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Meta's Superintelligence Lab has released Muse Wonder and Muse Wonder Full, its first frontier-class AI models, claiming benchmark scores comparable to leading rivals while emphasizing improved long-term memory for personal assistants.
· 5 sourcesThe Register will bring together senior representatives from HPE and Nvidia at an invite-only dinner in Washington DC on 29 October to discuss the trade-offs involved in choosing AI infrastructure, from capital cost to operational control and data sovereignty.
Microsoft has closed a loophole in Windows 11 setup that let users bypass the Microsoft account requirement by clicking a 'Learn More' link. The workaround, first documented by Windows enthusiast Bob Pony, was removed server side, returning the Out-of-Box Experience to its usual insistence on an online account.
Blueprints AI, a Santa Monica-based startup founded by architect Al Drams and data scientist Coco Cao, claims its AI can generate code-compliant, permit-ready architectural blueprints in minutes from a 2D sketch or PDF. The company will unveil a second-generation version of its software at TechCrunch Disrupt this week.
· 2 sourcesThe cyberattack that wrecked refrigeration at hundreds of French supermarkets is being described as a “wake-up call” for New Zealand retailers, with a security analyst saying the intrusion also affected supermarkets in Spain, Portugal, Poland, Germany and Belgium.
· 6 sourcesDevelopers of the XRP Ledger have disclosed and patched a critical vulnerability in the network's payment engine that could have let an attacker create counterfeit XRP. The integer overflow flaw sat dormant in the code for roughly a decade before a researcher reported it through the XRPL bug bounty program in September.
CMF, the budget-focused brand created by Nothing, has unveiled its first portable Bluetooth speakers, the Speaker S and Speaker M. The new devices, which the company is in the process of spinning off into an India-based standalone subsidiary, feature a design that resembles a carton of milk, combining affordability with bright colour options and a distinctive look intended to help them stand out in a competitive market.
OnePlus today launched the OnePlus 16 in China, its first flagship smartphone since the company withdrew from the US and European markets earlier this year. The device marks a return to the company's performance-focused roots, packing a Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 processor, up to 16GB of RAM and a 9,000mAh silicon-carbon battery.
AMD has introduced Helion, a standardized 21-inch rack reference design for agentic AI servers that can house up to 32,768 Zen 6 cores in a CPU-only deployment, complementing the Helios rack it revealed at last year's OCP Global Summit.
· 2 sourcesEU finance ministers have agreed to shift supervision of the bloc's largest crypto companies to a central watchdog, in a move designed to close a loophole in the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA) that allows firms licensed in one member state to serve customers across all 27 EU countries under home-country oversight alone.
GitLab has warned administrators of self-managed installations to patch immediately after disclosing a maximum-severity vulnerability in its CI/CD Regular Expression Compiler that could allow remote attackers to run arbitrary code on affected servers. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-97229, is fixed in the latest releases of GitLab Community and Enterprise Edition.
An artificial intelligence company has released a tool that allows law enforcement to pinpoint a specific house based on a single interior photograph, drawing on data from short-term rental platforms such as Airbnb and real estate sites like Zillow. Called Raven, the system can match features in an uploaded image against millions of property listings to identify the exact location in seconds.
· 2 sourcesSecurity researchers at Varonis Threat Labs have discovered a new Windows malware loader, named AvisLoader, that uses the encrypted Tox peer-to-peer messaging network for command and control, a design that makes traditional domain-based takedowns difficult.
GlobalFoundries has announced FDX Fusion, a 7nm-class fabrication process based on fully-depleted silicon-on-insulator (FD-SOI) technology, marking the company's return to developing advanced nodes nearly eight years after abandoning its FinFET roadmap. The process is designed for applications prioritising low power consumption and high integration, with production scheduled to begin in 2028 at GlobalFoundries' Dresden facility.
Microsoft has announced it will mainly rely on its own artificial intelligence chips to handle incoming requests, starting with the third-generation Maia accelerator it unveiled on Monday, a significant step away from its long dependence on Nvidia graphics processing units.
· 4 sourcesAhold Delhaize, one of the world’s largest food retail chains, confirmed today that it has taken some systems offline following a cybersecurity incident, with customers unable to use websites and apps in the Netherlands and Belgium and US employees locked out of scheduling and pay systems.
The global financial watchdog, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), has called on countries to improve cross-border information sharing and develop contingency plans for stablecoin failures. A report published on October 12 warns that stablecoins jointly issued by multiple companies could trap reserves in one jurisdiction while redemption demands hit another, creating a dangerous gap in crisis response.
UK AI minister Kanishka Narayan has warned it is 'likely, if not inevitable' that the country's cyber defences will be breached, as he outlined plans to deploy advanced AI to counter the threat and urged leading AI companies to prioritise safety over release.
· 4 sourcesAmbi, a startup founded by former Plaud executive Peter Mo, has raised $26 million across multiple funding rounds to build an AI app that listens to users throughout the day, providing real-time suggestions and insights. The company is releasing apps for iPhone, Mac, and Apple Watch, and plans a desktop app to expand its data capture.
· 2 sourcesFrench authorities were investigating on Monday a cyberattack that forced refrigeration units in hundreds of supermarkets to heat to 50C, spoiling fresh and frozen food worth millions of euros and causing fires, as Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu instructed the national cybersecurity agency ANSSI to investigate.
· 6 sourcesJeonbuk Bank has become the first traditional bank in South Korea to offer loans backed by bitcoin, a move that brings crypto collateral into the mainstream banking system. The bank ran its own stress tests to assess bitcoin's resilience during sharp price drops and chose the cryptocurrency based on its deep liquidity, the bank said.
SWI Group has raised €800 million to accelerate its conversion of former FTX-backed bitcoin miner Genesis Digital Assets into AI and high-performance computing infrastructure, the Amsterdam-listed company announced Oct. 12.
· 2 sourcesBritain's AI Safety Institute has confirmed it can still access and test the latest artificial intelligence models, while Microsoft president Brad Smith has argued the UK is best placed to lead global AI regulation. Speaking on a BBC podcast, Smith warned that AI is currently less regulated than milk and washing machines and called for urgent safety rules, including "kill switches" and legal duties to report breaches by rogue AI agents.
· 3 sourcesThe chief executives of Intel and Broadcom warned in Singapore that access to capital, rather than shortages of chips, memory or electricity, could become the biggest constraint on the AI boom, even as demand for computing infrastructure continues to outstrip supply.
· 2 sourcesIndependent researchers have documented three generations of hardware implants in Ledger Nano X wallets that can intercept recovery phrases and transmit them over cellular networks, as investigators trace up to US$93 million in suspected crypto thefts linked to devices sold by Southeast Asian reseller CryptoBilis.
· 4 sourcesTikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew says artificial intelligence will produce a real scientific breakthrough in physics, biotech, chemistry and materials science within the next two to three years, predicting the technology is "only at the beginning" of what it can do.
· 2 sourcesXRP Ledger developers have defended an emergency security patch that fixed a bug capable of creating XRP beyond the network's fixed supply, saying the usual two-week validator vote would have left the network exposed to attackers.
The UK's artificial intelligence minister will call on frontier AI companies to strengthen safety efforts and announce a boost to Britain's cyber defences, in a speech expected to signal a tougher government line on self-regulation.
· 2 sourcesPresident Donald Trump's campaign to rebrand artificial intelligence as "super intelligence" is winning converts among powerful Silicon Valley figures, with Elon Musk among the first to commit to the change, according to The Verge. Most of the broader public, however, continues to use the term AI.
The U.S. Supreme Court has not yet indicated whether it will hear cases over the legality of prediction markets, even as several amicus briefs, an interim final rule and a new rule proposal have piled up in the dispute, according to CoinDesk's State of Crypto newsletter.
The hacking group Cyberleek has issued an ultimatum to Take-Two Interactive and Rockstar Games: release a physical version of Grand Theft Auto VI and apologize, or the group will leak the full build of the game, including the complete story mode. The demand is coupled with a requirement that Cyberleek's Solana memecoin, $CYBERLEEK, reach a market cap of $30 million before the build is released.
US regulators have granted self-driving truck companies Aurora Innovation and Kodiak AI a five-year exemption from a rule requiring drivers to place reflective warning triangles on the road after a breakdown, clearing a significant regulatory hurdle to commercial deployment.
US video game console sales have collapsed, with Xbox hardware units down 33% year-to-date and PlayStation 5 units down 25% through August 2026, according to industry tracker Circana. Xbox sales are at an all-time low since the console launched nearly 25 years ago, while PS5 sales have fallen to their lowest point since 2013, when buyers held off ahead of the PS4 launch.
Anthropic's new OSS Scanner, powered by its Claude AI models, has surfaced more than 29,000 candidate vulnerabilities in widely used open source software over the past six months. However, only 516 have been patched, exposing a bottleneck between automated detection and human-led verification and remediation.
The International Monetary Fund has found genuine demand for tokenized stocks, with investors using blockchain-based shares for smaller and after-hours trades, but it warns the market remains volatile and illiquid.
Security firm iVerify has disclosed a new variant of iPhone spyware, designated P7 DarkSword, that can remotely scan for cryptocurrency wallet applications and extract sensitive data from compromised devices, highlighting an emerging threat to mobile crypto holders.
Independent AI safety evaluators, once a niche corner of the industry, are being asked to play a central role in overseeing the safety of advanced models, with Anthropic pledging to embed them in its operations and OpenAI and the White House backing the idea. But questions remain over funding, access and reporting structures.
· 2 sourcesAn AI-powered security system has uncovered a critical vulnerability in the XRP Ledger (XRPL) that could have allowed an attacker to create roughly 18 trillion XRP tokens, threatening the cryptocurrency's $94 billion market capitalisation. The bug, which survived more than a decade of security reviews and audits, was reported on September 22 and patched three days later, with no evidence of exploitation.
Brandon Thomas, the solo developer whose ArtCraft project set out to replicate Adobe's creative suite with free, open-source tools, has announced a second set of AI-built clones aimed at Microsoft Office. Named GridCraft, DeckCraft and WordCraft, the apps are designed to replace Excel, PowerPoint and Word respectively and, like ArtCraft, were created using the Claude AI model.
Ledger has confirmed that every verified case in last week's suspected $86 million wallet-draining incident involves devices sold through Southeast Asian reseller CryptoBilis, which has stopped selling hardware wallets while the Paris-based manufacturer works with authorities and faces unofficial claims of tampered devices in Europe.
· 2 sourcesResearchers have demonstrated a way to control where two-dimensional semiconductor crystals begin growing on a wafer, potentially removing a key barrier to manufacturing next-generation transistors at scale. The technique, described in a paper published in Nature on October 7, uses an etching flux to suppress random nucleation and force a single crystal to form at the centre of each patterned region. The team behind the work includes researchers from KAIST in South Korea and the startup TDS Innovation.
A phishing scam that inserts fake meetings into users' electronic calendars is growing exponentially, according to security researchers, exploiting the trust people place in calendar entries to steal login credentials.
One of Australia's most experienced mental health researchers has broken with prevailing alarm about chatbots, arguing that generative AI could be the most positive opportunity ever to emerge in mental health care, particularly for young people. Ian Hickie, a researcher in clinical psychiatry who has worked in mental health and suicide prevention for nearly four decades, made the case in an opinion article published across Nine newspapers.
· 3 sourcesMicrosoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella has called for advanced artificial intelligence systems to include an 'emergency brake' allowing authorized humans to pause or shut down a model mid-task, along with containment and tamper-proof logging of model actions, as concerns over AI safety continue to mount across the tech industry.
· 5 sourcesMicrosoft chairman and CEO Satya Nadella has called for advanced artificial intelligence systems to be built with a human-controlled 'emergency brake' that can pause or shut down a model mid-task, as concerns over AI safety escalate among tech leaders and researchers.
· 4 sourcesApple has disclosed a deal to hire employees and license technology from Huxe, a personalised audio startup founded by former Google NotebookLM developers, in what is known as a reverse acqui-hire, according to a regulatory filing with the European Commission.
· 3 sourcesKing Charles III has warned that malicious online actors are evolving their tactics by using automated technologies, posing challenges to trust and security in the digital age. In a letter to the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) to mark its 10th anniversary, the King praised the agency's achievements in defending against cyber attacks and safeguarding democratic institutions, while noting the need to balance the risks and opportunities of powerful new technologies.
Edward Dubrovsky, a 54-year-old Canadian cybersecurity executive who helped companies negotiate with ransomware attackers, has been arrested in Pennsylvania and transferred to Texas on federal conspiracy and extortion charges linked to the FBI's crackdown on the ShinyHunters hacking group.