Amazon Ring Ad Sparks Surveillance Backlash, Bezos Cuts WaPo

Amazon Ring's new Super Bowl ad, featuring an AI-powered "Search Party" feature, has sparked backlash amid growing fears of mass surveillance, according to The Verge. The feature, designed to scan footage from neighborhood cameras to find lost dogs, has raised concerns that it could be used to search for people. Meanwhile, Wikipedia editors are considering blacklisting the archive site Archive.today after it was used to direct a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.

The Ring ad, which promoted the new Search Party feature, drew criticism due to its potential for misuse. The Verge reported that the feature allows users to search across neighborhood camera footage, raising privacy concerns among critics.

In other tech news, Samsung confirmed its next Unpacked event for February 25th, as reported by The Verge. The event is expected to be software-focused, according to an extensive leak published by WinFuture.

Additionally, OpenAI is updating ChatGPT's deep research tool with a full-screen viewer, allowing users to read and navigate AI-generated reports more easily, The Verge reported. Users can now open a table of contents to jump to specific sections of the report.

In a separate development, Wikipedia editors are debating whether to ban Archive.today, according to Ars Technica. The archive site was reportedly used to launch a DDoS attack against a blogger. Editors are considering three options: removing or hiding all Archive.today links and adding the site to the spam blacklist, deprecating Archive.today while keeping existing archived links, or maintaining the status quo. Option A, which would involve blacklisting the site, would represent a significant change.

Finally, The Verge reported that Jeff Bezos could have saved The Washington Post's local news and sports reporters, but instead, layoffs occurred. Demonstrators held a "Save The Post" rally outside the Washington Post headquarters in Washington, DC, on February 5, 2026, according to a photo from Bloomberg via Getty Images.