8 stories
Researcher Xusheng Li found that Lenovo's ThinkPlus FU100, sold as AES-256 encrypted, is an unencrypted SD card whose fingerprint reader only switches on the USB connection. A follow-up using Codex found hardcoded keys and "backdoor" accounts in other vendors' "secure" storage products.
nv-uefi-unlocker, an open-source UEFI tool, runs from a USB stick before Nvidia's driver loads and lifts the tensor-rate cap on RTX 20, 30 and 40-series cards, now on Windows too. The developer's laptop RTX 4060 reached 65% higher FP16 performance.
Elon Musk said Blindsight, Neuralink's second product, is "ready from an engineering standpoint" and "just waiting on regulatory approval". He said the implant will let even the completely blind, and those who have never seen, see.
According to Axios, as reported by TechCrunch, OpenAI is preparing a PR campaign for after Tuesday's US midterm elections. Proposals include AI "speed limits", a push for global standards and a rebrand of data centers.
According to a CTech analysis, nine acquisitions of Israeli companies were signed in October, about the yearly average, but their stated or estimated value reached about $8.9 billion, nearly double the next-largest month. Varonis and Classiq account for $8.6 billion of it.
Z.ai founder Tang Jie says using AI to build smarter systems will bring AGI closer if done safely; Hong Kong's IPO pace stalls in the fourth quarter; and Kazakhstan refuses to choose between the US and China as it pursues its AI plans.
Cisco Talos reports on VOLTA, an infostealer that bundles everything taken from a victim's PC and asks an AI model, Claude Opus 4.6 by default, for a "target assessment" ranking assets by cash-out value. If the model refuses, it switches to another.
DeepSeek has put Super-Agent on GitHub under an MIT licence: a research prototype of an AI agent that takes coding tasks from a whole team and handles them with minimal human oversight. According to Bloomberg, it is aimed at Anthropic's Claude Code.
