Alvaro Lopez Ortega / 2026-10-23 Briefing

Created Fri, 23 Oct 2026 13:13:02 +0000 Modified Fri, 23 Oct 2026 13:29:46 +0000
4110 Words

Musk’s reported $1B stake in Skydance raises influence questions at CBS and CNN. Nokia and ICEYE will help Ukraine build sovereign satellite comms amid Starshield restrictions. Iowa’s age-verification law prompted Pornhub and other adult sites to block users. Quest Diagnostics confirmed a breach exposing patient health data, while a scammer pleaded guilty to stealing U.S. military members’ benefits using stolen PII.

🤖 AI & Computing

Vulkan 1.4.366 Released With SMPTE ST 2094-50 HDR Support

Vulkan 1.4.366 has been released with specification fixes, clarifications, and the new VK_GOOGLE_hdr_SMPTE_ST_2094_50_metadata extension. Google engineers added SMPTE ST 2094-50 dynamic metadata support to the Vulkan swapchain. The HDR video standard, developed by Google, Apple, and NBC Universal, aims to improve the experience when mixing SDR and HDR content.

Move Slow and Fix Things (2024)

The author reflects on his childhood dream of running a U.S. startup and his later disillusionment with Silicon Valley’s hustle culture, VC-driven growth, and “move fast and break things” mentality. He advocates instead for small, bootstrapped, sustainable projects that prioritize privacy, long-term thinking, and fixing what is broken rather than chasing unicorn status.

The foolishness of “natural language programming” (1978)

The article argues that “natural language programming” is misguided because programming inherently requires the care and precision of formal symbolism, and high-level languages only partially reduce the risk of silly mistakes. It contends that shifting to natural-language interfaces would not simply redistribute labor but could increase work on both sides, making the assumption that it would simplify human life doubtful.

Software is slow because of bad design, not slow languages

Rewriting software in faster languages like C or Rust generally won’t produce major speedups, since most programs are I/O-bound and slow languages already delegate CPU-heavy work to optimized native libraries. Meaningful performance gains usually come from redesigning software rather than changing languages, with only limited exceptions.

Debunking “Faster than Rust”: Malicious Benchmarks in Tov

The article debunks Tov’s claims of outperforming Rust by noting that Tov transpiles TypeScript to C, making its benchmark results logically suspect. It examines the bigint_fib, dispatch, and map_insert benchmarks and argues they were maliciously crafted to slow Rust. Improved Rust programs matched or exceeded Tov’s performance.

Oncology AI startup Pathos raises $237M Series E at $3B valuation, up from $1.6B

Pathos AI, a precision oncology biotech using AI to develop cancer drugs, raised a $237 million Series E at a $3 billion post-money valuation. The round marks an increase from its $1.6 billion valuation in May 2025 and will help advance its oncology drug pipeline.

Anthropic, Hg to launch AI consultancy embedding experts in European firms by 2026

Anthropic and London-based private equity firm Hg have agreed to launch a consultancy by the end of 2026. The new company will embed AI consultants and engineers into European businesses and advise them on deploying AI.

PreussenElektra, Nvidia to assess turning Germany’s idle nuclear plants into data centers

PreussenElektra is working with Nvidia to assess whether Germany’s idle nuclear plant sites could be redeveloped as data centers. The evaluation comes as dismantling of the reactors continues, and the company did not provide further details.

🔒 Security & Privacy

French lawmakers propose tagging rioters with invisible markers to track them down later

French lawmakers have proposed using odorless, painless coded liquid markers that remain invisible on skin for weeks and can be detected under UV light to identify riot suspects after demonstrations disperse. Critics warn the markers could wrongly tag peaceful protesters, medics, and journalists, citing a prior case in which a freelance journalist was detained after a protest. The proposal is part of broader police efforts using drones, body cameras, social media videos, and camera footage to identify suspects.

Scammer admits to fraud scheme targeting US military personnel with stolen PII

Robert Wayne Boling Jr. pleaded guilty to wire fraud and money laundering for using stolen PII of thousands of U.S. service members and veterans to access accounts and steal money and benefits. He operated from the Philippines with a U.S. Army civilian records administrator who photographed personal data and used money mules. Sentencing is set for January 14, 2027, with a maximum penalty of 40 years in prison.

Quest Diagnostics confirms breach of lab systems, patient data now at risk

Quest Diagnostics confirmed that attackers accessed its Quanum Lab Services Manager system on October 21, exposing an unknown amount of patient health information and personal data. The company says core operations and other customer ordering systems were not affected, and clients can use workarounds such as paper requisitions or Quanum eLabs. Quest is still investigating the incident and determining which patients and providers were impacted.

Fortinet says patch now, details later, but experts warn of hacks before Nov 10 disclosure

Fortinet has released security patches for five products, including FortiOS, FortiManager, and FortiAnalyzer, and urged customers to immediately update internet-facing devices. Full CVE details and advisories will not be published until November 10, nearly three weeks after the patches. Security experts warned that attackers could reverse-engineer the patches and exploit the flaws before disclosure.

Is this the new cyber normal?

Two severe PHP remote code execution vulnerabilities, CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619, were found using frontier AI models and are estimated to affect up to 70% of the internet. Premature leaks and missed embargoes led to exploitation in the wild before patches were fully available, highlighting how AI can rapidly turn theoretical flaws into working exploits and raising concerns about a new cybersecurity normal.

Jared Kushner’s Hacked Phone Revealed His Secret Negotiations

The provided page returns a 404 error and contains no article content. The only available information is the headline claiming Jared Kushner’s hacked phone revealed secret negotiations.

UK threatens subsea cable saboteurs with 14 years behind bars

The UK is proposing tougher penalties of up to 14 years in prison for sabotaging subsea cables. Whitehall also wants new powers over telecoms operators amid rising alarm over Russian activity.

Beware the claw: Do you want to win the bunny or reboot Android?

The article highlights a classic arcade game that is outdone by a judgmental Bugdroid, posing a choice between winning a bunny or rebooting Android. It uses the setup to deliver a playful warning about the claw.

Anthropic, Theorem use Claude to prove assembly-level security across 100+ OSS libraries

Anthropic said it partnered with Theorem to use Claude to formally prove security properties at the RISC-V assembly level across more than 100 real-world open-source libraries. Anthropic described this as the first large-scale effort to apply AI-driven formal verification to production software at the assembly level, adding that Claude also discovered bugs that had eluded years of testing.

OpenAI suspected 3 fired researchers leaked designs to Ryan Greenblatt via disappearing Signal (WSJ)

OpenAI’s security team investigated three safety researchers suspected of leaking internal AI-model design information to external AI-safety researcher Ryan Greenblatt, including via Signal. Security officers examined their phones and found some had enabled disappearing messages in chats with him. The three were fired a week later, with one saying he was told it was a breach of trust for using unsanctioned channels.

🐧 Linux & Open Source

Linux 7.4 Brings Hibernation Improvement For Helping Meet Energy Certifications

Linux 7.4’s merged PCI/PCIe changes include a hibernation power-management improvement. The hibernate poweroff path now aligns with suspend behavior for PCI(e) bridges, allowing bridges with downstream devices to enter low-power states during hibernation. This is intended to improve power management and help meet energy certification criteria, particularly on designs with a discrete GPU.

FFmpeg 9.1 Preps For Release With APV Vulkan Encoder, NVIDIA Optical Flow FRUC

FFmpeg 9.1 is preparing for release with a new Vulkan encoder for the APV royalty-free video format and an NVIDIA Optical Flow-accelerated frame rate up-conversion filter, vf_fruc_vulkan. The release also includes H.265 Vulkan encode optimizations, an improved AAC encoder, H.264 data partitioning support, and various new encoders, decoders, and filters.

Linux 7.4 Introduces New Driver For The Nintendo Switch 2 - Thanks To Valve

Linux 7.4 has merged HID subsystem updates including preliminary support for Nintendo Switch 2 controllers, developed by Vicki Pfau on behalf of Valve. The initial driver supports input for Joy-Con 2, Pro Controller 2, and GameCube NSO controllers. The same pull also adds a driver for Pulsar gaming mice and other HID fixes.

Linux 7.4 Fixes AMD CPU TLB Size Reporting For Zen 5 & Newer

Linux 7.4 has merged a fix for AMD Zen 5 and newer CPUs that corrects under-reported TLB sizes by accounting for reporting in multiples of 32, ensuring accurate values via /proc/cpuinfo and similar interfaces. The kernel also includes AMD SEV improvements, including the RMPOPT optimization for SEV-protected confidential VMs on lightly loaded EPYC Zen 6 servers and a new sysfs interface for reporting AMD SEV status.

Linux 7.4 Workqueue Changes Bring A “10 To 100 Times Faster” Optimization

Linux 7.4’s workqueue changes include an optimization by Tejun Heo that makes flushing visit only queues used since the last flush instead of one per possible CPU. This yields 10 to 100 times faster idle flushes on large systems, with one 192-CPU test improving from 40k to 4.2M flushes per second, benefiting high-core servers and XFS log forces.

Remove pgrust: the entry is cheating

The pgrust entry was removed from the ClickBench benchmark after its v0.4-preview binary was found to embed hand-written kernels for each query and a cross-query cache of filter verdicts that let hot runs replay prior answers without touching data. Its public v0.3 source also contains hand-lowered plans for all 43 queries and metadata-answer shortcuts, and refuses trivially perturbed queries. These behaviors violate benchmark rules against query-result caches and tuning for specific queries.

ReactOS reaches major milestone with NTFS install support

ReactOS can now be installed directly onto an NTFS partition, eliminating the previous FAT32 requirement and bringing the project closer to beta. However, the new NTFS driver lacks caching, journaling, and security support and may contain undiscovered bugs.

Torvalds: AI is fine for competent devs, but spare us the ‘drive-by’ patches

Linus Torvalds has embraced AI-assisted Linux kernel development, drawing criticism even as kernel maintainers focus on code quality rather than whether AI was used. The article argues AI can be useful for competent developers but warns that careless AI-generated “drive-by” patches burden maintainers and add work.

Vendor-affiliated AI agent tech gets adopted by friendly, funded foundation

Four AI-agent projects are moving under the governance of a friendly, well-funded foundation. The shift places the vendor-affiliated technology under vendor-neutral oversight.

Interview with volunteer PHP maintainer Ondřej Surý on fixing two critical PHP flaws

The article profiles Ondřej Surý, a Czech volunteer who helps maintain PHP and automate its security patches alongside his day job. After two critical PHP vulnerabilities affecting roughly 70 percent of websites were disclosed before a patch was ready, Surý’s patch automation helped countless sites deploy fixes amid mass exploitation attempts. His volunteer work made him an unsung hero in the race to secure the internet.

📱 Consumer & Hardware

Samsung One UI 9 update leaves some phones stuck in setup mode or with a drained battery

Samsung’s One UI 9 update has left some Galaxy S26 Ultra users unable to complete setup due to an unstable system WebView on certain networks, while Galaxy S24 and S25 users report increased battery drain, including faster idle drain. Samsung has provided troubleshooting steps for the setup issue and advises affected users to book service appointments if battery problems persist.

Median product “lifespan” has fallen from ~4y down to ~1.5y

SaaSHub’s product graveyard shows the median product lifespan has fallen from about four years to roughly 1.5 years, with a sharp decline in 2026. The author attributes this to cheaper software production enabling more experiments that are quickly abandoned when they fail to find customers, making distribution and marketing more important. They expect product lifespans to continue shrinking.

Making a smart TV dumb and then smart

An unwanted webOS update prompted the author to develop replacement TV software, reaching a working v1 after a few weekends with help from four models. The setup lets the author’s daughter control the TV by speech while the author browses on the largest screen, using WebRTC and repurposed vendor buffering logic to reduce latency. Although ML models wrote the code, the author guided key architecture and UX decisions, freeing the TV from bloatware and making it personalized.

Intel leadership, CTO on AI chip demand, 10nm lessons, TSMC catch-up, Terafab (Dwarkesh)

Dwarkesh Patel toured Intel’s most advanced fab and interviewed its technical leadership about future chip technologies including gate-all-around transistors, backside power, CFETs, and hybrid bonding, producing animated explainers to illustrate them. The piece examines how the semiconductor industry can meet AI-driven demand, noting that AI compute has grown about 3x annually while Intel says it could only double leading-edge wafer production with today’s global stock of chipmaking tools. It also covers lessons from Intel’s 10nm node, whether Intel can catch up to TSMC, and concepts such as Terafab.

Oura again sues Ultrahuman to block US sales of Ring Pro

Oura has filed a new U.S. patent lawsuit against Ultrahuman, seeking damages and an injunction to block sales of Ultrahuman’s redesigned Ring Pro, alleging infringement of two patents—including one issued just two days before the filing. The suit comes months after the redesign helped Ultrahuman return to the U.S. market following an import ban. Ultrahuman says it will defend itself vigorously and that the Ring Pro remains available in the U.S.

🏛️ Business & Policy

Nokia and ICEYE signed a letter of intent with Ukraine’s Defense Ministry to explore secure, sovereign low Earth orbit satellite communications controlled by Ukraine. The move follows Ukrainian reports that Starshield restrictions disrupted drone operations and air defenses, while Trump reportedly asked Musk to lift the limits and both sides denied responsibility. Europe and Canada are developing satellite alternatives, but none yet match Starlink’s scale.

Iowa Pornhub and other porn sites are now blocked as the age verification rule takes effect

Iowa’s new age-verification law, effective July 1, 2026, requires sites with at least one-third pornographic or harmful-to-minors content to verify users’ ages. Major adult sites including Pornhub and YouPorn blocked Iowa users as of June 30, while other sites use age checks, raising privacy concerns; the article notes VPNs can legally be used to bypass geoblocks but users should consider terms of service and applicable laws.

Swedish government offices to ban ChatGPT and Claude

Sweden’s Government Offices will block ChatGPT and Claude on staff work computers from Monday to ensure employees use approved AI tools such as Microsoft Copilot, whose security has been tightened. The move follows concerns that unapproved AI services could pose information-security risks, with similar blocks introduced at agencies including Skatteverket and Sis while Kronofogden considers one. The report also notes that Trafikverket’s internal audit found widespread, risky use of open AI services.

France needs to read my paper

The author argues that confusion over rising French sovereign bond yields reflects a fiscal deadlock between unpopular spending cuts and growth-slowing tax increases. Citing their paper “Pinning the Wage to Scarcity and Technology,” they distinguish productive “good capitalism” from rent-seeking “bad capitalism” and call for taxing the latter. They propose a Land Value Tax paired with a Universal Basic Income as a way to resolve France’s fiscal impasse.

Elon Musk Just Threatened the Coming Democratic Majority

The article argues that David Ellison’s earlier pressure campaign against Democratic attorneys general previewed a broader pattern of oligarchical coercion. It cites Elon Musk’s threat against Democrats or institutions that would scrutinize him after reports of planned congressional oversight, noting his leverage through Starlink, SpaceX, political influence, and media. The piece frames the midterms as a test between democratic systems and Musk’s extraordinary power.

SK Hyper in talks with tech firms, backers to fund 15GW Korea data centers by 2035; first 5GW $350B

SK Hyper, an SK Telecom unit, is in talks with major tech firms and financial investors to finance 15 gigawatts of data center capacity in South Korea by 2035. CEO Chung Suk-geun said the first 5-gigawatt phase alone would require $350 billion, including equipment.

Chinese media: DeepSeek, MiniMax approved to open-source, deploy AI overseas under export controls

DeepSeek and MiniMax have received approval to deploy AI models overseas, according to a Chinese state media affiliate. The report said much of Chinese AI will remain free for export and addressed Beijing’s draft proposal to restrict certain AI tools and services, including large language models and agents.

SK Hynix’s Solidigm halts US IPO review to fund new US chip fab, cites market conditions

SK Hynix said its SSD subsidiary Solidigm has halted a review of a potential U.S. IPO intended to fund a new U.S. chip fab, citing market conditions and share-price trends. SK Hynix said the decision does not reflect any change in Solidigm’s growth prospects, amid investor caution over AI valuations despite strong AI hardware demand.

Treasury proposes tighter investment rules for AI, supercomputing in China, Russia, other concerns

The provided content is an access notice requiring JavaScript and cookies, not a news article. No substantive details about the US Treasury’s proposed investment restrictions are available to summarize.

🌐 Media & Culture

Musk’s $1B stake at Skydance raises questions for CNN

Elon Musk has reportedly invested $1 billion in Skydance, the newly combined media company that owns CBS and CNN, though neither Musk nor Skydance has commented. Based on Skydance’s roughly $39 billion market value, the stake could be about 2.6%, adding to questions about billionaire influence in major news organizations.

How to watch Gold Coast 500 online for free

The 2026 Boost Mobile Gold Coast 500 runs October 23–25, 2026, on the streets of Surfers Paradise. Australian viewers can watch selected Saturday and Sunday coverage free on Seven/7plus, while full practice, qualifying, and race coverage requires Kayo Sports or Foxtel/Fox Sports; New Zealand uses Sky Sport and international fans can use SuperView. 7plus is geo-restricted to Australia and does not support VPN use, though a VPN may help Australian travelers access it.

Job Loss and Cortisone Mania

The author was laid off during a company restructuring and soon after became ill, triggering an autoimmune condition that caused weeks of exhaustion and required adjusted medication. Cortisone treatment rapidly relieved symptoms but produced restlessness and manic energy, which they channeled into cleaning, organizing, and completing neglected tasks. The piece describes this period as both disorienting and unexpectedly clarifying as they searched for meaning while unemployed.

The Rise and Fall of Jev

The article argues that the hype around Jev, a new general-purpose classifier/decision model, exposes the AI industry’s manipulative marketing and lack of real innovation. It says Jev’s core idea is not new, it lacks reasoning and multimodal capabilities, and its “no hallucination” claim only means outputs match a schema. Although Jev’s hype is fading, decision models are gaining attention, but major high-impact problems remain unsolved after four years of incremental AI progress.

Disney Raising Prices Days After Confirming Ads Will Now Show Up on Every Tier

Disney is raising prices days after confirming that ads will now appear on every Disney+ tier, including premium. In the first half of 2026, no Disney+ original made Nielsen’s Top 20 or weekly Top 10 and Disney+ won no main-ceremony Emmys, while rivals like Stranger Things and The Pitt dominated. Internal Luminate data show top Disney+ originals such as Daredevil: Born Again and Percy Jackson reached dedicated but not mass audiences.

This I Believe (1952)

In this 1952 essay, Robert A. Heinlein expresses faith in his neighbors, townspeople, and fellow citizens despite their faults, citing everyday examples of charity and decency such as Father Michael, Doc, and a town willing to feed the hungry. He argues that for every criminal there are thousands of honest, kindly people, and he affirms his belief in the honesty of workers and politicians and in humanity’s courage, decency, and ultimate endurance.

BOFH: I talked to Claude and he says you’re an idiot

This tech news roundup covers Linus Torvalds’ views on AI-assisted coding, Nvidia’s push for more open models and faster datacenter deployments, and security warnings about Signal phishing and a SharePoint zero-day. It also highlights FOSS updates including NetBSD’s AI-free positioning, Ubuntu’s new beta, and Firefox’s redesign.

Windows said modem worked fine. That unmistakable scorched electronics smell suggested otherwise

Windows reported that the modem was working fine, but the unmistakable smell of scorched electronics indicated hardware damage. The tech-support anecdote highlights how software diagnostics can miss obvious physical faults.

What are you doing this weekend?

The article invites readers to share their weekend plans and to ask for help or feedback. It also emphasizes that it is perfectly acceptable to do nothing at all over the weekend.