Tootfinder

Don't leave for the weekend without reading today's packed Metacurity for the most crucial infosec developments you should know, including
--Customers keep buying Predator spyware despite US sanctions
--Ukraine paralyzed top Siberian ISP,
--Meta AI shows other customers' sensitive info,
--Whole Foods still grappling with product disruptions,
--Malicious adtech is highly interconnected,
--Cybercrims are selling lost RCMP key containing informants…

Customers keep buying Predator spyware despite US sanctions
Ukraine paralyzed top Siberian ISP, Meta AI shows other customers' sensitive info, Whole Foods still grappling with product disruptions, Malicious adtech is highly interconnected, Cybercrims are selling lost RCMP key containing informants' data, BEC scammer sentenced to four years, much more

Louis Vuitton says customers in Turkey, South Korea and UK impacted by data breaches https://therecord.media/louis-vuitton-says-customers-impacted-by-data-breaches

Belkin's move to brick Wemo devices highlights how little accountability IoT companies face when abandoning connected products customers paid for (Scharon Harding/Ars Technica)
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/07/…

Belkin shows tech firms getting too comfortable with bricking customers’ stuff
There’s no easy alternative, and IoT customers are paying the price.

oh ha ha i kind of chuckled when i read the first paragraph of an abstract from 30 years ago
"The continuing miniaturization of computer hardware has made mobile computing increasingly popular, and it is a hit with researchers and programmers at CITI. Part of the attraction is the vast need for operating system hacking on these 80x86-based computers -- laptop manufacturers apparently encourage their customers to run MS-DOS and its derivatives!"

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 400727 nodes and 3200440 edges.
Tags: Economic, Commerce, Unweighted

Coinbase was hacked and lost 1000s of customers' name, address, phone, email, driver’s license, and passport info.
This is where the Orwellian "Know Your Customer" bullshit gets us. 1000s of companies store vast amounts of private data they aren't qualified to protect!

If you still think that #Apple cares for the #privacy of its paying customers:
Apple Gave #Governments Data on Thousands of Push

Life on Different Paths 🚶🚶‍♀️🚶‍♂️
生活诸多路径 🚶🚶‍♀️🚶‍♂️
📷 Nikon FE
🎞️FOMAPAN Action 400
buy me ☕️ ?/请我喝杯☕️？
#filmphotography

It's worth bearing in mind that all AI companies are in that phase where they burn money to attract the most customers and hope that the competition blinks first. That means all AI is pretty badly underpriced.
For coding, that's a problem. It's just on the edge of being arguably positive for some. If the price goes up by an order of ten, the bubble is going to burst. And it may take the other AI use cases with it. After all, coding was kind of a killer app.

Anthropic Is Bleeding Out
Hello premium customers! Feel free to get in touch at ez@betteroffline.com if you're ever feeling chatty. And if you're not one yet, please subscribe and support my independent brain madness. Also, thank you to Kasey Kagawa for helping with the maths on this. Soundtrack: Killer Be Killed -

Approximation Algorithms for the Cumulative Vehicle Routing Problem with Stochastic Demands
Jingyang Zhao, Mingyu Xiao
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.08316 htt…

Approximation Algorithms for the Cumulative Vehicle Routing Problem with Stochastic Demands
In the Cumulative Vehicle Routing Problem (Cu-VRP), we need to find a feasible itinerary for a capacitated vehicle located at the depot to satisfy customers' demand, as in the well-known Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP), but the goal is to minimize the cumulative cost of the vehicle, which is based on the vehicle's load throughout the itinerary. If the demand of each customer is unknown until the vehicle visits it, the problem is called Cu-VRP with Stochastic Demands (Cu-VRPSD). Assume that the ap…

Qantas confirms personal info of 5.7M customers were held on the system compromised in a recent cyberattack, including names, email addresses, and phone numbers (Stephanie Chalmers/ABC)
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-07-09/qan

Qantas confirms 5.7 million customers were impacted in cyber attack
Qantas Group chief executive Vanessa Hudson says the airline is focused on understanding what details of their data have been compromised and will let them know as soon as possible.

Aspect-Based Opinion Summarization with Argumentation Schemes
Wendi Zhou, Ameer Saadat-Yazd, Nadin Kokciyan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.09917 https://

Aspect-Based Opinion Summarization with Argumentation Schemes
Reviews are valuable resources for customers making purchase decisions in online shopping. However, it is impractical for customers to go over the vast number of reviews and manually conclude the prominent opinions, which prompts the need for automated opinion summarization systems. Previous approaches, either extractive or abstractive, face challenges in automatically producing grounded aspect-centric summaries. In this paper, we propose a novel summarization system that not only captures pred…

"Sorry, bathrooms are for customers only"
Well, you've just guaranteed that I won't be a customer later.

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…

So are sports gambling and horse-racing authorities the latest vertical to be hit by Scattered Spider? Yesterday, bookmakers Paddy Power and Betfair admitted to a cyberattack, an incident that follows an attack last month on the British Horseracing Authority.

Personal information belonging to customers of Paddy Power and Betfair compromised in data breach

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…

One way to ensure I don't buy an item is to market it "as seen on Shark Tank" -- but that's probably just me. Another way to ensure I don't buy an item is to market it as having AI features (??), and apparently that's widespread.
https://futurism.com/customers-see-ai-…

Something Hilarious Happens When Potential Customers See That a Product Has AI Features
New research explores how customers react to products that are marketed as having AI — with striking results.

DirecTV experiments with discontinuing satellite TV subscriptions for new customers in several US regions and directing subscribers toward its streaming option (Luke Bouma/Cord Cutters News)
https://cordcuttersnews.com/directv-stop…

DIRECTV Stops Selling Satellite TV for New Customers in Select Areas | Cord Cutters News
DIRECTV, a leading provider of television entertainment, has announced a significant shift in its service offerings, discontinuing satellite TV subscriptions for new customers in several regions across the United States. The company is now directing new subscribers toward its streaming option, as part of a broader strategy to adapt to evolving consumer preferences and technological […]

I just saw a post saying someone let their agent AI run for 19 hours to solve a problem.
Is that the expectation?
I’m going to predict a future scandal: A global consulting firm has been caught charging human hours for agentic AI elapsed time. If I were an unscrupulous consulting firm, I could charge customers 24 hours a day at ludicrously high prices to deliver what likely would have been an ill-advised and doomed project anyway.

Not a fan of customers who drive me mad. I’m doing my part of the relationship and I really need them to do their part.

Man, it took me a while to warm up to Costco, but it's really is one of the better corners of capitalism. They pay people fairly, sell only quality stuff, didn't disavow DEI, and aren't owned and run by hedge fund assholes.
It's amazing how nice it is not to have to evaluate every purchase. If it is there, it's usually because it has been proven to make customers happy and thus earned its shelf space.
And, no surprise, the CEO dogfoods himself.

The Pants Cost $20. They Explain $86 Billion of Costco Sales. — The Wall Street Journal
Kirkland Signature is now bigger than some of the world’s biggest companies—and it has become essential to Costco’s business

»Bitcoin Depot breach exposes data of nearly 27,000 crypto users:
Bitcoin Depot, an operator of Bitcoin ATMs, is notifying customers of a data breach incident that has exposed their sensitive information.«
Who ever believed in digital security with Bitcoin service providers?
🤷‍♂️

On expected #V2G returns: “Given the Netherlands’ more strained grid, Faton believes savings will be even higher there.”
Tough bet in a country where grid operators provide no financial incentives to residential customers to shift demand, let alone support the local grid with V2G.

'Utrecht Energized' launched: How bidirectional charging is set to make the breakthrough - electrive.com
Bidirectional charging is often hailed as the holy grail of e-mobility. The batteries of electric cars are not only used for driving but can also power homes

Alert - new email spam angle!

Anthropic unveils a new set of Claude Gov models tailored for US national security customers and designed to be applied to planning, analysis, and more (Kyle Wiggers/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/05/anthropic-u…

Anthropic unveils custom AI models for U.S. national security customers | TechCrunch
Anthropic says that it has released a new set of AI models tailored for U.S. national security customers.

European cloud providers and enterprise IT customers are sounding alarms over changes to VMware's licensing structure that have driven prices up by as much as 1,500% since Broadcom's acquisition of the virtualisation giant.
https://www.computing.co.uk/news/20…

European customers rail against Broadcom's 1,500% VMware price hike
A new report concludes that Broadcom’s price rises are leaving European customers without viable VMware alternatives.

Tesla's European car sales nosedive for fifth month in a row.
Tesla 'has sustained brand and reputational damage in part due to CEO Elon Musk's incendiary rhetoric and political activity.'
That's politely put.
https://www.cnb…

Tesla's European car sales nosedive for fifth month as customers switch to Chinese EVs
The U.S. EV maker has sustained brand and reputational damage in part due to CEO Elon Musk's incendiary rhetoric and political activity.

Sad news in the parish this evening. After 34 years, the Famous Pizza D'or in Monaghan town is closing their doors on June 1st 2025.
#Mastodaoine #Monaghan

Denkvoer voor het elektriciteitsnetwerk: baseren op hoogste vraag, of inzetten op Non Wire Alternatives om daarmee de netwerkkosten te verlagen?
#energietransitie

Is there a better way to serve retail customers? How about a smaller and cheaper grid connection
Hapless customers have had to pay for an expensive grid design that has delivered a lot of capacity that sits idle most of the time. There is a smarter solution.

From Translink
A new era for SkyTrain: The Mark V rolls into service on the Expo Line
The first of 47 new trains that will bring more space, comfort, and modern design to customers across Metro Vancouver.
Wider aisles with more standing room, handrails and new leaning pads
Spacious multi-use areas for bikes, luggage, strollers, wheelchairs, & other mobility devices
Enhanced safety and accessibility with visual door closure and emergency braking indicators

I do some advisory work with #Nubank $NU which is a big (well over 100M customers), young and fast growing Brazilian based fintech that has some very cool and senior people working remotely from the US like Michael Nygard (author of Release It! - Chief Architect), and @…@…

While I'm waiting to receive feedback/review from customers, I have some available time for illustration or design.
HMU if I can help out!
#Work #Illustration #Design

Twenty-seven states and DC sue 23andMe to oppose the sale of DNA data from its customers without their direct consent (Rylee Kirk/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/10/business/23andme-data-lawsuit.html

23andMe Customers Did Not Expect Their DNA Data Would Be Sold, Lawsuit Claims
The genetic-testing company, which collected DNA data from users, is for sale in bankruptcy court. Now, 27 states and the District of Columbia oppose selling the data without express consent.

Trial Length, Pricing, and Rationally Inattentive Customers
F. Nguyen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.06422 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.064…

Trial Length, Pricing, and Rationally Inattentive Customers
The "free trial" followed by automatic renewal is a dominant business model in the digital economy. Standard models explain trials as a mechanism for consumers to learn their valuation for a product. We propose a complementary theory based on the rational inattention framework. Consumers know their valuation but face a cognitive cost to remember to cancel an unwanted subscription. We model this using a Shannon entropy-based cost of information processing, where a consumer's baseline attention l…

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

Regardless of the weather, the cyber world is always hot, so check out today's Metacurity for the crucial infosec developments you should know, including
--M&S and Qantas leaders remain mum on ransomware payments,
--M&S chairman says two other British companies' ransomware attacks have gone unreported,
--5.7m customers impacted by Qantas attack,
--US sanctions DPRK man for IT worker scheme,
--DoJ seeks to bring COVID hacker to US,
--Rubio im…

M&S and Qantas leaders remain mum on ransomware payments
M&S chairman says two other British companies' ransomware attacks have gone unreported, 5.7m customers impacted by Qantas attack, US sanctions DPRK man for IT worker scheme, DoJ seeks to bring COVID hacker to US, Rubio impersonated in AI voice effort, MSFT patches 137+ flaws, much more

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.00075 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csSI_…

Optimizing Treatment Allocation in the Presence of Interference
In Influence Maximization (IM), the objective is to -- given a budget -- select the optimal set of entities in a network to target with a treatment so as to maximize the total effect. For instance, in marketing, the objective is to target the set of customers that maximizes the total response rate, resulting from both direct treatment effects on targeted customers and indirect, spillover, effects that follow from targeting these customers. Recently, new methods to estimate treatment effects in …

O'Reilly: GenAI has adopted a colonialist business model.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/timo3_proud-of-the-cloudflare-team-working-to-build-activity-7345899260506271745-mlHS

If you want to understand why O'Reilly is a supporter of this announcement, and want to ask both me and Matthew Prince about it, join our July 14 conversation on Live with Tim O'Reilly. | Tim O'Reilly
If you want to understand why O'Reilly is a supporter of this announcement, and want to ask both me and Matthew Prince about it, join our July 14 conversation on Live with Tim O'Reilly. AI has adopted colonialism as its business model: Extract resources from others and use it to enrich yourself and your customers at the expense of those whose resources you have taken, without giving much back. It's high time we started developing new mechanisms to enable content monetization for creators, not …

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

SmartLess podcast hosts create SmartLess Mobile, a phone company that will run on T-Mobile's network and target customers who can save money by taking less data (Lucas Shaw/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

Real-time Optimization of Transport Chains for Single Wagon Load Railway Transport
Carsten Moldenhauer, Philipp Germann, Cedric Heimhofer, Caroline Spieckermann, Andreas Andresen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.06621

Real-time Optimization of Transport Chains for Single Wagon Load Railway Transport
The freight branch of the Swiss national railways, SBB Cargo, offers customers to ship single or few wagons within its wagon load transportation system (WLV). In this system, wagons travel along a transport chain which is a sequence of consecutive trains. Recently, SBB Cargo redesigned its IT systems and renewed the computation of these transport chains. This paper describes the main design decisions and technical details: data structures, search algorithms, mathematical optimization of through…

The Impact of Event Data Partitioning on Privacy-aware Process Discovery
Jungeun Lim, Stephan A. Fahrenkrog-Petersen, Xixi Lu, Jan Mendling, Minseok Song
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.06008

The Impact of Event Data Partitioning on Privacy-aware Process Discovery
Information systems support the execution of business processes. The event logs of these executions generally contain sensitive information about customers, patients, and employees. The corresponding privacy challenges can be addressed by anonymizing the event logs while still retaining utility for process discovery. However, trading off utility and privacy is difficult: the higher the complexity of event log, the higher the loss of utility by anonymization. In this work, we propose a pipeline …

Cloud computing startup Crusoe plans to buy ~$400M worth of AI chips from AMD to rent to customers for its US data center that will come online by fall (Max A. Cherney/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/business/neocloud-c…

ConnectWise says nation-state attack targeted multiple ScreenConnect customers https://therecord.media/connectwise-nation-state-attack-targeted-some-customers

Online Selection with Uncertain Disruption
Yihua Xu, S\"uleyman Kerimov, Sebastian Perez-Salazar
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.22999 https://

Online Selection with Uncertain Disruption
In numerous online selection problems, decision-makers (DMs) must allocate on the fly limited resources to customers with uncertain values. The DM faces the tension between allocating resources to currently observed values and saving them for potentially better, unobserved values in the future. Addressing this tension becomes more demanding if an uncertain disruption occurs while serving customers. Without any disruption, the DM gets access to the capacity information to serve customers through…

One factor was important to me - local versus conglomerate. One of the companies, as highly rated as our choice, operates in 4 province. They've grown by buying smaller firms for customers and technicians. The sales rep was knowledgeable but his process felt slick and formulaic. Our chosen firm is large, more than 30 service people, and the owner is still active in the business. Our salesperson spent a lot of time asking questions and put together the quote in a more freestyle approach.

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.03941 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_mat…

Minimising Numbers of Losses and Abandonments in Small Call Centres Under a Transient Regime
We consider the problem of allocating customers to agents in small call centres so that transient performance indicators in terms of expected numbers of losses and abandonments are optimised. To gain insight into the general structure of optimal policies, we start by (i) using backward induction based upon Bellman's equation for a finite-horizon discrete-time model, and (ii) deriving stationary policies for an infinite-horizon continuous-time model with discounting. We then compare the performa…

Gift article from WaPo.
At the #capybara cafe, people line up to snuggle the world’s largest rodents
Owners of Florida’s Capybara Café say they are surprised by its popularity, hosting about 100 customers per day.
By Kyle Melnick
https://

At the capybara cafe, people line up to snuggle the world’s largest rodents
Owners of Florida’s Capybara Café say they are surprised by its popularity, hosting about 100 customers per day.

Databricks says it expects to generate $3.7B in annualized revenue by July, up 50% YoY, with nearly 50 of its 15,000 customers spending over $10M annually (Jordan Novet/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/11/databricks…

Databricks says annualized revenue will reach $3.7 billion by next month
Databricks told investors and analysts on Wednesday that annualized revenue will hit $3.7 billion by July, with 50% year-over-year growth.

⛽ Europe's biggest 'green' methanol plant opens in Denmark
#energy

Europe's biggest 'green' methanol plant opens in Denmark
Europe's largest "green" methanol plant opened in Denmark on Tuesday, boosting the continent's emissions reduction efforts—with customers ranging from shipping giant Maersk to toymaker Lego and pharmaceutical firm Novo Nordisk.

If you took off time last week, you should check out today's Metacurity, which succinctly recaps the most critical infosec developments you might have missed, including
--IT giant Ingram Micro's systems shut down after SafePay ransomware attack
--Qantas is talking with threat actor after attack,
--Android spyware flaw exposes thousands of customers,
--Ransomware negotiator may have struck deals with hackers,
--US sanctions bulletproof hoster,
--US g…

IT giant Ingram Micro's systems shut down after SafePay ransomware attack
Qantas is talking with threat actor after attack, Android spyware flaw exposes thousands of customers, Ransomware negotiator may have struck deals with hackers, US sanctions bulletproof hoster, US goes after DRPK "IT worker" program, A racist hacked Columbia and the NYT shamed itself, much more

Apple sparks a backlash from iPhone owners after pushing a notification from the Apple Wallet app that promoted a Fandango deal for Apple's F1 movie (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/24/iphone-customers-upset-…

iPhone customers upset by Apple Wallet ad pushing 'F1' movie | TechCrunch
However well-received the film may be, iPhone users don't necessarily want their built-in utilities, like their digital wallet, marketing to them.

👀
https://www.theverge.com/news/695501/cloudflare-block-ai-crawlers-default

Cloudflare will now block AI crawlers by default
Cloudflare has announced that it will now block AI web crawlers by default for new customers. It’s also introducing a new “Pay Per Crawl” fee that will let some publishers make AI companies pay to scrape their content.

AKEGEN: A LLM-based Tabular Corpus Generator for Evaluating Dataset Discovery in Data Lakes
Zhenwei Dai, Chuan Lei, Asterios Katsifodimos, Xiao Qin, Christos Faloutsos, Huzefa Rangwala
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.04687

AKEGEN: A LLM-based Tabular Corpus Generator for Evaluating Dataset Discovery in Data Lakes
How to generate a large, realistic set of tables along with joinability relationships, to stress-test dataset discovery methods? Dataset discovery methods aim to automatically identify related data assets in a data lake. The development and evaluation of such solutions for customers from a wide range of business domains, relies on diverse, high quality and domain-specific tabular benchmarks. Large language models (LLMs) are trained on a wide variety of text data, which can provide a strong foun…

This is only a problem for Reddit as long as the spammers don’t pay. The “solution” will be a paid program for “product placement” or something, and presto, they become valued customers.
The future’s so bright, it burns my eyes.
https://9to5mac.com/2025/06/26/r…

This is only a problem for Reddit as long as the spammers don’t pay. The “solution” will be a paid program for “product placement” or something, and presto, they become valued customers.
The future’s so bright, it burns my eyes.
https://9to5mac.com/2025/06/26/r…

This is only a problem for Reddit as long as the spammers don’t pay. The “solution” will be a paid program for “product placement” or something, and presto, they become valued customers.
The future’s so bright, it burns my eyes.
https://9to5mac.com/2025/06/26/r…

Sources: Samsung is delaying completion of its Texas fab due to a lack of customers; the plant was meant to come online in 2024 before being pushed to 2026 (Nikkei Asia)
https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Technology/S…

Samsung delaying completion of US chip plant due to lack of customers
South Korean chipmaker in no rush to install equipment at Texas factory

Tooting My Own Horn: Three Years And Counting
Why don't contractors stay in touch with potential customers? And I extended my blog streak to three years.
https://www.bobmuellerwriter.com/tooting-my-own-horn-three-years-and-counting/

Tooting My Own Horn: Three Years And Counting – Bob Mueller
I extended my weekly posting streak to three years this week. Still don't have the pool up. And I wonder about conspiracy theories.

This is exactly what I was afraid of when #laravel took VC money.
https://hachyderm.io/@j3j5/114784445289560905

As an OEM, I want to make my customers angry, so that they keep knocking on my RCE vulns.
https://mrbruh.com/asus_p2/

Interested in how "sovereign EU" AWS will work with Cloudfront and Trust Services (certificates) as these still currently require the use of us-east-1... and the subsequent agreement to submit to US courts for disputes.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/03/aws

AWS forms EU-based cloud unit as customers fret about Trump 2.0
: Locally run, Euro-controlled, ‘legally independent,' and ready by the end of 2025

More Belgian (Flemish?) households with solar panels, batteries or electric vehicles will be able to benefit from the flexibility they can offer the energy system as energy retailers Bolt and Trevion collaborate with VPP operator Powernaut.
https://powernaut.io/press/powernaut-a

Powernaut, Bolt, Trevion and Partners launch Belgium’s first energy contracts that pay consumers for grid support - Powernaut
Using Powernaut’s smart software, households with solar panels, home batteries, or EVs can now earn money by allowing their energy retailer to manage their devices intelligently. For example, devices may charge or reduce output during peak times to avoid grid overload. Retailers like Bolt and Trevion are offering these new contracts, allowing customers to benefit financially without sacrificing comfort. Partners such as Qbus and Innovoltus support the initiative, which is seen as a key step …

Hertz and other car rental agencies are increasingly relying on scanners that use high-res imaging and AI to flag even tiny blemishes, angering some customers (Gabe Castro-Root/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/09/travel/rental-car-ai-scann…

Hertz and Other Rental Car Agencies Turn to AI for Damage Detection
Hertz and other agencies are increasingly relying on scanners that use high-res imaging and A.I. to flag even tiny blemishes, and customers aren’t happy.

We have not gone to a movie theatre in decades. Over-priced and even back then the price of munchies were outrageous. With the wife in a wheelchair there is a limit on where we can sit and enjoy a movie.
For the most part I will wait until the DVD or blueray video comes out and for a lot less than two tickets I can buy the movie and watch it any time I want, as often as I want, with pauses when we want and replay any section!
I don't usually stream as that is NOT buying the…

Soundtoys Donating 100% Of Sales On June 25 & 26 To Supporting LGBTQIA Civil Rights https://www.synthtopia.com/content/2025/06/25/soundtoys-donating-100-of-sales-on-june-25-26-to-supporting-lgbtqia-civi…

Soundtoys Donating 100% Of Sales On June 25 & 26 To Supporting LGBTQIA+ Civil Rights
Customers who purchase any Soundtoys plug-in, bundle, or upgrade during the campaign period will help support Lambda Legal’s legal advocacy, public policy work, and impact litigation efforts across…

Why Google should proactively break itself up: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/02/technology/google-antitrust-breakup.html?unlocked_article_code=1.L08.oUPn.B0yCN3RUyZxS&smid=url-share…

What if Google Just Broke Itself Up? A Tech Insider Makes the Case.
Prosecutors aren’t the only ones arguing for a smaller Google. Some critics say it might be better for investors, customers and innovation.

En Route Path-planning for Partially Occupied Vehicles in Ride-pooling Systems
Pengbo Zhu, Giancarlo Ferrari-Trecate, Nikolas Geroliminis
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.04968

En Route Path-planning for Partially Occupied Vehicles in Ride-pooling Systems
Ride-pooling services, such as UberPool and Lyft Shared Saver, enable a single vehicle to serve multiple customers within one shared trip. Efficient path-planning algorithms are crucial for improving the performance of such systems. For partially occupied vehicles with available capacity, we introduce a novel routing algorithm designed to maximize the likelihood of picking up additional passengers while serving the current passengers to their destination. Unlike traditional methods that group p…

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

Cloudflare will now block AI crawlers by default
The internet architecture provider will also let some publishers make known AI scrapers pay to crawl their sites
https://www.theverge.com/news/695501/cloudflare-block-ai-crawlers-default

Cloudflare will now block AI crawlers by default
Cloudflare has announced that it will now block AI web crawlers by default for new customers. It’s also introducing a new “Pay Per Crawl” fee that will let some publishers make AI companies pay to scrape their content.

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

No such thing as a slow cybersecurity news day anymore, so don't miss today's Metacurity for the critical infosec developments you should know, including
--Top cyber vendors hope to clean up crazy threat group naming practices,
--Coinbase knew of data leak in January,
--Prolific swatter pleads guilty,
--Cartier confirms data breach,
--Abilene gropes for recovery after rejecting ransom payment,
--North Face customers' data stolen in credential s…

Top cyber vendors hope to clean up crazy threat group naming practices
Coinbase knew of data leak in January, Prolific swatter pleads guilty, Cartier confirms data breach, Abilene gropes for recovery after rejecting ransom payment, North Face customers' data stolen in credential stuffing attacks, $11.5m stolen from BitoPro hot wallets, much more

Replaced article(s) found for econ.GN. https://arxiv.org/list/econ.GN/new
[1/1]:
- Trial Length, Pricing, and Rationally Inattentive Customers
F. Nguyen

Anatsa mobile malware returns to victimize North American bank customers https://therecord.media/anatsa-android-banking-malware-returns-north-america

Salesforce is restricting third-party companies from long-term indexing and storing of Slack messages, which would hamper rival enterprise AI firms like Glean (The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/salesforce-blocks-ai-rivals…

Salesforce Blocks AI Rivals From Using Slack Data
Slack, an instant-messaging service popular with businesses, recently blocked other software firms from searching or storing Slack messages even if their customers permit them to do so, according to a public disclosure from Slack’s owner, Salesforce. The move, which hasn’t previously been ...

Charter and Disney expand their 2023 carriage agreement, bringing Hulu's ad-tier to Spectrum TV customers and restoring eight previously removed cable channels (Alex Weprin/The Hollywood Reporter)
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/bu…

Disney and Charter Strike Surprise Deal That Adds Hulu and Returns Axed Cable Channels to Lineup
Spectrum TV Select customers will soon get access to Hulu included in their subscription, as Freeform, FXX and other channels that were cut two years ago return.

My question about the PTSN switch-off campaign is: can BT not already *detect* (over the course of a year) which customers are using alarms or telecare devices likely to be impacted?
https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2025

Government Hails Start of National Campaign for UK Digital Phone Switch
The UK government has today hailed the start of a new national campaign, funded by broadband giants BT and Virgin Media, which aims to help support and encourag

Apple sparks a backlash from iPhone owners after pushing a notification from the Apple Wallet app that promoted a Fandango deal for Apple's F1 movie (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/24/iphone-customers-upset-…

iPhone customers upset by Apple Wallet ad pushing F1 movie | TechCrunch
However well-received the film may be, iPhone users don't necessarily want their built-in utilities, like their digital wallet, marketing to them.

Don't miss today's Metacurity for the most critical infosec developments you might have missed over the weekend, including
--Foreign nation suspected in hack of Washington Post reporters’ emails,
--WestJet hit by cyber incident,
--Iran likely to retaliate with cyber ops,
--Zoomcar breach exposed customers' data,
--Qilin gang hit French insurer,
--Trump provided Medicaid data to deportation officials,
--46K Grafana instances remain unpatch…

Foreign nation suspected in hack of Washington Post reporters’ emails
WestJet hit by cyber incident, Iran likely to retaliate with cyber ops, Zoomcar breach exposed customers' data, Qilin gang hit French insurer, Trump provided Medicaid data to deportation officials, 46K+ Grafana instances remain unpatched, 10K VirtualMacOSX customers affected by breach, much more

23andMe leadership grilled by lawmakers demanding answers about data security amid bankruptcy sale https://therecord.media/23andme-leadership-grilled-by-lawmakers-hearing

After Google's two antitrust losses in the past year, a look at critics' claims that its breakup might be better for investors, customers, and innovation (David Streitfeld/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com…

What if Google Just Broke Itself Up? A Tech Insider Makes the Case.
Prosecutors aren’t the only ones arguing for a smaller Google. Some critics say it might be better for investors, customers and innovation.

SCOTUS will review a dispute between Cox and major music labels after an appeals court threw out a $1B jury verdict against Cox over alleged piracy by customers (Blake Brittain/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/s…

Microsoft plans to add a "safety" category to its AI leaderboard on Azure Foundry, with a safety metric based on its ToxiGen and CAIS's WMD Proxy benchmarks (Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/02f39b33-fa6e-4bb7-b1f4-8171b50738af

Microsoft to rank ‘safety’ of AI models sold to cloud customers
Tech group’s corporate clients use its ‘leaderboard’ to assess rival offerings by likes of OpenAI and Elon Musk’s xAI

https://cyberscoop.com/att-wireless-account-lock-sim-swapping-protection/
AT&T deploys new account lock feature to counter SIM swapping

Walmart's Flipkart secures a lending license from the RBI, letting the e-commerce company offer loans directly to Indian customers and sellers on its platform (Ashwin Manikandan/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/w

Amazon says Prime Video in India caters to "subscription-ready" customers while Amazon MX Player is aimed at those transitioning from traditional media (Naman Ramachandran/Variety)
https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/amazon-india-st…

Amazon Preps Sets India Streaming Push With Prime Video, MX Player
Amazon targets India's diverse streaming market with Prime Video for premium subscribers and MX Player for mobile users.

Interviews with 24 Microsoft customers, salespeople, and others show that Microsoft is struggling to sell Copilot AI as enterprise customers opt for ChatGPT (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-2…

A profile of Nigerian fintech PalmPay, which raised $140M from Transsion and other Chinese firms, says it has 35M registered users, and aims to be "super app" (Aanu Adeoye/Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/f9b54a77-3565-4c0a-91f1-d78fc63659ae

Nigeria’s PalmPay thrives on ‘ultimate competition’ of cash
Chinese-backed payment app has focused on customers excluded by traditional banks, growing to 35mn users

Scale AI used Google Docs to track work for customers like Google, Meta, and xAI, and left confidential AI training documents accessible to anyone with the link (Business Insider)
https://africa.businessinsider.com/new

Scale AI exposed sensitive data about clients like Meta and xAI in public Google Docs, BI finds
As Scale AI seeks to reassure customers that their data is secure following Metas $14

"Scale AI left public Google Docs with sensitive details about thousands of its contractors, including their private email addresses and whether they were suspected of
'cheating.'"
https://africa.businessinsider.co…

Scale AI exposed sensitive data about clients like Meta and xAI in public Google Docs, BI finds
As Scale AI seeks to reassure customers that their data is secure following Metas $14

Qantas discloses a data breach after hackers gained access to a third-party platform with personal data of 6M customers, but says no financial info was exposed (Lawrence Abrams/BleepingComputer)
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/secu

AT&T launches Account Lock to protect wireless users against SIM swapping attacks, following similar features from T-Mobile, Verizon, and Google Fi (Emma Roth/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/news/695916/att-account-lock-sim-swapping-attack

AT&T now lets you lock down your account to prevent SIM swapping attacks
AT&T is launching a new Account Lock feature that will let wireless customers prevent unauthorized changes to their account, such as phone number and SIM card transfers.

Synthesia says it has over 65K customers and serves more than 70% of the Fortune 100, with its AI avatars mainly used for training and internal communications (Allie Garfinkle/Fortune)
https://fortune.com/2025/06/26/ai-digital-avatars-corporate-vi…

AI avatars are here in full force—and they’re serving some of the world’s biggest companies
Digital avatars make training and internal comms videos much easier and cheaper to produce.

Defense tech firm Leidos acquires VA-based Kudu Dynamics, which provides AI-enabled cyber defense and offense tools to the US DOD and other customers, for $300M (Courtney Albon/Defense News)
https://www.defensenews.com/industry/2025/05/…

Leidos acquires cyber company Kudu Dynamics
The finalized deal comes as Leidos is implementing a new “NorthStar” strategy that identifies cyber as one of five primary growth areas for the company.

OpenAI is expanding its consulting-like service to refine its models and build bespoke apps for large enterprise and government clients spending at least $10M (The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-takes-page…

OpenAI Takes a Page From Palantir, Doubles Down on Consulting Services
As OpenAI pitches its artificial intelligence to big companies and government agencies, it’s taking a page from the playbook of many software firms by offeringin-house researchers and software engineers to customize AI for customers. OpenAI is adding staff and resources for a consulting-like ...

Amazon says it plans to bring same-day and next-day delivery to "tens of millions" of people who live in "more than 4,000" smaller US towns by the end of 2026 (Andrew J. Hawkins/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/news/691877/amazo

Amazon bringing same-day delivery to ‘millions’ of rural customers
Amazon announced that it was bringing same-day and next-day delivery to 4,000 small towns and rural communities by the end of 2026.

Salesforce launches Agentforce 3 with an observability tool called Command Center and MCP support, and says 8,000 customers have signed up to deploy Agentforce (Larry Dignan/Constellation Research)
https://www.constellationr.com/blog-news/i

Salesforce launches Agentforce 3, Command Center for visibility
Salesforce launched Agentforce 3, which features Agentforce Command Center, support for Model Context Protocol (MCP), and updated Atlas architecture to speed up reasoning and performance. The rollout maintains Salesforce's Agentforce cadence, which includes updates every few months as the company learns from enterprise use cases. In addition, Salesforce has added more than 30 partners to AgentExchange including AWS, Box, Cisco, Google Cloud, IBM and payments players such as PayPal and Stripe.

Tesla quietly launches its robotaxi service in Austin, with ~10 vehicles and a human safety driver; Elon Musk says customers will pay "a $4.20 flat fee" (Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/5aefc191-d3de-4e6b-a2eb-08defd0678ee

Tesla launches robotaxi service in Austin
Self-driving technology on which Elon Musk has staked future of his company debuts in Texas

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.

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.