengths to normalize this bribe, though they do at least try to express how “unprecedented” this sort of thing is by citing an unnamed, ambiguous historian […]

“View from nowhere” journalism means these reporters from the Journal cannot call this naked corruption what it is, nor can they quote someone stating it. They can only gesture toward the obvious while writing the straightest of articles about the wackiest events. Things are going well.

Transport Canada’s Vehicle Headlights Survey ⇥ tc.canada.ca

Transport Canada is running a survey about the brightness of car headlights:

While new headlight technology in vehicles can help drivers see better, they can also cause problems for other road users. Transport Canada wants to learn how headlight glare affects road users and what vehicle or lighting features may influence how people experience it at night.

If you live in Canada and have been momentarily blinded by over-bright and poorly aimed headlights, it is worth taking this brief survey to share your thoughts.

Reuters: Meta Is Planning to Wreck the Lives of 20% of Its Staff Because It Is Spending So Much on Data Centres ⇥ reuters.com

Katie Paul, Jeff Horwitz, and Deepa Seetharaman, Reuters:

Meta is planning sweeping layoffs ​that could affect 20% or more of the company, three sources familiar with the matter told Reuters, as Meta seeks to offset costly artificial intelligence infrastructure bets and prepare for greater efficiency brought about by AI-assisted workers.

No date has been set for the cuts and the magnitude has not been finalized, the people said.

I do not know what is the right number of staff to run Meta’s operations but, whatever it is, there has to be a better way of figuring it out than by luring tens of thousands of people to work for you with promises of a huge salary and benefits, then upending their lives some time later. They have rent or a mortgage; they might have a family depending on their income; their ability to remain in a country may depend on their having a job. Perhaps it could be beneficial for staff to bargain with their company in a more collective manner.

BuzzFeed’s A.I. Pivot Might End in Bankruptcy ⇥ futurism.com

I know — weird that there is news about Digg and BuzzFeed on the same day in 2026. Anyway.

Victor Tangermann, Futurism:

Now, three years after its AI pivot, the writing is on the wall. The company reported a net loss of $57.3 million in 2025 in an earnings report released on Thursday. In an official statement, the company glumly hinted at the possibility of going under sooner rather than later, writing that “there is substantial doubt about the Company’s ability to continue as a going concern.”

Just a few months after BuzzFeed announced it was pivoting to A.I. to generate more personalized quizzes, it closed its Pulitzer Prize-winning news division.

Not to worry, though, because it launched a new company called Branch Office, which has an on-trend for last year website, some vague apps, and a name that shares an abbreviation with “body odour”. The announcement comes with a killer quote from BuzzFeed’s CEO:

“We’re accelerating into an era of infinite fake news, slop, personalization bubbles, and cuts at the organizations that actually care about content,” said Jonah Peretti. “We need a solution. Branch Office is that solution.”

An era of “slop”? “Cuts at the organizations that actually care”? Listen to yourself, Peretti.

Digg Reboot Needs to ‘Reset’, Lays Off a ‘Significant’ Amount of Staff ⇥ techcrunch.com

Sarah Perez, TechCrunch:

Digg — Kevin Rose’s reboot of his once-popular link-sharing site — is laying off a sizable portion of its staff, the company announced on Friday. The startup is not closing, however, Digg CEO Justin Mezzell said. Instead, Rose will return to work on Digg full-time as the company tries to find its footing.

Rose will continue to work as an advisor at investing firm True Ventures, but will make Digg his primary focus from here on out.

When this “reboot” was announced about a year ago, I was not optimistic. I feel bad for the staff who took a chance on this experiment, but I will be surprised if it comes back.

Meta Says It Is Removing End-to-End Encryption From Instagram Direct Messages ⇥ about.fb.com

In March 2019, Mark Zuckerberg announced his “privacy-focused vision for social networking”.

This did not come out of nowhere. Facebook is a technology firm hostile to user privacy, and media coverage has reflected its poor record. The company had even been pursuing a deal to operate in China and accept that government’s surveillance and censorship demands. So it decided to make some changes. It ended its plan for operating in China — not because it no longer wanted that massive audience, but because it was easier to lobby for a U.S. TikTok ban.

It also decided on six principles for that “privacy-focused vision”, among them:

Encryption. People’s private communications should be secure. End-to-end encryption prevents anyone — including us — from seeing what people share on our services.

Zuckerberg noted some of the risks for end-to-end encryption, but “[o]n balance,” Zuckerberg wrote, “I believe working towards implementing end-to-end encryption for all private communications is the right thing to do”. As a result, Meta’s Sara Su announced in August 2022 that the company would begin testing it in two key applications:

People want to trust that their online conversations with friends and family are private and secure. We’re working hard to protect your personal messages and calls with end-to-end encryption by default on Messenger and Instagram. […]

To Meta’s credit, Messenger defaulted to end-to-end encryption in December 2023. But the company has never flipped the switch for Instagram.

Earlier this week in a note appended to the top of Su’s post, the company said it was ending this pursuit:

Very few people were opting in to end-to-end encrypted messaging in DMs, so we’re removing this option from Instagram in the coming months. You can keep messaging with end-to-end encryption easily on WhatsApp.

I am not sure if it is worth reading anything into the explicit callout of WhatsApp but not Messenger.

In any case, this is another one of those fleeting Zuckerberg obsessions that is only relevant so long as it serves a media relations purpose. Of course not many people opted into end-to-end encryption — that is the whole point of the power of defaults, and something users should not have to think about. This is not an outright rejection of end-to-end encryption, given Meta’s support in other apps, but it is no longer important because it is a few trends behind.

This is now an artificial intelligence company. Do not ask what “Meta” means. It is not important either.

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Social Media’s Walled Gardens ⇥ mastodon.ar.al

Aral Balkan:

When you post things on Instagram, Facebook, and X, this is what they look like to people who don’t use those platforms.

They are login walls. Sometimes, these platforms will let you see an individual post without having an account or logging in, but very often they do not. This sucks for many reasons, but one thing I remain surprised by is how the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission seems completely okay with Meta using Mark Zuckerberg’s login-walled Facebook and Instagram pages to disclose material information about the company.

Sucker ⇥ theatlantic.com

McKay Coppins, the Atlantic (gift link):

When I set out to report on the sports-betting industry—its explosive growth, its sudden cultural ubiquity, and what it’s doing to America—my editors thought I should experience the phenomenon firsthand. Mindful of my religious constraints, they proposed a work-around: The Atlantic would stake me $10,000 to gamble with over the course of the upcoming NFL season. The magazine would cover any losses, and—to ensure my ongoing emotional investment—split any winnings with me, 50–50. Surely God would approve of such an arrangement, my editors reasoned, because I wouldn’t be risking my own hard-earned money.

[…]

I promised the bishop that I would steer clear of slippery slopes. “This will really just be a journalistic exercise,” I assured him.

I rarely think much of anything published in the Atlantic, and I cannot recall the last time I thought something from Coppins was worth recommending, but you should take the time to read this gut-wrenching reflection on the saturation of gambling in sports and, increasingly, media as a whole. I have read and watched countless stories about the fallout from the legalization of gambling in the United States and Canada — in particular, I think CBC News covered it well in an episode of the “Fifth Estate” (that video might be geographically restricted), while Drew Gooden’s video reflected on it from a fan’s perspective. But Coppin lived it.

This comparison is intriguing:

Executives at the major online sportsbooks are quick to trumpet their commitment to “responsible gaming.” But that purported commitment runs up against an economic reality: As much as 90 percent of the sportsbooks’ revenue comes from less than 10 percent of their users. Their apps seem clearly designed, much like TikTok and Candy Crush, to keep users scrolling and tapping in a hypnotic stupor. If your account is nearing empty, DraftKings will offer a “reload bonus” of gambling credits to entice you to deposit more money; if you’ve gone a couple of days without making a wager, you might get a push alert from FanDuel offering a “no sweat bet,” promising to refund a loss with site credits to be used for more gambling.

Social media is commonly compared to gambling. I recently wrote a headline referring to it as a “slot machine for feelings”. Coppins flips that around, pointing to the personalized notifications that lure people back, a feature that was also presented in the “Fifth Estate” documentary. There is no way for your phone to dispense cigarettes or alcohol, but gambling is right there, all the time.

Regardless of whether prohibition was the right call for gambling — and there is compelling evidence for that — I think the advertising and integration into sports and other media must be stopped.

‘This Is Not the Computer for You’ ⇥ samhenri.gold

Sam Henri Gold:

The consensus is reasonable: $599, A18 Pro, 8GB RAM, stripped-down I/O. A Chromebook killer, a first laptop, a sensible machine for sensible tasks. “If you are thinking about Xcode or Final Cut, this is not the computer for you.” The people saying this are not wrong. It is also not the point.

Nobody starts in the right place. You don’t begin with the correct tool and work sensibly within its constraints until you organically graduate to a more capable one. That is not how obsession works. Obsession works by taking whatever is available and pressing on it until it either breaks or reveals something. The machine’s limits become a map of the territory. You learn what computing actually costs by paying too much of it on hardware that can barely afford it.

This is such a good essay. It takes me right back to the first computers I used when I was a kid, trying everything and finding whatever limits exist. And they do exist, but they are far beyond what most people will even attempt because technology has far outpaced our typical use. Apple can make a full-on Mac with “a phone chip” because that phone has a display with nearly as many pixels as were in the 30-inch Cinema Display you used to need Apple’s most expensive Mac and a specific graphics card to run.

People are going to use this Mac like a Mac.

TechCrunch: L3Harris, a U.S. Military Contractor, Likely Built ‘Coruna’ iPhone Hacking Toolkit ⇥ techcrunch.com

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, TechCrunch:

A mass hacking campaign targeting iPhone users in Ukraine and China used tools that were likely designed by U.S. military contractor L3Harris, TechCrunch has learned. The tools, which were intended for Western spies, wound up in the hands of various hacking groups, including Russian government spooks and Chinese cybercriminals.

While Franceschi-Bicchierai notes the case of a former L3Harris executive who sold exploits to a Russian company, it remains unclear how this specific toolkit was leaked.

Grammarly Is Facing a Class Action Lawsuit Over Its A.I. ‘Expert Review’ Feature ⇥ wired.com

Shishir Mehrotra, CEO of Grammarly’s parent company Superhuman, on LinkedIn of all places:

Back in August, we launched a Grammarly agent called Expert Review. The agent draws on publicly available information from third-party LLMs to surface writing suggestions inspired by the published work of influential voices.

[…]

After careful consideration, we have decided to disable Expert Review while we reimagine the feature to make it more useful for users, while giving experts real control over how they want to be represented — or not represented at all.

This has been around since August without anyone noticing until recently, which likely means few people used it. Certainly none of the experts, whose likenesses were being used without permission to give advice, had any idea.

Regardless, I do not think this is something Mehrotra or Superhuman can duck out from with a simple my bad.

Miles Klee, Wired:

Superhuman, the tech company behind the writing software Grammarly, is facing a class action lawsuit over an AI tool that presented editing suggestions as if they came from established authors and academics—none of whom consented to have their names appear within the product.

Good.

MacBook Neo Teardown Reveals a Highly Repairable Laptop ⇥ youtube.com

Earlier this week, I linked to iFixit’s exploration of ways Apple used to prioritize repairability in its laptops. The headline on the article is “How Apple Used to Design Its Laptops for Repairability”, but the <title> tag reveals a more incendiary thesis:

Macbook Neo Shows how far Apple’s repairability design has fallen – iFixit

That is quite the bold statement for an article published just a few days after the MacBook Neo was announced and nearly a week before it became available.

Luckily, the good people at Tech Re-Nu in Melbourne got their hands on a Neo on launch day in Australia, and took it apart. They found modular internals held in place with dozens of screws. They only found adhesive on the back of the trackpad — hardly the end of the world. It is a far cry from the glued-in battery of the MacBook Pro. (Warning: that link goes to a page where Apple has decided to use PNGs for photographs instead of JPEGs, rendering the guide hundreds of megabytes large. Embarrassing.) Tech Re-Nu does not entirely disassemble the Neo, but it is possible to remove the keyboard for repair without replacing the entire top case.

This does not entirely invalidate iFixit’s argument, of course. Apple’s laptops used to have replaceable memory and storage, but none of that can be changed post-purchase. But the Neo is way more repairable than I think iFixit expected it to be. I wish that were true for the other laptops Apple introduced last week, both of which still use adhesive to secure the battery, and seemingly do not permit replacing the keyboard independently of the top case.

Also, it is always worth putting iFixit’s advocacy in the context of a company that also sells parts and tools. A conflict of interest, to be sure, but not invalidating — just something to be mindful of.