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NORTH KOREAN DEVELOPER EARNINGS

North Korean IT workers have infiltrated 300-900 jobs and are collecting crypto for payment.

TRIPADVISOR'S NEW LOGO REVEAL JUST MADE ME SPIT OUT MY COFFEE

TripAdvisor's new rebrand, created by Koto to mark the company's 25th anniversary, revives its iconic owl mascot "Ollie" with a more expressive, traveler-focused design and a warmer, photo-inspired color palette to emphasize authenticity and emotional connection. Departing from traditional rebrand announcements, TripAdvisor humorously unveiled Ollie's redesign via Instagram using parody “cosmetic surgery” language, successfully tapping into internet culture with a self-aware, tongue-in-cheek tone.

GOOGLE'S NEW GEMINI LOGO FINALLY FEELS PART OF THE FAMILY

Google has updated its Gemini logo to better align with its core brand identity, replacing the old blue and purple scheme with Google's signature red, yellow, green, and blue gradient. The redesign retains Gemini's star-shaped motif but introduces softer, curved points for a more organic feel, helping it feel less like an isolated AI product and more like an integrated part of Google Workspace. This subtle yet impactful change emphasizes the power of color and consistency in brand cohesion.

GOOGLE ROLLS OUT ITS NEW VEO 3 VIDEO GENERATION MODEL GLOBALLY

Google has launched its Veo 3 video generation model globally. Available in more than 159 countries for Gemini users, the model allows paying AI Pro subscribers to create 8-second videos from text prompts, with a daily limit of three videos. Google plans to expand capabilities by adding image-to-video generation features to Gemini in the future.

BUILT TO BOUNCE BACK: WHY RESILIENCE IS THE REAL CREATIVE SUPERPOWER

Resilience in creative work isn't just a personal trait but a collective strength built through real-world challenges, supportive leadership, and a culture that values process over perfection. Design leaders emphasize that true resilience comes from embracing iteration, making space for rest and perspective, welcoming honest critique, and building environments where teams can adapt, collaborate, and grow with purpose.

WHY YOU SHOULD STOP COMPLAINING

Designers should stop complaining about dysfunctional organizations and leaders, since decades of complaints haven't solved these problems. Converting complaints into actionable proposals proves more effective, as well-designed complaints transform into pitches, arguments, or plans that drive change. Instead of complaining, designers should pursue three alternatives: seeking power to make decisions, becoming influential advisors, or developing self-awareness about their limitations.

JOBS-TO-BE-DONE: A STRATEGIC NORTH STAR

Listerine dominates the mouthwash category by consistently focusing on one clear Job-to-be-Done: "Kills Germs." Despite evolving from a floor cleaner to a dandruff cure to a breath freshener, the brand maintains this core message as its strategic anchor. Brands win when buyers associate them with clear Jobs-to-be-Done.

ANALYZE YOUR WEBSITE'S ACCESSIBILITY FOR FREE

Scan your website with WCAG Plus and check its accessibility for free according to WCAG standards. Ethical, fast, and uncompromising.

THE APP THAT BUILDS APPS

VibeCode is the easiest way to learn how to create beautiful mobile apps. Simply generate apps with prompting, and view and test your app on your phone.

IPHONE 17 PRO MAX VS PRO: HERE'S HOW APPLE WILL DIFFERENTIATE MODELS

Apple's iPhone 17 Pro Max will further distinguish itself from the iPhone 17 Pro this year by significantly increasing its battery life, thanks to a thicker design that allows for a larger battery. While no exclusive camera features are expected this time, the Pro Max's battery advantage—which already outpaced the Pro—is set to grow even more, making it the clear choice for users who prioritize endurance.

HOW ATHLETICS DESIGNED A FLEXIBLE MOTION SYSTEM FOR NIKE'S INTERNAL NORTH AMERICAN DOCUMENTARIES

Athletics, in collaboration with North Sea Air and Revel, developed a dynamic and cohesive visual identity system for a Nike film series using color-coded, custom-doodled sticker tags to represent each team's unique story while maintaining overall unity. The modular system—with consistent typography, environment-inspired colors, and reusable motion elements—enabled vibrant, flexible storytelling across six diverse narratives, balancing individuality with brand cohesion.

IF YOUR TEAM THINKS THEY KNOW EXACTLY WHAT TO DESIGN, SAY IT BACK TO THEM

Designers can avoid building the wrong products by using "looping for understanding", summarizing stakeholder requirements back to them in their own words to confirm comprehension. This technique addresses the emotional frustration that occurs when stakeholders feel unheard, while also creating opportunities to identify and resolve misunderstandings before design work begins. The approach can be enhanced by framing requirements around user problems rather than features, helping teams stay focused on solving actual user needs.

SUPPORTING “POWER USERS” ISN'T ENOUGH: THREE COMPLEX-APP USER TYPES

Complex application users don't simply fall into "novice" or "expert" categories, but rather into three distinct types: Legacy, Legend, and Learner users.

35 WHIMSICAL FONTS FULL OF MAGIC AND WONDER

Whimsical fonts achieve their magical quality through playful letterforms, hand-drawn aesthetics, decorative elements, and unexpected proportions that evoke joy and wonder.

ANTHROPIC ANNUAL REVENUE REPORTEDLY REACHES $4 BILLION

Anthropic hit $4 billion in annual revenue just as two leaders of its Claude Code product jumped to Cursor, one of Anthropic's biggest customers. The timing matters because AI companies are desperately trying to retain talent with salaries up to $690,000. Meta just paid $14.3 billion for 49% of Scale AI and poached its CEO. When your biggest customers can afford to steal your best people, vertical integration suddenly looks less like a moat and more like a feeding ground.

THE $1B LAND GRAB FOR LEGAL TECH'S FUTURE

Clio bought vLex for $1 billion this week, shortly after Harvey expanded its LexisNexis partnership. Both moves reveal the same strategy - owning the full legal workflow from research to billing. The interesting part is how quickly legal data got locked up. Three companies control most legal data: Westlaw partnered with CoCounsel, Lexis with Harvey, and Clio now owns vLex. That concentration means smaller legal tech companies face a choice: find a dance partner or become one.

THE $4.6T SERVICE-AS-SOFTWARE OPPORTUNITY: LESSONS FROM YEAR ONE

AI-native startups are creating Services-as-Software companies to automate entire roles, positioning integration and outcomes as key differentiators over feature sets. Differentiation now relies on deeply embedding AI into customer environments, leading to a shift where pre-sales merge with post-sales, requiring extensive customization even before contracts are signed. Pricing models are evolving from access-based to outcome-based, aligning costs with the value AI delivers, signaling a major shift towards speed-to-value in a $4.6 trillion market opportunity.

THE ART OF COLD-EMAILING A BILLIONAIRE

Over half of billionaires have responded to this founder's cold emails, including Travis Kalanick and Eric Lefkofsky. Before writing, spend 90% of your effort figuring out the trade: what you want and what makes it worthwhile for them. Then hit four principles: establish competency fast, make your ask clear with the value to them, transparently state your self-interest, and show extra effort beyond the email. Most people think cold email is about persuasion when it's actually about understanding what the recipient values.

YOUR COMPLETE GUIDE TO DISCOUNTING

Discounting can harm long-term value if done without purpose, decreasing margins and encouraging customer churn. Avoid discounts driven by competitor pricing or unclear product fit, which often trigger bad customer behavior like devaluing the product. Proper discount strategies focus on enhancing lifetime value, such as with big logos or strategic wedges, rather than closing deals fast.

LIES PER SECOND, MEETINGS PER DECISION RATIO, AND OTHER IMPORTANT BIZ METRICS

Your startup is dying when it takes 15 meetings to make one decision, but traditional metrics won't tell you that. Andrew Chen tracks organizational health through weird ratios like "Meetings per Decision" and "PowerPoints per Launch" - inspired by how he measures everything unconventionally, even ranking activities by death risk ("micromorts"). These metrics catch decay early: healthy teams decide in 3-5 meetings, dying ones need 20.

Read the Delve case study.

SHORTCUT

Shortcut is an AI-powered Excel spreadsheet.

JITTER

Jitter is a collaborative motion design tool that lets you create professional animations in minutes.

PHONELY

Phonely AI offers AI-powered answering services for businesses.

IS CHATGPT REALLY ROTTING OUR BRAINS?

MIT researchers found that students using ChatGPT showed less brain activity and couldn't remember a single sentence from essays they'd just written, while those writing without AI remembered 89% correctly. However, the study had major flaws: just 54 students writing 20-minute essays in a lab doesn't reflect real-world AI use. The key is staying mentally engaged - use AI to challenge your ideas, not replace your thinking entirely.

STOP RUSHING TO RESOLVE TWO COMPETING OBJECTIVES

WOULD YOU REGRET LEAVING BEFORE A MASSIVE EXIT?

Jason Oakley left Verafin in 2015 for a friend's startup, walking away from stock options that became worth millions when the company sold to Nasdaq for $2.75 billion in 2021. When friends asked if he regretted missing out on life-changing money, he said no - learning and growing mattered more than waiting around for something that might never happen.

MARC RANDOLPH ON HOW IT TOOK NETFLIX A YEAR AND A HALF TO FIND PRODUCT/MARKET FIT

Netflix failed for 18 months with mail-order DVDs until it changed one thing: no more late fees.

MOONLIGHTING AT MULTIPLE STARTUPS

A founder discovered that a new hire was secretly working at 3-4 startups simultaneously with fake credentials.

WHY INVESTING IN GROWTH-STAGE AI STARTUPS IS GETTING RISKIER AND MORE COMPLICATED

Investing in growth-stage AI startups is becoming riskier as established companies rapidly scale and new startups quickly reach significant valuations.

YOUNG CONSULTING FINDS EVEN MORE FOLKS AFFECTED IN BREACH MESS – NOW OVER 1 MILLION

Young Consulting (now Connexure) experienced a ransomware attack in April 2024 that impacted over 1 million individuals. The BlackSuit group claimed responsibility. The breached data included names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, and insurance details.

CISCO FIXES MAXIMUM-SEVERITY FLAW IN ENTERPRISE UNIFIED COMMS PLATFORM (CVE-2025-20309)

Cisco discovered CVE-2025-20309, a backdoor vulnerability, in its Unified Communications Manager with unchangeable default root credentials. It affects only Engineering Special releases (15.0.1.13010-1 through 15.0.1.13017-1), allowing remote attackers root access. The vulnerability was found during internal testing with no known exploitation.

GRAFANA RELEASES CRITICAL SECURITY UPDATE FOR IMAGE RENDERER PLUGIN

Grafana Labs has issued security updates for its Image Renderer plugin and Synthetic Monitoring Agent to fix four high-severity Chromium vulnerabilities (CVE-2025-5959, CVE-2025-6554, CVE-2025-6191, and CVE-2025-6192). These flaws could allow remote code execution, memory access, and heap corruption via crafted HTML pages. Affected versions are those prior to 3.12.9 for Image Renderer and 0.38.3 for Monitoring Agent, both of which include a headless Chromium browser for dashboard rendering. Users should update immediately. Cloud and Azure instances have already been patched.

OUTSOURCED TRUST: HOW COINBASE'S $400M PROBLEM STARTED IN AN INDIAN CALL CENTER

Coinbase suffered a data breach that affected 69,461 users when outsourced call center employees illegally accessed customer information. The attackers demanded a $20 million ransom, but Coinbase offered a $20 million bounty instead. The breach enabled social engineering scams, resulting in losses exceeding $ 65.7 million.

GUEST POST: HOW I SCANNED ALL OF GITHUB'S “OOPS COMMITS” FOR LEAKED SECRETS

A security researcher discovered that GitHub permanently stores "deleted" commits from force pushes as "zero-commit" PushEvents in the GitHub Archive, making supposedly removed secrets still accessible via commit hashes. By scanning all zero-commit force push events since 2020 using the GitHub Event API and GitHub Archive data, the researcher built automated tools to identify and analyze these hidden commits for leaked credentials, uncovering $ 25,000 worth of active secrets. Key security strategies include implementing pre-commit secret scanning, treating any committed secret as permanently compromised regardless of deletion attempts, immediately revoking exposed credentials, and protecting .env files, which were the most common source of leaked secrets.

REVERSE ENGINEERING CURSOR'S LLM CLIENT

In this post, the authors used TensorZero, an open-source framework for optimizing LLM applications with downstream feedback signals, to observe the API calls and tokens sent between Cursor and the LLM providers. They first ran into errors connecting to TensorZero running locally because Cursor first sends a request to Cursor's servers for additional processing, so the authors needed to set up a reverse proxy to expose a public endpoint that would forward requests back to the local machine. They then had to solve for CORS issues. Eventually, they managed to wire Cursor up properly and included sample system prompts and interactions between a user session and what Cursor generates.

SHADOWCRYPT

Proactive ransomware defense and secure file hiding for Windows. Effortlessly protect, access, and recover sensitive files using encrypted mappings and smart shortcuts.

SECRETS NINJA

Secrets Ninja is a GUI-based tool that validates API keys and credentials found during penetration testing. It tests these secrets directly from your browser using frontend JavaScript, ensuring that no sensitive information is ever collected or logged.

TROLLRPC

TrollRPC is a library to bind RPC calls based on UUID and OPNUM. The goal of the library is to break specific RPC calls to an antivirus scanner for AMSI bypass.

RANSOMWARE GANG HUNTERS INTERNATIONAL SAYS IT'S SHUTTING DOWN

The Hunters International ransomware gang announced its shutdown on Thursday, offering free decryption keys to its victims. The group operated for two years, targeting organizations including a U.S. cancer center. Security experts suspect that this may be a rebranding effort, with the gang potentially transitioning to "World Leaks" to evade detection by law enforcement.

UNCOVERING NYTHEON AI - A NEW PLATFORM OF UNCENSORED LLMS

Threat researchers at Cato CTRL have released a report on an uncensored LLM platform known as Nytheon AI. The operators behind Nytheon trained a suite of gen AI tools by employing jailbreaks on open-source models from Meta and Deepseek. The Nytheon AI suite includes models for code generation, document summarization and translation, OCR, and a control model.

AWS CERTIFICATE MANAGER HAS ANNOUNCED EXPORTABLE TLS CERTIFICATES, AND I'M MOSTLY OKAY WITH IT

Recently, AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) added the ability to export certificates and private keys for use in EC2 or external applications. Currently, ACM does not implement ACME, so certificate renewals must be handled manually or via the AWS API. Organizations that want to ensure that private keys never leave ACM can disable exports at the AWS Organization level or on an account-by-account basis via SCPs.

NEW FAKE MARKETPLACE FROM CHINA MIMICS TOP RETAIL BRANDS FOR FRAUD

A scam originating from China has led to the creation of thousands of fake shopping websites that mimic real stores, stealing payment information from global shoppers, especially during major sales events in Mexico.

NORTH KOREAN HACKERS DROP NIMDOOR MACOS MALWARE VIA FAKE ZOOM UPDATES

North Korean hackers are deploying deceptive Zoom updates to distribute NimDoor malware on macOS and target cryptocurrency firms covertly to steal sensitive data.

POLICE DISMANTLE INVESTMENT FRAUD RING STEALING €10 MILLION

Spanish police dismantled a fake investment scam that defrauded over €10 million from hundreds of victims through false advertisements, fake websites, and call centers claiming to be investment experts.

AMAZON CONVERSIONS RISE 2.2X WHEN SELLERS LOOK BEYOND AGE

Combining generational targeting with audience values and behaviors boosts Amazon conversions by up to 2.2X compared to age alone. Page views, add-to-cart, and purchase rates also increase by about 1.5X. Many consumers identify more with mindsets or communities than their birth generation. Almost 60% say brands make inaccurate assumptions based on age. People are 2.2X more unified by shared communities, 2.1X by behaviors, and 1.4X by values than by generation. Nissan UK and Booking.com saw strong results by targeting shared passions and inclusivity beyond age groups.

RESEARCH: MARKETING TECH IS BROKEN. HERE'S HOW TO FIX IT

Companies are dedicating 24% of their marketing budgets to martech, but 44% of tools go unused, and nearly half of marketers say outcomes fall short of expectations. Higher impact is linked to strategic motivations, broader organizational integration, and involving marketing leadership, which boosts martech impact by 25%. Use of genAI also improves performance, with top users employing it in 32.1% of marketing activities compared to 4.3% among low users. To improve outcomes, companies should audit martech regularly, invest in talent, focus on long-term metrics, and align tools with creativity and customer insights.

10 STORYTELLING TIPS FROM 10 YEARS AT DISNEY

Drawing from a decade at Pixar and Disney, Jonathan Hurwitz explains how strong stories rely on wants versus needs, emotional themes like loss or sacrifice, and visual cues like shapes and colors to drive meaning quickly. He applies these lessons to social strategies that include casting real individuals, building brand “vibes,” and using narrative closure to create lasting impact.

COMPLAINTS: WHEN TO USE EMPATHY VS EXPLANATIONS

To reduce the virality of online complaints, brands should respond with empathy to disappointed customers and use explanations for angry ones. A study of over 470,000 Facebook posts showed that this strategy can cut complaint virality by up to 11 percent. Explanations help calm angry customers, while empathy works better for those feeling sad or let down. Brands that alternate these response styles in ongoing interactions see higher engagement and better public perception.