Saturday, 31 October 2026
Cloudflare tracks eMudhra exploitation in the wild; Google AI Mode blamed for $500B stock drop; Proton CEO cancels AI re-interviews
Today's Lead
EngineeringCloudflare Blog
4 real? Tracking exploitation and patching of eMudhra's weak keys
On October 19, 2026, researchers found that eMudhra, a certificate authority (CA), generated eight weak keys. Attackers could recover the intermediate private keys and forge certificates. Cloudflare patched its high-impact systems within hours. Cloudflare saw about 22,000 handshakes that used the weak keys in one week. No evidence of interception was found. Over half of probes from large networks still accepted the compromised chain.
Engineering
Latent Space
Google admits AI Mode hurts Search revenue; -15% $500B drop worst since 2004 IPO
Google Chief Business Officer Philipp Schindler said AI Mode earns less per query. AI summaries can replace visits to the source pages. Google shares fell 15 percent, the largest drop since its 2004 IPO. Reddit's CEO said AI Mode does not drive traffic. The article asks if an AI bear market is coming.
Irrational Exuberance
Self-reinforcing quality / adopting verification pattern
Imprint Engineering added a verification loop to its software development process. Each pull request needs a verification file before it leaves draft. The file records the checks that ran and the checks that could not run. These records show where the artificial intelligence (AI) tool struggles, so the team can improve its tools.
Firezone
Introducing sanstun: A sans-IO, parallel-friendly, userspace WireGuard implementation in Rust
Firezone released sanstun, a Rust implementation of WireGuard. The design passes time into the protocol state, so the code is easier to test. Encryption runs on worker threads, while the interface state stays single-threaded. Firezone built sanstun to replace its boringtun fork, which is now deprecated. sanstun is open source under the Apache 2.0 license.
GitHub
nesformer: A working Nintendo in ~1GB of Qwen weights
nesformer runs a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) 6502 CPU inside the weights of a stock Qwen3.5 model. A compiler computed these weights instead of training them. The model predicts the CPU execution log one token at a time. A small host program handles graphics, controller input, and interrupts. The project plays NROM cartridges, such as Super Mario Bros. The author reports that the output matches a conventional 6502 emulator for the bundled test games.
Humanities
JSTOR Daily
The Rise and Fall of Shanghai's "Sing-Song Girls"
Historian Gail Hershatter studies the sing-song girls of old Shanghai. These entertainers sold sex at fixed rates, not for gifts from elite patrons. From the 1860s, money replaced status, and the courtesan tradition lost its prestige. By the 1920s, sing-song girls joined a lower group called changsan. After 1949, the Communist government called sex work a social illness and tried to end it. The sex workers' own voices are mostly missing from the historical record.
Astral Codex Ten
Your Book Review: The History And Adventures Of An Atom
An anonymous reader reviews Tobias Smollett's 1769 novel, The History and Adventures of an Atom. The review says the book is one of the strangest works before the Modernists. The reviewer explains this strangeness through the history of early novels. Smollett wrote the book as an experimental break from convention. The narrator is an immortal atom, and the story is an allegory of British politics.