Publicis and The Trade Desk kissed and made up. This was to be expected given that they have more in common than separates them - namely, doing billions of dollars of good business between the two of them. Publicis fee audit story -alleging that TTD wasn’t transparent about them- was always a bit thin as a standalone grievance. The actual tension was structural: TTD going direct to advertisers, and TTD’s OpenPath SPO product threatening Publicis' lucrative business of curating SSP inventory. Well, one can’t blame agencies for being nervous: The rapid automation of the supply chain and the increasing pressure on middlemen (via agents or not) pose an existential threat to the agency model. Publicis dressed it up in audit language because "they're taking our clients" doesn't make for a nice press release. And TTD, fighting a declining stock price and suffering through the loss of several executives, had every incentive to settle fast and quietly - which they did, with zero terms disclosed and zero financials as well. Now they're "moving forward with a mutual commitment to measurable outcomes." Good for both. Yet, the inherent tension between the two partners does not magically go away because of this make-up. One has to wonder if this dispute might flare up again in the future.

Every parent wants to keep their kids safe. But doesn't want to hand over their photos to the nanny state. And no adult should have to scan their face just to talk to a friend. Enormous own goal for the UK Sure to make UK tech untouchable to the rest of the world. (Except, perhaps, to dictatorships.) And would slosh massive power to big tech companies. Finally, it wouldn't take much for the nudity filter to turn into a dissent filter. Well put by @signalapp

Developers from Signal (including its protocol's co-creator) along with Microsoft and Harvard unveil Encrypted Spaces, an open-source codebase for a new generation of private collaboration apps. Think Slack, Discord, Google Docs, all end-to-end encrypted. wired.com/story/signal-alums…

Beware of a new privacy company called Cape. Its founder, John Doyle, spent 9 years running the national security business at Palantir. Now he's trying to sell you privacy. The company is a phone carrier that promises to hide your name, your number, and your location, all the things the ordinary carriers hand over to anyone who asks. The pitch is sharp. The technology may even be real. But the man who built it spent the better part of a decade inside the firm that taught the American security state how to see. Doyle ran Palantir's national security arm and served in Army special forces before that. His co-founder Nicholas Espinoza was an embedded analyst inside Palantir, with a career to match: Booz Allen, Recorded Future, the intelligence-contractor world top to bottom. Among the people Cape brought in to advise and vet the product is the former Chief Operating Officer of the CIA, Andy Makridis. The money is a16z, Point72, and Bain Capital, near $200 million of it, the same investor class that bankrolls the defense and surveillance industry. That crowd does not fund tools built to make the state see less. Cape built the network that reached the USS Abraham Lincoln 130 miles off the coast. It runs research with the Air Force Research Laboratory. It built sensors for the Marines and ran the network for a joint US military exercise. It was built, in Cape's own words, "from the ground up to protect U.S. government agencies, businesses, and privacy-conscious individuals." Notice the order they put that in. The military was its very first customer. Where have we seen that before. Palantir was seeded by the CIA's own venture fund, built for the state first and sold to the rest later. Doyle is running the same play, in the same order. Cape says it protects you from foreign hackers, Chinese spy outfits, the Russians who went after NATO, Salt Typhoon, ordinary criminals. Every enemy it names lives outside the borders of the United States, and in all of it the name of a single American agency never once appears. The carrier built by the head of Palantir's national security business will guard you against every government on earth except the one Palantir serves. The guns never point at the king who signed the papers. A normal carrier that leases its towers controls almost nothing about how you're treated on the network. Cape built its own core, the brain that authenticates your phone, routes everything it sends, and decides what gets logged about you. That is the exact layer where a person is identified and tracked, and Cape owns it outright, inside American jurisdiction, in a closed system you cannot audit. What it sees, you will never know. By law it cannot stay out of it. Every carrier in America, Cape included, is bound by CALEA, the statute that requires the network to be built so the government can tap it on command. Cape says it complies. So the only thing standing between you and that tap is how much Cape chose to keep, and you are taking their word for what that is. You do not read its code. You do not audit its core. You hand your trust to Doyle and his Palantir men and you take their word, which is the same word the security state has been offering you for 20 years while it built the machine you are now paying Cape to escape. Verify everything. Trust no one selling you privacy who came from the people who sell governments the opposite.

Signal boss Meredith Whittaker has been talking to me about this - rejecting the idea of ‘scanning systems’ that purportedly detect nude images. Easily weaponised by governments, she says, for political speech and other content bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

🇨🇭Switzerland built its whole reputation on privacy. Now it's proposing a surveillance law that would force VPNs, email, and messaging providers to collect your ID, log your data for six months, and decrypt it on demand. Proton says it's worse than the US.

Meta is about to spend $150 billion on capital expenditures in a single year. To put that in perspective: – More than the combined annual revenue of Coca-Cola, Pepsi, and Nestle – Larger than Meta's own total revenue in 2017 – Roughly 10x what Meta spent on capex just five years ago Since 2010, Meta's annual capex has gone from ~$1B to ~$150B. The chart is literally vertical. All of it justified by one assumption: that AI will generate enough future cash flow to make this math work. The Financial Times calculated the implied return on hyperscaler AI investment from 2025 to 2030, assuming zero costs. Meta came out at -28.8%. That's the best case. The story Wall Street is being asked to believe: spend $750 billion over the next five years, accept negative returns on paper, and trust that something on the other side will make it work. Maybe it will. The internet eventually did. But Cisco has only recovered from 2000 after 26 years. The technology is real. The economics are a different question.

THE AI BOOMERANG IS REAL Remember when CEOs told everyone AI was coming for your job? Funny story. Now companies are quietly rehiring after discovering that chatbots, algorithms, and AI hallucinations aren’t great at judgment, customer service, quality control, or fixing the messes they create. • Google • Meta • IBM • Salesforce • Klarna • Shopify • Amazon • McDonald’s They replaced employees with software and then spent months realizing what the employees actually did.

🚨If you live in Europe, paying for anything in cash above €10,000 becomes illegal from 10 July 2027, and anything over €3,000 will mean handing over your ID before the payment goes through..... This is one EU law covering all 27 countries at once. Your government can set the limit lower than €10,000, but never higher, and several already have France and Spain cap business cash payments at €1,000. Italy sits at €5,000. Greece at just €500. The rule only lets those numbers fall further over time, never rise They say this is about catching criminals. But cash is still how most of Europe actually pays day to day. It's 63% of payments in Germany, 54% in Austria, 75% in Greece. Austria and Ireland have no cash limit at all today. From 2027 they will The same year this limit lands, the European Central Bank begins a year-long test of the digital euro A digital currency like this could come with limits on how much you hold, and digital money tried elsewhere has been built to expire or restrict how it gets spent But cash, the one form of money that leaves no record and answers to nobody, may not stay open for much longer Follow me to stay informed

New: Hackers have been stealing high-profile Instagram accounts by simply asking Meta's AI support chatbot to change the email associated with the account they want to steal. Shockingly easy, terrible flaw associated with offloading support to AI: 404media.co/hackers-simply-a…

DIGITAL ID: "Mexico passed law requiring all 127 million cell phone users to register their SIM to a biometric government ID by June 30" Those supporting "social media bans" here should be aware they are normalising ID verification to get online & even use a phone Protect internet freedom #together

Ronny Chieng’s speech at Harvard “Ai is just going to make mediocre people dumber” Truer words have never been spoken This is how you give a graduation speech!

🚨APPLE ADVERTISES $2 MILLION FOR FINDING SECURITY BUGS.. THEN CALLS YOUR DISCOVERY A "DUPLICATE".. PATCHES IT SILENTLY.. GIVES YOU NOTHING.. AND BANS YOUR APPLE ID IF YOU COMPLAIN.. Two researchers found a critical macOS vulnerability that let attackers steal passwords, encrypted chats, and Safari data through Archive Utility.. Submitted it October 2025.. Apple took 5 months.. Patched it with zero credit.. Zero CVE.. Zero bounty.. Their reason.. "You were not the first person to report this issue".. That's the duplicate loophole.. Apple claims an internal engineer found it first.. But researchers can't verify that.. Apple controls the tracking system.. No audit.. No appeals.. The researcher said it felt like "doing charity work for a $3 trillion company".. Another researcher found apps could access your entire photo library even after you turned off access in settings.. Apple's own page lists that at $50,000.. They reported it.. Apple went silent.. Patched it quietly.. Said it was a duplicate.. $0.. When the researcher blogged about it.. Apple permanently banned their 12-year-old Apple ID.. Apple's brand new Passwords app in iOS 18 was sending data over unencrypted HTTP.. A credential manager transmitting password reset links in plaintext.. Any attacker on the same WiFi could intercept them.. Researchers reported it.. Apple let it sit 3 months.. Patched it quietly.. Said it "didn't meet the impact criteria".. Then there's the FaceTime disaster.. A 14-year-old discovered you could eavesdrop on anyone's iPhone.. Start a FaceTime call.. Add your own number before they answer.. Their microphone turns on.. If they hit the volume button.. Their camera activates too.. His mother spent a week trying to tell Apple.. Emails.. Faxes.. Social media.. Support told her to pay $99 for a developer account to file a bug report.. Apple did nothing until the exploit went viral and millions started eavesdropping on each other.. Then they panicked.. Took FaceTime offline globally.. Congress sent formal letters to Tim Cook demanding answers.. Then there's the researcher who got so fed up being ignored that they hacked Apple's own internal daily security call.. They'd reported a zero-click iMessage vulnerability.. Apple stonewalled them.. So they found another flaw.. Used it to infiltrate the internal FaceTime call where Apple engineers discuss bugs.. And dropped a screenshot proving the exploit live.. The team securing 2.35 billion devices couldn't secure their own meeting.. Apple's response.. A threatening legal letter.. Not a bounty.. A legal threat.. This is why the exploit black market thrives.. A zero-click iPhone exploit sells for $1.5 to $2.5 million on the gray market.. Guaranteed payment.. No bureaucracy.. No "duplicate" risk.. Submitting to Apple means NDAs.. 6-12 months of waiting.. Risk of $0.. Risk of your Apple ID being banned if you speak up.. Those gray market exploits end up with mercenary spyware vendors like NSO Group.. Deployed against journalists and human rights lawyers worldwide.. Apple pushes researchers toward the black market.. Then spends billions defending against the exploits those researchers could have sold them for a fraction of the price.. 2.35 billion devices.. And the company would rather send lawyers than pay what they owe.

NEW: CENTCOM CONFIRMS: adversaries are buying commercial location data to target US troops. Pentagon acknowledges it's not a one-off threat. We got here thanks to big companies: Who forced advertising everywhere. And it became a surveillance & weapons targeting system. When you use apps they often harvest detailed data from your phone. That data gets piped to an ecosystem of data brokers... who then sell the movements of millions to anybody with a credit card. Customers include: shady players, criminals & military adversaries. The data is incredibly detailed and can be used to track US military & intelligence activity (and that of every other government) and direct attacks. Americans = extra vulnerable Thanks to a lot of lobbying, the US has no comprehensive privacy law. For all of GDPR's flaws, Americans are far less protected from the data broker ecosystem. ...which is now leaving everybody exposed. Troops included. Pentagon Policy? Yikes Right now troops aren't prohibited from using their personal phones (which for reasons explained above are like giant, identifying beacons). And until recently government devices could have ad tracking functionality enabled. Another massive own-goal. Finally it seems like policy is being implemented to disable trackign on gov devices, but the gaps are enormous. Some Action? Now, a bipartisan group of Senators led by @RonWyden has called on the Pentagon to stop the flow of location data & stop using browsers built around collecting advertising data (they specifically call out Chrome). And some other eminently sensible measures. Good but also: experts have been collectively warning about this for almost a decade. What are we doing? Story by @razhael reuters.com/business/media-t…

In the last 30 days alone: – Microsoft cancelled most of its Claude Code licenses, citing cost – Uber burned through its entire 2026 AI budget in 4 months – Uber's COO publicly said AI costs are "harder to justify" – A Fortune 20 CEO ordered token spending to be "dramatically slashed" – One company spent $500M in a single month on Claude with no usage limits – H200 rental prices crashed from $7/hr to $4/hr in three weeks The stocks: still at all-time highs. How long can the market keep ignoring the receipts?

None of this is satire. → A company spent $500,000,000 on Claude in one month because nobody set usage limits → Uber ran leaderboards ranking engineers by how much AI they used, not what they shipped → Uber burned their entire 2026 budget by April. Their COO said he can’t connect any of it to consumer features → A CTO told Axios employees were using enterprise AI to check the weather → Microsoft canceled most Claude Code licenses because the token bill spiraled → Companies are now laying people off to pay the AI bill. Not because AI replaced the work. Because the bill replaced the headcount.

🚨 THE BIGGEST AI BUBBLE IN HISTORY MAY BE PEAKING RIGHT NOW. SpaceX. OpenAI. Anthropic. Trillions in valuation. Hundreds of billions about to hit public markets. And almost nobody understands how dangerous this setup could become. Because this is exactly how late-stage bubbles behave: massive narratives, record valuations, and investors convincing themselves growth will last forever. The scary part? Most of these companies are still burning insane amounts of cash while markets price them like perfection is guaranteed. 2000 felt unstoppable too. Until liquidity disappeared and the entire Nasdaq collapsed.

𝗧𝗛𝗜𝗦 𝗜𝗦 𝗔𝗖𝗧𝗨𝗔𝗟𝗟𝗬 𝗜𝗡𝗦𝗔𝗡𝗘. – Europol raided an office in Latvia few weeks ago and what they found inside is hard to believe. – Latvia's counterterrorism unit OMEGA smashed through the doors with flashbang grenades. – Inside were 1,200 SIM box devices stacked floor to ceiling. 40,000 active SIM cards. Connected to 80 countries simultaneously. – They were running two websites, Gogetsms and Apisim where criminals could rent a phone number from any country on demand. – Those numbers were used for phishing, bank fraud, investment scams, extortion, and migrant smuggling. – 3,200 confirmed fraud cases in Austria and Latvia alone. – $5.8 MILLION in confirmed losses. – Police seized 4 luxury cars, $470,000 in frozen bank accounts, and $290,000 in crypto. – 7 people were running the entire operation. – The operation was called SIMCARTEL. – 49 MILLION fake accounts were created using their service. The same apps that make you jump through 6 verification steps just to log in. 49 million fake accounts got through while you were still waiting for your SMS code.

Pro tip: if a company says "we won't provide you with the keys" and "we are end-to-end encrypted" in the same breath, well... then they are not end-to-end encrypted.

The SpaceX IPO is the most brazen retail fleecing in modern market history. NASDAQ has REWRITTEN the index rules specifically for this listing. The 10% minimum free float requirement: gone. The 3 to 12 month seasoning period before index inclusion: cut to 15 trading days. Companies with small floats can now be weighted at 3x their actual float. Translation: every passive index fund, every 401k, every pension is about to be force-fed SPCX whether they want it or not. And what exactly are they buying? Class A shares carrying ONE vote each, while Musk holds 93.6% of the Class B super voting shares at TEN votes each. That gives him 85.1% of voting power on a 42% economic interest. He cannot be outvoted. He cannot be removed. CEO, CTO and board chairman simultaneously. For reference: Zuckerberg controls 61% of Meta. Buffett 35% of Berkshire. Musk: 85.1%. SpaceX is also claiming "controlled company" status, exempting it from needing a majority of independent directors. Shareholders waive the right to a jury trial. They waive the right to class actions. Mandatory arbitration only, courtesy of an SEC rule change pushed through on a party line vote last September. $1.75 trillion valuation. $80 billion raise. Largest IPO in history. The rules of the game were quietly rewritten so one man could extract maximum capital from retail while answering to no one.