Tech RSS Digest — 31 October – 1 November 2026

Most important

  1. The FBI blamed North Korea for the $6B+ Binance hack — and Binance started letting money out again. The agency attributes the heist to its TraderTraitor group, previously blamed for the ~$1.5B Bybit hack; the FBI says North Korea has stolen more than $6bn in this hack alone. Binance says it has covered 95% of the ~$6.3B stolen and resumed withdrawals in phases from Sunday.
  2. The market kept repricing the AI build-out as a credit risk. The cost of insuring against debt defaults at Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta and Oracle hit its highest level since 2021, and big tech buybacks fell 83% as AI spending eats the cash — the financing strain that dominated yesterday's digest is still the through-line.
  3. DeepSeek open-sourced a proactive coding agent. Super-Agent monitors group chats for coding issues and suggests solutions, released as a research prototype — a different shape of agent from the chatbots most labs are shipping.
  4. A ChatGPT share link could take over accounts. Researchers were paid $5K for a bug letting attackers run code in logged-in sessions of anyone who opened a hacker's ChatGPT share link. Simon Willison walks through how the takeover worked.
  5. Russia-linked hacktivists are causing physical damage, not just defacements. A look at a crude campaign over the past two years finds cyberattacks by Russia-linked groups that caused physical damage in NATO-aligned countries.
  6. Meta built a humanoid robot prototype with a Chinese firm in three months. Sources say Meta built the prototype with Fourier and is building a second, though Meta says it has no plans to sell the units.
  7. AWS capacity is largely sold out through 2027. InfoQ reports on-demand headroom is reserved and capacity is largely spoken for — while Amazon says AWS grew 39% and it will spend even more on AI in 2027, and Jassy predicts 6 to 8 AI models will be “good enough” for almost everything.
  8. Data centres became a political fight on several fronts at once. Hermantown approved a controversial Google data centre in a late-night meeting, Finnish police opened an investigation into Google's Muhos site, a judge let the NAACP lawsuit over xAI data centre pollution move forward, and TechCrunch notes data centres are now a midterm issue, even in Brooklyn.
  9. The M&A wave kept rolling. Guidewire agreed to acquire Hyperexponential for $1.7B in cash, Deepgram acquired Daily (and its open-source Pipecat voice framework) for an undisclosed sum, Lumaril raised a $66M Series A at a $400M valuation, and Shanghai-based NeuroXess raised ~$105M for brain-computer interface tech.
  10. ChatGPT and Codex usage limits are merging. OpenAI's help pages now describe combined ChatGPT and Codex limits, and GPT-5.6 Sol can reportedly beat Factorio on peaceful mode — a benchmark that says more about long-horizon planning than about games.

Other notable stories

Hacker News picks

The front page mixed the week's security fallout with lighter engineering fare: a tiny Pacific country rolls out universal basic income, OpenIDEA, the IDE rebuilt in Rust, why booking a Japanese train is so hard, the AI cost of JavaScript frameworks, leaking secrets from air-gapped computers via RAM radio signals, BBRouter, Ben Eater's 8-bit computer on 3D breadboards, a language model that lives in a boot sector, HackerTube, YouTube rebuilt from HN recommendations, a USB-C LTE modem that gives a computer a phone line, and Prospero, a new coding harness, and Norway makes shithouses great again.

Overall theme: The AI boom's bills kept coming due — in credit markets, in data-centre politics, and in the security incidents trailing the hype — while the industry's next bets (proactive agents, humanoids, brain-computer interfaces) got louder.

Sources: 141 items from AWS, Cyber, Software Updates, Tech Dev, Tech Leadership and Technology, plus Hacker News, published 31 October 07:10 – 1 November 07:10 Toronto time.