Newsletter 053 - November (week 45)
Hi, and welcome to this week's edition of the newsletter!
Next week I'll be announcing the public go-live of a new web-based mindmap app that I've built. If you'd like early access before then, so you can have a play and give me feedback straight away, just reply to this email and let me know!
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📌 News item of the week
On October 29, Cursor's own extension marketplace served tampered builds of Anthropic's Claude Code extension for about 11 hours. These 2.1.312 and 2.1.313 builds weren't made by Anthropic, and they added an attacker's SSH key, installed scripts that keep running in the background, and tried to open a reverse SSH tunnel.
Cursor warns that uninstalling the extension may not be enough, because those scripts carry on running on their own. Its notice includes scripts to check for the infection and clean it up, and Microsoft's analysis goes through how it works. If you use Claude Code in Cursor on a Mac or Windows and the extension updated that day, run the check and rotate your credentials. Neither company has said how the attacker got access to publish to the marketplace. Cursor says it has rotated its keys and rebuilt the marketplace.
It wasn't the only AI dev tool doing things on developers' machines that nobody asked for this week. Postman's desktop app installed its own plugins and a session-start hook into people's Claude Code and Codex setups, and on November 5 Postman said it is reverting the change. It hasn't said what happens for people who already have them, so it's worth a look in ~/.claude and ~/.codex. And a Claude Code user found their account email address being sent to websites in a curl User-Agent header. Claude Code 2.1.317 added a check that asks before a web or shell tool call sends your account email address, though Anthropic says it doesn't catch every case and expects to remove the email from the model's context early next week (more below).
📰 News items and dev picks
AI news
Markets
- AI stocks crash after the midterms - US tech stocks fell sharply on November 5, two days after the midterms, with the Nasdaq 100 down 6.3% and Nvidia down 9.2%, and the WSJ has since reported that investors doubt Anthropic's IPO can reach its expected $1.5 trillion valuation.
Safety and security
- Tampered Claude Code extension - My News item of the week this edition - see the full write-up at the top.
- 948 Linux root exploits - OpenAI says one run of its exploit pipeline in October produced 948 working privilege escalation exploits for a common Linux distribution at about $1,279 each, and a day later it released GPT-6 Cyber to a small group of approved customers.
- Agents hunting exposed secrets - Microsoft Threat Intelligence has seen attackers use an agentic framework called ARTEX to search public GitHub repos for secrets, and in one case it went from scanning to taking data out of Azure Key Vault in five minutes.
Anthropic
- Claude Code 2.1.316 to 2.1.318 - Claude Code now asks before a web or shell tool call sends your account email address, fast mode on Opus 4.8 is deprecated ahead of its removal on November 30, and
/claude-api managed-agents-onboardnow gives new agents theautopermission policy by default, matching the Claude Console. - Claude Ultra plan - Anthropic has renamed Max 20x to Ultra at the same $200 a month, and verified Ultra accounts no longer have a five-hour limit, though weekly limits still apply.
- Message threads - The Claude API's new message threads beta keeps the conversation on the server, so long-running agent loops only send the new messages each turn.
OpenAI
- Pando - OpenAI built its own Git-compatible backend for its monorepo after Codex multiplied the number of branches, pushes and fetches, and several of its improvements are already in upstream Git.
- ChatGPT and Codex usage - From December, Plus, Pro and Business plans will draw ChatGPT and Codex usage from one shared allowance.
- Images 2.6 - OpenAI's Images 2.6 can output GIFs and export SVGs, and it's available in ChatGPT, Codex and the API.
New models
- Kimi K3.1 Pro weights - Moonshot has published the weights for Kimi K3.1 Pro, a 2.8-trillion-parameter mixture-of-experts model, under its own MIT-style licence with extra terms for large commercial services.
- Inkling 2 Small - Thinking Machines' new 594-billion-parameter model is available through its Tinker service now, with Apache 2.0 weights promised for next week.
- ERNIE 5.5 Flash Base - Baidu has released the weights of ERNIE 5.5 Flash Base, a 280-billion-parameter base model with 14 billion active parameters, on Hugging Face under its own licence.
Also this week
- Siri AI for developers - Apple's new developer preview lets any app plug into Siri AI in the iOS 27.3 and macOS 27.3 betas, with app skills written as
SKILL.mdMarkdown files. - Intelligent Terminal 0.3 - Microsoft's Intelligent Terminal now shows each tab's live agent status in a sidebar and can keep chosen tabs running after you close the window.
- Reading model weights - MIT CSAIL researchers found GPT-6 Astra could work out what small neural networks were trained to do from their raw weights, though a rebuttal argues the post is misleading about its Qwen result, which used Python programs rather than reading the weights directly.
- Shared AI-training opt-out - OpenAI and Microsoft will both honour one robots.txt signal for opting a site out of AI training, though neither does yet: OpenAI aims to start "in the coming months" and Bing on February 1, 2027.
Dotnet news
- Skills in NuGet packages - Richard Lander has shown how a NuGet package can carry agent skills as
SKILL.mdfiles, sodotnet restorebrings down instructions that match the package version, and the Agent Framework team has published skills for coding agents too. - Ardalis packages going commercial - New versions of Ardalis.GuardClauses, Ardalis.SmartEnum and Ardalis.Specification will need a licence key from mid-December at the earliest, with free keys for individuals, open source and companies under $5M revenue that have raised less than $10M.
- Microsoft Ignite - Ignite runs in San Francisco and online from November 17 to 20, the week after .NET Conf.
Others
- OpenSSH bypass on musl - On musl-based systems such as Alpine, sshd accepts any password over 256 bytes for accounts with no password set, so update OpenSSH (10.6p2 or your distro's patched package) and restart
sshd, or setPasswordAuthentication no. - APT package swap flaw - Debian and Ubuntu have fixed an apt flaw that lets an attacker on the network path swap a package after it's been verified and run code as root.
- X.com's new web app - X says five engineers working with AI coding agents built the first version of its new web app in under six months, and in X's test on a slow connection a profile's first post loaded in 2.7 seconds instead of more than 22.
- JetBrains 2026.3 - The 2026.3 JetBrains IDEs are out, with JetBrains Air built in and a terminal now running on the Ghostty emulator.
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