Tech Brew Ride Home - Nobody Cares About AI Ads?

Episode Date: November 4, 2025

Apple brings the App Store to the web. When the cyber white hats turn black hat. Jensen didn’t get what he really wants from Trump. Coca-Cola says nobody cares if the commercials are AI. Is Common Crawl the secret AI infrastructure? And why Google Cloud is the thing sending Google stock to new all-time highs. Apple brings its App Store to the web (The Verge) Prosecutors allege incident response pros used ALPHV/BlackCat to commit string of ransomware attacks (Cyberscoop) Waymo’s robotaxis are coming to three new cities (The Verge) Trump Officials Torpedoed Nvidia’s Push to Export AI Chips to China (WSJ) Coca-Cola Injects ‘Holidays Are Coming’ Ads With an Upgraded Dose of AI (WSJ) The Nonprofit Doing the AI Industry’s Dirty Work (The Atlantic) AI turned Google Cloud from also-ran into Alphabet’s growth driver (Reuters) Steven Bartlett's Steve Jobs Cartoon Video Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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GoogleFi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. Welcome to the TechBrew right home for Tuesday, November 4th, 2025. I'm Brian McCullough. Today Apple brings the App Store to the web. When Cyber White Hats turn Black Hat, Jensen didn't get what he really wants from Trump, Coca-Cola says nobody cares if the commercials are AI is common-crawl to secret AI infrastructure and why Google Cloud is the thing sending Google stock to new all-time highs. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. If you are looking for enterprise-grade identity automation minus the enterprise-grade baggage, a.k.a. having your users log-on 500 times. Yesh ID delivers advanced IAM automation without moving teams onto a legacy identity provider. Whether you use Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, or ACTA, Yesh ID integrates directly. No rebuilds or rip-and-replaces are required. Yesh ID helps IT and security teams reduce risk, not just tickets. And IT, teams everywhere might have just breathed a collective sigh of relief.

Every access change, review, and approval is tracked and exportable, helping security teams effortlessly demonstrate compliance with SOC2, ISO, or HIPAA. IT and security teams can spot risk before it becomes a finding. Learn more at yesh ID.com slash tech brew. That's Y-E-S-H-ID.com slash tech brew. Apple has refreshed the web version of the App Store, letting users view and search for apps for the iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV, Apple Watch, and Apple Vision Pro. Quoting The Verge, Apple has launched its App Store on the web, offering a central hub where you can browse through different categories of apps

across all of the company's devices, as spotted earlier by Mac Rumors and 9-to-5 Mac. Now, when you navigate to apps.com, you'll see the revamped interface instead of a web page that just contains information about the App Store. There's no way to download apps from the App Store on the web, however. Apple just gives you the option to share an app or open it directly inside the App Store installed on your device, along with the ability to switch between listings of apps for the iPhone, iPad, Mac, Vision Pro, Apple Watch, and Apple TV. You can check out recommendations on the Today tab, as well as sort apps by categories such as productivity, entertainment, adventure, and more. The new web-based app store also serves as a portal where you can search for apps too.

Apple previously offered web pages for each of its apps, but they weren't easily accessible or searchable unless it was. from a direct link, end quote. Since we're on Apple here, a note that they've released version 26.1 of their full family of OS's, adding a tinted option for its liquid glass design that reduces transparency and increases contrast. So they keep dialing back on that. Quoting in Gadget, this includes what is sure to be a popular feature from the beta. Once installed, this update lets people opt to give the liquid glass look a frostier, more opaque appearance. You can find the option to tint the screen behind notifications and tab bars within the settings menu.

It's under display and brightness, then the liquid glass section. The feature is also present in iPadOS 26.1 and MacOS 26.1, both of which also dropped today. Ever since Apple unveiled, the liquid glass design it had planned for the next versions of iOS, the aesthetic has been divisive. We, at Engadget, have been pretty well split down the middle about it from the start. The tinting of the newest operating systems joins a growing rock. roster of accessibility and visibility options to customize how liquid glass looks from the full-on transparent mode to a higher contrast and higher opacity approach. One other standout from the 26.1

OS releases is for the iPad. Those of you who wanted the return of slideover for multitasking can breathe a sigh of relief. After appearing in the beta last month, the feature is back. Many iPad owners appreciated how slideover let them control screen real estate without constant rearranging of windows. The feature has been reimagined for the tablet's current capabilities, essentially letting you pin a window to the top of your screen and hide it when you want. This window can also be resized and given your aspect ratio of choice, end quote. U.S. federal prosecutors allege that three cybersecurity professionals carried out ransomware attacks on at least five U.S. companies in 23 using Alf v. ransomware, quoting Cyberscoop. Federal prosecutors allege that three cybersecurity professionals

whose job was to help companies respond to ransomware attacks instead carried out their own ransomware schemes against five U.S. businesses in 2023. Ryan Clifford Goldberg, Kevin Tyler Martin, and an unnamed co-conspirator, all U.S. Nationals, began using Alf V, also known as Black Cat Ransomware, to attack companies in May 2023, according to indictments and other court documents in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida. At the time of the attacks, Goldberg was a manager of incident response. at Cignia, while Martin, a ransomware negotiator at Digital Mint, allegedly collaborated with

Goldberg and another co-conspirator who also worked at Digital Mint and allegedly obtained an affiliate account on Alf V. The trio are accused of carrying out the conspiracy from May 23 through April 2025, according to an affidavit. The Chicago Sun Times was the first report on the indictment. Victims impacted by the attacks over a six-month period in 2023 included a medical company based in Florida, a pharmaceutical company based in Maryland, a California doctor's office, an engineering company based in California, and a drone manufacturer in Virginia. Goldberg Martin and their co-conspirator received a nearly $1.3 million ransom payment from the medical company in May 2023, but did not successfully extort a financial payment from the other victims, prosecutors said.

Signea confirmed Goldberg was formerly employed by the company. Immediately upon learning of the situation, he was terminated, the company said in a statement, Goldberg's attorney declared. line to comment. Digital Mint confirmed in a statement Monday that a former employee was indicted for organizing and participating in ransomware attacks. The company did not say when nor how it became aware of Martin and his co-workers alleged criminal activities and did not describe the circumstances regarding the end of their employment, end quote. Not to spend too long on this because we could do this ad infinitum going forward, but I do like to mention this as a sort of news you can use sort of thing, if you're in the cities I'm about to mention, sort of a public service announcement

for you. Quoting the verge, Waymo says it plans on launching commercial robotaxi services in three new cities, San Diego, Las Vegas, and Detroit. The announcement comes after the company said it would begin rapidly scaling to bring its fully driverless technology to more people on a faster timeline. Waymo didn't say exactly when it plans on opening up its vehicles to customers in all three cities, but it will likely be sometime next year. The company currently, currently, operates in five cities, the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Austin, and Atlanta. It has also said it wants to launch in Boston, Seattle, Denver, Miami, New York City, and Washington, D.C. The company is experiencing local pushback in both Boston and Seattle.

Waymo is licensed for autonomous ride-hailing in California, but will still need to obtain approval in Nevada and Michigan before it can operate fully driverless cars in a commercial capacity. Waymo will need a transportation network company permit in Michigan and testing a approval from both Nevada's DMV and the state's transportation authority for commercial operations, Waymo spokesperson Sandy Carp said, end quote. Not good news for Jansen or Nvidia. Sources tell the journal that President Trump decided not to discuss Nvidia's AI chip exports to China during his October 30th meeting with Xi Jinping following opposition from his top advisors.

As they prepared to meet Xi, top officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, told Trump the sales would threaten national security. security, saying they would boost China's AI data center capabilities and backfire on the U.S., the officials said. The U.S. was already preparing to make other concessions in the meeting with Xi in exchange for Beijing allowing exports of rare earth magnets. Others against the approval, the officials said include a U.S. trade representative Jameson Greer and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik, who helped lead trade talks.

Faced with nearly unified opposition from his top advisors, Trump, decided not to discuss the advance in video chips during his October 30th meeting with Xi in Busan, South Korea, the officials said Trump's ultimate decision marked a victory for Rubio and other Trump advisors over Huang, leader of the world's most valuable public company. Exports of Blackwell chips to China are potentially worth tens of billions of dollars in sales and could help Nvidia keep Chinese AI companies hooked on NVIDIA's technology. Greenlighting the export of NVIDIA's blackwell chips would be a seismic policy shift potentially giving China the U.S.'s biggest geopolitical competitor, a technological accelerant.

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their place to an expanded host of critters, letting Coke dodge the uncanny valley, where nearly real simulations of people wind up unsettling viewers. Coca-Cola declined to comment on the cost of the campaign, which includes two different commercials made by two artificial intelligence studios, that it said will air in around 140 countries. But Chief Marketing Officer Manolo Arroyo said it was cheaper and speedier to produce than a typical non-AI production. Before, when we were doing the shooting and all the standard processes for, you know, we were doing the shooting and all the standard processes for a project we would start a year in advance, Arroyo said.

Now you can get it done in around a month. Coca-Cola is one of many advertisers enchanted by generative AI's speed and cost efficiencies, despite some people's vocal distaste for the technology and its potential to make jobs in the creative industries redundant. The animator and writer Alex Hirsch last year responded to last year's AI ads by declaring that Coca-Cola is red because it's made from blood of out-of-work artists. and advertisers such as the retailer Airy have made their rejection of AI and photos and videos a public relations campaign in itself. That could curry favor with the 46% of consumers in the U.S., UK, Canada, and Australia,

who said they're not okay with AI and ads, according to a January poll from research company attest. But that number is also down from 49% a year earlier. Other advertisers are pushing ahead. 30% of connected TV commercials, social videos, and online videos this year are being built or enhanced using generative AI tools up from 22% in 2024, according to Trade Group, the Interactive Advertising Bureau. That figure will rise to 39% in 2026, the Bureau predicts. And despite the criticism, Koch's 2024 holiday ads scored very highly among regular consumers, according to System 1, a UK-based company that tests the effectiveness of ads,

which suggested people either didn't know or didn't care about the use of AI. Arroyo and other marketers are quick to point out that generative AI ads aren't just created by pressing a few buttons. In a behind-the-scenes film shared by Coke, a voiceover discusses the team of artists who, quote, work frame by frame, often pixel by pixel to touch up and tweak the festive images generated by the AI, end quote.

The Atlantic has an interesting profile of the nonprofit outfit Common Crawl, which scraped billions of webpages since 2013, including paywalled articles, to build an archive that is often used by OpenAI and other AI companies. The Common Crawl Foundation is little known outside Silicon Valley, yet for more than a decade, it has scraped billions of web pages into a petabyte scale archive that's free for researchers. In recent years, that trove has powered AI, OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Nvidia, Meta, Amazon, and others have used it to train large language models. The reporting finds Common Crawl has effectively opened a backdoor for training on paywall journalism, and the foundation appears to be lying to publishers about it, at least according to the Atlanta, while masking what its archives contain.

Common Crawl publicly says it collects only freely available content and doesn't go behind any paywalls. In practice, its crawler doesn't execute the JavaScript that triggers many new sites paywalls, so it captures full articles before the paywall appears. By the Atlantic's estimate, the archive holds millions of articles from outlets, including The Economist, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the New Yorker, Harper's, and the Atlantic. Publishers have asked for removals. Common Crawl says it complies. Yet inspections of its files shows large swathes of that content still present, and the archives content files show no modification

since 2016, suggesting removals haven't actually occurred. Its site's search tool also returns misleading no-captures results for many publisher domains. Some outlets now block Common Crawls CCBot, now the most blocked scraper among the top 1,000 sites, but that only stops future. Grabs. Meanwhile, Common Crawl has grown closer to AI firms, taking six-figure donations, co-authoring LLM data curation papers, and even hosting derived data sets, including for NVIDIA. As researcher Stefan Bach noted, today's generative AI likely wouldn't exist in its current form without Common Crawl. Executive Director Rich Screnta told the Atlantic models should read anything online, quote, the robots are people too, end quote, and dismisses

attribution or stricter controls. We can't police that. We're just a bunch of dusty bookshelves. The result, however, is that claims of openness help justify freewriting on journalism, in the Atlantic's opinion, pushing publishers toward stronger paywalls and obscuring who benefits from the data, not robots, but corporations, end quote. Finally, today, Reuters takes a look at how, once a money-losing backwater inside the company, Google Cloud has turned into one of Alphabet's fastest growing businesses lifted by big bets on AI and years of spending on data centers, custom chips, and networking. In the recent third quarter earnings report, cloud revenue topped $15 billion up 34% year-over-year

as demand surge for AI infrastructure and services, including Google's Gemini models. The business now threatens to overtake YouTube as Alphabet's number two cash generator behind search ads, and CEO Sundar Pichai says cloud will play an email. even more central role going forward. Much of the turnaround is attributed to Thomas Currian, the former Oracle executive who took over in 2018. Under his watch, Google Cloud's market share climbed from about 7% to 13% by 2025, according to Synergy Research. Pichai had flagged Cloud and YouTube as his two big bets when he became CEO in 2019. YouTube scaled quickly, while Cloud absorbed heavy losses through 2022 before turning its first profit in 2023.

The AI boom is narrowing the gap with Microsoft and Amazon, though the push has come with hefty CAPEX. Alphabet has twice surprised Wall Street this year with higher than expected spending to keep up with infrastructure needs. Internally, Korean reshaped culture and go-to-market strategies, opening lower-cost offices, tightening financial discipline, prioritizing revenue over bookings and organizing sales by industry so reps can speak the customer's language. The result, Google is now in the room with Enterprise that once defaulted to AWS or Azure, and nine of the top 10 AI labs, including OpenAI, Anthropic and Safe Superintelligence run on Google Cloud. A pivotal move was shifting sales of Google's in-house TPUs into cloud in 2020, freeing the unit to offer chips broadly, even to rivals. Anthropics subsequently scaled on TPUs and other developers have followed. Curian's growing cloud reflects clouds assent, but the race remains, Alphabet lifted 2025-Qapex guidance into the low 90 billions and signaled even more in 26. Still, Pachai argues Google's decade-long AI groundwork gives cloud resilience through any

short-term market swings. Quote, the ascent of Google Cloud is shifting the balance of power inside Alphabet. Current and former executives told Reuters Currian has gained Cloud at Google's weekly leads the agenda setting meetings where division leaders jostle over resources and priorities. What Thomas has been a powerful voice for is making sure that when we say we're focused on the user, that we're focusing on the enterprise customer to Pichai said, end quote. Okay, hive mind, I've got another something for you. This is related to what I was talking about yesterday, about wanting to use AI to do my 80s, 90s history podcasts and videos. Who is the best at doing cartoons?

I mean animated cartoons, not video cartoons. Like, let's say I have 30 seconds of audio of my Bo Jackson biography. What if I wanted to turn that into 30 seconds of a cartoon animating what I'm talking about in that audio so I compare it to the audio for a YouTube video. Who does that the best? Is it runway? Somebody else? Actually, here's an obvious startup idea for somebody out there. This is the tool I'm looking for, and I bet a lot of people out there are too.

Let's say I have a script or audio that runs about 45 minutes. I want to be able to pair video to it automatically. Like sometimes it creates a cartoon playing out what is happening in the audio. Sometimes it just puts pictures in in a Ken Burns effect style. I could even pick the pictures I want to use for the AI, but it puts it in there for me in the right places, according to the narrative. Basically, I want a tool that if I have 30 to 45 minutes of audio in some sort of automated way, it puts some sort of animation or video to it.

I actually have an example. The last link in the show notes today is to an experiment that Stephen Bartlett did, where he animated a video about the life of Steve Jobs. I want a tool like this, but fully automated. I imagine they did some sort of stringing together, a bunch of tools to make that video. Anyone know of somebody doing this? Email me at brian at ridehomefund.com. Thanks in advance.

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