The Handover
Monday 19 October 2026
The day in 7 stories, as Asia signs off and New York wakes up.
Business
CoreWeave shares and bonds slump as AI boom financing comes under strain
CoreWeave shares fell 15% last week and its bonds traded at distressed levels as investors questioned AI infrastructure economics. The declines show financing strain across the sector.
Business
NextDC shares plunge 40 per cent as power row delays flagship Melbourne data centre
NextDC halted trading after warning that power delays will affect its M3 data centre in West Footscray. A community blockade stopped Jemena installing high-voltage poles, exposing grid and local constraints.
Security
Critical Linux KVM Flaw PwnEscape Enables Novel Guest-to-Host Attack
A Linux KVM flaw rated 9.3 lets a guest VM corrupt the host network stack with malformed IPv4 packets, potentially enabling arbitrary code execution. Researcher Paulos Yibelo disclosed CVE-2026-99999.
AI
Music body warns Australia is alone in weighing AI copyright changes as Minogue and Cave songs used without pay
The global music publishing body ICMP says work by Kylie Minogue and Nick Cave was used to train AI without compensation. It says Australia alone among dozens approached is seriously considering weaker copyright law.
Tech
Timekeepers abolish leap seconds, warn of Y2K-scale internet of things disaster
The General Conference on Weights and Measures voted to stop using leap seconds. It warned that adding or subtracting a second could disrupt connected devices and cost as much to fix as the millennium bug.
Programming
Google drops Pytype for Meta's Pyrefly, citing 10x faster Python type checking
Google replaced Pytype with Meta-developed open-source Pyrefly for Python type checking, citing roughly 10 times faster checks. It also reported up to 98% lower rebuild latency and over 80% lower peak compute costs.
AI research
Looped decision models spend extra computation on harder questions
Researchers at Lehigh University and the University of British Columbia showed LEV spends more computation on harder questions. Adaptive stopping cut computation 15% to 24% with less than one percentage point of accuracy loss.
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.