CRUNCHY TECH

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YESTERDAY, STILL WORTH KNOWING

Google's AI search reportedly drains publisher traffic, Nvidia floats per-GPU software fees while modders unlock its cards, and a drone strike hits a Russian tax data centre.

Google's AI search squeezes publishers

Google's AI search features, chiefly AI Overviews launched in 2024, now summarise web pages at the top of results, and The Verge reports this is upending the old bargain in which publishers supplied content and Google sent them clicks. The cited numbers are stark: the New York Times' share of search traffic reportedly fell from 44 to 35.5 percent over three years, nineteen Digital Content Next members lost between 1 and 25 percent of Google traffic in May and June 2025, and DMG Media, owner of the Daily Mail, told the UK Competition and Markets Authority that click-through rates dropped by as much as 89 percent between June and July 2025, which it attributed to AI Overviews.

Google tells a different story. Search head Liz Reid has said click volume remained relatively stable, and senior vice president Nick Fox told the BBC, 'From our point of view, the web is thriving.' Publishers' court challenges have so far failed, with Judge Amit Mehta dismissing cases from Chegg and Penske Media and rejecting a class action by Arkansas newspapers. Google has, however, made sources more prominent in AI results, and The Verge's account suggests a future with less traffic to outside sites is drawing closer.

Nvidia prices its software, and modders unlock its chips

Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang said at GTC Berlin on October 22 that licensing the company's AI agent software could cost roughly $2,000 per GPU per year, the fee to 'run all the software that Nvidia provides that runs agents on these AI factories.' This is unconfirmed pricing: Nvidia has not said how many GPUs it would cover or which products are included. It is lower than the $4,500 one-year AI Enterprise subscription, but the two have not been confirmed as covering the same terms. The pricing talk sits alongside Nvidia's OpenShell Reference Architecture, announced October 21, which uses Nvidia Sentry to monitor AI agents and quarantine those crossing set boundaries, with Anthropic and Salesforce integrating it.

Separately, modders have lifted firmware limits on consumer RTX 30 and 40-series graphics cards, which share silicon with Nvidia's pricier professional GPUs. TechPowerUp reports an RTX 3090 Ti saw up to 80 percent faster BF16 matrix multiplication, the maths behind neural networks, and an RTX 4090 measured 331.6 TeraFLOPS with the unlock, up from 165.6, performance normally reserved for professional cards. The reporting frames this as Nvidia artificially limiting the silicon's compute performance.

Teardowns, jailbroken consoles and a strike on data centres

iFixit gave Apple's iPhone Duo a 5/10 repairability score, the best it has awarded a foldable, and suspects its complex hinge sometimes fails to descend properly, concentrating pressure on an accordion cable near the battery and possibly explaining reported cracked screens and hinges. Apple did not immediately comment.

A homebrew launcher called Playden lets jailbroken PlayStation 5 owners install Steam PC games, using Wine, a Windows compatibility layer. It is Alpha-stage software with mixed results, Valve does not support it, and it follows Sony's plan to end disc production by January 2028. Meanwhile a Sensor Tower analysis counted 76 breakout games, those selling at least 500,000 units in 30 days, between September 2025 and August 2026, up from 55, with indie breakouts jumping from 13 to 33 while triple-A barely moved. Estimates exclude free-to-play titles and Call of Duty. In other news, a Ukrainian drone strike reportedly damaged a Russian finance ministry data centre near Gorodets, over 600 miles from the frontlines, which held state registries including tax data.

BRIEF INDEX

7 briefs behind this edition