DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash squeezes the KV cache down to 890 bytes per token
DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash looks like a minor version bump until you read what the team actually shipped. The new model is a 552B-parameter multimodal mixture-of-experts system that supports million-token contexts, and its whole design centers on one number: 890 bytes per token of global KV cache. That is roughly a quarter of what DeepSeek-V4-Flash needed in HBM […]
The signing keys in US driver’s license barcodes were hiding in plain sight
Flip over a US driver’s license and you will find a PDF417 barcode that encodes your name, birth date, license number, and a pile of jurisdiction-specific fields. Most states leave it as plaintext. A few sign it. Security researcher Ryan Fahey has now shown that for the states whose cards are made by Canadian Bank […]
Azure Red Hat OpenShift moves the control plane out of your subscription
Azure Red Hat OpenShift (ARO) is now available with hosted control planes in public preview. Red Hat announced the change on September 15, and it restructures where the most expensive and least visible part of your cluster actually runs: instead of three control plane virtual machines sitting in your Azure subscription, the control plane runs […]
Revolut breach shows how a convincing government email can pull passports and transaction history
Revolut has disclosed a data breach with an uncomfortable mechanism: the company itself handed customer data to the attacker. Someone emailed Revolut while impersonating a government agency, the request passed the company’s checks, and out went identity documents, selfies, and complete transaction histories for an undisclosed number of customers. The story broke via BleepingComputer on […]
Cutting eBPF CPU cost by 90 percent with inode memoization
A developer working on an eBPF-based security agent found that the most expensive thing his agent did was not enforcing policy decisions. It was figuring out which policy applied in the first place. The fix, an inode-level cache inside the kernel, cut kernel CPU cost by about 90 percent in benchmarks, and the whole thing […]
Azure Functions Flex Consumption gets site-scoped certificates and end-to-end TLS
TLS/SSL certificate support for Azure Functions Flex Consumption is now generally available. Microsoft announced the milestone this week alongside end-to-end TLS encryption support, and together the two close a gap that has kept some teams on the older App Service plans longer than they wanted to be. If you run function apps on custom domains, […]
The azd extension framework is generally available
The Azure Developer CLI’s extension framework is now generally available. If you haven’t followed the azd project, extensions are the plugin system that lets teams add their own commands, automation, and service integrations to the CLI without forking it or wrapping it in scripts. The GA applies to the framework itself: the parts of azd […]
Storage Mover can now migrate SMB shares to Azure Files without agents
Azure Storage Mover now supports agentless migration from on-premises SMB file shares to Azure Files, in public preview. Until now, moving file shares into Azure with Storage Mover meant deploying and managing migration agents on VMs near the source data. The agentless path removes that step entirely: the service reads the SMB share over the […]
Azure Copilot’s Troubleshooting Agent hits general availability
Microsoft has taken the Troubleshooting Agent in Azure Copilot to general availability. It lives in the Azure portal, in both the Copilot chat experience and the Support + Troubleshooting blade, and its job is to take a vague complaint like “my VM rebooted itself last night” and turn it into a diagnosis, a fix, or […]
Real-SWE benchmarks AI coding agents on code that cannot leak into training data
Why another SWE benchmark Specific Labs released Real-SWE, a benchmark that runs frontier AI coding agents against private, real-world enterprise codebases. The pitch is simple and hard to argue with: public benchmarks leak. SWE-bench tasks live in public repositories, and their solutions are on the internet. Any model trained after the benchmark published has, at […]
The Linux Zoom client is reading your clipboard before you paste
What was found Simon Tatham, the developer behind PuTTY, noticed in early September that an update to the Linux Zoom client had started proactively reading everything written to the X11 clipboard. Zoom 7.1.5 on Linux does it. The previous version he ran, 6.6, did not. He documented the behavior in a Mastodon thread that has […]
Azure says goodbye to OS Guard: what AKS operators should do before December 10
The short version Microsoft will retire Azure Linux with OS Guard on Azure Kubernetes Service on December 10, 2026. On that date you will not be able to create new OS Guard node pools, and existing ones stop receiving support. The stated replacement is Azure Container Linux, which went generally available on AKS starting with […]