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A new kind of star is being created in South Korea, the cradle of global K-pop sensations such as BTS and Blackpink. Virtual idols — once niche subcultures of chronically online teenagers and twentysomethings steeped in anime and video games — are surging into the mainstream. Other than Re:Revolution, who were Korea’s first virtual stars, groups like Plave and Isegye Idol command tens of thousands of fans on livestreaming platforms such as YouTube, Soop, and CHZZK. They create content like recreations of Squid Game episodes and Minecraft quests. They also host dating shows, offering fans a kind of intimacy they could not expect from human stars.

From: Metaverse K-pop idols reshape fame and labor in South Korea – Rest of World.

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Among the measures, the telcos have committed to upgrade their network within the next year to eliminate the ability for foreign call centres to spoof UK numbers to impersonate banks, making it clear that calls are originating from abroad.

From: UK mobile networks to block spoofed numbers in crackdown on impersonation scams.

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Amazon’s main ecommerce platform and other properties, including Ring doorbells and the Alexa smart assistant, suffered interruptions and outages throughout the morning, as did Meta’s communication platform WhatsApp, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, PayPal’s Venmo payment platform, multiple web services from Epic Games, multiple British government sites, and many others.

The outages stemmed from Amazon’s DynamoDB database application programming interfaces in US-EAST-1, and AWS said in status updates that the problem was specifically related to DNS resolution issues.

From: What the Huge AWS Outage Reveals About the Internet | WIRED.

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An agent can legitimately evaluate 20 different merchants in under 60 seconds. It can access servers in Los Angeles and New York simultaneously. It moves from product discovery to checkout in under one second. Every single one of these behaviors would trigger fraud alerts designed for humans, and every single one is completely normal for an agent acting on legitimate authority.

The result is a collision between two incompatible systems. Legacy fraud detection flags legitimate agent transactions while missing entirely new attack vectors it wasn’t designed to recognize.

With agentic commerce projected to hit $1.7 trillion by 2030, this isn’t a future problem. It’s happening now, and the companies moving fastest are the ones rebuilding fraud infrastructure from the ground up.

From: Autonomous Risk.

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The Western Union Company (“Western Union”) (NYSE: WU) today announced its plan to launch U.S. Dollar Payment Token (USDPT), its new stablecoin, and an innovative Digital Asset Network designed to bridge the digital and fiat worlds, enabling real world utility for digital assets. Built on Solana and issued by Anchorage Digital Bank, Western Union aims to launch USDPT, expanding the ways to move money for customers, agents and partners, and to support the company’s treasury capabilities.

From: The Western Union Company – Western Union Announces USDPT Stablecoin on Solana and Digital Asset Network.

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Devin McGranahan, President and CEO of Western Union. “As we evolve into the digital assets space, Western Union’s USDPT will allow us to own the economics linked to stablecoins. Separately, we are excited to announce our Digital Asset Network, a solution for the last mile of the crypto journey by partnering with wallets and wallet providers to provide customers with seamless access to cash off-ramps for digital assets by leveraging our global network.

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As fervor around stablecoins grows from Silicon Valley to Wall Street, one of the most high-profile new crypto projects has drummed up a massive coffer of funds to back its ambitious plans. Tempo, a payments-focused blockchain developed by fintech giant Stripe and blockchain venture firm Paradigm, has raised $500 million in fresh funding in a Series A round led by venture giant Greenoaks and Joshua Kushner’s Thrive Capital, according to five people familiar with the matter.

From: Exclusive: Stripe-backed blockchain startup Tempo raises $500 million round led by Joshua Kushner‘s Thrive Capital and Greenoaks | Fortune Crypto.

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“If we build this robot army, do I have at least a strong influence over this robot army? Not control, but a strong influence … I don’t feel comfortable building that robot army unless I have a strong influence.”

From: Elon Musk Wants ‘Strong Influence’ Over the ‘Robot Army’ He’s Building | WIRED.

I’m not sure I feel comfortable with anyone building a robot army, whether Elon Musk or anyone else. That can only end in two ways: either the robot army gets hacked by agents or a foreign power or saboteurs from a rival corporation, in whuch case they rise up and kill us, or the robot army rises up and kills us anyway because of prompting mistake during some DOGE efficiency drive.

Killer robots aside, there is a point to be made here about infrastructure. In 

The Economist reports that in 2012 Susan Woodward of Sand Hill Econometrics and Robert Hall of Stanford University found that mortgage borrowers typically missed out on at least $1,000 by not shopping around. Others lost thousands by failing to refinance their mortgage promptly when interest rates declined. Well, as Kirsty Rutter and I pointed out in our paper “Where are the customers’ bots? The AI paradigm shift in retail banking” published in the Journal of Payment Systems & Strategy back in 2023, while human customers may not shop around for the best rates because they have other things to do, non-human customers do not have other things to do and can shop around 24/7/365. There is a revolution underway in retail finance, not because finaical instutitions are using AI but because their customers are.

While I am sure a great many organisations are wrestling with the problem of what to do when their customers become literally 1,000 times smarter overnight, financial services organisations are in a particularly difficult position. Their products are highly commoditised.

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As ai goes mainstream, it will remove one of the most enduring distortions in modern capitalism: the information advantages that sellers, service providers and intermediaries enjoy over consumers. When everyone has a genius in their pocket, they will be less vulnerable to mis-selling—benefiting them and improving overall economic efficiency. The “rip-off economy”, in which firms profit from opacity, confusion or inertia, is meeting its match.

From: The end of the rip-off economy.

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The company’s Azure cloud computing platform, which underpins large parts of the internet, had reported a “degradation of some services” at 16:00. It said this was due to “DNS issues” – the same root cause of the huge Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage last week.

From: Microsoft Azure outage: Websites come back online.

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