Nobody Cares About AI Ads?

you Welcome to the Tech Brew Ride 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 the secret AI infrastructure, and why Google Cloud is the thing sending Google stock to new all-time highs. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech.

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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 MacRumors and 9to5Mac. Now when you navigate to... apps.apple.com, you'll see the revamped interface instead of a webpage 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 webpages 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 OSs, adding a tinted option for its liquid glass design that reduces transparency and increases contrast. So... They keep dialing back on that, quoting Engadget.

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 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.

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 2023 using Alfv 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 Signia.

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 Alfv. The trio are accused of carrying out the conspiracy from May 2023 through April 2025, according to an affidavit. The Chicago Sun-Times was the first to 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.

Signia 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 declined 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."

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 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 approval from both Nevada's DMV and the state's transportation authority for commercial operations, Waymo spokesperson Sandy Karp said, end quote.

Not good news for Jensen 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. Quote, as they prepared to meet Xi, Top officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, told Trump the sales would threaten national 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 included U.S. Trade Representative Jameson Greer and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who helped lead trade talks.

Faced with nearly unified opposition from his top advisors, Trump decided not to discuss the advance of video chips during his October 30th meeting with Xi in Busan, South Korea, the official 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. Green lighting the export of NVIDIA's Blackwell chips.

would be a seismic policy shift, potentially giving China, the US's biggest geopolitical competitor, a technological accelerant. Wang, who speaks to Trump often, has lobbied relentlessly to maintain access to the Chinese market, end quote. Is the daily commute making your muscles feel stiff? Well, there could be a natural way to help relieve that discomfort. Cornbread hemp creates premium USDA organic full-spectrum CBD gummies designed to help with stress.

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Coca-Cola has released upgraded AI-generated ads for the holiday season this year after finding people didn't know or care about the use of AI and making the ads despite criticism. for its 2024 ads that also experimented with AI. Quoting the journal, The wheels of the red delivery trucks in Coke's new holidays are coming commercials look as though they're all turning rather than gliding like some did last year.

The shiny-faced, spaced-out humans of 2024 have ceded 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 a project, we would start a year in advance, Arayo 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 Aerie have made their rejection of AI in photos and videos.

a public relations campaign in itself. That could curry favor with the 46% of consumers in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia who said they're not okay with AI in 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, Coke's 2024 holiday ads scored very highly among regular consumers, according to System One, 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 non-profit 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 Atlantic. 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 news 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 swaths of that content still present. and the archive's 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 Crawl's CC bot, 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 datasets, including for NVIDIA. As researcher Stefan Back 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 free writing 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 surged 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 even more central role going forward. Much of the turnaround is attributed to Thomas... Kurian, 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...

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 2022, freeing the unit to offer chips broadly even to rivals. Anthropic subsequently scaled on TPUs and other developers have followed.

Kurian's growing clout reflects Cloud's ascent, but the race remains expensive. Alphabet lifted 2025 CapEx guidance into the low 90 billions and signaled even more in 2026. Still, Pichai 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 Korean 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 too, 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 can pair 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. 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. Talk to you tomorrow.