First things first
Big tech feels a little less shiny today: surveillance leaks, account takedowns, and a phone bug that can drop emergency calls are a reminder that software has real-world stakes. Even the AI stories have a human edge, from awkward election answers to agents missing consequential details.
Meanwhile, oddball experiments keep rolling, from a computer inside an AI model to CNC-carved stonework. Classic tools endure, even as old online habits fade.
The top 6
Court records in a Minnesota conspiracy case reveal ICE conducted extensive surveillance of left-wing activists, including monitoring Signal chats and gathering reports, recordings, and photographs. Defense attorneys say the operation, authorized under NSPM 7, echoes the FBI’s COINTELPRO campaigns and may be unconstitutional.
Google introduced Gemini 4 Carbon, a new model in its Gemini lineup. The announcement describes the model and its capabilities.
Apple’s MacBook Pro features a tandem OLED PROLED XDR display with touch gestures, Dynamic Island, and up to 2,000 nits of peak brightness. It includes M5 Pro or M5 Max chips, a redesigned audio and thermal system, and up to 24 hours of battery life.
A researcher crawled 10,000 websites to collect canvas fingerprints and traced an unusual, elaborate rendering to a script hosted by Servicepipe. They reverse-engineered the script to investigate its behavior and who was behind it.
A Kentucky man received a religious exemption from using AI, described as the first such exemption granted to a humanist. The exemption treats his humanist beliefs as grounds for opting out of AI use.
Stack Overflow now receives fewer than 1,000 questions per month. The figure reflects a sharp decline in new questions on the programming Q&A site.
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Quote of the day
All our dreams can come true if we have the courage to pursue them.
Walt Disney
Also big today
Emacs debuted at MIT in 1976, bringing programmers a full-screen editor that made code easier to view and change. Its ideas spread across operating systems and helped shape the free software movement and GNU/Linux.
Qwenputer embeds a deterministic RISC-V CPU in Qwen3.5 4B’s weights, using its Gated DeltaNet state as RAM to run arithmetic and code without external tools. The experiment also adds in-model file storage and is available with its code on Hugging Face and GitHub.
CNC machines use computer-guided diamond tools to carve detailed Gothic stonework in days instead of months. Carmelite monks use the technology to make ornate church construction faster and more accessible to people with computer skills.
A GitHub gist claims Claude Code spends 15-20% of tokens generating short status updates by repeatedly sending background agents’ full transcripts to a model. It offers a Bun preload script to disable those summaries, but warns updates can undo the workaround.
A leak of DHS records exposed personal and workplace details for more than 41,000 employees and contractors, including undercover ICE agents and information about surveillance programs. Distributed Denial of Secrets published the data, while Okta said it had no evidence its systems were breached.
AlpineBSD is a work-in-progress operating system combining the NetBSD kernel with an Alpine Linux-inspired userspace, apk-tools, BusyBox, and s6. It aims to minimize AI-generated software and currently has no installer, with hardware support limited by NetBSD.
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Did you hear about the cheese factory that exploded?
There was nothing left but de-brie.
Worth a look
Two high-speed trains collided near Toledo, Spain, causing a deadly crash. Aerial footage shows wreckage at the scene.
Surge AI’s DAYJOB: Tax benchmark tests agents on 50 professional tax assignments using 1,789 files, measuring research, judgment, and finished work - not just calculations. In one case, an agent missed a deadline that could cost a client a home-sale tax break, showing how agents can overlook consequential issues.
The r/Seattle moderators say archive.today links inject malware and have banned the site from the subreddit. The linked Reddit page is blocked unless visitors log in or use a developer token.
Meta suspended the No Kings Coalition’s Instagram account during a nationwide campaign urging voters to cast ballots early, disrupting organizers for several hours. Meta first blamed high activity, then said its systems flagged software using Claude AI, and acknowledged the suspension was an error without providing a clear technical explanation.
Formlabs’ Form Studio 1 Founders Edition is an MSLA resin 3D printer with a 7.9 × 4.9 × 9.3-inch build volume and support for Formlabs or third-party materials. The listed price is $749 before sales tax, despite the title’s $699 figure.
Craig Hockenberry describes his cancer treatment, including six weeks of spinal methotrexate injections that caused severe headaches and later chemotherapy infusions. The treatment changed his sense of taste, though he avoided nausea and other stomach problems.
Song of the day
Deep cuts
Attackers attempted to exploit critical GitLab vulnerability CVE-2026-97229 on Alpine Linux’s instance, crashing worker processes, but Alpine found no evidence of successful access or tampering. Alpine rebuilt the instance, reset passwords, and warns that self-managed GitLab deployments also need patched Ruby - not just a GitLab upgrade.
Cursor launched the Agent SDK, a framework for building custom agents in code and deploying them to Cursor’s infrastructure. Agents can respond to events such as pull requests, coordinate specialized agents, and use built-in evaluations and event replay.
Cuba will skip its scheduled clock change on November 1, 2026, and remain on daylight saving time. The country plans to change its clocks again in 2027.
Google AI Mode sometimes avoids directly saying Joe Biden won the 2020 US presidential election, instead directing users to official sources. Its responses vary across users and election years, while answers become more direct when asked outside the US.
A malformed WAP Push SMS can remotely and silently crash Android’s phone process, dropping active calls - including emergency calls - and interrupting cellular service. The vulnerability stems from an unchecked integer conversion; the site says Google classified it as non-security and will not fix it.
A Tesla Semi caught fire on I-880 in Hayward without a crash, leaving its driver unhurt and closing the freeway for about 10 hours. The cause is under investigation.
Today's best Hacker News stories, summarized and screenshotted, one email a day.