Thursday, 5 November 2026
Residential proxies found on White House network; full-stack formal verification goes mainstream via AI; Go ships JSON v2
Today's Lead
EngineeringKrebs on Security
Want to Rent an Internet Address at the White House?
Security researchers at Layer3 Intel detected residential proxy nodes using the address network of the Executive Office of the President from October 5 to November 3, 2026. The proxies exited from the White House network 236 times, using six internet addresses on 26 of 30 days, mostly between 5 p.m. and midnight. Synthient linked the traffic to Windows 11 computers running Infatica, a proxy program often bundled into free apps. Layer3 found 28 residential proxy services that could exit through the White House network. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
Engineering
Alcides Fonseca
Full-stack verification is the new trend
The blog post by Alcides Fonseca argued that formal verification is shifting from small software cores or simplified models to "full-stack" verification, which covers the whole software stack, including hardware. It described recent examples. Harmonic used its agent Aristotle to fix bugs in a C big-number arithmetic library and to prove that a faster version matched the original. SF-Tensor began formalizing NVIDIA's PTX language in Lean to prove graphics processing unit (GPU) kernel correctness. Theorem and Anthropic verified open-source software running on a RISC-V processor. The author said that frontier AI models lowered the expertise and effort needed for proofs, and that cheap, subsidized token prices made experiments affordable. The author said this matters because verifying AI-generated code end to end could make it trustworthy without manual review.
The Go Blog
A new Go API for JSON
On 4 November 2026, the Go team published a post about a new API for JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) in Go. The team made the encoding/json/v2 and encoding/json/jsontext packages stable in Go 1.27. These packages followed an experiment that began in Go 1.25, and they fixed behavior, API, and performance problems in the original encoding/json package. Benchmarks showed that Unmarshal ran up to 10 times faster, and Marshal performance stayed roughly equal to v1. The v1 package stayed supported and now runs on top of v2, and v2 changed several defaults that developers can control with options.
Dennis Forbes
Shlemiel the Painter Is Back: How Zig's libc Rewrite Made SQLite 12,000× Slower
Dennis Forbes found a performance bug in his chess analysis service, which was written in Rust and stored results in SQLite. Inserting about 40,000 records took minutes of central processing unit (CPU) time, and the bug appeared only in Linux builds. He compiled SQLite for Linux with zig cc, and Zig's rewritten string functions measured the full string length on every call. Tokenizing a 1.2 megabyte (MB) JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) file ran about 12,000 times slower, because tokenizers repeatedly re-measured the remaining text. Forbes argued that classic algorithmic mistakes still recur in 2026, even in mature tools.
Figma Engineering
How Figma Manages Sandboxes at Scale
Figma managed tens of thousands of sandboxes for its artificial intelligence (AI) products, which run untrusted code. Figma built Nimbus, a central sandbox platform with a simple application programming interface (API) for creating, monitoring, and deleting sandboxes. Nimbus kept pools of pre-started sandboxes, which cut provisioning latency by 90% and raised provisioning availability from 99% to 99.95%. Nimbus encrypted credentials before they entered a sandbox, and it blocked requests when a policy or credential could not be checked. Nimbus launched internally in November 2025, and Figma reported fewer incidents afterward.
Humanities
JSTOR Daily
How the Phone Book Taught America to Ask for Answers
In 1878, the first telephone directory was printed in New Haven, Connecticut, and it listed about fifty names on one page. Phone companies discouraged social calls because they wanted the telephone to look like a serious business tool. After Bell's patents expired in 1893 and 1894, thousands of independent telephone companies formed. Subscribers often called operators for numbers missing from the book, so companies created "Information" operators to answer them. In 1991, the Supreme Court ruled that white-pages entries lacked enough creativity for copyright protection.
Aeon
Their eyes
Aeon published the short documentary "Their Eyes," directed by Nicolas Gourault, on 5 November 2026. The film followed gig workers in Kenya, the Philippines, and Venezuela who label images of unfamiliar streets. This repetitive work helped self-driving cars in other parts of the world recognise their surroundings. The workers described their jobs as mostly precarious and low-paid. The film argued that the labour behind artificial intelligence (AI) systems is often overlooked and can deepen existing geographic inequalities.