Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20260206123527/https://signalcleveland.org/what-police-surveillance-technology-looks-like-in-cleveland/

Google's recent update to the manifest file for Chrome browser extensions, transitioning from manifest version 2 (MV2) to manifest version 3 (MV3), has raised concerns among users and ad blocker providers, who worry that the new restrictions, notably the shift from the powerful WebRequest API to the more restrictive DeclarativeNetRequest API, might reduce ad blocker effectiveness. Because ad blockers play a vital role for millions of users seeking a more private and ad-free browsing experience, this study empirically investigates how the MV3 update affects their ability to block ads and trackers. Through a browser-based experiment conducted across multiple samples of ad-supported websites, we compare the MV3 to MV2 instances of four widely used ad blockers. Our results reveal no statistically significant reduction in ad-blocking or anti-tracking effectiveness for MV3 ad blockers compared to their MV2 counterparts, and in some cases, MV3 instances even exhibit slight improvements in blocking trackers. These findings are reassuring for users, indicating that the MV3 instances of popular ad blockers continue to provide effective protection against intrusive ads and privacy-infringing trackers. While some uncertainties remain, ad blocker providers appear to have successfully navigated the MV3 update, finding solutions that maintain the core functionality of their extensions.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/42455984

FBI controversial smartphone sting operation led to nearly 30 arrests in Estonia

A new tool searches your LinkedIn connections for people who are mentioned in the Epstein files, just in case you don’t, understandably, want anything to do with them on the already deranged social network.

404 Media tested the tool, called EpsteIn—as in, a mash up of Epstein and LinkedIn—and it appears to work.

“I found myself wondering whether anyone had mapped Epstein's network in the style of LinkedIn—how many people are 1st/2nd/3rd degree connections of Jeffrey Epstein?” Christopher Finke, the creator of the tool, told 404 Media in an email. “Smarter programmers than me have already built tools to visualize that, but I couldn't find anything that would show the overlap between my network and his.”

• Archive: http://archive.today/AIkL2
• Github: https://github.com/cfinke/EpsteIn

Amazon reported fourth-quarter earnings slightly below Wall Street estimates even as sales surged and it reported the fastest growth in its prominent cloud computing business in 13 quarters.

The Seattle-based online behemoth on Thursday reported net income of $21.2 billion, or $1.95 per share, for the three-month period ended Dec. 31. That compares with $20 billion, or $1.86 per share, in the year-ago quarter.

Revenue rose 14% to $213.4 billion in the fourth quarter, compared with $187.8 billion in the year-ago period.

Analysts were expecting $1.97 per share on sales of $211.4 billion, according to analysts polled by FactSet.

Revenue from its cloud service arm called Amazon Web Services increased 24% to $35.6 billion. Analysts were expecting $34.9 billion.

Amazon said it plans to increase capital spending to $200 billion this year from $125 billion as it sees opportunities in artificial intelligence, robots, semiconductors and satellites, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said in a press release. Wall Street analysts were expecting spending to rise to around $147 billion, according to FactSet.

Microsite Highlighting Evidence from the Landmark Social Media Addiction Trials.

New documents show the tactics Meta, Google, Snap, and TikTok execs used to disrupt learning, prey on minors, and co-opt the PTA to control the narrative with parents

Claude Opus 4.6, released today, continues a trajectory of meaningful improvements in AI models’ cybersecurity capabilities. Last fall, we wrote that we believed we were at an inflection point for AI's impact on cybersecurity—that progress could become quite fast, and now was the moment to accelerate defensive use of AI. The evidence since then has only reinforced that view. AI models can now find high-severity vulnerabilities at scale. Our view is this is a moment to move quickly—to empower defenders and secure as much code as possible while the window exists.

Opus 4.6 is notably better at finding high-severity vulnerabilities than previous models and a sign of how quickly things are moving. Security teams have been automating vulnerability discovery for years, investing heavily in fuzzing infrastructure and custom harnesses to find bugs at scale. But what stood out in early testing is how quickly Opus 4.6 found vulnerabilities out of the box without task-specific tooling, custom scaffolding, or specialized prompting. Even more interesting is how it found them. Fuzzers work by throwing massive amounts of random inputs at code to see what breaks. Opus 4.6 reads and reasons about code the way a human researcher would—looking at past fixes to find similar bugs that weren't addressed, spotting patterns that tend to cause problems, or understanding a piece of logic well enough to know exactly what input would break it. When we pointed Opus 4.6 at some of the most well-tested codebases (projects that have had fuzzers running against them for years, accumulating millions of hours of CPU time), Opus 4.6 found high-severity vulnerabilities, some that had gone undetected for decades.

Part of tipping the scales toward defenders means doing the work ourselves. We're now using Claude to find and help fix vulnerabilities in open source software. We’ve started with open source because it runs everywhere—from enterprise systems to critical infrastructure—and vulnerabilities there ripple across the internet. Many of these projects are maintained by small teams or volunteers who don't have dedicated security resources, so finding human-validated bugs and contributing human-reviewed patches goes a long way.

So far, we've found and validated more than 500 high-severity vulnerabilities. We've begun reporting them and are seeing our initial patches land, and we’re continuing to work with maintainers to patch the others. In this post, we’ll walk through our methodology, share some early examples of vulnerabilities Claude discovered, and discuss the safeguards we've put in place to manage misuse as these capabilities continue to improve. This is just the beginning of our efforts. We'll have more to share as this work scales.

Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20260205123528/https://minnesotareformer.com/2026/02/03/how-ice-is-watching-you/

The Federal Communications Commission seems eager to let SpaceX experiment with massive data centers in space. On Wednesday, Chairman Brendan Carr tweeted, "The FCC welcomes and now seeks comment on the SpaceX application for Orbital Data Centers."

SpaceX’s application to launch up to one million satellites has been accepted by the agency, kicking off a public comment period. The announcement is surprising because the company only submitted its proposal on Friday. Usually, the FCC takes weeks or months to respond. In this case, it made a decision in days, even though SpaceX’s proposal appears preliminary and even rushed, according to space experts, some of whom question the constellation’s feasibility.

For perspective, only 14,500 satellites are currently in orbit. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk now wants to dramatically increase that number by about 70 times, raising questions about the environmental toll from the required rocket launches and the potential for space debris.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is surveying the commercial advertising technology market for tools capable of supplying location data and large-scale analytics to federal investigators, according to a recent Request for Information (RFI).

Framed as market research rather than a procurement, the RFI seeks information from companies offering “Ad Tech compliant and location data services” that could support criminal, civil, and administrative investigations across ICE’s mission set.

• European Commission officials met lobbyists more than 100 times on the Digital Fairness Act since December 2024. 83% of the lobby meetings that Commission top officials had on the DFA were with industry representatives, including 47 meetings with individual companies and 28 with business lobby groups. By contrast, less than 14% of these meetings were held with NGOs and trade unions.
• Meta lobbyists presented misleading claims to the European Commission about the safety of Instagram for young women. These claims are contradicted by several recent independent studies as well as analyses of Meta’s own internal documents that have entered the public domain via whistleblowers and US court cases.
• The Consumer Choice Center – a lobby group funded by Google and Meta – has launched a project called ‘EU Tech Loop’, which publishes articles on EU digital policies on the Euronews website. The content closely echoes Big Tech talking points, which raises questions about untransparent influencing via EU media spaces.
• Beyond Big Tech’s lobbying firepower, the DFA is facing at least four other obstacles: the current obsession among EU decision-makers with industry competitiveness via deregulation, pressure from the Trump administration, the growing power of the far right in EU politics, and the tendency to limit debate on social media addiction to rules for minors.