Google is bringing Personal Intelligence to Gemini AI in your car. With this update, Gemini in Android Auto and cars with Google built-in can tap into your information across Google apps, including Gmail, Calendar, Maps, Photos, YouTube, and Search.

As an example, Google says you can ask Gemini about your flight status if you're driving to the airport. The AI assistant can pull your flight details from a confirmation message in Gmail, and then use that information to look up its status. You can also ask Gemini to "take me to my doctor's appointment" instead of pulling up directions manually, or ask it to "find the car wash from the photo I …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Google is bringing Gemini's Personal Intelligence feature to cars, allowing its AI assistant to draw on information from Gmail, Calendar, Maps, YouTube, and other Google services to deliver more personalized responses while driving.

Google has joined Amazon in releasing a developer tool that makes it easy for PyTorch users to move their apps off Nvidia GPUs.

Google is launching a new browser safety feature for Chrome that aims to keep you better informed about how malicious a website might be before you open it. The new suspicious site warnings, available when Chrome's Enhanced Protection is on, build on a similar two-stage system introduced for Chrome file downloads in 2024, which provides visually different notifications for blocked files based on whether they're determined to be "suspicious" or "dangerous."

For the Chrome site warnings, the feature will flag a website as suspicious if it detects that it has similar qualities to other sites associated with phishing, malware, and scams. Google …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Today's links

• The death of history's most successful publisher: Google has a scorching case of "main character syndrome."
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Civil War x 4,400 ceramic cats; Okaysellers; Frankenstein hat; Clockwork Fagin; Tracking trackers; "Fever Beach."
• Upcoming appearances: Victoria, Vancouver, Ottawa, Vienna, Kilkenny, Couretnay, Vancouver, Oxford, Sheffield, Virtual, Oxford, Montreal.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

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The death of history's most successful publisher (permalink)

I published my first story in 1988, when I was 17 years old. Today, at 55, I've published more than 30 books, with three more coming in the next year or so. In the intervening years, I've spent a lot of time thinking and talking about publishing.

I've had plenty of opportunity to reflect on publishing: I've been a bookseller and worked in libraries, I wrote a column for Publishers Weekly, self-published a few books of my own, published the first-ever book licensed under Creative Commons, and broke several Kickstarter records for audiobook projects. But most of all, I've worked with publishing professionals: publicists, marketing directors, operations people, copyeditors, and, above all, editors.

My first novel editor was the magnificent Patrick Nielsen Hayden, who supported my publishing career from the very start, donating to help send me to the Clarion science fiction writers' workshop and inviting me to come read slush at Tor Books whenever I was in New York. Patrick didn't teach me everything I know about publishing, but he sure taught me a lot about publishing, and hardly a day goes by without my having cause to reflect on one of our many discussions over our decades-long professional and personal association.

Out of all the things I learned about publishing from Patrick, one truth stands out above all: publishing is "the act of making something public." Publishing may or may not involve editing, layout, printing, binding, marketing or other activities that we associate with publishing houses, but publishing always involves identifying a work, identifying an audience, and finding ways to connect that work to that audience.

This definition does a lot of useful work. For one thing, it locates publishing as part of the hard problem of human society, namely, "getting people to care about something that matters to you." Beyond publishing, this is the crux of politics, religion and commerce:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/04/self-publishing/

For another, this definition lets us understand that (for most of its existence) Google was the most successful publisher in human history. No other institution of any kind connected more works with more audiences. Lots of people have heard of Google's wildly unsuccessful motto "Don't be evil," but far fewer are familiar with Google's wildly successful mission statement, "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."

But all of that is in the past tense. With its AI projects – AI summaries, the Gemini chatbot – Google has abandoned the practice of "connecting works with audiences." Today, Google's function is to plunder all the works on the internet and chop them up and arrange them in an unimaginably vast, multidimensional array for the explicit purpose of preventing audiences from connecting with those works.

For most of its history, Google operated in a virtuous cycle with publishers whereby they allowed Google to crawl their sites and Google located audiences and connected them with the pages on those sites. Today, that cycle has turned vicious, with Google acting as a parasite that extracts value from the web's publishers and offers nothing in return.

This is entirely in keeping with the enshittification hypothesis: that once a platform is liberated from the disciplining forces of competition, regulation, labor and interoperability, it will squeeze its suppliers and users and harvest all the value for itself:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

But AI represents a new phase in enshittification. Google has assayed enshittificatory gambits in the past, like deliberately worsening its search results in order to force you to search repeatedly, which gave the company more chances to show you ads:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

But as sleazy as those gambits were, they were profitable. In some important sense, they were sustainable. Assuming Google could carry on indefinitely scamming its users in this way, they'd continue to bring in more cash than they spent, and continue to be the world's most successful publisher, connecting works and audiences (albeit in a deliberately degraded way).

Contrast this with AI, the money-losingest endeavor in the history of human civilization. Google is losing hundreds of billions of dollars on AI. The more AI Google does, the worse the company's financial footing becomes. If Google does this for long enough, it may cease to exist altogether. This collapse can only be prolonged by Google's ongoing extraction of value from web publishers, who no longer have their works connected with audiences via Google search results. Instead, Google usurps those audiences, shows them as many ads as it can, and still loses money in the bargain.

In Tim Wu's Age of Extraction, Wu lays out a thesis about how intermediaries – middlemen who perform a useful function connecting different groups, firms and individuals – are prone to developing "main character syndrome," abandoning their role as facilitators for others and abusing their position to make themselves the prime beneficiary of the transactions they facilitate:

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/691177/the-age-of-extraction-by-tim-wu/

Google has a scorching case of main character syndrome, and nowhere is that more obvious than in its AI-fueled transformation into web-scale parasite. The fact that this gambit might well destroy Google and the publishers the company once served – rather than merely enshittifying search with worse results and more ads – makes the whole thing look more like a Mafia bust-out than the enshittification of the first half of the 2020s:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bust_Out

It's certainly an ignominious end for history's most successful publisher (as was).

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Hey look at this (permalink)

• Trump says Google kisses his ass https://www.theverge.com/policy/1013485/trump-google-kiss-my-ass

• Tell Doug Ford: Say NO to Waymo https://techfordemocracy.ca/2026/04/29/say-no-to-waymo/

• Bizarre Blanets and Weird Worlds https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2026/10/bizarre-blanets-and-other-weir.html

• The Showrunners Network https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/spacecommand/the-showrunners-network?ref=8rypb4

• Christian Conman Jim Bakker is Dead https://skepchick.org/2026/10/christian-conman-jim-bakker-is-dead/

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Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Reenacting the Civil War with 44,000 ceramic cats in handmade uniforms https://web.archive.org/web/20011021022729/http://www.phillyburbs.com/intelligencerrecord/news/news_intell/1332513.htm

#20yrsago More on publishing and “okaysellers” https://www.nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/bestsellers_oka/#008116

#15yrsago HOWTO make a Frankenstein hat https://web.archive.org/web/20111022194802/http://deliacreates.blogspot.com/2011/10/hey-frankie.html

#15yrsago Copyright policy in the UK: an evidence-free zone https://www.openrightsgroup.org/publications/cant-look-now-finding-film-online/

#15yrsago Clockwork Fagin on Escape Pod https://delivery-edge.libsyn.com/shows/18601/items/1737698/EP315_ClockworkFagin.mp3

#10yrsago At long last, America’s racist, crazy tough-on-crime prosecutors are losing elections https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2828803

#5yrsago Imperfections in your Bluetooth beacons allow for unstoppable tracking https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/21/sidechannels/#ble-eding

#1yrago Carl Hiaasen's 'Fever Beach' https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/21/florida-duh/#strokerz-for-liberty

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Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Victoria: Munro's Books, Oct 20
  https://www.munrobooks.com/events/6113620261020

• Vancouver: Life After AI (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 22
  https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/46

• Ottawa: Life After AI (Ottawa Writers Festival), Oct 24
  https://writersfestival.org/event/life-after-ai

• Vienna: TED AI, Oct 28-30
  https://tedai-vienna.ted.com/

• Kilkenny (Kilkenomics), Nov 6-8
  https://kilkenomics.com/

• Courtenay: Enshittification (Sid Williams Theatre Society), Nov 10
  https://www.sidwilliamstheatre.com/events/cory-doctorow-talks-enshittification/

• Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12
  https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/

• Oxford: Ministry of the Future, Nov 23
  https://ministryforthefuture.co.uk/events.html

• Sheffield: Reverse Centaur at Juno Books, Nov 25
  https://www.outsavvy.com/event/40274/cory-doctorow-in-conversation

• Virtual: Enshittification, AI, and the Future of Technology (UBC Master of Educational Technology), Nov 28
  https://met.ubc.ca/2026/09/met-speaker-series-cory-doctorow-enshittification-ai-and-the-future-of-technology/

• Oxford: Bennett Oxford Symposium on Open Code in Science, Dec 9
  https://www.bennett.ox.ac.uk/events/2026-bennett-institute-symposium/

• Montreal: World Science Fiction Convention, Sep 2-6
  https://montreal2027.ca/en

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Recent appearances (permalink)

• Life After AI (Brain Bar)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPPa43-n0vI

• Terms of Service with Clare Duffy (CNN)
  https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/terms-of-service-with-clare-duffy/episodes/458ce968-af5d-11f0-b539-13ed2afe25f8

• AI, Work, and Power (Software Engineering Daily)
  AI, Work, and Power https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/podcasts/cory-doctorow-on-ai-work-and-power/

• AI, Corporate Power, and the Fight for Worker Control (Plutopia)
  https://plutopia.io/cory-doctorow-ai-corporate-power-and-the-fight-for-worker-control/

• How to Think About AI—Before It’s Too Late (Daniel Solove)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0xR3uEgGcc

---

Latest books (permalink)

• "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/

• "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce

• "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

• "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).

• "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

---

Upcoming books (permalink)

• "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

• "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

• "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027

• "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027

---

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

• “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 514 (27116 total).

• "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

---

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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

ISSN: 3066-764X

Some Google Home Speaker owners are currently experiencing an issue in which hundreds of gigabytes of data are being continuously downloaded to their device in the background. The bug, reported by 9to5Google and several Reddit users over the last week, may be caused by the speakers failing to correctly download and install a firmware update, with one Redditor finding that his device was consuming more than 200GB per day.

Thankfully, Google is aware of the issue. In a statement to 9to5Google, the company said that "a fix is already rolling out that should address this for users." Most of the reports are tied specifically to the new Google Ho …

Read the full story at The Verge.

During a rally on Saturday, October 17th, in Highland Heights, Kentucky, Donald Trump bragged about how much more powerful and influential he was during his second term. While listing off his accomplishments, he mentioned his decision to rename the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario.

"This is a much more powerful term. I can do stuff that's unbelievable … I called Google, Google Maps. See, Google wouldn't have taken my call in the first term. Now they kiss my ass."

Trump seems to be implying that he convinced Google to reflect the name change personally. That would seem to contradict Google's statement on the matter, in which it said that …

Read the full story at The Verge.

After a Chrome clone was spotted on the Play Store earlier this week, a user on Reddit says they're seeing a fake version of WhatsApp in a "sponsored" slot above the real version. As reported earlier by Android Authority, the WhatsApp dupe has racked up over 500,000 downloads and, at the time of writing, its Play Store listing is still live.

Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The WhatsApp clone is from a developer going by "Agment Assets sallu" who doesn't currently have anything else listed on the Play Store. Their listing for the WhatsApp impostor has the same icon, screenshots, and text as the real version, but …

Read the full story at The Verge.

OpenAI's ChatGPT Atlas browser is gone, but now ChatGPT's Google Chrome extension is getting some upgrades that allow it to use the browser tabs you already have open. With the extension installed, OpenAI says ChatGPT can now view your browser tabs when you tag Chrome in ChatGPT's web or desktop app, posting a demo video showing someone asking ChatGPT to compare the three tabs they have open with sofas they're considering.

A few big upgrades for Chrome users today! We're bringing the power of computer use to anyone who uses Chrome.

First up: ChatGPT can now use your tabs in Chrome to make answers more useful and get things done for you.

If …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Google is updating its AI search results to make inline links appear "higher up in responses more frequently," according to a blog post. The company's search results from AI Overviews and AI Mode give you answers in a customized view instead of the traditional list of links, but there are concerns that the format reduces traffic to publishers. Google says it's been making "continued and substantial increases to the presence of inline links in our AI experiences," and this new change will help ensure "ensure key sources are easily clickable right when you need them."

The company is announcing several other changes to highlight links an …

Read the full story at The Verge.

We knew that a number of big tech firms were helping to fund the construction of Trump's ballroom, but we didn't know just how much they were giving to the cause. Now the Washington Post published a list of all the major donors to the White House ballroom project, along with how much each contributed. In total, Silicon Valley and the crypto industry have reportedly delivered over $150 million for the effort.

Some of that money has come from individuals, some from charitable organizations tied to major firms or industry players, and some directly from the companies themselves. In Google's case, the $22 million was part of a controversial se …

Read the full story at The Verge.

The new shopping tool is available in the U.S. across Google Search and the Gemini app.

Ledger has announced its latest crypto-centric hardware effort, the Android-based Atom, a device that resembles a phone but is instead designed to be used alongside one. It arrives at a tricky time for Ledger, which has been forced to cease sales of some of its hardware across southeast Asia following hardware tampering in its supply chain, which has reportedly seen over $86 million worth of crypto stolen from across some users' accounts.

While Ledger's previous hardware wallet signers have been compact devices, running custom software and often with E Ink displays, the Atom is the spitting image of a regular Android smartphone. In fact it …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Google is making it easier to build and use personal Android apps created with AI, without having to make them available to everyone on the Play Store.

After months sitting on the sidelines of the frontier AI race, Google has finally launched its long-awaited Gemini 4 Argon model, claiming it can compete with the best the industry has to offer.

Google says Argon delivers "frontier reasoning and improved performance across complex workflows," while cutting down on hedging, repetition, and the cliches that continue to plague AI chatbots. The company claims Argon outperforms rival models like GPT-6 Astra, Claude Fable 5.1, and Claude Opus 5.5 across a range of benchmarks, including coding, cybersecurity, science, finance, and law.

Google says it's already putting Argon to use internally, s …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Google’s newest wearable costs $179.99 and has a sleek feel like the Fitbit Air but with an OLED display.

My first week with the new Android-powered laptops has been about as rocky as anyone's, but I've slowly learned to like them, even if love still feels a ways off. Every moment that's impressed me has been thanks to Android, whether I've been accessing a native version of a useful app or quickly checking my phone notifications from the laptop user interface.

But man, sometimes it just sucks.

Phone connectivity is flaky, app casting is awkward, and file-sharing seems to be flat-out broken. And that's just the interaction between a Googlebook and a phone - I have a whole other set of gripes about the limitations of native Android apps on a $ …

Read the full story at The Verge.

It looks like Google is getting ready to take the wraps off its rumored Fitbit Edge next Monday. In a post on X, Google posted a picture of what appears to be the side of the fitness tracker, with the caption: "Get an Edge on your health. 10.12.26."

A trove of Fitbit Edge leaks has surfaced over the past couple of weeks. So far, details shared by Dealabs and Android Headlines suggest that the upcoming device could feature a 1.34-inch always-on OLED touchscreen, built-in GPS, and several other sensors, including an accelerometer, barometer, altimeter, and gyroscope. It may also come with optical sensors for measuring heart rate and blood oxy …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Google's new operating system is off to a rocky start. The five newly launched Googlebook laptops have hardware that ranges from great to excellent, but the software in its current state is the weak point. There are four of us on staff at The Verge actively testing Googlebooks and, frankly, our internal Slack discussions have been mostly filled with collective venting of frustrations, disappointments, and bewilderment.

The promise of Googlebooks as a fresh and smartly designed alternative to Windows or Mac for Android phone owners sounds great, but there's more than just a few kinks and quirks to work out. Some of its issues and challenges …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Google is turning Gemini into an AI agent that can plan, execute tasks, and work across business apps and systems. The agent can delegate work to subagents, use multiple AI models, and even gets its own workplace identity, complete with an email address.