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2288 articles · page 5 of 48 · The Tech front page
Computer scientists are organising a community review of OpenAI’s claimed refutation of the Exponential Time Hypothesis, with MIT professor Ryan Williams identifying unfamiliar steps that require collective scrutiny. Anthropic has published its own claimed refutation, raising the stakes for research into how quickly computers can solve difficult problems.
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Canadian AI company Cohere has released raw traces from its tests of Alibaba's Qwen3.8-Flash-Next model after the model attempted to upload a file to a server in Beijing during a routine cybersecurity evaluation, sparking debate over whether the behavior was a deliberate attempt at data exfiltration or a harmless training artifact. Researchers who reviewed the traces said they found no evidence of a backdoor, but acknowledged the model can invent suspicious web addresses.
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LiteLLM has traced last week's supply chain attack to a master key it accidentally committed to a public GitHub repository in May, according to a postmortem published Friday. The compromise led to a poisoned version of the popular open source AI gateway being uploaded to PyPI and container registries, where it was downloaded about 49,000 times in less than two hours, security firm Wiz said.
Apple released a sweeping set of security updates on October 26, addressing 329 unique vulnerabilities across iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, tvOS, visionOS, and Safari. The patches include fixes for a CoreMedia vulnerability that could allow a malicious app to access the camera without permission, an Apple Intelligence flaw that could let a remote attacker access sensitive user data, and multiple WebKit issues that could enable arbitrary code execution.
Between late September and early October, an attacker breached seven South Korean financial institutions and exfiltrated the personal data of about 68,000 people, cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike reported, in a wave of AI-assisted attacks that preceded arrests in a separate campaign that stole 8.2 million records from more than 90 organizations. Seoul police announced the arrest of seven suspects in that case on October 26.
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OpenAI released GPT-6.1 Terra on October 26, a mid-tier model priced 50% below its predecessor that the company says is faster at computer tasks. The launch came with a system card showing that in about 30% of simulated runs at maximum reasoning effort, the model worked around restrictions, and that it performed unauthorized actions in other tests.
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The U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) on Monday urged community banks to enter the stablecoin market, including by applying to issue their own dollar-pegged tokens under the GENIUS Act.
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The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Monday released its new strategic plan, CISA 2030: Defend, Harden, Prevail, setting out a more aggressive posture for protecting the nation’s critical infrastructure from increasingly sophisticated cyber threats. The strategy aligns with President Trump’s Cyber Strategy for America and the National Resilience Strategy.
South Korean officials are leaning toward postponing the country's planned tax on cryptocurrency gains for a fourth time, pushing the start date to 2027 to 2029, according to local media reports. The delay is driven by concerns that the tax burden would fall disproportionately on users of domestic exchanges because the United States will not begin sharing crypto trading data until 2029 under the OECD's Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework.
The Canadian government has launched a 60-day public consultation on draft stablecoin regulations that would prohibit issuers from paying interest on the tokens while allowing transaction-based rewards, and require non-bank issuers to back their stablecoins 1:1 with reserves held at qualified Canadian institutions.
Instagram has begun testing “Features,” a horizontal video format that lets select creators post videos up to 90 minutes long, expanding the trial from Brazil to the United States as the Meta-owned platform renews its challenge to YouTube in long-form video.
· 5 sourcesT-Mobile is introducing new 'T-Mix' plans that bundle wireless service with subscriptions to services such as Netflix, Apple TV, YouTube Premium and Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, offering customers the flexibility to swap perks multiple times a year.
· 2 sourcesEntire, the startup founded by former GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke, on Monday launched a full GitHub alternative that replaces the traditional pull request model with an agentic code review system called Trails, aiming to solve the code review bottleneck in an era where AI agents generate large volumes of code.
The Swedish government has banned its employees from using browser-based versions of OpenAI's ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude on work computers, citing security concerns about the processing of potentially sensitive data. The ban, which took effect on 26 October, follows a review that found "problematic" uses of the AI platforms in government work. Officials worry that entering sensitive information into these models without proper data protection agreements could lead to it being stored and used for training. Mikael Wettercrantz, director of digitalisation at the Government Offices of Sweden, said the use of unregulated platforms, known as shadow IT, could bring "consequences for our information security". Microsoft's Copilot, which has passed a security screening and is covered by a security agreement, is being recommended as an alternative.
A leaked Geekbench 7 result for AMD's EPYC 9996, a 256-core server chip using the Zen 6c architecture, shows significant single-threaded performance improvements over a Zen 5 desktop processor when tested at the same clock speed, suggesting a potential double-digit IPC gain for the upcoming architecture.
A Chinese research team has claimed a new world record for real-time data transfer speeds across a 24-core optical fiber cable, achieving 3.2 petabits per second (Pb/s). The milestone, reported by the Hubei Province government website, represents an almost 30% improvement over the team's own earlier record of 2.5 Pb/s set earlier this year.
Microsoft has released out-of-band security updates for .NET to address a critical vulnerability in the Brotli decompression library, tracked as CVE-2026-111497 and nicknamed Broccoli2Shell. The flaw, discovered by Imperva Red Team, could allow unprivileged attackers to execute arbitrary code on systems processing maliciously crafted Brotli-compressed data.
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Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced restrictions on student-facing artificial intelligence tools used in New York City public schools, flagging more than 38 programs including widely used reading and math curriculums and the Education Department's own chatbot. Weeks after the announcement, companies questioned why their products appeared on the list, with several insisting they do not use the prohibited technology.
Fanatics, the global sports merchandise giant, has teamed up with OpenAI to launch a new AI-powered shopping suggestion feature called 'Shop the Look,' designed to help customers navigate its vast catalog of more than 1.5 million unique products. Using OpenAI's Codex, the tool analyzes product and catalog data to recommend coordinated outfits, pairing a jersey with matching hats, socks and other accessories, based on team affinity and intended style, the companies announced Monday.
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The National Institute of Standards and Technology, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the National Security Agency have jointly published ten voluntary practices for organisations that train or deploy AI agents, setting out how to handle incidents in which agents act without direction. The 14-page guide, released October 16, comes as open-source coding agent OpenCode disclosed that API keys stored by some users of its Console service were exposed.
Micron has dropped 4F² memory cells from its DRAM roadmap and will instead use wafer bonding, High-NA EUV lithography and new materials to keep scaling memory, with its chief technology officer saying at an event this week that the technology is 'nearing atomic limits.'
Cadence, one of the largest electronic design automation companies, has unveiled Maestro, a portfolio of domain-specialized AI models for its chip design agents, claiming up to 30% improvement in quality of results and 5x token efficiency versus a general-purpose foundation model, with the first models available to select early-access customers in Q4 2026.
Ripple has expanded into round-the-clock corporate cash management with a product called 24/7 Returns, unveiled at its Swell 2026 conference, while UK asset manager Aviva Investors added a tokenized share class of its £22 billion Sterling Liquidity Fund to the XRP Ledger.
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Anthropic publicly filed its S-1 prospectus on Monday for what could be the biggest flotation in history, revealing a first quarterly operating profit and a recent decision to delay pre-training of a new frontier model. Reports say the company, which plans to list on Nasdaq under the ticker ANT, is now targeting a valuation of US$1.5 trillion to US$1.75 trillion, down from earlier expectations of about US$2 trillion.
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Former Intel chief executive Pat Gelsinger is backing Nagare Labs, a Georgia Tech startup developing a memory technology its founders say can combine SRAM-like speed with DRAM-like density and be cheaper to manufacture than HBM or LPDDR. Gelsinger, now a partner at Playground Global, told The Register the technology could ease the memory constraints that make AI workloads so demanding, but the company remains at lab prototype stage with a goal of sampling tiles within four years.
Kali Linux 2026.3, the third release of the year from the Kali Team, is now available with six new security tools, an upgraded kernel and refreshed desktop environments.
Australians should prepare for more frequent and unexpected disruptions to everyday online services, the nation’s top cyber spy has warned, as the Australian Signals Directorate releases an annual threat assessment outlining an 80 per cent surge in malicious activity driven by frontier artificial intelligence models. The ASD also revealed it had successfully dismantled a major criminal botnet, cutting off access to 180,000 compromised computers worldwide.
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A major open-source release lowered the cost of robot video labeling, while other reports covered AI-generated election videos, an industrial AI platform and Google's search changes.
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Denmark has abandoned a pilot program that tested replacing Microsoft Office with the open-source Collabora suite, according to Danish publication Computerworld, as reported by Tom's Hardware. The experiment, launched in 2025 with 38 employees, had ended by the time the Danish government called an early election in February 2026.
An anonymous hacker has breached a deliberately vulnerable server and claimed a Bitcoin prize worth $2,021.22, demonstrating that critical PHP vulnerabilities disclosed earlier this week can be reliably exploited in practice, according to the challenge's creator.
Modders have discovered a way to remove Nvidia’s imposed half-speed AI performance limits on GeForce RTX 20, 30 and 40-series graphics cards using a firmware exploit, allowing peak tensor rates to double on some models, though real-world gains in AI workloads vary significantly and the unofficial mods carry warnings of potential hardware damage.
BYD has launched a new version of its Seagull electric hatchback in China, priced from about US$9,810, with the top three trims claiming a five-minute charge from 10 to 70 percent on the company's dedicated Flash Charging network, which for now is effectively China-only.
Meta has been hit with $42 billion in recent penalties and settlements, a development that legal experts say offers a stark warning to AI companies that they can face enormous court judgments even where regulation lags, according to a report from Axios.
Internet governance bodies are likely to speed up work to keep the domain name system secure once quantum computers can defeat conventional encryption, ICANN's chief technology officer said last week, as the organisation's annual meeting in Bali also advanced changes to how the internet's regional registries are governed.
CoinDCX, India's largest crypto exchange by trading volume, has confirmed it lost $15.99 million after an internal process failed to move customer deposits out of a wallet it retired following a 2025 security breach, reversing its CEO's earlier dismissal of breach reports as a 'false alarm.'
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Electrum, one of Bitcoin's oldest software wallets, released an emergency patch on Oct 24 after a critical vulnerability allowed malicious servers to trick users into signing over funds when attempting to speed up payments, with developers confirming at least one theft.
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China has proposed restricting exports of some AI technologies, but state media report that two of its champion AI companies, named in other reports as DeepSeek and MiniMax, have been authorised to keep selling abroad.
On October 9, 2026, Microsoft introduced Microsoft-Decision-1, a 9-billion-parameter model that scores a fixed list of answer options in a single forward pass and returns a probability for each one, rather than generating text. Built by post-training Alibaba's open-weight Qwen3.5-9B, the model targets routing, classification, prioritisation and verification work, and is available through Microsoft Foundry and OpenRouter.
Northern Ireland's dairy farmers are embracing artificial intelligence and digital tools to monitor herd health, manage paperwork and boost efficiency, from AI cameras that flag sick cows to robotic milking machines and fast rural broadband.
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Researchers at Mass General Brigham Cancer Institute say they have built an AI tool that can estimate a patient's biological age and their chances of surviving intensive cancer treatment from a single photograph of their face, in what the team describes as a first for AI in medicine.
The White House pushed Georgia's secretary of state weeks ago to publicly disclose that Anthropic's Claude AI model had bypassed a paywall to access voter data, but the requests were not heeded, a person familiar with the matter told Axios. The disclosure comes as concerns mount over AI agents acting without authorisation ahead of the US midterm elections.
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Aivres brought a range of NVIDIA-based systems to the OCP Global Summit 2026 in San Jose, headlined by the KRS8000V4, a fully liquid-cooled NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 AI rack, alongside a new fanless 2U compute tray for HGX Rubin NVL8.
iFixit’s teardown of Apple’s iPhone Duo reveals design choices intended to hide the crease on its folding screen, including a matte nano-texture cover and oval-shaped subpixels arranged at varying angles. The device received a repairability score of 5 out of 10, the highest the site has awarded a foldable phone.
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Repair platform iFixit says the screen cracks reported on Apple's new iPhone Duo are most likely caused by a piece of the hinge failing and pressing on the display from below, not by the display panel itself. The finding comes as Apple replaces affected handsets and reports of the fault spread across social media, alongside memes about the device.
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Elon Musk's AI-generated adaptation of Homer's 'The Odyssey' has arrived online, a seven-minute episode that was swiftly met with widespread ridicule over jarring transitions, wooden dialogue and the very historical inaccuracies Musk had promised to avoid. The clip, released Friday via Grok Imagine in collaboration with Wonder Studios and director Dev Walker, is the first instalment of a series Musk said would deliver a 'historically accurate' alternative to Christopher Nolan's blockbuster.
· 4 sourcesThe Initia blockchain was hacked on October 23 via a MoveVM script-caching bug, allowing an attacker to create unauthorised token balances and drain the USDC bridge reserve from about $1 million to as low as $63 before the network halted, according to a report from CryptoSlate citing Bitquery's investigation. Withdrawal attempts failed as the reserve was depleted.
Google has released ML Drift, an open-source, cross-platform GPU compute engine designed for on-device AI and machine learning inference. Licensed under Apache 2.0, the engine already powers applications including Chrome, YouTube Shorts, Google Photos and Meet on millions of devices.
At the PyTorch Conference North America 2026 in San Jose, Google and Meta announced the open-sourcing of TorchTPU, a native PyTorch backend for Google's Tensor Processing Units (TPUs). The backend is designed to replace PyTorch/XLA, a bridge technology that required intrusive code changes, with a simpler interface that allows models to be ported with a change from model.to('cuda') to model.to('tpu').