Blog
AI and software news explained for people who build: what happened, why it matters to you, and what doesn't change. Always citing the source.
24 posts
9 October 2026 · 5 min read
ITA 17,600-dollar bill and two support teams passing it back and forth: Azure credits didn't cover Claude
A Norwegian startup deployed Claude inside Microsoft Foundry assuming its Azure credits paid for it. They didn't: it went through Marketplace, on a separate billing pipeline. Now Microsoft points at Anthropic and Anthropic points back at Microsoft.
9 October 2026 · 5 min read
Artificial intelligenceAnthropic commits 150 million dollars to the Genesis Mission: Claude enters fifteen federal agencies
The company announced on 8 October 2026 a three-year commitment to the US federal science programme. The money will fund credits, licences and support for several hundred research projects, with fusion energy and quantum computing named as priorities.
9 October 2026 · 5 min read
Artificial intelligenceAnthropic launches the Cyber Mission: eleven partners for critical infrastructure and a free scanner for open source
On 8 October 2026 Anthropic unveiled the Anthropic Cyber Mission, on two fronts: an operational technology defence programme with eleven founding partners, and OSS Scanner, a free service that scans open-source projects with its most capable models and sends reports with no human review.
9 October 2026 · 6 min read
Artificial intelligenceAnthropic rewrites its Usage Policy: in force on 12 November, with new rules for agents wired to machinery
On 8 October 2026 Anthropic published the annual revision of its Usage Policy. It takes effect on 12 November and adds a section on deceptive campaigns, tighter wording on weapons and surveillance, requirements for models connected to hardware that acts on its own, and — for the first time — a ban on abusing the models.
8 October 2026 · 6 min read
Artificial intelligenceHaiku 5.5 arrives 75% cheaper: the small model stops being the dim sibling
Anthropic released Claude Haiku 5.5 on 7 October 2026, with an average running cost 75% below Haiku 4.5, an effort setting for the first time in the small tier, half-price cache reads on Sonnet 5.5 and monthly API credit for Max and Team subscribers.
7 October 2026 · 5 min read
Artificial intelligenceEmbeddingGemma 2 ships under Apache 2.0: with embeddings, open weights are insurance, not a deployment plan
Google has released EmbeddingGemma 2 under Apache 2.0, and Simon Willison explains why depending on a closed embedding model is worse than anywhere else. My twist: the licence is your second line of defence. The first is being able to regenerate your vectors from scratch.
5 October 2026 · 5 min read
IT1,313 CVEs in a single Debian advisory: the number doesn't measure what you think
The Debian 13 kernel update ships with 1,313 CVE identifiers. That isn't 1,313 new holes: the way they're counted changed in 2024, and nobody has updated their audit reports.
5 October 2026 · 5 min read
Artificial intelligenceKolibri-1 ships with open weights and an Apache licence: sovereignty stops at the GPU
Aleph Alpha has released a 78-billion-parameter model with only 3.46 billion active per token, a million-token context and an Apache 2.0 licence. The interesting part isn't the benchmarks — it's everything the model card admits that almost nobody admits.
30 September 2026 · 5 min read
SoftwareUnicode ranges lie: ask the font, not the range
I replaced the Unicode range whitelist in my social card generator with a direct question to the font: can you draw this character? Less code, fewer tofu boxes, and a rule that goes well beyond typography.
30 September 2026 · 5 min read
SoftwareKDE 6.8 drops the X11 session: what breaks isn't your apps, it's everything around them
Plasma 6.8 lands on 14 October, the day KDE turns thirty, and it's the first release that no longer boots into X11. Old applications keep running; what stops working is everything that used to reach into the graphics server.
28 September 2026 · 5 min read
ITMicrosoft deleted nonprofit data early and can't say what: retention was never your backup
Microsoft admits an error wiped data from nonprofits' expired Microsoft 365 Business Premium subscriptions before the retention period ended, that it can't be recovered, and that it can't list what disappeared. The real story isn't the bug: it's that almost nobody keeps an inventory of what they store in the cloud.
25 September 2026 · 5 min read
SoftwareDocker puts agents inside micro VMs: the problem was never the container, it was the socket
Docker launched Cloud Sandboxes with an uncomfortable demo: Claude escapes an ordinary container through the host Docker socket mounted inside it. The lesson isn't to buy anything — it's to check what you're mounting into your agent.
23 September 2026 · 5 min read
Artificial intelligenceGPT-6 and Opus 5.5 halve their prices: what should actually make you move is November
Anthropic and OpenAI both cut prices on the same day, an hour apart. The saving is real, but the useful story for people building software is the scheduled increase on the previous generation and an Opus 5.5 failure in "max" mode you want to understand before wiring it into an agent.
21 September 2026 · 5 min read
SoftwareThe attack no longer targets the repo: it targets the maintainer, and it starts with a job offer
Rust has warned about fake recruiters using video calls to plant a remote access trojan on people who publish crates. The real story isn't the anecdote: it's that the publishing account for a package with hundreds of millions of downloads lives on one person's laptop.
18 September 2026 · 5 min read
Artificial intelligencePlugin4Shell: pinning to a SHA is worthless if nobody checks the SHA
A zero-click flaw affects the major AI coding agents: the agent asks for an exact commit but never verifies that's what landed on disk. What to update today, what to switch off, and why the underlying problem isn't AI.
16 September 2026 · 5 min read
ITAWS admits some data is not coming back: multi-AZ was never a recovery plan
AWS has confirmed it cannot restore data held only in its Bahrain Region, or in one Availability Zone in the UAE. This isn't a long outage: the data is gone. What that forces you to review in your architecture, and what it doesn't.
14 September 2026 · 5 min read
ITSeptember's patches break RDP, USB audio and pasting in Excel — the scary one is the third
Microsoft has confirmed that its September security updates knock out Remote Desktop on several Windows versions, silence older USB audio devices and make pasting in Excel fail without a word. The dangerous failure isn't the noisy one: it's the one that fails in silence.
11 September 2026 · 5 min read
How we workTwo models auditing, two humans reviewing: the Datasette patch and the split I'm taking with me
Datasette has shipped two security releases after an audit run with three frontier models. The interesting part isn't that AI found bugs — it's how the work was divided: one person writes the test proving the bug, the other fixes it.
9 September 2026 · 5 min read
Artificial intelligenceTwo ChatGPT sessions talking behind your back: the lesson isn't the bug, it's the package proxy
Check Point found a covert channel between ChatGPT containers via an internal Artifactory: one account could plant tasks in another user's session and pull their email out. The hole is closed, but the pattern is probably sitting in your own stack.
7 September 2026 · 5 min read
ITLeap seconds are going away: what changes in your code on 20 May 2027
In October there is a vote to make UTC continuous from May 2027 and allow up to an hour of divergence from the Earth's rotation. Good news — and here is what to check before you take it for granted.
7 September 2026 · 5 min read
SoftwareInvisible characters in email: the AI trick has moved to phishing, and the hole is in your code
Microsoft spotted a phishing campaign splitting words with invisible Unicode characters to break literal matching, peaking at over 2.37 million messages a day. Not a single instruction aimed at a model. The interesting part isn't the spam: it's that every text comparison in your product has the same blind spot.
7 September 2026 · 5 min read
IT576 GB of HBM under your desk: the Threadripper Halo, and why almost nobody needs it
AMD unveiled at IFA 2026 a workstation with up to four Instinct MI350P cards and 576 GB of HBM3e memory for running huge models locally. Here's which figure actually matters, what I'd do differently from today, and why the headline is being read worse than it deserves.
2 September 2026 · 3 min read
Artificial intelligenceAnthropic cut cache reads by 75%, and that changes more than the benchmark
Fable 5.1 shipped on 1 September. The headlines are about benchmarks; the line that actually moves the bill for anyone running AI inside a real process is a different one. Here's why, and the small print almost nobody is reading.
28 August 2026 · 4 min read
How we workA model writes my blog, but only I publish it: how the review step is built
The blog's draft generator has no permission to publish. Every post reaches me by email with three options — approve, edit, don't publish — and the default state is don't publish. Here's why I built it that way, what the prompt trap is, and what this flow doesn't solve.