Travel app Hopper agrees to a $35M FTC settlement over allegations the company misled users by imposing hidden fees and misrepresenting the total costs (@laurenforristal / TechCrunch) (Visit Techmeme dot com for the link and full context!)

Sending money to family abroad still costs more than 6% in fees on average, and still takes days to arrive. That has barely moved in years, regardless of which app sends it. Pay(ID) does not fix one company's app. It fixes the layer underneath all of them.

An AI assistant app on your phone can answer almost any question but do almost none of your tasks. Ask it anything and it answers. Ask it to book the cab or clear your inbox and it stalls. The reason isn't that the model isn't smart enough. It's that it isn't allowed to. To act instead of just talk, an assistant needs to do things a normal app can't. Hear you without being opened first, see what's on your screen, reach into your other apps, keep running in the background. On Android, only Gemini ever got those privileges. Any other assistant you download runs as a boxed-in app, able to chat but not to act. On July 16, though, the EU ordered @Google to change that, handing 11 of these privileges to rival assistants or risking a DMA fine of up to 10% of global revenue. These privledges sort into four buckets: 1️⃣ Getting summoned: waking by voice, launching from the home button 2️⃣ Reading your context: seeing your screen, sensors, and app data, offering things before you ask 3️⃣ Acting for you: running tasks inside your apps, automating multi-step jobs, changing settings 4️⃣ Running the engine: using the phone's built-in models, running its own, staying alive in the background However, Gemini was the assistant Google built and tested for its own OS. Swap in a different one and you're trusting a new model (and a new runtime) with permission to act on your screen and inside your apps. A weaker or lower-reasoning model driving your OS doesn't just answer worse, it acts worse, and a wrong action costs more than a wrong sentence or hallucination. You can't swap the model under an agent and expect the same results, let alone the same safety. So opening the layer solves one problem and surfaces a bigger one. Android is only the first place this shows up. The same fight is already moving to popular browser, desktop, and car OSs where there's even more potential for major vulnerability issues. As full trustless agent automonomy is still quite a ways away, it's interesting to see how quickly adoption is growing while full security and trust still lag.

Moving from Solana to the EVM means rebuilding your app from scratch. Oak Security’s StylusPort enables teams to bring Rust smart contracts to the Arbitrum Platform without starting over. That means faster launches, lower costs and an easier path into the programmable economy.

Some more detail on the ROIC Intelligence App I built yesterday and mentioned on today's earnings call. I took the PDF that Brian Nowak at Morgan Stanley put together for Hyperscale ROIC this week and used Copilot code (coming in our new superapp) with a single prompt + skill (/drill-me) to create the plan, then used autopilot in auto to create the full app (with history, lookups, scenarios, what-ifs, etc). And /rubber-duck to test. And the best part is that all the artifacts are in my enterprise environment. My app is in Copilot, my code is in GitHub Enterprise; all my data pipelines/lake/semantic models are in Fabric. And everything is under Agent 365 IT/Sec/FinOps control! So this is not about Tokenmaxxing or vibe coding. Every step of the way the rails are engineered to create value, making everything a long-term reusable asset, with governance/security, and cost controls. This is the full system to drive business value. Disclosures: This is all pulled from public sources, and for illustrative purposes only...not financial advice! :) Here is the app and architecture...

🇺🇸 Tesla quietly filed a patent that could cut battery production costs by nearly half. The breakthrough is a new way to make battery cathodes without toxic liquid solvents, using a microscopic "spider web" structure that binds the materials together instead. It also triples manufacturing speed and could shrink the physical footprint of battery factories by up to 50%. It's not a lab experiment either. Gigafactory Texas is already mass-producing these cells for select Model Y vehicles, with Cybertruck, Cybercab, and Semi rollout expected through 2026 and 2027. Battery cost is the last big barrier to affordable EVs. Tesla just moved the needle. Source: Not a Tesla App