If you imagine a future in finance, make sure that you are aware of the movers and shakers driving innovation in the space.

The global financial sector is ever-evolving, driven largely by advancements in technology and increased access to financial infrastructure. As a result, there are a wealth (pun intended) of exciting opportunities for professionals looking to excel in this space.

With that in mind, if you want a career in finance or dealing with financial infrastructure, it can be helpful to take a look at some of the people whose insights, decision making, innovations and business manoeuvres are further developing the industry. The following 10 women are among those professionals.

Amy Hood

Amy Hood has been the executive vice-president and chief financial officer at Microsoft since 2013, having first joined its ranks in 2002. Her responsibilities involve leading the company’s worldwide finance organisation through: accounting and reporting; acquisitions; business development and ventures; financial planning and analysis; global real estate; internal audits; investor relations; tax planning; and treasury.

She has advanced Microsoft’s cloud endeavours and navigated growth amid a changing landscape – for example, during the AI boom. 

Andrea Reynolds

The CEO and founder of London-based financial services company Swoop, Andrea Reynolds has years of experience in raising finance for businesses as a chartered accountant and corporate finance advisor. She serves as chair of Berkshire Hathaway International Insurance, and is a non-executive director for both Berkshire Hathaway and Faraday Underwriting.

She is particularly interested in projects in which she can help under-represented founders learn about funding and how to navigate the funding landscape, and also sits on the advisory Ireland for Finance Committee. 

Ciara Walsh

Ciara Walsh is a co-founder and the CMO of Irish start-up JustTip, which is a cashless tipping platform for the hospitality industry. Walsh was previously named on the Sunday Independent’s 30 under 30 list, and she has spoken on the challenges of developing a start-up at a young age, learning from one’s mistakes and becoming resilient. 

Elaine Deehan   

The Ireland country manager for Monzo Bank Europe, Elaine Deehan is also a special projects manager at the organisation. She is at the forefront of developing Monzo’s presence in Ireland and, prior to her role there, worked across banking and fintech at Citi, AIB, Sentenial, CurrencyFair and Starling Bank, where she was also largely responsible for leading Irish expansion. Deehan was also previously named the Business Post’s Business Leader of the Month. 

Ioanna Stanegloudi

Ioanna Stanegloudi is a co-founder and the chief risk officer of fintech start-up Finclude, which was previously Verge Capital. She has been recognised among Fortune’s 40 under 40, was included in the Women in Fintech Powerlist by Innovate Finance, won the NYU Stern Entrepreneurs Challenge, placed second in the PitcHer competition at Grace Hopper Celebration, and had her company recognised by the UN.

Currently, she is focused on the mental health element of working and personal life, addressing issues around anxiety, burnout, perfectionism, career pressure, identity transitions and relationship stress.

Lesley Tully

The founder and CEO of This is Penny, Lesley Tully is redefining how women engage with pension infrastructure. Designed to account for the elements of a woman’s life that can often disrupt her financial goals, such as career breaks or additional care-giving responsibilities, This is Penny aims to enable women to develop a sturdy financial future.

Prior to establishing her own company, Tully was the head of design thinking for the Bank of Ireland Group, as well as the project director for Dublin Contemporary, Ireland’s largest art exhibition. As part of her role there, she drove strategy, finance, fundraising, operations, governance and stakeholder engagement. 

Niamh Cunningham

Niamh Cunningham is the head of corporate FP&A and strategic finance at Barclaycard Payments. Her previous roles include senior director and head of strategic finance for global sales, partnerships and international at Block; head of finance and strategy for international markets at Square; and group internal auditor at CRH.  

Ruth McCarthy

If you are particularly interested in the intersection of finance and compliance, then Ruth McCarthy is undoubtedly one to follow. The head of compliance, risk and policy at Irish fintech company Fexco, McCarthy’s work involves combining legal and regulatory knowledge with commercial awareness to deliver growth within the payments ecosystem. 

She is especially passionate about the Irish payments industry, payment technology, strategy and innovation.

McCarthy is also a member of the Legal Practitioners Disciplinary Tribunal. She is chair of the Fintech and Payments Association of Ireland, a member of the Industry Advisory Group for the Irish government’s Ireland for Finance strategy for financial services, and was a member of the ECB market advisory group on the digital euro.

Sarah Friar

The chief financial officer at OpenAI, Sarah Friar previously served as the CFO of Square, where under her guidance the organisation launched its initial public offering and added $30bn in market capitalisation. Prior to working at Square, she was the senior vice-president of finance and strategy at Salesforce, and she has held executive and leadership roles at Goldman Sachs and McKinsey. 

She is a member of a number of boards, such as the Board of Trustees at Stanford, the Board of Directors at ConsenSys and the Board of Advisors at Operation Hope. The latter is a global provider of financial dignity education and economic empowerment programmes for low- and moderate-income youths, individuals and families in underserved communities.

Friar is also the co-founder of Ladies Who Launch, a network that aims to mentor and inspire women entrepreneurs and business owners. Friar was named among the Time100 2026 most influential people and the 2023 NACD Directorship 100 selection.

Sinead Fitzmaurice

Sinead Fitzmaurice is notable for being the first female CEO in Ireland to scale an Irish tech company to unicorn status. Having since left Transfermate, where she achieved that feat, Fitzmaurice is now an operating partner at Aperture Capital. She is also the founder and CEO of Ryan Capital Group, a collection of investors and mentors whose aim is to help other founders to achieve success. She currently serves as a chair and non-executive director for financial services company Nazaré Point. 

Don’t miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic’s digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.

The AI song-generation platform Suno plans to make it easier to tell if a tune you hear was made by its tools.

Watermarks and fingerprinting were two items the company suggested in a blog post on Thursday that it intends to implement in a bid to “build the world’s best platform for music creation while contributing to a healthy and growing music ecosystem.”

The watermarking and fingerprinting effort remains vague, and Suno said it also plans to introduce a new downloads policy that limits mass distribution on streaming platforms.

Suno is one of many AI music generators that let you create and download songs using AI models. However, Suno’s source code was hacked in July, and the findings raise eyebrows. The code showed that Suno’s AI was trained by scraping music and lyrics from platforms such as YouTube Music and Genius, according to 404 Media. Suno also recently faced legal troubles from music groups, including Sony and Universal, for mass copyright infringement in 2024. 

Most streaming platforms don’t yet ban AI-generated music outright. But platforms like Spotify are already implementing policies to crack down on deepfakes, require disclosures about AI-generated music and allow artists to file complaints. Apple Music has Transparency Tags to spot and identify AI-generated music. And Deezer doesn’t include AI-generated music in recommendations, and doesn’t pay royalties for AI tracks. But are Suno’s efforts enough for artists, streaming platforms and recording companies?

Representatives for Suno, Deezer and Apple Music did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

In the blog post, Suno outlined a slew of changes to protect artists and their work. It says names aren’t used in training metadata in order to help people create original songs that aren’t inspired by any other artists. Suno also says it doesn’t allow prompts that specify artists or copyrighted songs. Instead, it focuses on musical characteristics. 

This list goes on, like Suno cracking down on any other potential attempts to copy artists by using third-party technology to screen audio files and lyrics for unauthorized use. Updates to its community guidelines clarify which activities are (and aren’t) prohibited on Suno. And its Trust & Safety team will continue to review and investigate reports of violations and take action. 

However, some parts remain vague. The blog post also mentioned new transparency tools to identify a Suno-generated song on other platforms. Then there’s new audio watermarking and fingerprinting technology to flag fraud and misuse, and the company plans to introduce a new downloads policy that limits mass distribution on streaming platforms. Suno has not yet shared any details on the downloads policy, or the watermarking and fingerprinting technology. 

Dashia is the consumer insights editor for CNET. She specializes in data-driven analysis and news at the intersection of tech, personal finance and consumer sentiment. Dashia investigates economic shifts and everyday challenges to help readers make well-informed decisions, and she covers a range of topics, including technology, security, energy and money. Dashia graduated from the University of South Carolina with a bachelor’s degree in journalism. She loves baking, teaching spinning and spending time with her family.

See full bio

Since the advent of the internet, there has been a dedicated digital art community that’s all about creating through computing.

Wacom, a Japanese company founded in 1983, is considered one of the longstanding leaders in this sector. One of the oldest producers of graphics tablets in the world, Wacom has spent the last few years iterating on its MovinkPad series — a specialized Android tablet that creators can use to spin up digital art at the click of a button or the swipe of a stylus.

I’m not a professional artist, or even a hobbyist. But I am a tech enthusiast and was interested to see how a digital art newbie like myself might use a device like the MovinkPad.

Wacom lent TechCrunch a MovinkPad 11, the first tablet in the series. The MovinkPad 11 is not Wacom’s latest release. That’s the MovinkPad Pro 14, which came out last fall and costs substantially more at $899 and offers a number of impressive upgrades, including an OLED screen with 3K resolution and broader color spectrum. But I wanted to start with the first in the series to get to know MovinkPad from its earliest iteration.

The upshot: The MovinkPad 11 is easy to set up and is a capable device that won’t break your budget. At $500, it’s a little too expensive for a casual user who isn’t specifically interested in digital art. But for those who have a passion for digital doodling and not a lot of cash to throw around, it’s a relatively midrange price point — stuck somewhere between budget picks like the Huion Inspiroy H640P (only around $30) and a more high-end item like Wacom’s Cintiq Pro 27 (which is a whopping $3,500), or an iPad (up to $1,100).

For those unfamiliar with the digital art community, you might wonder why anyone would ever want to use one of these? If you’re into making art, why not just stick to paper and pencil?

Digital art affords a distinct kind of creative experience that is impossible to replicate anywhere else, proponents argue. Its patrons include graphic designers, cartoonists, animators, and even video game designers. Some traditional artists use tablet art as a sketching and conceptualization method, and then transfer their drawings onto paper. Others do the opposite, sketching something on paper and transferring it to their tablet. Whatever you’re into, the right tablet can go a long way toward helping you realize your creative vision.

Specs and setup

The MovinkPad 11 is an 11.45-inch device that comes with 8 gigabytes of memory and 128 gigabytes of storage, and is battery-free, with a USB charger. It weighs just 1.3 pounds, so it’s relatively lightweight and easy to carry around with you wherever you go.

It also comes with the Pro Pen 3, a 6.3-inch stylus that is easy to use and includes three separate side buttons. Those side buttons can be programmed to your liking. Users can also swap out and customize the stylus nibs (Wacom offers a whole variety of $15 replacement nib packs of varying qualities).

I found the stylus to be lightweight, easy to use, and similar to wielding a fine-tipped felt pen.

The tablet was relatively straightforward to set up, although you’ll need to create an initial pin number to log into it. I questioned the reason for this level of security, at least for my sketches. (If you’re worried someone is going to steal your digital drawings, then your device will be locked and protected.) Setting up the pin is easy enough, though — just go to Settings > Security > Privacy. Choose your unlock settings to either swipe or none.

Since it’s an Android device, the MovinkPad can also be synced to your Google account, which could make integrating your creative materials significantly easier.

MovinkPad also comes with its own free digital art software, Wacom Canvas. With Canvas, users have some basic tools that they can use to get their digital sketches up and running. There’s also a paid app, Clip Studio Paint, which offers a larger range of features and capabilities (you can buy a license for a one-time fee that varies by version).

Depending on which program you’re using, the style and functionality of your stylus nib can also be adjusted. Within Clip Studio Paint, for instance, you can choose between a pen, paintbrush, or sketching pencil, and within each of those categories, there are a multitude of options.

The MovinkPad has a long list of competitors — including the iPad, which has its own variety of art apps and a dedicated stylus, the Apple Pencil. However, the MovinkPad offers a more focused and elegant solution than many of those options, and it comes from a longtime player in the graphics tablet space.

If digital art is your thing (or even if it’s not), the MovinkPad 11 is quite a bit of fun. I played around with it for several hours over a recent weekend and managed to work up some pretty goofy drawings. While none of my sketches are destined to hang in the Louvre, it was definitely a fun way to pass an afternoon.

Block’s Retro Repairs picked up a used Red Rabbit CT-606 cotton candy vending machine for three hundred dollars. New, these units sell for around six thousand. The exterior looked custom and ready for an arcade floor, yet inside it still ran a full Android 7 system on a Rockchip industrial board wired straight into stepper drivers and control boards. What arrived was broken in more ways than one.

Years of rock-solid sugar filth had accumulated, jamming the whirling skull. Some of the thermocouple wires had worn thru and were shorting out against the aluminum enclosure, not in the proper location. The batteries in the remote temperature sensor abruptly died one day, and there was no automatic way to renew them. After cleaning and re-insulating the sensor, relocating the thermocouple to the top of the head, and resetting the temperature objectives to 250 degrees Celsius, the machine resumed spitting out appropriate flower-shaped floss in a variety of colors. Then we went ahead and adjusted the furnace timeout settings, which had been set to a laughable zero seconds, allowing the induction coil to properly warm up before turning on. The mechanical portions were restored to working order, but the software was not.

Sale

Nostalgia Cotton Candy Machine – Retro Cotton Candy Machine for Kids with 2 Reusable Cones, 1 Sugar…

• Flossing sugar or hard candies – unique Extractor head allows you to use traditional flossing sugar or your favorite hard candies to make delicious…
• Cotton Candy kits – this unit works perfectly with any Nostalgia cotton candy kit – try the cotton candy flossing sugar (Ccfs300), or the hard candy…
• Simple operation – warm up the unit, add your flossing sugar, and enjoy your cotton candy in just a few short minutes

Pricing, product catalogs, and a variety of configurable choices were all stored on a distant server. Every time the computer booted up, it would send its hardware ID (which was simply a combination of its WiFi mac address and CPU serial number) to some Chinese domain without even bothering with a password, let alone checking to see if it was legitimate. The server then looked up which account was running the machine and returned the entire product database in JSON format. The machine’s screens allow the operator to change business hours, stock counts, and the amount of floss to produce, but they cannot change the actual costs. The machine remained locked to the old owner’s account, so he had to submit a support ticket, but Red Rabbit never responded.

The system was moved and isolated on its own little local network with no internet connection. He then enabled ADB on a custom Android build. The CT Terminal application and its SQLite product database were both installed on the device itself. When he looked at the database, he noticed that there were all the flavor images (some were even stored locally, while others were pulled from the web) and Chinese store names that turned out to be just little proverbs, original prices of $5 and $7, and some sales history showing he’d sold around 655 of the lower end cones and 494 of the higher ones for a grand total of $6700.

Even after multiple attempts to edit the database file and manually rewrite it back onto the system, the on-screen interface remained unchanged. These efforts appeared to enhance the machine’s chances of becoming stuck in a boot loop. It took months of putting up with the temperamental candy machine before a near-brick forced his hand and prompted him to perform a full factory reset on the control software, which also required resetting all of the temperature settings from scratch. That simple procedure removed the remaining settings that were incompatible with the hardware, and the machine began producing cotton candy much more consistently than before. Frustratingly, the account binding issue persisted, and we encountered a problem when he performed the first reboot following the reset; it would only stay in offline mode if he could establish a network connection first.

As a last resort, the only option was to modify the original application. Unfortunately, a lack of programming skills, along with the fact that much of the code was written in Chinese, made the task lengthy and difficult. To be honest, he was fortunate to have free access to code chatbots, or massive language models, which ended up doing a lot of the heavy lifting, allowing him to test over a dozen different versions before he found something that worked. The resulting code patch introduced a hidden options menu that could only be reached by injecting some custom code rather than using the regular default way.

From there, you could set the price of every flavor to $3, set them all to zero for a free play session, or make all of the prices go up or down by a certain percentage. We also managed to divert those network calls that were previously going out to the remote server, so the app would accept a weak local connection instead of attempting to connect to a real internet link. That meant that even if the server went down or he received account change notices in the future, the machine would continue to churn out candy.
[Source]

Despite the popularity of Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, and OpenAI Codex, developers have plenty of complaints about AI coding tools.

So researchers affiliated with York University and the University of Calgary in Canada decided to sift through developers’ concerns about LLM-based integrated development environments (LIDEs) by analyzing Reddit discussions for common themes.

Their findings suggest that the builders of such tools failed to prioritize security and privacy, leaving developers to defend themselves.

Gias Uddin, associate professor at York University and a co-author of the research, told The Register that these tools are still relatively new and are evolving rapidly, which creates pressure to add new capabilities.

“Our study cannot say whether that pressure caused any particular problem, but it does show that many reported issues come from how these tools are designed and what access they are given, not simply from the underlying models,” Uddin said. “In that sense, we believe prevention is better than cure; that is, security and privacy mechanisms should be built into the design before a tool is given broad access to a developer’s files, data, or systems.”

Uddin and co-authors Mostafijur Rahman Akhond, Md Afif Al Mamun, and Song Wang say they wanted to look beyond the known issues with AI-generated code at LLM-based tooling and how developers interact with it.

They describe their findings in a preprint paper titled “‘Impossible to hide secret …’: Uncovering Security and Privacy Issues in LLM-native IDEs,” accepted at the 41st IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE), 2026.

Starting from a set of 1.1 million Reddit posts, they identified 446 posts and more than 6,000 comments to develop a taxonomy of security and privacy issues associated with using these LIDEs for AI-assisted coding.

“Our taxonomy reveals a broad range of developer-reported concerns, including unauthorized file operations, unsafe or unexpected code execution, triggering of destructive actions, opaque data flows, telemetry collection, and potential leakage of sensitive information through expanded context access,” the authors state.

Some 43.1 percent of the posts covering security-related issues involved unauthorized file operations. 

These involved LIDEs removing project directories or files without authorization (28.3 percent). Users also described AI tooling modifying files without explicit user consent (8.8 percent), as well as accessing content beyond the active workspace (5.7 percent).

“In one severe case (1npqf2f), Claude Code executed chmod +x on scripts without consent (File Permission Changes 0.6%),” the paper recounts. “Although rare, such actions pose disproportionate security risks.”

Another set of posts describes operational safety issues arising from LIDE use, including impacts on production services. These accounted for 23.9 percent of security-related posts. Examples cited include reports of Replit removing a SaaS production database and Cursor deploying code to production despite an explicit directive not to do so.

A third category of woes covers unsafe code generation (18.2 percent). This involves incidents like nine VirusTotal detections reported for Cursor-generated software and hallucination-driven code changes: “When using Cursor, I noticed that after more than 10 rounds of dialogue, it starts to hallucinate and secretly modify code outside the requirements…”

Then there are the instances where these LIDEs ignored user instructions, allow lists, gates, permission settings, or .ignore files, which account for 16.5 percent of the security-related posts, as well as third-party tool integration risks (4.7 percent).

As for privacy problems, these were mentioned in 194 posts and cover issues like lack of transparency (45.9 percent) – the absence of clear information about what data an LIDE collects, retains, transmits, uses for training, or exposes to administrators – and unauthorized data access (23.7 percent).

Other privacy categories include privacy leakage violations (15.5 percent), unauthorized data collection and transmission (11.9 percent), and context integrity failures (8.8 percent), which refer to situations where “for example, a user of Claude Desktop reported receiving messages originating from another user’s session.”

Uddin said, “We don’t think developers are completely unaware of these issues, as we found ongoing discussions about security and privacy concerns across many of these tools. Still, people continue to adopt them because they can make development faster and easier. They are also making programming more accessible to a wider group of people, including those with little formal programming experience or limited knowledge of software security.”

Uddin said users cannot be expected to thoroughly understand which permissions are risky, which files need to be protected, or whether a tool is doing something it shouldn’t.

“That makes it even more important for tool makers to build security into the tools themselves, with safer defaults and safeguards that do not depend on the user being a security expert,” he said.

Even so, users of LIDEs are trying to manage the risks. The authors enumerate 13 mitigation strategies that developers have employed to get by. These fall into five general approaches: configuration management (33 percent); code governance (31 percent); data protection and privacy control (13 percent); isolation (13 percent); and external guidance (9 percent).

Based on their findings, the authors offer six recommendations. They advise: directing LIDE makers to implement proper security and privacy controls; enforcing security and privacy guardrails at an architectural level; incorporating a verification layer in LIDEs to validate generated code against security and privacy standards; establishing a formal protocol for assessing the trustworthiness of third-party tools; integrating sensitive file protection; and implementing strict security as a default.

“We believe secure defaults would be one of the most important improvements these tools could make,” said Uddin. “Developers should not have to discover after something goes wrong that a tool had more access or freedom than they expected. 

“Our findings point to practical measures such as limiting access to sensitive files by default, requiring clear approval before consequential actions, isolating projects and conversations, and making it easier to see and review what the tool is doing. 

“Users should still have flexibility, but the safer option should be the starting point rather than something they have to configure themselves. In fact, developers from the Reddit posts in our study were already using many of these safeguards in ad hoc ways; we think several of them should be built into the tools and enabled by default.” ®

Dense clouds of gas and dust gather into the clear outline of an open chest at the center of this new James Webb Space Telescope view. Light shines from inside the structure while long pillars of thick material trail from its base. Dark orange globules and pale hazes fill the background, and a few bright stars sit in the foreground, one of the largest positioned right in front of the chest’s lid.

This scene is situated in the Carina Nebula, a star-forming region located 7,500 light-years away in the constellation Carina. The nebula is vast, covering approximately 260 light-years and containing some of the Milky Way’s largest stars as well as tens of thousands of protostars. As luck would have it, it is also the closest location where astronomers can obtain a clear view of high-mass star formation in all its magnificence. Not to add, it’s the same location where Webb acquired the iconic Cosmic Cliffs image that helped put the telescope on the map.

LEGO Icons Hubble Space Telescope 11382

• EXPLORE THE HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE – Celebrate one of humanity’s greatest scientific feats while enjoying a relaxing building experience with the…
• REPLICA SPACE MODEL – Recreate the legendary space-based telescope with posable solar arrays and antennas, an opening aperture door and a detailed…
• AUTHENTIC DETAILS – Remove the exterior panels to reveal a detailed instrument bay, which features gyroscopes alongside primary and secondary…

The feature we’re looking at is a cometary globule known as the Treasure Chest. These gas and dust clouds typically have a dense center and a long, sweeping tail following after them. In this example, however, the thick material forms a type of body and open lid of a chest, while the tail stretches out in a fairly standard cometary shape. The glow we see is caused by the newborn stars inside and is visible because Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera can see thru the dust.

There are approximately 70 young stars crowded into a small cluster within the chest. The largest of these stars is an O-type star with a mass 19 times that of the Sun. Estimates put the cluster’s age at around 1.3 million years, tho some earlier work suggested it could be as young as 100,000 years. Because the stars are so young, they’re still buried in dusty material, and many of them have circles of gas and dust around them known as circumstellar disks, which are the type of thing from which planets form.

The powerful ultraviolet radiation from outside the chest is already affecting those disks, scorching them and blowing material away. The same force cut the chest into its current shape and continues to work on the disks. Models imply that disk lifetimes in such conditions can be rather low, often less than a million years. Once the remaining dust and debris have cleared, the disks will be exposed to the full force of the radiation, which is likely to be a harsh awakening. By examining the stars in this program, we will be able to determine if they had the opportunity to produce planets or if many of them will remain alone.

Radiation and wind from large stars nearby are most likely responsible for the chest’s form. Eta Carinae, located 39 light-years to the northwest, is the brightest star in the Carina Nebula. We’re talking about an item that outshines the others, a system that has at least one star that is 100 times the mass of our own sun and emits light that is five million times brighter. There’s also the star cluster Trumpler 16 chipping in with its own dose of energy, which is what stripped away the lower density gas a long time ago, leaving only the denser material that forms the chest today. To add the final nail in the coffin, the stars within the cluster are still slowly chipping away at the cloud from the inside out, so the structure is whittled away from both sides.

The image was captured with Webb’s Near Infrared Camera utilizing four distinct filters: 1.62 microns, 1.64 microns for iron emission, 4.44 microns for molecular hydrogen, and 4.7 microns. The iron and hydrogen filters identified locations where newborn stars are releasing material in dramatic way, and it’s a wild journey. Megan Reiter of Rice University leads the observing program 5408, which produced this image. That program is working to find out how these young stars collect gas from their surrounds and then blast it out in gigantic outflows, a piece of study that will result in comprehensive maps of over 100 new jets across the Carina region.

The Logitech Mobi Fold is, without question, the weirdest mouse I have ever used in my life.

This tiny, foldable travel mouse is focused on one thing above all: portability. Just like a clamshell phone from the noughties, it can fold in half, allowing you to easily slip it into your pocket if you’re working on the go. But even though the Logitech Mobi Fold’s exceptional portability is its clear USP, I have to ask… is it actually that necessary?