Hacks & tools: latest AI news

Tools, techniques and security research that practitioners are actually using.

• 2 Nov Google's Mandiant says hijacked enterprise AI accounts ran up fraudulent bills above $100,000 a day
• 1 Nov Torvalds says Linux 7.4 is unusually large as AI-found fixes now land in the merge window
• 1 Nov Snapdragon X2 Elite users report local LLM speeds falling 69% to 87% after Adreno driver 32.0.181.0
• 1 Nov Shanghai Jiao Tong team says it used MiniMax models to re-engineer 5,000 core functions of a US simulation package
• 1 Nov SK Telecom says 1,500 employee-built AI agents are in regular use and data clean-up doubled their accuracy to over 80%
• 31 Oct Memdoor rerun: five Qwen3.8-27B agents average 9.8 of 10 on LiveCodeBench Hard problems, Fable 5 alone 8.0
• 31 Oct Karpathy says Claude Opus 5.5 built HackerTube, a site of 6,454 videos recommended on Hacker News, in about two hours
• 31 Oct Developer compiles a vector unit into Qwen3.5-4B's weights to run a tiny Llama inside the model
• 30 Oct Vercel Labs open-sources agent-desktop, letting AI agents operate desktop apps through OS accessibility trees
• 30 Oct Microsoft Research open-sources TokenEconomizer, a plugin that cut coding-agent costs 18.4% to 30.9% on SWE-Bench tasks
• 30 Oct Open-source nesformer compiles an NES CPU into the weights of a stock Qwen3.5 model to play Super Mario Bros.
• 30 Oct Subvocal raises $1.3 million for glasses it says turn silently mouthed words into text at over 200 words a minute
• 30 Oct Ramen open-sources Aura Autopilot, an AI agent that playtests games in Unreal, Unity and Godot
• 30 Oct Nace.AI releases weights for Drex Max, a 27B multimodal decision model that runs on 24 GB Macs
• 30 Oct Open-source UEFI tool lifts Tensor Core rate limits on GeForce RTX 20, 30 and 40 cards before the driver loads
• 30 Oct OpenCode 2.2.3 lets users run their Claude Code login inside OpenCode through a built-in Claude Agent provider
• 30 Oct Cisco gives a 27-year-old engineer unlimited AI tokens to try refactoring 98% of its legacy code in 24 months
• 29 Oct Pika releases open weights for Pika H3 Flex, a video model post-trained on MiniMax H3
• 29 Oct The Biological Computing Co. releases Mischief 1, an image-to-video model it says draws on neuron research
• 29 Oct Proton CEO Andy Yen cancels staff AI 're-interviews' after 404 Media investigation, 404 Media reports
• 29 Oct Anthropic says Claude wrote most of a Rust rewrite of its Messages API, cutting CPU use by about 40 to 50%
• 29 Oct Factory releases Droid 1.0 with programmatic tool calling on by default
• 28 Oct Nvidia releases Nemotron 3.5 Transcribe, an open-weight speech model for 40 languages
• 23 Oct OpenAI says its red-team agents built a CPU cache covert channel between isolated microVMs
• 10 Oct Microsoft releases Decision-1, a model that returns probabilities for routing and classification
• 9 Oct Anthropic expands Claude Code Projects, which coordinate parallel cloud threads on one goal