In a legal filing meant to defend its advertising empire, Google may have inadvertently said what many in the industry have long suspected: the open web is in serious decline. That’s the phrase the company used in its September 5 court response as it fights against a proposed breakup of its ad business. At stake is whether Google must divest its AdX advertising exchange—an engine that has helped it dominate online display advertising for years.
But in trying to save itself from being carved up by the Department of Justice, Google made an unexpected pivot. After years of insisting that traffic from search is strong and the web is flourishing, the company is now warning that forced divestment could speed up what it calls the “rapid decline” of the open web.
So which is it? A healthy ecosystem driving billions of dollars in value—or a fragile economy on the brink of collapse? [Read more…]
On Wednesday, researchers uncovered three improperly issued TLS certificates for Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 DNS service, encrypted DNS lookup used by millions. The concern was clear: anyone with those credentials could impersonate Cloudflare’s resolver, decrypt user traffic, or redirect queries to malicious sites.
A startup called Farnsworth & Co. has found a niche in the dark overlap between surveillance, malware, and civil litigation. Their product? Personal data stolen from infected computers—now available for purchase by debt collectors, divorce lawyers, and anyone with a grudge and a budget.
If you use an Android phone, there’s a good chance Google’s Gemini AI is now interacting with your apps, even if you thought you had disabled it. The company recently rolled out changes that grant Gemini new levels of access to messages, phone calls, and third-party apps like WhatsApp, regardless of whether users had previously opted out. If that sounds invasive, it’s because it is.
You click a link. It takes you to a site that looks exactly right. The logo matches, the name checks out, and everything feels familiar. But something’s off. And before you realize what it is, you’ve handed over your login, your credit card, or worse, your network credentials. The trick wasn’t in the layout or the content. It was in the letters.