Friday, 23 October 2026
Anthropic uses Claude to formally verify 239 OSS-Fuzz entry points; NVIDIA open-sources a kernel-sandboxed AI agent runtime; Quad9 exits France over court-ordered DNS blocking
Today's Lead
EngineeringAnthropic
LLMs are making formal software verification feasible at a much larger scale
Claude wrote formal proofs that 239 entry points across 123 OSS-Fuzz libraries never crash on inputs under 64 MB. Claude turned existing fuzz tests into specifications, and the Rocq proof checker verified them on compiled RISC-V code. The proofs found real bugs that trillions of fuzz test runs had missed, but the authors warn that verified does not mean bug-free.
Engineering
GitHub
OpenShell – A safe, private runtime for fleets of autonomous AI agents
OpenShell is an Apache-2.0 runtime from NVIDIA that sandboxes autonomous AI agents using kernel-level controls on filesystem, system calls, and network egress, governed by declarative policies. Agents never hold real credentials; the gateway injects endpoint-scoped secrets only into requests bound for approved hosts. Policy changes that add credential-receiving hosts are checked by formal verification and held for human review before they take effect.
Quad9
Farewell, France
Quad9, a nonprofit DNS resolver, will stop serving users in France on November 24, 2026. A French court ordered it to block DNS resolution for domains named in a copyright case brought by beIN, and Quad9 refuses to comply. Quad9 says it cannot identify French users without undermining its no-logging policy, and it has appealed the ruling.
Berget AI
New open-source method shows the same AI request emits 8.5 times more CO₂ in Texas than in Sweden
Berget AI released an MIT-licensed method, built with SEI, WattTime, and Klimatkollen, that estimates the carbon footprint of each AI inference request. Using Kimi K3 as the example, the same request emits about 0.4 g of CO₂ in Sweden and 3.2 g in Texas, driven by grid carbon intensity. The authors argue that per-request reporting would let buyers compare AI providers on measured data rather than averages.
Sammy Hajhamid
jailbreaking the switch 2
The post introduces ns2jb, a software-only, tethered jailbreak for the Nintendo Switch 2 on firmware 23.0.1, which the author calls the first such exploit for the console. The chain starts with a 32-bit integer overflow in the SmileBASIC array REMOVE command on the Switch 1, which lacks pointer authentication (PAC), and leads to ROP on the Switch 2. A heap overflow in path normalization then corrupts a BufferedStorage cache entry to gain full filesystem permissions, and a swapped ExeFS handle lets the author run native code past the loader's signature checks.
Humanities
Aeon
Traction!
Jennifer R Vail argues that friction is not only an obstacle — it is a driver of progress. She traces this from early log rollers and wheels to Roman chariots, Viking longships, and regenerative braking. Each advance creates new friction, and this resistance marks progress, not failure.
JSTOR Daily
The Art of the Thousand Bloom Chrysanthemum
A Thousand Bloom is a single chrysanthemum trained over about 18 months to carry more than 1,000 flowers. The article traces the form to Japanese growers, who gave the plant formal shapes and cultural meaning, and to the imperial exhibition at Shinjuku Gyoen in Tokyo, where the ōzukuri style was first created in 1884. It then follows how Longwood Gardens in Pennsylvania learned the craft through Japanese masters from the 1990s onward, with its 2019 bloom count of 1,542 described as the largest produced outside Japan.