🪅 Heap Heap Hurray Ed. #567

Hump day vibes - let's power through Wednesday!

Psst - we have a surprise for our readers - check out our Brand New Events And Hackathons Listing Page. Try it out - and respond to this email to let us know your thoughts on it.

#BankSecurity - India's central bank mandated dot bank domains to enhance trust, but its registry leaked sensitive info, including bank employee data and domain security flaws. A researcher exposed 33 unauthenticated endpoints, allowing access to bcrypt password hashes, mobile numbers, and login IPs.

#Amazon - Amazon is exploring alternatives to Anthropic's AI models after a renegotiated contract will shift to token-based pricing, potentially increasing costs. The company is looking at OpenAI and has already committed $50 billion to the AI lab, while Anthropic is expanding its relationships beyond Amazon, including a $200 billion deal with Google Cloud.

#DRAM - A class action lawsuit has been filed against Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron, accusing the companies of conspiring to fix prices and supply of DRAM, resulting in massive price increases. The suit alleges the firms artificially inflated prices, driving up costs by 700% in four years, and seeks damages and permanent injunctive relief to restore competitive conditions in the market.

Oyo's India Revenue Falls Below 12%, USA Becomes Largest Market
OYO's Indian market now accounts for less than 12% of its overall revenue, with the US emerging as its largest market, driven by strategic acquisitions, including the 2024 purchase of US-based G6 Hospitality.

MongoDB Expands Academia Program In India
MongoDB expands its India academia program to upskill two million builders by 2030, increasing investment in local language initiatives and regional partnerships to equip the next generation of builders with cloud, data, and AI skills.

Apple Escalates India Antitrust Dispute
Apple has accused Indian antitrust investigators of "copy-pasting" claims from rivals, arguing their findings against the company should be thrown out. Apple denies allegations of "abusive conduct" on the App Store and claims the investigation relied on rivals' claims rather than independent work.

ProtonMail Lumo - The AI assistant now supports multimodal processing, allowing it to process both text and images, and includes features for image generation, image editing, image analysis, and sketch-to-image conversion.

Threads - Live Chats now support translation, allow Community Champions to create and host their own sessions, enable hosts to delete messages, and are gaining desktop support and pinned messages.

Google - The Tenor API, which provided searchable GIFs to various platforms, has been discontinued to allow Google to focus its resources.

Reddit - Will now require users to be logged in to access old[dot]reddit[dot]com in order to prevent abusive scraping and automated traffic.

Nano Banana 2 Lite - This model delivers text-to-image outputs in 4 seconds and is a cost-efficient choice for developers focused on drafting and ideating, with a cost of $0.034 per 1K image.

Anthropic Claude Sonnet 5 - It is now available across all plans, with improved agentic capabilities, lower prices, and a lower rate of undesirable behaviors compared to its predecessor.

Taken - An interactive privacy experience that reveals what your browser automatically shares with websites the moment you visit. It visualizes your digital fingerprint, device details, and other passive data collection to help you understand how much information is exposed without logging in or granting permissions.

Specification Website - A comprehensive, open source reference for building high quality websites. It documents the technical standards and best practices for areas like accessibility, SEO, security, performance, privacy, and AI readiness, serving as a practical checklist for developers, designers, and site owners.

ACAI - A toolkit for spec-driven software development that helps teams and AI agents build software from structured specifications instead of prompts. It provides a spec format, CLI, dashboard, and workflow to keep requirements, implementation, testing, and reviews aligned throughout the development process.

Check out our Brand New Events And Hackathons Listing Page. Try it out - and respond to this email to let us know your thoughts on it.

Loops In AI
Industry leaders Peter Steinberger and Boris Cherny are advocating for AI loops, which enable agents to complete long-running tasks and improve products autonomously. Loops require four key elements: scoping, context, evaluation, and testing, allowing agents to verify themselves. Examples include PR babysitters, bug fixers, and performance autoresearchers.

Yak Shaving Madness
A software engineer shares their experience building a custom static site generator from scratch, illustrating the concept of yak shaving - doing a chain of related tasks that ultimately lead to an unrelated outcome.