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Meta's New 'Personal AI Agent' Muse Beats ChatGPT in Downloads - and Get Blocked by Amazon

21 September 2026 at 23:04
Meta's AI "personal agent" Muse overtook ChatGPT as the #1 iOS free app in the U.S. on Friday, reports CNBC β€” and it's still showing more downloads as of Monday night. Muse now has over 2.5 million downloads since its debut less than two weeks ago, according to analytics firm Sensor Tower... [Muse] is currently ahead of popular services like OpenAI's ChatGPT, Polymarket and Kashi... It's also ahead of rival AI apps like Anthropic's Claude and SpaceXAI's Grok AI, in addition to the Facebook-parent's own Meta AI app... Meta pitched the app as a way for consumers to manage and direct supercharged digital assistants that can perform a number of tasks across the web, like filling out electronic forms and organizing email inboxes... "I think up to this point most of the agentic use cases have not really been for normal people," Bernstein analyst Stacy Rasgon told CNBC in a "Squawk on the Street" interview on Monday. "Now you've got Meta's Muse and other agents out there that are starting to maybe get more potential for more broad-based adoption." The buzz around Meta was also reflected in the stock, which surged more than 11% on Monday. Amazon is already blocking Muse, reports GeekWire. Amazon first tried to get Meta to voluntarily exclude Amazon, but they were unsuccessful: The problem, Amazon says, is that it never agreed to any of it. Meta didn't tell Amazon that Muse would access its store, the agent doesn't identify itself when it browses, and it appears to capture and store customer credentials, which the company says could create privacy and security risks. As of Sunday night, people trying to use Muse to shop on Amazon were seeing the popup, "Continued access by an unauthorized AI agent violates Amazon's Conditions of Use, to which our customers have agreed..." Amazon has spent the past year trying to keep outside agents off its site, suing Perplexity over its Comet browser and moving to block shopping agents from Google and OpenAI. [Amazon won a preliminary injunction against Perplexity in March, the article poitns out, "then lost it on Aug. 4, when the Ninth Circuit ruled that the user β€” not the AI company β€” was the one accessing Amazon's computers under federal anti-hacking law. The court denied Amazon's petition for rehearing on Sept. 10."] On Sunday night, Amazon said it is in direct conversation with Meta about the issue. Asked whether it would consider taking legal action, the company declined to comment. The business stakes are high for Amazon. In addition to operating its flagship e-commerce site, Amazon generated more than $68 billion in ad revenue last year β€” a business that depends on people browsing its pages and seeing sponsored products. Muse also appears to scrape account data, reports CNBC. But Shopify, however, "is working with Meta on Muse access. Shopify CEO Tobias LΓΌtke announced Monday that the e-commerce site was partnering with Muse to allow agentic checkout in its online stores."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Looking for a business idea, need someone who knows their industry.

Hi,
I'm 24M and have been around 2 yrs working as a developer. I want to start building something of my own, but I am not getting any good ideas or problems to work on. So if anyone here has any tech-related business idea or a problem you might be facing in the sector you are working in. Would love to talk, and if it sounds good, we can work together to build something.

submitted by /u/Samir0011
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Paramount Skydance 'Emerges Victorious', Finally Wins Settlement for Warner Bros Takeover

21 September 2026 at 18:34
Paramount Skydance just "emerged victorious" reports Reuters, "from a legal battle over its $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros Discovery" that will "dramatically concentrate power across Hollywood's film, TV, streaming and news businesses." The victory comes "after settling with a California-led group of US states and a Hollywood writers union, paving the way for one of the largest media mergers in history." Paramount agreed to abide by temporary film quotas and a news oversight committee, avoiding a forced sale of cable assets such as CNN or any of its lucrative film franchises... The Writers Guild of America settled its parallel case against Paramount, while saying it still believes the deal will damage the industry. The states' settlement forced the union to "contend with the reality of forging ahead alone, with no backing from government enforcers" in a complex case that would have cost millions of dollars... Paramount promised in the state settlement to bring more film production to the US β€” spending at least $300 million more each year in domestic production β€” and adhere to US theatrical release quotas for five years. The company will produce 30 movies in each of the first two years of the deal, and 32 movies in each of the following three years, Bonta said. Each year, at least four of those films must be independent films and at least 20% must be blockbusters. If it falls below that threshold, it will pay $30 million per film, most of it into funds to support workers. Paramount also promised not to raise rates on theater operators for three years. The article notes that California attorney general Rob Bonta still said "I don't think these two companies should merge" at a press conference announcing the settlement, "but that's not something that we are focused on with our resolution here." He call their agreement "a strong antitrust outcome." And Politico notes that Bonta acknowledged at the press conference that "Some of you who may be watching this may have wanted a different outcome. I understand that." But he argued he'd reached a settlement capable of "providing more film production that protects Hollywood workers and their livelihoods, that places guardrails allowing for robust cable negotiations, that protects competition and creates more choice for consumers about what this merger could mean for the industry." It "resolves the antitrust concerns at the heart of our lawsuit against the company and Warner Brothers," he said... The agreement came as a disappointment to opponents of the transaction, including the Block the Merger Coalition, which cast the settlement as a sweetheart deal for Paramount Chief Executive David Ellison and his father, Oracle Co-Founder Larry Ellison, who is financially backstopping the acquisition. "This is a bad deal for the future of film, entertainment, independent journalism, and a strong democracy in this country," the coalition said in a statement. "We are disappointed and angry that the interests of average Americans have been trampled to benefit oligarch billionaires....." The $111 billion deal allows Paramount to combine its namesake streaming service with HBO Max, creating a new offering with about 200 million subscribers. That would help Paramount compete against companies such as Netflix, which boasts more than 325 million subscribers worldwide.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CRM recommendation for startup

Hello, we are working on invoicing software and wanted to contact more potential customers. We did direct contact, but that is really slow.

We are looking for some CRM, where can we add all potential customers, also the existing ones I would say.

It will be for two people at start, ideally free from beginning. Happy to pay later if we get more paying customers.

What features I am looking for.

  • easy to setup
  • api/mcp so we can integrate also in our product and add customer on sign up
  • have space for 3 people for free
  • different category of clients: freelancers, companies, accountants, etc,

Optional features:

  • add custom email and be able to send emails to customers.
  • prefill email messages based on customer profile/category
  • calendar to arrange calls

Do you have such a recommendation? Or what features I would need, but I don't know currently? :)

submitted by /u/erichstark
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CRM recommendations for a small team doing mostly outbound/field sales?

Looking for some CRM recommendations because I’m currently trialling Folk and I’m not completely sold on it.

There’s only two of us at the moment. Probably 95% of what we do is outbound, either physically going into businesses or calling them. My associate will do most of the initial prospecting, gather whatever information she can, and then either follow up herself or hand the lead over to me once they’re interested.

I’m less interested in a CRM being a prospecting tool and more interested in it being really good at capturing what we find and making sure we follow it up properly.
Typical example would be: she walks into a business, owner isn’t there but staff say they’ll be in Monday. She needs to quickly add the business, contact/details/notes, then set an action to go back Monday. If she speaks to the owner and they’re interested, she can then put an action in for me to call them, arrange a demo etc. From there I’d want a simple pipeline through demo > quote > won/lost.

A few things that are important:
Really quick contact/company and note capture
Custom fields (turnover, current supplier, current POS/software, industry, number of locations, pain points etc.)
Next action/date and reminders
Last contacted
Call lists / ability to filter a list and work through it
Easy handover and task assignment between the two of us
Simple pipeline
Good mobile app would be a big plus as we’re out in the field a lot

Nice to haves would be WhatsApp integration, email integration with open/link tracking, and some sort of ChatGPT/AI integration.

One thing I’m not loving about Folk is the separation between Company, Person and Deal. I understand why CRMs work that way, but for us 90%+ of the time there is one business, one main decision maker and one sales opportunity. A lot of the useful data belongs to the business itself because we’ll want to filter it later for prospecting β€” e.g. show me all pubs using X POS with Β£20k+ monthly turnover that haven’t been contacted recently. Having to jump between three different records feels like more admin than we need.

We’re not doing massive automated outbound sequences or managing hundreds of inbound leads. It’s much more hands-on relationship selling and we want the CRM to make sure nothing falls through the cracks.

I’ve looked at Close, Folk, Fluid, Attio etc. but I’m open to anything.

What would you use for this? TIA

submitted by /u/Life-Hack8480
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Ninja Forms 3.15.3 vulnerability – patched version 3.15.4 is already available

21 September 2026 at 15:22

A security vulnerability has been reported in Ninja Forms 3.15.3.

The patched version 3.15.4 was released today and includes additional security hardening, including strengthened output escaping in the admin submission edit screen.

If your site is still running 3.15.3, check the plugin page directly. The update may not appear immediately in the WordPress dashboard.

Please update to 3.15.4 as soon as possible.

WordPress.org changelog:
Ninja Forms on WordPress.org

submitted by /u/Upstairs_Control_611
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Wordpress 7.1.1 - Error related to XMLRPC.php and Jetpack Access

21 September 2026 at 14:02

Is anyone else seeing an error in their WP dashboard of "WordPress.com requests to your site are being blocked, usually by a firewall or security rule."

It looks to be associated with Jetpack (hence the wordpress.com reference)?

Environment:
Hosted at IONOS using shared hosting. All plugins (very few) updated. No issues until 7.1.1.

submitted by /u/mtwhite-mem
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PSA-2026-09-21 - Critical - Regarding a significantly used contrib module

https://www.drupal.org/psa-2026-09-21

There will be a security release for a widely used contributed module on September 23, 2026 between 17:00 and 21:00 UTC.

We are announcing this release in advance because the affected contributed module is used on a significant portion of Drupal sites, and the upcoming release will include a significant number of advisories. The advisory with the highest risk score for the release is currently rated as critical.

Edit

From slack,

This will be the first time we've handled this many advisories, but we're also taking steps to do as much in advance as possible, so we'll see how it goes and then we'll know how long it takes πŸ™‚

Also,

This will not be covered by Drupal Steward. There are far too many individual advisories, and many of them would not be mitigatable by a WAF rule, so it would give a false sense of security if we did probably. (And nothing is highly critical.)

I'll update the PSA accordingly.

🫠

submitted by /u/mrcaptncrunch
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The more I mess with AI agents, the more I think the context is the hard part

I've been experimenting with agents for GTM work and I'm starting to think building the agent itself might be the easy bit.

The annoying part is giving it enough context to be useful.

If I ask something about an account, I'd want it to already understand the people involved, previous emails, calls, notes and whatever has been happening with the deal. Having an agent research something is less impressive when I first spend ten minutes explaining the customer to it.

I'm curious how people are solving this in practice. Is your CRM becoming the context layer for the agents or are you feeding customer context into them some other way?

And once they have that context, what work are you comfortable letting them handle?

submitted by /u/Dudewithtude097
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As KDE Turns 30, Contributors and Commits are Going Strong

21 September 2026 at 14:04
"In a few weeks, KDE will turn 30 years old," writes core contributor Kevin Ottens, celebrating with some special KDE community data analytics (including a 30-year graph of the number of contributors): It peaks around 180 on average (and sometimes reaches towards around 200 people) then shrinks again hitting bottom around 110 persons on average in 2017... Since then, we had two major events happening. First, 2018 is the year where we had the first set of KDE Goals being picked by the community, one being "Streamlined onboarding of new contributors". Second, we had the transition to GitLab which was fully delivered early in the second quarter of 2020... Now it seems like the team size is around 140 people on average, so closer to the all time high of 2010 but we didn't fully close the gap yet. Interestingly though, the commit count is much closer to the one we had in 2010, with a bit less people. We even had an all time high commit count in 2023 which surpassed any other week since the creation of the project. And to make things even brighter, the trends at the end of the plot point upwards. Looks like 2026 will be a very good year. Hopefully the growth will stay stable this time and then the community will be the biggest it's ever been... [For the KDE Plasma desktop] We find the 2010 dip but it's much less dramatic than in all the other plots. It stabilized much quicker and managed to stay with an almost identical team size. We also find the increase leading up to 2020. And clearly it's one of the projects which benefitted the most of the GitLab transition. It's average team size almost doubled during the transition! Earlier I asked where the increase we could see on KDE as a whole but not on applications was coming from? Well, this is probably it. Like the rest of KDE, 2026 will be a very good year for Plasma as well. I wonder... will it double in size again next year compared to 2020? "I'm rather happy that KDE as a whole seems very healthy..." the post concludes. "It looks like in almost 30 years KDE built a great community and many awesome products..." "Kudos to all the people involved for the past 30 years! Even if you're not involved any more you helped contribute something beautiful and precious to the world. We're the living proof that large commons can be created and made sustainable thanks to passionate people."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

How do you keep track of people who wear four different hats?

I'm trying to understand how smaller VC/investment teams deal with relationships because they seem to get messy fast.

One person might be a founder at a portfolio company, an angel in another deal, an LP connection and someone we'd potentially introduce to another founder later. Six months pass and remembering why somebody matters can involve searching emails, old notes and probably asking whoever originally knew them.

The CRM options I've looked at mostly seem good at storing the information. I'm more interested in whether they help you make sense of it later.

Anyone here managing this for a small investment team? What does your setup handle for you day to day that you wouldn't want to go back to doing manually?

submitted by /u/Johneeston176
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Fake LastPass Authenticator Installer Abuses Microsoft-Signed Driver to Kill Antivirus and EDR

A fake LastPass Authenticator installer offered on GitHub installs a Windows kernel driver that shuts off antivirus and other security software before a password stealer runs if a victim downloads and runs it, researchers at LastPass and Delphos Labs said on September 17. Microsoft's own hardware-compatibility program signs the driver, scored zero detections on VirusTotal when researchers

Contagious Interview Campaign Compromises 30,000 Devices, Steals $10.71M in Crypto

The North Korean threat actors behind the Contagious Interview campaign have compromised at least 30,000 devices located in more than 100 countries and siphoned funds or account credentials from over 7,000 cryptocurrency wallets, according to a new joint cybersecurity advisory. The primary targets of the campaign are individual web designers, engineers, and specialists in cryptocurrency,

Google Fined €403 Million Over GDPR Violations Tied to Location Data

Google has beenΒ fined €403 millionΒ for breaking the EU's data protection law, the GDPR, in the way three of its features handled people's location data from May 2018 to February 2020. Ireland's Data Protection Commission (DPC), Google's lead regulator in the EU, also ordered the company to make its processing comply with the law within 6 months. The DPC has not said publicly which

I built Saas CRM (in development)

Hi I am a fresh grad. I built CRM to learn enterprise software architecture, check it in google unithreadcrm says Connects with people. You can freely check it, click test demo to try. I already provided sample data. It is so easy to use, please provide feedback. Thanks!

submitted by /u/jestscaledev
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How to RevOps teams deal with revenue leaking?

Hey β€œRevOps and DataOps”,

Working on something in the revenue operations space and trying to wrap my head around a specific problem before I go too deep.

The pattern I keep hearing is that dashboards tell you something is wrong, but not what, where it started, or how long it's been happening. By the time a number turns red, the damage is already done and tracing it back across your CRM, data warehouse, billing platform, and whatever else is in the stack can eat up hours.

Curious if this is actually a painful thing for RevOps or DataOps teams at software companies, or if most people have figured it out already.

Two questions if you have a minute

  1. How does your team handle it today?
    Any tools, workflows, or manual checks that actually work? (Or honest answers about what doesn't?)
  2. If it's a real problem, roughly how costly is it?
    Doesn't need to be precise, even a rough monthly number, or even just "significant enough that we have a dedicated person for it," is genuinely useful.

Even a short "yeah this is annoying and here's what we do" type reply would help a lot.
Thanks.

submitted by /u/Excellent-Salary3565
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Sales god Crm Salesgodcrm

Do NOT USE THIS COMPANY
They will force you to signup for the $694.00 plan
You will be forced to also sign up for 97.00 a month β€œcoaching plan” they will be on it when it comes to signing up but for coaching they will be like ghosts.
If you don’t cancel and you get billed the 97.00 they will not refund and they will cancel your account if you dispute the transaction with your bank . So the $694 plan that you paid for will be for no reason. Also the platform itself doesn’t work very well.
Save yourself this headache and avoid at all costs. Complete waste of time and money.

submitted by /u/Illustrious_Still117
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