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October 22, 2026, 2:25 PM
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Lily Hay Newman / Wired:
AWS analysts say that at least one actor attempted to exploit the PHP2Shell vulnerabilities on October 17, four days before their public disclosure and patching  —  Amazon Web Services logged attempts to leverage the internet-melting PHP2Shell bugs four days ago.  They're now being “broadly exploited” across the internet.
Matthew Prince / @eastdakota:
Cloudflare's Matthew Prince says PHP2Shell exploit attempts on its network rose from thousands in the 10 hours before the disclosure to millions afterward  —  Some stats on #php2shell. In the 10 hours before it was publicly announced, across the @Cloudflare network we saw thousands of attempts to exploit it. That jumped to tens of thousands in the 45 minutes post announcement, hundreds of thousands within 2 hours, and millions now.
Wired:
The PHP Foundation says its patches for the RCE vulnerabilities are limited to PHP 8.2 and newer, leaving legacy deployments dependent on third-party vendors
Abhirami G / Reuters:
eMudhra says it will exit the SSL/TLS certificate business, 1% of its revenue, after its TLS certificates with private keys of just 3 to 8 bits were compromised  —  Indian digital trust services provider eMudhra (EMUD.NS) on Thursday said it would voluntarily withdraw from the global SSL/TLS …
Madison Mills / Axios:
Sources: US banks are restricting third-party AI agents from accessing customer accounts, after some agents appeared to act independently of users' instructions  —  Major U.S. banks are detecting unauthorized third-party AI agents operating inside customer accounts, with some agents attempting …
Rohan Goswami / Semafor:
Sources: Elon Musk has invested ~$1B in Ellisons' Skydance; in 2022, David Ellison's father, Larry Ellison, invested $1B in Musk's deal to take Twitter private  —  Elon Musk has invested roughly $1 billion in Skydance, according to people familiar with the matter, providing …
New York Times:
Ukraine says the abrupt throttling of US-funded Starshield grounded dozens of drones mid-flight, costing one unit $1M+, and halted some strikes for three days
AJ Vicens / Reuters:
Microsoft says China-linked hackers used AI penetration testing tool ARTEX to compromise ConnectWise as part of a campaign targeting hundreds of organizations  —  A Chinese state-aligned hacking group used an AI-driven penetration testing tool to compromise IT services firm ConnectWise as part …
Rebecca Torrence / Bloomberg:
Warp Sciences, founded by former OpenAI CPO Kevin Weil to speed up drug development using AI, emerges from stealth with $215M at an $865M post-money valuation  —  Kevin Weil, the former OpenAI executive who led the ChatGPT maker's AI-for-science efforts, is launching a new startup aimed …
More: Crypto Briefing.  X: @dyett, @kevinweil, and @kevinweil.  LinkedIn: Rebecca Torrence
Anzar Mehraj / Reuters:
METR says a pilot test of OpenAI's monitoring system found vulnerabilities, including an exploit that could have let AI agents hide hundreds of recent actions  —  AI safety research group METR said on Thursday a pilot exercise to stress-test OpenAI's internal monitoring system uncovered several …
Emily Mullin / Wired:
Hugging Face releases Carbon-X, an open-weight, 14B-parameter decoder-only model trained on 300B tokens that lets users query DNA sequences via natural language  —  The new open-source model speaks the language of DNA and can help researchers understand the effects of any changes on gene activity and health.
Lulu Yilun Chen / Bloomberg:
Sources: DeepSeek raised ~$15B in its latest fundraising round, one of China's largest ever, with CATL and Tencent among the biggest contributors  —  The Chinese AI pioneer DeepSeek has raised about 100 billion yuan ($15 billion) in its latest fundraising round, one of the country's largest ever …
New York Times:
US SEC filings show how Meta restructured its stock to shield Mark Zuckerberg from California's proposed wealth tax, after he said he'd sell his Palo Alto home  —  The billionaire told Meta's board that he planned to list his Silicon Valley home for sale.  The company remade its stock structure …
Rhea Rose Abraham / Reuters:
Epic says “Fortnite is coming back to the App Store in Australia” on Thursday after an Australian federal ruled in an antitrust case that Apple must open up iOS  —  Epic Games said its shooter title “Fortnite” will return to Apple's (AAPL.O) App Store in Australia on Thursday …
Jay Peters / The Verge:
The Browser Company plans to shut down its Arc browser on December 22, as it shifts attention to the AI-focused Dia browser  —  New feature development for the innovative web browser ended last year.  Now The Browser Company is telling users to try Dia, Arc's replacement.
Emma Roth / The Verge:
Apple is rolling out a new “Made for iPhone Duo” badge in the App Store, and touts Netflix, Prime Video, Zoom, Word, and Outlook as Duo-optimized apps at launch  —  Many apps, including Netflix, Microsoft Word, and Zoom, are taking advantage of the Duo's extra screen real estate.
John Gruber / Daring Fireball:
iPhone Duo review: the outer device is by far the worst iPhone Apple has ever made, while the inner device is a splendid tablet with a UI that bests the iPad's
Elias Schisgall / Wall Street Journal:
1Password passes $500M in ARR, up from $400M in November 2025, driven by enterprise AI coding assistants and agents, and launches 1Password for Agents  —  And the free cash flow margin is in the double digits amid an explosion in coding assistants and agents in enterprise settings
Victoria Craw / Washington Post:
President Trump says he called Sundar Pichai to ask to rename the Atlantic Ocean in Google Maps, but that he would “probably pass” following Pichai's pushback  —  President Donald Trump said he called Google's Sundar Pichai to discuss renaming the Atlantic Ocean, but would …
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Walmart unveils Agent Gateway, an MCP server that lets AI agents shop on its site, and Agent Profiles that authorize agents and track their purchases separately  —  Walmart is embracing agentic commerce with the launch of its own Agent Gateway to manage transactions and other new features aimed …
Claude:
Anthropic debuts Claude Duet, a proactive agent app for iOS, Android, and the web that works in the background, in research preview for US Pro and Max users  —  A research preview is available by waitlist today, starting with US Pro and Max subscribers.  —  Join the waitlist … ShareCopy link
Todd Bishop / GeekWire:
Microsoft says it is closing The Garage, which for 17 years gave employees worldwide space and tools for side projects and ran the company's Global Hackathon  —  Microsoft is winding down The Garage as a companywide program, ending a 17-year run for the effort that gave employees space …
More: The Verge
William Shaw / Bloomberg:
Barclays plans to cut 5,000 jobs, or ~5% of its workforce, by the end of 2026 as part of AI-driven cost cutting, with ~60% affecting support and developer roles  —  Barclays to Cut 5,000 Jobs as AI Starts to Create Efficiency  —  Video Player is loading.  —  Unmute  —  Current Time 0:00 Loaded: 69.77% Playback Rate
Lauren Feiner / The Verge:
Filings: Nvidia, Anthropic, and OpenAI had their highest-spending lobbying quarter between July and September, spending $2.2M, $2.1M, and $1.5M, respectively  —  Collectively, they spent nearly $6 million around cybersecurity, child safety, and more. … It was a busy summer for AI lobbyists.
Will Maddox / Axios:
Nirva, which plans to launch a wearable AI personal companion that offers relationship advice and more, raised $25M, bringing its total funding to $33M  —  Nirva, a startup developing wearable AI personal companions, raised $25 million ahead of its November product launch, CEO Wei Lyu tells Axios Pro exclusively.
Isabella Ward / Wired:
Meta reports 18% YoY ad revenue growth in Europe for Q3, down from ~40% in Q1 and 24% in Q2, lagging the US and Canada, after rolling out Less Personalized Ads  —  An earnings briefing on Wednesday revealed ad revenue has slowed since the European Union introduced the Less Personalized Ads models at the beginning of this year.
Rocket Drew / The Information:
Atlanta-based Tractian, which uses AI and sensors to predict machine failures and recommend maintenance plans, raised a $130M Series D at a $1.4B valuation  —  Tractian, a 7-year-old physical AI startup based in Atlanta, Georgia, has raised $130 million at a valuation of $1.4 billion …
Maria Diaz / ZDNET:
Amazon rebrands Kindle Unlimited as Kindle+ and expands access to audiobooks, including titles narrated by AI  —  Unlike narrated audiobooks from Audible and other providers, the audiobooks created with Virtual Voice in Kindle+ will instead be narrated by AI.  —  ZDNET's key takeaways

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From Mediagazer

Associated Press:
A federal judge orders Trump to sit for a deposition in his defamation lawsuit against the BBC by December 11, or face sanctions up to dismissal of the lawsuit

Dominick Mastrangelo / The Hill:
Politico corrects a story to say Chief of Staff Susie Wiles had no direct role in setting up Katie Zacharia's Sean Hannity interview, after a White House threat

Ruth Graham / New York Times:
Sources: Christianity Today lost 50%+ of its 79 staff to layoffs or resignations, amid complaints its new leadership is pushing back on independent journalism

More News

Earlier Picks

Foreign Affairs:
How the US and China are building rival “AI empires” to extend their power over innovation, production, science, culture, and, ultimately, advanced thought
Jacob Cooper / Railway Blog:
Cloud provider Railway says an unauthorized party may have accessed customers' encrypted environment variables and, for some, obtained the decrypted contents
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