Daily Tech News 31 October 2026

• Binance was hacked by thieves who made off-ish with $6.3 billion. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  I say "ish" for two reasons: First, half the funds were immediately frozen and cannot be transferred further; second, it's a bit like bank loans: When you lose $1000 in Bitcoin, you have a problem; when you lose $6.3 billion in Bitcoin the blockchain has a problem.
  
  The attack was bootstrapped through a compromised devops laptop. The developer themselves didn't have access to do this, but they had access inside the corporate firewall so more sophisticated attacks could be launched bypassing that level of security entirely.

• Speaking of compromised devops laptops, the Visual Studio Code extension for the Claude AI tool on the Cursor platform was backdoored for twelve hours. (The Register)
  
  That's bad. It apparently doesn't affect the mainstream Claude Code interface, only that extension for that IDE on that particular marketplace, but that's another firewall bypass in a very widely used tool.
  
  
  
• Google's first datacenter in space is operational after launching on a SpaceX Falcon 9 earlier this month. (Tech Crunch)
  
  This is a small test run - only 1000 watts of power - and is intended to examine radiation and thermal stresses in the real environment before further deployments.
  
  
  
• With Nvidia's RTX 5090 declared extinct in the wild, interest turned to the second-fastest model, the RTX 5080. With predictable results as the card more than doubled in price and then followed its bigger sibling across the Darwinian event horizon. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The 5080 was never good value, and now it's gone.
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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