π Newsletter #005 - There are Alternatives (Unless Your Alternative was Sora, Because that's Gone Now)
β¨ In This Edition β¨
- π Short-Form Content: RIP Sora; AI ""efficiencies""; Meta has been ordered to pay; Pokemon Go-ddammit we were all just feeding a visual AI!?; and more!
- π° Long-Form Content: Finally kicking off that Alternatives series! Here is Pt. I - Messaging, Browsing, and Email
- π Good News!: A new section! It's not all doom and gloom. EU Chat Control is gone; No AI on Wikipedia; The small web; Gen Z can tell when they're looking at slop and that's making Ad Conversion Line Go Down.
- π― The Post-Script: Following & Reading: BlurBlogs!
π Short-Form Content
OpenAI is killing off Sora, their video-generation tool that was also licensed through Disney. Quote Forbes: "For a product that arrived with the air of inevitability, Sora ended with remarkable speed." Yep.
Maybe AI (read: LLM chatbots) isn't all it's cracked up to be, in terms of speeding up work and creating efficiencies? On top of that, businesses are slowly realizing that the jump on this particular hypetrain is turning out to be costing a lot of money.
Meta has been ordered to pay $375 mil after a court found that they misled consumers about the safety of its platforms, and endangered children. This is, to our knowledge, the first time this has happened.
Google may be having plans to simply, uh, go ahead and display something else than your website when people go and wish to visit your website. I don't even know what else to comment here as this breaks with basically all the tenets of the World Wide Web as we know it:
A patent granted to Google on January 27, 2026 titled βAI-generated content page tailored to a specific userβ describes a system that evaluates your companyβs landing page in real time and, if it decides the page wonβt perform well enough for a specific user, replaces it with an AI-generated version assembled on the fly. The user never sees what your team built, they see what Google's machine learning model thinks they should see instead.
As part of their mission to lock down Android, Google is implementing a 24-hr wait before you can install apps of your choice. This is, of course, an attempt to make their plan of locking down android more palpable, since, see, you can totally still install all the apps you'd like to install! Side note, you may also see this process referred as "sideloading," which is very similar to the concept of "jaywalking."
An excellent essay by Jack Whittaker on why age verification threatens online security & privacy. Here's more on what Techdirt calls the "surveillance stack" behind age verification.
Unfortunately, when we were all playing Pokemon Go, we weren't just catching 'em all.
π° Long-Form Content
Alternatives Pt. I - Messaging, Browsing, and Email
Edited image based on original work by Mediamodifier on Unsplash.
I'd been planning to get started on this series for a while, but there was always something a little more pressing to write about - but now! It finally happened.
The article recommends privacy-friendly, less shitty and less tracky alternatives for messaging, browsing, and search. It is for you if you have had all the data-harvesting, ad-targeting, and Big Tech surveillance up to here; It is also for you, and also all your friends and family, even if - especially if! - they're not steeped in privacy and digital surveillance conversations.
You can switch away from Big Tech today. No need to be a tech expert - this can be an incremental process. Don't forget to always do your due diligence before installing apps and signing up for tools, and lastly, donβt let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Read the full article for all my browsing, search, and messaging picks, and for links to other privacy-focused recommendations on the web.
Part 2 coming Soon! β’οΈ
πGood News!
This is a new section in the Technically Good newsletter. In it, we'll highlight positive developments in the space of digital rights, digital sovereignty, and privacy, to show that it's not all doom & gloom.
The European Parliament has killed Chat Control, which means Big Tech will be forced to stop scanning private messages starting in April. Hooray! Let's forget for a moment how creepy it is that this was a thing that had to be banned in the first place.
Germany has made the Open Document Format mandatory for its "Deutschland-Stack" (its sovereign digital infrastructure ecosystem). This format is open-source and used by the LibreOffice ecosystem, reducing reliance on e.g. Microsoft and its proprietary formats.
GenZ can tell when they're faced with visual slop, and ad conversion rates are tanking because of it. That's the market responding rationally though, right? Or are we not allowed to call it that because it's AI?
After a lot of work by contributors and advocates, Wikipedia has banned AI content in articles. Hooray!
An excellent blog post by Elena Rossini on why public institutions should embrace the Fediverse. Beats me why a lot of institutions, governmental and otherwise, are still treating Twitter like their de-facto official news outlet.
If you would like to learn more about the Small Web, and why it is nice and how you can participate in it, give this article by Aral Balkan a read.
π―The Post-Script
Following & Reading
I've been enjoying the concept of the "BlurBlog:" It provides an interesting mix of an old-school RSS feed reader, and some social elements (like sharing and commenting), without the algorithmic bloat and distortion. I am trying it out as a way to quickly re-share interesting RSS-feed articles to my own feed.
You can subscribe to it directly if you also use NewsBlur - or you can treat it like a regular RSS feed and subscribe to it that way. How very meta! Original content, like articles and newsletters, will of course remain on BearBlog.
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