AI Weekly Malaysia

Feedly, the largest standalone RSS reader with 15 million users, has suffered a weeklong web app slowdown that paying users call 'unusable,' with the iOS app also broken and the classic mobile app shut down without warning. CEO Edwin Khodabakchian attributed the issues to a bug, not the company's ongoing pivot to AI-powered cyber threat intelligence, and claimed RSS remains a priority.

Cursor launched Origin, an early-beta code hosting platform available to all paid plans (except enterprise orgs whose admins opt out). It supports repos, pull requests, code browsing, and two-way GitHub sync where GitHub remains the source of truth for synced repos. Integrations with Vercel (preview deployments per PR), Depot, and Buildkite (CI) are already live, with 'agent-native features' promised soon.

Amazon is purchasing rare and out-of-print books, physically destroying them by cutting off their spines, and scanning the contents for AI training at a Las Vegas facility (VGT3), according to a 404 Media investigation that tracked a rare book to the site. These pre-2022 texts are especially valuable because they contain no AI-generated content, avoiding 'model collapse' that degrades LLM outputs when trained on synthetic text.

Sun Clock is a free, ad-free 24-hour web clock that visualizes sun position, sunrise/sunset, golden hour, twilight, and moon phase/times for your location. It adjusts its rotation direction based on hemisphere, works as an installable Progressive Web App, stores all location data locally with no cookies, and its source is MIT-licensed.

GitHub Copilot Autofix introduced a script injection vulnerability into Snowflake's snowflake-connector-net GitHub Actions workflow on June 18 by removing an existing sanitized input pattern and replacing it with direct string expansion in a shell script. Five days later, Wiz's autonomous AI red agent found the bug during a routine public repo scan, exploited it by crafting a GitHub issue title that exfiltrated Jira credentials via an out-of-band callback, and gained read access to Snowflake's engineering, security compliance, and bug bounty projects. Snowflake patched the same day Wiz reported it and rotated credentials the next day, confirming a five-day exposure window with no unauthorized access beyond Wiz.

OpenAI President Greg Brockman told CNBC that recent executive departures, including revenue chief Denise Dresser after eight months and longtime executive Brad Lightcap, are 'not actually that atypical' and attributed scrutiny to OpenAI's spotlight. Dresser was tasked with growing OpenAI's enterprise unit, which competes directly with Anthropic.

Groq raised $350M at a $3.5B valuation, down sharply from $6.9B last September, after Nvidia hired founder Jonathan Ross and top talent via a licensing deal—turning Groq from an LPU chip competitor into an Nvidia GPU neocloud customer. The company now operates 13 data centers across four regions serving 6M+ developers and plans to scale from 54MW to 200MW by 2027, targeting medium-to-large Nvidia cluster rentals for training and inference.

Opening arguments begin Tuesday in Oakland federal court for a case co-led by California AG Rob Bonta, involving a coalition of 29 state attorneys general suing Meta over allegations it fostered addictive behavior in teens and children on Facebook and Instagram. This follows a recent loss for Meta in New Mexico, where AG Raúl Torrez won a case that may serve as a blueprint for the broader coalition.

Mozilla is progressively rolling out an experimental, off-by-default ad blocker in Firefox for iOS, using an EasyList-based filter list to block third-party ad networks, trackers, pop-ups, and overlays. It notably does not block search result ads from Google or Bing, nor sponsored content on Firefox's own New Tab Page, and Mozilla acknowledges some ads won't be caught by the current filter list.

A Yale School of Public Health study projects that universal health coverage could save $1 trillion and 114,000 lives annually. The article page itself is mostly site navigation and boilerplate with minimal substantive content accessible.

Alibaba is selling its entire stake in Lingxi Games—the studio behind 'Three Kingdoms: Strategy Edition'—for at least $1.5 billion to redirect capital toward AI infrastructure buildout. The move is compared to Micron's exit from consumer business as a strategic narrowing of focus.

BYD Malaysia is offering Merdeka-season rebates on its 2026 EVs: RM14,000 off the Atto 3 (Ultra now RM111,800, Premium RM124,800) and up to RM7,000 off the Sealion 7 (Premium down to RM181,800). The promo likely runs through end of September, with buyers also entered into a gold-bar and football-jersey giveaway.

404 Media used an AirTag hidden in a ~1,000-book order placed by an anonymous, price-insensitive buyer on Biblio to trace where bulk rare books are going. The shipment ended at Amazon's LAS8 facility in northeast Las Vegas, specifically the VGT3 section, where worker forum discussions confirm large volumes of books are destructively scanned—strongly suggesting Amazon is scanning books for AI training data.

Nvidia is investing $1.5B in SB Energy and extending up to $105B in credit to build OpenAI's Ports-Pike data center near Cincinnati, Ohio, securing itself as sole compute infrastructure supplier for a facility scaling from 4.25 to 8 gigawatts. The site includes a planned $33B, 9.2 GW natural gas power plant on former US uranium-enrichment land, with natural gas plant construction costs having risen 66% in two years.

Nathan Lambert argues Nvidia is investing heavily in near-open-source models (like Nemotron, releasing data and training code) to create a world where many companies build their own 'token machines' rather than buying from Anthropic/OpenAI, driving massive demand for Nvidia inference hardware. He distinguishes true open-source models (full training recipe, data, code — e.g. OLMo, Pythia) from open-weight models (just weights and inference code — e.g. Llama), and notes Nvidia is reportedly spending ~$26B on this strategy.

African defense tech startup Terra Industries raised an additional $18M, bringing its seed round to $52M, with backers including 8VC, Silent Ventures, and Nova Global. The company builds autonomous systems, drones, and mine-detecting combat vehicles, and claims it is on track to book $100M in contracts by year-end.

GitHub reported a 50% error rate on repository content downloads starting 1340 UTC on Aug 17, 2026, with Copilot also experiencing degraded availability. This is the latest in a string of 2026 outages affecting Actions, Pages, and Issues, with GitHub's own May availability report acknowledging that AI-assisted coding and agentic workflows are adding infrastructure strain.

Chinese startup Photon Matrix Lab has opened pre-orders for a $1,000 consumer laser mosquito zapper that uses LiDAR to locate insects and a galvo-mounted laser to kill them mid-air within a 6-meter range. The company raised $2.8M on Indiegogo and claims mass production has begun, but laser safety certifications remain incomplete as of June 2026, leaving backers anxious.

Yana Welinder, solo founder of fashion brand Yana Bana, describes using ChatGPT and Codex to run her entire operation without engineers — converting hand-drawn sketches into product images, using Codex to operate CLO (professional 3D fashion software) to generate CAD files for 3D printing without learning the tool, researching manufacturers, and building an e-commerce site with payments. She emphasizes treating prompts as detailed specs (describing silhouette, fabric behavior, even sound) and notes ChatGPT Images 2.0 follows original sketches more faithfully than other models that produce flashy but generic output.

The headline announces a sub-$7,000 sports car called the Gasolini AR1, positioned as a lightweight, fun alternative to hypercars. However, the article body provided is entirely cookie-consent boilerplate with no substantive content about the vehicle, its specs, availability, or manufacturer.

Automattic launched WordPress.com Education, a free classroom plan giving each student a full WordPress.com site with 6GB storage, backups, staging, plugin support, SFTP/SSH, phpMyAdmin, and a free .blog or .art domain for one year with no credit card required. After the first year, students pay $2/month or drop to a free WordPress.com tier with all content intact. The program was piloted with 5,000 students across 27 countries.

A judge ruled that Nine PBS owns the 50TB of archival TV data sitting on Iron Mountain servers, clearing the station to retrieve 70 years of content after its hosting provider went under. The case establishes that the station, not the defunct host, holds ownership of its own data.

Nvidia has disclosed a $21 billion stake in SpaceX, per an Ars Technica report from August 2026. The article body was not accessible (only cookie consent boilerplate was captured), so details on deal structure, timing, and strategic rationale are unavailable.

Wiz's autonomous AI security agent 'Red Agent' discovered and exploited a GitHub Actions script injection vulnerability in Snowflake's public repo (snowflakedb/snowflake-connector-net) five days after it went live. The vulnerability was introduced by PR #1218, co-authored by 'Copilot Autofix powered by AI,' which replaced a sanitized input pattern with direct string expansion of GitHub issue titles into a run: block—yet GitHub's AI-assisted security review flagged nothing. The exploit let an unauthenticated attacker execute arbitrary commands on a GitHub Actions runner and exfiltrate a token to access Snowflake's internal Jira.

Germany's Bundeskartellamt concluded proceedings against Apple after the company committed to changing its App Tracking Transparency Framework (ATTF), which had imposed stricter consent-prompt requirements on third-party apps than on Apple's own apps. Apple must now align consent requests more closely and give third-party app providers more freedom to combine consent prompts sensibly. Apple maintains ATTF is privacy-protective but offered binding commitments under Germany's abuse-of-dominance provision for large digital companies.