Sunday, October 4, 2026

Annie Jacobsen @AnnieJacobsen

☣️🦠 UPDATE on pneumonic plague outbreak at the BSL-3 lab in Siberia. 🦠☣️ Russian gov't in TOTAL information control mode. Baikalsk municipal admin warned residents NOT to travel to the area where the lab accident occurred, then deleted the info ~2 hrs later. Local REN TV deleted 5 posts about the accident. Local journalists who reported on the accident yesterday appear not to have not written any updates since. Pneumonic plague is 100% fatal if not treated with antibiotics within the first 24 hours of symptoms. The biggest question being suppressed: have there been any more deaths from plague? The US State Dept lists Russia as having an illegal bioweapons program, one of 2 nations (N. Korea is other). Genetic modifications / bioweapons engineering more likely done at Obolensk and Vector (in a BSL-4 lab), but this is impossible to know for certain.

Reports of a deadly pathogen leak at a Russian research facility are sparking alarm as local authorities actively suppress information.

KhushbuSundar @khushsundar

As a woman, I refuse to stay silent when another woman is digitally violated, degraded and humiliated. What has been done through AI is not a joke, not entertainment and not something we should ever normalise. It is cruel, abusive and deeply shameful. It is tearing off her dignity. I am outraged by the creation and circulation of morphed videos targeting a woman. No woman should have to fear that technology can be weaponised to invade her dignity, reputation and sense of safety. Today, it is her. Tomorrow, it could be me, you, our daughter, our sister, our mother, or any woman we love. We cannot remain silent simply because we are not the victim today. When one woman’s dignity is attacked, every woman has a reason to stand up and speak out. Those who create such content, knowingly share it, promote it or deliberately amplify it must be held accountable under the law. There must be consequences and punished to set an example. A woman’s body is not content. Her dignity is not entertainment. Her humiliation is not a joke. And AI must never become a weapon against women. As women, we must stand together and say: ENOUGH. I stand with you #JanhviKapoor Stay strong bachcha. ♥️♥️♥️

A prominent actress is rallying support against the malicious use of AI to generate nonconsensual explicit imagery of women.

Aaron @aaronp613

This went under the radar, but earlier this week, Apple released USB-C to MagSafe 3 Cable (2m) Firmware 3.2.0 The last firmware update for this cable was over 3 years ago

Apple quietly updated the firmware for its magnetic charging cables for the first time in three years, prompting speculation about fixes.

Rjey @RjeyTech

Just got home, so here's my take. Xiaomi didn't copy Apple with the 18 Fold. - The wide "passport" foldable isn't Apple's idea. Oppo did it with the Find N in 2021. Google did it with the Pixel Fold in 2023. Apple picked a shape the industry had already tested. - Xiaomi launched Sept 7. Apple announced the Duo Sept 9 and it doesn't ship until Oct 23. You don't engineer a hinge, a custom folding panel and a production line off leaked renders in a few months. - What's inside is all Xiaomi. Its own Xring 03 chip, and triple-window multitasking with floating apps, while the Duo caps you at two apps side by side. A clone doesn't ship with its own silicon and a different idea of how a foldable should work. Samsung has been making foldables since 2019. Apple is 7 years late to this category.

Tech reviewers are pushing back on claims that Xiaomi copied Apple's new foldable, noting the Chinese brand's distinct hardware choices.

Catherine Rampell @crampell

In Springfield, OH, nearly 1,400 workers were laid off at truck factory just days before Trump rally. Layoffs were large enough to basically erase an entire year of job growth in the greater Dayton, Ohio, area. https://apnews.com/article/trump-ohio-midterms-factory-workers-7c8dc7901de15a22a909bcd9c8b78a3e?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=share

A major manufacturing layoff in Ohio is drawing national attention for its timing just ahead of a high-profile political rally.

Polymarket @Polymarket

BREAKING: OpenAI safety employee resigns after 3.5 years, declaring the company’s culture is broken & warning that “the time for trial and error is over.”

Another departure from OpenAI's safety team is renewing debate over whether the company is prioritizing rapid deployment over caution.

Chubby♨️ @kimmonismus

Gemini 4 is very close to official release. What surprises me is that we haven't heard anything from GLM, DeepSeek, or Kimi for quite some time. I am particularly eager for a GLM-5.4, given that GLM-5.3 continues to be cited- even in Anthropic blog posts -as one of the best models in terms of cyber capabilities.

As Google prepares its next major AI release, developers are wondering when China's leading open-weight models will answer back.

Open Source Intel @Osint613

NOW: A large fire (~51 megawatts) was detected at the Saudi Aramco’s Yanbu oil refinery approximately 40mins ago. This comes after unconfirmed reports of missile launches from Yemen. Contributed by: @BeamTracker_

Satellite data detected a massive fire at a Saudi oil refinery, aligning with reports of a potential missile strike from Yemen.

Rolling Stone @RollingStone

“When you’re an American soldier, you go to work every day, and step back like 20 or 30 years with tech.” Dan Driscoll wanted to modernize the military. Pete Hegseth forced him out. The former Secretary of the Army speaks for the first time since resigning in September. Read: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/dan-driscoll-modernize-military-hegseth-1235635481/

The former Secretary of the Army is speaking out about his resignation and the political resistance to modernizing military technology.

Trung Phan @TrungTPhan

Ben Affleck talks about building InterPositive, the AI video startup he sold to Netflix for ~$590m. Says when he first saw AI text-to-video, he told Matt Damon: “Dude, we have to do as many movies in the next few years as we can. We’re finished.” He later felt the AI video models didn’t fully understand filmmaking (they had raw video knowledge but didn’t convey “cinematic language”). Affleck raised money and his team (16 employees total) spent 8 months with various cameras and equipment shooting footage as inputs to train a new model (letting other filmmakers build a model for each film based on daily footage, which presumably makes it easier to do post-production edits): “[We built our own] data set that would serve as late-stage training for open models to do discrete tasks…It was geared toward actual specific tasks that would generate value, as opposed to, ‘Oh, this is novel. That’s kind of cool. Look what it can do.’ It was more, ‘it needs to hit these criteria’… We built the workflow. [It] is designed to train from a filmmaker while they’re making their movie. Rather than exposing what you’re doing to everybody to learn from, they retain the proprietary nature. In other words, they benefit from the learning they’re creating. They train their own discrete model using the same technique we did, just on top of that additional layer we had created.“

Ben Affleck revealed how he built and sold a specialized AI video startup to Netflix by training models on actual cinematic techniques.