Tootfinder

A look at China's push to integrate AI tools into children's lives, even as educators and researchers remain skeptical, warning the benefits are overstated (Viola Zhou/Rest of World)
https://restofworld.org/2025/ai-china-childhood/

AI is reshaping childhood in China
Government support and tech companies’ drive for profit fuel a rush to integrate AI tools, from robot tutors to chatbots, in education and caretaking.

How the Venezuelan government is using crypto and stablecoins like USDT to manage the downturn; Venezuela sells most of its oil to China and is paid in crypto (Anatoly Kurmanaev/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/20…

How Maduro Is Responding to Trump’s Pressure on Venezuela’s Economy
President Nicolás Maduro’s opponents hope a new period of economic pain will finally topple his government. He is using cryptocurrency to hold on.

Copenhagen-based Formalize, whose compliance software serves organizations in 80 countries, raised a €30M Series B co-led by Acton Capital and Blackfin Tech (Tamara Djurickovic/Tech.eu)
https://tech.eu/2025/10/28/formalize-raises-eur30m-to-a…

Formalize raises €30M to advance compliance solutions across Europe
Copenhagen-based Formalize has raised €30 million in a Series B co-led by Acton Capital and Blackfin Tech, with participation from West Hill Capital and CIBC Innovation Banking. The company has raised €50 million to date.Across Europe, organisations face an increasingly complex, interconnected regulatory landscape, with evolving rules reshaping expectations for information security, resilience, and reporting across industries and regions. Formalize, addresses this with a single platform…

UMG and Stability AI announce a partnership to develop music creation tools powered by "responsibly" trained AI (Marc Schneider/Billboard)
https://www.billboard.com/pro/umg-stability-ai-partnership-develop-music-creation-tools/

UMG Partners With Stability AI to Develop Music Creation Tools for Artists, Producers
Following its Udio settlement, UMG teams up with Stability AI to build responsibly trained AI tools that empower artists and protect copyrights.

Two ex-staffers of cybersecurity incident response companies Sygnia and DigitalMint plead guilty to targeting US companies in 2023's BlackCat ransomware attacks (Sergiu Gatlan/BleepingComputer)
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/secu<…

Nexperia warns customers face impending production halts and urges its Chinese unit to reengage, says it hadn't got "any meaningful response" despite outreach (Sarah Jacob/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

Microsoft says it supports the OpenAI board moving to form a public benefit corporation and recapitalization, and now holds a ~$135B OpenAI Group PBC investment (Microsoft)
https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2025/10/28/the-next-chapter-of-the-m…

The next chapter of the Microsoft–OpenAI partnership - The Official Microsoft Blog
Since 2019, Microsoft and OpenAI have shared a vision to advance artificial intelligence responsibly and make its benefits broadly accessible. What began as an investment in a research organization has grown into one of the most successful partnerships in our industry. As we enter the next phase of this partnership, we’ve signed a new definitive...

A look at Live Nation's Setlist.fm, a wiki-like site with 80M annual users that changed live music by letting users document songs that artists play at concerts (Marc Hogan/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/27/arts/music/setlist-fm-website-con…

The Website Reshaping Live Music, One Set List at a Time
On Setlist.fm, users track what songs artists play at concerts (and more). The availability of so much data has changed the ways musicians and fans experience shows.

After AWS's major outage, Signal's Meredith Whittaker says there "isn't really another choice" but to use AWS and "the entire stack" is "owned by 3-4 players" (Emma Roth/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/news/807147/signal…

‘There isn’t really another choice:’ Signal chief explains why the encrypted messenger relies on AWS
Signal head Meredith Whittaker has responded to concerns about the encrypted messaging app’s use of Amazon Web Services, saying “there isn’t really another choice.”

OpenAI confirms Andrea Vallone, the head of an OpenAI safety research team that works on ChatGPT's mental health responses, is set to leave at the end of 2025 (Maxwell Zeff/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/openai-research-lead-mental-health-quietly-depar…

A Research Leader Behind ChatGPT’s Mental Health Work Is Leaving OpenAI
The model policy team leads core parts of AI safety research, including how ChatGPT responds to users in crisis.