FAA Ground Stop Halts US Flights as Cursor Breach Backdoors 5,000 Devs

AI & Machine Learning

LangChain has raised a $300 million Series C at a $3 billion valuation, led by CapitalG with GIC, DFJ Growth, IVP and Sapphire Ventures taking part. That is more than double the $1.25 billion valuation it secured about a year ago. The company began in 2022 as an open source project that helped early LLMs search the web, call APIs and query databases, then shifted to agent management once frontier labs built those abilities into their own harnesses. Its LangSmith product is pitched as model- and cloud-neutral software for building and containing agents. LangChain now claims 7,000 LangSmith customers, including Harvey, Rippling, Nvidia, Toyota and Salesforce. Source: TechCrunch Verified: True

Google has open sourced XSE, the XLA Serving Engine, a C++ runtime that serves machine learning models without a Python interpreter in the request path. It targets ranking, recommendation, embedding and vision models with short requests and tight latency budgets, not large-scale LLM inference. Google says XSE already handles more than six million queries per second across Search, Ads and YouTube Shorts. In its tests on short requests, the engine delivered two to five times the throughput of its best optimised Python server while using a quarter of the memory. Models are written in JAX, exported as StableHLO in an XLA SavedModel, and compiled to native code for CPUs, GPUs or Google’s TPUs. Source: The Register Verified: True

Anthropic’s updated usage policy, in force since November 12, bars users from sustained and needless abusive or cruel behaviour toward its Claude models. The company says the rule targets repeated cruelty with no discernible purpose, and exempts legitimate uses such as academic research. The change landed alongside a survey from AI search tracker Searchable, based on eight million messages sent to ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude by an opted-in US panel. It found 33 percent of US chatbot users swear at or insult their assistants. Insults did not help: chatbots resolved the complaint in the next reply 24 percent of the time when insulted, against 35 percent when users stayed civil. Source: The Register Verified: True

Arm principal engineer Lorenzo Stoakes is stepping back from general Linux kernel patch review, citing the volume of AI-generated patch series. He keeps his four memory-management maintainerships but told the kernel mailing list he lacks the bandwidth to review outside those areas. Stoakes told The Register that AI-written submissions have gone from weekly to daily to roughly half of what he sees in review. His move follows similar warnings from stable-kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman, who said last month that maintainers are burnt out and that there are not enough reviewers for LLM-generated patches. The episode shows how AI coding tools are shifting cost onto the unpaid review capacity of open source projects. Source: The Register Verified: True

Consumer Hardware

Tesla has opened pre-orders of its two-seat autonomous Cybercab to select customers for personal use. The order page lists a $29,990 price plus a $299 monthly fee to operate the vehicle, with estimated delivery in December 2026. Buyers must accept delivery in one of a handful of Texas cities, and the car will only run unsupervised inside the same geofenced areas as Tesla’s Robotaxi service. Elon Musk said the Cybercab will be available nationwide as regulators approve it, and called the monthly fee too high, suggesting it should be closer to $115. Tesla recently said it will end Cybertruck production next year and use the freed factory capacity to build more Cybercabs. Source: TechCrunch Verified: True

LogicLens has launched an AI fact-checking tool that runs as a Chrome extension and as an iOS app called Receipts. It scans articles, social posts and videos for factual errors and for bad reasoning, flagging logical fallacies, misrepresented information and polarising framing, and cites sources for its findings. On iOS it appears as a share-sheet option; in Chrome it is triggered from the extensions list. The company does not name the models behind the service, but claims a research-backed system that outperforms general chatbots and trained experts, a claim that has not been independently tested. The pitch reflects growing demand for consumer tools that push back on AI-generated misinformation. Source: The Register Verified: True

Cybersecurity

Cursor has confirmed a breach that let attackers publish malicious copies of Anthropic’s Claude Code extension through its marketplace on October 29. The intrusion began with an access key stolen from AI infrastructure provider Fireworks AI, which exposed a storage bucket of historical coding-agent traces, some containing unredacted API credentials. Attackers used those credentials to reach Cursor’s SaaS tools, taking archived source code, support emails and customer contact details. The tampered extension versions 2.1.312 and 2.1.313 were live for about 11 hours and exposed up to 5,000 developers to malware that installed persistent SSH backdoors. Cursor says Anthropic’s genuine extension and the Open VSX registry were not compromised. Source: BleepingComputer Verified: True

Uber is notifying thousands of drivers that their personal and driver’s licence information was stolen in the same Fireworks AI breach. Filings with US state attorneys general say Uber was told on October 9 that hackers had stolen internal credentials at the provider and used them to access Uber data. Notices so far cover 2,567 people in Massachusetts, 3,430 in South Carolina and 1,873 in Rhode Island, with Illinois and California numbers still pending. Fireworks attributes its breach to a financially motivated group that sells stolen tokens for accessing large language models. Notion has also confirmed its data was taken, making Fireworks a single point of failure for several well-known customers. Source: TechCrunch Verified: True

Trezor has confirmed that three Safe 5 hardware wallets sold by Southeast Asian reseller CryptoBilis contained malicious hardware implants. The implant is an extra circuit board fitted between the main board and the display, which reads recovery words and passphrases off the screen and sends them to attackers over a cellular network. All three devices were bought between August 20 and September 23, 2026, and no affected customer has reported lost funds. Firmware 2.13.1, released on November 11, stops the known implants from capturing anything, though it cannot protect phrases already taken. The case follows confirmed implants in Ledger devices sold through the same reseller, which have been linked to thefts. Source: BleepingComputer Verified: True

German drone maker Quantum Systems has confirmed it was hit by an active cyberattack from hostile actors in late October. According to Der Spiegel and the Financial Times, attackers compromised the update server for QBase, the company’s ground-control and mission-planning software, and pushed a malicious update file to customers. The Bundeswehr reportedly grounded its Quantum Systems drones as a precaution and left them out of a recent exercise before clearing them to fly again. Quantum Systems believes it was targeted over its support for Ukraine, where Germany is funding production of tens of thousands of its interceptor drones. German military counterintelligence, the BfV and the BSI are all reported to be involved in the response. Source: BleepingComputer Verified: True

Enterprise Infrastructure

The US Federal Aviation Administration halted all departures in US airspace for around five hours on Friday after a communications failure hit every Air Route Traffic Control Center. The ground stop was lifted at about 8:30 PM Eastern Time, after thousands of flights had been cancelled or delayed. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy blamed problems with copper wiring during a network upgrade by contractor L3Harris, and said it is not yet clear whether the cause was incompetence or a faulty router. L3Harris, which manages the FAA Telecommunications Infrastructure network, says more than 70 percent of the planned move from legacy copper to fibre is complete and that it is supporting the investigation. The outage shows how fragile a critical national network can be in the middle of a migration. Source: The Register Verified: True

Microsoft’s plan to retire free student email and collaboration services is pushing schools and universities to look at alternatives. The changes apply at an institution’s first renewal on or after January 1, 2028, and the replacement free tier, Microsoft 365 Education A0, excludes Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and Teams. Analyst Mary Jo Foley puts indicative student pricing at $2 a year for A2, $4 for A3 and $6 for A5, with Teams adding another dollar. The UK’s Department for Education said it was disappointed by the move. Collabora and Nextcloud are pitching migrations, with Nextcloud pointing to several Swiss universities that moved 39,500 users and 585 terabytes of data over one weekend in August. Source: The Register Verified: True

HPE has introduced new hybrid configurations of its Cray Supercomputing Storage Systems E2000 that mix NVMe SSDs with 32 TB SAS-4 hard drives. The company claims up to 41 percent more data throughput per rack, reaching 116 GB/s for reads and 92 GB/s for writes, and up to 32 percent more usable capacity. HPE says soaring prices for large SSDs, driven by AI infrastructure demand, are the reason customers want disk back in the mix. The idea is that national labs and research institutions can spend less on storage and more on compute nodes. The configurations go on sale in early 2027, alongside a Rack Management Controller that adds real-time monitoring and leak detection for liquid cooling. Source: The Register Verified: True

Policy & Regulation

Online safety experts told the UK Parliament’s Communications and Digital Committee that big tech firms are doing the bare minimum to comply with the Online Safety Act. Durham University law professor Clare McGlynn said Google and Bing downrank some search terms for illegal extreme pornography while leaving close synonyms easy to find. She argued the companies’ own algorithms could identify those adjacent terms if they took a systematic approach. Lawyer Alexandra Whiston-Dew said sites that openly advertise hosting illegal content are slipping past search engines and other platforms, and pointed to Ofcom’s limited resources. The evidence adds pressure on both the regulator and the platforms as the Act’s enforcement matures. Source: The Register Verified: True

Britain’s Information Commissioner’s Office has written to more than 200 senior health leaders after receiving over 300 reports of staff snooping in medical records between January and mid-October 2026. Staff were found looking up people they knew, browsing files out of curiosity and sharing private information with others. ICO chief executive Paul Arnold wants each executive to confirm who can access patient records, whether access is monitored, and what happens when someone is caught. Responses are due by November 27, and organisations that have not reviewed their safeguards in the past six months get a further three months to fix them. The regulator’s point is that the risk comes from insiders with legitimate access, not from outside hackers. Source: The Register Verified: True