28 Dec 2025 Search

Stop the slop by disabling AI features in Chrome by Avram Piltch. (Personal IT tips about how to turn off the AI features, so hot right now. Will they take the hint? Related: Firefox browser falls to AI. What do we do now? by David Gerard, Mozilla’s new CEO: Firefox will become an “AI browser” by Thom Holwerda.)

Make your aging computer feel brand new with Windows 11 Pro, now just $10 (Somehow it seems like the plummeting Microsoft license prices should be a bigger news story than it is. The same site has offered MS-Office deals, apparently legit, for 90-something percent off.)

Europe gets serious about cutting digital umbilical chord with Uncle Sam’s big tech by Kim Loohuis. (Cool story, but the real decision-makers who matter here are the managers of individual IT projects. You can’t spell #Eurostack without U.)

Salesforce regrets firing 4000 experienced staff and replacing them with AI According to executives familiar with the transition, automated systems struggled with nuanced issues, escalations, and long-tail customer problems. The result was declining service quality, higher complaint volumes, and internal firefighting to stabilize operations that had once been handled by experienced staff.

The ANA’s “Words of the Year”: A Decade-Long Record of Saying Things No One Can Say With a Straight Face by Jay Mandel. The ANA word of the year is a yearly ritual of naming whatever the industry is already defending, rebranding, or distancing itself from.

Critics rush to torrent “60 Minutes” episode CBS is accused of censoring by Ashley Belanger, Archivists Posted the 60 Minutes CECOT Segment Bari Weiss Killed by Joseph Cox. (Related: The year journalism goes underground in America by Heather Chaplin.)

Open Source: Inside 2025’s 4 Biggest Trends by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols. Despite the simple fact that we all depend on open source, all too many projects remain underfunded. Others, such as NET 6, are still popular, but their maintainers have quit supporting them. What’s a user to do? This isn’t a new problem. Back in 2021, Tidelift, a security company that also financially supported open source maintainers, found that 46% of open source project maintainers received no pay at all. Almost as bad, even those who were paid, a mere 26% earn more than $1,000 per year for their work. Things have not improved. In fact, they’ve gotten worse. In 2024, Tidelift’s latest results showed that now 60% of open source maintainers are unpaid.

Google Built Its Empire Scraping The Web. Now It’s Suing To Stop Others From Scraping Google by Mike Masnick. (This data is too valuable to not get collected by anybody, though. If this one easily-targetable company goes away, the path from scraper to buyer will get more obfuscated and distributed. Google should know that just from how well they can deniably sponsor copyright-infringing sports streams and ebooks.)

Australia’s Social Media Age Limit Policy Delays Account Creation, Not Access to Content by Ravi Iyer and Jon Haidt. (What I was surprised by was that somehow the law manages to cover the really risky stuff like Instagram but not GitHub or Wikipedia. Might lead to a noticeable pop in teen skill levels and educational achievements?)

How the Mad Men Lost the Plot Again by Ian Leslie. Ad agencies have fervently embraced the digital gospel. But by doing so, say the doubters, they lost sight of what made the industry valuable in the first place.

Inside My Battles With Google Trust & Safety by Jonathan Bellack. I believe things only look OK from the inside because big platforms don’t have to bear the cost of their externalities, namely all the people who are still being harmed by safety issues.

How to make Firefox scrollbars permanent, thicker by Igor Ljubuncic. (A good basic usability tip.)

How to quit Spotify by Brian Merchant. Spotify has been driving down wages for artists far longer than the AI companies, reducing payouts for musicians over the years until most are now making a statistically meaningless amount from the platform; many estimates put the figure as low as $0.003 per stream. In 2024, Spotify stopped paying artists for songs that had fewer than 1,000 streams, despite the fact that 81% of musicians on the platform don’t cross that threshold.

Bust the big tech cartel by Andrew Orlowski. Google and Meta’s market-rigging costs every household around £1,000 a year. (Related: living with a bigger ad duopoly)