08 May 2026 Search

Behind the Scenes Hardening Firefox with Claude Mythos Preview by Brian Grinstead, Christian Holler, Frederik Braun. Two weeks ago we announced that we had identified and fixed an unprecedented number of latent security bugs in Firefox with the help of Claude Mythos Preview and other AI models. In this post, we’ll go into more detail about how we approached this work, what we found, and advice for other projects on making good use of emerging capabilities to harden themselves against attack. (News coverage: Mozilla says 271 vulnerabilities found by Mythos have “almost no false positives” by Dan Goodin. This is a brilliant business model. Give away the bug reporting systems that open source developers are finding useful, and sit back and wait for owners of proprietary codebases to line up for access.)

When It Comes to Data Privacy, Consumers Must Be in the Driver’s Seat: Attorney General Bonta, Partners Secure $12.75 Million General Motors Privacy Settlement | State of California - Department of Justice - Office of the Attorney General The settlement, which is subject to court approval, includes $12.75 million in civil penalties and strong injunctive terms, including restrictions on its use of consumer driving data and a ban on such data being sold to data brokers.

Digital Advertising is a Casino, Pretending to be a Supermarket by Jacob Sanders. I could share (or you could look this stuff up) that over the past two decades, Meta has been caught inflating video metrics and “potential reach” numerous different ways often times by hundreds of percent; Google has been sued by the DOJ for manipulating its own auctions while running the exchange, the broker, and the bidding sides all simultaneously; programmatic pipelines have been shown to swallow 60%+ of every ad dollar into opaque fees; and industrial-scale fraud rings like Methbot and 3ve have siphoned off billions using fake humans that platforms couldn’t distinguish from real ones; or when Meta’s ad-delivery algorithms were found by the DOJ to illegally discriminate and in violation of the Fair Housing Act.

A Publisher Didn’t Get Its UID2 Setup Right. The Trade Desk Didn’t Notice. What Went Wrong? by Anthony Vargas. They clearly were unable to flag that we made an unintentional mistake, the source said. I’m not confident they would have been able to detect a malicious implementation, either.

Deepfakes are everywhere. The godfather of digital forensics is fighting back | Science | AAAS by Kai Kupferschmidt (this is the source of those example fake photos showing perspective failures)

Turn Off ChatGPT’s New Ad Tracking by Tate Jarrow.

App Store Search Ads and the Slippery Slope from the Think Tap Work blog. iOS App Store search is no longer about relevance. It’s about ad inventory.

Solex Energy plans 5 GW solar cell factory in India by Uma Gupta. The company has recently expanded its technology roadmap through a partnership with Germany’s ISC Konstanz, focused on advancing high-efficiency solar cell technologies.

Russian Sources: Ukraine Is Fielding New AI-Capable Drones That Can’t Be Detected or Jammed by Stefan Korshak. There has been a qualitative change in [unmanned aerial vehicles] at the front; in essence, Ukraine has introduced a new generation [drone], which is creating serious logistics challenges…these drones operate day and night, and are inaudible (except in the final seconds, when they’re diving, as in the video). They are undetectable by conventional detectors and are protected from electronic warfare. They are extremely high-quality, mass-produced military-grade. And there’s a theory that they’re controlled not by human operators, but by AI.

Are GPC Signals Anti-Competitive? by Alan Chapell. (In the W3C Privacy Principles, we did our best to make it clear that different contexts with common ownership should be treated fairly with contexts with different ownership. So far, California law needs some work in this area.)

It’s open season for refusing AI by Brian Merchant. It’s not just data centers, either. It’s a trend I’ve noticed over the last few weeks: Across the AI economy, workers and consumers have taken to refusing the technology in direct and robust ways.

“because fuck you”: why consumer choice is being stripped away and how the tech industry profits from it The tech industry has perfected the practice of presenting decisions without justifications. Not without explanations — they always have explanations, carefully worded explanations, explanations that have been through legal and comms and probably a focus group. What they don’t have are justifications. An explanation tells you what they decided. A justification tells you why it actually makes sense. The gap between those two things is where because fuck you lives.

More: Links for 16 May 2026