#aioverview — Public Fediverse posts

Weekly output: FCC frees Verizon from phone-unlocking rule, Donut Lab’s solid-state battery, Wikipedia turns 25, Google traffic trends

This week brought a lot of unpleasant headlines, but none made me feel uneasy like the news that Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson was subjected to an unexpected visit by the FBI at her house Wednesday that concluded with investigators confiscating her work and personal laptops, her phone and her smartwatch–all seized, it now seems, on a fraudulent pretext. Since then, the man who spent his equivalent of pocket change to buy the Post in 2013 has said nothing about that in public, yet another way in which Jeff Bezos has shown himself an unworthy successor to Katharine Graham and her son Don Graham.

In addition to what you see below, I wrote a post for Patreon readers sharing bonus bits about what I learned at CES two weeks ago.

1/12/2026, FCC Unties Verizon From 60-Day Phone-Unlocking Rule, PCMag

Two days after the Federal Communications Commission granted Verizon’s wish, Verizon suffered an hours-long outage that people could work around relatively easily if their phones were unlocked to allow them to add a third-party eSIM.

1/15/2026: Wikipedia Is Now 25 Years Old [Citation Not Needed], PCMag

I had made a mental note to myself to write an essay about the free online encyclopedia hitting the quarter-century mark, but then the actual date snuck up on me. Fortunately, the lede and the headline basically wrote themselves.

1/17/2026: Donut Labs’ Solid-State Battery-Powered Motorcycle Turned Heads at CES, But Big Questions Remain, PCMag

Writing this left me feeling over my skis more than usual–I don’t cover battery technology in any great depth, this startup has disclosed almost nothing about the design of its solid-state batteries, and two outside analysts weren’t willing to assess their pitch. But reading up at length on this company and on others working on better EV batteries did make me realize one thing: There’s enough innovation happening here that we don’t need Donut’s invention to work.

1/17/2026: AI Is Still Hammering News Sites, Google Search and Social Referrals Plunge, PCMag

The brutal declines in Google search traffic reported in a study published Monday by the University of Oxford’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism caught my eyes and those of my editors, but I also found some news value in this report’s stats about which online platforms and technologies newsroom leaders plan to emphasize or back away from.

#AI #AIOverview #BrendanCarr #ces #DonutLab #EVBattery #FCC #phoneUnlocking #SIMLock #smartphoneUnlock #solidStateBattery #verizon #Wikipedia

Google pushes Gmail into its Gemini era, but is this really what users want?

https://web.brid.gy/r/https://nerds.xyz/2026/01/google-gmail-gemini-ai-push/

Weekly output: Mozilla Firefox CEO, AI crawlers vs. publishers and creators, teenage AI chatbot use, Android Live Emergency Video, PCMag’s best tech bought in 2025, World App

Somehow I’m down to the last full workweek of the year–and yet my writing and gift shopping seem to have more than a week’s worth of work remaining.

12/8/2025: Mozilla is doing a delicate dance with AI, Fast Company

I spoke with Mozilla CEO Laura Chambers at a Web Summit event for the second time this year. One thing Firefox’s management no longer needs to worry about, unlike when I met with Chambers at Web Summit Qatar in February: the threat of Google being forced to stop paying browser developers to keep its search engine as the default.

12/9/2025: AI Platforms Are Paying (Some) Big Publishers, Leaving Smaller Ones Behind, PCMag

This post began with me taking notes from a Web Summit panel featuring Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince talking about that Internet infrastructure company’s Pay Per Crawl initiative to push AI providers to pay Web publishers for access to their content, then I did some follow-up reporting that included setting up Cloudflare’s AI Crawl Control bot-blocking filter on this blog, and then I had to update the post the morning it was published after the European Commission opened an investigation into how Google runs its AI Overview search feature.

12/9/2025: 28% of Teens Use Chatbots Daily. You Can Probably Guess Which One They Like Best, PCMag

The latest survey by the Pew Research Center surfaced some interesting statistics about how much teenagers use AI chatbots and which ones they use the most.

12/10/2025: Need Help? Android Phones Can Now Share Live Video With 911 Dispatchers, PCMag

Google is shipping this feature a year after Apple did, but its emergency live video implementation works on far more devices than Apple’s.

12/11/2025: The Best Tech PCMag Editors Bought in 2025, PCMag

I wrote a short graf lauding the compact, quick-charging (and Wirecutter-endorsed) USB-C charger that I bought after losing the considerably bulkier model that came with my laptop.

12/13/2025: App That Verifies Your Existence Adds Encrypted Messaging, PCMag

Tools for Humanity announced an update to its World App that adds an end-to-end-encrypted chat feature and expands its cryptocurrency tools. I took advantage of this news peg to try out the app’s ability to verify a “World ID” by scanning the NFC tag on my U.S. passport; that did not go well at all for me.

12/15/2025: Updated to add the PCMag best-tech package that I forgot to check for on Sunday.

#AIChatbot #AIOverview #AISearch #ChatGPT #Firefox #GoogleZero #Mozilla #PayPerCrawl #PewResearchCenter #ToolsForHumanity #WebSummit #WorldApp #WorldID

Weekly output: Mozilla Firefox CEO, AI crawlers vs. publishers and creators, teenage AI chatbot use, Android Live Emergency Video, PCMag’s best tech bought in 2025, World App

Somehow I’m down to the last full workweek of the year–and yet my writing and gift shopping seem to have more than a week’s worth of work remaining.

12/8/2025: Mozilla is doing a delicate dance with AI, Fast Company

I spoke with Mozilla CEO Laura Chambers at a Web Summit event for the second time this year. One thing Firefox’s management no longer needs to worry about, unlike when I met with Chambers at Web Summit Qatar in February: the threat of Google being forced to stop paying browser developers to keep its search engine as the default.

12/9/2025: AI Platforms Are Paying (Some) Big Publishers, Leaving Smaller Ones Behind, PCMag

This post began with me taking notes from a Web Summit panel featuring Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince talking about that Internet infrastructure company’s Pay Per Crawl initiative to push AI providers to pay Web publishers for access to their content, then I did some follow-up reporting that included setting up Cloudflare’s AI Crawl Control bot-blocking filter on this blog, and then I had to update the post the morning it was published after the European Commission opened an investigation into how Google runs its AI Overview search feature.

12/9/2025: 28% of Teens Use Chatbots Daily. You Can Probably Guess Which One They Like Best, PCMag

The latest survey by the Pew Research Center surfaced some interesting statistics about how much teenagers use AI chatbots and which ones they use the most.

12/10/2025: Need Help? Android Phones Can Now Share Live Video With 911 Dispatchers, PCMag

Google is shipping this feature a year after Apple did, but its emergency live video implementation works on far more devices than Apple’s.

12/11/2025: The Best Tech PCMag Editors Bought in 2025, PCMag

I wrote a short graf lauding the compact, quick-charging (and Wirecutter-endorsed) USB-C charger that I bought after losing the considerably bulkier model that came with my laptop.

12/13/2025: App That Verifies Your Existence Adds Encrypted Messaging, PCMag

Tools for Humanity announced an update to its World App that adds an end-to-end-encrypted chat feature and expands its cryptocurrency tools. I took advantage of this news peg to try out the app’s ability to verify a “World ID” by scanning the NFC tag on my U.S. passport; that did not go well at all for me.

12/15/2025: Updated to add the PCMag best-tech package that I forgot to check for on Sunday.

#AIChatbot #AIOverview #AISearch #ChatGPT #Firefox #GoogleZero #Mozilla #PayPerCrawl #PewResearchCenter #ToolsForHumanity #WebSummit #WorldApp #WorldID

Great data & insights from @ahrefs 🔍
📊 New research shows that Google AI Overviews change every 2 days — yet their underlying meaning stays almost identical.
AI search is both highly dynamic (70% content change, 45% citation turnover) and semantically stable (0.95/1.0 similarity).
Full article → https://ahrefs.com/blog/ai-overview-change/
#SEO #AIOverview #Search #AI #GoogleAI #SGE #ContentStrategy #SearchMarketing #DigitalStrategy #OpenWeb #TechNews #MastodonTech

An example of enshittification and how badly Google has broken its core reason for existence, search: Google is using an LLM to "hallucinate" postcodes.

I dunno about other countries, but in Australia, if you get someone's postcode correct and a detail as simple as the recipient's name or nickname, a street name without the number, or the name of a home, then our postal service has a miraculously high success-rate for delivering a letter or parcel to the correct destination. You can write the wrong suburb or state in the address, but if you use the right the postcode, Australia Post delivers. But, without the correct postcode, you're up the creek without a paddle. The wrong postcode can lead to delayed delivery or can result in your mail getting the "Return to sender" treatment.

Google Search results _could_ index the database from Australia Post or pay a moderate commercial licensing fee to access their API. But, instead, Google's got an LLM to make-up postcodes. The results are near enough to appear convincing at first glance, such as using '3' for first digit of postcodes in Victoria. Then, they present it in the top position of Search results and have the cheek to use the Australia Post logo. In my experience, there appears to be a correlation between numerical similarity of Google's fictional postcodes and geographical proximity of suburbs. Google's "AI Overview" presents misleading nonsense instead of using traditional indexing or a trivial lookup table.

(More details in the Alt-text of the screenshot.)

#Google #GoogleSearch #AI #AIOverview #LLMs #Enshittification #AustraliaPost #Australia #Postcode #Zipcode

Weekly output: Chrome for iOS/iPadOS, Google AI Overview clickthroughs, Trump “AI Action Plan,” Cricket Wireless

My schedule this week includes Nationals Park–not to see the home team find a new way to lose a game, but to attend a two-day conference about drone policy happening there that will feature a few drone-delivery demos.

Speaking of poor decisions in D.C., I wrote a post Friday for Patreon readers about the home clean-energy upgrades that I can’t push through before the early demise of the Inflation Reduction Act’s tax credits at the hands of Republicans in Congress.

7/21/2025: Google Adds Limited Multiple-Account Support to Chrome for iOS, iPadOS, PCMag

This is not a huge change to the experience of using Google’s browser on Apple’s mobile devices, but I used this post as an opportunity to point out how the major browsers all fail to offer a mobile equivalent to their desktop apps’ abilities to keep a browsing session isolated from the rest of your use over browser restarts.

7/23/2025: Few People Are Clicking Past Google’s ‘AI Overviews’ Search Results, PCMag

Google keeps denying that it’s seen any major dropoff in how often people follow links to sites in its AI Overview results even as news and other sites report that they’ve seen Google traffic plummet. I do not find those denials as persuasive as Google might hope.

7/24/2025: Trump’s ‘AI Action Plan’ Looks to Boost Data Center Buildouts, Ban ‘Woke’ AI, PCMag

I spent a chunk of Wednesday afternoon reading up on this plan, then spent a chunk of that evening watching Trump’s rambling, 50-minute speech that often wandered into completely unrelated topics. As a result, dinner was a little late Wednesday.

7/26/2025: Cricket Wireless Unwraps New Plans That Lower the Cost Of Mobile Hotspot Use, PCMag

I knew Cricket had stuck with its older plan lineup for a long time, but I didn’t realize the last comprehensive rewrite happened in 2017.

#AIActionPlan #AIOverview #ChromeIOS #ChromeIPadOS #CricketWireless #GoogleAccounts #GoogleAI #prepaidWireless #searchClickthroughs #TrumpAI