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Commvault has a Ctrl+Z for rogue AI agents

2 weeks 6 days ago
The company's new software keeps an eye on your agents and backs up data.

Keep your agents close and your agent-monitoring software closer. Commvault’s new AI Protect can discover and monitor AI agents running inside AWS, Azure, and GCP environments and even roll back their actions when something goes wrong.…

O'Ryan Johnson

You can finally control serial devices from Firefox

2 weeks 6 days ago
Long languishing API gets love from Mozilla

Firefox will soon be able to communicate directly with your 3D printer. Thirteen years after the idea was initially proposed, the Web Serial API has landed in Firefox Nightly, Mozilla's work-in-progress channel for its browser.…

Thomas Claburn

Audit Finds Google, Microsoft, and Meta Still Tracking Users After Opt-Out

2 weeks 6 days ago
alternative_right shares a report from 404 Media: An independent privacy audit of Microsoft, Meta, and Google web traffic in California found that the companies may be violating state regulations and racking up billions in fines. According to the audit from privacy search engine webXray, 55 percent of the sites it checked set ad cookies in a user's browser even if they opted out of tracking. Each company disputed or took issue with the research, with Google saying it was based on a "fundamental misunderstanding" of how its product works. The webXray California Privacy Audit viewed web traffic on more than 7,000 popular websites in California in the month of March and found that most tech companies ignore when a user asks to opt-out of cookie tracking. California has stringent and well defined privacy legislation thanks to its California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) which allows users to, among other things, opt out of the sale of their personal information. There's a system called Global Privacy Control (GPC), which includes a browser extension that indicates to a website when a user wants to opt out of tracking. According to the webXray audit, Google failed to let users opt out 87 percent of the time. "Google's failure to honor the GPC opt-out signal is easy to find in network traffic. When a browser using GPC connects to Google's servers it encodes the opt-out signal by sending the code 'sec-gpc: 1.' This means Google should not return cookies," the audit said. "However, when Google's server responds to the network request with the opt-out it explicitly responds with a command to create an advertising cookie named IDE using the 'set-cookie' command. This non-compliance is easy to spot, hiding in plain sight." The audit said that Microsoft fails to opt out users in the same way and has a failure rate of 50 percent in the web traffic webXray viewed. Meta's failure rate was 69 percent and a bit more comprehensive. "Meta instructs publishers to install the following tracking code on their websites. The code contains no check for globally standard opt-out signals -- it loads unconditionally, fires a tracking event, and sets a cookie regardless of the consumer's privacy preferences," the audit said. It showed a copy of Meta's tracking data which contains no GPC check at all.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

BeauHD

NASA insiders oddly relaxed about latest budget threats

2 weeks 6 days ago
Veterans think Congress may swat cuts again, but uncertainty could still do lasting damage

exclusive  As NASA's Artemis II mission headed for the Moon, the Trump administration unveiled another attempt to cut the agency's science budget. Yet some insiders, perhaps buoyed by déjà vu and a little post-traumatic resilience, are less alarmed than you might expect.…

Richard Speed