A library of snippets
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Three-quarters of agentic activity (69.57%) touched product and search routes: browsing product listings, reading articles, and running searches. This echoes the annual finding that most agents today are exploring product listings rather than completing transactions.
The remaining activity splits across authentication (9.22%), user account routes (8.55%), miscellaneous (4.82%), content engagement (4.68%), and checkout and payment (3.16%).
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Overview
SPIFFE and SPIRE provide a uniform identity control plane across modern and heterogeneous infrastructure. Since software and application architectures have grown substantially, they are spread across virtual machines in public clouds and private data centers. Security models for the organizations that manage them must keep up with these infrastructure technologies. And this is where SPIFFE and SPIRE come in. With SPIFFE/SPIRE, developers and operators can build software using new infrastructure technologies, while allowing security teams to step back from time-consuming security processes.From: SPIFFE – Secure Production Identity Framework for Everyone.
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As transaction data become richer and more contextual, the real competitive advantage moves from who collects data to who can combine signals across companies to see risk, demand and opportunity earlier than anyone else.
From: The future favors ecosystems over empires – Fast Company.
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Selective disclosure and zero-knowledge proof approaches are often presented as the elegant privacy answer. In some scenarios, they are genuinely powerful. But elegant cryptography does not automatically become elegant infrastructure.
At scale, these approaches can introduce lifecycle complexity, revocation questions, verifier burdens, performance costs, and user experience friction.
From: Wallets and Credentials Are Here. Maturity Is Not. – Spherical Cow Consulting.
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The almost inevitable news that Meta is building a “photorealistic” AI-powered 3D Mark Zuckerberg will surely set in motion an unstoppable trend for Silicon Valley CEOs. Your own personal Musk is just around the corner.
Mr. Zuckerberg is apparently personally involved in training and testing his avatar to engage in conversaiton with employees, programming the models behind the avatar with his mannerisms and thinking on company strategies. The idea is that employees might feel more connected to their boss by meeting him in the metaverse. This may well be true, I couldn’t say, but it is interesting to see him follow the trail blazed by noted pop singer FKA Twigs. She testified to a US Senate Judiciary subcommittee that she has developed her own deepfake version of herself (trained in her personality and able to speak in French, Korean and Japanese) so that she can leave the bots to interact with journalists and her many fans while she focuses on her music.
I’ve often said that artists can tell us more about the future than technologists (this is why, for example, I am the sponsor of the Future of Money Design Awards for art students that were presented at Pay360 in London earlier this year). It was great to this farsighted and innovative use of new technology coming from a British creative and I was not surprised to see Mr. Zuckerberg following down the same path.
Ms. Twigs said that in an age that demands a lot of press interaction and promotional work, her AI double will free her up to “spend more time making art” and I am sure that Mr. Zuckerberg’s AI double will similarly free him up for more creative tasks that talking to employees. But in era of rampant fakery, I do wonder how employees, fans, regulators or journalists will know that they are looking at the real fake Mark and not a fake fake Mark?
The problem of bogus AI-powered CEOs is much in my mind as I write becaue my good friend Howard Hall was recently subject to a clever fraud attempt using this technique. It’s worth setting this out in full, a salutary tale and a testament to some smart thinking that save a couple of hundred thousand bucks.
You have been warned.
Incidentally, given my morbid nature, I wonder if listening to employees complaining about the flavours of free ice cream in the cafeteria is really the main reason for Silicon Valley Dupes. I think there may be a much more serious reason for CEOs to retire to their bunkers and send their digital doppelgängers out into the world. We have already seen one CEO assassinated on the way to board meeting in New York and Molotov cocktails thrown at the house of Antropic CEO Sam Altman. With prediction markets booming n the darkest corners of the internet, and spending on CEO security is shooting up.
In the US, median spending on security for C-level executives had already gone up 16% to a record $106,530 in 2024 with coverage going from a quarter of those executives to a third. Technology companies had the biggest growth in implementing security measures for executives, with a three-quarters jump in those receiving the benefits, and that was long before someone opened fire on Sam Altman’s house (not the same people who tried to firebomb, it seems.)
Sending your AI to testify before Congress in the metaverse or tasking your avatar with visiting employees in their cubicles to brighten their days, while you remain in an underground lair below a Pacific island, would seem the natural modus operandi for a happening 21st-century corporation.
The story of “Sam”, the Indian medical student who made a fortune from an AI generated entirely fake woman is emblematic of our age, frankly. He tried a couple of ideas that didn’t work and then asked AI (in this, case Google’s Gemini) for advice. It suggested he target the “MAGA/conservative niche” because “the conservative audience (especially older men in the US) often has higher disposable income and is more loyal”. The Ai was right and within a month, the silicon beauty Emily Hart had more than 10,000 Instagram followers, many of whom also subscribed to her Grok-generated nude photos on Fanvue, where they could also message “her”. Sam got a cut from the subscriptions and the merch (yes, the non-existent MAGA model had her own merchandise too) was making a few thousand dollars a month.
(Sam is my hero. In that Wired magazine piece he is quoted as saying “I was basically doing nothing,“ he says. “And it was just flooded with money.”. What an inspiration.)
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A KYA token tells you the agent is verified and tells you, within consent boundaries, which human authorized it. Experian’s Human to Agent Binding takes those identity claims and enriches them against decades of consumer identity data and fraud prevention models trained on billions of transactions.
From: Akamai Joins the Experian Agent Trust Ecosystem, Powered by Skyfire KYA Identity – Skyfire.
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A verified agent presents a signed JWT, the token gets validated cryptographically without a round-trip through anyone’s proxy
From: Akamai Joins the Experian Agent Trust Ecosystem, Powered by Skyfire KYA Identity – Skyfire.
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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s home appears to have been the target of a second attack Sunday morning, two days after a 20-year-old man allegedly threw a Molotov cocktail at the property, The Standard has learned.
From: Sam Altman’s house targeted in second attack; two suspects arrested | The San Francisco Standard.
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The central bank has teamed up with technology firm Norbloc on the project, which it says will support financial institutions and fintechs to deliver faster, more reliable and secure digital onboarding for individuals and businesses, while substantially reducing turnaround times and operational costs.
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Snippings