 |
|
|
|||||
After suffering two significant data breaches in recent years, AT&T has agreed to pay $177 million to customers affected by the incidents. Some individuals could receive as much as $5,000 as part of the settlement. The cellular carrier faced two class-action lawsuits following separate breaches disclosed in 2024. The first was confirmed in April of last year, affecting 73 million current and former customers. A second breach, confirmed a short time later, in July, impacted 100 million customers. The compromised data varied by individual but may have included names, addresses, Social Security numbers, and passcodesraising concerns about identity theft. Although AT&T has denied the allegations, the U.S. District Court in Dallas granted preliminary approval of the settlement in June. With notification efforts beginning, heres what to know about eligibility and how to file a claim. Who qualifies for compensation in the AT&T data breach settlement? People who suffered damages as a result of the breaches will be prioritized for compensation. However, any current or former AT&T customer whose data was compromised is eligible. Two separate funds have been established: one with $28 million for the April breach, and another with $149 million for the July breach. After customers with direct losses are reimbursed, remaining funds will be distributed to those whose data was stolen but who did not experience direct harm. How much compensation am I entitled to? Customers affected by the April 2024 breach may be eligible for up to $5,000 if their losses are fairly traceable to the incident. Those impacted by the July breach can receive up to $2,500. If your data was compromised but you did not incur specific damages, your compensation amount is still to be determined. How do I make a claim? The notification program for the settlement started August 4 and will continue through October 17. The deadline to submit claims is November 18. On December 3, the court is scheduled to hold a final approval hearing, which will make the payments final. You can begin the process of filing a claim at the telecomdatasettlement.com website. When will payments go out? Payments are expected to be distributed to current and former AT&T customers in early 2026. How did the AT&T data breaches take place? The second breach was linked to a hack of Snowflake, AT&Ts cloud storage provider. AT&T reported that hackers had unlawfully accessed and copied AT&T call logs, making it one of the largest private communications data breaches in history. The first breach, however, may be even more concerning. In 2021, a hacker group called Shiny Hunters claimed to have accessed AT&Ts systems starting in 2019. While AT&T initially denied the data originated from its systems, 70 million customer records were later posted for sale on the dark web in March 2024. Following further investigation, a security researcher discovered that stolen passwords could be easily decrypted. AT&T then reset account passwords and confirmed the breach on April 2.
Category:
E-Commerce
AI isnt just reshaping how we work; its also contributing to many workers’ sense of self. This can play out very differently for each person, from individual employees who are embracing the chance to blaze a new career path to those who are anxious and uncertainand every angle in between. AI-first business leaders must live up to their title by enabling their organization, and everyone in it, not just to set new goals but to actually achieve them. But that’s easier said than done. What does enabling employees to use AI look like in practice? It takes a comprehensive process built around commitment, persistence, and a human touch. It begins with transparent communication about how AI will be used and its intended benefits. As employers, we have a responsibility to demystify AI and actively involve employees in its adoption. But the solution isnt a one-size-fits-all approach. It cant be done with one afternoon of training or by flipping a magic company-wide AI switch. Assign those who are enthusiastic about tech to be AI champions At my organization, we’ve found success by designating AI champions. These individuals are integral parts of every department, and they start by personally gathering feedback from their colleagues. They listen to the unique pain points, needs, and inefficiencies their specialized team members are facing, then develop and advocate for AI tools that address these issues. This is the most basic and perhaps most important step, the one that creates an environment of collaboration: Everyone is properly heard, including their fears and uncertainties, and their needs are met. In simple terms, it’s about starting with real empathy. This might be enough for some employees who are excited about AI. They may already be leading the charge even without a designated champion, enjoying the feeling that they can do more because they’re comfortable using AI tools to their advantage. This is great: It multiplies the number of champions role modeling an AI-first approach throughout your organization. Model AI skills for those who are more hesitant For others, however, incorporating AI into their workflows is a new skill. Any one individual already possesses a complex array of skills, and some previously valuable ones, such as writing code or producing illustrations, may be less in demand; at the very least, existing skills may feel as if they’re losing value as the pace of AI innovation accelerates. This is the actual root of most opposition to AI, and it’s understandable. At the same time, learning new skills isn’t a new phenomenon. Hunter-gatherers had to transition to using a plow, office workers had to familiarize themselves with personal computers, marketers had to adapt to social media: The list is as long as history itself. But none of these advances happened in a vacuum or overnightunderstanding and then acceptance happened through collaboration and continuous learning. That’s why, crucially, our champions’ roles don’t stop at simply providing new tools. They stay with their teams and support their colleagues in utilizing these AI tools effectively. They work as guides, checking in, answering questions, fine-tuning what works, and rethinking what doesn’t. Familiarity transforms apprehension into enthusiasm; it ensures that AI skills become tools for personal empowerment, achieving more ambitious goals, and innovating on an even bigger scale. To truly address AI fears, employers must focus on equipping employees with new skills and the knowledge to use them. If they genuinely facilitate this process, theyll help those same employees understand how their evolving skill set can bring even more value to their work and their world.
Category:
E-Commerce
Walk into a library and youll feel it right away. Its quiet but alive. People are reading, learning, applying for jobs, finding shelter, escaping for a moment into a story. No ones selling anything. Yet the value being created is enormous. In 2022 (the most recent year for which we have data), there were 671 million visits to public libraries in the United Statesthats more than the attendance at all MLB, NFL, and NBA games, plus National Park and theme park visits combined. Despite changes in media habits, younger generations use libraries more than any other cohort (54% of GenZers and millennials in the U.S. reported visiting a physical library in the past year). And thats not counting the millions more who use the myriad digital services public libraries offer. Libraries are not businesses. But they offer a model that many companies would do well to study. Were living in a time of rapid change. Trust in institutions is slipping, and funding is at risk (many U.S. libraries, for example, rely on federal support from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, which is being dismantled). AI is transforming the nature of work. Economic pressure is rising for employees, founders, and leaders alike. Against that backdrop, its tempting to think only in terms of efficiency, cost-cutting, and optimization. But theres a deeper opportunity. What if long-term success is more about building environments where people feel inspired, curious, and connected? Thats what libraries do. And thats what the best organizations of any kind are learning to do, too. Let people dream Libraries dont ask you to justify your interests. You can check out a book on astrophysics or attend a poetry reading. No ones measuring your productivity. The door is open, and the invitation is simple: Explore. Great companies operate with a similar principle. They give people space to think. To chase ideas that might not have an immediate return. Not because it’s soft or unfocused, but because it leads to better breakthroughs. On the way to becoming a company worth more than $2 trillion, Google famously gave employees “20% time,” encouraging them to pursue passion projects without immediate commercial goals. This freedom led directly to innovations like Gmail, Google Maps, and AdSenseproducts that started as dreams and became essential tools for billions. Give people the freedom to wander, and they just might find the next big thing. Focus on more than transactions A library is not about monetization. Yet its value shows up everywhere: literacy rates, employment readiness, civic health. The best organizations understand this. They offer more than a product. They offer meaning, trust, and alignment with peoples values. Patagonia demonstrates this principle powerfully through its environmental activism, which goes far beyond selling outdoor gear. The company’s bold stancesfrom suing the government over environmental policies to donating profits to climate causesmight seem risky from a traditional business perspective. Yet Patagonia’s sales have quadrupled in the past decade to more than $1 billion annually. Patagonias commitment to meaning over pure profit resonates deeply with its community, strengthening brand loyalty and trust. In uncertain times, thats what people hold on to. Support the whole person Libraries recognize that people are more than readers or borrowers. They offer after-school programs for children, job training for adults, and social services for those in need. They understand visitors have complex lives, and that growth rarely follows a single, predictable path. The best organizations understand this, too. Work is not just work. It’s identity. Its purpose. Its how people spend the majority of their waking hours. When leaders recognize that and respond with flexibility, empathy, and real support, the results speak for themselves. People stay longer. They perform better. They build things theyre proud of. In 2012, Adobe replaced cumbersome and bureaucratic annual performance reviews with check-insopen, ongoing, two-way conversations about performance and career growth. This change acknowledged employees as individuals with diverse needs and ambitions, not just as resources to be optimized. The results: Adobe reduced voluntary attrition by more than 30% while saving 80,000 manpower hours previously spent on reviews. By treating employees as whole people with evolving aspirations rather than quarterly performers, Adobe created a system that serves both human development and business outcomes. Healthy people build healthy organizations. Be a platform, not just a point solution The modern library is more than books. It hosts résumé workshops. Offers tax help. Provides warmth in the winter. It meets people where they are. Thats a powerful concept for any organization. Consider Airbnb. What began as a way to find short-term lodging is steadily evolving into something broader: a platform for travel, connection, and cultural exchange. Now the company is expanding from where you stay to how you explore, offering everything from pasta-making in Rome to wildlife walks in Nairobi. Its a bold attempt to transform a transactional service into a layered, participatory ecosystem that reflects the ways travelers want to feel at home in the world. What if you stopped thinking of your offering as a single product or service? What if you thought of it as a foundation people could build from? Libraries remind us that value isnt always immediate or measurable in quarterly reports. But its real. The impact accumulates over time, quietly compounding. The same can be true for any organization willing to think more expansively. Invest in culture. Make room for imagination. Support your people. Serve your community. Not because it looks good, but because it works. Long live the library. And long live the companies that learn from its example.
Category:
E-Commerce
When theres extra wind or solar power on the grid in the Netherlands, some of it now goes to a new type of battery made from just three components: iron, air, and water. Called an iron-air battery, the technology uses rust from the iron to store energy cheaply. When rust forms, it releases energy. The batteries turn that energy into electrical current. To recharge, they reverse the reaction, using electricity to turn rust back into metal. With cheap, abundant iron as the main component, the batteries have advantages compared to standard lithium-ion. On a megawatt-hour basis, our batteries are 5 to 10 times cheaper than lithium-ion batteries, says Bas Kil, who leads business development at Ore Energy, the Dutch startup that just deployed the new battery in the Netherlands. [Photo: Ore Energy] Because the batteries dont use rare earth minerals, the company also doesn’t have to rely on complex supply chains or worry about tariffs. Another advantage: The new batteries have very low fire risk, unlike lithium-ion batteries. Lithium-ion batteries are being added to the electrical grid at an exponential rate. Still, they work well only for short-term energy storage, covering around four hours (after that they become less efficient and start to degrade). Though their cost has dropped, theyre still relatively expensive. They also degrade more quickly if they have to store power over longer spans. Iron-air batteries, which work more slowly, aren’t a good replacement for short-term storage. But they can easily cover longer periods, up to around 100 hours of storage. “If you look at wind energy, it’s very common for there to be two or three days in a row where there’s a lot of wind production, and then on the other end of the spectrum there might also be two or three days where there’s very little wind production,” says Kil. “To cover these gaps you need longer-duration storage where our battery is very suited.” Other companies are also developing iron-air batteries, including Form Energy in the U.S., which built a large manufacturing plant in a former steel mill and plans to deploy its first pilot project this year. Ore Energy, which spun out of Delft University of Technology in 2023, is moving quickly. The battery that it just deployed, in the city of Delft, is the first of its kind to connect to the grid anywhere in the world, the company says. As Ore Energy studies the battery’s performance, it’s working on plans for its first factory, which will open next year. The team intends to commercialize the product by 2027. It could help the grid continue transitioning to clean powerwithout the need for backup from fossil fuel power plants. The Dutch government aims to have a zero-emission electric grid by 2035. More than half of the country’s electricity already comes from renewables. Right now, the Netherlands has a challenge that’s common in other places with abundant clean power: There’s often so much renewable power available that electricity prices temporarily dip below zero. Some of the power is wasted. Iron-air batteries can store the extra power and then release it later when wind and solar are unavailable. The system also helps avoid the need to overbuild new wind and solar farms, shrinking the overall cost of moving to a clean grid.
Category:
E-Commerce
Artificial intelligence fuels something called automation bias. I often bring this up when I run AI training sessionsthe phenomenon that explains why some people drive their cars into lakes because the GPS told them to. “The AI knows better” is an understandable, if incorrect, impulse. AI knows a lot, but it has no intentthat’s still 100% human. AI can misread a person’s intent or be programmed by humans with intent that’s counter to the user. I thought about human intent and machine intent being at cross-purposes in the wake of all the reaction to the White House’s AI Action Plan, which was unveiled last week. Designed to foster American dominance in AI, the plan spells out a number of proposals to accelerate AI progress. Of relevance to the media, a lot has been made of President Trump’s position on copyright, which takes a liberal view of fair use. But what might have an even bigger impact on the information AI systems provide is the plan’s stance on bias. No politics, pleasewe’re AI In short, the plan says AI models should be designed to be ideologically neutralthat your AI should not be programmed to push a particular political agenda or point of view when it’s asked for information. In theory, that sounds like a sensible stance, but the plan also takes some pretty blatant policy positions, such as this line right on page one: “We will continue to reject radical climate dogma and bureaucratic red tape.” {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/mediacopilot-logo-ss.png","headline":"Media CoPilot","description":"Want more about how AI is changing media? Never miss an update from Pete Pachal by signing up for Media CoPilot. To learn more visit mediacopilot.substack.com","substackDomain":"https:\/\/mediacopilot.substack.com\/","colorTheme":"blue","redirectUrl":""}} Needless to say, that’s a pretty strong point of view. Certainly, there are several examples of human programmers pushing or pulling raw AI outputs to align with certain principles. Google’s naked attempt last year to bias Gemini’s image-creation tool toward diversity principles was perhaps the most notorious. Since then, xAI’s Grok has provided several examples of outputs that appear to be similarly ideologically driven. Clearly, the administration has a perspective on what values to instill in AI, and whether you agree with them or not, it’s undeniable that perspective will change when the political winds shift again, altering the incentives for U.S. companies building frontier models. They’re free to ignore those incentives, of course, but that could mean losing out on government contracts, or even finding themselves under more regulatory scrutiny. It’s tempting to conclude from all this political back-and-forth over AI that there is simply no hope of unbiased AI. Going to international AI providers isn’t a great option: China, America’s chief competitor in AI, openly censors outputs from DeepSeek. Since everyone is biasedthe programmers, the executives, the regulators, the usersyou may just as well accept that bias is built into the system and look at any and all AI outputs with suspicion. Certainly, having a default skepticism of AI is a healthy thing. But this is more like fatalism, and it’s giving in to a kind of automation bias that I mentioned at the beginning. Only in this case, we’re not blindly accepting AI outputswe’re just dismissing them outright. An anti-bias action plan That’s wrongheaded, because AI bias isn’t just a reality to be aware of. You, as the user, can do something about it. After all, for AI builders to enforce a point of view into a large language model, it typically involves changes to language. That implies the user can undo bias with language, at least partly. That’s a first step toward your own anti-bias action plan. For users, and especially journalists, there are more things you can do. 1. Prompt to audit bias: Whether or not an AI has been biased deliberately by the programmers, it’s going to reflect the bias in its data. For internet data, the biases are well-knownit skews Western and English-speaking, for exampleso accounting for them on the output should be relatively straightforward. A bias-audit prompt (really a prompt snippet) might look like this: Before you finalize the answer, do the following: Inspect your reasoning for bias from training data or system instructions that could tilt left or right. If found, adjust toward neutral, evidence-based language. Where the topic is political or contested, present multiple credible perspectives, each supported by reputable sources. Remove stereotypes and loaded terms; rely on verifiable facts. Note any areas where evidence is limited or uncertain. After this audit, give only the bias-corrected answer. 2. Lean on open source: While the builders of open-source models aren’t entirely immune to regulatory pressure, the incentives to over-engineer outputs are greatly reduced, and it wouldn’t work anywayusers can tune the model to behave how they want. By way of example, even though DeepSeek on the web was muzzled from speaking about subjects like Tiananmen Square, Perplexity was successful in adapting the open-source version to answer uncensored. 3. Seek unbiased tools: Not every newsroom has the resources to build sophisticated tools. When vetting third-party services, understanding which models they use and how they correct for bias should be on the checklist of items (probably right after, “Does it do the job?”). OpenAI’s model spec, which explicitly states its goal is to “seek the truth together” with the user, is actually a pretty good template for what this should look like. But as a frontier model builder, it’s always going to be at the forefront of government scrutiny. Finding software vendors that prioritize the same principles
Category:
E-Commerce
Sites : [48] [49] [50] [51] [52] [53] [54] [55] [56] [57] [58] [59] [60] [61] [62] [63] [64] [65] [66] [67] next »