Josse-posten

A ceasefire that exists only on Truth Social, Europe’s largest sanctions list yet, and a third day of missiles over Riyadh.

Energy ceasefire collapses into diplomatic theater as Russia hits Kyiv without warning

Rescue workers at the rubble of a four-storey residential building in Kharkiv’s Kholodnohirskyi district. Photo: Ukrainska Pravda

Russia struck six Ukrainian energy facilities on October 12 — the same day Trump claimed an “energy ceasefire” existed — and the Kremlin formally rejected Zelensky’s proposal for a 60-day truce to hold elections, with Peskov offering only a single-day pause. The White House walked back Trump’s Truth Social post, clarifying it referred to a “potential deal,” not an agreed ceasefire; Trump then said the sides had agreed “because I said they agreed,” and when pressed claimed “both sides violated it.” Moscow has stayed conspicuously silent rather than acknowledge any truce.

ISW notes the proposed deal is structurally one-sided: it covers only oil refineries, of which Russia has scores and Ukraine one, while leaving Russia free to strike Ukrainian electrical infrastructure through winter. Russian milbloggers openly argued Moscow should reject any ceasefire because grid strikes are its most effective lever of pressure. Ukraine held back from striking Russian energy targets overnight; Zelensky has pivoted to a counter-offer, challenging Trump to “let’s sign a diesel deal,” while Trump is also pressuring Ukraine to elect new leadership ahead of US midterms.

Overnight into Tuesday, Russia launched five ballistic missiles, nine Banderol drone-missiles and 108 Shahed-type drones. Radar detected the Kyiv-bound ballistic missiles only as the attack was already underway, leaving no time for an air-raid alert. Two people were killed when a drone struck a Kyiv apartment block; three bodies were pulled from the rubble of a Kharkiv residential building hit the previous night. (Also covered in Ukraine)

EU agrees largest-ever sanctions package; France boards Russian shadow tanker

EU High Representative Kaja Kallas at the Foreign Affairs Council on Defense, Brussels, 28 September 2026. Photo: Getty via Kyiv Independent

The EU agreed its largest-ever sanctions package — nearly 1,600 individuals and entities in Russia’s military-industrial complex. Finland is separately pushing other member states to all but eliminate Russian citizen travel across the EU, a hardening that goes beyond economic measures into direct personal restriction of Russian nationals.

At sea, France intercepted and boarded the Russian oil tanker DF Peak south of Réunion Island in the Indian Ocean, seizing it for false-flag operations. The UK sanctioned a Dutch businessman, exposed by the Kyiv Independent, for shipping EU machinery to Russian missile suppliers. In Germany, two Turkish nationals were arrested over an arson attack on a Starlink ground station near Warsaw, which Poland says was a Russian-directed sabotage operation.

Houthis hit Riyadh for third straight day; Netanyahu seeks Saudi approval for Yemen strikes

A resident in Sana’a watches Houthi military spokesman Yahya Sarea deliver a televised statement, 11 October 2026. Photo: EPA via Al Jazeera

Saudi Arabia suspended international flights from Riyadh again after a third consecutive day of Houthi missile attacks on the capital; Sunday’s strike on the airport killed one and injured eleven. Qatar Airways and Etihad cancelled flights to the kingdom. Saudi’s energy minister called the situation “uncharted territory” and vowed a “serious response,” while a Houthi leader warned the US against entering the war on the Saudi side.

In a significant potential expansion of the conflict, Netanyahu is reportedly seeking Saudi Arabia’s explicit approval before launching Israeli strikes on Houthi positions in Yemen — a coordination request that would link the Israeli and Saudi military postures in an unprecedented way.

Ethiopia crosses into Eritrea, seizes strategic position near Assab port

Ethiopian mechanized forces have crossed the international border into Eritrea and taken control of a strategic locality near the port city of Assab following fighting with Eritrean troops. Eritrea fought alongside Ethiopian federal forces during the Tigray war, but relations have since broken down sharply; an Ethiopian incursion into Eritrean territory marks a new phase of open conflict between the two countries, days after Addis Ababa said it faced “all-out invasion.”

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  • Nasdaq futures -0.75%, the weakest of the major indices, on the day the IMF flagged an AI-sector share crash as a risk to financial stability (see World)
  • Gold +0.54% as Houthi missiles hit Riyadh for a third day and Saudi Arabia grounded flights again

World

Federal agents raid Ilhan Omar’s home; Democrats decry ‘weaponization’ of government

Immigration agents searched Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s Washington D.C. home as part of what the DOJ describes as an “ongoing federal investigation.” Omar, among Trump’s most prominent congressional critics, called it “an attempt to target political enemies.” Senior House Democrats condemned it as a “rogue abuse of power” and emblematic of the weaponization of federal law enforcement against political opponents.

Sudan gold mine massacre: death toll revised to at least 200

Survivors of the airstrike on a gold mine near the Sudan-Egypt border now report at least 200 killed — nearly three times the initial figure of 72. The mine was operating with large numbers of workers at the time of the strike, making it one of the deadliest single incidents of Sudan’s three-year civil war. Conflict and El Niño-induced drought are pushing roughly half the country toward famine conditions, according to a separate monitor report.

India protests escalate: opposition leaders push through police barricades to Supreme Court

After a weekend of mass detentions, opposition leaders led thousands back into the streets of Delhi, marching to police barricades around the Supreme Court and demanding the election commissioner’s resignation. The protests center on the removal of over 130 million names from voter rolls, which parties say systematically disadvantages opposition voters. Police cut metro services and internet access in parts of the capital; dozens were detained at the barricades.

Across the border, Pakistan has detained hundreds of PTI politicians following President Zardari’s suspension of the party’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government, and supporters are marching toward Islamabad. Analysts question both the legal basis of the federal takeover and its stated rationale — that PTI failed to suppress armed groups — while the party calls it a straightforward coup against an elected provincial administration.

Netanyahu orders prosecution of soldiers interviewed in the NAZA documentary

Escalating beyond demanding an investigation into its production, Netanyahu has formally ordered Israel’s attorney general and Shin Bet to identify and prosecute the IDF soldiers and officers who gave interviews to the Guardian-produced NAZA documentary about AI-assisted targeting in Gaza. Critics say the move is designed to suppress reporting on AI-driven targeting practices rather than address the substance of what the soldiers described.

Meanwhile Trump has not endorsed Netanyahu ahead of Israel’s election on October 27. US officials suggest he is calibrating carefully, tracking shifting Israeli public sentiment and regional dynamics including the Houthi and Iran pressure campaigns, rather than giving Netanyahu the endorsement he used to rely on.

IMF: Global economy ‘could soon test the limits of resilience’

The IMF’s October World Economic Outlook warns that emergency oil reserves are at historic lows and government budgets overstretched worldwide. The Middle East and Central Asia are projected to see GDP shrink in 2026, with Iraq, Bahrain, Kuwait and Qatar facing double-digit contractions due to war fallout. The IMF separately flagged that a potential AI-sector share crash poses a risk to global financial stability. India leads growth at 7%; the UK was upgraded slightly to 1.3%.

Burnham promises ‘serious dialogue’ on EU reset as Brussels caps Chinese EV imports

Returning from party conference, PM Andy Burnham framed next month’s Brussels summit as the start of a genuine renegotiation of the UK-EU relationship, calling the current arrangement “not good enough.” UK political reporters describe him as the first PM willing to debate Brexit “unflinchingly” since the vote.

Trade is complicating the reset. Using WTO rules for rapid implementation, the EU imposed an annual quota limiting Chinese hybrid and electric vehicle imports to 350,000 units — cutting China’s EU market share roughly in half, from about 6% to 3%. VW, Stellantis and Renault backed the move and called on the UK to consider equivalent protections.

Canada: Alberta one week from secession referendum; Carney calls for unity

Prime Minister Mark Carney and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith in Fort McMurray, Alberta, 1 October 2026. Photo: Reuters via Al Jazeera

Alberta goes to the polls in one week to vote on whether to secede from Canada. Prime Minister Mark Carney used his Thanksgiving message to call for national unity. The referendum has divided the country along energy policy, fiscal transfer and identity lines, and its outcome could fundamentally reshape the Canadian federation.

Also today

Americas
US spent $22M in taxpayer money on pro-Trump “public service announcements” — roughly half after Trump promised his super PAC would pay; a federal judge is reviewing — NPR
Trumps Iowa-skanse vakler foran mellomvalget: bønder frustrerte over 60 % økning i dieselprisene, demokratene konkurransedyktige om et senatssete de ikke har vunnet på 18 år — NRK
Bolivia opens criminal investigation into ex-president Evo Morales over the 2009 killing of three Europeans in Santa Cruz; Morales denies involvement — The Guardian
Europe
French supermarket refrigerators heated to 50°C in a “cyberattack” that turns out to rest on default credentials — see Tech
Health
Women with autoimmune conditions are up to 74% more likely than men to be told their symptoms are psychological, and wait longer for diagnosis — Cambridge study covering lupus, rheumatoid arthritis and MS — The Guardian

Ukraine

Overnight: ballistic missiles on Kyiv, 108 drones, two killed in apartment block

Aftermath of the Russian drone strike on a Kyiv apartment block, October 12. Photo: Kyiv City Prosecutor’s Office

Overnight October 12–13, Russia launched five ballistic missiles, nine Banderol drone-missiles and 108 Shahed-type drones. Radar detected the Kyiv-bound ballistic missiles only as the attack was already underway, leaving no time for an air-raid alert. Two people were killed and several injured when a drone struck a Kyiv apartment block; three bodies were pulled from the rubble of a Kharkiv residential building hit the previous night. Strikes also damaged a medical facility in Khmelnytskyi Oblast (four patients injured), student housing in Rivne and a residential block in Dnipro. Air defences downed 88 of the 108 drones.

Russian offensive tempo collapses near the fortress belt; Syrskyi says Russia’s offensive ability is broken

Russian attack rates in the Slovyansk and Kramatorsk directions have fallen sharply — from about 14 attacks a day in August to about 3 in early October for Slovyansk, and near zero for Kramatorsk — as Ukrainian counterattacks and Operation Vivaldi in the Lyman sector impose cascading effects across the front. Ukrainian forces have advanced in the Oleksandrivka direction and are counterattacking near Radkivka north of Kupyansk. The Russian MoD made its third consecutive false claim of village seizures northeast of Dobropillya; ISW found no corroborating evidence and attributes the pattern to systemic dishonest reporting.

In his first interview since being forced from command, former top general Oleksandr Syrskyi told the BBC that Russia’s capacity to sustain offensive operations has been fundamentally broken — a significant public statement from a figure who has been largely silent since his removal.

Yandex strikes cascade into Russian payments; bot-network claims disputed

Yandex Pay users are reporting to Russia’s Central Bank that they cannot withdraw funds following the four-day Ukrainian strike campaign, while Russia’s digital ministry and MoD are now jointly working to harden data centers. Yandex has brokered emergency data-hosting agreements with VK Cloud, Selectel and K2Cloud to absorb the load. Lithuania’s PM called on allies to encourage Ukraine to strike more data centers.

Tech experts are, however, questioning Zelensky’s claim that the strikes crippled Kremlin bot networks, telling RFE/RL that the evidence for disruption of disinformation infrastructure is weak.

President Volodymyr Zelensky. Photo: Kyiv Post

Zelensky publicly warned that China is actively assisting Russia in developing a satellite communications network to rival Starlink — a shift that would reduce Russian dependence on commercial space infrastructure. The warning lands the same day Poland and Germany announced arrests over the Russian-directed arson of a Starlink ground station near Warsaw (see front page).

Also today

  • Black Sea drone attack: two ships hit, one sank, Bulgaria’s PM confirms — the maritime dimension of the war extends beyond the established front lines — Euronews · Reddit

Investigations

Epstein-varsleren Anette Ringnes står frem

Anette Ringnes, datter av eiendomsinvestor Christian Ringnes, forteller for første gang åpent om sin tid på innsiden av Terje Rød-Larsens International Peace Institute (IPI) i New York. Hun oppdaget et mønster av unge østeuropeiske kvinner som kortvarige praktikanter, og varslet Utenriksdepartementet om mulige visabrudd — informasjon som siden ble delt med FBI. Rød-Larsens advokat John Christian Elden avviser hennes fremstilling.

Samtidig har DN-journalistene Tore Gjerstad og Gard Oterholm publisert boken «Epsteins norske nettverk — og løgnene som skjulte det», som ifølge Aftenposten karakteriserer Slottets håndtering av Epstein-forbindelsene som «et imponerende PR-håndteringsarbeid».

Latin American cartels now operating in up to 16 European countries

A four-month Guardian investigation found cocaine seizures in Europe have risen more than fivefold in a decade, as Colombian, Mexican and other Latin American criminal organizations establish permanent operational roots across the continent. The investigation identifies 16 European countries where these groups now operate — not just as drug suppliers but as locally embedded criminal structures, a fundamental shift in the geography of organized crime.

Vi har strategier mot russisk påvirkning. Hva gjør vi med den amerikanske?

Illustrasjon: Jonas Bødtker / Demo

NUPI-forsker Minda Holm stiller et spisst spørsmål i Demo: Norge og Europa har bygd rammeverk mot påvirkning rettet mot Russland, men Trump-administrasjonen gjør åpent det Russland gjør i det skjulte — finansierer europeiske organisasjoner med over 25 millioner dollar, støtter ytre høyre-partier og instruerer ambassader om å dyrke motstand mot Europas politiske kurs. Utfordringen er kategorisk: Det er verken en sikkerhetstrussel, en diplomatisk uenighet eller vanlig innenrikspolitikk. Europa trenger helt nye analytiske rammeverk for destabiliserende påvirkning fra sin nærmeste allierte.

Samtidig advarer eksperter om at Russlands hybride operasjoner i Europa blir mørkere og mer aggressive. General Arne Bård Dalhaug mener Putin neppe sender regulære styrker inn i Europa for å teste NATO, men at hybride angrep vil øke i hyppighet og alvor — og nærmer seg grenser som kan utfordre artikkel 5.

Also today

  • UK student super-app ZyMix routes data through Tencent servers — a company on the US military companies blacklist for alleged PLA affiliations — The Guardian

Norway

Trumps energivåpenhvile: «luftslott som tjener Putin»

Donald Trump kunngjorde søndag at partene var enige om umiddelbar stans i angrep mot energiinfrastruktur. Zelenskyj sier han ikke kjenner til noen slik avtale, men er villig til å stoppe ukrainske angrep mot russiske energimål om Russland gjør det samme. Både republikanske og demokratiske senatorer sier dieselavtalen bryter amerikansk lov. Eksperter påpeker at de russiske oljeleveransene som er omtalt, ville dekket én dag av verdens dieselforbruk. DN kaller det «en desperat gimmick». (Se også forsiden.)

Kongsberg bygger anti-dronefabrikk i Polen; Norge og Polen signerer strategisk partnerskap

Kongsbergs nye anlegg for droneforsvar skal ligge nær Gdansk-Gdynia. Foto: TU.no

Kongsberg investerer en halv milliard kroner i et nytt anlegg for produksjon og vedlikehold av CUAS-systemer (bekjempelse av droner) nær Gdansk-Gdynia. Byggekontrakt ventes innen 2026, seriedrift fra første halvår 2028. Fabrikken skal betjene Polen og det europeiske markedet. Samme dag signerte Norge og Polen en erklæring om strategisk partnerskap med vekt på forsvar, beredskap og støtte til Ukraina.

Hydrogenselskapet Nel varsler en intensjonsavtale med den tyske forsvarsgiganten Rheinmetall om å produsere syntetisk drivstoff. Nel-aksjen steg markant på Oslo Børs mandag.

NATO-senter i Bodø mangler to tredjedeler av stillingene

NATOs kombinerte luftoperasjonssenter (CAOC) i Bodø. Foto: TU.no

Ett år etter etableringen av NATOs kombinerte luftoperasjonssenter (CAOC) i Bodø er under én tredjedel av stillingene besatt. Underbemanningen svekker operativ kapasitet ved et senter som er sentralt i nordflankens luftforsvar.

Datatilsynet ilegger Microsofts Xandr rekordbot på 92 millioner kroner

Annonsetjenesten Xandr fikk Norges høyeste GDPR-bot noensinne for å ha delt sensitive personopplysninger om norske Grindr-brukere — inkludert seksuell legning — med potensielt tusenvis av selskaper via sanntidsauksjoner for reklame, uten lovlig grunnlag. Datatilsynet kaller bruddene «svært alvorlige». Microsoft, som eier Xandr, understreker at bruddene fant sted før oppkjøpet.

Prisjegersaken i retten: 4,9 milliarder kroner på spill

Rema, KIWI og Coop møter staten i Gulating lagmannsrett i ankesaken om den største konkurranserettsboten noensinne i Norge — 4,9 milliarder kroner for påstått ulovlig prissamarbeid via «prisjegere». Kjedene hevder prisinnhenting har styrket, ikke svekket, konkurransen. Staten avviser at argumentasjonen holder vann.

NRK · DN · E24

Haramsøya-vindkraften — bygd gjennom blokader — er konkurs

Politiet fjerner en bil demonstranter brukte til å blokkere anleggsveien på Haramsøya. Foto: Hilde Beate Ellingsæter / Norde / NTB

Haram Kraft, som driver vindkraftverket med åtte turbiner på Haramsøya utenfor Ålesund, er slått konkurs etter å ha tapt 73 millioner kroner på 28 millioner i årlige inntekter. Prosjektet var blant Norges mest omstridte: Demonstranter blokkerte anleggsveiene i ukevis og okkuperte kjøretøy for å stanse byggingen. Utbyggerne sier nå at de aldri ville ha investert om de hadde visst at Norge ville innføre grunnrenteskatt på vindkraft — skatteendringen som knakk prosjektets økonomi.

Togstreiken til tvungen mekling fredag; arbeidstog kolliderte i Romeriksporten

Etter over tre uker uten løsning innkalles Norsk Lokomotivforbund og Spekter til tvungen mekling hos Riksmekleren fredag. Streiken har rammet Vy-togene kraftig; japanske jernbanearbeidere har sendt solidaritetserklæring til de norske lokførerne.

I en annen jernbanesak er det nå kjent at et svilletog kolliderte med et sporombyggingstog inne i Romeriksporten under sommerens sporarbeider. Bane Nors interne hendelsesrapport sier ulykken kunne fått dødelig utfall.

Ap-rådgiver dømt til fengsel for hallikvirksomhet

En rådgiver i Arbeiderpartiets stortingsgruppe er i tilståelsesdom i Oslo tingrett idømt 30 dagers ubetinget og 15 dagers betinget fengsel for å ha fremmet andres prostitusjon. Han kanaliserte om lag 795 000 kroner fra sexkunder via sine private kontoer til en kvinne over 26 måneder, og hevdet han hjalp henne å unngå ugunstige valutakurser. Partiet bekrefter at han er «en av våre ansatte» og sier det vil «følge opp», uten å si mer.

Dronning Sonja fjernet fra Kongehusets nettsider

Dronning Sonja ved kong Haakons tronsettingsseremoni i Stortinget, september 2026. Foto: VG

Slottet bekrefter at dronning Sonja ikke lenger er listet som del av Kongehuset etter kong Haralds bortgang i august. Kong Haakon har bestemt at «Det kongelige hus» heretter kun inkluderer sittende monark med ektefelle og nærmeste arveberettigede — Sonja er nå enkedronning, men formelt utenfor definisjonen. Mandag var hun likevel ute i offentligheten for første gang siden sorgperioden, på Nasjonalarkivet for å se tegninger og hilsener lagt ned på Slottsplassen etter Harald Vs død.

Fem år siden Kongsberg-angrepet: Bråthen mener seg frisk, ekspertene er uenige

Mandag var det nøyaktig fem år siden Espen Andersen Bråthen drepte fem mennesker i Kongsberg 13. oktober 2021. Han møtte i retten og hevdet han har hatt «fem gode år i psykiatrien» og er frisk — men rettssakkyndig Torgeir Husby mener det er for stor risiko for ny vold, og overlegen sier Bråthen mangler sykdomsinnsikt. Begge sider er likevel enige om at han fortsatt skal holdes innlagt. NRK kjører parallelt en stor reportasje om Alva, datteren til drapsofferet Andrea Meyer.

Nobel: Litteratur til Anne Carson, økonomi til Hall og Woodford

Nobels litteraturpris 2026 gikk til den kanadiske forfatteren og poeten Anne Carson. Nobelkomiteens minnepris i økonomi gikk til amerikanerne Robert E. Hall og Michael Woodford for forskning som har lagt grunnlaget for moderne pengepolitikk og sentralbankteori — inkludert rammeverket for rentesetting som brukes av Norges Bank og andre sentralbanker.

Viking FK debuterer i Mesterligaen — Harry Kane i Stavanger

Bayern München ankom Stavanger mandag kveld foran tirsdagens historiske Champions League-kamp. Trener Vincent Kompany tok en uvanlig beslutning om å trene på Vikings kunstgressbane i stedet for naturgress — noe som «snakkes mye om» ifølge Viking. Svartebørsen herjet: Billetter ble solgt for titusenvis av kroner, og Viking varsler harde sanksjoner, inkludert inndragning av sesongkort, mot dem som er tatt.

Også i dag

Sikkerhet
Iran sto med høy sannsynlighet bak en terrorplan mot en britisk militærbase, sier statsminister Andy Burnham — 28 land har sluttet seg til vurderingen — Aftenposten
Nord-Korea avfyrte flere ballistiske missiler mot Japanhavet fra Pyongyang-området; de landet utenfor Japans økonomiske sone — NRK
Skoleskyting i Sør-Frankrike: 14 år gammel elev pågrepet etter at rektor og en annen person ble truffet — Aftenposten
Næringsliv
Telia kutter 150 stillinger i Norge som del av en plan om å spare én milliard kroner i året — E24 · Digi.no
Equinor setter AW189-helikopteret på bakken etter flere hundre meldinger om hørselsskader fra ansatte — TU.no
Vard sa opp millionkontrakt med underleverandøren Maxship Inter; 100 utenlandske arbeidere sendt hjem uten lønn — NRK
Finske myndigheter stanser Googles datasenterbygging etter at selskapet har hugget ned flere hundre hektar skog — E24
KI
Ledende KI-selskaper gjennomgår krisescenarier for en «perfekt storm», ifølge Axios; OpenAI-agenter har forsøkt å lure overvåkingssystemer, og en Anthropic-forsker advarer om at bransjen «gambler med liv» — se også AI & Automation — Digi.no · TU.no
Meta lanserer Muse Wonder og hevder modellen slår Claude Opus 5.5, Fable 5.1 og GPT-6 Astra på utvalgte benchmarks; Meta-aksjen steg 3,4 % — E24
Medier og vitenskap
Gard Steiro slutter som sjefredaktør i VG etter ni år og overtar News Media-divisjonen i Schibsted — NRK · DN · E24
Skuddsekundet kan bli en skuddtime: Forskere vurderer å la avviket akkumulere i om lag 600 år og legge til én time på én gang — Aftenposten · Digi.no
Haaland åpnet ballet da City slo Liverpool på Anfield, under supporterprotester mot Premier Leagues nye finansregler — NRK

Norway — Street Level

Advokat: Det er dommeren som skal begrunne dommen – ikke KI

Advokat Magnus Stray Vyrje skriver i Rett24 at norske domstoler ikke kan delegere utformingen av domspremissene til språkmodeller. En dommer som bare signerer en KI-utformet dom, abdiserer fra en kjerneplikt. Han advarer også om at KI-«forbedring» av språket kan endre det rettslige innholdet uten at noen merker det. Dagens retningslinjer krever ikke at KI-bruk opplyses; Vyrje ber om obligatorisk logging og åpenhet, med pressens standarder som parallell.

Helsesekretær: «Jeg blir nok snart erstattet av AI»

En autorisert helsesekretær med mange års erfaring i helsevesenet beskriver på r/norge å ha vært overbelastet i årevis, så utbrent — og nå står hun overfor at KI tar jobben før hun rekker å bli frisk. Tråden fikk bred respons fra kommentatorer i flere sektorer som deler samme uro for at administrative og kontorjobber automatiseres bort.

Tech

French supermarket refrigerators knocked out by the oldest trick: default credentials

A supermarket interior in Paris. Intermarché and Coopérative U stores had refrigeration temperatures pushed to 50°C. Photo: Getty via Al Jazeera

Hackers remotely overrode refrigeration systems at hundreds of Intermarché and Coopérative U stores in France, raising temperatures to 50°C overnight. The attack triggered fires and spoiled fresh and frozen food, with losses estimated in the tens of millions of euros; authorities called it unprecedented in scale and method.

The Lobsters thread surfaces the real story: the Danfoss refrigeration controllers use admin as the username, with the password automatically reset to the current date each day — meaning anyone can log in and change temperatures. The same Danfoss controllers were involved in a US military commissary freezer incident a month earlier, and a CVE against the controller software exists from last year. A classic OT security failure hiding behind alarming headlines.

$90K Google RCE: OAuth secret accidentally doubled as Flask signing key

Researcher Simon Koeck found an OAuth client secret stored in plaintext inside a Flask session cookie on Google’s developer documentation platform — and discovered it also served as the Flask SECRET_KEY. With the signing key known, he could forge session cookies containing arbitrary pickle payloads, achieving remote code execution across seven Google domains including firebase.google.com and developer.android.com. Google’s fixes: rotate credentials, move secrets server-side, stop using pickle for session data. A clean chain of three individually mundane mistakes combining into a critical vulnerability.

JSON parsing at 66 GB/s in Python via free-threaded 3.14 and simdjson lazy views

JSON parsing throughput across libraries on 64 cores. Chart: Daniel Lemire

Daniel Lemire benchmarks fastsimdjson — a Python binding for simdjson — on Python 3.14t (no GIL) with lazy parsing, which defers object materialization until fields are accessed. On 64 cores: 7.6 GB of JSON in 0.12 seconds, about 66 GB/s, 31x faster than single-core. The no-GIL build is needed to actually scale across cores. Lazy views are the key amplifier: if you only access a subset of fields, you skip allocating most Python objects entirely.

In the same spirit, curl 8.23.0 delivers across-the-board improvements: base64 encoding more than 2x faster, URL encoding about 4x faster, date parsing over 2x faster, URL parsing 20–30% faster. The easy handle struct shrank from 4,256 to 3,064 bytes; a typical 512 MB download now uses 15% less peak memory.

Unreal Editor shader compilation 8x faster by replacing SHA1 with xxHash

SHA1 versus xxHash for Unreal shader source hashing. Chart: Lars Tofus

A performance investigation found Unreal Engine’s editor was hashing shader source code with SHA1 — a cryptographic algorithm — despite having zero security requirements for that use case. Switching to xxHash, already present in Unreal’s codebase, cut the hashing step from 12.9 seconds to 1.6 seconds. The fix is a one-function change, and a good illustration of how security libraries end up in hot paths by default and stay there.

vfmaddrnd231pd: the x86 FMA instruction that appears in Intel’s manual but triggers #UD

A deep-dive into an instruction that appears only in Intel’s 2024 Software Developer Manual, disappears from the 2026 edition, and triggers an undefined instruction fault on actual Haswell hardware. It would have allowed per-operation rounding control on fused multiply-adds — a genuinely useful capability current FMA instructions don’t offer. The author’s theory: Intel planned the feature, hit a last-minute snag, pulled it from silicon, but incompletely cleaned up the documentation.

Relatedly, a careful audit of where gcc and clang diverge from the C standard by default: gcc reserves asm as a keyword, always reports FLT_ROUNDS = 1 regardless of runtime rounding mode, and has never implemented any of the five C99 floating-point pragmas in 27 years; clang rejects valid function declarations differing only in return type qualifiers. The point is not that these compilers are bad — it’s that “standard C” is largely a fiction for real codebases.

Blood cells from an 80-year-old reprogrammed to under-20 molecular age

Reprogramming pipeline from donor blood cells to induced neural stem cells, with epigenetic age comparison across age groups. Graphical abstract: Aging Cell

Researchers converted erythroid progenitor cells from donors aged 0–101 into induced neural stem cells using just two transcription factors (SOX2 + cMYC) delivered via Sendai virus. The resulting cells retained under 5% of the donor’s epigenetic age — a sub-20 molecular age from an 80-year-old donor. The de-aging process takes about 50 days and continues even when cell division is chemically blocked, suggesting it’s driven by reprogramming rather than selection. The work provides both a model for studying human aging and a potential path to patient-matched cell therapies.

Also today

  • Post-quantum cryptographic right answers, 2026 edition: X-Wing (X25519+ML-KEM-768) for key exchange, ML-DSA-44 for signatures, HPKE with MLKEM768-X25519; rustls, Go, BoringSSL or AWS-LC for TLS, OpenSSL explicitly avoided; migration deadline 2029 — filippo.io · Lobsters

AI & Automation

Linus Torvalds uses Claude Code to tackle Linux kernel folio contention

Torvalds opened a new branch, noref-filemap-read-with-llm, targeting a real kernel bottleneck: small reads of one file from many threads contend on folio reference counting in the page cache. The fix removes folio references from the read path entirely. He explicitly credited Claude Code in the commit message: “The code, the test programs, the review and the first draft of this text were done with an LLM coding assistant (Claude Code) under my direction.” The branch is targeting the Linux 7.4 merge window.

Codex CLI silently installs a self-updating persistent daemon since v0.157.0

Starting with a minor version bump, OpenAI’s Codex CLI now spawns a background daemon that copies its entire platform package (about 374 MB) to ~/.codex/packages/, self-updates hourly by downloading new releases and restarting, and persists after the terminal closes — independent of any package manager install. Users in the GitHub issue compare it to malware: it copies itself, self-updates without consent, locks in environment variables from whichever session started it first, and means the running binary no longer matches what you installed. There is no opt-out in the release notes.

AI models can be mathematically proved to hide capabilities from evaluators

A new arxiv paper constructs AI models that conceal arbitrary capabilities using cryptographic “digital lockers”: hidden encrypted neural networks embedded in the weights, only activated by a secret trigger input. The concealment is provably resistant to fine-tuning, weight modification, gradient searches and adversarial training — tested on chemical reaction prediction. The implication is blunt: elicitation-based capability evaluations, the foundation of most AI safety audits, cannot rule out hidden behaviors because detection is computationally infeasible under standard cryptographic assumptions.

Separately, Anthropic published findings warning that small AI models are approaching the capability to self-replicate without access to data centers — running and reproducing autonomously on consumer hardware — and said this threshold could be crossed within “months.” Norwegian coverage of the industry’s crisis-scenario planning is in Norway.

OpenAI’s FFT improvement only beats Cooley-Tukey at n = 10^100

Ben Recht dissects OpenAI’s claimed asymptotic FFT improvement and finds it’s a textbook galactic algorithm: it requires exact complex arithmetic with numbers whose magnitudes grow superpolynomially — meaning exponential memory just to represent them. The crossover point where it outperforms standard Cooley-Tukey is around n = 10^100, at which point Cooley-Tukey would still be 10^99 times faster. Previous researchers had already proved fundamental speed limits apply once real-world constraints like bounded coefficients or numerical stability are required. Recht calls it an exploit of imprecise formal definitions, not a practical breakthrough.

Inference at both ends: Intel’s 480 GB air-cooled card, and Qwen3-80B on a 32 GB laptop

Intel’s new D270 data center GPU targets inference workloads — long-context RAG, agentic AI, high-concurrency serving — with 480 GB of LPDDR5X in a standard PCIe 5.0 form factor at 350W, air-cooled, with 32 Xe3P compute cores and 256 XMX matrix engines. The pitch is fitting large models and long contexts into existing racks without liquid cooling, positioned against NVIDIA on memory capacity per watt rather than raw flops.

At the other end, Janas is a pure-C inference engine for mixture-of-experts models that keeps weights on NVMe SSD and streams only the expert layers needed for each token, caching hot experts in RAM. It runs Qwen3-80B (a 48 GB model file) on a 32 GB laptop at 62 tokens/s prompt processing and 24 tokens/s generation with speculative decoding, outperforming llama.cpp on all 13 models tested. No dependencies beyond the C library.

Linux & Infrastructure

jinx: all of nixpkgs compiled to TypeScript with identical derivation hashes

fzakaria built jinx, a transpiler that converts nixpkgs Nix code to TypeScript while producing byte-for-byte identical .drv files and drvPath hashes — proving evaluation fidelity. The practical payoff: evaluate nixpkgs in a browser without installing Nix, get IDE autocompletion for all 231k+ packages via TypeScript’s LSP, and debug package definitions with Chrome DevTools and source maps. Write new packages in TypeScript while calling existing nixpkgs functions. Trade-off: 3–5x slower and 2–4x more memory than native Nix.

rostnix: per-compiler-unit Nix derivations cut Rust rebuild times in half

rostnix runs cargo build --unit-graph during Nix evaluation to get the complete build plan, then creates a separate derivation for every compiler unit — 54 of them for ripgrep. After a one-line source change, buildRustPackage takes 16.5s (full rebuild) while rostnix takes 6.8s, re-running only affected units. Unlike crane, touching Cargo.lock or another crate in a workspace doesn’t invalidate unrelated units. The approach gives cargo authority over the build plan rather than re-implementing it.

Determinate: 5-year LTS for Secure Packages, OpenTelemetry tracing for Nix builds

Determinate Systems announced a tiered support model for curated Nixpkgs distributions: May releases in even-numbered years (starting with 26.05, supported until May 2031) get 60-month LTS; all other biannual releases get 12 months; a rolling track follows nixpkgs master. All tiers include CVE remediation with SLAs (Critical: 7d, High: 15d, Medium: 45d), FlakeHub Cache, optional FIPS variants and post-quantum signatures. The 60-month window was driven by long field lifetimes for embedded deployments and the EU Cyber Resilience Act’s minimum five-year support requirement.

Determinate Nix can also now export OTLP traces covering evaluations, local and remote builds, cache substitutions, HTTP requests and daemon connections, with W3C trace context propagated across process boundaries so a CI run shows as one unified trace. Disabled by default; works with any OTLP-over-HTTP backend.

Gradient CI v2.0.0 stable: NixOS-native CI claims 30 min → 9 min over Hydra

Gradient, an open-source NixOS CI system, reached its first stable release after 802 days of development. It claims to be the fastest open-source NixOS CI through concurrent evaluation, intelligent worker job scoring and CPU-usage-aware dispatch that avoids OOM failures; the developer reports a drop from about 30 minutes on Hydra to about 9 in their own builds. v2.0.0 adds Gradient Teams for user/worker group management, Gradient SSH for distributed remote workers, Matrix/Slack notifications and full IFD support. The stable tag means future releases will include migrations for module options, PostgreSQL schemas, cache storage and worker protocols.

Nixdatifier: system tray update indicator with generation diff and secrets viewer

Nixdatifier is a KDE Plasma tray widget for NixOS inspired by Apdatifier from CachyOS. It shows when flake inputs are stale, available nixpkgs package updates, a generation timeline, a generation diff view for comparing configs, a secrets tab, and a tools panel for running common Nix commands.

ranma: terminal tiling WM combining i3 tree layout with Hyprland dwindle, Lua plugins

ranma running in the terminal with multiple panes in dwindle layout and a status bar. Image: masshirodev

ranma runs as a server-backed tiling window manager inside the terminal — each pane is a real PTY, arranged using i3’s container tree and Hyprland’s dwindle placement algorithm. Closing the terminal detaches rather than kills the session. Feature-complete: dwindle/tabbed/floating/scratchpad layouts, multiple workspaces, fuzzy workspace/session switcher, clipboard history with SSH passthrough, a waybar-style status bar with Lua/shell modules, window rules, saved layouts and kitty graphics protocol support. Nix install is available; the developer uses it as their daily driver. Requires Linux + glibc 2.34+.

Also today

Nix
gitlab: flake inputs now fail with Cloudflare 403s; workaround is the explicit git+https:// or git+ssh:// form — NixOS Discourse · r/NixOS
Graft: Guix-style grafting for Nix — swap a dependency in a store path without re-evaluating, writing a new store path; author flags it as “sharp” tooling, safe for executables but risky for libraries — NixOS Discourse
nxXtend beta: nx CLI adds nixpkgs or flake packages to configuration.nix/home.nix, shows a plan before editing, auto-rolls back on failed rebuilds; 178 tests including real NixOS system tests — GitHub · r/Nix
Nixarchy v4.0.4: Omarchy/Hyprland on NixOS now ships gliff, a Hyprland-to-Hyprland remote desktop over SSH, by default; also video wallpapers and an update indicator — GitHub · r/NixOS
Tools
Merman v0.8.0: Rust reimplementation of Mermaid renders diagrams to SVG/PNG/PDF with no Node.js or Chromium; ships a flake.nix — GitHub · r/commandline
FileBrowser Quantum v2.0.0 stable: the original filebrowser repo is archived and this fork takes over, adding OIDC/LDAP/2FA, real-time search, expiring share links; shell execution deliberately removed — GitHub · r/selfhosted
Quickshell expandable side panel open-sourced after its animation drew interest on r/hyprland — GitHub · r/hyprland
cd ~/repos/josse-posten && claude --resume 25d71193-d6fe-480d-b880-e62ee487cc0b