Weekly output: Mozilla Firefox CEO, AI crawlers vs. publishers and creators, teenage AI chatbot use, Android Live Emergency Video, PCMag’s best tech bought in 2025, World App
Somehow I’m down to the last full workweek of the year–and yet my writing and gift shopping seem to have more than a week’s worth of work remaining.
12/8/2025: Mozilla is doing a delicate dance with AI, Fast Company
I spoke with Mozilla CEO Laura Chambers at a Web Summit event for the second time this year. One thing Firefox’s management no longer needs to worry about, unlike when I met with Chambers at Web Summit Qatar in February: the threat of Google being forced to stop paying browser developers to keep its search engine as the default.
12/9/2025: AI Platforms Are Paying (Some) Big Publishers, Leaving Smaller Ones Behind, PCMag
This post began with me taking notes from a Web Summit panel featuring Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince talking about that Internet infrastructure company’s Pay Per Crawl initiative to push AI providers to pay Web publishers for access to their content, then I did some follow-up reporting that included setting up Cloudflare’s AI Crawl Control bot-blocking filter on this blog, and then I had to update the post the morning it was published after the European Commission opened an investigation into how Google runs its AI Overview search feature.
12/9/2025: 28% of Teens Use Chatbots Daily. You Can Probably Guess Which One They Like Best, PCMag
The latest survey by the Pew Research Center surfaced some interesting statistics about how much teenagers use AI chatbots and which ones they use the most.
12/10/2025: Need Help? Android Phones Can Now Share Live Video With 911 Dispatchers, PCMag
Google is shipping this feature a year after Apple did, but its emergency live video implementation works on far more devices than Apple’s.
12/11/2025: The Best Tech PCMag Editors Bought in 2025, PCMag
I wrote a short graf lauding the compact, quick-charging (and Wirecutter-endorsed) USB-C charger that I bought after losing the considerably bulkier model that came with my laptop.
12/13/2025: App That Verifies Your Existence Adds Encrypted Messaging, PCMag
Tools for Humanity announced an update to its World App that adds an end-to-end-encrypted chat feature and expands its cryptocurrency tools. I took advantage of this news peg to try out the app’s ability to verify a “World ID” by scanning the NFC tag on my U.S. passport; that did not go well at all for me.
12/15/2025: Updated to add the PCMag best-tech package that I forgot to check for on Sunday.
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