Welcome to globalGlob(**/*) Presents: Log Level Debug a show about news, and stuff, and things, in the technology world Recorded live, May 9th, 2026 I'm your host, and I'm a year older...my birthday was last week. I got a new microphone. And here's all the news we logged over the past week. Google is in hot water after it was discovered the Chrome browser downloads a 4GB A.I. Model to the local machine, the weights for Google's Gemini Nano. The browser does so by default as part of it's on-device A.I. functionality. The 4GB download at Chrome's scale amounts to between 6,000 to 60,000 tonnes of CO2-equivalent emissions. Which is roughly equivalent to streaming 1-2 hours of a HD video. A thing you're doing right now. But don't feel bad about it. Streaming a globalGlob show is a good thing. Tell your friends about us. To calm people down, Google explained this isn't new and Chrome has been downloading local A.I. models since 2024. A spokesperson also added quote: "We didn't think this would be a problem for people, and are very sorry. To make it up to everyone, Smoke Bomb" End Quote. You heard that right. He stopped mid-sentence, threw a smoke bomb, and ran away. Google has published instructions for disabling the A.I. features in Chrome, but I didn't see the option in my browser. *looks away* Did any of you find it?...no, no...no one? Google wouldn't lie right?...maybe?! *looks at camera* Oh. I guess a large multinational company actually can lie to everyone and get away with it. *tosses paper* Moving on Apple has settled a class action lawsuit and will pay $250 million to users because they announced A.I. features for the iPhone and never shipped them. After hearing the news you can't make promises and then not ship features, Kickstarter is just, shutting down. Saying they don't want to take chances anymore. To claim your $25 settlement from Apple, you need to have bought an iPhone between June 10 2024, and March 25 2025. Apple has responded saying quote, "After years promising features that didn't live UP to expectations, we were excited to innovate and promise features that didn't even live. We see now that isn't what our customers wanted and will return to our previous strategy of releasing features years after our competitors have created versions so bad, ours look amazing in comparison. And we're glad you can be on that journey with us." end quote. He then lit a smoke bomb and moon walked away. Another smoke bomb? I guess it's a silicon valley thing. *tosses paper* Moving on - Mozilla published a blog post detailing how they used A.I. models to find a record breaking amount of security bugs in Firefox. They created an internal pipeline allowing them to switch models trivially, and at scale. They say the big takeaway is that newer models give useful security reports, not the A.I.-slop they were creating in the past. The team knew the models were better at reviewing security findings when it stopped telling them to use Chrome instead. The blog post states over 100 people contributed code to ship the numerous security fixes. Which is about 98 more people than the average software company dedicates to security fixes. And about 99 more people than the average software company wants to pay for security maintenance. Flipping bits a little. Sometimes a company is in the news so much that we want to talk about them, but either don't have the time to cover everything, or don't want to take time away from all the other stories. So we're introducing a new segment we call 'A Week of News in 60,000 milliseconds. Or more. Maybe less' where we rush through their news in about one minute. This week we're talking Microsoft's Fumbles. Microsoft is offering U.S. employees the chance to voluntarily retire. This week the terms of the buyout were published, and employees will receive health coverage, and some of their vested stock up to a certain amount depending on how long they've been at the company. However they will still be contractually obligated to say good things about Bing for at least the next 30 years. So....tradeoffs. Microsoft is winding down their Xbox Copilot mobile app and will stop developing the Xbox Console Copilot functionality. This is part of Microsoft's new strategy dubbed, "Stop wasting money on things no one will use." Security researches discovered every password stored in Microsoft Edge's password management functionality is stored into memory...in clear text, making it much easier for attackers to extract passwords by reading application memory. When reached for comment, a spokesperson said Quote, "We asked Copilot how to fix it, and it told us to use a real password manager instead. After numerous meetings, we've concluded that's the best course of action for everyone involved and will not be fixing...I mean, will not be changing this functionality" End Quote. He then lit a pipe bomb and everyone ran away. And that's all the news that happened this week. If we didn't talk about it, it's not in the logs. Join Log Level Debug next week when we'll talk about everything that happened between now and then. If you watched the video, please like and subscribe. If you listened to the audio only podcast, please leave a review somewhere. Preferably a place you leave podcast reviews. Take care everyone.