North Korea could be behind Binance hack; Reddit, Intel stocks tank

TechmemeOct 31, 2026

Fri, Oct 30

top news

TRM Labs attributes the Binance hack to North Korea-based TraderTraitor, which drained ~$6.36B from Binance wallets across 10 blockchains, mostly in ~20 minutes (Tom Westbrook / Reuters)

@cz_binance: Seems token recovery already began. Another little detail in addition to the effort described, users pay trading fees on Binance in the coins they trade, so Binance's naturally accumulates all tokens they list. Your funds are SAFU! [embedded post]

@chainalysis: Our investigators are observing never-seen-before laundering patterns with the stolen funds from the Binance exploit. Thousands of transactions in a short period suggest that the attackers are using automation to obscure the trail of funds. Rather than simply moving funds onward, they repeatedly circulate them among addresses, often sending funds back to addresses involved earlier in the sequence. [image]

@nikitabier: The largest crypto exchange in the world just experienced the largest robbery in human history—and the person running it is a nomadic autistic man in Dubai posting “Funds are SAFU!” What a time to be alive.

Reddit closed down 29.27% on Friday, the worst drop since becoming a public company in 2024, after it forecast weak Q4 revenue (Caleigh Keating / CNBC)

@mikeisaac: reddit basically one of the last places i search for human results and now google is shredding that. does the open web even exist in ten years?

@dkthomp: The rise of Google AI Mode (plus agents) will be a big economic shift for the web—but it's also a huge psychological shift in our relationship to other people on the web... This will change the economics of the internet because the machine has gone from hunting and gathering (ranking and displaying links to which they send traffic) to serving final meals (summarizing the results). We're seeing AI Mode affect Alphabet earnings, Reddit revenues, and search traffic for publishers. That's already a big story.

@buccocapital: Reddit call was absolutely fascinating. Everyone should listen to it as a bellwether for where the internet is going - AI Mode is increasingly default Google experience - AI Mode provides rich info and data in line, less incentive to leave search - AI Mose incentivizes dialog, Google wants to keep you engaged to serve more ads at each turn - Google will milk search for as much revenue as possible as they transition from a search company to a cloud service and chip company - As traffic from humans becomes more scarce this will put Google in an increasingly adversarial position to the rest of the internet - This is a massive headwind to all media type companies who are not destinations - This is a massive headwind to all content-driven go-to-market motions especially in the SMB. …

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Intel stock closed down 28.58% on Friday, its worst day since the 1970s and wiping ~$12B off US government's stake, after issuing weaker-than-expected guidance (CNBC)

@scottlincicome: One of the many problems with the government's Intel stake - and Trump bragging about big stock gains over the summer - is that the “gains” are an illusion: they're only realized when the government sells, but the government can't sell.

@trungtphan: If you bought $10,000 of Intel at its peak during the Dotcom Bubble in 2000, you'd now have $9,000.

@ericboehm87: Yikes! I sure am glad that my tax dollars aren't invested in an equity share in this company, because that's a thing the federal government would never do

The UK CMA opens a probe into whether Meta imposed exploitative terms on publishers and advertisers to use their content to develop its AI and other services (Reuters)

Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Oracle have a collective $3T+ in AI spending commitments over the coming years, including Alphabet's $1T and Meta's $800B (Brody Ford / Bloomberg)

Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Oracle returned just 9.3% of cash to shareholders in the first three quarters of 2026, a 15-year low amid AI spending (Patturaja Murugaboopathy / Reuters)

Google says its Suncatcher prototype data center satellite is online after an October 1 launch, with Gemma 4 generating a haiku about being in space (Tim Fernholz / TechCrunch)

NYSE owner ICE plans US-regulated Hyperliquid-based perpetual markets with Trade.xyz, a market operator on the crypto platform, and takes a stake in Trade.xyz (Katherine Doherty / Bloomberg)

OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Anthropic say they will adopt a new standard that publishers can use to opt out of being scraped by AI across multiple crawlers (Emma Roth / The Verge)

CrowdStrike: China-linked hackers used AI tool ARTEX with a DeepSeek LLM and another model to target 200+ organizations in 11 days, compromising at least nine (Kevin Collier / NBC News)

artificial intelligence

Anthropic renames its $100 per month Max 5x plan as Max and the $200 per month Max 20x plan as Ultra, and removes the 5-hour limit for verified Ultra accounts (Claude / @claudeai)

OpenAI tightens limits on the weapons-related information that ChatGPT provides teens, even when a question appears harmless, as part of new safeguards (Reuters)

Meta quietly launches Style Sketch, an AI fashion app that helps users put together outfit ideas using clothes they own, in Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand (Aisha Malik / TechCrunch)

FEC data: AI-oriented PACs spent nearly $80M on the 2026 US elections, mostly before the primaries; pro-regulatory PACs outspent Leading the Future's network (Ian Krietzberg / Puck)

How a wave of startups are betting on AI to make formal software verification practical and essential, including &Truth, which launches with a $70M seed (Paresh Dave / Wired)

AI Processors

Sources: DeepSeek doubled its latest round's size due to surging black market Nvidia Blackwell chip prices, with Chinese state-owned investors representing 27% (The Information)

S-1: Anthropic says it heavily depends on TSMC chips made in Taiwan and warns of risks from “potential disruption” amid geopolitical tensions with China (Joseph C. Sternberg / Wall Street Journal)

earnings

CXMT reports Q3 revenue of ~$16.7B, up 613.2% YoY, and a net profit of ~$8.17B, swinging to profitability on the back of rising AI-driven memory chip prices (Reuters)

NAND maker Kioxia reports FY Q2 operating profit up 22x YoY to ~$12.7B, in line with est., but forecasts Q3 operating profit of ~$12.7B, below ~$14.9B est. (Bloomberg)

Twilio reports Q3 revenue up 20% YoY to $1.56B, vs. $1.52B est., net income up 333% to $161M, and expects slower Q4 revenue growth; TWLO drops 20%+ (Elias Schisgall / MarketWatch)

streaming

Sources: Spotify aims to launch its AI remix service in Q1 2027 and may charge $4-$5/month extra; it is still negotiating licensing deals with Sony and Warner (Anna Nicolaou / Financial Times)

Andy Jassy says Prime Video has “a revenue run rate in the tens of billions of dollars and is now profitable in its own right” (Julie Bort / TechCrunch)

funding deals

Filing: Vancouver, WA-based Powerlattice, which makes a power delivery chiplet to reduce AI compute power needs by 50%+, raised $86M, after raising $31M in 2025 (Kurt Schlosser / GeekWire)

Dream, which is training AI world models on US building data to automate construction design and engineering, emerges from stealth with a $17M seed led by a16z (Marina Temkin / TechCrunch)

Ravical, whose AI-powered platform helps accounting and tax firms manage their operations, raised a $17M seed led by MMC, bringing its total funding to $25M (Tamara Djurickovic / Tech.eu)

more news

Salesforce acquires Rune, which makes AI military logistics software, sources say for $375M in cash and stock; Rune raised $30m from a16z and others (Margaux MacColl / Resilience Media)

London's High Court dismisses Meta, TikTok, and X's challenge to Ofcom's Online Safety Act information requests, rejecting arguments they were disproportionate (Sam Tobin / Reuters)

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Sources: Indian AI infrastructure company AM Intelligence seeks to raise as much as $3B to fund a previously announced purchase of Nvidia Vera Rubin systems (Bloomberg)

Sources: Google is in talks with the DOD on a new effort to secure the data that feeds into software being built for the Golden Dome missile defense program (Bloomberg)

Inside Nscale's 2,250-acre, 8GW Monarch Compute Campus in West Virginia, which has been hit by construction issues, local opposition, and financing risks (Financial Times)

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