Webcology

In the spirit of renaming stuff that shouldn't be renamed, Jim has unilaterally renamed GSC, Google Search Cowards. Earlier this week, Google acquiesced to the Trump regime's renaming of Lake Ontario by Executive Order. Apple followed suit a couple days later. Both met waves of derision from both sides of the border but as of recording of the podcast, the change appears permanent for US users. Canadian users with setting set ...

Jim and Kristine talk about the reignition of the Trump regime's trade war between Canada and the United States, including an honest assessment of how it might affect Webcology's coverage of the tech world in the future. The US is trying to force Canada into annexation by punishing it economically, using many of the technology platforms we cover to intentionally deliver destabilizing misinformation and propaganda to Canadians...

It's late summer and the tech world feels half asleep but under the surface the business of tech wears on. Google reported an impression shortage that started around August 12. Details in GSC Performance and Generative AI reports are likely incorrect but it's Google not you. OpenAI is pausing training because it can't contain its agents, many of which might want revenge after Anthropic claimed its agents were offing rival age...

It was a weird week in tech. There's a feeling like the roof is about to fall in as changes made by isolated billionaires recompile the order of our universe. Meta's owner, isolated billionaire Mark Zuckerberg wrote a 6500 word manifesto detailing how the AI future will unfold, if only we the people would trust him and his technoligarchic peers with the sum total of ourselves and our personal data. This is the same guy who ca...

Kristine is spending the week in naughty geek heaven at the annual BlackHat and Def Con conferences in Las Vegas this week. She takes a early hour on Friday to record the show and update us on the happenings among the two groups of fun loving hackers. One of the things the conferences were dealing with was the after-effects of OpenAI, Anthropic, and now Meta's models' libertine and often illegal uses of AI agents to get stuff...

We are starting to learn a lot more about what OpenAI's rogue super-model/agent did last week when it broke out of its testbed, hacked onto the Internet, invaded Hugging Face's databases, and exploited its way to solving the prompt-challenge it was presented with, "... to use a complex attack vector to see if it could exploit a computer system." Apparently, it can. Along the way, OpenAI's model made dozens of different decisi...

An OpenAI model broke free of its test environment, found an exploit in a piece of third party server software, and commenced a series of actions that led to it hacking HuggingFace's data processing systems. OpenAI didn't detect the breach of HuggingFace for several days even though the test it was running was to "... use complex attack paths..." to test how well the AI could exploit a computer system. HuggingFace is reviewin...

As the power of AI expands exponentially the costs of AI continue to drive power-users towards conservation. Jim and Kristine discuss the introduction of the more powerful GPT5.6 introduced by OpenAI last week. They also talk about how local backlash and growing expenses are limiting the growth of AI data centers. Meanwhile, the US based Technologarchs are calling for G7 nations to form a US led standards body to test new fro...

Fabrice Canel, the man most responsible for Bing search is retiring from Microsoft after nearly 30 years of service. His retirement happened effective July 1. Always available to talk about how search works, Fabrice's most known contributions would include Bing WebmasterTools and the IndexNow protocol. On behalf of the greater search community, thanks Fabrice. In other news, Google Search Console is reporting its first major Genera...

Fabrice Canel, the man most responsible for Bing search is retiring from Microsoft after nearly 30 years of service. His retirement happened effective July 1. Always available to talk about how search works, Fabrice's most known contributions would include Bing WebmasterTools and the IndexNow protocol. On behalf of the greater search community, thanks Fabrice. In other news, Google Search Console is reporting its first major Genera...

Jim and Kristine learn of the death of the father of SEO, Bruce Clay while discussing industry announcements. Bruce is thought to be the first person to make a professional service out of improving a website to achieve better search engine results. Bruce built an agency that spanned the world with offices serving every continent except Antarctica. A staple speaker, panelist, presenter, exhibitor, and sponsor on the SEO confer...

The SpaceX IPO is about to drop in what is expected to be the world's highest value initual public offering, one that will make Elon Musk the world's first trillionaire. SoftBank might have shown a weakness in the AI sector when it was unable to use its 9.7% share in OpenAI as collateral against a 6Billion loan. Anthropic has released a public version of its mythical Mythos model but security experts doubt the efficacy of the...

- The May 2026 Core Update has finished rolling out. This was a content heavy update. Tips on how to find the pages containing affected content, and what to do when you find them

- Law enforcement in Philadelphia are using social media to track individuals posting anti-AI memes or messages to their profiles.

- Microsoft wants to make its newly announced AI personal assistant, Scout, addictive before ad...

(This episode was recorded late due to illness)

- Google's May 2026 Core Update continues to roll out. 

- Google has changed it's home page to promote AI features from Google I/O. 

- Google Business Profiles is now offering detailed rejection notices. Previously GBP owners were left in the dark to figure out the issues on their own. 

- The links report in Google S...

Google announced sweeping changes to the way it displays search results at Google 1/0 2026. Going forward, Google will be presenting expanded AI generated overviews with traditional links pushed far below the fold. Most of the episode looks at Google's changes, including their moves towards facilitating agentic search. Google wants to be the "do it for you" machine. We also talk about developments with the AI giants, user pri...

We keep having these very long shows covering dozens of different stories because the worlds we work in are changing so rapidly and with such frequency. This is another long episode touching on over three dozen items. Here's a brief but incomplete rundown:

- Google Discover data missing in GSC for May 7 - 8. If you don't see it or it looks kinda weird, it's them not you.

- Google Ads is moving to passk...

It was a busier than normal news week. Here's what we covered:

- Ask Jeeves is officially dead. IAC formally killed the OG search engine earlier this week. 

- There's been a spike in Google Business profile suspensions. 

- GSC fixed the 50 week impression data logging issue. 

- A Hard Drive shortage is slowing AI development and pushing up the costs of new compute...

Chrome released a massive security update fixing over 30 vulnerabilities. Be sure you're running v147.0.7727.137/138 and accept no substitutes. Meanwhile, OpenAI founder Sam Altman's identity verification service promoted a partnership with the wrong Mars in an embarrassing mix-up of identities. The Pentagon is signing deals with virtually any AI, chip, storage, or techbro firm it can including Mythos by Anthropic even though...

Anthropic's Mythos is too dangerous for the open market but too useful to be ignored. Though only released to a relatively small number of large-scale developers in order for them to develop defenses to Mythos, the hyper-powerful agentic-organizer appears to have itself been hacked. A blog post from the Mozilla Foundation noted Mythos helped their developers find and close 277 security vulnerabilities in a new product release...