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.
57 posts
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.