11 – Breaking News & Latest Updates 2026
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Sean Hollister
Sean Hollister
California is two steps away from making porn websites verify your age.

The State Assembly has passed a bipartisan bill with zero votes against it. It has to pass the senate and governor next.

Louisiana passed its law in January, forcing Pornhub to scan government IDs. Pornhub told Gizmodo that traffic fell 80 percent in the state — claiming that seekers “migrated to darker corners of the internet that don’t ask users to verify age.”

Mia Sato
Mia Sato
Here’s how bad link rot is.

Pew research found that more than a third of webpages from 2013 are now inaccessible. 23 percent of news webpages have at least one broken link, and 54 percent of Wikipedia articles have at least one reference link going to a page that doesn’t exist anymore.

Pew data showing that 38 percent of webpages from 2013 are no long accessible as of October 2023.
Image: Pew Research Center
Richard Lawler
Richard Lawler
Sundar Pichai on “Google Zero.”

As Google plugs AI into search, what happens to the web? Nilay Patel discussed that topic with Google CEO Sundar Pichai this week on the Decoder podcast. It quickly became a deeper discussion about the new AI Overviews results, but you can start with a small bite here.

Wes Davis
Wes Davis
How to get Google Search results without AI Overviews.

Tedium has a tip for opting out of Google’s AI summarized answers: add “udm=14” to your default search URL, so it reads as “https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14” instead of Google dot com.

To set this up in Chrome, go into Settings, then Search engine > Manage search engines> Site search. In Arc, go to Arc > Settings > Profiles > Search settings > Add (Site search).

A screenshot showing three fields, filled out as follows: Name is “Google Web Search”; Shortcut is “gw”; and URL is “https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14”
Here’s how your new default search should look, at least in the Arc browser.
Screenshot: Arc search settings
Google CEO Sundar Pichai on AI-powered search and the future of the web
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The head of Google sat down with Decoder last week to talk about the biggest advancements in AI, the future of Google Search, and the fate of the web.

Nilay Patel
Wes Davis
Wes Davis
AI art is gobbling up DeviantArt’s creator revenue sharing.

AI art isn’t just showing up on the platform in droves, but DeviantArt is actively promoting the bots that pedal it, writes Slate.

And those bots are reportedly earning tens of thousands of dollars, “monopolizing” the site’s revenue stream using generative models perhaps trained on the very artists the bots supplant.

Google I/O 2024: everything announcedGoogle I/O 2024: everything announced
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Emma Roth and Wes Davis
Google I/O 2024 live blog: it’s AI time

Rhymes with “high time.”

Victoria Song, Kylie Robison and 3 more
Wes Davis
Wes Davis
If Apple doesn’t announce a new Apple Pencil tomorrow, I’ll eat my hat.

You can erase the logo for the company’s “Let Loose” iPad event (10AM ET tomorrow) at the top of its home page. I can’t seem to erase the whole thing before it switches to new art, though.

Very unsatisfying. 6 / 10.