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Introducing Skia Graphite: Chrome’s rasterization backend for the future

In Chrome, Skia is used to render paint commands from Blink and the browser UI into pixels on your screen, a process called rasterization. Skia has powered Chrome Graphics since the very beginning. Skia eventually ran into performance issues as the web evolved and became more complex, which led Chrome and Skia to invest in a GPU accelerated rasterization backend called Ganesh. Over the years, Ganesh matured into a solid highly performant rasterization backend and GPU rasterization launched on all platforms in Chrome on top of GL (via ANGLE on Windows D3D9/11). However, Ganesh always had a GL-centric design with too many specialized code paths and the team was hitting a wall when trying to implement optimizations that took advantage of modern graphics APIs in a principled manner. This set the stage for the team to rethink GPU rasterization from the ground up in the form of a new rasterization backend, Graphite. Graphite was developed from the start to be principled by having fewer and more comprehensible code paths. This forward looking design helps take advantage of modern graphics APIs like Metal, Vulkan and D3D12 and paradigms like compute based path rasterization, and is multithreaded by default. ↫ Michael Ludwig and Sunny Sachanandani at the Chromium Blog The level of complexity in browsers and their rendering engines blows my mind every time I read about it. When I first got access to the internet, it consisted of static pages with text and still images, but now browser engines are almost as complex as entire operating systems. Not all of that progress has been good – boy has a lot of it not been good – but we’re stuck with it now, and thus people making browsers have to deal with stuff like this. If you ever wonder why there really only are two browser engines in the world – Google’s Blink and Apple’s WebKit – this is your answer. Who in their right mind wants to develop something like this from scratch and compete with Google and Apple?

YouTube’s new anti-adblock measures

Over the past few months, YouTube has been trying another round of anti-adblock measures. Currently the anti-adblock stuff is being A/B tested, and one of my accounts is in the experimental group. I wrote a filter that partially avoids one of the anti-adblock measures, fake buffering, on uBlock Origin (and Brave browser, since it uses the same filter rules). (It’s already in the default filter lists, you don’t need to manually add the filter.) One thing that people have ran into is “fake buffering”, where videos will take a while to load due to a lot of buffering, but only at the very start of the video (there’s no mid-video fake buffering). As I’ll explain, the fake buffering is 80% of the length of the ads you would’ve seen, so even with fake buffering you’re still saving time using an adblocker. ↫ iter.ca The battle between YouTube on one side, and users wanting a non-shitty experience without paying for YouTube Premium on the other, is unlikely to end any time soon. Your computer, your rules, so I’m on the side of the people wanting to block ads on YouTube – the same applies to OSNews if you don’t want to pay for our ad-free version – but I’m still intrigued to find out just how far Google is willing to go. I sometimes see YouTube with ads at other people’s homes. It’s a nightmare.

‘Dystopian tales of that time when I sold out to Google’

If you ever wanted to know what it was like to be an engineer at Google during the early to late 2000s, here you go. Now even though Google is fundamentally a spyware advertising company (some 80% of its revenue is advertising; the proportion was even higher back then), we Engineers were kept carefully away from that reality, as much as meat eaters are kept away from videos of the meat industry: don’t think about it, just enjoy your steak. If you think about it it will stop being enjoyable, so we just churned along, pretending to work for an engineering company rather than for a giant machine with the sole goal of manipulating people into buying cruft. The ads and business teams were on different floors, and we never talked to them. ↫ Elilla Even back then, Google knew full well that what they were doing and working towards was deeply problematic and ethically dubious, at best, and reading about how young, impressionable Google engineers at the time figured that out by themselves is kind of heartbreaking. In those days, Google tried really hard to cultivate an image of being different than Apple or Microsoft, a place where employees were treated better and had more freedom, working for a company trying to make the web a better place. Of course, none of that was actually true, but for a short while back then, a lot of people fell for it – yes, including you, even if you now say you didn’t – and reading about the experiences from people on the inside at the time, it was never actually true.

That time “AI” translation almost caused a fight between a doctor and my parents

What if you want to find out more about the PS/2 Model 280? You head out to Google, type it in as a query, and realise the little “AI” summary that’s above the fold is clearly wrong. Then you run the same query again, multiple times, and notice that each time, the “AI” overview gives a different wrong answer, with made-up details it’s pulling out of its metaphorical ass. Eventually, after endless tries, Google does stumble upon the right answer: there never was a PS/2 Model 280, and every time the “AI” pretended that there was, it made up the whole thing. Google’s “AI” is making up a different type of computer out of thin air every time you ask it about the PS/2 Model 280, including entirely bonkers claims that it had a 286 with memory expandable up to 128MB of RAM (the 286 can’t have more than 16). Only about 1 in 10 times does the query yield the correct answer that there is no Model 280 at all. An expert will immediately notice discrepancies in the hallucinated answers, and will follow for example the List of IBM PS/2 Models article on Wikipedia. Which will very quickly establish that there is no Model 280. The (non-expert) users who would most benefit from an AI search summary will be the ones most likely misled by it. How much would you value a research assistant who gives you a different answer every time you ask, and although sometimes the answer may be correct, the incorrect answers look, if anything, more “real” than the correct ones? ↫ Michal Necasek at the OS/2 Museum This is only about a non-existent model of PS/2, which doesn’t matter much in the grand scheme of things. However, what if someone is trying to find information about how to use a dangerous power tool? What if someone asks the Google “AI” about how to perform a certain home improvement procedure involving electricity? What if you try to repair your car following the instructions provided by “AI”? What if your mother follows the instructions listed in the leaflet that came with her new medication, which was “translated” using “AI”, and contains dangerous errors? My father is currently undertaking a long diagnostic process to figure out what kind of age-related condition he has, which happens to involve a ton of tests and interviews by specialists. Since my parents are Dutch and moved to Sweden a few years ago, language is an issue, and as such, they rely on interpreters and my Swedish wife’s presence to overcome that barrier. A few months ago, though, they received the Swedish readout of an interview with a specialist, and pasted it into Google Translate to translate it to Dutch, since my wife and I were not available to translate it properly. Reading through the translation, it all seemed perfectly fine; exactly the kind of fact-based, point-by-point readout doctors and medical specialists make to be shared with the patient, other involved specialists, and for future reference. However, somewhere halfway through, the translation suddenly said, completely out of nowhere: “The patient was combative and non-cooperative” (translated into English). My parents, who can’t read Swedish and couldn’t double-check this, were obviously taken aback and very upset, since this weird interjection had absolutely no basis in reality. This readout covered a basic question-and-answer interview about symptoms, and at no point during the conversation with the friendly and kind doctor was there any strife or modicum of disagreement. Still, being into their ’70s and going through a complex and stressful diagnostic process in a foreign healthcare system, it’s not unsurprising my parents got upset. When they shared this with the rest of our family, I immediately thought there must’ve been some sort of translation error introduced by Google Translate, because not only does the sentence in question not match my parents and the doctor in question at all, it would also be incredibly unprofessional. Even if the sentence were an accurate description of the patient-doctor interaction, it would never be shared with the patient in such a manner. So, trying to calm everyone down by suggesting it was most likely a Google Translate error, I asked my parents to send me the source text so my wife and I could pour over it to discover where Google Translate went wrong, and if, perhaps, there was a spelling error in the source, or maybe some Swedish turn of phrase that could easily be misinterpreted even by a human translator. After pouring over the documents for a while, we came to a startling conclusion that was so, so much worse. Google Translate made up the sentence out of thin air. This wasn’t Google Translate taking a sentence and mangling it into something that didn’t make any sense. This wasn’t a spelling error that tripped up the numbskull “AI”. This wasn’t a case of a weird Swedish expression that requires a human translator to properly interpret and localise into Dutch. None of the usual Google Translate limitations were at play here. It just made up a very confrontational sentence out of thin air, and dumped it in between two other sentence that were properly present in the source text. Now, I can only guess at what happened here, but my guess is that the preceding sentence in the source readout was very similar to a ton of other sentences in medical texts ingested by Google’s “AI”, and in some of the training material, that sentence was followed by some variation of “patient was combative and non-cooperative”. Since “AI” here is really just glorified autocomplete, it did exactly what autocomplete does: it made shit up that wasn’t there, thereby almost causing a major disagreement between a licensed medical professional and a patient. Luckily for the medical professional and the patient in question, we caught it in time, and my family had a good laugh about it, but the next person this happens to might not be so lucky. Someone visiting a

Oddly, in defense of Google keeping Chrome

As much as I’m a fan of breaking up Google, I’m not entirely sure carving Chrome out of Google without a further plan for what happens to the browser is a great idea. I mean, Google is bad, but things could be so, so much worse. OpenAI would be interested in buying Google’s Chrome if antitrust enforcers are successful in forcing the Alphabet unit to sell the popular web browser as part of a bid to restore competition in search, an OpenAI executive testified on Tuesday at Google’s antitrust trial in Washington. ↫ Jody Godoy at Reuters OpenAI is not the only “AI” vulture circling the skies. Perplexity Chief Business Officer Dmitry Shevelenko said he didn’t want to testify in a trial about how to resolve Google’s search monopoly because he feared retribution from Google. But after being subpoenaed to appear in court, he seized the moment to pitch a business opportunity for his AI company: buying Chrome. ↫ Lauren Feiner at the Verge Or, you know, what about, I don’t know, fucking Yahoo!? Legacy search brand Yahoo has been working on its own web browser prototype, and says it would like to buy Google’s Chrome if the company is forced by a court to sell it. ↫ Lauren Feiner at the Verge If the courts really want Google to divest Chrome, the least-worst position it could possibly end up is in some sort of open source foundation or similar legal construction, where no one company has total control over the world’s most popular browser. Of course, such a construction isn’t exactly ideal either – it will become a battleground of corporate interests soaked with the blood of ordinary users – but anything, anything is better than cud peddlers like OpenAI or whatever the hell Yahoo! even is these days. As users, we really should not want Google to be forced to divest Chrome at this point in time. No matter the outcome, users are going to be screwed even harder than if it were to stay with Google. I hate to say this, but I don’t see an option that’s better than having Chrome remain part of Google. The big problem here is that there is no coherent strategy to deal with the big technology companies in the United States. We’re looking at individual lawsuits where judges and medieval nonsense like juries try to deal with individual companies, which, even if, say, Google gets broken up, would do nothing but strengthen the other big technology companies. If, I don’t know, Android suddenly had to make it on its own as a company, it’s not users who would benefit, but Apple. Is that the goal of antitrust? What you really need to deal with the inordinate power of the big technology companies is legislation that deals with the sector as a whole, instead of letting random courts and people forced to do jury duty decide what to do with Google or Amazon or whatever. The European Union is doing this to great success so far, getting all the major players to make sweeping changes to the benefit of users in the EU. If the United States is serious about dealing with the abusive behaviour of the big technology companies, it’s going to need to draft and pass legislation similar to the European Union’s DMA and DSA. Of course, that’s not going to happen. The United States Congress is broken beyond repair, the US president and his gaggle of incompetents are too busy destroying the US economy and infecting children with measles, and the big tech companies themselves are just bribing US politicians in broad daylight. The odds of the US being able to draft and pass effective big tech antitrust regulations is lower than zero. OpenAI Chrome. You feeling better yet about the open web?

Google is a monopolist in online advertising tech, judge says

Google acted illegally to maintain a monopoly in some online advertising technology, a federal judge ruled on Thursday, adding to legal troubles that could reshape the $1.86 trillion company and alter its power over the internet. Judge Leonie Brinkema of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia said in a 115-page ruling that Google had broken the law to build its dominance over the largely invisible system of technology that places advertisements on pages across the web. The Justice Department and a group of states had sued Google, arguing that its monopoly in ad technology allowed the company to charge higher prices and take a bigger portion of each sale. ↫ David McCabe at The New York Times Google has come under fire from all sides in the United States, being declared an abusive monopoly in two different court cases covering search and now online advertising. In this case, Google controls 87% of the online advertising market in the US, which clearly confers monopoly power onto the company. No actual remedies have been proposed yet in this case, though, but breaking up the company is on the table. Google isn’t the only company facing antitrust court cases in the US, as Amazon and Apple, too, have the US government breathing down their necks. All three of these companies have overtly been trying to buy the favour of the new regime in Washington, but so far, without any success. I doubt we’ll get as far as a breakup, but I definitely think that’s the only real way we’ll ever get proper market forces at work again in the technology market. Not that any of us are really “consumers” in this online ad business, but of course, monopoly pricing still affects us through higher prices for the goods being advertised. If companies are forced to accept Google’s higher pricing for online ads, those costs will definitely be offloaded to consumers. As such, even breaking up a monopoly that doesn’t seem to affect us personally can still improve our lives by lowering prices.

Memory safety for web fonts in Chrome: Google replaces FreeType with Rust-based alternative

There’s no escaping Rust, and the language is leaving its mark everywhere. This time around, Chrome has replaced its use of FreeType with Skrifa, a Rust-based replacement. Skrifa is written in Rust, and created as a replacement for FreeType to make font processing in Chrome secure for all our users. Skifra takes advantage of Rust’s memory safety, and lets us iterate faster on font technology improvements in Chrome. Moving from FreeType to Skrifa allows us to be both agile and fearless when making changes to our font code. We now spend far less time fixing security bugs, resulting in faster updates, and better code quality. ↫ Dominik Röttsches, Rod Sheeter, and Chad Brokaw The move to Skrifa is already complete, and it’s being used now by Chrome users on Linux, Android, and ChromeOS, and as a fallback for users on Windows and macOS. The reasons for this change are the same as they always are for replacing existing tools with new tools written in Rust: security. FreeType is a security risk for Chrome, and by replacing it with something written in a memory-safe language like Rust, Google was able to eliminate a whole slew of types of security issues. To ensure rendering correctness, Google performed a ton of pixel comparison tests to compare FreeType output to Skrifa output. On top of that, Google is continuously running similar tests to ensure no quality degradation sneaks into Skrifa as time progresses. Whether anyone likes Rust or not, the reality of the matter is that using Rust provides tangible benefits that reduce cost and lower security risks, and as such, its use will keep increasing, and tried and true tools will continue to be replaced by Rust counterparts.

Google multibillionaire Brin demands employees work 60 hours a week on autocomplete tools

Over the past few years, the tech industry has gone from cushy landing pad for STEM grads to a cesspit of corporate greed, where grueling hours are commonplace, and layoffs could strike at any moment. Unfortunately for employees of Alphabet, the parent company of Google, the squeeze is just getting started. ↫ Joe Wilkins at Futurism Sergey Brin, one of the original co-founders of Google who seems to spend most of his time not working at Google, has sent out a company-wide memo demanding everyone working at Google puts in at least 60 hours a week, in the office, to work on “AI” that will eventually replace the very employees he’s demanding work 60 hours a week in the office. Mind you, this is the same Google that has just gone through several rounds of layoffs and made $26.3 billion in profit in a single quarter. The goal, according to Brin, is for Google to be the first to create an “artificial general intelligence”, you know, that thing we used to call just “AI” until the Silicon Valley scammers got a hold of the term. There’s no indication anyone is even remotely close to anything even remotely related to “AGI”, and it’s highly unlikely the glorified autocomplete they are peddling today are anything more than a very expensive dead end to nowhere, but that’s not stopping him from working his employees to the bone. At this point in time I feel like the big tech companies are racing towards a cliff, blinded by huge piles of investment money, deafened by each other’s hyperbolic claims and promises, while clueless politicians cheer them on. All of this is going to come crashing down in a spectacular fashion, and of course, the billionaires at the top won’t be the one suffering the consequences. As is tradition.

Google Maps is run by cowards

Google, on its Google Maps naming policy, back in 2008: By saying “common”, we mean to include names which are in widespread daily use, rather than giving immediate recognition to any arbitrary governmental re-naming. In other words, if a ruler announced that henceforth the Pacific Ocean would be named after her mother, we would not add that placemark unless and until the name came into common usage. Google, today, in 2025: Google has confirmed that Google Maps will soon rename the Gulf of Mexico and Denali mountain in Alaska as the “Gulf of America” and “Mount McKinley” in line with changes implemented by the Trump Administration, but users in the rest of the world may see two names for these locations. Nothing is worth less than the word of a corporation.

Google begins requiring JavaScript for Google Search

Google says it has begun requiring users to turn on JavaScript, the widely used programming language to make web pages interactive, in order to use Google Search. In an email to TechCrunch, a company spokesperson claimed that the change is intended to “better protect” Google Search against malicious activity, such as bots and spam, and to improve the overall Google Search experience for users. The spokesperson noted that, without JavaScript, many Google Search features won’t work properly and that the quality of search results tends to be degraded. ↫ Kyle Wiggers at TechCrunch One of the strangely odd compliments you could give Google Search is that it would load even on the weirdest or oldest browsers, simply because it didn’t require JavaScript. Whether I loaded Google Search in the JS-less Dillo, Blazer on PalmOS, or the latest Firefox, I’d end up with a search box I could type something into and search. Sure, beyond that the web would be, shall we say, problematic, but at least Google Search worked. With this move, Google will end such compatibility, which was most likely a side effect more than policy. I know a lot of people lament the widespread reliance on and requirement to have JavaScript, and it surely can be and is abused, but it’s also the reality of people asking more and more of their tools on the web. I would love it websites gracefully degraded on browsers without JavaScript, but that’s simply not a realistic thing to expect, sadly. JavaScript is part of the web now – and has been for a long time – and every website using or requiring JavaScript makes the web no more or less “open” than the web requiring any of the other myriad of technologies, like more recent versions of TLS. Nobody is stopping anyone from implementing support for JS. I’m not a proponent of JavaScript or anything like that – in fact, I’m annoyed I can’t load our WordPress backend in browsers that don’t have it, but I’m just as annoyed that I can’t load websites on older machines just because they don’t have later versions of TLS. Technology “progresses”, and as long as the technologies being regarded as “progress” are not closed or encumbered by patents, I can be annoyed by it, but I can’t exactly be against it. The idea that it’s JavaScript making the web bad and not shit web developers and shit managers and shit corporations sure is one hell of a take.

Google announces it’s going to intentionally violate EU law

Google has told the EU it will not add fact checks to search results and YouTube videos or use them in ranking or removing content, despite the requirements of a new EU law, according to a copy of a letter obtained by Axios. In a letter written to Renate Nikolay, the deputy director general under the content and technology arm at the European Commission, Google’s global affairs president Kent Walker said the fact-checking integration required by the Commission’s new Disinformation Code of Practice “simply isn’t appropriate or effective for our services” and said Google won’t commit to it. ↫ Sara Fischer at Axios Imagine if any one of us, ordinary folk told the authorities we were just not going to follow the law. We’re not going to pay our taxes because tax law “simply isn’t appropriate or effective for our services”. We’re not going to follow traffic laws and regulations because doing so “simply isn’t appropriate or effective for our services”. We’re not going to respect property laws because doing so “simply isn’t appropriate or effective for our services”. We’d be in trouble within a heartbeat. We’d be buried in fines, court cases, and eventually, crippling debt, bankruptcy, and most likely end up in prison. The arrogance with which these American tech giants willfully declare themselves to be above EU laws and regulations is appalling, and really should have far more consequences than it does right now. Executives should be charged and arrested, products and services banned and taken off the shelves, and eventually, the companies themselves should be banned from operating within the EU altogether. Especially with the incoming regime in the US, which will most likely grant the tech giants even more freedom to do as they please, the EU needs to start standing up against this sort of gross disrespect. The consequences for a corporation knowingly breaking the law should be just as grave as for an individual citizen knowingly breaking the law.

Google allows advertisers to fingerprint you for even better tracking

They tried to keep it from prying eyes, but several people did notice it: Google made a pretty significant policy change regarding the use of fingerprinting by advertisers. While Google did not allow advertisers to use digital fingerprinting, the company has now changed its mind on this one. Google really tried to hide this change. The main support article talking about the reasoning behind the change is intentionally obtuse and nebulous, and doesn’t even link to the actual policy changes being implemented – which are found in a separate document. Google doesn’t highlight its changes there, so you have to compare the two versions of the policy yourself. Google claims this change has to be implemented because of “advances in privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) such as on-device processing, trusted execution environments, and secure multi-party computation” and “the rise of new ad-supported devices and platforms”. What I think this word salad means is that users are regaining a modicum of privacy with some specific privacy-preserving features in certain operating systems and on certain devices, and that the use of dedicated, siloed streaming services is increasing, which is harder for Google and advertisers to track. In other words, Google is relaxing its rules on fingerprinting because we’re all getting more conscious about privacy. In any event, the advice remains the same: use ad-blockers, preferably at your network level. Install adblocking software and extensions, set up a Pi-Hole, or turn on any adblocking features in your router (my Ubiquiti router has it built-in, and it works like a charm). Remember: your device, your rules. If you don’t want to see ads, you don’t have to.

Google launches Chromium development fund to ward off antitrust concerns

Don’t you just love it when companies get together under the thin guise of open source to promote their own interests? Today Google is pleased to announce our partnership with The Linux Foundation and the launch of the Supporters of Chromium-based Browsers. The goal of this initiative is to foster a sustainable environment of open-source contributions towards the health of the Chromium ecosystem and financially support a community of developers who want to contribute to the project, encouraging widespread support and continued technological progress for Chromium embedders. The Supporters of Chromium-based Browsers fund will be managed by the Linux Foundation, following their long established practices for open governance, prioritizing transparency, inclusivity, and community-driven development. We’re thrilled to have Meta, Microsoft, and Opera on-board as the initial members to pledge their support. ↫ Shruthi Sreekanta on the Chromium blog First, there’s absolutely no way around the fact that this entire effort is designed to counter some of the antitrust actions against Google, including a possible forced divestment of Chrome. By setting up an additional fund atop the Chromium organisation, placed under the management of the Linux Foundation, Google creates the veneer of more independence for Chromium than their really is. In reality, however, Chromium is very much a Google-led project, with 94% of code contributions coming from Google, and with the Linux Foundation being very much a corporate affair, of which Google itself is a member, one has to wonder just how much it means that the Linux Foundation is managing this new fund. Second, the initial members of this fund don’t exactly instill confidence in the fund’s morals and values. We’ve got Google, the largest online advertising company in the world. Then there’s Facebook, another major online advertising company, followed by Microsoft, which, among other business ventures, is also a major online advertising company. Lastly we have Opera, an NFT and cryptoscammer making money through predatory loans in poor countries. It’s a veritable who’s who of some of the companies you least want near anything related to your browsing experience. I highly doubt a transparent effort like this is going to dissuade any judge or antritrust regulator from backing down. It’s clear this fund is entirely self-serving and designed almost exclusively for optics, with an obvious bias towards online advertising companies who want to make the internet worse than towards companies and people trying to make the internet better.

Meet Willow, our state-of-the-art quantum chip

Today I’m delighted to announce Willow, our latest quantum chip. Willow has state-of-the-art performance across a number of metrics, enabling two major achievements. The concensus seems to be that this is a major achievement and milestone in quantum computing, and that it’s come faster than everyone expected. This topic is obviously far more complicated than most people can handle, so we have to rely on the verdicts and opinions from independent experts to gain some sense of just how significant an announcement this really is. The paper’s published in Nature for those few of us possessing the right amount of skill and knowledge to disseminate this information.

Vanir: open-source security patch validation

Today, we are announcing the availability of Vanir, a new open-source security patch validation tool. Introduced at Android Bootcamp in April, Vanir gives Android platform developers the power to quickly and efficiently scan their custom platform code for missing security patches and identify applicable available patches. Vanir significantly accelerates patch validation by automating this process, allowing OEMs to ensure devices are protected with critical security updates much faster than traditional methods. This strengthens the security of the Android ecosystem, helping to keep Android users around the world safe. ↫ Google Security Blog Google makes it clear this tool can easily be adapted for other avenues too – it’s not locked into only working with Android and Java/C/C++. Since it’s now open source, anyone can contribute to it and make it compatible – for lack of a better term – with other platforms and programming languages as well.

DOJ will push Google to sell Chrome to break search monopoly

Speaking of Google, the United States Department of Justice is pushing for Google to sell off Chrome. Top Justice Department antitrust officials have decided to ask a judge to force Alphabet Inc.’s Google to sell off its Chrome browser in what would be a historic crackdown on one of the biggest tech companies in the world. The department will ask the judge, who ruled in August that Google illegally monopolized the search market, to require measures related to artificial intelligence and its Android smartphone operating system, according to people familiar with the plans. ↫ Leah Nylen and Josh Sisco Let’s take a look at the history and current state of independent browsers, shall we? Netscape is obviously dead, Firefox is hanging on by a thread (which is inconspicuously shaped like a giant sack of money from Google), Opera is dead (its shady Chrome skin doesn’t count), Brave is cryptotrash run by a homophobe, and Vivaldi, while an actually good and capable Chrome skin with a ton of fun features, still isn’t profitable, so who knows how long they’ll last. As an independent company, Chrome wouldn’t survive. It seems the DoJ understands this, too, because they’re clearly using the words “sell off”, which would indicate selling Chrome to someone else instead of just spinning it off into a separate company. But who has both the cash and the interest in buying Chrome, without also being a terrible tech company with terrible business incentives that might make Chrome even more terrible than it already is? Through Chrome, Google has sucked all the air out of whatever was left of the browser market back when they first announced the browser. An independent Chrome won’t survive, and Chrome in anyone else’s hands might have the potential to be even worse. A final option out of left field would be turning Chrome and Chromium into a truly independent foundation or something, without a profit motive, focused solely on developing the Chromium engine, but that, too, would be easily abused by financial interests. I think the most likely outcome is one none of us want: absolutely nothing will happen. There’s a new administration coming to Washington, and if the recent proposed picks for government positions are anything to go by, America will be incredibly lucky if they get someone smarter than a disemboweled frog on a stick to run the DoJ. More likely than not, Google’s lawyers will walk all over whatever’s left of the DoJ after 20 January, or Pichai will simply kiss some more gaudy gold rings to make the case go away.

Torvalds thinks “AI” is 90% marketing, and Google claims 25% of its code is “AI”-generated

Torvalds said that the current state of AI technology is 90 percent marketing and 10 percent factual reality. The developer, who won Finland’s Millennium Technology Prize for the creation of the Linux kernel, was interviewed during the Open Source Summit held in Vienna, where he had the chance to talk about both the open-source world and the latest technology trends. ↫ Alfonso Maruccia at Techspot Well, he’s not wrong. “AI” definitely feels like a bubble at the moment, and while there’s probably eventually going to be useful implementations people might actually want to actively use to produce quality content, most “AI” features today produce a stream of obviously fake diarrhea full of malformed hands, lies, and misinformation. Maybe we’ll eventually work out these serious kinks, but for now, it’s mostly just a gimmick providing us with an endless source of memes. Which is fun, but not exactly what we’re being sold, and not something worth destroying the planet for even faster. Meanwhile, Google is going utterly bananas with its use of “AI” inside the company, with Sundar Pichai claiming 25% of code inside Google is now “AI”-generated. ↫ Sundar Pichai We’re also using AI internally to improve our coding processes, which is boosting productivity and efficiency. Today, more than a quarter of all new code at Google is generated by AI, then reviewed and accepted by engineers. This helps our engineers do more and move faster. So much here feels wrong. First, who wants to bet those engineers care a whole lot less about the generated code than they do about code they write themselves? Second, who wants to bet that generated code is entirely undocumented? Third, who wants to bet what the additional costs will be a few years from now when the next batch of engineers tries to make sense of that undocumented generated code? Sure, Google might save a bit on engineers’ salaries now, but how much extra will they have to spend to unspaghettify that diarrhea code in the future? It will be very interesting to keep an eye on this, and check back in, say, five years, and hear from the Google engineers of the future how much of their time is spent fixing undocumented “AI”-generated code. I can’t wait.

A Google breakup is on the table, say DOJ lawyers

Next up in my backlog of news to cover: the US Department of Justice’s proposed remedies for Google’s monopolistic abuse. Now that Judge Amit Mehta has found Google is a monopolist, lawyers for the Department of Justice have begun proposing solutions to correct the company’s illegal behavior and restore competition to the market for search engines. In a new 32-page filing (included below), they said they are considering both “behavioral and structural remedies.“ That covers everything from applying a consent decree to keep an eye on the company’s behavior to forcing it to sell off parts of its business, such as Chrome, Android, or Google Play. ↫ Richard Lawler at The Verge While I think it would be a great idea to break Google up, such an action taken in a vacuum seems to be rather pointless. Say Google is forced to spin off Android into a separate company – how is that relatively small Android, Inc. going to compete with the behemoth that is Apple and its iOS to which such restrictions do not apply? How is Chrome Ltd. going to survive Microsoft’s continued attempts at forcing Edge down our collective throats? Being a dedicated browser maker is working out great for Firefox, right? This is the problem with piecemeal, retroactive measures to try and “correct” a market position that you have known for years is being abused – sure, this would knock Google down a peg, but other, even larger megacorporations like Apple or Microsoft will be the ones to benefit most, not any possible new companies or startups. This is exactly why a market-wide, equally-applied set of rules and regulations, like the European Union’s Digital Markets Act, is a far better and more sustainable approach. Unless similar remedies are applied to Google’s massive competitors, these Google-specific remedies will most likely only make things worse, not better, for the American consumer.

Google to websites: let us train our AI on your content, or we’ll remove you from Google Search

Google now displays convenient artificial intelligence-based answers at the top of its search pages — meaning users may never click through to the websites whose data is being used to power those results. But many site owners say they can’t afford to block Google’s AI from summarizing their content. That’s because the Google tool that sifts through web content to come up with its AI answers is the same one that keeps track of web pages for search results, according to publishers. Blocking Alphabet Inc.’s Google the way sites have blocked some of its AI competitors would also hamper a site’s ability to be discovered online. ↫ Julia Love and Davey Alba OSNews still relies partially on advertising right now, and thus Google continues to play a role in our survival. You can help by reducing our dependency on Google by supporting us through Patreon, making donations using Ko-Fi, or buying our merch. The more of you support us, the closer to reality the dream of an ad-free OSNews not dependent on Google becomes. OSNews is my sole source of income, and if that does not work out, OSNews will cease to exist if I’m forced to find another job. Due to Google’s utter dominance on the internet, websites and publishers have no choice but to accept whatever Google decides to do. Not being indexed by the most popular search engine on the web with like 90% market share is a death sentence, but feeding Google’s machine learning algorithms will be a slow death by a thousands cuts, too, for many publishers. The more content is fed to Google’s AI tools, the better they’ll get at simply copying your style to a T, and the better they’ll get at showing just the little paragraph or line that matters as a Google result, meaning you won’t have to visit the site in question. It’s also not great for Google in the long-term, either. Google Search relies on humans making content for people to find; if there’s no more quality content for people to find, people aren’t going to be using Google as much anymore. In what is typical of the search giant, it seems they’re not really looking ahead very far into the future, chasing short-term profits riding the AI hype train, while long-term profits take a back seat. Maybe I’m just too stupid to understand the Silicon Valley galaxy brain business boys, but to a simple man like me it seems rather stupid to starve the very websites, publishers, authors, and so on that your main product relies on to be useful in the first place. I honestly don’t even know how much of OSNews’ traffic comes from Google, so I don’t know how much it would even affect us were we to tell Google’s crawlers to get bent. My guess is that search traffic is still a sizable portion of our traffic, so I’m definitely not going to gamble the future of OSNews. Luckily we’re quite small and I doubt many people are interested in AI generating my writing style and the topics I cover anyway, so I don’t think I have to worry as much as some of the larger tech websites do.

Google threatened tech influencers unless they ‘preferred’ the Pixel

The tech review world has been full of murky deals between companies and influencers for years, but it appears Google finally crossed a line with the Pixel 9. The company’s invite-only Team Pixel program — which seeds Pixel products to influencers before public availability — stipulated that participating influencers were not allowed to feature Pixel products alongside competitors, and those who showed a preference for competing phones risked being kicked out of the program. For those hoping to break into the world of tech reviews, the new terms meant having to choose between keeping access or keeping their integrity. ↫ Victoria Song at The Verge Even though this ended up being organised and run by a third party, and Google addressed it immediately, it doesn’t surprise me at all that stuff like this happens. Anyone who has spent any time on tech YouTube, popular tech news sites, and content farms knows full well just how… Odd a lot of reviews and videos often feel. This is because a lot of review programs subtly – or not so subtly – imply that if you’re not positive enough, you’re going to be kicked out and won’t get the next batch of cool products to review, thereby harming your channel or website. Apple is a great example of a company that uses the threat of not getting review samples, event invites, and similar press benefits to gain positive media attention. I myself was kicked out of Apple’s review program and press pool way back during the Intel transition, because I mentioned the new Intel MacBook Pro got uncomfortably hot, and Apple really didn’t like that. They tried to pressure me to change the wording, but I didn’t budge, and consequently, that was the end of me getting any review items or press invites. I only ever accepted one Apple press invite, by the way, to their headquarters in The Netherlands, which was in Bunnik, of all places. Not much of value was lost without Apple press invites. Nobody wants to go to Bunnik. With every review of a loaned item on OSNews, you can be 100% sure there are no shenanigans, because I simply do not let anyone influence me. OSNews doesn’t live or die by getting reviews of the latest and greatest tech, so I have no incentive to deal with pushy, manipulative companies or PR people. I refused to budge to Apple 17 years ago, during my first year at OSNews, when I was in my early 20s – and I’ve never budged since, either. Now look at everyone getting press access from Apple, and think to yourself – would any of them tell Apple to get bent? That being said, I’d love to review the new Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold, if only to make fun of that horrid name. Hit me up, Google.