Hey folks,Imagine BlinkIt and Zepto don’t exist, and you walk into a supermarket to grab milk and some ice cream. You head to the refrigerated section, open the freezer door, and reach for your favourite brand.Everything looks normal, and the freezer is humming away. Except someone hacked the cooling system. And instead of keeping your food frozen, the machine is heating up.Sounds absurd, doesn’t it?After all, we tend to think of cyberattacks as someone stealing passwords, draining bank accounts, or bringing websites crashing down. And the idea that a hacker could spoil your groceries by tampering with a refrigerator sounds like something out of a particularly strange episode of Black Mirror.But that’s exactly what happened in France this week.Hackers targeted refrigeration systems at hundreds of French supermarkets, and some units reached 50°C, spoiling fresh and frozen food. At some stores, the overheating equipment also produced smoke and fire.So, how does someone hack a refrigerator in the first place? And more importantly, why would a supermarket’s cooling system even be connected to the internet?To understand that, we need to look at how modern refrigeration works. A large supermarket doesn’t rely on someone checking every freezer manually. Instead, electronic controllers manage its refrigeration equipment by monitoring temperatures, regulating cooling, and helping maintenance teams spot problems.That’s convenient, especially when you’re managing hundreds of outlets, but it also creates a potential entry point for hackers.And this is where the story gets particularly uncomfortable. Some vulnerabilities in the refrigeration system were already known, and the manufacturer issued fixes, but many affected units ran outdated firmware or had reached the end of their supported life.In other words, the problem wasn’t necessarily that hackers had invented some sophisticated way to hack into the refrigeration system. It was that some systems were old, insufficiently protected, and still accessible over the internet.And this isn’t just a problem for French supermarkets. It’s a reminder that cybersecurity isn’t just about protecting our information online, but also about being mindful of how we connect the devices we rely on every day to the internet. When appliances like refrigerators, baby monitors, lightbulbs, and door locks connect to the internet, a security lapse can do more than expose sensitive data.That doesn’t mean that we should completely stop connecting devices to the internet. Rather, we should be mindful and think twice about what we need connected and what we don’t.Here’s a soundtrack to put you in the mood… 🎵Roti by HarmeeetIt’s a wonderful song about the people around his tiffin shop, which he and his mother run in Bhopal.You can thank our reader, Prateek Senapati, for this lovely recommendation.Also, folks, keep your music recommendations coming. We’d love to feature them in our Sunday editions, especially gems from underrated Indian artists many of us haven’t discovered yet. Can’t wait to hear them!What caught our eye this week… 👀Can a Nobel-winning trick fix your dating life?If you’ve ever used a dating app, you probably know the drill. You swipe through hundreds of profiles, match with a few people, exchange the “Hey wassup”, go on a date, and you never talk again or watch the conversation slowly die.And this has become a bit of a pattern with dating apps, as they have spent years convincing us that the secret to finding love is having more choices.But what if the problem isn’t that we have too few options? What if we have too many?Or what if you want a man/woman with the iron in them? Or give it up. This is not a game of cards! This is your life and theirs! (For the uninitiated, this is a famous quote by Lee Kuan Yew, paraphrased)That’s a question the Singapore government seems to be asking. And its answer involves a 60-year-old mathematical idea and an algorithm originally designed to solve something called the Stable Marriage Problem.Yes, you read that right. Mathematics is now playing Cupid in Singapore.To understand why, here’s the backstory.You see, Singapore has been grappling with a falling birth rate for quite some time, and it hit a record low of 0.87 births per woman in 2025. And the government has tried various measures to encourage people to start families, from financial incentives to housing support. But getting people to have children is rather difficult when they haven’t found someone to have them with in the first place.Enter FirstDate, a dating app developed by Singapore’s digital government agency, GovTech. It’s an app for public officers aged 21 to 35, and instead of presenting users with an endless stream of profiles, FirstDate offers one potential match at a time.Users first fill out a questionnaire covering their interests, habits, values and preferences, and the app uses this information to suggest someone they might be compatible with.But here’s the interesting bit. FirstDate doesn’t simply throw compatible profiles together and hope for the best. Its matching system draws on the Gale-Shapley algorithm, a framework developed by mathematicians David Gale and Lloyd Shapley in 1962. Shapley later shared the 2012 Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on stable allocations and market design.So, how does this Nobel (read: novel) idea work?Imagine a room with ten men and ten women. Everyone ranks the people in the opposite group by preference. Now, the challenge is to pair everyone up in a way that prevents two people from abandoning their assigned partners for each other.Why does that matter? Because the obvious way to organise a dating market is to let everyone choose freely. But when everyone makes choices at the same time, you can end up in a situation where two people would rather be together than with their assigned partners. Economists call this an unstable matching, or a matching not in equilibrium.Think of it as a couple at a party who are both secretly more interested in each other than in the people they’re currently dating. If they could get together, they would. And that possibility makes the original arrangement unstable.Gale and Shapley wanted to avoid this problem. Their solution was an algorithm called deferred acceptance.Here’s how it works. Let’s say the women get to propose first. Each woman approaches her favourite man. If a man receives proposals from several women, he keeps the one he prefers most, but he doesn’t commit just yet. He rejects the others, who then move on to their second choices.In the next round, those rejected women propose again. A man who already has a tentative match compares any new proposals with the one he’s holding. If he prefers a new suitor, he drops the existing match and holds on to the new one instead. The rejected woman then tries her next choice.The process repeats until everyone has either found a match or exhausted their options. At that point, the tentative matches become final.Source: ResearchGate / How ranked preference matching eliminates unstable pairs.The clever part is that this process guarantees a stable matching, provided everyone has ranked their preferences and the participants meet the algorithm’s assumptions. No pair will both prefer each other over their assigned partners.In other words, the algorithm finds an arrangement where no two people have a mutual incentive to break away and form a different pair.The same underlying idea has been used in school admissions and other allocation systems. The Nobel-winning insight was that how you organise choices can matter as much as the choices themselves.But there’s a catch. The Gale-Shapley algorithm doesn’t guarantee that everyone gets their favourite partner. Nor does it guarantee that everyone is equally happy with the outcome.In fact, who proposes first matters. When one group proposes, and the other responds, the proposing side generally gets a more favourable outcome among the possible stable matchings. Reverse the roles, and the advantage switches sides.So stability doesn’t necessarily mean fairness. It simply means that the final arrangement doesn’t contain a pair who would both prefer to be matched with each other instead.And that brings us back to FirstDate.By limiting the number of introductions, FirstDate is betting that people might make more considered decisions. The algorithm helps organise the matching process, while the slower pace encourages users to focus on the person in front of them rather than wondering who else might be available.Of course, there’s a difference between matching two people on paper and getting them to fall in love. Still, the idea is worth watching, and whether a Nobel-winning algorithm can help people find love remains to be seen.InfographicReaders RecommendThis week, our reader Anjuna VK recommends reading The Elsewherians by Jeet Thayil.They write:
The Elsewherians is the first book I have read by Thayil, and I fell promptly in love with the prose-ified poetry of his writing. It is a story of places as much as it is of people; places that take you in, mess you up a bit, and let you go.
From an author who said that writers, if they write to preach, risk becoming insufferably pretentious, the book is devoid of any agenda, and it simply tells the story of Ammu and George across Kerala, Bombay, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Paris, Bangalore, and more. A story about people who don’t belong anywhere, and places that don’t belong to anyone.
Thanks for the rec, Anjuna!That’s it from us this week. We’ll see you next Sunday.Until then, send us your book, music (preferably from underrated Indian artists), business movies, documentaries, or podcast recommendations. We’ll feature them in this newsletter! Also, don’t forget to tell us what you thought of today’s edition. Just hit reply to this email (or if you’re reading this on the web, drop us a message at morning@finshots.in).Don’t forget to share this edition on WhatsApp, LinkedIn, and X.
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