Category: 3. Business

This is an era of the “rug pull”, an age of the “pump and dump”.

The terms come from investment scams, but now apply more generally. A project is going well, prices are skyrocketing, attracting more investors: “the pump”.

Suddenly, it all comes crashing down. The rug is pulled and the founders vanish with the money. Investors are left with worthless assets: “the dump”.

After years of being courted by tech companies and encouraged to provide content optimised for their platforms and websites, news sites are increasingly finding themselves locked out and denied access to their users.

This is sometimes presented as a media industry issue, as a story about news sites outflanked by changing technology.

But it’s about much more than that. News sites are the canaries in the coalmine.

This is about the biggest change to the web in 20 years, one that will affect how you access information and what you read and watch.

Most of us have grown up with the “open web” — the enormous global collection of websites where information and content are published and shared freely without requiring the approval of a hypothetical web-owner or third party.

It’s so commonplace it’s hard to imagine a future without it, and yet it’s under threat.

AI tools trained on the best websites of the open web are now killing traffic to these sites.

And despite changing the future of journalism and our access to an online public resource of information, the issue is getting little attention.

From search engine to answer engine

The two best examples of this trend are the choices made by Meta and Google to sideline news site content and referrals.

Just under a decade ago, Meta abruptly changed its algorithm to show less news content on the main feed, beginning a process that culminated a year ago, when it announced it no longer wanted any news content.

Now it looks like Google is doing something similar.

The facts are different, but the consequences for journalism are the same.

Google has built an AI model partly trained on news content (which it initially took for free, without asking) that’s able to answer many user queries and therefore avoid having to direct them to the sites themselves.

As a result, search traffic to news sites appears to be tanking.

This week, Google went one step further, rolling out the advanced search tool AI Mode to Australian users, which will further sideline news sites and embed the shift from “search engine” to “answer engine”.

Some publishers are discussing “Google Zero” — the hypothetical moment when Google Search stops sending any traffic to third-party websites, instead providing AI overviews directly on the search results page.

“I think it’s an absolutely pivotal, maybe the most pivotal moment for journalism ever,” Kevin Indig, a US-based search engine optimisation (SEO) expert, told me.

“A lot of publishers are asking themselves, what is our business model?”

“What is our model when AI answers so many questions?”

Newsrooms optimise for Google

It’s hard to overstate Google’s importance to online journalism.

Over the past two decades print readership declined, radio and TV audiences dwindled, and social media platforms became fickle.

Facebook turned away from news and the responsibility of moderation. Twitter got weird. YouTube was overrun with misinformation.

Through all this, Google was pretty solid. The essential utility for the web continued to direct billions of users to news sites, so ubiquitous it was almost invisible.

Optimising articles so they ranked higher in Google became second nature. News sites employed staff to spot search trends.

Google isn’t just another way of getting eyeballs on an article. Its search engine is baked into the concept of a news website.

And it goes further than this.

Given Google’s dominance of the search market, Google search is arguably central to the operation of the open web — of the hundreds of millions of publicly accessible websites that get most of their readers via Google.

A whole SEO industry exists on the basis that Google will continue to sift the web and publish search results leading users to the most relevant sites.

Another huge industry, content marketing, is based on the idea that publishing useful or generally interesting information on a topic will draw readers to a site, where they may then purchase a product or service.

As Indig put it, until recently, “every participant of the marketplace was winning.”

“Whether they’re journalists, or content marketers, or advertisers, or Google, they were all winning. It was a great deal.”

Then generative AI changed the game.

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Has Google done a rug pull?

About a year ago Google rolled out generative AI answers, posted above the standard blue links, for some search queries.

Since then, news sites have reported steep declines in search traffic of 30 per cent. Some content marketers saw declines of 80 per cent.

There’s broadly two opposing arguments here. The first is that Google is giving users what they want — the internet changes and we all have to adapt. The second is that this is a rug pull.

According to the second argument, Google using AI to answer search queries isn’t just an evolution of search, but a betrayal of the basic quid pro quo.

The open web is based on the idea of a reciprocal and mutually beneficial relationship between publishers and search engines like Google.

But Google’s AI is trained on open web data, which includes news sites.

So Google is arguably using content from news sites that costs these newsrooms readers and advertising revenue. It’s gone from helpful partner to publishing rival.

Instead of Google sending readers to other sites, it’s pursuing a future where there’s only one big site: Google.

Now, maybe fears of “Google Zero” are an overreaction.

Google still sends billions of readers to news sites.

Services like Google Discover remain an important source of traffic for news.

Google needs content from news sites to train its AI, so the AI can generate answers that are factual and up to date.

It also needs news sites to do well so it can make money from selling ads on these sites.

But then again, it’s early days. We’re only one year into the experiment.

There’s widespread speculation Google will make AI Mode (a chatbot-like generative AI search tool) the default for search, which would mean less traffic to news sites, and probably mass lay-offs and fewer publishers.

And what then?

The future of journalism could be pretty bleak if publishers were only being kept alive to train AI chatbots for a US tech company.

What can publishers do?

Publishers could demand licensing deals so that Google and others pay them for the content used to train AI models.

This is already happening. In August, Google signed a deal with Australian Associated Press to provide content for its AI platform.

But this approach has its drawbacks. Licensing deals favour big news sites. Smaller, independent publishers could miss out, as happened with the News Media Bargaining Code in 2021.

This inequality around licensing deals contributed to the net loss of about 166 news outlets in Australia over the past five years.

Another option is regulators like the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission could demand AI companies fairly compensate publishers for content.

Regulating US tech giants is tricky. Meta pulled Australian news from Facebook and Google initially threatened to pull its search engine rather than pay publishers for content under the News Media Bargaining Code.

A third option is an automated system for paying content owners for their work.

In July, the online infrastructure company Cloudflare announced the trial of a service that allows content owners to charge AI crawlers for access.

So far, there’s no broad consensus about what works, Indig said.

In the meantime, across the open web, gates are going up. More publishers are using paywalls to make up for lost ad revenue.

“For a lot of publishers, gating wasn’t viable,” he said.

“Now it’s like they’re being pushed towards the cliff and gating is one of the best kinds of options that they have.”

Expect to see more gated content, fewer publishers, and perhaps fewer articles overall.

From now on, you may see fewer explainers, how-to guides, or other content that’s generally more easily summarised by AI.

After this rug pull, the web is going to be less open.

Last month’s International Baking Industry Exposition (IBIE) offered U.S. Wheat Associates (USW) staff from Sub-Saharan Africa, South America and Southeast Asia a peek into the future of the industry — from advantages artificial intelligence (AI) could present bakers to more practical developments in baking ingredients, including potential benefits sourdough fermentation has for consumers’ gut health.

Scientific advancements in wheat biotechnology also took its turn in the spotlight.

As USW Bakery and Noodle Technologist Ivan Goh puts it, the IBIE is like a “world tour of everything baking.”

IBIE, considered one of the world’s largest and most comprehensive baking events, was held Sept. 13–17 in Las Vegas. It attracted more than 1,000 exhibitors from across the globe.  Focus was placed on the latest advancements in technology, ingredients, equipment and packaging. The show also hosted its largest education program ever, with more than 250 sessions and demonstrations.

Helping USW Help Customers

“Technical staff in all U.S. Wheat offices handle numerous customer inquiries related to wheat-based products on a regular basis, so this kind of experience was especially valuable for us,” said Goh. He attended the 2025 IBIE with USW Regional Vice President Joe Sowers, along with South and Southeast Asian Baking Technologists Sam Yap and Adrian Redondo. “Many manufacturers showcased their latest machines and even assembled complete production lines at the show, which provided great insight into how various products are made.”

USW’s Cape Town office brought a team of millers and bakers from Sub-Saharan Africa.

“The goal was to provide technical staff from regional milling and baking companies in our region a chance to engage directly with U.S. bakery equipment manufacturers,” said USW Cape Town Program and Marketing Specialist Domenique Opperman. She led the team with USW Regional Director for Sub-Saharan Africa Chad Wiegand. “These are companies that purchase U.S. wheat, and we felt they would really get a lot out of learning about the latest innovations.”

USW’s Santiago office sponsored a team of bakers at this year’s IBIE, too. USW Regional Director Miguel Galdos and Technical Specialist Andres Saturno explored new innovations in baking with the team. They also engaged with milling and baking companies from South America participating in the event.

“We had the opportunity to meet with several important bakeries in our market to answer questions and discuss what we were seeing,” said Galdos. “For example, the Chilean Bakers Association was on hand, so we spent time with their members to interact with them of the things being presented.”

Brad Erker, executive director of Colorado Wheat Research Foundation, conducted an educational session on scientific advancements in wheat biotechnology during this year’s IBIE. Erker discussed the potential for enhanced crop performance and sustainability improvements through biotech innovation.

Dr. William “Bill” Wilson helped establish the Grain Procurement Management for Importers short course at the Northern Crops Institute (NCI) more than four decades ago. Over the course of his long career, he has worked with hundreds of course participants from across the globe.

Wilson recently transitioned to a new role with North Dakota State University (NDSU) but was still involved in this year’s course. USW talked with him about the course’s history, the core tenets that make it successful year after year, and how the course has been refined over time to meet the changing needs of global grain buyers.

What was the initial driving force behind establishing the NCI grain procurement short course?

At the time the course was founded in 1982, the U.S. marketing system was considered very complicated compared to that of competitors like Australia or Canada. The purpose was that if we better educate buyers about the mechanics of our grain marketing system, then buyers can be more effective in their purchasing strategies. That was the idea, and I would say it still is the idea.

How have course participants changed over the years?

During our first couple of courses, nobody knew what an NCI course meant. One of the first programs was primarily seven people from Iraq who were involved in insect inspection. They were not really involved in the nuts and bolts of procurement, but that was the state of the industry at the time.

Over the next decade, the course increased to about 40 people. We had a lot of simultaneous translation; sometimes we were translating simultaneously into five languages. But the class was largely dominated by government buying agencies, so they had limited discretion as to what they did and their primary goal was to get the lowest cost.

Nowadays, we fill our class every year with 35 students, which is the capacity of our trading room. And we are always at capacity. We now teach multiple courses, one on wheat and corn and one on soybeans.

All of the students today are younger; they’re trained in futures, options and trading; they’re conversant in English and they’re very active in the purchasing of wheat. This is radically different than earlier years. They’re operating in a very competitive environment and using what we consider to be sophisticated strategies for managing risk and procurement.

How has the course been refined to meet the needs of this change in participants?

These are all recently trained people. They’re fully aware of the operations of futures , cash and options markets. When I observe the way we teach and what they ask questions about, they’re doing everything we’re teaching them. What they’re trying to do is fine-tune the way they’re doing it, whereas in earlier years, we were teaching them – what is the futures market?

First, we teach a lot about risk management, and we teach a methodology called Value at Risk (VaR). This is a novel technology and we teach it regularly in our university class. Increasingly, five to 10 percent of students are actively using this already in their import situation. So they’re looking to fine-tune their knowledge of how to use this method.

Second, we have a commodity trading room at NDSU that I developed in 2012. We have 34 workstations replicating what would look like a commodity trading room at any company, and we have access to all of the major media and information sources in the world. So a big part of one of our sessions is to articulate and illustrate all of these sources of information.

We also have online trading during our course. We give them assignments ahead of time, and then they have to trade overnight in groups. It brings the group together.

When we have very volatile marketing periods, it brings out a lot of questions, not only on the mechanics of making a buy decision, but also things like the price ladder and others.

Third, we are spending a lot of time on logistics and supply chain management. Every company in the world is analyzing its supply chain. I asked the students what their biggest source of risk is and it was transit time risk, so we introduced case studies to illustrate the impacts of transit time risk, where you make a purchase, expect shipment in 15 days and it takes 45 days. We now also have a special session devoted specifically to stock holding as a strategy.

How has industry engagement with the course changed?

In the 1980s, trying to get an industry speaker to come to Fargo was a killer. If I asked any company, I want to bring in a group of 30 people that you don’t know, so that you can tell them anything, they would say – forget it! So, I had to lean on former students of mine.

Then, over time, as our audience became more sophisticated and more commercially intriguing, we had no problem having industry speakers. We now have three to five industry speakers. We have traders coming in, we have local shuttle elevators coming in and the BNSF railroad is a regular speaker. As a matter of fact, we have more industry speakers than we can accommodate!

How does the integration of academic and industry experts benefit participants?

It’s good because I’m an academic. We as academics don’t know everything, and we don’t sell wheat, so it’s important to have industry speakers.

And industry speakers typically are not natural teachers. So we have a perfect complementarity now between academic presentations and experienced industry speakers. This has enhanced our program substantially.

How has USW helped contribute to the success of this course?

USW was with us from the very beginning. Most important to me is that USW identifies participants around the world who would benefit the most from this course. All of the overseas staff have been involved in the courses, so they know what we do. USW is like a matchmaker.

I also interact with the USW staff overseas. When they’re at NCI for trade teams and other programs, I always take a little pulse check about what’s of emerging importance and how we need to make marginal changes to the course each year.

How does this course ultimately drive sales of wheat?

When you teach in this class, you’re teaching somebody for their career and for a lifetime. Our approach is to teach the tools that are really important to utilize the flexibility of the U.S. market system.

The tools that we teach are always applicable for U.S. purchases. Over time, the idea is that if buyers are more knowledgeable, they make better decisions. That’s the approach we take.

Security researchers at Google say hackers targeting corporate executives with extortion emails have stolen data from “dozens of organizations,” one of the first signs that the hacking campaign may be far-reaching.

The tech giant said Thursday in a statement shared with TechCrunch that the Clop extortion gang exploited multiple security vulnerabilities in Oracle’s E-Business Suite software to steal significant amounts of data from affected organizations.

Oracle’s E-Business software allows companies to run their operations, such as storing their customer data and their employees’ human resources files. 

Google said in a corresponding blog post that the hacking campaign targeting Oracle customers dates back to at least July 10, some three months before the hacks were first detected. 

Oracle conceded earlier this week that the hackers behind the extortion campaign were still abusing its software to steal personal information about corporate executives and their companies. Days earlier, Oracle’s chief security officer, Rob Duhart, claimed in the same post — since scrubbed — that the extortion campaign was linked to previously identified vulnerabilities that Oracle patched in July, suggesting the hacks were over.

But in a security advisory published over the weekend, Oracle said the zero-day bug — named because Oracle had no time to fix the bug, as it was already being exploited by hackers — can be “exploited over a network without the need for a username and password.” 

The Russia-linked Clop ransomware and extortion gang has made a name for itself in recent years for mass-hacking campaigns, often involving the abuse of vulnerabilities unknown to the software vendor at the time they were exploited, to steal large amounts of corporate and customer data. This includes managed file transfer tools, like Cleo, MOVEit, and GoAnywhere, which companies use as a way to send sensitive corporate data over the internet.

Google’s blog post includes email addresses and other technical details that network defenders can use to look for extortion emails and other indications that their Oracle systems may have been compromised.

MILAN — MILAN (AP) — Italian luxury sports carmaker Ferrari raised its 2025 guidance on Thursday, despite global 15% tariffs on foreign car imports to the United States, as the company unveiled the new powertrain and chassis of its first fully electric production vehicle.

Ferrari CEO Benedetto Vigna declined to give target production numbers or a price for the Ferrari Elettrica, which will be delivered beginning late next year, with the design to be revealed in the spring.

Under the carmaker’s new five-year plan, 40% of the product lineup will be the brand’s core internal combustion engines, 40% will be hybrid and 20% will be electric by 2030, with an average of four new launches a year in the period. The new business plan calls for more models with lower volumes of each.

The fully electric vehicle Ferrari Elettrica represents a new segment that Vigna said would bring new buyers to Ferrari. It builds on 15 years of electrification research at Ferrari, starting with Formula 1 technology that was first incorporated into the limited edition La Ferrari hybrid supercar that debuted in 2013.

To maintain the sports car feel and emotions integral to the Ferrari experience, the Elettrica will capture powertrain vibration through accelerometers on the rear axle that will be amplified to create a sports car roar. Drivers also can select five power levels using steering panels to create the sensation of continuous acceleration.

Ferrari also is manufacturing most critical components internally, including the battery system and software. The chassis and body shell will be made out of 75% recycled aluminum, saving 6.7 tons of carbon dioxide per vehicle.

In raising its forecast, Ferrari said that revenues this year would top 7.1 billion euros ($8.2 billion), up from more than 7 billion euros in the previous guideline. Ferrari also targets earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, or EBITDA, of 2.7 billion euros with a margin of more than 38.3%.

Presenting its five-year plan, the Formula 1 racing team and sports carmaker that has expanded into luxury goods is projecting net revenues of 9 billion euros by 2030 with and EBITDA of at least 3.6 billion euros on 40% margins.

Chief Financial Officer Antonio Picca Piccon said that the confirmation of 15% tariffs on European car imports to the U.S. removed “an important element of uncertainty.” The targets were raised based on solid business performance and increased revenues from the sports car business.