Before AI, phishing attempts often included telltale signs like obvious typos or rudimentary graphic design. Now that AI makes it much easier to design and code convincingly, scams are on the rise. According to , 60 percent of companies reported an increase in fraud-related losses from 2024 to 2025. And the advent of AI browsers could make things even worse.
The acquisition merges two complementary approaches to earning Bitcoin - shopping and passive browsing - into a single platform, simplifying the user experience and broadening opportunities to "stack sats" across everyday online activity.
Meet Rewarded Interest, a company launched last year by Scott Spencer and Thede Loder. Spencer was a long-time Google ad tech product leader who joined with the DoubleClick acquisition and Loder was most recently an engineering leader at Microsoft via the acquisition of RiskIQ. Spencer and Loder are attempting an idea that has been tested many times, but never brought to life successfully - although there's a new twist this time. Rewarded Interest has a Chrome browser extension that promises users a cut of the revenue they generate from online tracking data.
I have very mixed feelings about Google's AI Overviews. On one hand, they sometimes provide tidbits of information without having to dig through web page after web page. On the other hand, as with all AIs (and some web pages), the information they provide can be wrong. Don't get me started on how much traffic they're sucking away from the sites whose data they're hoovering up without giving back any traffic.