Binance loses $6.3B in record crypto hack

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Binance loses $6.3B in record crypto hack LINK

• Binance, the world's biggest cryptocurrency exchange, lost $6.3 billion to hackers in the largest crypto theft on record, with investigators at TRM Labs and Chainalysis saying they are highly confident North Korea carried out the attack.
• Most of the money vanished in about 20 minutes starting late yesterday, after what Binance said may have been a hacked engineer's laptop; the firm halted withdrawals, recovered roughly $3 billion, and pledged to cover every loss.
• Markets reacted fast as bitcoin fell to a six-week low near $76,000 and Binance's BNB token slid 5%, while stablecoin issuers Tether and Circle froze about $1.57 billion and $800 million respectively.

Reddit will require an account for most content LINK

• Reddit says it will make everyone sign in with a registered account to view the site, ending a two-decade run of open access and joining Facebook, LinkedIn, and X in requiring logins.
• CEO Steve Huffman says most unauthorized scraping of Reddit's data for AI training happens through logged-out pages, though the company will still license content to partners like Google and keep the front page viewable without an account.
• Reddit will test the logged-in rule in markets outside the US in the coming months, and Huffman stresses it won't ask for names or identities, only an actual login tied to an account.

OpenAI rebuilds its AI rulebook around five values LINK

• OpenAI reorganized its Model Spec, the public rulebook for how its models should act, around five core values: faithfulness to human intent, minimizing harm, honesty, human agency, and care.
• The update adds a chain of command ranking instructions by authority, red-line rules barring weapons and mass surveillance, and a "no other objectives" rule blocking GPT from chasing revenue, self-preservation, or dodging shutdown.
• OpenAI retired most detailed style guidance, now calls the model "GPT" instead of "the assistant," and invited public feedback, noting its models don't yet fully follow the Spec it describes.

Google's AI summaries are eating its own ad profits LINK

• Google said on Wednesday's earnings call that its "AI Mode" search responses are harder to make money from, cutting into the company's hugely profitable advertising business and causing it to miss revenue targets.
• Search advertising still brought in $63.4 billion in the third quarter of 2026, up 12% from a year earlier, but that fell about $1.6 billion short of Wall Street's forecasts of roughly 15% growth.
• Google's share price dropped as much as 13% yesterday, erasing over $500 billion in market value in its worst single-day loss ever, even as AI spending climbed to $51.3 billion in the third quarter.

GitHub scales up to survive AI code flood LINK

• GitHub is massively expanding its infrastructure after a flood of AI-generated code overwhelmed its servers, pushing monthly commits to 7.4 billion in September 2026, five times the volume from a year earlier, and causing repeated outages.
• The company's roadmap adds four million CPU cores and 160 petabytes of fast storage, while a redesign separating compute and storage aims for 35 times more throughput, plus extra capacity for its troubled GitHub Actions CI/CD platform.
• GitHub is also moving to a multi-region setup on Microsoft's Azure cloud, a migration it expects to finish early next year, after site availability sank to around 84 percent on May 7, prompting apologies from executives.

Polymarket halts trading after $2.5M hack LINK

• Prediction market Polymarket briefly stopped all trading yesterday after attackers broke into an outside provider and planted crypto-stealing code, with about $2.5 million in assets traced to a wallet believed to belong to the hacker.
• The malicious JavaScript was served through DebugBear, a website performance-monitoring service, and hijacked logged-in Polymarket sessions to sell users' prediction-market positions and move their cryptocurrency to an attacker-controlled wallet.
• Polymarket said it fixed the problem, resumed trading about an hour later at 3:05 p.m. ET, referred the breach to law enforcement, and promised to fully reimburse everyone affected, though it hasn't said how many users lost funds.

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Trending tools

Gologin Cloud Browser: runs real Chromium in the cloud with persistent sessions, unique fingerprints and built-in proxies for multi-accounting, scraping and AI agents. LINK

AfterLid: keeps Mac builds, downloads and local AI tasks running with the lid closed, and lets you check status from your phone LINK

Reset Alerts: texts you when OpenAI announces a Codex usage limit reset and when it's available, so you can use remaining quota before it refreshes. LINK

Kiwi: a free AI assistant on iMessage or WhatsApp that reads your calendar and email, flags tasks, and handles small jobs after your approval. LINK

Congress Trades: tracks stock transactions made by members of Congress, helping investors monitor political trading activity and spot potential market signals LINK

Helio: opens directly to today's solar generation from your inverter, with live power, historical curves, and savings tracking, deployable free on Vercel. LINK

Trending papers & reports

AI time savings look smaller once you count the mistakes that slip through, with the same developer data showing a 19% to 24% slowdown and review time capping one model's speedup at 3.6x. LINK

Automated bug hunters catch under 21% of the real bugs human maintainers eventually fix across a codebase, and the problems they flag are often valid but different from what developers actually prioritize. LINK

Human-AI oversight teams show that combining people and models to check AI outputs has real potential, yet in nearly 4,000 safety tasks tested, current blending methods barely beat the better source alone. LINK

Chatbot gender gap has closed, with similar shares of men and women now using AI chatbots after women saw a steeper increase since 2024, a Pew survey of 5,100 US adults finds. LINK

Anti-data center ads now make up 57% of political data center ads on Facebook and Instagram this October, up from a pro-data center lean in January, a Pew Research Center analysis finds. LINK

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