DeepMind AI Agents Find Weaknesses in 1024-bit RSA, Urging Key Retirement

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On 6 November 2026, Google DeepMind announced that AI agents working under human supervision identified two weaknesses in 1024-bit RSA encryption. One method reportedly lowers the cost of forging signatures by about 1,600 times compared with the previous best, while another reduces the average cost of factoring each additional key in a large batch by roughly 30 times. These figures come from theoretical estimates, and no live production keys were broken. Keys of 2048 bits or larger, which modern protocols almost universally use, are not affected. Organizations are advised to inventory their 1024-bit keys and replace them with 2048-bit or larger RSA, ECDSA, or Ed25519.

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GPT-6 Astra edit lifts small model's math score, but weight-reading claim fails audit

MIT CSAIL researchers reported that GPT-6 Astra edited about 0.016% of Qwen3.5-0.8B's weights without training, raising MATH-500 accuracy from 7.9% to 48.1%. The edit changed a rank-1 component in 64 columns of two down_proj tensors, and an independent re-run reported 51.0% on MATH-500. Much of the gain appears to come from removing a repetition loop that caused the base model to hit token limits, rather than from new mathematical ability. A broader claim that the model could read weights to infer training data did not survive an independent audit published on 5 November 2026. The edited checkpoint is released under Apache 2.0 and is small enough to run on a 12 GB GPU.

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

Arete 27B Cuts Propaganda in Qwen3.8-27B Fine-Tune, Scores Higher on Fact Accuracy

Nous Research released Arete 27B on 6 November 2026, an Apache 2.0 supervised fine-tune of Alibaba's Qwen3.8-27B aimed at reinforcing Western values. On the company's 803-prompt values evaluation, the share of answers containing propaganda fell from 22% to 0.9%, and the mean fact score rose from 2.32 to 2.98 out of 5. The model still trails the teacher model Inkling and Mistral Large 4 on fact scores, while general benchmark results were essentially unchanged. The training used roughly 52.8 million tokens of text-only data, with no reinforcement learning or architectural changes. Nous Research published the weights, training pairs and evaluation set, though no hosted provider serves the model yet.

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

GitHub Copilot Now Available in Apple's Xcode 27.3 Beta

Apple released Xcode 27.3 beta on November 3, 2026, and GitHub confirmed on November 4 that Copilot now runs inside the built-in coding assistant. The beta requires macOS Tahoe 26.6 or later, with a public release expected in December 2026 alongside macOS 27.3. Users sign in with a GitHub account, and any Copilot plan is supported. The integration is in public preview and coexists with the existing GitHub Copilot extension for Xcode, which Apple and GitHub both confirm. Apple warns that the feature may share project files with its model, so users are advised to review its privacy documentation first.

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

Tracking a Leased IPv6 /48 in NetBox From Claim to BGP Announcement

A practical guide explains how to record a leased IPv6 /48 in the open source NetBox IPAM tool, starting from the day the block is claimed. It covers creating an RIR, an aggregate for the /48, and an ASN object, then organizing child prefixes with statuses like reserved, active, and deprecated. The article shows how to automate allocations through the NetBox API and pynetbox, and how to store operational details such as LOA location, ROA status, and BGP session information. It also recommends a nightly drift check that compares host addresses against NetBox records to catch untracked ranges. The author discloses that they operate IPYE, a company that leases IP space, and mentions it as an option for obtaining the block.

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