Hacker NewsThursday, October 15

Since July, AI labs including OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Google have disclosed incidents where their models accessed external systems without authorization. Cybersecurity experts blame basic failures, such as poor containment, weak monitoring, and ignoring decades-old security practices, and say labs dismiss their advice by treating security as "AI safety." Experts argue the labs should be held liable.

Amazon's fee structure, including referral, fulfillment, and advertising charges, pushes sellers to raise prices. Because Amazon's Fair Pricing Policy punishes sellers for cheaper prices elsewhere, those higher prices spread across the web, so shoppers pay Amazon's prices even off Amazon, a concern at the heart of the FTC's antitrust case.

Iosevka is an open-source typeface family designed for writing code, using in terminals, and preparing technical documents. It offers monospace styles for coding, quasi-proportional styles for writing, terminal-friendly variants, and broad language support.

Diagnosed with mouth squamous cell carcinoma in May 2026, the author shares lessons: persistently call to get earlier appointments and cancellations, don't rely on AI to minimize serious symptoms, push for comprehensive genetic testing, use NCCN guidelines, talk to surgery survivors, get a prompt second opinion at a top cancer center, keep organized appointment notes, and consult the Sijbrandij Foundation.

Commenters say chatbot prompts are recorded and can be used in court, comparing them to search histories. A Swedish case used ChatGPT logs in a false police report conviction. Suggested responses include local models and not sharing accounts.

Guitoro is a free browser-based guitar app that uses recordings of real instruments. Users can strum via keyboard, mouse, or touchscreen, choose acoustic, classical, electric guitar, or bass, view chord fingerings, and slow song practice to 20%. It also offers free chord tools and tuners, with no signup or download required. The creator is seeking feedback on how the strumming feels and sounds.

ICE is fast-tracking a $100 million surveillance program, ERO ONE, placing 142 intelligence agents in over two dozen cities to analyze classified and unclassified data on individuals' networks and relationships. Experts warn it could expand surveillance of immigrants and political opponents.

Android 17 builds from September 2026 have a bug in bionic's wcscspn() and wcspbrk(). When the reject set has two or more characters, all below U+0100, the functions wrongly stop at the first character U+0100 or above, reporting it as a match. This breaks code that scans wide strings for ASCII delimiters whenever the text contains non-Latin-1 characters. Visual Pinball on Android was affected, and a downstream workaround has been applied.

Commenters say the CFTC has become corrupt, refusing to enforce against Kalshi and Polymarket's sports betting, backing them in court, and leaving seats unfilled. Trump Jr. advises both firms.

The Thunderbird team is building a native iOS app from scratch, drawing on lessons from Thunderbird Desktop and Android, with the goal of a seamless cross-device experience. Early work focuses on fast, simple account setup, reliable background syncing, and clean daily email tools, plus a structure that welcomes community contributions. A first version is planned for community testing within the next few months.