AI Weekly Malaysia

Fairphone's CTO explains how and why the Dutch company builds a different kind of smartphone.

SpaceXAI Memphis said on its X account that more than 2,000 subscribers from the Memphis and Southaven area have already signed up for the discounted Starlink offer. Elon Musk is giving subscribers living near his data centers up to $65 off on their monthly internet bill.

Tom's Hardware highlights a 32GB Team Group T-Force Vulcan Eco DDR5-6400 RAM kit priced at $405 with a promo code, calling it the cheapest DDR5-6400 kit currently available. The product is marketed with environmentally conscious packaging.

Wayve and Uber have launched paid self-driving rides in London using 15 Ford Mustangs with a licensed safety driver onboard, beating Waymo (still in testing) to paying passengers. Wayve also showed a Nissan LEAF prototype with integrated sensor packaging and NVIDIA DRIVE Hyperion, intended for UK roads next year and eventually capable of fully driverless operation.

A South Korean court revealed that Chinese chipmaker CXMT allegedly ran 'Project Hefei,' a systematic effort to steal Samsung's 620-step DRAM manufacturing recipe, which helped CXMT capture 10% of the global DRAM market. The court says CXMT used a literal written roadmap for the industrial espionage.

Article URL: https://jestoph.com/2026/09/04/jane-street-challenge.html Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49562657

A digital sign at London's O2 arena was caught displaying a Windows 10 update notification while advertising an indoor skydiving experience. Windows 10, which left support last year, still holds roughly 30% market share per Statcounter, and Microsoft quietly extended consumer security updates to 2027 in June 2026.

Vivo Malaysia launched the V80 Lite 5G, a mid-range smartphone featuring a 10,000mAh battery, 6.83-inch 1.5K AMOLED 120Hz display, IP68/IP69 and MIL-STD-810H durability. Promo pricing runs from RM1,399 (6GB+128GB) to RM1,899 (8GB+256GB), with pre-orders open until 11 September 2026 and free gifts valued up to RM1,145 including a Smart Projector and 4-year battery warranty.

Nvidia's equity investments surged to $99 billion as of July 26, up from ~$7 billion a year earlier and ~$2.2 billion two years prior, with over $40 billion committed in 2026 alone. Investments span the AI stack including OpenAI, CoreWeave, and Nebius, positioning Nvidia as both chip supplier and strategic backer across frontier labs, cloud providers, and infrastructure companies.

California personal injury firm DK Law alleges UK-based ConnexAI sold it a phone-and-AI system (including 'Athena' software with sentiment analysis, entity recognition, call transcripts, and Spanish transcription) that did not perform as promised, and then unlawfully renewed its one-year contract and continued invoicing after being told it would not renew. ConnexAI, which filed its own complaint in a New York court in March 2026 for non-payment, rejects the allegations as frivolous.

Wordfence reports over 440,000 exploit attempts against two critical WordPress plugin RCE flaws: CVE-2026-14894 (Super Forms, CVSS 9.8, fixed in v6.3.314) and CVE-2026-32475 (Elementor Pro, CVSS 9.0/9.8, fixed in v4.2.2). Both allow unauthenticated attackers to upload arbitrary PHP files via form file-upload fields, enabling web shells, admin account creation, and full site takeover.

The UK Ministry of Defence has launched Project PANOPTES, a £5M ($6.8M) tender for an autonomous, vehicle-mounted counter-drone system, with first-stage submissions closing September 23. The MoD is particularly interested in Laser Directed Energy Weapons to defeat NATO Class 1 drones (up to 150 kg) against single, sequential, and swarm attack profiles, moving beyond a 2024 demonstration where a 15 kW laser on a Wolfhound truck neutralized targets beyond 1 km.

This is sponsored partner content ranking three travel eSIM providers (Holafly, Saily, Airalo) by a 'Travel eSIM Value Index 2026.' Holafly scored highest at 91.1/100, largely because it offers day-by-day plans, while Saily and Airalo force fixed-duration packages that can leave travelers paying for unused days.

Asia Pacific University of Technology & Innovation (APU) launched what it claims is Malaysia's first AI Supercomputing Lab powered by NVIDIA DGX Spark at its Technology Park Malaysia campus, giving students hands-on access to compute for LLMs, generative AI, and agentic AI development. The launch was officiated by Higher Education Minister Dr Zambry Abdul Kadir and aligns with national policy statements from PM Anwar Ibrahim and Digital Minister Gobind Singh Deo pushing Malaysia to build, not just consume, AI.

Plex released urgent updates for Plex Media Server 1.43.3 and Plex Desktop 1.115.0 patching multiple undisclosed security flaws, with CVE identifiers requested but no details shared. Over 360,000 devices expose the Plex Media Server web interface per Censys data. Plex's history includes a 2020 vulnerability (CVE-2020-5741) that was used as the initial access point in the LastPass breach.

Google patched CVE-2026-85046, a high-severity V8 type confusion bug (CVSS 8.8) actively exploited in the wild, allowing remote code execution inside Chrome's sandbox via a crafted HTML page. The fix ships in Chrome 152.0.7977.82/.83 for Windows/macOS and 152.0.7977.82 for Linux, and this is the sixth actively exploited Chrome zero-day patched in 2026.

Lexar announced the Lexar Muse, claimed to be the world's thinnest portable SSD at 0.15-inch thickness, as part of its 30th anniversary. The drive uses a proprietary pogo-pin cable and includes a magnetic sleeve for mounting to phones. No pricing, capacity, speed, or availability details were provided in the article.

Fortefi Capital, a Securities Commission Malaysia-licensed digital investment manager, launched a platform letting Malaysian SMEs earn returns on idle operating cash while preserving liquidity for daily needs like payroll and supplier payments. The company estimates a business with RM240,000 average investable cash earning 3% annual return could add RM7,200 — a 6% profit uplift on a RM120,000 annual profit — without additional sales.

OpenAI unveiled GPT-6 Astra, which scores 100% on ExploitBench (up from 78.5% for GPT-5.6 Sol), 99.9% on ARC-AGI-3, and 98% on FrontierMath Tier 4. The model reached OpenAI's 'Critical' cybersecurity capability threshold, can develop working exploits from zero-day vulnerabilities including in hardened browsers and OSes, but the released version is restricted to secure code review and patching only—refusing PoC exploit creation. Broader access via OpenAI Daydream will roll out less restrictive safeguards in coming weeks.

Article URL: http://www.techdirt.com/2026/09/03/hackers-had-a-live-feed-of-every-id-this-verification-company-scanned-for-over-a-year/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49561320

A lab worker at an organ-transplant-related company couldn't log into her workstation because she was interpreting the SHIFT key as producing 'capital' versions of numbers — typing 'Capital Two' instead of '@'. The support engineer only figured it out when she spelled her password aloud and he realized 'capital two' meant she was holding SHIFT while pressing 2.

Simon Willison's August sponsors-only newsletter covers OpenAI's accidental cyberattacks, one-shotting Raccoon Heist games with Fable 5 and Sol 5.6, Claude auto mode, and understanding ChatGPT Work. It costs $10/month, with the previous month's issue released as a free preview.

OpenAI launched GPT-6 Astra, claiming new SOTA in computer use and coding, priced 2.5x higher per token but reportedly cheaper per completed task, framed as an 'automated AI Engineer for <$6/hour.' The rollout was bumpy with delayed access for paying users while influencers got early access, and the system card revealed decreased chain-of-thought monitorability despite improved alignment. Independent benchmark aggregators disputed OpenAI's 'AGI-like' framing, saying gains are large but uneven once cost and non-cherry-picked evals are considered.

A Google Cloud engineer performing routine hardware maintenance in us-central1-b sequentially unplugged 100% of fiber-optic cables across all network devices within 13 minutes, defeating Google's multi-path redundancy design and causing a partial outage from 07:41 to 11:52 PT on September 1, 2026. Traffic drop rates hit 100% for affected VMs, which could still communicate with each other but were unreachable from outside. Google restored service by shifting traffic to healthy capacity elsewhere in the region.

More than half of employers in Singapore do not plan to increase headcount and intend to freeze or moderate wages in 2027 despite a slight improvement in their business outlook for the year, according to a survey by the Singapore National Employers Federation (SNEF). The survey was conducted between Jun and Aug 2026. It gathered [&#8230;]