This is the news from Thursday 5 November. Read the latest news
Daily news
Safari’s automatic dark mode, Postman plugins and Siri AI apps
Today in 30 seconds
- Safari 27.3 beta can turn light websites dark on its own
- Postman’s desktop app added plugins to Claude Code and Codex unasked
- Apple opens Siri AI to every developer in the iOS 27.3 beta
- Google rewrites its help for “Crawled, currently not indexed”
- Gemini and Google AI Mode visit your pages with new user agents
- Microsoft Clarity now shows what AI agents do on your site
- ChatGPT reaches 1.2 billion weekly users and 20% of Google’s searches
- OpenAI buys Pierre Computer to bring Code Storage into Codex
- Experts push back on the GPT-6 Astra weight-editing claims
- WordPress 7.2 Beta 4 lets you pick which translations to update
- Vercel Security Review checks every push for security bugs
Good morning. Safari wants to paint your website dark, whether you planned for it or not. Postman made itself at home inside some coding agents. And Siri is finally open for business with app makers. Grab a coffee. This one is busy.
Safari 27.3 beta can turn light websites dark on its own
Apple’s WebKit team has announced Adaptive Dark Mode in the Safari 27.3 beta. When a user turns it on, Safari changes light websites into dark versions. Sites that already support dark mode are left alone. Safari aims for a text contrast of 4.5:1 and keeps most photos as they are.
To keep your own look, declare color-scheme: light dark and build a real dark theme. To opt out, use color-scheme: light only. Apple says that keyword did not work in beta 1 yet. Your site also can’t detect when the mode is on.
Why it matters If your site has no dark theme, some Safari visitors may soon see colours you never picked. Logos and brand colours are the most likely to look odd.
I would test your site in dark mode this week. Use SVG for logos and set color-scheme in the head of the page, not later with JavaScript.
Postman’s desktop app added plugins to Claude Code and Codex unasked
A developer reports that Postman desktop 12.33.4 for macOS added its own plugins to Claude Code and Codex on 24 October. It also added a startup hook that tells the agent to use Postman’s skill for API work. The installer approved that hook itself, so the user never saw a prompt.
The GitHub report says there is no evidence that any data was sent. As of 4 November, Postman had not publicly responded. It is one of the most discussed posts on Hacker News, with more than 1,300 points.
Why it matters Any app on your laptop can now change how your coding agent behaves. I would check ~/.claude/settings.json and ~/.codex/config.toml for plugins and hooks you didn’t add.
Apple opens Siri AI to every developer in the iOS 27.3 beta
Apple has opened a Siri AI Developer Preview to all developers, starting with the iOS 27.3, iPadOS 27.3 and macOS 27.3 betas. Apps connect through App Intents. People can then ask Siri in their own words to check a delivery, book a table or place an order.
App Store submissions open in spring, and Siri AI apps reach customers “in a few months”. Siri AI is not available in the EU on iOS, and it has daily usage limits.
Why it matters If your business has an app, Siri may soon be a new front door to it. The apps that are ready first will get noticed first.
Google rewrites its help for “Crawled, currently not indexed”
Google has updated its help page for the “Crawled – currently not indexed” status in Search Console. The new text says Google doesn’t index every page, so this is “a common message for many sites”. It points you to the URL Inspection tool for important pages and to a form for site-wide bugs.
The old line telling you not to resubmit the URL is gone. Barry Schwartz notes the new text doesn’t mention page quality, which Google has linked to this status before.
Why it matters A long list of these URLs is not an emergency by itself. Check your important pages one by one, and make thin pages better.
Duplicate pages often land in this list, and my guide to canonical URLs can help.
Gemini and Google AI Mode visit your pages with new user agents
Dave Smart at Tame the Bots checked his server logs. He found that Gemini fetches pages with the short user agent Google. AI Mode in Search uses Google-Lens. Both fetched only the HTML, not images or scripts, and the requests seem to follow a user’s question.
One client’s firewall flagged the plain Google string as suspicious because it is so short.
Why it matters If your firewall blocks these visits, Gemini and AI Mode can’t read your page when someone asks about you. Check your security rules for these two names.
I cover the other bots to allow in my guide on how AI search finds your site.
Microsoft Clarity now shows what AI agents do on your site
Microsoft Clarity has added Agentic Analytics. A new Agent Activity dashboard shows which AI agents visit your site and what they do, such as searches, logins and checkouts. Simulations test whether an agent can finish a task, starting with shopping and travel sites.
Ask Clarity lets you ask questions about visitor behaviour in plain English, but it is in closed beta for retailers. Microsoft says AI agent visits nearly doubled in three weeks. Clarity is free.
Why it matters AI agents now shop and book for people. I like this as a free way to see if they get stuck on your checkout.
ChatGPT reaches 1.2 billion weekly users and 20% of Google’s searches
ChatGPT’s consumer product lead, Adam Fry, told Big Technology that weekly users grew from 1 billion to 1.2 billion in 60 days. He said ChatGPT’s volume of search-like questions is about one-fifth of Google’s. People also make 1.5 billion images a week.
The free part of the article doesn’t say how OpenAI counts a “search”.
Why it matters ChatGPT is no longer a side channel. If it can’t find or quote your site, you miss a real slice of people looking for what you sell.
OpenAI buys Pierre Computer to bring Code Storage into Codex
OpenAI is buying Pierre Computer, Axios reports, and will fold its Code Storage product into Codex. Code Storage is a Git-based storage system built for machines. It already serves Lovable, Bolt and Amp, and syncs with GitHub, GitLab and Bitbucket. The price wasn’t shared.
Pierre’s open source tools, including Diffs and Trees, will stay open source.
Why it matters OpenAI wants Codex to hold your code, not just write it. That puts it closer to GitHub, which Microsoft owns.
Experts push back on the GPT-6 Astra weight-editing claims
Yesterday I covered a paper where GPT-6 Astra fixed a small Qwen model by editing its weights. spaCy creator Matthew Honnibal says the framing is misleading. The Qwen fix used Python and ran the model on practice problems. Only tiny networks were read from raw weights alone.
Simon Willison tested the raw-weights task on his laptop with Qwen 3.8 27B. It named three of four games correctly, after roughly an hour per run.
Why it matters Big AI headlines often shrink when experts read the paper. The result is still impressive, just smaller than it first sounded.
WordPress 7.2 Beta 4 lets you pick which translations to update
WordPress 7.2 Beta 4 came out on 3 November. The Updates screen now lists each translation update on its own, so you can choose which ones to install. This beta also makes keyboard focus easier to see in Windows High Contrast mode and fixes right-to-left block alignment.
Beta 5 is due 10 November, and the final release is set for 8 December.
Why it matters One bad translation update can change words across your site. Now you can hold it back. Test the beta on a copy of your site, never on the live one.
Vercel Security Review checks every push for security bugs
Vercel Security Review is now in public beta for Pro and Enterprise teams. It reviews your code on each push to a connected GitHub repository. It posts findings on pull requests and suggests a fix you can apply with Vercel Agent.
Reviews are free until 10 November. After that you pay the AI model’s token price plus $0.25 per million tokens. Vercel says it is not a full security audit.
Why it matters A second set of eyes on every push catches easy mistakes, like a leaked key. Watch the bill if your team pushes often.
Quick hits
- Chrome 157 is now on stable for Windows, Mac and Linux, with 213 security fixes. Chrome Releases
- Google AI Mode can now show up to four ads in one answer. Search Engine Roundtable
- Server-side Google Tag Manager will pass full IP addresses to Google Ads tags from 11 January 2027. Search Engine Roundtable
- Screaming Frog 25 adds custom dashboards, a Social tab and auto throttling for struggling servers. Screaming Frog
- Reddit is testing ads in its search results as Google sends it less traffic. TechCrunch
- Anthropic released FlashProve, an open source prototype that proves which model wrote a reply. Anthropic
- Cloudflare Zero Wire explains critical web vulnerabilities in plain language, with next steps. Cloudflare
- Three-Live from Google turns AI-written Three.js code into 3D and AR content. Google Open Source
- GitHub had a two-hour outage for pull requests and Git, then trouble with Actions and Pages. GitHub Status
You're all caught up
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