PayPal disclosed a software error in its Working Capital platform that exposed sensitive customer data, including Social Security numbers, for months in 2025.

The post PayPal Flaw Exposed Email Addresses, Social Security Numbers for 6 Months appeared first on TechRepublic.

I recently came across a term, “internet poisoning”, that I thought I knew the meaning of. But it turned out to be more complicated. There are actually two definitions for “internet poisoning” — but I’ll try to reduce them to one.

The colloquial description of internet poisoning is when a person has spent so much time in toxic internet discourse that they begin to believe that the real world is as bad as the world online that they’ve been steeping in. Sociologically, this leads to a growing trend toward real world nihilism among people who are too plugged in.

To get to the second meaning of internet poisoning, it’s helpful to grok a related term, “data poisoning”. Data poisoning is an AI exploit in which bad actors feed bad data to an AI model’s training dataset. By poisoning the training data, the model itself can be poisoned.
Under certain circumstances, however, bad actors are not even needed. AI companies scrape their training data from the internet. As AI reliance increases, new AI generated data (with possibly upwards of 20% hallucination rates) gets put out on the internet and becomes part of the dataset for the training of future models (currently being marketed as “superintelligence”).

This eating-where-you-poo effect becomes magnified when 1) the main strategy for creating next-gen AI is scaling: throwing all resources into collecting more data and gathering more compute 2) you get to the end of the internet and 3) zero-sum thinking in the tech industry becomes endemic that someone else will get to asymptotic AI results before you do and, Highlander-style, it turns out there can only be one. At this point, long-term employees are made redundant to free up money for more compute, internal ethics groups are shut down or ignored, and standards for data-scrubbing are lowered.

This provides background for the second meaning of “internet poisoning”. Internet poisoning occurs when AI models provide sometimes erroneous data to the internet which then gets reinvested/reingested into the next generation of superintelligences.
The colloquial and the technical definitions of “internet poisoning” can be reconciled if we then imagine a species jump between machine data and human knowledge. The poisoned superintelligences will continue to spew poisoned data; this in turn poisons humans who become nihilistic and write online manifestos to their internet communities, which spread on reddit, which in turn poisons the post-superintelligence generation of AI, and so on, and so on…

Xbox has new leaders today, now that Phil Spencer and Sarah Bond are out - and you'd be forgiven for assuming that means yet another round of layoffs and shuttered studios, especially one day after Sony jettisoned a beloved developer.

Not yet, it seems. "To be clear, there are no organizational changes underway for our studios," Microsoft Gaming EVP Matt Booty wrote in his memo today. It's a little buried under everything else Microsoft's outgoing and incoming gaming CEOs are saying, so figure it's worth dragging to the surface!

Booty:

We have good reasons to believe in what's ahead. This organization and its franchises have navigated c …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Microsoft gaming boss Phil Spencer has just announced he's leaving the company after 12 years leading Xbox and nearly 40 at Microsoft in total. His replacement: Asha Sharma, formerly head of development for Microsoft's AI enterprise teams. Before that, she was COO of Instacart for three years, and spent four at Meta in charge of the company's messaging apps.

What will Sharma do with Xbox? Read for yourself in her first internal memo, which we've printed in full below.

Sharma says she is committed to "the return of Xbox," games in "new categories and markets where we can add real value, grounded in what players care about most." She says t …

Read the full story at The Verge.

— Karim Meghji is taking over the the role of president and CEO at Code.org, the Seattle-based computer science education nonprofit.

Meghji, the former CTO at Seattle digital remittance company Remitly, joined Code.org in 2022 to serve as chief product officer, leading the organization’s shift toward an AI-centered strategy.

Cameron Wilson, the longtime president at Code.org, is transitioning to an executive advisor role at the organization where he has worked for more than 12 years.

“It’s impossible to overstate Cameron’s impact on Code.org and on the education system,” Code.org founder Hadi Partovi said in a news release on Friday. “He helped build an institution that will continue to serve students for generations, and I am profoundly grateful for his leadership and partnership.”

Code.org was launched in 2013 by brothers Hadi and Ali Partovi with a mission to expand computer science education to K-12 students. Backed by nearly $60 million in funding from the likes of Microsoft, Amazon, Google and others, Code.org counts 102 million students and 3 million teachers on its platform today, with 232 million projects created by students around the world.

Code.org says its AI curriculum has already helped more than 6 million students learn foundational concepts around the technology. More than 25 million students have completed activities in its “Hour of AI” campaign.

The company employs 107 people following layoffs in January.

Partovi, who has been operating as chairman of the board for the past two years, will continue in that role.

— Jeff Hebert is a new senior hardware manager at Amazon leading a team working on last-mile delivery innovations.

“Intelligent sensors, human-digital interfaces, and robotics that leverage the latest capabilities of AI, edge processing, and connectivity have immense potential to increase safety and efficiency at the heart of Amazon’s business,” he said in a post on LinkedIn.

Hebert spent 15 years at Seattle-based product development firm Synapse and left as president last August. He was most recently at consulting firm Capgemini Invent.

— Former Tableau CEO Ryan Aytay is the new president and chief operating officer of Code Metal, a Boston-based company that builds AI tools that automatically translate and optimize code for different hardware systems.

Aytay announced earlier this month that he was leaving Salesforce after 19 years. He’d been serving since 2023 as the CEO of Tableau, the Seattle-based data visualization company that was acquired by Salesforce in 2019.

“I’m incredibly energized about this next chapter,” Aytay wrote on LinkedIn. “The combination of world-class tech, real customer demand, and team building with urgency and integrity is rare — and I feel lucky to be part of it!”

Code Metal just closed a $125 million Series B funding round at a $1.25 billion valuation.

— Douglas Dawson, a longtime communications leader at Microsoft, is now leading comms for the team focused on Microsoft’s cloud and AI strategy. He previously led Microsoft’s global communications team, and has been with the company for almost 12 years.

— Harshit Shah is the new chief technology officer at LiveView Technologies, a company that develops cloud-connected video surveillance, safety, and remote monitoring solutions. Shah was previously CTO at Kyruus Health. He spent four years as an engineering leader at Amazon Web Services and another 10 at Microsoft as a software and program manager.

— Diana Leo is the new vice president of governmental affairs for the Bellevue Chamber of Commerce.

Leo has an extensive background in politics, policy, and public service. She previously led multi-state advocacy for iCivics, advancing nonpartisan K-12 civic education policies through legislative engagement. She served as grassroots and outreach director for Utah Sen. Mike Lee and held senior leadership appointments in the first Trump administration.

— Andrew Peterson joined the board of directors at Austin, Texas-based cybersecurity company DryRun Security.

Peterson is a Seattle native and entrepreneur-turned-investor who returned to the city to lead Aviso Ventures, a venture capital fund founded in 2023 to back early stage enterprise and infrastructure software startups. He previously co-founded Signal Sciences, a cybersecurity company acquired by Fastly in 2020.

— Vincent Valentino is the new energy economy lead at the Washington State Department of Commerce following more than three years leading green economy initiatives for the City of Seattle’s Office of Economic Development.

Valentino, who is also vice chair of the board of Washington State Green Bank, said in a post on LinkedIn, that he’s looking forward to “continuing to work to make Washington a national leader in all things clean energy and climate tech!”