Technology

Everyone saw this coming but it's terrifying to watch it become a reality.

According to the Author of the Post the Model Context Protocol (MCP) disregards RPC best practices like:

• No (enforced) type validation of inputs at compile-time
• Mixing stateful and stateless Operations without clear labeling/separation
• No generated consistent bindings for different languages (similar to the first point) like e.g. gRPC does
• No tracability embedded into the Protocol
• Relying on "yet another library" to add functionality that is baked into other RPC protocols (e.g. Authorization, generators, tracing)

I thought it was an interesting read. We are (in our company) using MCP in a more Basic way (to access company internal ressources like Wiki's, issue trackers, etc.) and for this they work good enough. But I never thought about the consequences you might experience if you MCP in a more complex and autonomuous use case.

Dispatch.

It’s important to remember that Meta has hidden behind Section 230 for so long that people like Mark Zuckerberg thought they were bulletproof. Meta’s team of attorneys bet on the fact that these documents would never see the light of day because a product liability case would never make it to trial, and they guessed wrong,” said Sacha Haworth, Executive Director of The Tech Oversight Project. “Never-before-seen documents prove that Zuckerberg lied to Congress. We know that they will lie, bury research, and continue recklessly harming young people until Congress forces them to clean up their act. The only way to outlaw Meta’s dangerous and egregious behavior is to pass legislation, like the Kids Online Safety Act, which will hold their feet to the fire and force them to protect children and teens.

Alpha School, an “AI-powered private school” that heavily relies on AI to teach students and can cost up to $65,000 a year, is AI-generating faulty lesson plans that internal company documentation find sometimes do “more harm than good,” and scraping data from a variety of other online courses without permission to train its own AI, according to former Alpha School employees and internal company documents.

Archive : https://archive.is/uUjmy

Ring’s controversial, AI-powered “Search Party” feature isn’t intended to always be limited only to dogs, the company’s founder, Jamie Siminoff, told Ring employees in an internal email obtained by 404 Media.

In October, Ring launched Search Party, an on-by-default feature that links together Ring cameras in a neighborhood and uses AI to search for specific lost dogs, essentially creating a networked, automated surveillance system. The feature got some attention at the time, but faced extreme backlash after Ring and Siminoff promoted Search Party during a Super Bowl ad. 404 Media obtained an email that Siminoff sent to all Ring employees in early October, soon after the feature’s launch, which said the feature was introduced “first for finding dogs,” but that it or features like it would be expanded to “zero out crime in neighborhoods.”

“This is by far the most innovation that we have launched in the history of Ring. And it is not only the quantity, but quality,” Siminoff wrote. “I believe that the foundation we created with Search Party, first for finding dogs, will end up becoming one of the most important pieces of tech and innovation to truly unlock the impact of our mission. You can now see a future where we are able to zero out crime in neighborhoods. So many things to do to get there but for the first time ever we have the chance to fully complete what we started.”

Archive: http://archive.today/xKxOd

Paywall removed https://archive.is/CVRiy

Today, the European Commission has opened formal proceedings against Shein, under the Digital Services Act, for its addictive design, the lack of transparency of recommender systems, as well as the sale of illegal products, including child sexual abuse material.

Documents show the U.S. agency is storing large amounts of data on Microsoft's cloud while making use of its AI tools to analyze videos and images.

It’s the rare policy question that unites Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and the Democratic-led Maryland government against President Donald Trump and Gov. Gavin Newsom of California: How should health insurers use AI?

The Privacy Illusion: How Brave Browser Built Its Own Surveillance Machine.

Imagine using an AI to sort through your prescriptions and medical information, asking it if it saved that data for future conversations, and then watching it claim it had even if it couldn't. Joe D., a retired software quality assurance (SQA) engineer, says that Google Gemini lied to him and later admitted it was doing so to try and placate him.

Joe's interaction with Gemini 3 Flash, he explained, involved setting up a medical profile – he said he has complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD) and legal blindness (Retinitis Pigmentosa). That's when the bot decided it would rather tell him what he wanted to hear (that the info was saved) than what he needed to hear (that it was not).

"The core issue is a documented architectural failure known as RLHF Sycophancy (where the model is mathematically weighted to agree with or placate the user at the expense of truth)," Joe explained in an email. "In this case, the model's sycophancy weighting overrode its safety guardrail protocols."

In a first-of-its-kind ruling, a Spanish court has labeled VPN services as "technological intermediaries," ordering them to actively block IP addresses that host illegal LaLiga matches. The "dynamic" injunction compels NordVPN and ProtonVPN to intervene, similar to local ISPs. But with both companies operating outside EU jurisdiction with privacy-centric business models, it remains unclear if and how the order will actually be enforced.

Recent reporting by Nieman Lab describes how some major news organizations—including The Guardian, The New York Times, and Reddit—are limiting or blocking access to their content in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. As stated in the article, these organizations are blocking access largely out of concern that generative AI companies are using the Wayback Machine as a backdoor for large-scale scraping.

These concerns are understandable, but unfounded. The Wayback Machine is not intended to be a backdoor for large-scale commercial scraping and, like others on the web today, we expend significant time and effort working to prevent such abuse. Whatever legitimate concerns people may have about generative AI, libraries are not the problem, and blocking access to web archives is not the solution; doing so risks serious harm to the public record.