Khan's Tech Briefing

Tech Briefing — November 7, 2026

Sat, 07 Nov 2026 05:00:00 -0600

OpenAI has reportedly raised another eleven billion dollars at a valuation of one point two five trillion dollars, as rival Anthropic moves toward an IPO.

Voters weighed in on forty one data center ballot measures this week, and in all but one, the majority backed more restrictions on development.

Chainalysis says hackers stole credentials and tokens for all of its customers in an attack that included AI agents; hundreds of exposed Artex hacking tool servers were also found online.

Nvidia hardware worth eleven point four million dollars vanished in transit between Oakland and Texas, with no arrests two months on.

The FAA is finally moving off floppy disks, targeting floppy-free information display systems at four hundred thirty five sites by the end of 2028.

A developer ended a lucrative Roku screensaver deal over the Fox acquisition, saying, quote, I can't be part of the Fox world.

Tech Briefing — November 6, 2026

Fri, 06 Nov 2026 05:00:00 -0600

Tesla is winding down Cybertruck production around the middle of next year to make room for increased Cybercab output, according to an X post from Elon Musk.

The New York Times Company is reportedly trying to buy Letterboxd for three hundred thirty million dollars; the Times declined to comment on the Times' story.

Meta, Google and TikTok are suing California's attorney general over a state law that would restrict social media access for children under sixteen.

Mark Cuban says Facebook knowingly runs AI deepfake scam ads, pointing to documents indicating sixteen billion dollars in fraud revenue.

At least ten local governments have moved to drop Flock's surveillance cameras since summer, citing privacy, data-sharing and procurement concerns.

Sony is reviving the original Walkman headphones with USB-C and orange ear cushions, while Blue Origin says its new rocket engine performs better at a quarter of the cost.

Tech Briefing — November 5, 2026

Thu, 05 Nov 2026 05:00:00 -0600

The Verge reports Big Tech is still pouring record sums into AI data centers, with no sign the spending stops or the promised returns arrive.

A Google data center in London lost power in October and its generators never kicked in, blamed on a bad configuration in the plant's controllers.

Apple will begin scanning iCloud public share links for what it calls 'harmful content,' a term it has not defined.

Hackers used flaws in both iOS and Android to infect phones, and researchers suspect a Kremlin-sponsored group targeting diplomats.

Hours after Waymo left its app, Uber said it alone can make robotaxis pay; only four people booked a ride with an AI agent in its busiest week.

Quick hits: Nintendo's Switch 2 sales fell almost forty percent after a price increase, VMware shipped vSphere Express for up to 128 cores, and Snap passed thirty million paid subscribers.

Tech Briefing — November 4, 2026

Wed, 04 Nov 2026 05:00:00 -0600

Binance says attackers used fake job interviews to carry out a six point three billion dollar crypto heist, and the exchange attributes the operation to North Korea.

AMD says it is on track to overtake Intel as the largest x86 vendor, with its CEO saying supply chains can absorb surging data center and A I demand.

Microsoft is pitching A I PCs while RAM prices climb, and is also improving Windows 11 performance on 8 gigabyte machines.

Data center builders are turning to old jet engines as grid connections and new turbines take years to arrive.

Canva is cutting twenty two percent of staff in a reorganization that nods to the pace of technological change.

Anthropic is building FlashProve, a system meant to let anyone verify which model produced a given A I response.

Tech Briefing — November 3, 2026

Tue, 03 Nov 2026 05:00:00 -0600

Anthropic's revised IPO filing warns its compute tab could top one trillion dollars while third quarter revenue nears seventeen billion dollars, and says growth at that pace is unlikely to continue.

Gartner reckons open models can handle about ninety percent of agentic work at a twentieth the cost of a frontier large language model, arguing that the harness around the model is where the value sits.

Raspberry Pi raised prices again: a memory crunch pushed the 16GB Pi 5 to three hundred eighty-five dollars, more than triple its launch price, just a month after the last increase.

An EU court rejected Broadcom's bid to keep confidential the names of cloud providers backing CISPE's challenge to the VMware merger approval, while an open source replacement for a hidden VMware migration tool is reportedly in production at scale.

Apple will force developers to declare whether an app enables dating so it can apply the right age rating, and its watchOS 27 beta is testing Siri Recap and Live Rewind.

A Kyiv startup's pocket-sized, ten-ounce receiver lets Ukrainian troops watch Russian drone video feeds, though moves toward digital and A I guided drones could shorten that advantage.

Tech Briefing — November 2, 2026

Mon, 02 Nov 2026 05:00:00 -0600

Microsoft's cash reserves are larger than ever, and The Register frames the story around the gap between record profits and what flows back to the engineers who built the business.

Linus Torvalds says the Linux kernel is out of its stabilization phase and now has a much healthier model for AI contributions, though machine-made patches often get rewritten.

India floats a national AI plan built on the principle that the model travels to the data rather than the data traveling to the model, aiming for local AI without giving Big Tech open access.

OpenAI may rebrand its data centers as AI compute campuses, and Anthropic updated Claude to stop it from recreating existing video games.

In security and commerce: North Korea named as the source of the Binance hack, brake pedals breaking on Huawei-made cars, and Google reporting softer Asian ad spend tied to Europe's customs changes.

Lighter fare: the coder behind Google's Pac-Man clone explains how the game broke Firefox, plus Wikihack and OccupySaaS trending on Hacker News.

Tech Briefing — November 1, 2026

Sun, 01 Nov 2026 05:00:00 -0600

A use-after-free flaw in the Linux kernel's IPv4 TCP stack is out as CVE-2026-98432 with a CVSS score of 9.8, the ceiling of the critical range.

Openreach says the UK's legacy public switched telephone network shuts off in one hundred days, on January 31, 2027, with no extensions.

Anthropic users report being blocked for anything touching training larger models, drawing hundreds of comments on Hacker News.

Data centers are now a midterm issue even in Brooklyn, and a judge will let the NAACP's Clean Air Act lawsuit against xAI proceed.

HackerTube, a YouTube-style interface over 6,454 videos pulled from 39,834 Hacker News comments, is the day's fun detour.

In quick hits: a team of five Qwen3.8-27B models reportedly beats Fable 5 on LiveCodeBench Hard, and Apple's CEO says the company doesn't want to ship AI for AI's sake.

Tech Briefing — October 31, 2026

Sat, 31 Oct 2026 05:00:00 -0500

Cracks are showing in the AI spending boom as debt piles up, cash flow stays negative, and investors grow skeptical.

Nvidia is reportedly weighing whether to cosign the loan for Nscale's AI data center in West Virginia, a sign of how nervous the money has gotten.

Anthropic is expected to land a high junk credit rating after its IPO, and Intel's stock crash knocked twelve billion dollars off the US government's stake.

Scribd is notifying users of a security incident covering Scribd, SlideShare, Everand, and Fable; Anthropic's VS Code extension on Cursor was backdoored for nearly twelve hours.

Applebee's exposed customer data via a hardcoded database password, while Salesforce reportedly agreed to pay three hundred seventy five million dollars for defense tech startup Rune.

Lighter notes: tributes to Patrick Stewart and a Next Generation episode guessing game, plus Bluesky's new moderation inbox.

Tech Briefing — October 30, 2026

Fri, 30 Oct 2026 05:00:00 -0500

Binance was hacked for an estimated six point three billion dollars, the largest crypto theft on record, and paused withdrawals; reporting links the breach to an engineer's laptop.

Intel lost roughly a quarter of its market value after a PC chip plunge, even as its CEO predicts a datacenter processor boom the company may struggle to supply.

Amazon's AWS is installing an AI accelerator about every fourteen seconds and chasing one trillion dollars in revenue, but the quarter brought a two point four billion dollar negative free cash flow.

General Motors will pay two hundred twenty million dollars to settle a multi-state privacy suit from thirty-five attorneys general over its Smart Driver program.

Reddit is heading toward a logged-in-only experience as search traffic falls, while fan fiction site Archive of Our Own could be offline for up to four weeks after a security incident.

Also: Waymo taps Toyota for robotaxis in Japan and the U.K., Sony plans a Mouthwashing film, and researchers found unpatched bugs in five AI developer tools.

Tech Briefing — October 29, 2026

Thu, 29 Oct 2026 05:00:00 -0500

Microsoft posts its tenth straight record quarter with ninety-two point three billion dollars in revenue, and discloses Azure's dollar revenue for the first time at thirty-three point two billion.

Microsoft also says it booked ten billion dollars in revenue from its commercial arrangements with OpenAI, underscoring how financially tangled the partnership remains.

Google's Gemini 4 Carbon claims top benchmark scores in coding and cybersecurity and undercuts Claude on price, but Google is reportedly struggling to make AI Mode searches pay.

A hacktivist group leaked details of more than forty-one thousand Homeland Security personnel, while GitLab deals with attempted exploitation of CVE-2026-97229.

Stack Overflow now gets fewer than one thousand questions a month, a stark marker of where developers go for answers.

In lighter news, Fujifilm will increase tape production capacity fivefold because of AI, and an astronomer's software flagged a possible dwarf planet so rare he assumed it was a bug.