Tootfinder

Digital bank Monzo, which has 13M UK customers, plans to launch a mobile phone service; Revolut and Klarna, each with ~11M UK customers, announced similar plans (Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/1c6ce97e-f358-4249-b264-67c71b764164

lol, right on
https://nypost.com/2025/10/16/us-news/mta-pop-up-shop-draws-customers-and-one-celebrity-hunting-for-g-train-signs-and-other-wacky-decor/

https://karlgroves.com/how-much-should-you-spend-on-accessibility/
“… a good rule of thumb is to treat accessibility as a core part of your compliance strategy. Aiming for 5%–10% of your compliance budget is a solid starting point. For some, that may mean 0.1%–0…

The most important part of a car is it's software. That is already clear for some time.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62weyp4qqgo

VW introduces monthly subscription to increase car power
The German car-maker says its "optional power upgrade" is designed to give customers more choice.

"As trading activity spiked on [#Crypto] exchanges and prices whipsawed, multiple centralized platforms suffered glitches. Binance’s site went completely down at one point, and customers reported unexplained account freezes, unsuccessful trades, and automated protections like stop-losses failing to trigger"
Again, of course. People build crypto exchanges because they want to get ric…

Anatomy of a crypto meltdown
October 2025 brought the most dramatic crypto flash crash of all time, but it was only a dress rehearsal for the systemic crisis the industry is building toward.

Things Spirit Airlines make their passengers pay for:
▫️Drinks & snacks
▫️Checked luggage
▫️Carry-ons
▫️Seat selection
▫️Changing flights
▫️Printing boarding pass at airport
Customers joke about the lavatory being coin-op. I'd rather die than fly #Spirit.
From: @…

Smudge The Insult Cat 🐀 (@SmudgeTheInsultCat@mas.to)
Attached: 1 image

Trump's ending of de minimis exemptions (which would apply 35% taxes to shipments from Canada less than $800)
Means I might have to stop shipping #Accordion swag to customers in the US after August 1
Or at least it will get much more expensive/burdensome/complicated
So if you want any

Well, then. I see VW is off the table when it comes time to trade in our car. No way in hell am I paying for a car, and then adding a subscription to unlock the features that are built in to it.
VW introduces monthly subscription to increase car power https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62weyp4

VW introduces monthly subscription to increase car power
The German car-maker says its "optional power upgrade" is designed to give customers more choice.

Not all data is useful; some data is of poor quality, and much of it is messy. Poor data quality can negatively impact customers, employees, and decision-making processes. At this year's Berlin Buzzwords, Jan Meskens explored the journey from identifying symptoms to uncovering root causes, along with strategies for improvement.
Watch the full session:

Source: SoftBank's plans for a JV with OpenAI to bring AI to Japanese corporate customers are well behind schedule, with an update now expected in November (Yusuke Ogawa/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/business/media-tel

Information Asymmetry in Queues with Strategic Customers
Shunan Zheng, John Hasenbein
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09899 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.09899

Information Asymmetry in Queues with Strategic Customers
This paper studies information asymmetry in an unobservable single-server queueing system. While system managers have knowledge of the true arrival rate, customers may lack this information and instead form arbitrary beliefs. We propose a three-tier hierarchy of information asymmetry with increasing levels of information disclosure:customers keep private beliefs, customers are aware of the beliefs of others, and customers know the true arrival rate. Within this framework, the effects of the bel…

As Microsoft EOLs Windows 10, I'm reminded of why Windows is fundamentally broken, by design. https://davelane.nz/windows-broken-design When you're a global platform monopoly, your existing users are your biggest competition. Your interests and those of your customers are diametricall…

“Motability Operations is committed to ensuring that its customers have fair access to home charging, so they can benefit from the convenience, cost savings and accessibility benefits it offers, while safeguarding the accessibility of pavements for disabled pedestrians.
Research undertaken with [..] customers has identified a variety of accessibility challenges with existing cross-pavement products, and a range of considerations for more accessible future designs.”

Home charging for all | Motability Operations
Improving access to home charging is more important than ever. Our report explores the role cross-pavement products could play in creating a smooth EV transition.

Atlassian acquires developer productivity platform DX for $1B in cash and restricted stock; DX has 350 enterprise customers and raised less than $5M (Rebecca Szkutak/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/18/atlassian-acquires-dx-a-devel…

Atlassian acquires DX, a developer productivity platform, for $1B | TechCrunch
Atlassian is making its largest acquisition yet by buying DX so it can offer a developer productivity tool.

Lag killed me this time.
I got an amazing thief ISP.
And I'm doing a bad job at getting better internet cause I don't complain.
Companies love that!
Other customers go:
I want better internet!
I go: I want better lag!
13:16 UTC and I'm in the queue to get in to Fortnite.
13:18 UTC I'M IN!
#Fortnite

Wow, a lot happened in the cybersecurity world over the weekend, so check out today's Metacurity for the most critical infosec developments you might have missed, including
--The White House fired 176 CISA employees on Friday, with more layoffs feared,
--Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters leaked 5m Qantas, 23m Vietnam Air customers' records,
--Spanish cops dismantle GXC Team,
--Dutch gov't warns of China's Nexperia security risks,
--Breach of crypto betting…

The White House fired 176 CISA employees on Friday, with more layoffs feared
Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters leaked 5m Qantas, 23m Vietnam Air customers' records, Spanish cops dismantle GXC Team, Dutch gov't warns of China's Nexperia security risks, Breach of crypto betting platform Shuffle exposes user data, FCC chair says sites have removed barred Chinese electronics, much more

🇺🇦 Auf radioeins läuft...
Two Door Cinema Club:
🎵 Happy Customers
#NowPlaying #TwoDoorCinemaClub
https://open.spotify.com/track/5BQV6zDJ8lRr8nN6lV2WWi

Shocked to hear that «After careful consideration, we have decided to stop accepting new customers for Amazon Glacier (original standalone vault-based service) starting on December 15, 2025. There will be no change to the S3 Glacier storage classes as part of this plan». /s
For years I've been duly billed either 0,01 € or 0,00 € per month for some ancient Glacier test I never bothered to clean up. Now that makes me some kind of protected species on

On the overlap times in queues with dependence under a Farlie-Gumbel-Morgenstern copula
Ioannis Dimitriou
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14100 https://arxiv.or…

On the overlap times in queues with dependence under a Farlie-Gumbel-Morgenstern copula
In this work, we analyze the steady-state maximum overlap time distribution in a single-server queue by introducing a dependence structure between service and interarrival times under the Farlie-Gumber-Morgenstern copula. We provide explicit expressions by indicating the effect of dependence. We also focus on the steady-state distribution of the minimum overlap time of a customer with its two adjacent customers. A more general dependence structure is also investigated. A numerical example illus…

Strategic Pricing and Ranking in Recommendation Systems with Seller Competition
Tushar Shankar Walunj, Veeraruna Kavitha, Jayakrishnan Nair, Priyank Agarwal
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13462

Strategic Pricing and Ranking in Recommendation Systems with Seller Competition
We study a recommendation system where sellers compete for visibility by strategically offering commissions to a platform that optimally curates a ranked menu of items and their respective prices for each customer. Customers interact sequentially with the menu following a cascade click model, and their purchase decisions are influenced by price sensitivity and positions of various items in the menu. We model the seller-platform interaction as a Stackelberg game with sellers as leaders and consi…

They move to ... Germany (partly)
https://social.heise.de/@heiseonlineenglish/115040366123200972

Plex tells customers to reset their passwords after suffering data breach that includes email addresses, usernames, and passwords (Lawrence Abrams/BleepingComputer)
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/plex-tells-users-to-re…

Plex tells users to reset passwords after new data breach
Media streaming platform Plex is warning customers to reset passwords after suffering a data breach in which a hacker was able to steal customer authentication data from one of its databases.

“More than 9,000 low carbon assets were registered, including smart electric vehicle (EV) chargers, batteries and heat pumps.
The results highlight a maturing flexibility market, where customers and businesses are helping to strengthen the electricity network while cutting costs and supporting Net Zero.”

Graham: Putin ‘can’t tolerate’ going ‘after his customers’
https://thehill.com/business/5445534-graham-putin-cant-tolerate-going-after-his-customers/

Cafe life.
(At Vancouver’s Purebread, which is a fine bakery.)
#Photography

amazon_copurchases: Amazon co-purchasing network (2003)
Network of items for sale on amazon.com in 2003 and the items they "recommend" (via the "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought" feature). If one item is frequently co-purchased with another, then the first item recommends the second.
This network has 262111 nodes and 1234877 edges.
Tags: Economic, Commerce, Unweighted

this scam-detector dot com bollox keeps showing up in my search results for random websites.
looks like scam-detector dot com is a scam:
https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/www.scam-detector.com
my good deed for the day 🐝

Salesforce expands its partnerships with OpenAI and Anthropic to embed their AI models into Agentforce 360, including letting customers access it in ChatGPT (Larry Dignan/Constellation Research)
https://www.constellationr.com/blog-news/i

Salesforce expands OpenAI, Anthropic partnerships, eyes Agentforce everywhere
Salesforce expanded partnerships with OpenAI and Anthropic to embed their large language models into Agentforce 360. At Dreamforce 2025, Salesforce said it has expanded a partnership with OpenAI so customers can access Agentforce 360 in ChatGPT. Salesforce customers will be able to access sales records, review conversations and build Tableau visualizations from within ChatGPT.

Google says hackers stole its customers’ data in a breach of its Salesforce database
https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/06/google-says-hackers-stole-its-customers-data-in-a-breach-of-its-salesforce-database/

Google says hackers stole its customers' data by breaching its Salesforce database | TechCrunch
Google confirmed that one of its cloud-stored Salesforce databases was breached, exposing its customer data. Google attributed the breach to a hacking group, ShinyHunters, known for breaking into Salesforce databases.

All I can say is 'oh crap'...
https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/article/canadian-tire-says-recent-breach-of-e-commerce-database-involved-customer-info/

Credit reporting giant TransUnion has disclosed a data breach
affecting more than 4.4 million customers’ personal information.
In a filing with Maine’s attorney general’s office on Thursday, TransUnion attributed the July 28 breach to unauthorized access of a third-party application storing customers’ personal data for its U.S. consumer support operations.
TransUnion claimed “no credit information was accessed,” but provided no immediate evidence for its claim.
The d…

TransUnion says hackers stole 4.4 million customers' personal information | TechCrunch
The credit reporting giant confirmed unauthorized access to a third-party application storing the personal information of its customers, including Social Security numbers.

Disney cancellation page crashes as customers rush to quit after Kimmel suspension
https://creators.yahoo.com/lifestyle/story/disney-cancellation-page-crashes-as-customers-rush-to-quit-…

you’re appeasing the right?
no customers in sight

Red Hat Investigating Breach Impacting as Many as 28,000 Customers, Including the Navy and Congress https://www.404media.co/red-hat-investigating-breach-impacting-as-many-as-28-000-customers-including-the-navy-and-congress…

It's so much fun putting up a sale sign designed by @… and within seconds having customers see it and they bought from it.

Civility & common sense has truly gone to hell: Obnoxious audacity has become the norm worldwide.
And you can thank all the societal leeches that live by the philosophy of, "If you don't ask, you don't get".
☑️ Starbucks asks customers in South Korea to stop bringing printers and desktop computers into stores as workers transform cafes into remote offices | Fortune

Starbucks asks customers in South Korea to stop bringing printers and desktop computers into stores as workers transform cafés into remote offices
“You can just go and have a cup of coffee, work there—but people are taking it a little bit to the extreme nowadays,” one Korean studies professor said.

Singapore's three neobanks, GXS Bank, MariBank, and Trust Bank, together posted $278.1M in losses in 2024 as legacy rivals digitalized, intensifying competition (Dylan Loh/Nikkei Asia)
https://asia.nikkei.com/spotlight/asean…

Profits, and customers, prove elusive for Singapore's digital banks
Lenders backed by Grab, Sea, StanChart hang on as legacy rivals DBS, UOB, OCBC boom

🌐 Availability
Current: Public beta via #Anthropic #API for Tier 4 customers
Available: #AmazonBedrock integration
Coming soon:

«The representative would not commit to publicly notifying its customers about the bugs.» It's wild to me that any company would still try to get away with this without informing their customers!
"Sex toy maker Lovense caught leaking users' email addresses and exposing accounts to takeovers"
https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/29/sex-toy-maker-lovense-caught-leaking-users-email-addresses-and-exposing-accounts-to-takeovers/

DoorDash and Waymo announce a partnership to let DoorDash use Waymo's robotaxis for delivery, starting with deliveries from Phoenix's DashMart store (Andrew J. Hawkins/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/news/800455/waymo-doordash-autonomous-food-…

DoorDash will use Waymo’s robotaxis for delivery in Phoenix
Waymo is teaming up with DoorDash to use its driverless vehicles to delivery takeout orders to customers in Phoenix.

amazon_copurchases: Amazon co-purchasing network (2003)
Network of items for sale on amazon.com in 2003 and the items they "recommend" (via the "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought" feature). If one item is frequently co-purchased with another, then the first item recommends the second.
This network has 262111 nodes and 1234877 edges.
Tags: Economic, Commerce, Unweighted

And at least here in #NYC, I see evidence of people #reading all the time.
1 - Bookstores all over the city have customers at any time of day - they are often full, I struggle to get through to certain shelves at times.
2 - Every time I ride the subway i see someone reading a paper book on the train. Same thing with most times I go to any park or most cafes (at least ones where people sit alone).
3 - I have a friend who works at a major book #publisher and she’s been telling me all year that their sales are some of the best they’ve ever been. They’ve had multiple instances of needing to urgently order more books printed because of certain titles getting way more demand than expected. Those aren’t all celebrity memoirs or newest trendy fantasy either - it often happens with older titles, across genres.
4 - Nearly every acquaintance I have in the city (not just my friends) reads on a regular basis. I hear about books people have read and see them pulling books out all the time - most of the people I know read at least a book a month.

New Blog - Boot a VM in 3 Seconds
Woof. This made my brain hurt over a few weeks between delighting customers, but I persevered.
Firecracker is the tiny, lightweight VM technology behind AWS Lambda "serverless" Function as a Service. You can run these tiny, tiny, fast VMs on-premises if that solves a business problem.
Anyway, here is an actual working tutorial that I wrote as most of the major tutorials out there did not work for me. Enjoy.

Boot a VM in 3 Seconds - Firecracker
Boot a VM in 3 Seconds - Firecracker (This is a copy of the README from my GitHub repo where you will find all the files to do this yoursel...

Poseidon: A OneGraph Engine
Brad Bebee, \"Umit V. \c{C}ataly\"urek, Olaf Hartig, Ankesh Khandelwal, Simone Rondelli, Michael Schmidt, Lefteris Sidirourgos, Bryan Thompson
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.11166

Poseidon: A OneGraph Engine
We present the Poseidon engine behind the Neptune Analytics graph database service. Customers interact with Poseidon using the declarative openCypher query language, which enables requests that seamlessly combine traditional querying paradigms (such as graph pattern matching, variable length paths, aggregation) with algorithm invocations and has been syntactically extended to facilitate OneGraph interoperability, such as the disambiguation between globally unique IRIs (as exposed via RDF) vs. l…

I ordered something online today. Their form would autocomplete my address, only to then inform me that the address (they proposed themselves!) is not allowed to include any non-latin letters. 🤦 I guess they don't have a lot of German customers... 🙄

Big tech is laying off user researchers in droves, because it believes that coercing its customers is more profitable than silly things like "making good products people want to buy."
But now the FAFO pendulum is coming around, with Amazon's $2.5B dark pattern settlement and #a11y lawsuits galore.
#UX

UX so bad that it's illegal
Big tech is divesting from user-centered design, and getting into hot water with the law.

In case you missed it, my piece yesterday on the 176 CISA employees fired last Friday, which will not go behind the customary archive paywall.
It's critical to note that sources told me more RIFs are in store for the nation's embattled cybersecurity agency.
https://www.

The White House fired 176 CISA employees on Friday, with more layoffs feared
Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters leaked 5m Qantas, 23m Vietnam Air customers' records, Spanish cops dismantle GXC Team, Dutch gov't warns of China's Nexperia security risks, Breach of crypto betting platform Shuffle exposes user data, FCC chair says sites have removed barred Chinese electronics, much more

"Please do not use Google AI to find out our specials. Please go on our Facebook page or our website,"
the restaurant wrote in a weary Facebook post.
"Google AI is not accurate and is telling people specials that do not exist
which is causing angry customers yelling at our employees."
https://

Local Restaurant Exhausted as Google AI Keeps Telling Customers About Daily Specials That Don't Exist
A restaurant is begging its customers to please stop using notoriously unreliable Google AI to ask about its menu items.

Crunchyroll partners with Delta Airlines to offer over 2,000 anime titles on more than 169,000 seatback screens later in 2025 (Raquel 'Rocky' Harris/The Wrap)
https://www.thewrap.com/crunchyroll-delta-airlines-anime-partnership/

Crunchyroll Partners With Delta Airlines to Offer In-Flight Anime Viewing | Exclusive
Customers boarding Delta flights will have access to a selection of over 2,000 titles from the anime streamer.

🇺🇦 Auf radioeins läuft...
Two Door Cinema Club:
🎵 Happy Customers
#NowPlaying #TwoDoorCinemaClub
https://open.spotify.com/track/5BQV6zDJ8lRr8nN6lV2WWi

Bummer. I was looking forward to discovery.
“Amazon to pay $2.5 billion to settle FTC allegations it duped customers into enrolling in Prime”
https://apnews.com/article/amazon-prime-ftc-bezos-online-shopping-a3aa849de1279e3675a162ec6815…

Amazon to pay $2.5 billion to settle FTC allegations it duped customers into enrolling in Prime
Amazon has reached a historic $2.5 billion settlement with the Federal Trade Commission which said the online giant tricked customers into signing up for its Prime memberships, and made it difficult to cancel after they did so. The Seattle company will pay $1 billion in civil penalties — the largest fine in FTC history, and $1.5 billion will be paid to consumers who were unintentionally enrolled in Prime, or were deterred from canceling their subscriptions.

https://www.irishnews.com/news/uk/capita-hit-with-14m-fine-for-personal-data-breach-in-2023-cyber-attack-GAHNGXNPXJMQHDPO6UPQHDQNLA/
Capita hit with £14m fine for personal data breach in 2023 cyb…

Capita hit with £14m fine for personal data breach in 2023 cyber attack
Hackers stole personal information including pension details and staff records as well as details of customers of organisations Capita supports.

This is one of the most shortsighted and greediest things I've seen a successful tech company do in a while.
Just staggeringly mindblowing how the C-suite there failed to understand or just decided to ignore what their customers would do.

CoreWeave says it has signed a new $6.3B order with Nvidia, which guarantees that Nvidia will purchase any residual cloud capacity not sold to customers (Harshita Mary Varghese/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/business/coreweave-nv…

amazon_copurchases: Amazon co-purchasing network (2003)
Network of items for sale on amazon.com in 2003 and the items they "recommend" (via the "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought" feature). If one item is frequently co-purchased with another, then the first item recommends the second.
This network has 410236 nodes and 3356824 edges.
Tags: Economic, Commerce, Unweighted

Don't miss today's Metacurity for the critical infosec developments you might have missed over the weekend, including
--Embargo may be a rebranded version of ALPHV ransomware group,
--Russian threat group GreedyBear is stealing crypto,
--Israel beat Iran in the brief war's cyber conflicts,
--M&S resumes click and collect orders,
--GPT-5 was a disaster and easy to hack,
--Hacker breached dealership portal and could hack customers' cars,

New Embargo group may be a rebranded version of ALPHV ransomware gang
Russian threat group GreedyBear is stealing crypto, Israel beat Iran in the brief war's cyber conflicts, M&S resumes click and collect orders, GPT-5 was a disaster and easy to hack, Hacker breached dealership portal and could hack customers' cars, Korea's Yes24 ransomwared again, much more

Researchers report rare intrusion by suspected Chinese hackers into Russian tech firm https://therecord.media/rare-china-linked-intrusion-russian-tech-firms

Salesforce says it expects FY 2030 revenue of $60B , vs. $58.37B est., excluding impact from the $8B pending acquisition of data management company Informatica (Jordan Novet/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/15/salesforce-stock-jumps-a…

Salesforce stock jumps after company offers rosy forecast for 2030
Salesforce is counting on Agentforce artificial intelligence software to pull in more revenue from customers.

New Blog - Boot a VM in 3 Seconds
Woof. This made my brain hurt over a few weeks between delighting customers, but I persevered.
Firecracker is the tiny, lightweight VM technology behind AWS Lambda "serverless" Function as a Service. You can run these tiny, tiny, fast VMs on-premises if that solves a business problem.
Anyway, here is an actual working tutorial that I wrote as most of the major tutorials out there did not work for me. Enjoy.

GitHub - DennisFaucher/firecracker: Learning Firecracker "Serverless" MicroVMs
Learning Firecracker "Serverless" MicroVMs. Contribute to DennisFaucher/firecracker development by creating an account on GitHub.

A security researcher said
flaws in a carmaker’s online dealership portal
exposed the private information
and vehicle data of its customers,
and could have allowed hackers to remotely break into any of its customers’ vehicles.
Eaton Zveare, who works as a security researcher at software delivery company Harness,
told TechCrunch the flaw he discovered
allowed the creation of an admin account
that granted “unfettered access” to the unnamed carma…

Security flaws in a carmaker's web portal let one hacker remotely unlock cars from anywhere | TechCrunch
Security researcher Eaton Zveare told TechCrunch that the flaws he discovered in the carmaker's centralized dealer portal exposed vast access to customer and vehicle data. With this access, Zveare said he could remotely take over a customer's account and unlock their cars, and more.

Remedio, which uses AI to detect risky device misconfigurations on corporate networks, raised $65M led by Bessemer, a source says at a $300M valuation (Thomas Brewster/Forbes)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewste

How This Israeli Hacker Bootstrapped Her AI Cyber Company To Profitability
An alum of Israel’s intelligence complex, Tal Kollender built her now $300 million-valued startup largely through word of mouth, counting Amazon and Coca-Cola as customers.

amazon_copurchases: Amazon co-purchasing network (2003)
Network of items for sale on amazon.com in 2003 and the items they "recommend" (via the "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought" feature). If one item is frequently co-purchased with another, then the first item recommends the second.
This network has 403394 nodes and 3387388 edges.
Tags: Economic, Commerce, Unweighted

Filing: Nvidia reveals its top two customers accounted for 39% of its Q2 revenue, up from 25% in Q2, 2024 (Kif Leswing/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/28/nvidias-top-two-mystery-customers-made-up-39percent-of-its-q2-revenue-.html…

Nvidia's top two mystery customers made up 39% of the chipmaker's Q2 revenue
Nvidia's top two customers making up 39% of its total revenue is renewing concern about the risk of the chipmakers clientele concentration.

Yes, at German discount supermarkets, you can purchase a do-it-yourself 'Balkonsolar' system and battery. Simply plug it in and you're ready to go.
However, Aldi Australia offers complete systems: 6 kW solar, a 5.5 kW inverter and a 10 kWh LFP battery, fully installed for AU$7,000 (€4,000)!

Supermarket giant expands rooftop solar and battery offer
Budget supermarket chain Aldi is expanding its residential solar business, opening up sales of its rooftop PV and battery energy storage packages to customers in Australia’s eastern states after a trial in Victoria.

Meanwhile, in other "No shit, Sherlock" news:
☑️ Majority of companies hiking prices to cover tariffs: KPMG
https://www.newsweek.com/majority-companies-hiking-prices-cover-tariffs-kpmg-10840802

Majority of Companies Hiking Prices to Cover Tariffs: KPMG
KPMG LLP found that many companies are passing costs onto customers while adopting other strategic changes to cope with the duties.

🇺🇦 Auf radioeins läuft...
Two Door Cinema Club:
🎵 Happy Customers
#NowPlaying #TwoDoorCinemaClub
https://open.spotify.com/track/5BQV6zDJ8lRr8nN6lV2WWi

AP is ending its weekly book reviews, beginning Sept. 1.
This was a difficult decision but one made after a thorough review of AP’s story offerings
and what is being most read on our website and mobile apps as well as what customers are using.
Unfortunately, the audience for book reviews is relatively low and we can no longer sustain the time it takes to plan, coordinate, write and edit reviews.
AP will continue covering books as stories, but at the moment those will …

The Associated Press tells its book critics that it’s ending weekly reviews
Terrible news from The Associated Press. Media Nation correspondent J.A. passes along this note from Anthony McCartney, the AP’s global entertainment and lifestyle editor. AP to end its weekl…

A Nigerian cybercrime ring is actively targeting established companies in the transportation and aviation industries with BEC scams.
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/07/phishers-target-aviation-execs-to-scam-customers/

NBCUniversal warns customers that its networks may be dropped from YouTube TV if the two parties cannot reach a new distribution agreement by September 30 (Sara Fischer/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2025/09/26/nbc-youtube-tv-blackout-warning

NBC warns customers it may go dark on YouTube TV
This is the third major, public pay-TV dispute between a national content provider and YouTube TV in recent months.

Woof. This made my brain hurt over a few weeks between delighting customers, but I persevered.
Firecracker is the tiny, lightweight VM technology behind AWS Lambda "serverless" Function as a Service. You can run these tiny, tiny, fast VMs on-premises if that solves a business problem.
Anyway, here is an actual working tutorial that I wrote as most of the major tutorials out there did not work for me. Enjoy.

amazon_copurchases: Amazon co-purchasing network (2003)
Network of items for sale on amazon.com in 2003 and the items they "recommend" (via the "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought" feature). If one item is frequently co-purchased with another, then the first item recommends the second.
This network has 403394 nodes and 3387388 edges.
Tags: Economic, Commerce, Unweighted

World Liberty Financial blocking Justin Sun's wallet contrasts with the Trump sons' complaints about being "debanked", the issue they said inspired the project (Molly White/Citation Needed)
https://www.citationneeded.news/issue-92/

Issue 92 – The scam of all scams
The Trumps “debank” major customers from their “anti-debanking” cryptocurrency venture, and a CFTC nominee says the Winklevosses are blackballing him

Filing: credit reporting giant TransUnion discloses a data breach affecting 4.4M customers' personal info but claims "no credit information was accessed" (Zack Whittaker/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/28/tran

TransUnion says hackers stole 4.4 million customers' personal information | TechCrunch
The credit reporting giant confirmed unauthorized access to a third-party application storing the personal information of its customers.

Walmart has agreed to pay
$5.6 million
to settle a lawsuit alleging that the retail giant
charged California customers prices that were higher than advertised
https://www.aol.com/news/walmart-pay-5-6-million-011551472.html

Walmart to pay $5.6 million to settle lawsuit alleging California shoppers were overcharged
Walmart has agreed to pay $5.6 million to settle a lawsuit filed by the Santa Clara County District Attorney's Office, alleging that the retail giant overcha...

Apple to start selling Vision Pro-compatible PlayStation VR2 Sense controllers for $250 on November 11 and the $130 Logitech Muse digital pen on October 22 (Zac Hall/9to5Mac)
https://9to5mac.com/2025/10/15/apple-v

Apple Vision Pro: PlayStation VR2 Sense controller in November, Logitech Muse and standalone Dual Knit Band available to order - 9to5Mac
Apple Vision Pro is officially being upgraded from the M2 to the new M5, but existing customers don’t need an...

amazon_copurchases: Amazon co-purchasing network (2003)
Network of items for sale on amazon.com in 2003 and the items they "recommend" (via the "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought" feature). If one item is frequently co-purchased with another, then the first item recommends the second.
This network has 403394 nodes and 3387388 edges.
Tags: Economic, Commerce, Unweighted

US insurance giant Allianz Life says hackers stole the personal information of the "majority" of its customers, staffers, and employees, in a mid-July breach (Zack Whittaker/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/26/alli

Allianz Life says 'majority' of customers' personal data stolen in cyberattack | TechCrunch
Exclusive: Allianz Life said the "majority" of its customers and employees had data stolen in the July cyberattack. The company said it has notified the FBI.

amazon_copurchases: Amazon co-purchasing network (2003)
Network of items for sale on amazon.com in 2003 and the items they "recommend" (via the "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought" feature). If one item is frequently co-purchased with another, then the first item recommends the second.
This network has 403394 nodes and 3387388 edges.
Tags: Economic, Commerce, Unweighted

https://www.theverge.com/notepad-microsoft-newsletter/754647/microsoft-grok-4-roll-out-private-preview-notepad?utm_content=buffer2ce4c&…

Microsoft is cautiously onboarding Grok 4 following Hitler concerns
Microsoft is taking a careful approach with rolling out Grok 4 on Azure AI Foundry. It’s working on a private preview for a handful of customers.

Source: HR software company Gusto paid ~$600M to acquire Guideline, which offers 401(k) plans to SMBs; Guideline raised $340M and had a $1.15B valuation in 2021 (TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/01/sources-g…

Sources: Gusto paid $600M to acquire Guideline, plans to divest customers linked to rivals | TechCrunch
While the HR tech Guideline was last valued at $1.15 billion, the sale will likely yield a profit for most investors.

Jeremy Clarkson's pub has been 'swindled' out of £27,000 by hackers
https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/showbiz-news/jeremy-clarkson-pub-hackers-cotswolds-32433280

Jeremy Clarkson's pub has been 'swindled' out of £27,000 by hackers
The 65-year-old also accused some customers of failing to use the bathrooms properly

Sources: the Trump administration cut 176 CISA jobs last week as part of laying off 4,000 US federal workers, and is likely to make further mass CISA layoffs (Cynthia B Brumfield/Metacurity)
https://www.metacurity.com/the-white-house-f…

The White House fired 176 CISA employees on Friday, with more layoffs feared
Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters leaked 5m Qantas, 23m Vietnam Air customers' records, Spanish cops dismantle GXC Team, Dutch gov't warns of China's Nexperia security risks, Breach of crypto betting platform Shuffle exposes user data, FCC chair says sites have removed barred Chinese electronics, much more

Amazon plans to make OpenAI's new gpt-oss open-weight models available on Bedrock and SageMaker, the first time it has offered OpenAI's models to customers (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-08-05/am…

Paxos applies to create a US national trust bank, which would allow it to manage and hold assets for customers, following applications by Circle and Ripple (Hannah Lang/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boa

The Senate passes a measure requiring Nvidia and AMD to prioritize US customers over China for advanced AI chip sales, as part of a defense policy bill (Oma Seddiq/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-10/sena…

In an email to customers, Venmo says Venmo users and PayPal users will be able to send each other money natively in the app in the US and worldwide in November (Amanda Silberling/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/30/venmo-an…

Venmo and PayPal users will finally be able to send money to each other | TechCrunch
For years, customers have been using convoluted workarounds to transfer money between the two services.

Google says Cl0p hackers who exploited vulnerabilities in Oracle's E-Business Suite have stolen data from "dozens" of organizations since at least July 10 (Zack Whittaker/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/09/dozens-of-o…

‘Dozens’ of organizations had data stolen in Oracle-linked hacks | TechCrunch
The mass-hacks targeting Oracle E-Business customers is the latest hacking campaign by Clop, an extortion group known for abusing security flaws in enterprise products to steal large amounts of sensitive data.

Relace, which makes tools and specialized language models to help AI agents code faster for customers like Lovable and Figma, raised a $23M Series A led by a16z (Stephanie Palazzolo/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/an

Andreessen Backs a Startup Developing Tools That Coding Agents Use
Countless startups sell tools to software engineers, such as version control systems to track who’s making changes to a codebase, and sandboxes where code can be safely run and tested without affecting the main system.Now, a startup is building such tools for artificial intelligence agents that ...

Verizon agrees to buy Starry, which provides home internet via millimeter wave tech to ~100K customers and filed for bankruptcy in 2023, for an undisclosed sum (Masha Abarinova/Fierce Network)
https://www.fierce-network.com/broadband/verizon-buys-starry-what-y…

Toronto-based Spellbook, whose AI helps with legal contracts, raised $50M led by Khosla Ventures at a $350M valuation and says it has ~4,000 customers (Lizette Chapman/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-09/k…

Inside Intel's new 700-acre factories in the Arizona desert, which cost $32B and are starting large-scale 18A chip production, as it seeks to impress customers (Michael Acton/Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/e4b1fa29-6027-44d9-8375-b3368132dd1b
…

Intel CTO Sachin Katti says 18A and Panther Lake are "foundational to our future" and manufacturing is "mission critical, not just for Intel but for" the US (New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/09/technol

Intel’s Big Bet: Inside the Chipmaker’s Make-or-Break Factory
The centerpiece of the company’s comeback hopes is a multibillion-dollar facility in the Arizona desert. Will it draw new customers?

Brex says it has secured a license in the EU, allowing it to issue credit and debit cards and offer its spend management products to European customers (Julie Bort/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/07/ipo-hopeful-brex-scored-…

IPO hopeful Brex scored major win to sell in the EU, plans UK expansion | TechCrunch
The EU has authorized Brex to sell its spend management products directly in all 30 countries, "no workarounds required," CEO Pedro Franceschi said.

New York-based Casap, which helps banks automate disputes and fight fraud, raised a $25M Series A led by Emergence Capital, bringing its total funding to $33.5M (Jeff Kauflin/Forbes)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffkauflin/2

Everyone Hates Credit Card Disputes. This Fintech Is Using AI To Fix That.
New York startup Casap has raised $25 million in new funding to help banks tackle the thorny problem of credit and debit card disputes, aiming to make the process smoother for honest customers and tougher for fraudsters.

Anthropic and IBM partner to make Anthropic's Claude models available in IBM's latest IDE, and IBM aims to make Claude available in more products soon (Belle Lin/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/articles/anthro…

Alvys, an AI-powered logistics software provider, raised a $40M Series B led by RTP Global, bringing its total funding to $77M; Alvys has 1000 customers (Mary Ann Azevedo/Crunchbase News)
https://news.crunchbase.com/transportation/logistics-software-star…

Exclusive: Trucker's Son Bucks Logistics Funding Decline with $40M Raise For Startup Alvys
Alvys, an AI-powered logistics software provider, has raised $40 million in an RTP Global-led Series B funding, the company tells Crunchbase News exclusively.

T-Mobile's Starlink-powered satellite service T-Satellite is now generally available as a standalone subscription for US users, not just T-Mobile customers (Emma Roth/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/news/712546/starlink-powered-t-sate…

Starlink-powered ‘T-Satellite’ service is now live on T-Mobile
T-Mobile is rolling out its Starlink-powered satellite service, T-Satellite, which will let customers with supported devices send text messages and share their location without cellular service.

Microsoft launches the 13.8-inch Surface Laptop 5G for business customers, featuring Intel Core Ultra series 2 processors, shipping on August 26 for $1,799 (Zac Bowden/Windows Central)
https://www.windowscentral.com/hardware/surface/sur…

Microsoft launches Intel-exclusive Surface Laptop 5G with reengineered design — but it's SHOCKINGLY expensive
The Surface Laptop 7 with 5G is now available to order, but only for business customers and with an Intel Core Ultra chip. The device will ship on August 26 and starts at an eyewatering $1,799.

Anker paid users of its Eufy security cameras $2 per video of staged or real package and car thefts to train its AI systems from December 2024 to February 2025 (Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/04/anke

Anker offered Eufy camera owners $2 per video for AI training | TechCrunch
Hundreds of Eufy customers have donated hundreds of thousands of videos to train the company’s AI systems.