Monday, 26 October 2026
LLM prices fall 80% as open-weight competition bites; eMudhra intermediate CAs compromised; DORA annual survey discontinued
Today's Lead
EngineeringMax Woolf's Blog
OpenAI and Anthropic cut their LLM prices by up to 80% within a few months. Why?
OpenAI and Anthropic made a series of LLM price cuts and model releases between June and September 2026, each responding to the other. The author argues that easy model swapping, open-weight models, and many inference providers on OpenRouter create competitive pressure that keeps prices low. He rejects the theory that labs will raise prices later, because competing providers push prices toward marginal cost. He finds it odd that both companies cut their main revenue source while preparing for IPOs with large reported losses, and he suggests compute efficiency and subscription changes may explain part of the cuts.
Engineering
Apple Support
About the compromised eMudhra intermediate CAs
The private keys of eight intermediate Certification Authorities (CAs) operated by eMudhra were compromised. Two issue code signing certificates that Apple's frameworks do not trust. The other six issue TLS certificates, which could be used to create certificates that appear valid for any website. Apple began blocking 12 affected TLS and related certificates on October 19, 2026, and added emSign ECC Root CA - G3 on October 23, 2026, through automatic configuration updates. Terminal tools such as curl, git, python3, and openssl read /etc/ssl/cert.pem and do not apply Apple's block, so administrators can optionally remove the affected root CAs from that file, and Apple plans a future update to fix this.
LeadDev
What's next for DORA?
Google's DORA team, part of Google Cloud, has announced it will not run the annual survey this year, so there will be no 2026 report. DORA was valued as an independent benchmark that linked engineering work to customer outcomes and was not tied to any vendor's tools. Google has not explained the decision, and some commentators link it to the modest findings of DORA's 2025 AI research, though this is speculation. DORA plans more qualitative research, while engineering intelligence vendors and developer experience tools will keep publishing data that may be less neutral. Organizations can run their own surveys using DORA's openly licensed questions on dora.dev, starting with a baseline and measuring change after an experiment.
Rust Blog
How to fund Rust contributors
Rust's workload keeps growing, and many contributors are volunteers, which can lead to burnout and slow progress on complex features. Funding this year helped maintenance and features such as allocators, the never type, the next trait solver, and the Polonius borrow checker, but only a fraction of contributors are paid. The article describes three ways to fund Rust: general maintenance through the Rust Foundation Maintainers Fund or the RustNL Maintainers Team, specific Project Goals listed on goals.rust-lang.org, and individual contributors through their sponsorship pages. Companies can join the free Rust Commercial Network, which does not require Foundation membership, and can fund employee time, hiring, or the Engineer in Residence role.
yossarian.net
TIL: POSIX wordexp(3) is dangerous
The POSIX C function wordexp(3) performs shell-style expansions, and it is often used for tilde expansion such as turning ~/foo into a home directory path. By default, all expansion features are enabled, including command substitution, so input like $(cat /etc/passwd)/foo gets executed. The WRDE_NOCMD flag turns off command substitution, but the author says it is weak protection on some libc implementations. The musl libc passes input to the system shell and adds a basic check that misses some patterns Bash still treats as command substitution, and macOS libc uses a similar delegation approach with a bypass reported in 2023. The author recommends never calling wordexp(3) on untrusted input, even with WRDE_NOCMD.
Humanities
Aeon
What cooperatives for an anticapitalist peace look like
Aslan argues that liberal peacebuilding, which focuses on ceasefires, disarmament, and reintegration, cannot produce durable peace while capitalist production relations remain intact. She cites Guatemala, where land tenure stayed unresolved and violence rose after the 1996 accords. She proposes anticapitalist peace, in which cooperatives that prioritize collective need and democratic governance change the economic structures behind conflict. She examines Rojava's commune-based cooperative economy and Colombia's ECOMÚN, a federation of former FARC-EP members and local communities, to show both the promise and the limits of this approach.
Aeon
The bisexual artist who reimagined womanhood for the Jazz Age
This video profiles Tamara de Lempicka (1894-1980), a Polish painter and a leading figure of Art Deco, a style that combined modernist geometry with glamour. Her work often shows independent female desire in 1920s culture. The video, part of the Great Art Explained series hosted by James Payne and Laura Beardsell-Moore, traces how her wealthy upbringing, her escape from the Russian Revolution, and her time in 1920s Paris shaped her art. The central focus is her 1929 self-portrait, Autoportrait (Tamara in the Green Bugatti), which the hosts argue presents a new, modern idea of womanhood.