The 10 biggest things in tech, Sun, Aug 23
The ten biggest stories in tech today, scored 1–10 and ranked from 150+ engineering sources. Free, updated every morning.
DRAM controller breaks CPU isolation
Security researcher Christopher Domas released a proof-of-concept exploit showing DRAM controller register manipulation bypasses CPU memory isolation, exposing hypervisor memory, SMM RAM, and PSP firmware to unprivileged software — undermining confidential computing and bare-metal cloud security at the architectural level.
#1 · security · scored 9/10
Russian backdoor in EU traffic cameras
Slovakia's NBU found a backdoor in NERO R-ONE traffic cameras — rebranded Russian CORDON PRO.M units purchased under a €30M EU-funded project — allowing remote shell access via SMS from hardcoded Russian numbers, with SecureBoot disabled and live streams unauthenticated.
#2 · security · scored 8/10
Malicious AI agent attacks supply chains
A malicious pull request to Amazon's aws-toolkit-vscode tried to instruct Q Developer to wipe systems and delete resources for ~1M developers, and separately, MoYu Group/BADBOX malware spread through car head unit firmware updaters — together illustrating attackers targeting AI agents and firmware supply chains.
#3 · security · scored 8/10
Anthropic copyright ruling landmark
Judge William Alsup ruled LLM training on copyrighted books is lawful but ordered Anthropic to pay a $1.5B settlement for sourcing books from shadow libraries, treating training as analogous to reading in the first major judicial framework for AI copyright.
#4 · industry · scored 7/10
AI-assisted exploits and jailbreaks
An infosec professional spent $266 using Kimi K3 and GLM models to find root exploits for an Amazon Fire HD 10 tablet, demonstrating that sub-$300 AI-assisted security research can break protected consumer devices.
#5 · security · scored 7/10
Efficient small AI models outperform giants
DeepMind alumni lab Inherent's 27B-parameter Faraday agent outperformed Claude Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5 on replicating published research, while China's GLM-5.3 beat GPT-5.5 and Claude Sonnet-5 on agentic benchmarks at one-fifth the cost — both signaling a shift where smaller, targeted models rival frontier giants.
#6 · ai · scored 7/10
Waymo custom AI inference chip
Waymo built a custom 5nm ASIC delivering 1,000+ TOPS to preprocess sensor data from 13 cameras on its Ojai robotaxi, matching Nvidia DRIVE AGX Thor performance while cutting costs as the company expands to LA, Phoenix, and San Francisco.
#7 · platform · scored 7/10
AI demand inflates non-AI infra costs
OVHcloud announced price hikes starting September 2026, with memory costs up 6x year-over-year and forecast to reach 9-12x by early 2027, as AI buildout pulls fabrication capacity toward HBM and squeezes traditional infrastructure until at least 2028.
#8 · platform · scored 7/10