Technology & Science

Chainalysis, the blockchain analytics firm used by law enforcement, exchanges and financial institutions, disclosed on Friday evening that an attacker gained unauthorized access to internal systems and tools. The company says the accessed data covers user IDs, full names, email addresses and organizational role labels for users on its platform. It says it has no evidence that investigation data or authentication credentials were exposed. It attributes the intrusion to what it calls 'offensive agentic techniques' but has not explained how they were used or who was responsible. Chainalysis has notified affected customers, retained outside security specialists and is still working out which records were taken for each customer organization. It stated the incident has no connection to the record Binance theft, which it has been helping to trace.

BRUSSELS — The European Commission told Amazon and Microsoft on June 25 that it preliminarily considers Amazon Web Services and Azure gatekeepers under the Digital Markets Act, even though the two clouds fall short of the law's usual size thresholds. It ran a stakeholder roundtable on July 1 as part of its market investigation. Bloomberg has reported that a final decision could come as soon as this month, and the Commission has said no final decision has been taken. Designation would bring interoperability duties and limits on self-preferencing and customer lock-in, with a compliance period reported at six months. Microsoft's head of competition policy has argued publicly that Google Cloud should be examined too. The Commission fined Google €890 million under the same law in July.

MOSCOW — Rosstat, Russia's state statistics agency, said on Sunday that its websites were hit by a coordinated cyberattack. Hackers separately claimed to have stolen 23 terabytes of data, including material on Russian losses in the war in Ukraine, according to The Moscow Times. The agency's statement addressed the attack on its web properties; it did not, in the reporting available, confirm the theft claim or the contents of any stolen files. The hackers' claim is unverified, and no outside analysis of the supposed dataset has been published. Rosstat is the source of Russia's official economic and demographic figures, so any tampering or leak would draw scrutiny from analysts and governments that track Russian data.

MOUNTAIN VIEW — Google announced Gemini 4 Carbon, which it calls its strongest model, citing cybersecurity and long-horizon capabilities. The announcement follows Gemini 4 Argon, which Google says launched two weeks earlier. Carbon is not yet generally available. Google says it will go first to a subset of cyber defenders and then reach more trusted partners in stages through its Fairwind Program. The company says it is taking part in the U.S. government's voluntary process for pre-release model testing. It says developers, businesses and consumers will get access soon, with no date given. Introductory pricing matches Argon's: $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens. Argon reached broad availability on October 13, and Google's launch post says its price rises to $4 and $20 after November 30. The benchmark and capability claims come from Google and have not been independently verified.

Several reports this week focus on how AI spending is funded and whether it pays off. Bloomberg reported that S&P Global Ratings cut Meta's rating outlook to negative because of AI spending. It also reported that Amazon drew on an $80 billion supplier loan facility to help fund AI. TechCrunch, citing the Financial Times, said Anthropic is expected to receive a high-yield 'junk' rating from credit agencies after its IPO. On the other side, CNBC compiled third-quarter results showing returns beyond Big Tech. Santander booked about 194 million euros in AI-driven value over nine months, and Novartis's chief executive said AI had begun to improve its profit and loss. Meta reported 26 percent revenue growth tied to AI advertising, and Google Cloud revenue more than doubled to roughly $31 billion. The figures are company-reported.

Thrive Holdings, a vehicle run by investor Josh Kushner and backed by OpenAI, struck a definitive agreement on October 29 to acquire ADT. The price is $10 per share. That values the equity at $7.6 billion and the enterprise at $15.3 billion, a premium of about 45.6 percent. The agreement includes a 30-day go-shop period. Apollo is providing the financing, with no financing contingency. OpenAI is Thrive's partner and investor, supplying frontier models and forward-deployed engineers. OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap described the deal as a model for rapidly deploying frontier AI across entire organizations. No results have been shown yet. The claim that AI will improve ADT's operations is a stated plan, not a demonstrated outcome. The deal still needs to close, and rival bids could emerge during the go-shop.

DoorDash said it has received only 'several hundred' orders from AI agents, TechCrunch reported. That is small next to the attention agent shopping has drawn. Separately, CNBC reported on October 31 that humans are still doing the work behind some AI agents. The report points to a gap between marketing and what the software handles on its own. Startups keep launching consumer agents. One example is Zest, an app that finds restaurants and books reservations over text. Vendors are also shipping enterprise tooling, including identity and permission layers for agents. The headline reports give no wider usage figures. Independent measures of how many agent transactions complete without human help are not yet available. Treat the vendors' claims about autonomy as unproven until such data is published.

Two phase 3 trials, REMODEL-1 and REMODEL-2, found that remibrutinib reduced relapses in adults with relapsing multiple sclerosis more than teriflunomide, an established oral therapy. At the 100 mg dose, the annualized relapse rate fell by 35.2% in the first trial and 31.2% in the second, according to an announcement from the maker, Novartis. Remibrutinib is an oral Bruton tyrosine kinase inhibitor, a class that targets immune cells involved in MS. The results were given in a late-breaking session at the MSToronto2026 meeting and published at the same time in The Lancet, so the full peer-reviewed paper is available. The relapse figures are the company's own summary of the trial data.

The biggest genetic study of fibromyalgia to date has identified 26 genetic risk factors for the chronic pain disorder, Science News reported in its November 1 issue. One of the variants lies in the gene linked to Huntington's disease. Fibromyalgia, marked by widespread pain and fatigue, has no clear tissue damage to explain it, and the condition has often been questioned or misunderstood in clinical practice. A large genome-wide search of this kind compares DNA across many patients and controls to find inherited variants that raise risk. The Science News summary does not say what the next steps are, and variants of this type usually raise risk modestly rather than cause the disease on their own.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — United Launch Alliance said it will return its Vulcan rocket to flight on Friday, Nov. 13, ending a nine-month grounding. The mission will carry 40 Amazon Leo broadband satellites from Cape Canaveral. It will be Vulcan's fifth flight and the first with six strap-on solid boosters. Northrop Grumman-built boosters suffered nozzle failures on the rocket's second flight and again on Feb. 12, during the Space Force's USSF-87 mission. Both times the payloads still reached orbit. ULA says a joint industry-government team identified several potential contributors and addressed them with design and process changes to the nozzle. It has not named a single root cause. Testing and analysis will continue during the flight. The date remains subject to range approval.

SPOKANE, Wash. — Harvard astrophysicists announced a candidate dwarf planet, provisionally named 2026 ED138, at the 59th annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences in Spokane. They found it in data from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile. The observatory's 8-meter mirror and wide field of view let it image the whole visible sky about every three nights and pick out very faint, distant objects. The researchers say the object ranks among the seven largest bodies identified in the outer solar system so far. Lead researcher Matthew Holman said further telescope imaging is needed to pin down its size. Until then it remains a candidate, not an officially recognized dwarf planet.