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Ransomware scum disrupted utility services with SimpleHelp attacks

3 weeks ago
Good news: The vendor patched the flaw in January. Bad news: Not everyone got the memo

Ransomware criminals infected a utility billing software providers' customers, and in some cases disrupted services, after exploiting unpatched versions of SimpleHelp’s remote monitoring and management (RMM) tool, according to a Thursday CISA alert.…

Jessica Lyons

Shopify Partners With Coinbase and Stripe In Landmark Stablecoin Deal

3 weeks ago
Shopify is launching stablecoin payments for its merchants later this year, starting with USDC in collaboration with Coinbase and Stripe. Fortune reports: The publicly traded tech company lets merchants -- including vintage clothes sellers, cosmetics businesses, and electronics companies -- set up their own online marketplaces. By late June, Shopify will let a select group of users accept payments in USDC, a stablecoin issued by the crypto company Circle, which recently had one of the year's hottest IPOs. "In our own philosophical framework, we are extremely aligned with everything that crypto stands for," Tobias Lutke, the CEO of Shopify and a Coinbase board member, said onstage at a Coinbase conference on Thursday. Shopify will then gradually expand access to merchants across its network in the U.S. and Europe before opening up stablecoin payments to every merchant who uses its platform. The e-commerce company worked with Coinbase to develop a payments protocol to handle chargebacks, refunds, and other intricacies of retail payments on Coinbase's blockchain, Base. It also collaborated with fintech giant Stripe, one of Shopify's payments processors, to integrate stablecoins into the e-commerce company's existing software stack. "I think other payment processors will look at what Shopify is building and be like, 'Holy crap,'" Jesse Pollak, a Coinbase executive who oversees the crypto exchange's wallet and blockchain divisions, told Fortune.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Amazon Doubles Prime Video Ads to 6 Minutes Per Hour

3 weeks ago
Amazon has quietly doubled the ad load on Prime Video to 4-6 minutes per hour, up from the 2-3.5 minutes initially discussed when ads launched in 2024. AdWeek reports: According to six ad buyers and documents reviewed by ADWEEK, the current ad load on Prime Video now ranges from four to six minutes per hour. And while that could bring down CPMs, buyers will be watching whether this impacts user experience. "Prime Video ad load has gradually increased to four to six minutes per hour," an Amazon representative wrote to an ad buyer in an email obtained by ADWEEK. The exchange occurred earlier this month. The increase, which Amazon had telegraphed to investors but has not publicly acknowledged to consumers, gives the company significantly more inventory to sell across its rapidly expanding streaming business. "They told us the ad load would be increasing," said Kendra Tang, programmatic supervisor at Rain the Growth Agency. "That's been confirmed recently when we noticed more avails in the system."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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