MoviePass, the $10-a-month movie subscription service that once dominated the industry, has been hit with financial issues that essentially brought an end to the company as we knew it.

Some of the ways it dealt with those issues included changing some users' passwords to keep them from ordering tickets, according to a Business Insider report this week.

Because MoviePass's business model essentially involved paying theaters the full price for customers' tickets, the company was quickly losing money, according to the report.

CEO Mitch Lowe reportedly became frustrated with subscribers who took advantage of the low monthly rate by going to the movies every day, and ordered the company limit subscriber access before the April 2018 release of Avengers: Infinity War.

Lowe called for the passwords for a "small percentage of power users be changed," which would keep them from going into the MoviePass app and ordering tickets, according to Business Insider.

By the end of July 2018, the company was losing around $40 million a month, and on July 26 it ran out of money to put on MoviePass cards, Business Insider says.

In particular, the report highlights a strategy the company used to keep users from bankrupting it, by changing account passwords to prevent ticket purchases that might cost it money it didn’t have.

Business Insider’s report looks at how Ted Farnsworth, CEO of MoviePass parent company Helios & Matheson Analytics, and MoviePass CEO Mitch Lowe, transformed the company from a little-known subscription service to a nationwide sensation.

MoviePass has had an extremely rough couple of years, due in part to its buzzy $10-a-month fee it introduced back in the summer of 2017.

The change, which allowed subscribers to see a movie a day every day of the month for less than the price of an average ticket in most American cities, resulted in an explosion in popularity and exposure for MoviePass.

The report, however, outlines how the price drop was mainly a marketing tactic to generate headlines, and that it led to a surge in sign-ups the company could barely keep up with.

For example, MoviePass never anticipated the number of physical cards it needed, and its vendor ended up running out, leading to delays in on-boarding new users.

A huge vulnerability in group dating app 3fun has been found by security researchers which allowed anyone to find the personal information, chat data, private photos, and real time location data of any of the other apps’ 1.5 million users.

The discovery was made by Pen Test Partners, who said that 3fun has “probably the worst security for any dating app we’ve ever seen.”

The discovery comes as dating apps are facing renewed scrutiny over the amounts of intensely personal information they hold about their users.

TechCrunch notes that multiple dating apps including Jewish dating app JCrush, conservative dating app Donald Daters, and Coffee Meets Bagel have all reported data breaches in the past couple of years, and there are ongoing concerns over Grindr’s ownership by a Chinese company.

Pen Test Partner’s security researchers discovered that 3fun was storing its users location data in the app itself, rather than keeping it securely on its servers.

This meant it was a trivial task for the researchers to reveal the data on the client side, even when users are supposedly restricting their location data.

Ant Financial has hinted that its mutual aid platform could collaborate with insurance providers as user numbers continue to swell, Chinese media reported.

Why it matters: Mutual aid platforms like Ant’s Xianghubao started gaining traction in China last year, especially among those who have typically not been well-served by the country’s healthcare system.

They enable members to share treatment costs equally, and are often seen as more accessible and affordable than traditional products.

Other Chinese tech giants have also dipped their toes into mutual aid over the past year.

Tencent is a major investor in insurtech startup Waterdrop, which closed a RMB 1 billion ($142 million) funding round in June.

Xianghubao and other mutual aid platforms have faced regulatory scrutiny (in Chinese) from regulators for promoting their products as insurance products.

Apple may have become known for premium-priced technology, but the company’s new Apple Card credit card is being made available to a large cross section of borrowers, including people who might not qualify for other major cards.

Users invited to the early Card preview program are being accepted even with weak credit scores, albeit generally with relatively high interest rates and low credit limits.

Early user comments on Reddit and Twitter have confirmed rumors that predated the card’s release: Rather than restricting the Apple Card to its wealthiest customers, Apple and partner Goldman Sachs are casting a wide net to broaden the service’s customer base.

While users with credit scores in the 700s are unsurprisingly getting accepted on the spot, so are many users in the low to mid 600s — enough that rejections are comparatively uncommon.

At least one user with credit “in the high 500s” was also accepted, albeit with a $750 credit limit.

As part of the application process, users are asked to provide some basic personal details to enable a quick decision and confirming credit check through TransUnion, most notably including current income level.

Android Q is bringing in a lot of changes but it might be famous or infamous for one thing: shifting Android to a fully gestural navigation system.

Forget the insinuation that this was blatantly copied from Apple.

Many Android users are complaining about how the new Back gesture from the side edges conflict with Android’s own long-held UI standards.

Google developers are not coming out to show the numbers that say that it’s actually what users want.

Just as Google developers claimed, gestures are becoming more common in smartphones, especially as their screens take over the entire face of the device.

Google now wants to standardize those gestures since different OEMs have all gone their separate ways.

A handful of the most popular gay dating apps are exposing the precise location of their users.

In a demonstration for BBC, security researchers were able to generate a map of app users across London, revealing the precise location of each using a method called trilateration.

Apps like Grindr and Romeo are meant to expose some location data.

The hookup apps operate by allowing men to find potential partners within a certain radius of their location.

But the location data is meant to be an approximation, a radius in which the other user is located — much like listings on Airbnb.

Instead, researchers have found that by using a process called trilateration, they can find users with pinpoint accuracy.