Canadian librarian Ian Linkletter has ended a five-year legal battle with ed-tech firm Proctorio after being sued for sharing public YouTube help videos that exposed how the company's remote-proctoring AI works. Ars Technica reports: ... Together, the videos, the help center screenshot, and another screenshot showing course material describing how Proctorio works were enough for Proctorio to take Linkletter to court. The ed tech company promptly filed a lawsuit and obtained a temporary injunction by spuriously claiming that Linkletter shared private YouTube videos containing confidential information. Because the YouTube videos -- which were public but "unlisted" when Linkletter shared them -- had been removed, Linkletter did not have to delete the seven tweets that initially caught Proctorio's attention, but the injunction required that he remove two tweets, including the screenshots.

In the five years since, the legal fight dragged on, with no end in sight until last week, as Canadian courts tangled with copyright allegations that tested a recently passed law intended to shield Canadian rights to free expression, the Protection of Public Participation Act. To fund his defense, Linkletter said in a blog announcing the settlement that he invested his life savings "ten times over." Additionally, about 900 GoFundMe supporters and thousands of members of the Association of Administrative and Professional Staff at UBC contributed tens of thousands more. For the last year of the battle, a law firm, Norton Rose Fulbright, agreed to represent him on a pro bono basis, which Linkletter said âoewas a huge relief to me, as it meant I could defend myself all the way if Proctorio chose to proceed with the litigation."

The terms of the settlement remain confidential, but both Linkletter and Proctorio confirmed that no money was exchanged. For Proctorio, the settlement made permanent the injunction that restricted Linkletter from posting the company's help center or instructional materials. But it doesn't stop Linkletter from remaining the company's biggest critic, as "there are no other restrictions on my freedom of expression," Linkletter's blog noted. "I've won my life back!" Linkletter wrote, while reassuring his supporters that he's "fine" with how things ended. "It doesn't take much imagination to understand why Proctorio is a nightmare for students," Linkletter wrote. "I can say everything that matters about Proctorio using public information."

An anonymous reader shares a report: This summer, Oslo's public-transport authority drove a Chinese electric bus deep into a decommissioned mine inside a nearby mountain to answer a question: Could it be hacked? Isolated by rock from digital interference, cybersecurity experts came back with a qualified yes: The bus could in theory be remotely disabled using the control system for the battery.

The revelation, presented at a recent public-transport conference, has spurred officials in Denmark and the U.K. to start their own investigations into Chinese vehicles. It has also fed into broader security concerns across Europe about the growing prevalence of Chinese-made equipment in the region's energy and telecommunications infrastructure.

The worry is the same for autos, solar panels and other connected devices: that mechanisms used for wirelessly delivering system updates could also be exploited by a hostile government or third-party hacker to compromise critical networks. [...] The Oslo transport authority, Ruter, said the bus's mobile-network connection via a Romanian SIM card gave manufacturer Yutong access to the control system for battery and power supply. Ruter said it is addressing the vulnerability by developing firewalls and delaying the signals sent to the vehicles, among other solutions.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: The Trump administration will provide Constellation Energy with a $1 billion loan to restart the Crane Clean Energy Center nuclear plant in Pennsylvania, Department of Energy officials said Tuesday. Previously known as Three Mile Island Unit 1, the plant is expected to start generating power again in 2027. Constellation unveiled plans to rename and restart the reactor in Sept. 2024 through a power purchase agreement with Microsoft to support the tech company's data center demand in the region.

Three Mile Island Unit 1 ceased operations in 2019, one of a dozen reactors that closed in recent years as nuclear struggled to compete against cheap natural gas. It sits on the same site as Three Mile Island Unit 2, the reactor that partially melted down in 1979 in the worst nuclear accident in U.S. history. The loan would cover the majority to the project's estimated cost of $1.6 billion. The first advance to Constellation is expected in the first quarter of 2026, said Greg Beard, senior advisor to the Energy Department's Loan Programs Office, in a call with reporters. The loan comes with a guarantee from Constellation that it will protect taxpayer money, Beard said.

An anonymous reader shares a report: When Nigel Morris tells you he's worried about the economy, you listen. As industry observers know, Morris co-founded Capital One and pioneered lending to subprime borrowers, building an empire on understanding exactly how much financial stress the average American can handle. Now, as an early investor in Klarna and other buy-now-pay-later companies like Aplazo in Mexico, he's watching something that makes him deeply uncomfortable.

"To see that people are using [BNPL services] to buy something as basic and fundamental as groceries," Morris told me on stage at Web Summit in Lisbon this week, "I think is a pretty clear indication that a lot of people are struggling." The statistics back up his unease. Buy-now-pay-later services have exploded to 91.5 million users in the United States, according to the financial services firm Empower, with 25% using the services to finance their groceries as of earlier this year, according to survey data released in late October by lending marketplace Lending Tree.

These aren't discretionary purchases -- the designer bags and latest Apple headphones that BNPL was marketed for originally. Borrowers aren't paying it all back, either. According to Lending Tree, default rates are accelerating: 42% of BNPL users made at least one late payment in 2025, up from 39% in 2024 and 34% in 2023.

"Just a little more than a month after reaching an all-time high, Bitcoin has erased the more than 30% gain registered since the start of the year..." reports Bloomberg: The dominant cryptocurrency fell below US$93,714 on Sunday, pushing the price beneath the closing level reached at the end of last year, when financial markets were rallying following President Donald Trump's election victory. Bitcoin soared to a record US$126,251 on Oct 6, only to begin tumbling four days later after unexpected comments on tariffs by Trump sent markets into a tailspin worldwide. "The general market is risk-off," said Matthew Hougan, the San Francisco-based chief investment officer for Bitwise Asset Management. "Crypto was the canary in the coal mine for that, it was the first to flinch."

Over the past month, many of the biggest buyers — from exchange-traded fund allocators to corporate treasuries — have quietly stepped back, depriving the market of the flow-driven support that helped propel the token to records earlier this year. For much of the year, institutions were the backbone of Bitcoin's legitimacy and its price. ETFs as a cohort took in more than US$25 billion, according to Bloomberg data, pushing assets as high as roughly US$169 billion. Their steady allocation flows helped reframe the asset as a portfolio diversifier — a hedge against inflation, monetary debasement and political disarray. But that narrative — always tenuous — is fraying afresh, leaving the market exposed to something quieter but no less destabilising: disengagement. "The selloff is a confluence of profit-taking by LTHs, institutional outflows, macro uncertainty, and leveraged longs getting wiped out," said Jake Kennis, senior research analyst at Nansen. "What is clear is that the market has temporarily chosen a downward direction after a long period of consolidation/ranging..."

Boom and bust cycles have been a constant since Bitcoin burst into the mainstream consciousness with a more than 13,000% surge in 2017, only to be followed by a plunge of almost 75% the following year... Bitcoin has whipsawed investors through the year, dropping to as low as US$74,400 in April as Trump unveiled his tariffs, before rebounding to record highs ahead of the latest retreat... The market downturn has been even tougher on smaller, less liquid tokens that traders often gravitate toward because of their higher volatility and typical outperformance during rallies. A MarketVector index tracking the bottom half of the largest 100 digital assets is down around 60% this year.

"To be clear, the current economics of space-based data centers don't make sense," writes the Wall Street Journal.

"But they could in the future, perhaps as soon as a decade or so from now, according to an analysis by Phil Metzger, a research professor at the University of Central Florida and formerly of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration." "Space enthusiasts (comme moi) have long sought a business case to enable human migration beyond our home world," he posted on X amid the new hype. "I think AI servers in space is the first real business case that will lead to many more...."

The argument essentially boils down to the belief that AI's needs are eventually going to grow so great that we need to move to outer space. There the sun's power can be more efficiently harvested. In space, the sun's rays can be direct and constant for solar panels to collect — no clouds, no rainstorms, no nighttime. Demands for cooling could also be cut because of the vacuum of space. Plus, there aren't those pesky regulations that executives like to complain about, slowing construction of new power plants to meet the data-center needs. In space, no one can hear the Nimbys scream. "We will be able to beat the cost of terrestrial data centers in space in the next couple of decades," Bezos said at a tech conference last month. "Space will end up being one of the places that keeps making Earth better."

It's still early days. At Alphabet, Google's plans sound almost conservative. The search-engine company in recent days announced Project Suncatcher, which it describes as a moonshot project to scale machine learning in space. It plans to launch two prototype satellites by early 2027 to test its hardware in orbit. "Like any moonshot, it's going to require us to solve a lot of complex engineering challenges," Pichai posted on social media. Nvidia, too, has announced a partnership with startup Starcloud to work on space-based data centers. Not to be outdone, Elon Musk has been painting his own updated vision for the heavens... in recent weeks he has been talking more about how he can use his spaceships to deploy new versions of his solar-powered Starlink satellites equipped with high-speed lasers to build out in-space data centers.

On Friday, Musk further reiterated how those AI satellites would be able to generate 100 gigawatts of annual solar power — or, what he said, would be roughly a quarter of what the U.S. consumes on average in a year. "We have a plan mapped out to do it," he told investor Ron Baron during an event. "It gets crazy." Previously, he has suggested he was four to five years away from that ability. He's also touted even wilder ideas, saying on X that 100 terawatts a year "is possible from a lunar base producing solar-powered AI satellites locally and accelerating them to escape velocity with a mass driver." Simply put, he's suggesting a moon base will crank out satellites and throw them into orbit with a catapult. And those satellites' solar panels would generate 100,000 gigawatts a year. "I think we'll see intelligence continue to scale all the way up to where...most of the power of the sun is harnessed for compute," Musk told a tech conference in September.

An anonymous reader shared this report from CNBC: [T]he computing power of crypto mining generates a lot of heat, most which just ends up vented into the air. According to digital assets brokerage, K33, the bitcoin mining industry generates about 100 TWh of heat annually — enough to heat all of Finland.This energy waste within a very energy-intense industry is leading entrepreneurs to look for ways to repurpose the heat for homes, offices, or other locations, especially in colder weather months.

During a frigid snap earlier this year, The New York Times reviewed HeatTrio, a $900 space heater that also doubles as a bitcoin mining rig. Others use the heat from their own in-home cryptocurrency mining to spread warmth throughout their house. "I've seen bitcoin rigs running quietly in attics, with the heat they generate rerouted through the home's ventilation system to offset heating costs. It's a clever use of what would otherwise be wasted energy," said Jill Ford, CEO of Bitford Digital, a sustainable bitcoin mining company based in Dallas... "Same price as heating the house, but the perk is that you are mining bitcoin," Ford said...

The crypto-heated future may be unfolding in the town of Challis, Idaho, where Cade Peterson's company, Softwarm, is repurposing bitcoin heat to ward off the winter. Several shops and businesses in town are experimenting with Softwarm's rigs to mine and heat. At TC Car, Truck and RV Wash, Peterson says, the owner was spending $25 a day to heat his wash bays to melt snow and warm up the water. "Traditional heaters would consume energy with no returns. They installed bitcoin miners and it produces more money in bitcoin than it costs to run," Peterson said. Meanwhile, an industrial concrete company is offsetting its $1,000 a month bill to heat its 2,500-gallon water tank by heating it with bitcoin. Peterson has heated his own home for two-and-a-half years using bitcoin mining equipment and believes that heat will power almost everything in the future. "You will go to Home Depot in a few years and buy a water heater with a data port on it and your water will be heated with bitcoin," Peterson said.
Derek Mohr, clinical associate professor at the University of Rochester Simon School of Business, remains skeptical. Bitcoin mining is so specialized now that a home computer, or even network of home computers, would have almost zero chance of being helpful in mining a block of bitcoin, according to Mohr, with mining farms use of specialized chips that are created to mine bitcoin much faster than a home computer... "The bitcoin heat devices I have seen appear to be simple space heaters that use your own electricity to heat the room..."
CNBC also spoke to Andrew Sobko, founder of Argentum AI (which is building a marketplace for sharing computing power), who says the idea makes the most sense in larger settings. "We're working with partners who are already redirecting compute heat into building heating systems and even agricultural greenhouse warming. That's where the economics and environmental benefits make real sense. Instead of trying to move the heat physically, you move the compute closer to where that heat provides value."

A new "cold war" between America and China is "pushing leaders to sideline concerns about the dangers of powerful AI models," reports the Wall Street Journal, "including the spread of disinformation and other harmful content, and the development of superintelligent AI systems misaligned with human values..."

"Both countries are driven as much by fear as by hope of progress. " In Washington and Silicon Valley, warnings abound that China's "authoritarian AI," left unchecked, will erode American tech supremacy. Beijing is gripped by the conviction that a failure to keep pace in AI will make it easier for the U.S. to cut short China's resurgence as a global power. Both countries believe market share for their companies across the world is up for grabs — and with it, the potential to influence large swaths of the global population.

The U.S. still has a clear lead, producing the most powerful AI models. China can't match it in advanced chips and has no answer for the financial firepower of private American investors, who funded AI startups to the tune of $104 billion in the first half of 2025, and are gearing up for more. But it has a massive population of capable engineers, lower costs and a state-led development model that often moves faster than the U.S., all of which Beijing is working to harness to tip the contest in its direction. A new "whole of society" campaign looks to accelerate the construction of computing clusters in areas like Inner Mongolia, where vast solar and wind farms provide plentiful cheap energy, and connect hundreds of data centers to create a shared compute pool — some describe it as a "national cloud" — by 2028. China is also funneling hundreds of billions of dollars into its power grid to support AI training and adoption...

"Our lead is probably in the 'months but not years' realm," said Chris McGuire, who helped design U.S. export controls on AI chips while serving on the National Security Council under the Biden administration. Chinese AI models currently rank at or near the top in every task from coding to video generation, with the exception of search, according to Chatbot Arena, a popular crowdsourced ranking platform. China's manufacturing sector, meanwhile, is rocketing past the U.S. in bringing AI into the physical world through robotaxis, autonomous drones and humanoid robots. Given China's progress, McGuire said, the U.S. is "very lucky" to have its advantage in chips...

If AI surpasses human intelligence and acquires the ability to improve itself, it could confer unshakable scientific, economic and military superiority on the country that controls it. Short of that, AI's ability to automate tedious tasks and process vast amounts of data quickly promises to supercharge everything from cancer diagnoses to missile defense. With so much at stake, hacking and cyber espionage are likely to get worse, as AI gives hackers more powerful tools, while increasing incentives for state-backed groups to try to steal AI-related intellectual property. As distrust grows, Washington and Beijing will also find it hard, if not impossible, to cooperate in areas like preventing extremist groups from using AI in destructive ways, such as building bioweapons. "The costs of the AI Cold War are already high and will go much higher," said Paul Triolo, a former U.S. government analyst and current technology policy lead at business consulting firm DGA-Albright Stonebridge Group. "A U.S.-China AI arms race becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, with neither side able to trust that the other would observe any restrictions on advanced AI capability development...."
The article includes an interesting observation from Helen Toner, director of strategy for Georgetown's Center for Security and Emerging Technology and a former OpenAI board member. Toner points out "We don't actually know" if boosting computing power with better chips will continue producing more-powerful AI models.

So "If performance plateaus," the Journal writes, "despite all the spending by OpenAI and others — a growing concern in Silicon Valley — China has a chance to compete."

From the personal blog of interface expert Bruce Ediger: Early in March 2025, I noticed that a web crawler with a user agent string of

meta-externalagent/1.1 (+https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters/crawler)

was hitting my blog's machine at an unreasonable rate.

I followed the URL and discovered this is what Meta uses to gather premium, human-generated content to train its LLMs. I found the rate of requests to be annoying.

I already have a PHP program that creates the illusion of an infinite website. I decided to answer any HTTP request that had "meta-externalagent" in its user agent string with the contents of a bork.php generated file...

This worked brilliantly. Meta ramped up to requesting 270,000 URLs on May 30 and 31, 2025...

After about 3 months, I got scared that Meta's insatiable consumption of Super Great Pages about condiments, underwear and circa 2010 C-List celebs would start costing me money. So I switched to giving "meta-externalagent" a 404 status code. I decided to see how long it would take one of the highest valued companies in the world to decide to go away.

The answer is 5 months.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Washington Post: Winning the lottery isn't what brought Carrie Edwards her 15 minutes of fame. It was giving it all away. Standing alone in her kitchen one day in September, the Virginia woman was thunderstruck to discover she had won $150,000 in a Powerball drawing. As she was absorbing her windfall, she said, "I just heard as loud as you can hear God or whoever you believe in the universe just say, this is -- it's not your money." Then came a decision: She would donate it all to her three most cherished charities (source paywalled; alternative source). [...] Her journey to the lucky prize started when she walked into a 7-Eleven with a friend who wanted to buy two Powerball tickets. The jackpot for the Sept. 6 drawing was topping $1.7 billion, the second-largest amount ever. Edwards, 68, hardly ever played the lottery, but her friend was an active player who gave her two pieces of advice: Always buy a paper ticket, rather than getting them online. And the Powerball multiplier is a scam, don't do it. She ignored him on both accounts.

She created a Virginia Lottery account on her phone. Then, instead of the typical strategies of using family birthdays and lucky numbers, she went to ChatGPT -- which she had only recently started using for research -- and asked, "Do you have any winning numbers for me?" "Luck is luck," replied the chatbot. Then it gave numbers that she plugged in -- paying the extra dollar for the Power Play to multiply anything she might win. She initially thought luck wasn't on her side when she didn't win the massive jackpot. But what she didn't realize is that she'd picked the "draw two" option, meaning her numbers were reentered for the next drawing. When she got a notification on her phone that she had won, she said, she thought it was a scam, or maybe she'd won something small, like $10. Just to satisfy her curiosity, she logged into her account and saw that she had matched four of the five numbers plus the Powerball in that second drawing. It would have been a $50,000 payout, but the multiplier tripled her winnings.

"Within the past year, stories have been posted on Slashdot about people helping North Koreans get remote IT jobs at U.S. corporations, companies knowingly assisting them, how not to hire a North Korean for a remote IT job, and how a simple question tripped up a North Korean applying for a remote IT job," writes longtime Slashdot reader smooth wombat. "The FBI is even warning companies that North Koreans working remotely can steal source code and extort money from the company -- money that goes to fund the North Korean government. Now, five more people have plead guilty to knowingly helping North Koreans infiltrate U.S. companies as remote IT workers." TechCrunch reports: The five people are accused of working as "facilitators" who helped North Koreans get jobs by providing their own real identities, or false and stolen identities of more than a dozen U.S. nationals. The facilitators also hosted company-provided laptops in their homes across the U.S. to make it look like the North Korean workers lived locally, according to the DOJ press release. These actions affected 136 U.S. companies and netted Kim Jong Un's regime $2.2 million in revenue, said the DOJ. Three of the people -- U.S. nationals Audricus Phagnasay, Jason Salazar, and Alexander Paul Travis -- each pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud conspiracy.

Prosecutors accused the three of helping North Koreans posing as legitimate IT workers, whom they knew worked outside of the United States, to use their own identities to obtain employment, helped them remotely access their company-issued laptops set up in their homes, and also helped the North Koreans pass vetting procedures, such as drug tests. The fourth U.S. national who pleaded guilty is Erick Ntekereze Prince, who ran a company called Taggcar, which supplied to U.S. companies allegedly "certified" IT workers but whom he knew worked outside of the country and were using stolen or fake identities. Prince also hosted laptops with remote access software at several residences in Florida, and earned more than $89,000 for his work, the DOJ said.

Another participant in the scheme who pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud conspiracy and another count of aggravated identity theft is Ukrainian national Oleksandr Didenko, who prosecutors accuse of stealing U.S. citizens' identities and selling them to North Koreans so they could get jobs at more than 40 U.S. companies. According to the press release, Didenko earned hundreds of thousands of dollars for this service. Didenko agreed to forfeit $1.4 million as part of his guilty plea. The DOJ also announced that it had frozen and seized more than $15 million in cryptocurrency stolen in 2023 by North Korean hackers from several crypto platforms.

According to CNBC, JPMorgan Chase has secured deals ensuring it will get paid by the fintech firms responsible for nearly all the data requests made by third-party apps connected to customer bank accounts. From the report: The bank has signed updated contracts with the fintech middlemen that make up more than 95% of the data pulls on its systems, including Plaid, Yodlee, Morningstar and Akoya, according to JPMorgan spokesman Drew Pusateri. "We've come to agreements that will make the open banking ecosystem safer and more sustainable and allow customers to continue reliably and securely accessing their favorite financial products," Pusateri said in a statement. "The free market worked."

The milestone is the latest twist in a long-running dispute between traditional banks and the fintech industry over access to customer accounts. For years, middlemen like Plaid paid nothing to tap bank systems when a customer wanted to use a fintech app like Robinhood to draw funds or check balances. [...] After weeks of negotiations between JPMorgan and the middlemen, the bank agreed to lower pricing than it originally proposed, and the fintech middlemen won concessions regarding the servicing of data requests, according to people with knowledge of the talks.

Fintech firms preferred the certainty of locking in data-sharing rates because it is unclear whether the current CFPB, which is in the process of revising the open-banking rule, will favor banks or fintech companies, according to a venture capital investor who asked for anonymity to discuss his portfolio companies. The bank and the fintech firms declined to disclose details about their contracts, including how much the middlemen agreed to pay and how long the deals are in force.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Executives are turning to a novel structure to fund crypto accumulation vehicles as investor appetite thins. They're called in-kind contributions, and they now account for a growing share of digital-asset treasury, or DAT, deals. Instead of raising cash to buy tokens in the open market, DAT sponsors contribute large slugs of their own crypto, often unlisted and hard to value.

Digital-asset treasuries are a new breed of public company built to hold concentrated crypto positions. The structure surged in 2025 as small-cap firms, especially in biotech and mining, reinvented themselves as digital-asset proxies. Sponsors provide tokens or raise money to buy them, and the stock then trades as a kind of listed bet on crypto. For insiders, it's a shortcut to liquidity. For investors, a wager on upside. But not all DATs carry the same level of risk. Earlier deals raised money to buy tokens through regular markets, which offered at least some independent price check. In-kind contributions skip that step -- letting insiders decide what their tokens are worth, sometimes before the token even trades publicly. That shift means pricing and trading risks land more squarely on shareholders, many of them retail investors.

Investor faith is already wobbling. Many DATs that once traded above the value of their holdings now trade below it. As insiders supply the tokens and set their price, it's becoming harder for investors to tell what these deals are really worth, or when to get out. The in-kind structure was on full display in a recent $545 million private placement by Tharimmune Inc., a biotech firm-turned-crypto proxy, to set up a buyer of Canton Coins. About 80% of the raise came in the form of unlisted Canton tokens, priced at 20 cents each, according to an investor presentation seen by Bloomberg News. The token began trading on exchanges Nov. 10 and is now around 11 cents, CoinGecko data show.

More deals are following the same template. In these placements, insiders contribute tokens -- sometimes illiquid or unlisted -- to form a treasury, lock in valuations and seed the perception of market demand. But when tokens list below deal price, public shareholders absorb the difference. [...] Then there's Flora Growth Corp., a Nasdaq-listed company that announced a $401 million deal to start acquiring Zero Gravity tokens in September. On closer inspection, the firm had raised just $35 million in cash to pair with a $366 million in-kind contribution of then-unlisted 0G tokens. Those tokens were priced at around $3 a piece; they subsequently listed, and are now trading at about $1.20.

Cryptocurrency companies and fintech startups are applying to open banks in the United States. Ripple, Coinbase and the UK payments company Wise have submitted applications for national trust charters this year. Trust banks cannot take deposits or make loans but charge fees for safekeeping customer assets and are not FDIC insured. The applications have reached 12 so far this year, more than any of the preceding eight years, according to data compiled by Klaros Group.

Comptroller of the Currency Jonathan Gould said last month that cryptocurrency activity should be done within the banking system if legally permissible and safe. His agency regulates nationally-chartered U.S. banks. The Bank Policy Institute and the Independent Community Bankers of America oppose the applications. BPI sent letters urging the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to reject the Ripple, Wise, and Sony applications. The group said approving Coinbase could significantly increase risks to the U.S. financial system.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Singapore's central bank will hold trials to issue tokenized MAS bills next year and bring in laws to regulate stablecoins as it presses forward with plans to build a scalable and secure tokenised financial ecosystem, the bank's top official said on Thursday. "Tokenization has lifted off the ground. But have asset-backed tokens achieved escape velocity? Not yet," said Chia Der Jiun, Managing Director of the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), a keynote address at the Singapore FinTech Festival.

He said MAS has been working on the details of its stablecoin regulatory regime and will prepare draft legislation, with the emphasis on "sound reserve backing and redemption reliability." MAS is also supporting trials under the BLOOM initiative, which explores the use of tokenized bank liabilities and regulated stablecoins for settlement, he added. "In the CBDC space, I am pleased to announce that the three Singapore banks, DBS, OCBC, and UOB, have successfully conducted interbank overnight lending transactions using the first live trial issuance of Singapore dollar wholesale CBDC," he said. MAS will expand trials to include tokenized MAS bills settled with CBDC, he added.

Apple is cutting its App Store fee from 30% to 15% for developers who join a new Mini Apps Partner Program, which requires using more of Apple's built-in technology to power lightweight "mini apps." "This includes using Apple software to register a user's purchase history, verify user ages and to process in-app purchases," reports CNBC. From the report: A "mini app" is a lightweight piece of software inside a third-party app store, like that of Discord's. These apps uses are built using web technology like HTML or Javascript. [...] Apple has argued that both developers and users are better off when using its technology and rules, instead of eschewing them to try to avoid fees. "This program is designed to help developers who host mini apps grow their business and further the availability of mini apps on the App Store -- all while providing a great customer experience," the company said in its announcement. [...] Participants in the new program will still have to provide Apple with information for each specific mini-app experience they offer.

China's state-sponsored hackers used AI technology from Anthropic to automate break-ins of major corporations and foreign governments during a September hacking campaign, the company said Thursday. From a report: The effort focused on dozens of targets and involved a level of automation that Anthropic's cybersecurity investigators had not previously seen, according to Jacob Klein, the company's head of threat intelligence.

Hackers have been using AI for years now to conduct individual tasks such as crafting phishing emails or scanning the internet for vulnerable systems, but in this instance 80% to 90% of the attack was automated, with humans only intervening in a handful of decision points, Klein said.

The hackers conducted their attacks "literally with the click of a button, and then with minimal human interaction," Klein said. Anthropic disrupted the campaigns and blocked the hackers' accounts, but not before as many as four intrusions were successful. In one case, the hackers directed Anthropic's Claude AI tools to query internal databases and extract data independently.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Robinhood Markets is betting its Gen Z and millennial clientele are as eager to send out for delivery of a wad of cash as they are to order pizza or a pint of ice cream.

The brokerage is joining with food-and-drink delivery app Gopuff to allow customers to withdraw cash from their Robinhood bank accounts and have it brought right to their door. For a $6.99 delivery fee -- or $2.99 if they have more than $100,000 in assets across their Robinhood accounts -- users can skip the ATM and have money delivered in a sealed paper bag while they are at home.

It is a new feature that Robinhood first teased in March, when Chief Executive Vlad Tenev unveiled the company's plans to roll out many traditional and -- as with its cash-delivery service -- unconventional banking services.

Verizon is planning to cut roughly 15,000 jobs, looking to reduce costs as it contends with increased competition for wireless service and home internet, according to WSJ, which cites people familiar with the matter. From the report: The cuts, the largest ever for the carrier, are set to take place in the next week, the people said. The majority of the reduction is expected to be made through layoffs. Verizon also plans to transition about 200 stores into franchised operations, which will shift employees off its payroll.

Verizon, the largest U.S. telecommunications provider by subscriber base, faces a fierce battle for both wireless and home internet customers. It has lost crucial postpaid phone subscribers for three consecutive quarters. Last month, Verizon named its lead independent director Daniel Schulman as its new chief executive officer. Schulman, a former CEO of PayPal and Virgin Mobile USA, has said he would aggressively reduce the company's entire cost base and take steps to reverse the customer losses.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Anthropic announced plans Wednesday to spend $50 billion on a U.S. artificial intelligence infrastructure build-out, starting with custom data centers in Texas and New York. The facilities, which will be designed to support the company's rapid enterprise growth and its long-term research agenda, will be developed in partnership with Fluidstack.

Fluidstack is an AI cloud platform that supplies large-scale graphics processing unit, or GPU, clusters to clients like Meta, Midjourney and Mistral. Additional sites are expected to follow, with the first locations going live in 2026. The project is expected to create 800 permanent jobs and more than 2,000 construction roles. The investment positions Anthropic as a major domestic player in physical AI infrastructure at a moment when policymakers are increasingly focused on U.S.-based compute capacity and technological sovereignty. "We're getting closer to AI that can accelerate scientific discovery and help solve complex problems in ways that weren't possible before. Realizing that potential requires infrastructure that can support continued development at the frontier," said CEO Dario Amodei. "These sites will help us build more capable AI systems that can drive those breakthroughs, while creating American jobs."