Mozilla’s Firefox and Microsoft’s Edge plan to stop trusting new certificates from TrustCor, after a report revealed TrustCor’s ties to a US defense contractor (Joseph Menn/Washington Post)

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
Akeyless, which helps companies manage passwords, certificates, and API keys, raised $65M Series B, comprising $45.5M in equity and $19.5B in debt, led by NGP  —  Back in 2018, Refael Angel, a former security software engineer at Intuit, had an idea for a new approach to protect encryption keys …

Paul Sawers / TechCrunch:
Mozilla acquires Pulse, which made an automated status updater for Slack before shuttering, and plans to use its ML tech to improve personalization in Pocket  —  Firefox developer Mozilla is making a rare foray into the world of mergers and acquisitions, with news that it has snapped …

Carly Page / TechCrunch:
Google says Barcelona-based spyware vendor Variston planted spyware by exploiting zero-day flaws in Chrome, Firefox, and Windows between 2018 and 2022  —  A Barcelona-based company that bills itself as a custom security solutions provider exploited several zero-day vulnerabilities in Windows …

Joseph Menn / Washington Post:
China seems to be flooding Twitter with porn tweets mentioning places where people are protesting, overwhelming Twitter’s radically reduced anti-propaganda team  —  For hours, links to adult content overwhelmed other posts from cities where dramatic rallies escalated

Mia Sato / The Verge:
A study by Mozilla using YouTube recommendation data from 20,000+ users and 500M+ videos finds the “dislike” and “not interested” buttons have little impact  —  Even when users tell YouTube they aren’t interested in certain types of videos, similar recommendations keep coming, a new study by Mozilla found.

Ina Fried / Axios:
Sources: Twitter starts cutting an unspecified number of contractor workers in various fields, including content moderation, real estate, marketing, and others  —  After laying off half its staff earlier this month, Twitter on Saturday started culling its vast ranks of contract staff, sources confirmed to Axios.