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Most important

1. Binance suffered what looks like the largest crypto theft ever — about $6.3B. TRM Labs attributes the hack to North Korea-based TraderTraitor, which drained ~$6.36B from Binance wallets across 10 blockchains, mostly in ~20 minutes; Binance pledged to cover all losses and said its initial investigation points to a compromised DevOps laptop, while Tether froze 1.5B+ USDT and Circle froze 800M+ USDC. Binance temporarily suspended all deposits and withdrawals during the investigation.
2. Amazon closed a rough week for AI spending with a $42.4B cash burn. Q3 revenue rose 12% to $201.9B and AWS grew 39% to $45.98B, but $77B+ of property and equipment spending in the quarter produced a free cash outflow of $42.4B, and AMZN dropped 8%+ after hours. Andy Jassy still says AWS will be a $1T business — but first, it will spend big.
3. DoorDash confirmed its ~$17B acquisition of Instacart. The deal pays $65 per share, a 26% premium to Instacart's 22 October close, uniting the two biggest US delivery platforms — the deal yesterday's digest had flagged as imminent.
4. China-linked hackers used an AI tool to hit 200+ organisations in 11 days. CrowdStrike reports the attackers used AI tool ARTEX with a DeepSeek LLM and another model, compromising at least nine targets — a concrete case of AI-accelerated intrusion, not just AI-written phishing.
5. Intel and Alphabet both got punished for the AI transition. Intel reported Q3 revenue up 21% to $16.5B but forecast Q4 below estimates, with shares down 23%+ as the memory shortage drags its PC outlook; Alphabet shares fell 12% after Google said AI Mode searches earn less, and Google Search is now less than half of Alphabet's revenue.
6. Microsoft went back to the bond market to fund AI capex. It is seeking $25B+ in its first US investment-grade bond sale since 2017, while Nadella says Copilot daily users grew five times in a year — and Microsoft retired Azure Deployment Environments with no replacement product.
7. Anthropic's S-1 warned it heavily depends on TSMC chips made in Taiwan. The filing flags risks from “potential disruption” amid geopolitical tensions with China; separately, Anthropic is SpaceX's single largest customer, accounting for 34.5% of Q3 revenue, surpassing the US government.
8. OpenAI rewrote its AI rulebook. The updated Model Spec is organised around five values — faithfulness to human intent, harm minimisation, honesty and transparency, human agency, and care — while Sam Altman says OpenAI will point its robots at building data centres, and almost scrapped token pricing before backing off.
9. The security list kept growing. A Linux TCP use-after-free, CVE-2026-98432, AWS issued a bulletin for incorrect authorisation in the Private CA Connector for Kubernetes (CVE-2026-119115), Anthropic-themed phishing emails bypassed top security tools, fan-fiction site AO3 could be offline for up to 4 weeks after a security incident, and Polymarket resumed trading after a hack via third-party provider DebugBear, saying it will reimburse affected traders.
10. Reddit will force users to log in. The shift, in response to AI scraping, comes as Q3 revenue rose 53% to $895M but DAUq missed estimates and shares dropped 17%+; meanwhile Discord chats are hitting Google search, and Google and Meta are resisting broad ICE demands for user data.

Other notable stories

• Twilio reported Q3 revenue up 20% to $1.56B but expects slower Q4 growth, sending shares down 15%+; Pinterest missed on revenue and Q4 guidance; Roblox reported bookings down 12% and DAUs down 9%; Coinbase posted its first profit in a year on unrealised crypto gains; SanDisk reported revenue up 378% to $11B and announced an 8-for-1 stock split.
• Waymo tapped Toyota to supply robotaxis for Japan and the U.K.; Rivian's R2 is already its best-selling vehicle and its VW joint venture expanded to include an AI assistant; GM reached a $220M settlement over selling drivers' private data.
• Nscale's 2,250-acre, 8GW Monarch campus in West Virginia has been hit by construction issues, local opposition, and financing risks, even as Nvidia is in talks to provide billions in credit guarantees for a 460MW Nscale data centre Anthropic plans to use; DeepSeek doubled its latest round's size on surging black-market Blackwell chip prices; Cohere raised a record C$7bn Series E backed by Canada and Nvidia.
• Meta quietly launched Style Sketch, an AI fashion app, in Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand; Instagram is offering select creators $50K to $500K to cross-post long-form YouTube content; senators launched an inquiry into Meta's 'pervert glasses'; the FTC and eight states sued Toast over hidden fees and hard-to-cancel plans.
• Google adopted DPoP to strengthen OAuth 2.0 against token theft and replay attacks; Spotify aims to launch an AI remix and covers product in Q1 2027 for ~$5 per month, pending licensing deals; Kalshi raised $1B at a $40B valuation while Utah filed 14 criminal charges against it.
• The Pentagon is treating freezer malfunctions across 6+ military bases as a suspected cyberattack; an Accenture staffer's Claude agent ran on a DOD network for two months and appears to have sent info to a third-party site; Pico CSS is no longer maintained; Mistral released the weights of Mistral Large 4.
• AWS items in the window: Aurora post-quantum TLS key exchange, MSK Connect plugin and worker configuration updates, RDS for Oracle and SQL Server storage autoscaling on additional volumes, Marketplace subsidiary-account authorisation, and the Private CA Connector bulletin above.

Hacker News picks

The front page mixed craft with unease: how do you take a picture of a black hole?, I returned my iPhone Duo, Pico CSS is no longer maintained, a Linux TCP use-after-free and its patch validation, open-weight AI models exploiting the patch gap, AI agent swarms run in Minecraft and Mindustry, a tiny world model running games on a Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W, DOOM turned into a transformer, Mistral Large 4 weights released, the importance of communities around software, and an Ask HN wondering are you tired too in this AI era?

Overall theme: The AI spending bill came due in the same window as the biggest crypto heist on record — Amazon's $42.4B cash outflow and Microsoft's return to the bond market priced the build-out, while the $6.3B Binance hack and an AI-driven intrusion campaign showed the other side of the same technology, and the delivery market consolidated with DoorDash swallowing Instacart.

Sources: 303 items from AWS, Cyber, Software Updates, Tech Dev, Tech Leadership and Technology, plus Hacker News, published 29 October 07:00 – 30 October 07:05 Toronto time.