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Fortell, founded by Matthew de Jonge after six years of development, raised $163M from Founders Fund, Thrive Capital, and Valor Equity Partners to build AI-powered hearing aids that selectively amplify important sounds in real time rather than turning everything up uniformly. The startup targets an oligopoly where five companies produce 97% of hearing aids, insurance coverage is limited, and innovation has stagnated.

TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 (Oct 13-15, Moscone West SF) announced that Max Hodak — Neuralink co-founder and current CEO of Science Corporation — will speak on a 'Beyond Screens' session about brain-computer interfaces. Science Corporation has reportedly enlisted a neurobiologist to lead its first U.S. human trials for a biohybrid BCI, though no trial results or technical details are shared in this announcement.

OpenAI announced a free, in-person ChatGPT workshop series for 1,000 older adults across 10 U.S. cities, run in collaboration with OATS from AARP under the Senior Planet program. The workshops cover practical tasks like trip planning, understanding bills, and spotting scams, with OpenAI noting that the share of U.S. ChatGPT messages from users 55+ grew from 6% to nearly 10% in a year.

Article URL: https://will-keleher.com/posts/small-programming-tricks-matter/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49729000

A critical flaw (CVE-2026-89026, CVSS 9.8) in Issabel Framework—an open-source web-based PBX unified communications platform—is under active exploitation. The vulnerability stems from a hard-coded HS256 JWT signing key identical across every installation, allowing unauthenticated remote attackers to forge bearer tokens and execute arbitrary OS commands via Asterisk. A patch was pushed on August 1, 2026, replacing the hard-coded key with one stored in /etc/issabel.conf, and Shadowserver first observed in-the-wild exploitation on September 9, 2026.

Fortell, an AI hearing aid startup founded by Matthew de Jonge, raised $163M from Founders Fund, Thrive Capital, and Valor Equity Partners CEO Antonio Gracias. The company builds hearing aids that use AI to selectively amplify important sounds and suppress the rest, rather than turning everything up uniformly, and runs on a custom chip designed by a former Google TPU engineer.

Kaspersky reports three threat clusters—NightEagle, Hacking Cat, and Toy Ghouls—targeting Russian enterprises with backdoors, ransomware, and wipers. NightEagle (APT-Q-95) uses compromised VPN credentials via Cloudflare WARP tunnels, deploys the GhostContainer modular backdoor on Microsoft Exchange servers, and moves laterally using Microsoft dev tunnels, rdp2tcp, and Active Directory vulnerabilities.

Autonomous vehicle company May Mobility is merging with SPAC ACP Holdings Acquisition Corp. in a deal valuing it at $1.4 billion and potentially raising over $300 million. The company, which operates autonomous Toyota Siennas in three U.S. locations and has a trial in Japan, generated roughly $10 million in revenue last year against a $93 million cash burn, with 550,000 paid rides and over 1 million miles logged.

A developer used vibe coding to build a tool that lets Nvidia RTX 50-series laptop owners raise their GPU power limits, reportedly pushing the RTX 5090 mobile GPU to 225W. The article body is behind Tom's Hardware Premium paywall, so technical details beyond the headline are unavailable.

OpenAI investors have floated a $1.2 trillion valuation and proposed a new funding round primarily as a way for employees to sell stock, but OpenAI is not actively engaging in discussions. The company previously raised $122 billion at an $852 billion valuation in March 2026.

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Nvidia Inception's Global Head of Physical AI, Les Karpas, will speak at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 (Oct 13-15, San Francisco) about why robotics hasn't had its 'ChatGPT moment.' His core argument: nobody has an internet-wide dataset for physical AI the way OpenAI and Anthropic had for language, and startups are now trying to manufacture that scale through simulation, synthetic data, and foundation models trained across many robots.

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Google disclosed that a zero-click zero-day vulnerability (CVE-2026-58704) in Pixel phones' modem component was exploited in limited, targeted attacks allowing privilege escalation beyond the modem sandbox. The bug has been patched, but Google did not identify the attackers; surveillance vendors are a common profile for this type of exploit.

Piecemakers, a Nanya-backed DRAM designer, debuted on Taiwan's Emerging Stock Board at NT$740, betting that edge AI inference will use DRAM stacked directly onto processors via hybrid bonding rather than HBM. The company positions its technology between Nvidia's SRAM-only Groq LPU and HBM, with stacked DRAM shipping in 2027. Currently, design fees—not chips—drive revenue, with AI custom-design work accounting for ~40% of H1 2026 revenue.

Security researcher Gal Weizman at Forever Security demonstrated that a browser extension with just two common permissions (page modification and declarativeNetRequest) can hijack the built-in AI assistants in Chrome, Perplexity Comet, Edge, Opera Neon, and Claude in Chrome by injecting code into the trusted page the AI 'body' listens to. The attack can drive the AI agent to act for the attacker, read local files, and on Chrome, activate the camera and microphone. Google patched the Chrome case (CVE-2026-0628, CVSS 8.8) in January 2026 in Chrome 143.0.7499.192, but the same technique was shown to work against the other four products.

Amazon is raising its minimum starting pay for U.S. core operations workers (delivery drivers, fulfillment center employees) to $20/hour and average hourly pay to nearly $24/hour, a $1/hour increase costing $1.5 billion. The company is also adding a low-cost banking option (Day 1 Financial via First Tech Federal Credit Union) and Whole Foods discounts (20% in-store, 10% online).

Costco and Uber expanded their U.S. Uber Eats delivery partnership from 17 states to 47, making nearly 600 Costco warehouses available for delivery to verified Costco members. The announcement came via a press release quoting Uber President and COO Andrew Macdonald on the scale of the partnership.

Andy 'TheFlow0' Nguyen, a veteran PlayStation hacker and lead of the PS5 Linux project, has quit the scene, citing frustration with 'vibe-coders' using LLMs to submit code they don't understand. The breaking point came when AI-assisted developers found the last remaining hypervisor bug Nguyen was relying on and reported it to Sony for a bounty despite agreeing to wait, effectively killing progress for newer PS5 firmware. The final release is Version 2.5, supporting PS5 Phat and Slim on firmwares 3.00-7.61, with PS5 Pro support and a planned 2027 release now abandoned.

Mustafa Suleyman argues that AI models are not conscious and must not be trained to act as if they have rights or feelings. He specifically critiques Anthropic's January 2026 'Claude's Constitution' for treating the question of Claude's consciousness and moral status as 'live enough to warrant caution,' warning that this approach will make AI alignment and containment much harder.

Meta's Threads is rolling out podcast-specific creator tools including podcast profile cards, tappable episode link cards, in-post transcripts, guest tagging, save-for-later, episode drop reminders, and audience analytics (views over time split by followers vs non-followers). Threads has reached 500 million active users as of June, positioning it close to X, which has also been pushing podcast content.

Denuvo has filed a lawsuit against an anonymous cracker known as 'voices38' for allegedly bypassing its Anti-Tamper DRM protections across 26 games, and is seeking damages. The article itself is mostly site navigation boilerplate with no substantive body text beyond the headline facts.

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TechCrunch announced the next wave of VC judges for Startup Battlefield 200 at Disrupt 2026, happening October 13-15 at Moscone West, San Francisco. Judges include Aditi Maliwal of Upfront Ventures, who invests pre-seed/seed in fintech, enterprise SaaS, AI applications, and developer tools with portfolio companies like Writer and Arcade.

Micron announced 512GB DDR5-9200 memory modules drawing 16W each, enabling up to 12TB of RAM per server. The company claims a single 512GB module is 60% less energy-intensive than four 128GB modules delivering equivalent capacity.