AI Weekly Malaysia

Sonic Fire Tech raised a $15M round led by the O.H.I.O. Fund with Khosla Ventures participating, bringing total funding to $18.5M including a prior $3.5M seed. The Ohio-based startup uses infrasonic waves at ~20 Hz pumped through PVC ceiling pipes to suppress fires in seconds without water or chemical residue, and plans to pursue National Fire Protection Association approval, which typically takes about three years.

Siemens and Reinhausen are jointly developing a modular solid-state transformer (SST) that converts medium-voltage AC (up to 36 kV) directly into 800 VDC for high-density AI datacenter racks, reducing intermediate conversion stages. No commercial availability date was given. Nvidia separately plans its own 800 VDC power rack for the second half of 2026, citing that racks drawing 1 MW or more will require this shift.

A CVSS 9.8 unauthenticated remote code execution flaw (CVE-2026-15748) in the Forminator Forms WordPress plugin affects all versions through 1.56.1, across 600,000+ active installations. Exploitation requires a form containing both a File Upload and Select field; the handle_file_upload() function's extension blocklist is bypassed via pipe-alternative MIME type keys, and custom storage roots may lack the .htaccess PHP-execution guard present in the default upload directory. The fix shipped in version 1.56.2 on July 31, 2026.

The article title claims a hidden AirTag revealed Amazon is destroying rare books to train AI, but the provided article text contains only cookie consent boilerplate from Ars Technica—no substantive content is available to verify the claim or extract details.

YouTube will count a view as soon as a video starts playing or a user enters a live broadcast, effective August 24, replacing the previous ~30-second threshold. The old metric is preserved as 'Engaged views' in YouTube Analytics. The change aligns YouTube with TikTok and Instagram, and comes alongside higher monetization thresholds for new creators starting next year: 8,000 qualified watch hours or 20 million Shorts views in 90 days, up from 1,000 subscribers plus 4,000 watch hours or 10 million Shorts views.

Kaspersky reports new modules in the Cavern C2 framework, used by Iranian-linked group Cavern Manticore against Israeli entities. The toolkit now uses DNS A-record responses to switch between direct HTTPS and a Google Apps Script relay, and a module called HOLLOWGRAPH abuses Microsoft 365 calendar events via the Graph API as a covert two-way C2 channel, dating events to 2050 to avoid detection.

Qwen3.8 27B, an open-weights model from Alibaba released August 2026, scores 52 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v4.1.1, ranking #1 out of 135 models in its class (small open-weights, 4B–40B). It supports text and image input, has a 256k context window, is a reasoning model, and is licensed Apache 2.0 — but is notably verbose, generating 160M output tokens versus a class median of 43M.

Geekom admitted to shipping AMD mini PCs with malware-laced network drivers and has since removed the malicious package, issuing guidance for affected users. The incident is a supply chain compromise where the malware was embedded in official driver software shipped with the hardware.

A developer shares a multi-month update after migrating from Gmail to Fastmail, finding the switch successful. Key tactic: using subdomain addressing (e.g., newsletters@sub.domain.com) so Fastmail auto-files emails into matching folders without manual rules, which proved better than Gmail's auto-sorting. They also note Fastmail supports up to ~100 domains per account, and that freshly registered custom domains may get greylisted by recipient email providers.

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.