The Handover
Sunday 4 October 2026
The day in 7 stories, as Asia signs off and New York wakes up.
Business
Amazon ends data center NDAs, pledges $1 billion to host communities amid growing backlash
Amazon will invest more than $1 billion over five years near its data centers and stop using NDAs with government agencies. The pledge comes as New York halts new permits for a year and more than 100 moratoriums are considered nationwide.
World
UAE says flydubai attack was terrorist act as Australia probes co-pilot's Victorian links
The UAE called the attempted hijacking of a flydubai flight to Israel a terrorist attack. ASIO and the AFP are probing the Omani co-pilot’s Melbourne university links after he allegedly brandished an axe at the lead pilot.
AI
California signs landmark AI workplace protections into law
California Governor Gavin Newsom signed laws barring employers from using AI alone to fire workers, predict emotional states or collect neural data without consent. The measures limit automated workplace decisions and monitoring.
Security
Critical GitLab vulnerability under active exploitation allows unauthenticated file reads
CVE-2026-85706, a 10.0-rated flaw in self-managed GitLab CE/EE, is being actively exploited to read server files without authentication. It was patched on September 11 and added to CISA’s exploited-vulnerability catalog.
Security
AI speeds up exploit development, exposing limits of CVE-based security
AI is accelerating how quickly software flaws are found and exploited, according to an analysis published by The New Stack. It argues security teams should assess local risk rather than rely on CVE counts and severity scores.
Security
ShinyHunters Suspect Detained in Jordan, Cooperating with FBI
A suspected ShinyHunters member detained in Jordan is cooperating with the FBI, Reuters reported, citing sources. Saif al-Din Khader, known online as Rey, is helping identify and locate other members of the hacking group.
AI research
Fine-grained routing makes sparse video attention faster without quality loss
UC San Diego and ByteDance Seed researchers showed VSA2 can sparsely route attention across video tokens in diffusion transformers. It generated 720p video substantially faster than FlashAttention-3, with comparable or better quality.
The Handover is the day in a handful of stories, weekday evenings at 8pm your time, and a thread on X at 7am in New York and in London. Get it by email or push from your account, or subscribe by email.
Also posted as a thread on X: @zotpaper.