Tootfinder

This person deserves a short story award.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R1C7I6NOWE02FM?ASIN=B0CQ8S545V

Elon Musk says Tesla's robotaxi service will "tentatively" begin on June 22 in Austin, with first autonomous deliveries of a car to a customer's home on June 28 (Ari Levy/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/10/elon-musk-

Elon Musk says Tesla robotaxi rides in Austin 'tentatively' set to begin June 22
Tesla CEO Elon Musk said in a post on X on Tuesday that the first self-driving Tesla will reach a customer's house on June 28.

now i really want to try Cheddar Bay biscuits https://mas.to/@carnage4life/114830335171951140

Check out today's Metacurity for the critical infosec developments you should know, including
--UK's NCA arrested four people for M&S, Co-Op cyberattacks
--Russian hoops player Kasatkin busted in France in connection with ransomware,
--McDonald's employee chatbot was riddled with absurd flaws,
--Hackers stole $40m from GMX protocol,
--Customer data exposed in Bitcoin Depot breach,
--Hackers run scam messages in old Mt. Gox wallets,
--Ni…

UK's NCA arrested four people for M&S, Co-Op cyberattacks
Russian hoops player Kasatkin busted in France in connection with ransomware, McDonald's employee chatbot was riddled with absurd flaws, Hackers stole $40m from GMX protocol, Customer data exposed in Bitcoin Depot breach, Hackers run scam messages in old Mt. Gox wallets, much more

from my link log —
EBCDIC is incompatible with GDPR.
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/10/ebcdic-is-incompatible-with-gdpr/
saved 2024-10-28

EBCDIC is incompatible with GDPR
Welcome to acronym city! The Court of Appeal of Brussels has made an interesting ruling. A customer complained that their bank was spelling the customer's name incorrectly. The bank didn't have support for diacritical marks. Things like á, è, ô, ü, ç etc. Those accents are common in many languages. So it was a little surprising that the bank didn't support them. The bank refused to spell their c…

Bango: subscription providers are reducing their reliance on direct acquisition strategies like social media ads due to rising costs and diminishing returns (Daniel Frankel/StreamTV Insider)
https://www.streamtvinsider.com/advertisin…

Bango: Subscription providers turn to bundling as direct acquisition marketing falters
Marketers of subscription services including those themed around streaming video and music are cutting back on once reliable direct acquisition strategies, including display and social media advert | A new Bango study concludes that subscription service providers are cutting back on once reliable direct acquisition strategies, including display and social media advertising, for customer growth and are turning to indirect marketing mechanisms like bundling.

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.00436 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csLG_…

Learning from Double Positive and Unlabeled Data for Potential-Customer Identification
In this study, we propose a method for identifying potential customers in targeted marketing by applying learning from positive and unlabeled data (PU learning). We consider a scenario in which a company sells a product and can observe only the customers who purchased it. Decision-makers seek to market products effectively based on whether people have loyalty to the company. Individuals with loyalty are those who are likely to remain interested in the company even without additional advertising…

When a customer solves their own issue after being their rubber duck, but you still get the credit for helping.

Sources: JPMorgan Chase told fintech companies it will start charging fees for access to customers' account data, which could drastically reshape the industry (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

You want to customize the settings, right? Of course you do. Thats why you need settings for the settings.
But…what if you want to customer the •customizer•???
The why we invented Settings Settings Settings. Only from Apple. https://mastodon.social/@_inside/114655449845163418

In three of the four weeks since WWDC, the conversion rate for OmniFocus on visionOS has been above 71%. (In the other week it was still above 62%, so the overall conversion rate for the full period is above 70%.)
I'm not suggesting everyone run out and make visionOS apps today: the total market size is still small. But it's a good sign for customer enthusiasm on the platform.
(As a company who specialized in building NeXT apps, we're no strangers to tiny markets with…

Customer just asked us to upgrade-in-place their 12yo RoR-based PM app currently running on Ubuntu 12.
Not looking forward to this fun.
#Sysadminnery

Transaction Categorization with Relational Deep Learning in QuickBooks
Kaiwen Dong, Padmaja Jonnalagedda, Xiang Gao, Ayan Acharya, Maria Kissa, Mauricio Flores, Nitesh V. Chawla, Kamalika Das
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.09234

Transaction Categorization with Relational Deep Learning in QuickBooks
Automatic transaction categorization is crucial for enhancing the customer experience in QuickBooks by providing accurate accounting and bookkeeping. The distinct challenges in this domain stem from the unique formatting of transaction descriptions, the wide variety of transaction categories, and the vast scale of the data involved. Furthermore, organizing transaction data in a relational database creates difficulties in developing a unified model that covers the entire database. In this work, …

[PODCAST] The problem(s) with platforms by #DemocracyWorks with #CoryDoctorow
https://pca.st/episode/026e66ba…

Why We Feel What We Feel: Joint Detection of Emotions and Their Opinion Triggers in E-commerce
Arnav Attri, Anuj Attri, Pushpak Bhattacharyya, Suman Banerjee, Amey Patil, Muthusamy Chelliah, Nikesh Garera
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.04708

Why We Feel What We Feel: Joint Detection of Emotions and Their Opinion Triggers in E-commerce
Customer reviews on e-commerce platforms capture critical affective signals that drive purchasing decisions. However, no existing research has explored the joint task of emotion detection and explanatory span identification in e-commerce reviews - a crucial gap in understanding what triggers customer emotional responses. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel joint task unifying Emotion detection and Opinion Trigger extraction (EOT), which explicitly models the relationship between causal text …

The vacated rule, meant to go into effect on 14 July, would have covered all forms of negative option marketing
– programs that allow sellers to interpret customer inaction as acceptance of subscriptions,
often leading to unintended charges.
The FTC’s original 1973 rule only covered limited forms of these practices.
It would have also stopped businesses from forcing customers through lengthy chat sessions with agents or creating other barriers to cancellation.
The…

Nearly 3,000 North Face website customer accounts breached as retail incidents continue https://therecord.media/north-face-customer-accounts-data-breach-notification

Customer Service Representative's Perception of the AI Assistant in an Organization's Call Center
Kai Qin, Kexin Du, Yimeng Chen, Yueyan Liu, Jie Cai, Zhiqiang Nie, Nan Gao, Guohui Wei, Shengzhu Wang, Chun Yu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.00513

Customer Service Representative's Perception of the AI Assistant in an Organization's Call Center
The integration of various AI tools creates a complex socio-technical environment where employee-customer interactions form the core of work practices. This study investigates how customer service representatives (CSRs) at the power grid service customer service call center perceive AI assistance in their interactions with customers. Through a field visit and semi-structured interviews with 13 CSRs, we found that AI can alleviate some traditional burdens during the call (e.g., typing and memori…

Enhancing Customer Service Chatbots with Context-Aware NLU through Selective Attention and Multi-task Learning
Subhadip Nandi, Neeraj Agrawal, Anshika Singh, Priyanka Bhatt
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.01781

Enhancing Customer Service Chatbots with Context-Aware NLU through Selective Attention and Multi-task Learning
Customer service chatbots are conversational systems aimed at addressing customer queries, often by directing them to automated workflows. A crucial aspect of this process is the classification of the customer's intent. Presently, most intent classification models for customer care utilise only customer query for intent prediction. This may result in low-accuracy models, which cannot handle ambiguous queries. An ambiguous query like "I didn't receive my package" could indicate a delayed order, …

from my link log —
O2 VoLTE: locating any customer with a phone call.
https://mastdatabase.co.uk/blog/2025/05/o2-expose-customer-location-call-4g/
saved 2025-05-17

To Protect the LLM Agent Against the Prompt Injection Attack with Polymorphic Prompt
Zhilong Wang, Neha Nagaraja, Lan Zhang, Hayretdin Bahsi, Pawan Patil, Peng Liu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.05739

To Protect the LLM Agent Against the Prompt Injection Attack with Polymorphic Prompt
LLM agents are widely used as agents for customer support, content generation, and code assistance. However, they are vulnerable to prompt injection attacks, where adversarial inputs manipulate the model's behavior. Traditional defenses like input sanitization, guard models, and guardrails are either cumbersome or ineffective. In this paper, we propose a novel, lightweight defense mechanism called Polymorphic Prompt Assembling (PPA), which protects against prompt injection with near-zero overhe…

Really developing a loathing of corporate no-reply email addresses. Whatever else they do they don't enhance customer service.

There’s a fascinating phone scam wave going on that I’ve seen it so far with Apple and now PayPal.
You get an 100% legit looking mail even with valid BIMI headers and everything, telling you about some expensive thing or subscription with a number to call to dispute it.
The main giveaway is that the recipient is always an address in zantigoo.com and not you. 1/2

Imagine if a candidate for US President had a workable program to ban sludge, that bureaucratic hell companies and the government put us through on support lines, in endless phone menus, and online to make us give up. They'd win 50 states!
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/

That Dropped Call With Customer Service? It Was on Purpose.
Endless wait times and excessive procedural fuss—it’s all part of a tactic called “sludge.”

United Natural Foods, a grocery distributor to 30K stores in the US and Canada and Whole Foods' main distributor, hit by a cyberattack, halting some operations (Zack Whittaker/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/09/majo

Major US grocery distributor warns of disruption after cyberattack | TechCrunch
UNFI, a grocery distributor for Whole Foods and others, warned of disruptions to customer orders after a cyberattack.

Potential Customer Lifetime Value in Financial Institutions: The Usage Of Open Banking Data to Improve CLV Estimation
Jo\~ao B. G. de Brito, Rodrigo Heldt, Cleo S. Silveira, Matthias Bogaert, Guilherme B. Bucco, Fernando B. Luce, Jo\~ao L. Becker, Filipe J. Zabala, Michel J. Anzanello
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.22711

Potential Customer Lifetime Value in Financial Institutions: The Usage Of Open Banking Data to Improve CLV Estimation
Financial institutions increasingly adopt customer-centric strategies to enhance profitability and build long-term relationships. While Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is a core metric, its calculations often rely solely on single-entity data, missing insights from customer activities across multiple firms. This study introduces the Potential Customer Lifetime Value (PCLV) framework, leveraging Open Banking (OB) data to estimate customer value comprehensively. We predict retention probability and…

Did you know that the tickets for the world's most important awards ceremony run through Flownative's servers? 😎
I conducted another interview, this time with long-time customer @… from Passcreator. David talks a bit about what's going on and it's really exciting to see what he and his team have built over the years based on a flow applicati…

For various reasons I get CCs of both sides of new system planning: the customer asking for vague stuff and hardware vendors providing precise quotes and my highly appreciated boss running both conversations.
It is very strange to watch our first “AI” system being defined. Customer built a prototype on a Mac and really doesn’t understand his needs or the constraints. He definitely doesn’t get that servers are different. Or that we aren’t

Just found out that an old intranet we initially created for a customer back in 2008-9 (on Drupal 4.7 or maybe 5, subsequently upgraded through to Drupal 6) is still running (not on the open internet). Their MS Sharepoint replacement for it has been... less than stunningly successful in its designated role.
I suspect that original Intranet, even inflation adjusted, would've cost the orders of magnitude less in up-front development and per-year maintenance.

Some of these big retailer breaches have tended to surface in the Korean press first, now it's Papa John's.
https://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/news/2025-06-26/na…

Papa John's Korea confirms customer data breech exposing names, contact info, addresses
Pizza franchise Papa John's Korea has confirmed a customer data breach caused by a security vulnerability, prompting an official investigation by the Personal Information Protection Commission (PIPC).

Learn to be horrified and offended by customer support that goes nowhere, by inaccessible remedy for problems. Learn to be horrified by the denial of humanity at scale.

A Hybrid Mean Field Framework for Aggregators Participating in Wholesale Electricity Markets
Jun He, Andrew L. Liu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.03240 https:/…

A Hybrid Mean Field Framework for Aggregators Participating in Wholesale Electricity Markets
The rapid growth of distributed energy resources (DERs), including rooftop solar and energy storage, is transforming the grid edge, where distributed technologies and customer-side systems increasingly interact with the broader power grid. DER aggregators, entities that coordinate and optimize the actions of many small-scale DERs, play a key role in this transformation. This paper presents a hybrid Mean-Field Control (MFC) and Mean-Field Game (MFG) framework for integrating DER aggregators into…

So on to the new house. We decided to collect 3 quotes, so I fired up the Google thingy and looked for HVAC companies in my area. I only looked at companies with 500 reviews with a customer rating of 4.8 or better. The company we ultimately chose had 2,000 reviews with an average of 4.9. Read through the reviews! You learn a lot about their responsiveness and how they deal with problems. If multiple named service people are praised versus 1 individual, then it's likely a cultural thing.

So Builder . ai Mechanical Turked things and Microsoft (and others) were none the wiser.
Due diligence: boring stuff that when you skip it with catch up with you fast.
“Builder . ai’s platform relied on around 700 engineers based in India who manually wrote code based on customer requests. Despite the company marketing it as AI-generated, most of the work was done by humans behind the scenes.”

London AI startup Builder.ai collapses after 'human-powered' tech revelation
London AI startup Builder.ai collapses after 'human-powered' tech revelation

Adapting Online Customer Reviews for Blind Users: A Case Study of Restaurant Reviews
Mohan Sunkara, Akshay Kolgar Nayak, Sandeep Kalari, Yash Prakash, Sampath Jayarathna, Hae-Na Lee, Vikas Ashok
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.04865

Adapting Online Customer Reviews for Blind Users: A Case Study of Restaurant Reviews
Online reviews have become an integral aspect of consumer decision-making on e-commerce websites, especially in the restaurant industry. Unlike sighted users who can visually skim through the reviews, perusing reviews remains challenging for blind users, who rely on screen reader assistive technology that supports predominantly one-dimensional narration of content via keyboard shortcuts. In an interview study, we uncovered numerous pain points of blind screen reader users with online restaurant…

Had a fun conversation on this week's Mac Power Users with @… and @…, ranging from punched card computing in the '70s through developing for NeXT in the '90s to considering how to tastefully use (and avoid overuse) Liquid …

Major food wholesaler says cyberattack impacting distribution systems https://therecord.media/major-food-wholesaler-cyberattack-impacting-distribution

Tesla says a Model Y drove itself from Gigafactory Texas to a buyer's home 30 minutes away, marking its first fully autonomous vehicle delivery (Andrew J. Hawkins/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/news/694801/tesla-autonomous-delivery…

Tesla says it delivered its first car autonomously from factory to customer
Tesla delivered its first vehicle autonomously from factory to customer. But

Predicting and Explaining Customer Data Sharing in the Open Banking
Jo\~ao B. G. de Brito, Rodrigo Heldt, Cleo S. Silveira, Matthias Bogaert, Guilherme B. Bucco, Fernando B. Luce, Jo\~ao L. Becker, Filipe J. Zabala, Michel J. Anzanello
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.01987

Predicting and Explaining Customer Data Sharing in the Open Banking
The emergence of Open Banking represents a significant shift in financial data management, influencing financial institutions' market dynamics and marketing strategies. This increased competition creates opportunities and challenges, as institutions manage data inflow to improve products and services while mitigating data outflow that could aid competitors. This study introduces a framework to predict customers' propensity to share data via Open Banking and interprets this behavior through Expl…

SERP Interference Network and Its Applications in Search Advertising
Purak Jain, Sandeep Appala
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.21598 https://

SERP Interference Network and Its Applications in Search Advertising
Search Engine marketing teams in the e-commerce industry manage global search engine traffic to their websites with the aim to optimize long-term profitability by delivering the best possible customer experience on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). In order to do so, they need to run continuous and rapid Search Marketing A/B tests to continuously evolve and improve their products. However, unlike typical e-commerce A/B tests that can randomize based on customer identification, their tests fa…

This was really interesting. It's about Topaz AI, which was a denoising/upscaling solution I looked at about nine months ago, and rejected because I wasn't really prepared to make the investment at that stage ($300/yr) https://mstdn.social/@Onmyom/114779996030982643…

Had a good call with a TelemetryDeck customer about our UI, then a bad call from the vet— the parasites are still there.
I am so tired.

"Fixer les prix des livres au détail est une politique commune en Europe, mais comment la prévention de la concurrence affecte-t-elle les libraires et les acheteurs ? Christos Genakos, Lorien Sabatino et Tommaso Valletti constatent que lorsque la possibilité d'offrir des prix plus bas aux clients est limitée, les vendeurs se tournent vers la concurrence sur le service Š la clientèle et la variété des livres - améliorant ainsi l'expérience des acheteurs."

Solving and closing customer support issues like…

Was going to one bar but it turned out to be karaoke night so hard pass.
Walked on, past a bar called “The Eccentric“, and obviously I had to check it out. I am after all something of an eccentric myself, I hope.
The name is not misleading. You enter down a few steps into what looks like their liquor storage. The bar has more bottles of booze than I have ever seen in any bar. Apparently in fairly random order, but I am sure they have a very sophisticated system. Only customer so …

I have to say I was pleasantly surprised to see how easy Pirate Ship is for getting shipping labels at reduced rates. Their customer service is top-notch. My work had been paying for a shipping provider and I was able to drop their prices considerably.
Not an ad, just a fan of how easy they made #shipping.

From Translink
Help Shape the Future of Compass
We're exploring the next generation of Compass and are looking for your input which will help guide the future of our region's transit experience. Complete the survey and enter the draw to win one of ten Compass Minis pre-loaded with a monthly pass!

"Because I deserved support in that moment. I deserved having my boss taking me to the side to have a coffee and asking me how I was doing. I deserved having somebody more in my team to help me figure out a new technical solution for that project, instead of leaving me alone. I deserved having a product owner communicating issues to that customer. I deserved having someone giving a fucking shit about my mental health."

Radio Silence
I have had three episodes of burnout in my professional life, in three consecutive years.

Time For 9 o'clock #HashTagGames hosted by @…
It's Customer Experience Day. Let's play!
#ComplaintsAtFictionalBiz

Non-Heuristic Selection via Hybrid Regularized and Machine Learning Models for Insurance
Luciano Ribeiro Galv\~ao, Rafael de Andrade Moral
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.05609

Non-Heuristic Selection via Hybrid Regularized and Machine Learning Models for Insurance
In this study, machine learning models were tested to predict whether or not a customer of an insurance company would purchase a travel insurance product. For this purpose, secondary data provided by an open-source website that compiles databases from statistical modeling competitions were used. The dataset used presents approximately 2,700 records from an unidentified company in the tourism insurance sector. Initially, the feature engineering stage was carried out, which were selected through …

AidAI: Automated Incident Diagnosis for AI Workloads in the Cloud
Yitao Yang, Yangtao Deng, Yifan Xiong, Baochun Li, Hong Xu, Peng Cheng
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.01481

AidAI: Automated Incident Diagnosis for AI Workloads in the Cloud
AI workloads experience frequent incidents due to intensive hardware utilization and extended training times. The current incident management workflow is provider-centric, where customers report incidents and place the entire troubleshooting responsibility on the infrastructure provider. However, the inherent knowledge gap between customer and provider significantly impacts incident resolution efficiency. In AI infrastructure, incidents may take several days on average to mitigate, resulting in…

Tel Aviv-based Wonderful, which develops customer support AI agents for businesses in non-English speaking countries, raised a $34M seed led by Index Ventures (Yuliya Chernova/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/articles/wonderfu…

angry sales guy: hey, what gives. I was reading the minutes yesterday and you recorded `and was written for sales (if they can read..?)`.. that's not professional.
me: well, I write all the customer facing stuff.
asg: ... so?
me: and I write all of the training material for all teams downstream of engineering
asg: .. and?
me: so what I write is arguably the most important, most exciting content that engineering produces.
asg: Look, I don't see-

Spatial Optimization of Autonomous Vehicle Assignment Based on Distance-Driven Demand and Customer Patience
Niloufar Mirzavand Boroujeni, Nasim Mirzavand Boroujeni, Nima Moradi, Saeed Jamalzadeh
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.12671

Spatial Optimization of Autonomous Vehicle Assignment Based on Distance-Driven Demand and Customer Patience
Autonomous vehicles (AVs) can improve efficiency, reduce costs, and enhance road safety. They optimize traffic flow, minimize congestion, and support sustainability through shared mobility and reduced fuel consumption. A key challenge in AV deployment is allocating vehicles to parking lots across regions to meet fluctuating demand. Proper allocation reduces delays, lowers costs, and boosts user satisfaction by ensuring timely vehicle availability. This paper explores the impact of customer wait…

ImpReSS: Implicit Recommender System for Support Conversations
Omri Haller, Yair Meidan, Dudu Mimran, Yuval Elovici, Asaf Shabtai
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14231

ImpReSS: Implicit Recommender System for Support Conversations
Following recent advancements in large language models (LLMs), LLM-based chatbots have transformed customer support by automating interactions and providing consistent, scalable service. While LLM-based conversational recommender systems (CRSs) have attracted attention for their ability to enhance the quality of recommendations, limited research has addressed the implicit integration of recommendations within customer support interactions. In this work, we introduce ImpReSS, an implicit recomme…

If there's one thing I've learned about myself over the last 3-4 years is that I am not cut out for any form of customer support.
My urge to yell "Then just don't do it that way!" is far too strong.

Apple claims that the App Store is in their customer interests and protects them from being scammed.
1) Are there no scamming apps in the App Store?
2) When I look at the potential costs of using an application it looks like this. I honestly cannot tell how much it costs. I do not feel that the App Store is protecting me.

Investigating the emergent invariant properties of Hungarian electric distribution networks
Michelle T. Cirunay, B\'alint Hartmann, T\'imea Erdei, Tam\'as Soha
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.04009

Investigating the emergent invariant properties of Hungarian electric distribution networks
Electric power distribution networks serve as the final and essential stage in power delivery, bridging transmission infrastructure and end users. The structural configuration of these networks plays a critical role in determining system reliability, fault tolerance, and operational efficiency. Although the design of distribution systems is influenced by various regional factors, such as geography, customer density, and planning standards, the extent to which consistent structural characteristi…

Useful.
I’ve always disliked the fact that SOHO NAT routers all seem to be configured with one of a handful of 192.168.*/24 subnets. Beyond the risk of collision, I’ve had the experience of being told vehemently by benighted customer “IT guys” that I’ve done something horribly wrong by setting their inside up on 10.175.202.0/23 or some similarly uncommon RFC1918 block, because they “knew” that it was supposed to be in the Class C range of RFC 1918.

Picking uncontested private IP subnets with usage data

Trilevel Memetic Algorithm for the Electric Vehicle Routing Problem
Ivan Milinovi\'c, Leon Stjepan Uroi\'c, Marko {\DJ}urasevi\'c
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.01065

Trilevel Memetic Algorithm for the Electric Vehicle Routing Problem
The Electric Vehicle Routing Problem (EVRP) extends the capacitated vehicle routing problem by incorporating battery constraints and charging stations, posing significant optimization challenges. This paper introduces a Trilevel Memetic Algorithm (TMA) that hierarchically optimizes customer sequences, route assignments, and charging station insertions. The method combines genetic algorithms with dynamic programming, ensuring efficient and high-quality solutions. Benchmark tests on WCCI2020 inst…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.15965 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_ees…

Analyzing the Impact of Accent on English Speech: Acoustic and Articulatory Perspectives
Advancements in AI-driven speech-based applications have transformed diverse industries ranging from healthcare to customer service. However, the increasing prevalence of non-native accented speech in global interactions poses significant challenges for speech-processing systems, which are often trained on datasets dominated by native speech. This study investigates accented English speech through articulatory and acoustic analysis, identifying simpler coordination patterns and higher average p…

Data breach reveals Catwatchful ‘stalkerware’ is spying on thousands of phones
https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/02/data-breach-reveals-catwatchful-stalkerware-spying-on-thousands-android-phones/

Exclusive: Data breach reveals Catwatchful 'stalkerware' is spying on thousands of phones
The spyware operation's exposed customer email addresses and passwords were shared with data breach notification service Have I Been Pwned.

Mal wieder 'nen Onlineshop erwischt, der bei jeder Paketbewegung größer zehn Zentimeter eine E-Mail schickt. Weil regelmäßiger Kundenkontakt ist wichtig, sagen die Kollegen aus der Customer Happyness Abteilung.

NYT and Amazon agree to a content licensing deal for use in Amazon's AI platforms and to bring the NYT's "content to a variety of Amazon customer experiences" (New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/29/business/m…

The Times and Amazon Announce an A.I. Licensing Deal
In 2023, The Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement. Now its editorial content will appear across Amazon platforms.

Not only do #Youtube's automatic AI voice-overs sound like customer-service hotline robots ... their translations aren't even correct!
Here's one of those funny "interview with a Javascript programmer / Linux user / etc." videos. It's subtitle right at the beginning mentions a "404 page" (you know, the web server "page not found" errors). The mo…

Scale AI emphasizes that it remains an independent company and says Meta will not have access to Scale's internal systems or customers' confidential information (Scale AI)
https://scale.com/blog/customer-trust-scale-meta-deal

Scale Remains Independent After Meta Investment | Scale
Customer trust and data security remain Scale’s top priorities.

‘Significant’ amount of customer data accessed during cyberattack on Qantas airline https://therecord.media/qantas-airline-data-breach

womp womp
https://www.reuters.com/business/google-scale-ais-largest-customer-plans-split-after-meta-deal-sources-say-2025-06-13/

Wenn ich mir einen potentiellen Dienstleister genauer angucke, schaue ich auf jeden Fall auf die "über uns"-Seite. Denn ich möchte wissen, wie sich die Firma selbst sieht, wie sie so ticken.
Für Flownative habe ich mal etwas ausprobiert. Mit einigen unserer Kunden habe ich Interviews geführt. Auf dieser Basis habe ich dann Artikel geschrieben. Was haltet ihr von dem Format? Kann man sich so lange Texte heute noch leisten?

Gotta drive 50km with my own car (and fuel) in my (would have been) free time because one of my colleagues used an insurance form in the truck but never replaced it.
So when I needed one (hit a wall at a customer while backing truck into the tight ass space without mirrors - sun kept blinding me), there was none so I now have to go back there to get the paperwork sorted...
Lovely...

Evaluating the Impact of Lean and Green Practices on Operational Performance: A Real Data-Driven Simulation Case Study
Farah Altarazi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.17354

Evaluating the Impact of Lean and Green Practices on Operational Performance: A Real Data-Driven Simulation Case Study
Global market-driven forces and customer needs are continuously changing. In the past, profitability and efficiency were the primary objectives of most companies. However, in recent decades, sustainable performance has emerged as a new competitive advantage. Companies have been compelled to adopt a concept that combines these evolving global interests with traditional goals resulting in the innovation of the lean and green approach. In this study, a research methodology that includes system a…

>> Die Einführung von gezielter Werbung durch #WhatsApp zeigt: "Wenn du nicht dafür bezahlst, bist du nicht der Kunde, sondern das Produkt." <<
From: @…

Constant-Factor Algorithms for Revenue Management with Consecutive Stays
Ming Hu, Tongwen Wu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.00909 https://

Constant-Factor Algorithms for Revenue Management with Consecutive Stays
We study network revenue management problems motivated by applications such as railway ticket sales and hotel room bookings. Request types that require a resource for consecutive stays sequentially arrive with known arrival probabilities. We investigate two scenarios: the reject-or-accept scenario, where the request can be fulfilled by any available resource, and the choice-based scenario, which generalizes the former by incorporating customer preferences through basic attraction models. We dev…

Multi-Tool Analysis of User Interface & Accessibility in Deployed Web-Based Chatbots
Mukesh Rajmohan, Smit Desai, Sanchari Das
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.04659

Multi-Tool Analysis of User Interface & Accessibility in Deployed Web-Based Chatbots
In this work, we present a multi-tool evaluation of 106 deployed web-based chatbots, across domains like healthcare, education and customer service, comprising both standalone applications and embedded widgets using automated tools (Google Lighthouse, PageSpeed Insights, SiteImprove Accessibility Checker) and manual audits (Microsoft Accessibility Insights). Our analysis reveals that over 80% of chatbots exhibit at least one critical accessibility issue, and 45% suffer from missing semantic str…

Microsoft has once again been named a Leader in the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Data Science and Machine Learning (DSML) Platforms.
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog

Microsoft recognized for second consecutive year as a Leader in the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Data Science and Machine Learning Platforms | Microsoft Azure Blog
Find out how Microsoft Azure Machine Learning can help you optimize business processes, improve customer experiences, and drive innovation.

https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/australias-qantas-confirms-cyber-incident-one-its-contact-centres-2025-07-01/
Australia's Qantas says 6 million customer accounts accessed in cyber hack

Inside job
When an account gets hacked, social media giant Meta offers little support, spawning a shadowy network of brokers and Meta employees who profit from helping users get back online
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/art

I honestly don’t get how this is possible in 2025.
There’s no excuse for not having protected backups of everything critical. That was true 30 years ago, it is true today. Back then a bigger piece of the risk was hardware, less malware. Today it is unlikely for a disk failure to take your data because we all learned that RAID was worthwhile. But RAID is not a backup and backups today need to be resistant to intentional malicious deletion.

Exact distribution of discrete-time D-BMAP/G/\inf queueing model
Tonglin Liao, Youming Li
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.23178 https://ar…

Exact distribution of discrete-time D-BMAP/G/\inf queueing model
In this paper, we consider discrete-time D-BMAP/G/\inf queueing model. We construct effective discrete-time Markovian dynamics for this model and utilize it to derive exact time-dependent distribution of customer number and the corresponding moments for the original queueing model. Numerical simulations are used to verify our results. Using our result, we provide analytical distribution for discrete-time M/M/\inf, and then compare it with the distribution of continuous-time M/M/\inf.

MainStreet Bank reports vendor cyber incident that leaked customer info https://therecord.media/Main-street-cyber-incident-bank

LOL this is me at gigs when a drunk person comes up and asks if we can play a particular song where there has been weeks of back-and-forth with the client/planner locking down the set list.
I say we definitely do, fucking awesome song man, enthusiastically and with absolute certainty, then go back to playing and never think about it again

The tech lead next to me has been on the phone the past 3 (work) days fielding calls from the service team installing a prototype system.
Every single problem they've encountered so far is one I - a year ago - suggested a quality-of-life/design-for-serviceability/ux improvement to mitigate, minimize or deal with should it occur.
Our product managers know our customer's industry inside and out but not one has commercial software experience. I have 30 yrs of it.
T…

Court filing: Deel alleges Rippling's "competitive intelligence manager" Brett Alexander Johnson posed as a customer to access Deel's product and business info (George Hammond/Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/abd988f6-e524-48d9-8433-27c…

New spying claims emerge in Silicon Valley corporate espionage scandal
HR start-ups Rippling and Deel trade allegations their leaders directed efforts to steal company secrets from one another

KiseKloset: Comprehensive System For Outfit Retrieval, Recommendation, And Try-On
Thanh-Tung Phan-Nguyen, Khoi-Nguyen Nguyen-Ngoc, Tam V. Nguyen, Minh-Triet Tran, Trung-Nghia Le
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.23471

KiseKloset: Comprehensive System For Outfit Retrieval, Recommendation, And Try-On
The global fashion e-commerce industry has become integral to people's daily lives, leveraging technological advancements to offer personalized shopping experiences, primarily through recommendation systems that enhance customer engagement through personalized suggestions. To improve customers' experience in online shopping, we propose a novel comprehensive KiseKloset system for outfit retrieval, recommendation, and try-on. We explore two approaches for outfit retrieval: similar item retrieval …

Are You Listening to Me? Fine-Tuning Chatbots for Empathetic Dialogue
Paulo Ricardo Knob, Leonardo Scholler, Juliano Rigatti, Soraia Raupp Musse
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.02537

Are You Listening to Me? Fine-Tuning Chatbots for Empathetic Dialogue
Conversational agents have made significant progress since ELIZA, expanding their role across various domains, including healthcare, education, and customer service. As these agents become increasingly integrated into daily human interactions, the need for emotional intelligence, particularly empathetic listening, becomes increasingly essential. In this study, we explore how Large Language Models (LLMs) respond when tasked with generating emotionally rich interactions. Starting from a small dat…

French payments group Worldline's stock drops 20% after European journalism network EIC reports alleging that the company covered up customer fraud (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

I got talked into trying Meat Church “Holy Voodoo” seasoning today at Blackhawk Hardware by an employee and a customer. Both raved about it. I need a jalapeño enhanced rub to use with my smoked and sautéed veggies.
https://www.meatchurch.com/products/holy-voodoo-seasoning

Holy Voodoo Seasoning

From Translink
Oakridge–41st Avenue Canada Line Station to close early for seven weeks
Two phases of night work necessary to install support structures at station entrance
The Canada Line’s Oakridge–41st Avenue Station will be closing at 11 p.m. from Sunday to Thursday nights over seven weeks, to allow for important upgrade work.

The temporary closures will happen in two phases and are necessary to ensure customer safety.
🧵1/n

Decagon, which offers AI-powered customer service agents for enterprises, raised a $131M Series C co-led by Accel and a16z at a $1.5B valuation (Anna Tong/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/technology/customer-service-ai-startup-…

Newspaper giant Lee Enterprises says nearly 40,000 Social Security numbers leaked in ransomware attack https://therecord.media/newspaper-lee-enterprises-cyberattack-ssn

Engineering Serendipity through Recommendations of Items with Atypical Aspects
Ramit Aditya, Razvan Bunescu, Smita Nannaware, Erfan Al-Hossami
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.23580

Engineering Serendipity through Recommendations of Items with Atypical Aspects
A restaurant dinner or a hotel stay may lead to memorable experiences when guests encounter unexpected aspects that also match their interests. For example, an origami-making station in the waiting area of a restaurant may be both surprising and enjoyable for a customer who is passionate about paper crafts. Similarly, an exhibit of 18th century harpsichords would be atypical for a hotel lobby and likely pique the interest of a guest who has a passion for Baroque music. Motivated by this insight…

Sources: Google, Scale AI's largest customer, plans to cut ties with the company after the Meta deal; Microsoft, OpenAI, and xAI also plan to step back (Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/business/google-scal…

Marc Benioff says "AI is doing 30% to 50% of the work at Salesforce now", including software engineering and customer service (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-26/salesforce-ceo-s…

Sources: mass production of Microsoft's next AI chip is delayed to 2026 and is expected to underperform Nvidia's Blackwell chip, released in late 2024 (The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/microsofts-ai-chip-effort-falls-b…

Microsoft’s AI Chip Effort Falls Behind
Microsoft has spent years designing its own artificial intelligence chips, in part to reduce its dependence on Nvidia. It isn’t going so well. The software giant, which Nvidia employees say was its largest customer by revenue last year, is taking much longer than expected to design its ...

Berlin-based Synthflow, a no-code service letting enterprises build and deploy customized voice AI customer service agents, raised a $20M Series A led by Accel (Rebecca Szkutak/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/24/how-

How Synthflow AI is cutting through the noise in a loud AI voice category | TechCrunch
Synthflow AI was founded in 2023 and has amassed more than 1,000 customers and handled more than 45 million calls.

Estonia issues arrest warrant for Moroccan wanted for major pharmacy data breach https://therecord.media/estonia-arrest-warrant-pharmacy-data-breach

23andMe privacy ombudsman recommends company obtains consent for sale of customer data https://therecord.media/23andme-privacy-ombudsman-recommends-consent-sale

Boston-based Maven, which builds autonomous AI agents for enterprises' customer support, raised a $50M Series B led by Dell, taking its total funding to $78M (Chris Metinko/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/pro/enterprise-softw…

Exclusive: Maven AGI raises $50M Series B
The Series B was led by Dell Technologies Capital.

Scale AI's rivals like Snorkel AI, Labelbox, and Turing report rising interest from clients concerned about Scale's independence after Meta's $14.3B investment (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

Glasgow City Council impacted by ‘cyber incident’ https://therecord.media/glasgow-city-council-cyber-incident