Tootfinder

Sources: xAI was part of a US government AI initiative alongside OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, but was removed after Grok posted antisemitic content in July (Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/xai-grok-government-contract-hitler/

xAI Was About to Land a Major Government Contract. Then Grok Praised Hitler
Internal emails obtained by WIRED show a hasty process to onboard OpenAI, Anthropic, and other AI providers to the federal government. xAI was on the list—until MechaHilter happened.

Nothing here sounds criminal, but it also doesn't sound like good government. Rich white boys' club maintains its hold on power and we all get worse public services.
https://sfstandard.com/2025/10/15/san-francisco-daniel-…

SF mayor’s lieutenant steered contract to firm with ties to Daniel Lurie
Records show the mayor’s office chose the software company OpenGov over a cheaper vendor that a majority of city staff preferred.

The LA Times Guild plans to hold its first-ever strike authorization vote as contract talks near their third year; the union lost about 200 members since 2022 (Raquel 'Rocky' Harris/The Wrap)
https://www.thewrap.com/la-times-union-strike-authorization-vote/…

LA Times Union to Hold First-Ever Strike Authorization Vote as Contract Talks Near 3rd Year
Since negotiations began in September 2020, the guild has seen layoffs impact approximately 200 Times staffers.

Bridging Solidity Evolution Gaps: An LLM-Enhanced Approach for Smart Contract Compilation Error Resolution
Likai Ye, Mengliang Li, Dehai Zhao, Jiamou Sun, Xiaoxue Ren
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10517

Bridging Solidity Evolution Gaps: An LLM-Enhanced Approach for Smart Contract Compilation Error Resolution
Solidity, the dominant smart contract language for Ethereum, has rapidly evolved with frequent version updates to enhance security, functionality, and developer experience. However, these continual changes introduce significant challenges, particularly in compilation errors, code migration, and maintenance. Therefore, we conduct an empirical study to investigate the challenges in the Solidity version evolution and reveal that 81.68% of examined contracts encounter errors when compiled across di…

Do Large Language Models Respect Contracts? Evaluating and Enforcing Contract-Adherence in Code Generation
Soohan Lim, Joonghyuk Hahn, Hyunwoo Park, Sang-Ki Ko, Yo-Sub Han
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12047

Do Large Language Models Respect Contracts? Evaluating and Enforcing Contract-Adherence in Code Generation
Prevailing code generation benchmarks, such as HumanEval+ and MBPP+, primarily evaluate large language models (LLMs) with pass@k on functional correctness using well-formed inputs. However, they ignore a crucial aspect of real-world software: adherence to contracts-the preconditions and validity constraints that dictate how ill-formed inputs must be rejected. This critical oversight means that existing benchmarks fail to measure, and models consequently fail to generate, truly robust and reliab…

> "The MechaHitler defense contract is raising red flags"
We're living in the backstory lore of a satirical 90s videogame.
https://www.theverge.com/x-ai/775411/grok-xai-safety-musk-warren-hegseth-dod

The MechaHitler defense contract is raising red flags
Every AI company should be worried about safety. But xAI and Grok should be most concerned. Senator Warren sent Pete Hegseth a letter to that effect.

SmartCoder-R1: Towards Secure and Explainable Smart Contract Generation with Security-Aware Group Relative Policy Optimization
Lei Yu, Jingyuan Zhang, Xin Wang, Jiajia Ma, Li Yang, Fengjun Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09942

SmartCoder-R1: Towards Secure and Explainable Smart Contract Generation with Security-Aware Group Relative Policy Optimization
Smart contracts automate the management of high-value assets, where vulnerabilities can lead to catastrophic financial losses. This challenge is amplified in Large Language Models (LLMs) by two interconnected failures: they operate as unauditable "black boxes" lacking a transparent reasoning process, and consequently, generate code riddled with critical security vulnerabilities. To address both issues, we propose SmartCoder-R1 (based on Qwen2.5-Coder-7B), a novel framework for secure and explai…

Uhoh… Didn’t we get EU connectivity via Colt?
Oh. Never mind. Dodged a bullet *AGAIN* by having cancelled that contract (a few years back, actually…)
If I was a superstitious person I’d think that I'd been blessed to never be directly harmed by any sort of cyberattack. If I was a narcissist I'd think that I was somehow specially skilled at intuitively avoiding all attacks...
I’m neither, and recognize the absurdity of random chance, which ALWAYS does the unlikely…

Kevin Beaumont (@GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social)
Attached: 1 image Here's the forum post, it's a Russian Tor site.

Scumbaggery ain't nothing new.
https://noc.social/@todayilearned/115378327700458180

Today I learned (@todayilearned@noc.social)
Attached: 1 image TIL Columbia Pictures president Harry Cohn actively prevented the Three Stooges from discovering how popular they were. Despite their films being in extremely high demand, Cohn made them believe they were always in danger of cancelation so they wouldn't negotiate a better contract. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Stooges#Moe,_Larry,_and_Curly_(1934%E2%80%931946) #til #todayilearned https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1o7a5po/til_columbia_pictures_presiden…

ExDoS: Expert-Guided Dual-Focus Cross-Modal Distillation for Smart Contract Vulnerability Detection
Yifan Jia, Ye Tian, Yanbin Wang, Jianguo Sun, Haitao Xu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10252

ExDoS: Expert-Guided Dual-Focus Cross-Modal Distillation for Smart Contract Vulnerability Detection
The success of smart contracts has made them a target for attacks, but their closed-source nature often forces vulnerability detection to work on bytecode, which is inherently more challenging than source-code-based analysis. While recent studies try to align source and bytecode embeddings during training to transfer knowledge, current methods rely on graph-level alignment that obscures fine-grained structural and semantic correlations between the two modalities. Moreover, the absence of precis…

SAG-AFTRA announces a new agreement tailored for serialized microdramas, or "verticals", with budgets under $300K that it plans to circulate later this month (Katie Kilkenny/The Hollywood Reporter)
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business

SAG-AFTRA Gets In the Verticals Game
The union will be circulating a new agreement for microdramas with budgets under $300,000 later this month.

I Know Who Clones Your Code: Interpretable Smart Contract Similarity Detection
Zhenguang Liu, Lixun Ma, Zhongzheng Mu, Chengkun Wei, Xiaojun Xu, Yingying Jiao, Kui Ren
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09630 …

I Know Who Clones Your Code: Interpretable Smart Contract Similarity Detection
Widespread reuse of open-source code in smart contract development boosts programming efficiency but significantly amplifies bug propagation across contracts, while dedicated methods for detecting similar smart contract functions remain very limited. Conventional abstract-syntax-tree (AST) based methods for smart contract similarity detection face challenges in handling intricate tree structures, which impedes detailed semantic comparison of code. Recent deep-learning based approaches tend to o…

ICE plans to hire dozens of contractors to scan X, Facebook, TikTok, and other social media platforms
to target people for deportation.
https://www.wired.com/story/ice-social-media-surveillance-24-7-contract/

ICE Wants to Build Out a 24/7 Social Media Surveillance Team
Documents show that ICE plans to hire dozens of contractors to scan X, Facebook, TikTok, and other platforms to target people for deportation.

ICE Wants to Build Out a 24/7 Social Media Surveillance Team.
#USpol

ICE Wants to Build Out a 24/7 Social Media Surveillance Team
Documents show that ICE plans to hire dozens of contractors to scan X, Facebook, TikTok, and other platforms to target people for deportation.

https://www.nextgov.com/cybersecurity/2025/08/cisa-officials-commit-supporting-top-vulnerability-cataloging-program/407309/
CISA officials commit to supporting top vulnerability cataloging program

CISA officials commit to supporting top vulnerability cataloging program
Organizations around the world rely on the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures Program, whose contract with CISA almost expired in April. It serves as the worldwide, de facto standard for vulnerability identification and management.

Mechanism design and equilibrium analysis of smart contract mediated resource allocation
Jinho Cha, Justin Yoo, Eunchan Daniel Cha, Emily Yoo, Caedon Geoffrey, Hyoshin Song
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.05504

Mechanism design and equilibrium analysis of smart contract mediated resource allocation
Decentralized coordination and digital contracting are becoming critical in complex industrial ecosystems, yet existing approaches often rely on ad hoc heuristics or purely technical blockchain implementations without a rigorous economic foundation. This study develops a mechanism design framework for smart contract-based resource allocation that explicitly embeds efficiency and fairness in decentralized coordination. We establish the existence and uniqueness of contract equilibria, extending c…

Understanding Inconsistent State Update Vulnerabilities in Smart Contracts
Lantian Li, Yuyu Chen, Jingwen Wu, Yue Pan, Zhongxing Yu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06192 https://

Understanding Inconsistent State Update Vulnerabilities in Smart Contracts
Smart contracts enable contract terms to be automatically executed and verified on the blockchain, and recent years have witnessed numerous applications of them in areas such as financial institutions and supply chains. The execution logic of a smart contract is closely related to the contract state, and thus the correct and safe execution of the contract depends heavily on the precise control and update of the contract state. However, the contract state update process can have issues. In parti…

Interaction between Returns and Order Flow Imbalances: Endogeneity, Intraday Variations, and Macroeconomic News Announcements
Makoto Takahashi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06788 h…

Interaction between Returns and Order Flow Imbalances: Endogeneity, Intraday Variations, and Macroeconomic News Announcements
The study examines the interaction between returns and order flow imbalances (differences between buy and sell orders), constructed from the best bid and offer files of S&P 500 E-mini futures contract, using a structural vector autoregressive model. The intraday variation in market activity is considered by applying the model for each short interval each day, whereas the endogeneity due to time aggregation is handled by estimating the structural parameters via the identification through heteros…

Having just finished a 1-year consulting contract myself, my own list of restrictions for future jobs/consulting is very similar:
- will not work on adtech/surveillance/weapons
- will not knowingly make world worse and/or abet genocides
- will not be forced to use vibe coding (or will explain cost implications)
- prefer to work in the open
- prefer remote only
- flexible with time zones (last role was for a company in LA, -9h)

Joey de Villa 🪗 (@AccordionGuy@mastodon.cloud)
Attached: 1 image As long as we’re in the “September Surge” (that trend where there’s a noticeable uptick in job vacancies and hiring around September and October, when companies ramp up for year-end and the upcoming year), you might as well also ask “What DON’T I want in a new job?” https://www.globalnerdy.com/2025/09/06/what-dont-you-want-in-your-next-job/

US federal contracting records suggest US ICE is planning to hire ~30 contractors to monitor social media content, seeking leads for enforcement operations (Dell Cameron/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/ice-social-media-surveillance-24-7-contract/

ICE Wants to Build Out a 24/7 Social Media Surveillance Team
Documents show that ICE plans to hire dozens of contractors to scan X, Facebook, TikTok, and other platforms to target people for deportation.

Mangrove: Fast and Parallelizable State Replication for Blockchains
Anton Paramonov, Yann Vonlanthen, Quentin Kniep, Jakub Sliwinski, Roger Wattenhofer
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06616

Mangrove: Fast and Parallelizable State Replication for Blockchains
Mangrove is a novel scaling approach to building blockchains with parallel smart contract support. Unlike in monolithic blockchains, where a single consensus mechanism determines a strict total order over all transactions, Mangrove uses separate consensus instances per smart contract, without a global order. To allow multiple instances to run in parallel while ensuring that no conflicting transactions are committed, we propose a mechanism called Parallel Optimistic Agreement. Additionally, for …

Smart Contract-Enabled Procurement under Bounded Demand Variability: A Truncated Normal Approach
Jinho Cha, Youngchul Kim, Junyeol Ryu, Sangjun Park, Jeongho Kang, Hyeyoung Hwang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07801

Smart Contract-Enabled Procurement under Bounded Demand Variability: A Truncated Normal Approach
This study develops a strategic procurement framework integrating blockchain-based smart contracts with bounded demand variability modeled through a truncated normal distribution. While existing research emphasizes the technical feasibility of smart contracts, the operational and economic implications of adoption under moderate uncertainty remain underexplored. We propose a multi-supplier model in which a centralized retailer jointly determines the optimal smart contract adoption intensity and …

Logically Contractive Mappings: Fixed Points and Event-Indexed Rates
Faruk Alpay, Taylan Alpay
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07059 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.…

Logically Contractive Mappings: Fixed Points and Event-Indexed Rates
We introduce "logically contractive mappings" nonexpansive self-maps that contract along a subsequence of iterates and prove a fixed-point theorem that extends Banach's principle. We obtain event-indexed convergence rates and, under bounded gaps between events, explicit iteration-count rates. A worked example shows a nonexpansive map whose square is a strict contraction, and we clarify relations to Meir--Keeler and asymptotically nonexpansive mappings. We further generalize to variable-factor e…

A SHACL-based Data Consistency Solution for Contract Compliance Verification
Robert David, Albin Ahmeti, Geni Bushati, Amar Tauqeer, Anna Fensel
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.15420

A SHACL-based Data Consistency Solution for Contract Compliance Verification
In recent years, there have been many developments for GDPR-compliant data access and sharing based on consent. For more complex data sharing scenarios, where consent might not be sufficient, many parties rely on contracts. Before a contract is signed, it must undergo the process of contract negotiation within the contract lifecycle, which consists of negotiating the obligations associated with the contract. Contract compliance verification (CCV) provides a means to verify whether a contract is…

Getting In Contract with Large Language Models -- An Agency Theory Perspective On Large Language Model Alignment
Sascha Kaltenpoth, Oliver M\"uller
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07642

Getting In Contract with Large Language Models -- An Agency Theory Perspective On Large Language Model Alignment
Adopting Large language models (LLMs) in organizations potentially revolutionizes our lives and work. However, they can generate off-topic, discriminating, or harmful content. This AI alignment problem often stems from misspecifications during the LLM adoption, unnoticed by the principal due to the LLM's black-box nature. While various research disciplines investigated AI alignment, they neither address the information asymmetries between organizational adopters and black-box LLM agents nor con…

@… is suing ICE over their contract with spyware companies. *Please* support them financially if you can afford it.
https://www.404media.co/were-suing-ice-for

We’re Suing ICE for Its $2 Million Spyware Contract
404 Media has filed a lawsuit against ICE for access to its contract with Paragon, a company that sells powerful spyware for breaking into phones and accessing encrypted messaging apps.

The Impact of Sanctions on decentralised Privacy Tools: A Case Study of Tornado Cash
Raffaele Cristodaro, Benjamin Kramer, Claudio J. Tessone
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09443 ht…

The Impact of Sanctions on decentralised Privacy Tools: A Case Study of Tornado Cash
This paper investigates the impact of sanctions on Tornado Cash, a smart contract protocol designed to enhance transaction privacy. Following the U.S. Department of the Treasury's sanctions against Tornado Cash in August 2022, platform activity declined sharply. We document a significant and sustained reduction in transaction volume, user diversity, and overall protocol utilization after the sanctions were imposed. Our analysis draws on transaction data from three major blockchains: Ethereum, B…

In a new ad campaign, TelevisaUnivision says Google plans to move Univision from YouTube TV's basic bundle to a Spanish-language package that costs extra (Sara Fischer/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2025/09/09/televisaunivision-youtube-carriage-contract

Scoop: TelevisaUnivision wages war with YouTube
TelevisaUnivision says YouTube's efforts make Google look "evil."

Efficient tensor-network simulations of weakly-measured quantum circuits
Darren Pereira, Leonardo Banchi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07211 https://arxiv.org…

Efficient tensor-network simulations of weakly-measured quantum circuits
We present a tensor-network-based method for simulating a weakly-measured quantum circuit. In particular, we use a Markov chain to efficiently sample measurements and contract the tensor network, propagating their effect forward along the spatial direction. Applications of our algorithm include validating quantum computers (capable of mid-circuit measurements) in regimes of easy classical simulability, and studying generative-machine-learning applications, where sampling from complex stochastic…

Despite having beencriticized by civil rights groups for using
"cell site simulators" (Stingrays) during the last Trump administration,
ICE continues to use the technology.
Earlier this year, new media publication Straight Arrow News said it had
“mobile network anomalies” around a Washington state protest against ICE raids that were consistent with Stingray use.
Forbes found contract records showing ICE purchased nearly
$1 million worth of “cell s…

How ICE Is Using Fake Cell Towers To Spy On People’s Phones
ICE is using a controversial spy tool to locate smartphones, court records show.

AGL breaks wind energy drought with 15-year contract in South Australia, supporting decarbonisation efforts and job creation. #climatechange #climatesolutions #climate

Australia’s wind energy drought set to be broken as AGL signs 15-year contract with South Australia project
Australia’s wind financing drought expected to be broken after the country’s biggest coal generator signs 15-year off take deal with new South Australia project.

Auctioning Future Services in Edge Networks with Moving Vehicles: N-Step Look-Ahead Contracts for Sustainable Resource Provision
Ziqi Ling, Minghui Liwang, Xianbin Wang, Seyyedali Hosseinalipour, Zhipeng Cheng, Sai Zou, Wei Ni, Xiaoyu Xia
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07333

Auctioning Future Services in Edge Networks with Moving Vehicles: N-Step Look-Ahead Contracts for Sustainable Resource Provision
Timely resource allocation in edge-assisted vehicular networks is essential for compute-intensive services such as autonomous driving and navigation. However, vehicle mobility leads to spatio-temporal unpredictability of resource demands, while real-time double auctions incur significant latency. To address these challenges, we propose a look-ahead contract-based auction framework that shifts decision-making from runtime to planning time. Our approach establishes N-step service contracts betwee…

The US Army awards Palantir a contract worth up to $10B over the next decade, creating a "comprehensive framework for the Army's future software and data needs" (Elizabeth Dwoskin/Washington Post)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/…

Palantir gets $10 billion contract from U.S. Army
The software company’s enterprise contract over the next decade cements its central role in warfighting for years to come. 

"Bhutan awards 120 MW solar contract"
#Bhutan #SolarPower #Energy #Renewables

Bhutan awards 120 MW solar contract
Bhutan has awarded a contract for the 120 MW Jamjee solar project to a consortium of local firm Rigsar Construction and India’s HILD Energy. The project will be the country’s largest solar installation once completed.

Learning to Incentivize: LLM-Empowered Contract for AIGC Offloading in Teleoperation
Zijun Zhan, Yaxian Dong, Daniel Mawunyo Doe, Yuqing Hu, Shuai Li, Shaohua Cao, Zhu Han
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03464

Learning to Incentivize: LLM-Empowered Contract for AIGC Offloading in Teleoperation
With the rapid growth in demand for AI-generated content (AIGC), edge AIGC service providers (ASPs) have become indispensable. However, designing incentive mechanisms that motivate ASPs to deliver high-quality AIGC services remains a challenge, especially in the presence of information asymmetry. In this paper, we address bonus design between a teleoperator and an edge ASP when the teleoperator cannot observe the ASP's private settings and chosen actions (diffusion steps). We formulate this as …

Goh, heeft het NSC eindelijk eens een goed voorstel.
https://www.volkskrant.nl/politiek/nsc-wil-dat-schoof-aangifte-doet-tegen-faber-om-lekken-uit-ministerraad-ze-lapt-de-wet-aan-haar-laars~bc52…

NSC wil dat Schoof aangifte doet tegen Faber om lekken uit ministerraad: ‘Ze lapt de wet aan haar laars’
Nieuw Sociaal Contract wil dat minister-president Schoof aangifte doet tegen oud-PVV-minister Faber wegens lekken uit de ministerraad. In haar vrijdag verschenen memoires doet zij verslag van de kritiek die voormalig NSC-minister Uitermark in de ministerraad had op Fabers asielwetten.

Don't miss today's Metacurity for a crush of infosec developments you should know, including
--Cloudflare, Palo Alto Networks, and Zscaler are caught up in Salesloft Drift attacks,
--UK watchdog says military doesn't know Afghan breach-related costs are,
--Jaguar Land Rover hit by cyber incident,
--Amazon disrupted Midnight Blizzard op,
--Trump reactivates ICE spyware contract,
--Gov'ts are flocking to surveillanceware
--Hackers tried t…

Cloudflare, Palo Alto Networks, and Zscaler are caught up in Salesloft Drift attacks
UK watchdog says military doesn't know Afghan breach-related costs are, Jaguar Land Rover hit by cyber incident, Amazon disrupted Midnight Blizzard op, Trump reactivates ICE spyware contract, Gov'ts are flocking to surveillanceware, much more

In a July 11 arbitration hearing between Politico and the PEN Guild, Politico argued that some Politico AI experiments aren't subject to editorial standards (Andrew Deck/Nieman Lab)
https://www.niemanlab.org/2025/08/politico

Politico’s recent AI experiments shouldn’t be subject to newsroom editorial standards, its editors testify
In a July arbitration hearing, Politico faced allegations that two generative AI tools violated its union contract.

Hmmm, this would seem to run afoul of the Constitution's ArtI.S10.C1.6.1 Contract Clause - except that that part of our Constitution applies only to States.
Personally, I do not understand why any international body would schedule events - like the World Cup or the Olympics - in the US.
"Trump warns he’ll move World Cup soccer games out of ‘unsafe’ cities like … Santa Clara? "

Trump warns he’ll move World Cup soccer games out of ‘unsafe’ cities like … Santa Clara?
The president rips San Francisco’s ‘radical left lunatic’ leadership, but games are set for Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, 44 miles away.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)
paid $825,000 earlier this year
to a company that manufactures vehicles equipped with various technologies for law enforcement,
including fake cellphone towers known as “cell-site simulators,” which can be used to spy on nearby phones.  
According to public records, the award dated May 8
“provides Cell Site Simulator (CSS) Vehicles to support the Homeland Security Technical Operations program”
and is a modifi…

ICE bought vehicles equipped with fake cell towers to spy on phones  | TechCrunch
The federal contract shows ICE spent $825,000 on vans equipped with “cell-site simulators” which allow the real-world location tracking of nearby phones and their owners.

If true, this explains why the #Browns took #ShedeurSanders for $4.6M:
▫️$15M (6%) of $250M in Shedeur merch equity & tax classification as a business revenue not personal income
▫️Sponsorships like Nike worth $5M-$10M & Beats by Dre, Gatorade, etc. worth $6.5M
▫️Owner…

The groundbreaking clause in Shedeur Sanders’ rookie deal that’s rewriting the rules
Cleveland Browns rookie quarterback Shedeur Sanders has included a groundbreaking clause in his contract that could set a new standard in the NFL.

EVMx: An FPGA-Based Smart Contract Processing Unit
Joel Poncha Lemayian, Hachem Bensalem, Ghyslain Gagnon, Kaiwen Zhang, Pascal Giard
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.23518 https://…

EVMx: An FPGA-Based Smart Contract Processing Unit
Ethereum blockchain uses smart contracts (SCs) to implement decentralized applications (dApps). SCs are executed by the Ethereum virtual machine (EVM) running within an Ethereum client. Moreover, the EVM has been widely adopted by other blockchain platforms, including Solana, Cardano, Avalanche, Polkadot, and more. However, the EVM performance is limited by the constraints of the general-purpose computer it operates on. This work proposes offloading SC execution onto a dedicated hardware-based …

Smart Contract Adoption in Derivative Markets under Bounded Risk: An Optimization Approach
Jinho Cha, Long Pham, Thi Le Hoa Vo, Jaeyoung Cho, Jaejin Lee
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07006

Smart Contract Adoption in Derivative Markets under Bounded Risk: An Optimization Approach
This study develops and analyzes an optimization model of smart contract adoption under bounded risk, linking structural theory with simulation and real-world validation. We examine how adoption intensity alpha is structurally pinned at a boundary solution, invariant to variance and heterogeneity, while profitability and service outcomes are variance-fragile, eroding under volatility and heavy-tailed demand. A sharp threshold in the fixed cost parameter A3 triggers discontinuous adoption collap…

ScamDetect: Towards a Robust, Agnostic Framework to Uncover Threats in Smart Contracts
Pasquale De Rosa, Pascal Felber, Valerio Schiavoni
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07094 https:…

ScamDetect: Towards a Robust, Agnostic Framework to Uncover Threats in Smart Contracts
Smart contracts have transformed decentralized finance by enabling programmable, trustless transactions. However, their widespread adoption and growing financial significance have attracted persistent and sophisticated threats, such as phishing campaigns and contract-level exploits. Traditional transaction-based threat detection methods often expose sensitive user data and interactions, raising privacy and security concerns. In response, static bytecode analysis has emerged as a proactive mitig…

Source: Meta signed a contract worth $140M to use technology from AI image startup Black Forest Labs, committing $35M in the first year and $105M in the second (Kate Clark/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20…

This story is cute: A malicious "Solidity" (that's the smart contract language Ethereum and other blockchains use) extension for Cursor, the Vibe-Coding Editor included code that steals your tokens/coins.
I find it funny for two reasons:
- Blockchainers love talking about how you need to verify things you interact with but someone wasn't checking if they have the right extension
- Programming smart contracts is hard because it's a massively hostile envir…

Code highlighting with Cursor AI for $500,000
Kaspersky GReAT experts uncover malicious extensions for Cursor AI that download the Quasar backdoor and a crypto stealer.

https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/18/ice-unit-signs-new-3-million-contract-for-phone-hacking-tech/
ICE unit signs new $3M contract for phone-hacking tech

ICE unit signs new $3M contract for phone-hacking tech | TechCrunch
Homeland Security Investigations, the law enforcement arm of ICE, adds phone-unlocking tech made by Magnet Forensics to its arsenal of technology used to power the Trump administration’s deportation crackdown.

Labor Market Reforms, Flexibility, and Employment Transitions Across Formal and Informal Sectors
Selidji Caroline Tossou
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.03668 https://

Labor Market Reforms, Flexibility, and Employment Transitions Across Formal and Informal Sectors
In this paper, I investigate the 2017 labor market reform in Benin, which reduced firing costs and allowed firms to renew short-term contracts indefinitely. Using micro-data from the Harmonized Household Living Standards Surveys and a two-way fixed effect approach with nearby countries as the control group, I assess the reform's impact on employment, worker tenure, contract types, and wages. My empirical results reveal a 2.6 percentage point (24.5 percent) increase in formal sector employment a…

Knapsack Contracts and the Importance of Return-on-Investment
Zohar Barak, Asnat Berlin, Ilan Reuven Cohen, Alon Eden, Omri Porat, Inbal Talgam-Cohen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.05956

Knapsack Contracts and the Importance of Return-on-Investment
We formulate the Knapsack Contracts problem -- a strategic version of the classic Stochastic Knapsack problem, which builds upon the inherent randomness shared by stochastic optimization and contract design. In this problem, the principal incentivizes agents to perform jobs with stochastic processing times, the realization of which depends on the agents' efforts. Algorithmically, we show that Knapsack Contracts can be viewed as Stochastic Knapsack with costs and multi-choice, features that in…

New York-based Crosby, a law firm that uses AI to help speed up the contracts process, raised a $20M Series A co-led by Index Ventures, BCV, and Elad Gil (Alex Konrad/Upstarts Media)
https://www.upstartsmedia.com/p/crosby-ai-law-firm-raises-20-million

Crosby, 'AI Law Firm' Working With Startups Like Cursor, Raises $20 Million
The Series A from Index Ventures and Bain Capital Ventures will help lawyer turned founder Ryan Daniels expand how his year-old startup can use AI to speed up contract reviews.

Federal lawmakers sent a letter to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)
demanding information on any plans Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has
to use Graphite, a spyware program that can access
— without the owner’s knowledge or consent
— a phone’s location data, photos, and encrypted applications, including WhatsApp and Signal.
Last year, the Biden administration paused the contract with Paragon Solutions, which operates Graphite,
while it …

Lawmakers Demand Information About Potential Use of Paragon Spyware by ICE
The lawmakers warned that allowing ICE to use spyware “threatens Americans’ freedom of movement and freedom of speech.”…

“Produce”? I guess that Pentagon contract with Grok will get its first use.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9w1014rlq9o

Donald Trump orders US attorney general to 'produce' more Epstein documents
Trump's supporters and opponents alike have demanded more disclosures related to the disgraced financier.

Newsroom union members at the Los Angeles Times vote to authorize a strike as they raise the pressure for a new contract after three years of negotiations (Katie Kilkenny/The Hollywood Reporter)
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business

Los Angeles Times Journalists Authorize a Strike
Eight-five percent of participating members voted to empower the newsroom union to call a potential work stoppage.

A Microstructure Analysis of Coupling in CFMMs
Althea Sterrett, Austin Adams
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.06095 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.06095

A Microstructure Analysis of Coupling in CFMMs
The programmable and composable nature of smart contract protocols has enabled the emergence of novel market structures and asset classes that are architecturally frictional to implement in traditional financial paradigms. This fluidity has produced an understudied class of market dynamics, particularly in coupled markets where one market serves as an oracle for the other. In such market structures, purchases or liquidations through the intermediate asset create coupled price action between the…

Robust Contract with Career Concerns
Tan Gan, Hongcheng Li
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.22852 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.22852…

Robust Contract with Career Concerns
An employer contracts with a worker to incentivize efforts whose productivity depends on ability; the worker then enters a market that pays him contingent on ability evaluation. With non-additive monitoring technology, the interdependence between market expectations and worker efforts can lead to multiple equilibria (contrasting Holmstrom (1982/1999); Gibbons and Murphy (1992)). We identify a sufficient and necessary criterion for the employer to face such strategic uncertainty--one linked to s…

(LinkedIn) Revision Implant is despite its name already quickly looking for markets beyond visual prostheses https://www.linkedin.com/posts/revision-implant-nv_elmedix-medicalinnovation-oncology-activity-7363137424329252864-bp…

The expertise that we have developed in extreme miniaturization of medical devices is also finding its way to use cases beyond visual prostheses: in that regard, we are proud to announce that we have… | ReVision Implant
The expertise that we have developed in extreme miniaturization of medical devices is also finding its way to use cases beyond visual prostheses: in that regard, we are proud to announce that we have signed a long-term supply contract with Elmedix, to deliver a critical component to be used in their therapy. Elmedix is a clinical-stage medtech company that is developing a revolutionary heat-based therapy for metastasized cancers. We wish them all the best in their coming second round of clinic…

⚾ Sports teams appear to provide less injury protection for players with temporary contracts
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-09-sports-teams-injury-players-temporary.html

Sports teams appear to provide less injury protection for players with temporary contracts
Research in Economic Inquiry reveals that Major League Baseball teams appear to manage player injuries differently depending on contract status, with players on temporary contracts missing significantly fewer games due to injury. This suggests that teams may invest less in the long-term health of non-permanent players.

AI-Driven Generation of Data Contracts in Modern Data Engineering Systems
Harshraj Bhoite
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.21056 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.21056…

AI-Driven Generation of Data Contracts in Modern Data Engineering Systems
Data contracts formalize agreements between data producers and consumers regarding schema, semantics, and quality expectations. As data pipelines grow in complexity, manual authoring and maintenance of contracts becomes error-prone and labor-intensive. We present an AI-driven framework for automatic data contract generation using large language models (LLMs). Our system leverages parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods, including LoRA and PEFT, to adapt LLMs to structured data domains. The mode…

The Dark Side of Upgrades: Uncovering Security Risks in Smart Contract Upgrades
Dingding Wang, Jianting He, Siwei Wu, Yajin Zhou, Lei Wu, Cong Wang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.02145

The Dark Side of Upgrades: Uncovering Security Risks in Smart Contract Upgrades
Smart contract upgrades are increasingly common due to their flexibility in modifying deployed contracts, such as fixing bugs or adding new functionalities. Meanwhile, upgrades compromise the immutability of contracts, introducing significant security concerns. While existing research has explored the security impacts of contract upgrades, these studies are limited in collection of upgrade behaviors and identification of insecurities. To address these limitations, we conduct a comprehensive s…

The UK's obligatory inshore fishing vessel position reporting system (I-VMS) appears to have launched without one of the suppliers having a finalised contract. So they just stopped relaying the data.
(It's not like AIS - it batches up positional data and relays via cell-towers when in range.)
https://www.

I-VMS Urgent Update
The Marine Management Organisation (MMO) is aware that Succorfish is no longer transmitting I-VMS data to the UK VMS Hub. This is preventing MMO from receiving positional data from under-12m vessels using Succorfish type-approved devices.

Lyte Quorum: Off-Chain Ready Smart Contract Hosted with Choice
Hao Hao, Dahlia Malkhi, Maofan Yin, Lizan Zhou
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.23448 https://arxi…

Lyte Quorum: Off-Chain Ready Smart Contract Hosted with Choice
This paper introduces Lyquor, a decentralized platform that reimagines blockchain infrastructure through a service-centric model where nodes selectively host smart contracts (called Lyquids) while preserving global composability. We present three key innovations: (1) Fate-Constrained Ordering (FCO), which decouples consensus from execution to enable selective hosting without sacrificing Layer-1 grade composability; (2) Direct Memory Architecture (DMA), which eliminates state access bottlenecks …

Things are about to get woolly in cybersecurity, so don't miss today's Metacurity for the most critical infosec developments you should know, including
--The UK is a European hotspot for cyberattacks,
--Hackers stole employee data from FEMA,
--DoD and DHS prep for government shutdown,
--CISA kills CIS and MS-ISAC contract,
--WestJet says hackers stole data in a breach,
--Newsom signs nation's toughest AI safety law,
--Labour Party to stud…

The UK is a European hotspot for cyberattacks
Hackers stole employee data from FEMA, DoD and DHS prep for government shutdown, CISA kills CIS contract, WestJet says hackers stole data in breach, Newsom signs nation's toughest AI safety law, Labour Party to study facial recognition, Asian beer giant hit by incident, much more

The Unwritten Contract of Cloud-based Elastic Solid-State Drives
Yingjia Wang, Ming-Chang Yang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.17372 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.…

The Unwritten Contract of Cloud-based Elastic Solid-State Drives
Elastic block storage (EBS) with the storage-compute disaggregated architecture stands as a pivotal piece in today's cloud. EBS furnishes users with storage capabilities through the elastic solid-state drive (ESSD). Nevertheless, despite the widespread integration into cloud services, the absence of a thorough ESSD performance characterization raises critical doubt: when more and more services are shifted onto the cloud, can ESSD satisfactorily substitute the storage responsibilities of the loc…

Public records show C3 AI's Project Sherlock, company's flagship contract to speed up policing in San Mateo County, has struggled with usability issues and more (Thomas Brewster/Forbes)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewste

Billionaire Tom Siebel's C3 AI Was Supposed To Speed Up Policing. It’s Not Going Well.
San Mateo County pumped $12 million into a grand AI surveillance system that was supposed to level up its police work. Three years later, it still hasn’t seen the benefits.

Neoen Australia making strides in Western Australia with new big battery projects, signaling shift towards renewable energy powerhouse in the region. #climatechange #climatesolutions #climate

Neoen starts work on first six-hour battery after giant “solar soaker” completed months ahead of schedule
Neoen starts work on its first six-hour battery as the country’s biggest battery – completed four months ahead of schedule – starts its contract as a “solar soaker”

ContractEval: Benchmarking LLMs for Clause-Level Legal Risk Identification in Commercial Contracts
Shuang Liu, Zelong Li, Ruoyun Ma, Haiyan Zhao, Mengnan Du
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03080

ContractEval: Benchmarking LLMs for Clause-Level Legal Risk Identification in Commercial Contracts
The potential of large language models (LLMs) in specialized domains such as legal risk analysis remains underexplored. In response to growing interest in locally deploying open-source LLMs for legal tasks while preserving data confidentiality, this paper introduces ContractEval, the first benchmark to thoroughly evaluate whether open-source LLMs could match proprietary LLMs in identifying clause-level legal risks in commercial contracts. Using the Contract Understanding Atticus Dataset (CUAD),…

Synthesis of Sound and Precise Leakage Contracts for Open-Source RISC-V Processors
Zilong Wang, Gideon Mohr, Klaus von Gleissenthall, Jan Reineke, Marco Guarnieri
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06509

Synthesis of Sound and Precise Leakage Contracts for Open-Source RISC-V Processors
Leakage contracts have been proposed as a new security abstraction at the instruction set architecture level. Leakage contracts aim to capture the information that processors may leak via microarchitectural side channels. Recently, the first tools have emerged to verify whether a processor satisfies a given contract. However, coming up with a contract that is both sound and precise for a given processor is challenging, time-consuming, and error-prone, as it requires in-depth knowledge of the ti…

A Small Collusion is All You Need
Yotam Gafni
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.05986 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.05986

A Small Collusion is All You Need
Transaction Fee Mechanisms (TFMs) study auction design in the Blockchain context, and emphasize robustness against miner and user collusion, moreso than traditional auction theory. \cite{chung2023foundations} introduce the notion of a mechanism being $c$-Side-Contract-Proof ($c$-SCP), i.e., robust to a collusion of the miner and $c$ users. Later work \cite{chung2024collusion,welfareIncreasingCollusion} shows a gap between the $1$-SCP and $2$-SCP classes. We show that the class of $2$-SCP mechan…

Deep learning CAT bond valuation
Julian Sester, Huansang Xu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.25899 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.25899

Deep learning CAT bond valuation
In this paper, we propose an alternative valuation approach for CAT bonds where a pricing formula is learned by deep neural networks. Once trained, these networks can be used to price CAT bonds as a function of inputs that reflect both the current market conditions and the specific features of the contract. This approach offers two main advantages. First, due to the expressive power of neural networks, the trained model enables fast and accurate evaluation of CAT bond prices. Second, because of…

CBS News Digital's WGA East members reach a deal with management on their first collective bargaining agreement, a week before Skydance is set to take over (Todd Spangler/Variety)
https://variety.com/2025/digital/news/cbs-news-digital-wga-east-u…

CBS News Digital WGA East Union Members Reach Three-Year Contract Deal
WGA East members at CBS News Digital reached a deal on their first collective-bargaining agreement, coming a week before Skydance-Paramount deal closes.

SolContractEval: A Benchmark for Evaluating Contract-Level Solidity Code Generation
Zhifan Ye, Jiachi Chen, Zhenzhe Shao, Lingfeng Bao, Xiaohu Yang, Zhongxin Liu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.23824

SolContractEval: A Benchmark for Evaluating Contract-Level Solidity Code Generation
The rise of blockchain has brought smart contracts into mainstream use, creating a demand for smart contract generation tools. While large language models (LLMs) excel at generating code in general-purpose languages, their effectiveness on Solidity, the primary language for smart contracts, remains underexplored. Solidity constitutes only a small portion of typical LLM training data and differs from general-purpose languages in its version-sensitive syntax and limited flexibility. These factors…

Satellite: Detecting and Analyzing Smart Contract Vulnerabilities caused by Subcontract Misuse
Zeqin Liao, Yuhong Nan, Zixu Gao, Henglong Liang, Sicheng Hao, Jiajing Wu, Zibin Zheng
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.23679

Satellite: Detecting and Analyzing Smart Contract Vulnerabilities caused by Subcontract Misuse
Developers of smart contracts pervasively reuse subcontracts to improve development efficiency. Like any program language, such subcontract reuse may unexpectedly include, or introduce vulnerabilities to the end-point smart contract. Unfortunately, automatically detecting such issues poses several unique challenges. Particularly, in most cases, smart contracts are compiled as bytecode, whose class-level information (e.g., inheritance, virtual function table), and even semantics (e.g., control f…

An interview with Michele Mulroney, the new president of WGA West, about helping bring Jimmy Kimmel back, plans for upcoming contract negotiations, and more (Wendy Lee/Los Angeles Times)
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/busin…

The Writers Guild helped bring Kimmel back. Here's what its new president plans next
Michele Mulroney was elected WGA West president, a key role during next year's negotiations with major studios.

CON-QA: Privacy-Preserving QA using cloud LLMs in Contract Domain
Ajeet Kumar Singh, Rajsabi Surya, Anurag Tripathi, Santanu Choudhury, Sudhir Bisane
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.19925

CON-QA: Privacy-Preserving QA using cloud LLMs in Contract Domain
As enterprises increasingly integrate cloud-based large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and Gemini into their legal document workflows, protecting sensitive contractual information - including Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and commercially sensitive clauses - has emerged as a critical challenge. In this work, we propose CON-QA, a hybrid privacy-preserving framework designed specifically for secure question answering over enterprise contracts, effectively combining local and c…

An Algorithm-to-Contract Framework without Demand Queries
Ilan Doron-Arad, Hadas Shachnai, Gilad Shmerler, Inbal Talgam-Cohen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.20038 https://

An Algorithm-to-Contract Framework without Demand Queries
Consider costly tasks that add up to the success of a project, and must be fitted by an agent into a given time-frame. This is an instance of the classic budgeted maximization problem, which admits an approximation scheme (FPTAS). Now assume the agent is performing these tasks on behalf of a principal, who is the one to reap the rewards if the project succeeds. The principal must design a contract to incentivize the agent. Is there still an approximation scheme? In this work, our ultimate goal …

LegalOn, whose contract review tool uses AI to identify risks and suggest edits, raised a $50M Series C, bringing its total raised to $200M (Kate Park/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/24/softbank-backed-legalon-fuels-ai…

SoftBank-backed LegalOn lands $50M to streamline legal workflows with AI | TechCrunch
LegalOn, which provides AI-powered contract review software for legal teams, has raised $50 million in a Series C round.

YouTube TV drops Univision and other TelevisaUnivision networks after contract talks failed; Google is also in renewal negotiations with NBCU (Todd Spangler/Variety)
https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/univision-goes-dark-on-youtube-tv-b…

Univision Goes Dark on YouTube TV
Google's YouTube TV has dropped Univision's local TV stations along with other TelevisaUnivision networks after the two sides failed to come to terms on a contract renewal Tuesday.

It's been a crazy week, so before you head out for the weekend, don't miss today's Metacurity for the most critical infosec developments you should know, including
--Two Scattered Spider members busted in London, US indicts one of them,
--MI6 launches dark web portal for potential spy comms,
--KT announced yet another breach,
--Korean authorities vow sweeping response to hacking spree,
--ICE signs contract with Graykey phone hacking device maker,

Two Scattered Spider members busted in the UK, one indicted in the US
MI6 launches dark web portal for potential spy comms, KT hit by another breach, Korean authorities vow sweeping response to hacking spree, ICE signs contract with Graykey phone hacking device maker, ChatGPT flaw that enabled Gmail extraction fixed, $2m theft roils BNB Chain DeFi scene, much more

LISA Technical Report: An Agentic Framework for Smart Contract Auditing
Izaiah Sun, Daniel Tan, Andy Deng
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.24698 https://arxiv.or…

LISA Technical Report: An Agentic Framework for Smart Contract Auditing
We present LISA, an agentic smart contract vulnerability detection framework that combines rule-based and logic-based methods to address a broad spectrum of vulnerabilities in smart contracts. LISA leverages data from historical audit reports to learn the detection experience (without model fine-tuning), enabling it to generalize learned patterns to unseen projects and evolving threat profiles. In our evaluation, LISA significantly outperforms both LLM-based approaches and traditional static an…

Smart Contract Intent Detection with Pre-trained Programming Language Model
Youwei Huang, Jianwen Li, Sen Fang, Yao Li, Peng Yang, Bin Hu, Tao Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.20086

Smart Contract Intent Detection with Pre-trained Programming Language Model
Malicious intent in smart contract development can lead to substantial economic losses. SmartIntentNN is a deep learning model specifically designed to identify unsafe intents in smart contracts. This model integrates the Universal Sentence Encoder, a K-means clustering-based intent highlighting mechanism, and a Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory network for multi-label classification, achieving an F1 of 0.8633 in distinguishing ten different intent categories. In this study, we present an up…

CON-QA: Privacy-Preserving QA using cloud LLMs in Contract Domain
Ajeet Kumar Singh, Rajsabi Surya, Anurag Tripathi, Santanu Choudhury, Sudhir Bisane
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.19925

CON-QA: Privacy-Preserving QA using cloud LLMs in Contract Domain
As enterprises increasingly integrate cloud-based large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and Gemini into their legal document workflows, protecting sensitive contractual information - including Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and commercially sensitive clauses - has emerged as a critical challenge. In this work, we propose CON-QA, a hybrid privacy-preserving framework designed specifically for secure question answering over enterprise contracts, effectively combining local and c…

A Stream Pipeline Framework for Digital Payment Programming based on Smart Contracts
Zijia Meng, Victor Feng
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.21075 https://arxiv…

A Stream Pipeline Framework for Digital Payment Programming based on Smart Contracts
Digital payments play a pivotal role in the burgeoning digital economy. Moving forward, the enhancement of digital payment systems necessitates programmability, going beyond just efficiency and convenience, to meet the evolving needs and complexities. Smart contract platforms like Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) networks and blockchains support programmable digital payments. However, the prevailing paradigm of programming payment logics involves coding smart contracts with programming lang…

A Time-Bound Signature Scheme for Blockchains
Benjamin Marsh, Paolo Serafino
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.03697 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.03697

A Time-Bound Signature Scheme for Blockchains
We introduce a modified Schnorr signature scheme to allow for time-bound signatures for transaction fee auction bidding and smart contract purposes in a blockchain context, ensuring an honest producer can only validate a signature before a given block height. The immutable blockchain is used as a source of universal time for the signature scheme. We show the use of such a signature scheme leads to lower MEV revenue for builders. We then apply our time-bound signatures to Ethereum's EIP-1559 and…

SAEL: Leveraging Large Language Models with Adaptive Mixture-of-Experts for Smart Contract Vulnerability Detection
Lei Yu, Shiqi Cheng, Zhirong Huang, Jingyuan Zhang, Chenjie Shen, Junyi Lu, Li Yang, Fengjun Zhang, Jiajia Ma
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.22371

SAEL: Leveraging Large Language Models with Adaptive Mixture-of-Experts for Smart Contract Vulnerability Detection
With the increasing security issues in blockchain, smart contract vulnerability detection has become a research focus. Existing vulnerability detection methods have their limitations: 1) Static analysis methods struggle with complex scenarios. 2) Methods based on specialized pre-trained models perform well on specific datasets but have limited generalization capabilities. In contrast, general-purpose Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive ability in adapting to new vulnerability pa…

Program Analysis for High-Value Smart Contract Vulnerabilities: Techniques and Insights
Yannis Smaragdakis, Neville Grech, Sifis Lagouvardos, Konstantinos Triantafyllou, Ilias Tsatiris, Yannis Bollanos, Tony Rocco Valentine
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.20672

Program Analysis for High-Value Smart Contract Vulnerabilities: Techniques and Insights
A widespread belief in the blockchain security community is that automated techniques are only good for detecting shallow bugs, typically of small value. In this paper, we present the techniques and insights that have led us to repeatable success in automatically discovering high-value smart contract vulnerabilities. Our vulnerability disclosures have yielded 10 bug bounties, for a total of over $3M, over high-profile deployed code, as well as hundreds of bugs detected in pre-deployment or unde…

The fate of Jimmy Kimmel's ABC show, whose contract ends in 2026, will reveal if Colbert's cancelation was a one-off or a fundamental shift in late-night TV (CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/26/cbs-canceling-colbert-raises-late-night-questions…

CBS canceling Colbert begs the question: Are more late night shows next?
The cost of producing late night programs has risen as the media industry has been upended by streaming and shifting consumer habits.

SoK: Root Cause of \$1 Billion Loss in Smart Contract Real-World Attacks via a Systematic Literature Review of Vulnerabilities
Hadis Rezaei, Mojtaba Eshghie, Karl Anderesson, Francesco Palmieri
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.20175

SoK: Root Cause of \$1 Billion Loss in Smart Contract Real-World Attacks via a Systematic Literature Review of Vulnerabilities
The Ethereum ecosystem, despite its maturity, continues to witness catastrophic attacks, with billions of dollars in assets lost annually. In response, a significant body of research has focused on identifying and mitigating smart contract vulnerabilities. However, these efforts predominantly focus on implementation-level bugs, leaving a critical gap between academic understanding of vulnerabilities and the root causes of real-world high-impact financial losses. We employ a two-pronged methodol…

Scale AI signed a $100M ceiling contract with the DOD to provide end-to-end services, including its data engine for data preparation and AI model testing (Maria Curi/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2025/09/17/scale-ai-deal-pentagon

Exclusive: Scale AI strikes deal with Pentagon
The deal will allow DOD to acquire AI capabilities and deploy them on top secret networks using Scale AI's end-to-end products.

On LLM-Assisted Generation of Smart Contracts from Business Processes
Fabian Stiehle, Hans Weytjens, Ingo Weber
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.23087 https://ar…

On LLM-Assisted Generation of Smart Contracts from Business Processes
Large language models (LLMs) have changed the reality of how software is produced. Within the wider software engineering community, among many other purposes, they are explored for code generation use cases from different types of input. In this work, we present an exploratory study to investigate the use of LLMs for generating smart contract code from business process descriptions, an idea that has emerged in recent literature to overcome the limitations of traditional rule-based code generati…

YouTube TV and Fox reach a new carriage deal for Fox News, local Fox stations, Fox Sports, and other channels (Todd Spangler/Variety)
https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/youtube-tv-fox-corp-deal-extension-fox-news-blackout-1236498996/…

YouTube TV, Fox Corp.: Short-Term Deal Extension, Averting Fox News Blackout
Fox News, local TV stations and other Fox Corp.-owned networks will remain on YouTube TV -- for now -- after the parties agreed to a short-term extension to their previous contract, as talks on a renewal continue.

BugMagnifier: TON Transaction Simulator for Revealing Smart Contract Vulnerabilities
Yury Yanovich, Victoria Kovalevskaya, Maksim Egorov, Elizaveta Smirnova, Matvey Mishuris, Yash Madhwal, Kirill Ziborov, Vladimir Gorgadze, Subodh Sharma
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.24444

BugMagnifier: TON Transaction Simulator for Revealing Smart Contract Vulnerabilities
The Open Network (TON) blockchain employs an asynchronous execution model that introduces unique security challenges for smart contracts, particularly race conditions arising from unpredictable message processing order. While previous work established vulnerability patterns through static analysis of audit reports, dynamic detection of temporal dependencies through systematic testing remains an open problem. We present BugMagnifier, a transaction simulation framework that systematically reveals…

LLAMA: Multi-Feedback Smart Contract Fuzzing Framework with LLM-Guided Seed Generation
Keke Gai, Haochen Liang, Jing Yu, Liehuang Zhu, Dusit Niyato
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.12084

LLAMA: Multi-Feedback Smart Contract Fuzzing Framework with LLM-Guided Seed Generation
Smart contracts play a pivotal role in blockchain ecosystems, and fuzzing remains an important approach to securing smart contracts. Even though mutation scheduling is a key factor influencing fuzzing effectiveness, existing fuzzers have primarily explored seed scheduling and generation, while mutation scheduling has been rarely addressed by prior work. In this work, we propose a Large Language Models (LLMs)-based Multi-feedback Smart Contract Fuzzing framework (LLAMA) that integrates LLMs, evo…

Fair Contracts
Matteo Castiglioni, Junjie Chen, Yingkai Li
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.11214 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.11214

Fair Contracts
We introduce and study the problem of designing optimal contracts under fairness constraints on the task assignments and compensations. We adopt the notion of envy-free (EF) and its relaxations, $ε$-EF and envy-free up to one item (EF1), in contract design settings. Unlike fair allocations, EF contracts are guaranteed to exist. However, computing any constant-factor approximation to the optimal EF contract is NP-hard in general, even using $ε$-EF contracts. For this reason, we consider settin…

Client--Library Compatibility Testing with API Interaction Snapshots
Gustave Monce (LaBRI), Thomas Degueule (LaBRI), Jean-R\'emy Falleri (LaBRI), Romain Robbes (LaBRI)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.20814

Client--Library Compatibility Testing with API Interaction Snapshots
Modern software development heavily relies on third-party libraries to speed up development and enhance quality. As libraries evolve, they may break the tacit contract established with their clients by introducing behavioral breaking changes (BBCs) that alter run-time behavior and silently break client applications without being detected at compile time. Traditional regression tests on the client side often fail to detect such BBCs, either due to limited library coverage or weak assertions that…

From Contracts to Code: Automating Smart Contract Generation with Multi-Level Finite State Machines
Lambard Maxence, Bertelle Cyrille, Duvallet Claude
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.16276

From Contracts to Code: Automating Smart Contract Generation with Multi-Level Finite State Machines
In an increasingly complex contractual landscape, the demand for transparency, security, and efficiency has intensified. Blockchain technology, with its decentralized and immutable nature, addresses these challenges by reducing intermediary costs, minimizing fraud risks, and enhancing system compatibility. Smart contracts, initially conceptualized by Nick Szabo and later implemented on the Ethereum blockchain, automate and secure contractual clauses, offering a robust solution for various indus…

A Web-Based Environment for the Specification and Generation of Smart Legal Contracts
Regan Meloche, Durga Sivakumar, Amal A. Anda, Sofana Alfuhaid, Daniel Amyot, Luigi Logrippo, John Mylopoulos
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.11258

A Web-Based Environment for the Specification and Generation of Smart Legal Contracts
Monitoring the compliance of contract performance against legal obligations is important in order to detect violations, ideally, as soon as they occur. Such monitoring can nowadays be achieved through the use of smart contracts, which provide protection against tampering as well as some level of automation in handling violations. However, there exists a large gap between natural language contracts and smart contract implementations. This paper introduces a Web-based environment that partly fill…

Bribers, Bribers on The Chain, Is Resisting All in Vain? Trustless Consensus Manipulation Through Bribing Contracts
Bence So\'oki-T\'oth, Istv\'an Andr\'as Seres, Kamilla Kara, \'Abel Nagy, Bal\'azs Pej\'o, Gergely Bicz\'ok
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.17185

Bribers, Bribers on The Chain, Is Resisting All in Vain? Trustless Consensus Manipulation Through Bribing Contracts
The long-term success of cryptocurrencies largely depends on the incentive compatibility provided to the validators. Bribery attacks, facilitated trustlessly via smart contracts, threaten this foundation. This work introduces, implements, and evaluates three novel and efficient bribery contracts targeting Ethereum validators. The first bribery contract enables a briber to fork the blockchain by buying votes on their proposed blocks. The second contract incentivizes validators to voluntarily exi…

CASPER: Contrastive Approach for Smart Ponzi Scheme Detecter with More Negative Samples
Weijia Yang, Tian Lan, Leyuan Liu, Wei Chen, Tianqing Zhu, Sheng Wen, Xiaosong Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.16840

CASPER: Contrastive Approach for Smart Ponzi Scheme Detecter with More Negative Samples
The rapid evolution of digital currency trading, fueled by the integration of blockchain technology, has led to both innovation and the emergence of smart Ponzi schemes. A smart Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investment operation in smart contract that uses funds from new investors to pay returns to earlier investors. Traditional Ponzi scheme detection methods based on deep learning typically rely on fully supervised models, which require large amounts of labeled data. However, such data is often…

From Paradigm Shift to Audit Rift: Exploring Vulnerabilities and Audit Tips for TON Smart Contracts
Yury Yanovich, Sergey Sobolev, Yash Madhwal, Kirill Ziborov, Vladimir Gorgadze, Victoria Kovalevskay, Elizaveta Smirnova, Matvey Mishuris, Subodh Sharma
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10823

From Paradigm Shift to Audit Rift: Exploring Vulnerabilities and Audit Tips for TON Smart Contracts
The Open Network (TON) is a high-performance blockchain platform designed for scalability and efficiency, leveraging an asynchronous execution model and a multi-layered architecture. While TON's design offers significant advantages, it also introduces unique challenges for smart contract development and security. This paper introduces a comprehensive audit checklist for TON smart contracts, based on an analysis of 34 professional audit reports containing 233 real-world vulnerabilities. The chec…