Archives

Z.ai open-sources its whole coding agent stack with ZCode

The harness, not just the model Z.ai, the company behind the GLM model family, open-sourced ZCode this week, and the interesting part is the scope. This is not a CLI script and a README. The repository contains the desktop client, the browser workspace, the backend services, the shared UI, and the agent runtime that powers […]

Why Trail of Bits calls SAML a fractal of bad design

A retrospective on the protocol nobody can replace Security firm Trail of Bits published a historical analysis of SAML this week, and the title is not subtle: they call it a fractal of bad design, straightforward on the surface but built on what they describe as a foundation of sand, bone dust, and ash. The […]

Claude Opus 5.5 cuts prices and rethinks how the model writes

The price is the story Claude Opus 5.5 is out, and the most interesting number on the announcement page is not a benchmark score. Input tokens now cost $4 per million, down from $5 on Opus 5. Output fell from $25 to $20 per million. Cache reads dropped hardest, from $0.50 to $0.20 per million. […]

Google ran a mole inside the TeamPCP supply-chain gang

The inside view of the worst supply-chain spree on record Reporting by WIRED’s Andy Greenberg, picked up by Ars Technica on Saturday, lays out something that sounds like a spy thriller but happened in a group chat: Google’s security subsidiary Mandiant had an undercover analyst inside TeamPCP’s inner circle for most of the hacking group’s […]

Xiaomi’s MiMo-V2.6 takes the open-weight crown and shows its RL receipts

A car company just published the strongest open weights on the board Xiaomi released and fully open-sourced MiMo-V2.6 on September 21, and the flagship Pro model lands at 46 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index. That score puts it ahead of every other open-weight model on that leaderboard, above xAI’s Grok 4.6 and Google’s Gemini […]

Azure Sphere OS 26.09 ships everywhere after the longest evaluation window yet

The update that took six months of testing to do almost nothing Azure Sphere OS 26.09 has reached general availability, wrapping up an evaluation run that started in late July and stretched all the way to September. Microsoft’s own description of the release is almost comically modest: no customer-facing changes. What the release actually contains […]

Playwright Workspaces goes GA in three more Azure regions

Microsoft has taken Playwright Workspaces to general availability in Australia East, Japan East, and Switzerland North, bringing the managed browser-testing service to seven regions in total. For teams in those three areas it removes the awkward compromise of running end-to-end browser suites against cloud browsers an ocean away. What the service actually does Playwright Workspaces […]

Qwen Image 2.1 lands as open weights with a license catch

Alibaba’s Qwen team released Qwen Image 2.1 as open weights on September 20, and it hit the top of Hacker News within hours. The model unifies text-to-image generation and image editing in a single 7B-parameter network, adds native transparency support, and ships with day-zero integrations across Diffusers, ComfyUI, and vLLM. There is one detail you […]

Confidential VMs for Azure Linux reach GA in AKS

Microsoft has taken Confidential VMs for Azure Linux to general availability in Azure Kubernetes Service. Teams running sensitive container workloads can now build AKS node pools on hardware-encrypted VMs, and the announcement stresses the part that matters most: no application code changes are required. What a confidential VM actually gives you A confidential virtual machine […]

Compiler optimizations, proven in Lean, squeeze 19 percent out of Skia rendering

A paper accepted at OOPSLA 2026 applies compiler theory to something most of us never think of as a compiler target: the draw commands behind every web page. In Semantics for 2D Rasterization, three researchers from the University of Utah built a formal model of Skia, the graphics library that renders Chrome, Firefox, Android, Flutter, […]

PyPy 8.0.0 ships first Python 3.12 support and starts the abi3 wheels push

The PyPy team released PyPy 8.0.0 on September 19, 2026, and it is a bigger deal than the version number suggests. Yes, there is the expected round of interpreter updates. The headline, though, is buried in the release notes: this version lays the real groundwork for CPython’s limited ABI, which could finally close the gap […]