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o get around the sheer inconvenience of other human beings, he and fellow founder Diana Nunez created a woman to pose however they like with none of the fuss, none of the real people and, conveniently, none of the pay.

From: The dark rise of AI influencers: Why beautiful people who don’t exist are invading your social media | Daily Mail Online.

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Aitana is among the first AI influencers: a new wave of perfect, potentially problematic content creators invading your social media feeds with flawless skin, washboard abs and unerringly symmetrical faces.

Alongside Aitana, a handful have broken through like Mia Zelu, a blonde haired blue-eyed Bible verse-quoting girl next door who ‘turned up’ at Wimbledon. These virtual Barbies can wear anything, be anywhere, do anything, no questions asked.

Comments are left on their picture-perfect lives by older men who don’t seem aware they aren’t real, an army of absurdly proportioned copycat virtual models, and cynics barely able to comprehend what appears to be the complete collapse of reality online

From: The dark rise of AI influencers: Why beautiful people who don’t exist are invading your social media | Daily Mail Online.

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Recent analysis reveals that current MCP implementations are vulnerable to a wide spectrum of security threats — ranging from malicious code execution and unauthorized remote access to credential exfiltration and prompt injection. Because LLMs are empowered to invoke tools defined on MCP servers, these vulnerabilities can be exploited by coercing the model into making unsafe or unintended calls, effectively turning a cooperative AI into a compromised agent.

From: Why the MCP Protocol Needs a Security Wake-Up Call | by TONI RAMCHANDANI | Data And Beyond | Medium.

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The Danish Post Office has announced that it will stop delivering letters at the end of this year, ending four hundred years of service. Good for them.

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Meta Battles an ‘Epidemic of Scams’ as Criminals Flood Instagram and Facebook

From: Meta Battles an ‘Epidemic of Scams’ as Criminals Flood Instagram and Facebook – WSJ.

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The Lloyds data showed that 57 per cent of the funds flowing through money mule accounts exited via the UK’s Faster Payment system to other accounts and 20 per cent by value went to a single digital finance firm, which was unidentified.

About 10 per cent of the funds were withdrawn from money mule accounts in cash via ATMs or branches, RUSI said, while nearly a fifth went on debit card payments, including some to international money transfer companies. A much smaller amount, less than 1 per cent, went to cryptocurrency exchanges.

From: Surge in ‘money mules’ raises concern at UK financial watchdog.

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More than 225,000 people were identified as “money mules” for letting criminals use their accounts to launder funds last year, raising concerns at the UK financial watchdog after a 23 per cent increase from a year earlier.

From: Surge in ‘money mules’ raises concern at UK financial watchdog.

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Blockchain networks and stablecoins are doing more than just cutting fees. They’re enabling new categories of software:

Programmatic payments between machines: Imagine AI agent-powered marketplaces automatically brokering deals for computer resources and other services.
Micropayments for media, music, and AI contributions: Imagine setting a budget with some simple rules and leaving it to “smart” wallets to disburse the payments.
Transparent payouts with full audit trails: Imagine using these systems to track spending in government.
Global commerce without a mess of intermediaries: Imagine settling international transactions instantly at negligible cost — in fact, you don’t have to imagine it as it’s already happening.

From: Stablecoins: Payments without intermediaries – a16z crypto.

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OnlyFans has paid out a record $701mn in dividends ahead of a potential multibillion-dollar sale of the UK-based streaming platform used by sex workers and celebrities to reach their audiences.

The latest financial windfall for owner Ukrainian-American entrepreneur Leonid Radvinsky shows the lucrative business that OnlyFans has created over the past decade in connecting online creators, including many porn stars, directly with fans.

The platform has never been more popular with audiences and creators. In 2024, the total number of creator accounts grew 13 per cent to 4.6mn as more sought to make money through the platform, with the number of fan accounts growing almost a quarter to 377.5mn globally.

The group’s largest market by far is the US, but it remains headquartered and pays tax in the UK.

In accounts being filed at Companies House on Friday, UK-based Fenix International, which owns OnlyFans, said it took in $7.2bn from subscribers, up from $6.6bn, in 2024 and paid out $5.8bn to its creators — $500mn more than the previous year. Creators earn 80 per cent of all payments made by fans on the platform.

From: OnlyFans hands record $701mn dividend to owner ahead of sale.

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Under the United States CLOUD Act, the United States government can compel U.S.-based companies to provide data to the government regardless of where the data is stored. The testimony from Microsoft France’s representative has confirmed that this supersedes all other international and domestic laws.

In short: Microsoft will listen to the U.S. government regardless of Canada or and other country’s domestic laws.

From: Microsoft says U.S. law takes precedence over Canadian data sovereignty – Digital Journal.

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