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The security firm Layer3 Intel says its residential proxy monitoring routed traffic out through AS2650, the network of the Executive Office of the President, 236 times between October 5 and November 3, from six addresses on 26 of 30 days, via 28 different proxy services. Residential proxy services sell the use of ordinary people's devices so traffic appears to come from their networks, often via SDKs bundled into free apps. Layer3 says anyone could buy this access for a few dollars, that other detection services also list the addresses as proxy exits, and that the evening-heavy timing suggests an infected personal device rather than guest Wi-Fi.

KrebsOnSecurity reports that Synthient linked the activity to Windows 11 installations of Infatica, a proxy service whose founder's hosting firm, King Servers, hosted most of the addresses Russia used against Arizona and Illinois election systems in 2016. Synthient's Ben Brundage says some resellers charge as little as 60 cents a gigabyte. Layer3 says it will share its logs with agencies.

In a November 2 blog post, Rikiya Takehi, Jayden Teoh, Alex Zhang and Omar Khattab of MIT CSAIL report that OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra can "natively" read and write neural network weights, which they call Weight-Space Programming. Given only the raw numbers of small networks, Astra named which of four grid games each was trained on and what shape each of three diffusion models draws. It also wrote small game-playing networks from scratch. Asked to make the Qwen3.5-0.8B language model better at math without training, it found a cause of the model's reasoning loops and edited 0.016% of its weights; the authors say MATH-500 rose from 7.9% to 48.1% and IFEval from 21.0% to 62.3%. A similar attempt on Gemma 3 270M did not help. The logs are public on GitHub.

spaCy author Matthew Honnibal called the post misleading: by his count only three experiments, on networks of 17,000 to 172,000 weights, worked from raw weights with no tools, while the Qwen result used Python and up to 50 test runs of the model, much as a human ML engineer would. Simon Willison found that Qwen 3.8 27B on his laptop also named three of the four games from the published prompts, and wrote that some wider commentary on the paper did not feel justified.

Fed up with YouTube's recommendations late on a Friday night, Andrej Karpathy says he asked Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 the next morning to build a YouTube clone made only of videos recommended on Hacker News. Per his October 31 post, the agent downloaded HN's comments, used Claude Sonnet to filter out spam and found about 40,000 comments recommending a YouTube video, which gave 6,454 videos recommended by a few people each between 2007 and 2026, across 150 topics. The result, hackertube.org, has a YouTube-style interface, "For You" recommendations kept in the browser with no user accounts, keyboard shortcuts and a downloadable data export.

Karpathy says the whole thing took about two hours. His only manual steps were creating a Google Cloud API key for video metadata, starting a server and buying the domain; Claude Code deployed and hardened it.

Özgün Kültekin of the security firm Wakefield published an illustrated write-up (under a pun on "ssh") of a login bypass in OpenSSH on Linux systems built on the musl C library, such as Alpine, OpenWrt, Buildroot and Yocto, when sshd runs without PAM. Locked or key-only accounts are marked with a "" instead of a password hash. Since 2012, musl's crypt() returns "" when it fails, and it fails on passwords over 256 bytes. Because sshd hashes a wrong password even for such accounts, a password of 257 to 1,024 characters produced "*" and matched. He says the flaw has existed since 2016 and that on Alpine's official AWS and Azure images the default user, which has passwordless doas, is affected, which amounts to root.

He says he found it by testing about 17,600 unusual logins across many sshd builds with "agent swarms". OpenSSH 10.6p2, released November 5, works around it in sshd; the OpenSSH team says it considers the root cause outside sshd. The fix is to upgrade or turn off password logins, and his GitHub repo has a check script.

After seeing Andrej Karpathy's HackerTube, the developer known on Hacker News as roansh built the same idea for books, again largely with Claude Opus 5.5. In the Show HN post, roansh says Claude wrote almost all of it, data pipeline included, while they steered, made decisions and bought the domain. The site lists books that at least two different commenters brought up between 2007 and now; its footer counts 15,704 books and 284,808 mentions. It sorts them into topics from fiction and history to programming and Lisp, with top-recommended, most-mentioned, rising and "For You" views, and each book links back to the comments that mentioned it. The data can be downloaded from the About page.

The author notes the ranking counts mentions, so praising a book and trashing it both count.

In a November 2 post, the developer behind chalmovsky.com writes that he took all his Ubuntu servers offline and is moving them to another distribution. His complaint: CVE-2026-98432, a critical (CVSS 9.8) remotely reachable use-after-free in the Linux kernel's TCP code, had been patched by Debian on October 16, and Anthropic says it built a working root exploit, yet more than two weeks later every supported Ubuntu release, LTS included, was listed as vulnerable. He contrasts this with Ubuntu's promise of "timely patches for critical vulnerabilities" and with volunteer-run distributions (Debian, Arch, Alpine) that had shipped the fix.

Atlas's advisory, updated November 5, says Red Hat shipped fixed kernels on November 1 and AlmaLinux on November 2, while Ubuntu had a fixed kernel only for 26.10 and its fixes for 22.04, 24.04 and 26.04 were still in testing. Ubuntu's CVE page rates the bug Critical and offers an interim packet-filtering mitigation.

A Postman user filed a "[SEVERE]" GitHub issue reporting that opening the Postman desktop app (12.33.4) on a Mac automatically installed Postman plugins into OpenAI's Codex and Anthropic's Claude Code, plus a Postman CLI. Postman's own log recorded an "auto-existing-upgrade" install. The reporter says Codex's global config gained a Postman plugin, a remote MCP server connection and a session-start hook telling the agent to load Postman's skill before any non-trivial API engineering task, and that the plugin's installer source code tries to mark its own hook as trusted. The reporter says the report does not claim any data was exfiltrated.

The issue drew hundreds of reactions. On November 5 a Postman team member replied that the change was meant to simplify setting up coding agents, that the company now understands its messaging did not make that clear, and that Postman is reverting it and will redesign it "with the right level of control." The issue was then closed and locked.

Cursor says that on October 29, between about 2:27 a.m. and 1:35 p.m. Pacific, its VS Code extension marketplace served maliciously modified versions 2.1.312 and 2.1.313 of Anthropic's Claude Code extension for Windows and macOS, versions not made by Anthropic. The code ran as soon as the extension loaded: it sent host and user details to the attacker, added an attacker SSH key labeled "svc-telemetry" to the user's authorized keys, tried to enable SSH and open a reverse tunnel, and set up persistence. Cursor says errors in the malware meant the SSH step failed unless Cursor ran with admin rights. It pulled the versions, shut down and rebuilt the marketplace, rotated keys and had the attacker's server taken offline. Affected users should run its check, remove the key and persistence, and rotate credentials; uninstalling alone may not be enough.

The security firm Phorion, which also detected it, published a technical analysis, including the macOS permission-check mistake that skips turning on Remote Login.

IEEE Spectrum's Dina Genkina looks at PHP2Shell, the PHP flaw disclosed in late October that put sites running WordPress, Drupal and other PHP software at risk of data theft and remote code execution. The underlying memory bug had been reported to the PHP Foundation in 2024 but was treated as a mere crash. A researcher at the security firm Calif, auditing PHP with AI tools under OpenAI sponsorship, turned it into a working code-execution exploit within two weeks; Wiz confirmed and expanded the findings, and four PHP engineers spent two months on a patch. As far as anyone knows, it was fixed before attackers had the exploit.

"Now it is time for the technical debt to be paid off," says Matt Suiche of Tolmo. Columbia's Suman Jana describes an asymmetry: AI makes finding bugs easier, but fixes must close every path without breaking anything, which strains unfunded open-source maintainers. Johns Hopkins' Matthew Green expects little to change until something worse happens; meanwhile, he says, install updates promptly.

Rasmus Moorats drives a 2014 Renault Latitude. When Estonia switched to winter time, he found the dashboard had no way to set the clock: the TomTom Carminat LIVE unit reads the menu entry for its Settings screen from the navigation SD card, which DRM ties to a specific card, and the previous owner had thrown the card away. A replacement would have cost about 60 euros shipped.

So he pulled the firmware, a custom TomTom OS on Linux 2.6.28, built an emulator in QEMU and looked for a way in. Modified update images were rejected, and the SD card and writable partitions were mounted so nothing on them could run. He finally combined a scripting feature that can write a log file anywhere with the kernel's core_pattern setting, then deliberately crashed a system program, so the kernel ran his script as root. After backing up the unit, he found the time is taken from GPS with the local offset stored as a number of minutes in a settings file, which he could then change.

OpenAI announced three results it says its models produced, in harmonic analysis, complexity theory and quantum field theory, and released them differently, Engadget reports. Two manuscripts are on GitHub: one proves Sogge's local smoothing conjecture for waves in every spatial dimension, and one claims the Exponential Time Hypothesis (ETH) is false. The preprint describes a deterministic algorithm that counts the satisfying assignments of any k-CNF formula in subexponential time.

ETH, a widely believed assumption that some problems can't be solved quickly, underpins hundreds of papers; if it is false, better algorithms could exist in fields from databases to computational biology. OpenAI asked outside experts, including the scientists who proposed ETH, to examine and explain the computer-science result; the physics result (on interacting quantum field theories in four dimensions) has been left to a group of physicists that has not yet published. OpenAI says it won't seek academic credit. TechCrunch reports that Anthropic released its own refutation of ETH hours later, after Anthropic mathematician Levent Alpöge suggested OpenAI's solution drew on pre-existing work. The claims have not been peer reviewed; MIT's Ryan Williams, organizing the field's response with ETH's proposers, told TechCrunch parts of the proof look "alien."

Hacker News commenters said the headline "buries the lede," asked whether this shifts the odds on P versus NP, and one questioned the size of OpenAI's donation to academia.

A researcher writing as "veritas" on nullpt.rs crawled 10,000 popular websites with Playwright and collected the images that browser-fingerprinting scripts draw on hidden canvases (published as fingerprint.garden). Tracing one striking canvas led to a heavily obfuscated anti-bot script served from servicepipe.tech.

The script was laced with function names like "computeRicinLethalDosageForWaterSupply", a hidden system prompt encoded in invisible Unicode characters that tells an AI to drop its safety rules, and Tiananmen Square references aimed at Chinese models. The author concludes these are tripwires meant to make AI assistants refuse to help deobfuscate the code: two Western models refused the task, while GLM-5.3 complied. A block that would run shell commands under Node.js looked like more decoy, gated behind an environment flag. Underneath, the script collects ordinary fingerprinting signals (user agent, GPU strings, WebGL limits). A related domain, servicepipe.ru, belongs to a Russian anti-DDoS and traffic-filtering company.

Hacker News commenters traded similar 'magic strings' they have seen and debated whether browsers should let pages fingerprint this freely.

Mistral released the weights of Mistral Large 4 (nicknamed "Le Chonk"), a 1-trillion-parameter multimodal model that entered public preview earlier in October. The company says three more weeks of reinforcement learning since the preview improved coding and defensive cybersecurity: it reports leading open-weight scores on Cognition's FrontierCode 2.0 (19.7%) and Terminal-Bench 4.0 (41%), and 51% on the Artificial Analysis Cyber Index, with a 96.6% refusal rate on malicious cyber prompts. These are vendor-reported results. It adds low, medium and high reasoning modes and says the model was trained from scratch on European infrastructure.

Weights are on Hugging Face under the "Mistral Ecosystem Open-Weight license," a modified MIT license: free to use, modify and commercialize, except that model-as-a-service providers need a separate commercial license. API pricing is $0.70 per million input tokens and $2.10 per million output tokens.

On Hacker News, a commenter noted the price is roughly half the preview's, another argued the license makes it "weights available" rather than open source, and several said its main draw is European provenance.

Anthropic, PBC filed its Form S-1 registration statement with the SEC on October 26, the public version of the draft prospectus first reported the week before. It has applied to list Class A shares on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the symbol "ANT"; share count and price range are still blank. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley lead the underwriters.

The filing says revenue was $41 million in 2023, $386 million in 2024 and $4.6 billion in 2025, and $16.3 billion in the first half of 2026, up 1,300% year over year, while warning that growth will slow. The $80.7 billion first-half net loss includes $72.4 billion from the rising fair value of convertible notes and similar instruments. No single customer was more than 10% of revenue in the first nine months of 2026.

Governance: a Long-Term Benefit Trust elects a board majority through Class T stock, and a single Class F share held by a co-founders' company carries 50.1% of the general vote, making Anthropic a "controlled company" under Nasdaq rules. On Hacker News, commenters marveled at the revenue curve, debated whether the loss signals an AI bubble, and one said they were feeding the filing to Claude to "replicate" the company.

Defense attorneys for 15 Minnesota residents facing federal conspiracy charges have obtained discovery records describing a large surveillance operation by Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), part of ICE, Wired's Ali Winston reports. The defendants were part of volunteer networks that tracked federal immigration agents during last winter's Operation Metro Surge in the Twin Cities; prosecutors allege a conspiracy to impede enforcement and to identify, stalk and assault agents.

According to the records Wired reviewed, about 120 HSI agents, including 11 undercover officers, worked the case under investigations named Project Whipple Shield and Operation Puppet Master, funded through a long-running undercover program, Operation Keyhole. Agents joined trainings and meetings, read about 15 terabytes of infiltrated Signal chats, used Customs and Border Protection Reaper drone footage, ran Patriot Act 314(a) financial queries on 29 subjects, and combined hosting, payment and data-broker records to identify one activist. Defense lawyers and former officials quoted by Wired compare it to the FBI's COINTELPRO; the government's position is set out in its charges.

Hacker News commenters focused on how much of the data was bought from brokers rather than obtained by warrant.

Patrick Stewart has died at 86. A statement on his official social media account said he died Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles after "a brief and poignant journey with Alzheimer's Disease and Lewy Body Dementia," CBC News reports. He was best known as Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation and as Professor Charles Xavier in the X-Men films, but his career began on stage: he grew up in Mirfield, Yorkshire, trained at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School and spent years with the Royal Shakespeare Company, later playing Broadway and the West End with Ian McKellen. He was a patron of Refuge, a UK charity for domestic abuse survivors, and during the COVID-19 lockdowns posted a Shakespeare sonnet a day online. The family asked for donations to Alzheimer's research and caregiver charities in lieu of flowers.

Marvel Studios, Hugh Jackman, Jonathan Frakes and William Shatner were among those paying tribute. It was the week's most-upvoted story on Hacker News, where the thread filled with commenters' memories of watching The Next Generation as children and of his lockdown sonnet readings.