ep04 + ep05: VSCode breach + Google vs the open web

Two episodes scaffolded and shipped end-to-end:

ep04 (Fri 2026-05-22 18:00 UTC, video CcBjlKit9IY): VSCode/GitHub breach. 3,800 internal repos exfiltrated via trojanised Nx Console extension. Companion blog explains why the editor permission model is the deeper problem, what does and does not transfer to browser extensions (MV3 sandbox helps; CRX signing and native messaging do not), and what Browy does about it.

ep05 (Thu 2026-05-28 18:00 UTC, video cxqv5HIIFVo): Google I/O 2026 keynote. AI Overviews became the default Search experience. Companion blog frames the deprecation of the 20-year crawl-for-traffic deal: the web is the raw material now, the middleman is trying to swallow it. Practical recommendations: outbound-link search engines, RSS, personal allowlists, source reading when stakes are high. Positions Browy as a tool that gives users back agency on the page in front of them.

Per-post OG images generated. Both EN + zh-CN versions. blog.mdx + index.mdx Writing CardGrids updated in both locales (rotating ai-slop and the older two further down).

Co-authored-by: Copilot <223556219+Copilot@users.noreply.github.com>

Author: ritabratamaiti

public/og/google-vs-the-web.png

@@ -47,6 +47,20 @@ const posts = [
     accent: '#fbbf24',
     mascot: 'sweat.png',
   },
+  {
+    slug: 'vscode-extension-breach',
+    title: 'GitHub got pwned through\none VSCode extension.',
+    subtitle: '3,800 internal repos exfiltrated.',
+    accent: '#f87171',
+    mascot: 'shocked.png',
+  },
+  {
+    slug: 'google-vs-the-web',
+    title: 'Google quietly declared\nwar on the open web.',
+    subtitle: 'AI Overviews is the default answer now.',
+    accent: '#a78bfa',
+    mascot: 'thinking.png',
+  },
 ];
 
 function wrapText(text, maxCharsPerLine = 22) {

public/og/vscode-extension-breach.png

@@ -21,6 +21,18 @@ companion 30-second video on YouTube.
 
 ## Recent
 
+- [**Google quietly declared war on the open web.**](/blog/google-vs-the-web/), May 2026.
+  At Google I/O 2026, AI Overviews became the default Search
+  experience. The deal that built the web for two decades has been
+  quietly cancelled. The web is the raw material now. The middleman
+  is trying to swallow it.
+
+- [**GitHub got pwned through one VSCode extension. 3,800 repos.**](/blog/vscode-extension-breach/), May 2026.
+  A trojanised Nx Console extension came through the official VS
+  Code Marketplace and exfiltrated 3,800 internal repos. The deeper
+  problem isn't this one extension. It's that the editor has no
+  sandbox model.
+
 - [**Every $20 AI subscription costs about $100 to serve. The bill is coming.**](/blog/ai-subscription-bomb/), May 2026.
   AI labs are running an industry-wide loss-leader. Anthropic users
   burn $8 in compute per $1 of subscription revenue. Microsoft was

scripts/build-og-images.mjs

@@ -0,0 +1,220 @@
+---
+title: "Google quietly declared war on the open web."
+description: "At Google I/O 2026 this week, AI Overviews became the default Search experience for English users. Search increasingly answers from a Google-hosted synthesis instead of routing you to the source. The web is the raw material now. The middleman is trying to swallow it."
+slug: blog/google-vs-the-web
+template: doc
+tableOfContents: false
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+  - tag: meta
+    attrs:
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+      content: article
+  - tag: meta
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+      content: "2026-05-28T00:00:00Z"
+  - tag: meta
+    attrs:
+      property: article:author
+      content: "Ritabrata Maiti"
+  - tag: meta
+    attrs:
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+      content: "https://browyhq.github.io/og/google-vs-the-web.png"
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+      content: "google, search, ai overviews, ai search, open web, seo, web standards, browser agency, agentic ai, google io 2026"
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+        "headline": "Google quietly declared war on the open web.",
+        "description": "At Google I/O 2026, AI Overviews became the default Search experience. The deal that built the web for two decades has been quietly cancelled.",
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+import { YouTube } from 'astro-embed';
+import { LinkCard, CardGrid } from '@astrojs/starlight/components';
+
+<p style="opacity:0.7;font-size:0.9em;margin-top:-0.5em">By <a href="https://github.com/ritabratamaiti">Ritabrata Maiti</a> · <time datetime="2026-05-28">May 28, 2026</time> · 8 min read</p>
+
+<YouTube id="cxqv5HIIFVo" title="Google quietly declared war on the open web." />
+
+At Google I/O this week, the Search team made AI Overviews the default
+answer surface for English users. The
+[official keynote post](https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/search/search-io-2026/)
+buries the change under a lot of "agentic" and "personal intelligence"
+language, but the practical effect is small and definite: Search now
+answers from a Google-hosted synthesis. The blue links are a fallback,
+not the product.
+
+This was the inevitable next step of a series of changes that started
+with featured snippets and accelerated with AI Overviews. The
+[10 percent inaccuracy rate](https://www.techrepublic.com/article/google-ai-overviews-inaccurate-answers-analysis/)
+on AI Overviews is now everyone's problem, because Overviews are
+everyone's default answer.
+
+The
+[piece on tante.cc](https://tante.cc/2026/05/20/on-google-declaring-war-on-the-web/)
+called this "declaring war on the web," and the wording is exactly
+right. What follows is what I think the change actually is, the deal
+that broke, and what to do about it.
+
+## The deal that built the web
+
+Sites let Google crawl them. Google sent traffic back. Both sides
+won. The crawler got fresh content; the site got readers, and the
+readers had a clear path back to the source when they wanted to dig
+deeper.
+
+This contract held for about twenty years. It built the open web as
+a publishing surface, the indie blog as a thing that paid rent, the
+SEO industry, the long-tail of niche reference sites, and most of
+what we now call "documentation on the internet." It was an
+asymmetric trade, but both sides understood it. You give Google the
+catalog. Google sends you the foot traffic.
+
+AI Overviews quietly cancelled the trade.
+
+The crawler still runs. The catalog still gets ingested. The output
+on the user's screen is now a Google-synthesised answer, with the
+sources demoted to a row of tiny chip-shaped citations the median
+user does not click. The reader gets an answer, often correct,
+sometimes wrong, and never has to leave the search results page.
+
+## What this is, named plainly
+
+The framing in the original piece is sharp and worth quoting at
+length:
+
+> Your work, your writing or art do matter a bit still: As (unpaid)
+> raw material for their synthetic text extruders. You get to work
+> for free so Google can have tight control on the flow of
+> information and make sure that the responses people get are in
+> line with what they need them to be.
+
+This is the right frame. The web is not the product anymore. The
+web is the raw material. The product is the synthesised view on top
+of it, hosted on Google's infrastructure, branded with Google's UI,
+and accountable to Google's editorial choices.
+
+A useful analogy: the relationship between a wire service and a
+newspaper. The wire produces the underlying reporting; the newspaper
+picks, edits, and presents. The reader sees the newspaper. For a
+long time the web was the newspaper. Google was the index, the table
+of contents that pointed at the newspaper. AI Overviews flipped that.
+Google is the newspaper now. Your site is the wire.
+
+The thing that makes this disorienting is that nobody negotiated the
+new arrangement. The publishers did not agree to be wire
+contributors. The wire contributors did not get paid. The newspaper
+masthead never asked.
+
+## Why this is bigger than search-traffic math
+
+The temptation is to treat this as an SEO problem. Traffic numbers
+will drop, sites will adapt, the market will sort it out. That misses
+the scale.
+
+Google holds the largest single browser deployment on the planet,
+the largest single mobile OS, the largest single web video platform,
+the dominant share of web standards committee participation, the
+dominant share of ad-tech, and now the dominant search-answer
+surface. A single company sets the abstraction layer at every point
+between the publisher and the reader. When that company decides the
+abstraction layer should not include outbound links, there is no
+counter-party large enough to disagree at scale.
+
+This is the part the SEO frame misses. The market does not have a
+way to sort out a question of this scale because the market does not
+have a participant of this scale. The closest analogue is regulatory.
+The EU has begun acting. The DOJ case is grinding along. Neither is
+fast enough to matter at the speed Google can ship.
+
+The web is going to survive this. The independent publisher, the
+solo blog, the niche reference site, the corner of the internet
+written by one human for fifteen others, will get squeezed in the
+process. Some will respond by exiting. Some will paywall. Some will
+move to Substack or to mailing lists, which is just running their own
+distribution stack. The shape of the open web will change a lot,
+faster than the SEO market expects.
+
+## What you can do as a user
+
+The advice older than the problem still applies. Run your own tools.
+Pick your own sources. Don't outsource your reading to a system whose
+incentives are to keep you on its surface.
+
+Concretely:
+
+- **Use a search engine that links out.** Kagi, Marginalia, Mojeek,
+  Searx, DuckDuckGo, Brave Search. None are perfect, all are linking
+  out by default. The web still indexes; the index is just not the
+  default surface anymore.
+- **Keep an RSS reader.** Feedbin, Inoreader, NetNewsWire on the Mac,
+  Readwise Reader if you want web archiving. Subscribing directly to
+  the publishers you trust routes you around the answer-surface
+  entirely.
+- **Build a personal allowlist of go-to sources.** The handful of
+  sites you check first when you want a real answer. For me that's
+  about thirty sites; the search engine is where I go when none of
+  them have it. This is roughly how everyone used the web in 2005.
+- **Read source material when the stakes are high.** AI Overviews are
+  wrong 10 percent of the time. That rate is fine for "what is the
+  recipe for pancakes." It is not fine for "what does this medication
+  interact with."
+
+The pattern is the same in each case: keep the human in the loop
+when the cost of wrong is high, and let the machine condense when the
+cost of wrong is low.
+
+## What this has to do with what I build
+
+I work on [Browy](https://browy.dev), an open-source AI agent that
+lives in a Chromium extension. It drives the real browser tab you
+have open. You ask it a question; it inspects the page, follows
+links, reads other tabs, and writes you an answer with the sources
+visible inline. It does not synthesise from a hosted index. It
+operates on the web you would see if you were doing the work yourself.
+
+That is not a coincidence. It is the response to exactly the
+disintermediation move described above. If the answer-surface is
+hosted by a counter-party whose incentives are not yours, the answer
+you want is the one you can produce yourself, against the sources
+you trust, on the page that loaded in front of you.
+
+The web is not ending. The middleman is trying to swallow it. Run
+your own tools.
+
+---
+
+<CardGrid>
+  <LinkCard title="← All posts" href="/blog/" description="Index of every post on the Browy blog." />
+  <LinkCard title="GitHub got pwned through one VSCode extension" href="/blog/vscode-extension-breach/" description="The threat model isn't a clever attacker. It's a checkbox you didn't read." />
+</CardGrid>