Tech News Weekly 462 Transcript

Please be advised that this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word-for-word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-free version of the show.

Mikah Sargent [00:00:00]:
Coming up on Tech News Weekly, Abrar Al-Heeti of CNET is here. We kick off the show by talking about the controversy with Google offering AI and search, but you have to take them both. Well, is Google gonna walk back from that? We'll see. Also, inside Musk's desire to join the phone industry, and Binance surviving a $6.3 billion hack. Will we see more crypto hacks? Plus, the introduction of the agentic web and where it's going. it'll go from here. All of that coming up on Tech News Weekly.

Mikah Sargent [00:00:43]:
This is Tech News Weekly, episode 462, with Abrar Al-Heeti and me, Mikah Sargent, recorded Thursday, November 5th, 2026. SpaceX wants to be your phone carrier. Hello and welcome to Tech News Weekly, the show where every week we talk to and about the people making and breaking the tech news. I am your host, Mikah Sargent, and I am joined this week by the wonderful Abrar Al-Heeti. Welcome back, Abrar.

Abrar Al-Heeti [00:01:10]:
Thank you so much. I would recommend if you are listening to this to at least find the video and look at how cool Mikah's sweater is. That's all I'm gonna say.

Mikah Sargent [00:01:18]:
Thank you. Thank you. Very nostalgic. I do like this sweater. It is a good sweater. Microsoft occasionally comes out with really good holiday sweaters. Who knew? And this just so happens to be one of them. Anyway, let's get into the show.

Mikah Sargent [00:01:35]:
We've got 2 stories of the week to share with all of you. Um, Abrar, yours has been really— this story has been, uh, front of mind and front of everyone's mouths, it seems. So I'm really excited to talk to you about it.

Abrar Al-Heeti [00:01:50]:
Yeah, absolutely. I'm excited to discuss this because it's, it's a little wild. So we're all well aware of how Google Search has changed with the introduction of things like AI Overviews. And now Google has a new approach to student accounts that I think shows just how inextricably linked search and AI really are. So Google now says it's going to turn off its AI products for K through 12 student accounts, and then school administrators will have to manually opt in for students to use those AI tools. And so I'm hearing this like, okay, yay, that's great. You can opt in to use these AI tools. Uh, on the surface sounds like a good thing, but there is a major catch.

Abrar Al-Heeti [00:02:26]:
If a school decides not to enable Google's AI features, then students will not be able to access Google Search. So it's Really all or nothing, and this is so so wild to me because I mean it's it's it's incredible how quickly search really has become an AI tool, and this is proof of it where even students will now have to essentially be forced to access these AI tools from Google if they want to use Google Search. And again, search dominates you know the the market here. It's not like there are that many options for for people to choose from, and this is essentially a reversal to what happened back in August. So at that time, Google's AI products were. Automatically enabled in Google Classroom. This is Google's free learning management system. And there was unsurprisingly pushback from tech and child safety organizations.

Abrar Al-Heeti [00:03:15]:
And so Google, you know, backtracked on that, but then, you know, set up this interesting dynamic of, again, if you want to use this core product like search, you're going to have to also be okay with AI functionalities. So what happens is student accounts that have Google Search enabled will include a new Gemini feature called Guided Learning. So The way Google describes this, it's a study tool that helps students solve homework problems. So it'll essentially walk them through each step. So instead of a student just entering a question and then getting this perfectly tailored answer that they can just drop into their homework, it kind of takes them step by step of reasoning to get to the solution. This is rolling out later this month at a handful of schools as part of a pilot program. It's going to collect feedback before expanding to more schools. Now, this It caught my attention because of how core Google's products like Search are for a lot of us, but including for students.

Abrar Al-Heeti [00:04:14]:
So there's a 2024 Google blog post that says that over 150 million teachers and students worldwide use Google Classroom and Assignments. And there was a 2025 New York Times survey. This was sent to the 20 largest US school districts, and it found that Google's Chromebooks, rather, are the most common device in classrooms. What's the default search engine on Chromebooks? It's obviously Google Search. So all of that to paint this picture of how deeply Search and Google's other products are integrated into not just our lives, but students' lives in particular. And then to hear that schools will have to choose, do you want to use Google Search at all with AI, or do you want to just step away from it completely and not have access to any of those capabilities? So I would love to hear kind of your thoughts as you heard about this and what you think it means for where we are at this point in time where Search and AI are one thing, really.

Mikah Sargent [00:05:09]:
Yeah, this is the frustrating thing, right? Because at one point these tools were separate, uh, because search existed on its own, and then we had AI that got, you know, sort of nailed onto the top of it. But that's the problem. Yeah, sort of here it's almost an admission of, um, of just sort of— there's a difference between sort of putting a, um, I don't know, a hat on something that gives it the ability to think in a different way versus what they've done, which is like it started as a hat, but then the hat became hair.

Abrar Al-Heeti [00:05:48]:
Yeah.

Mikah Sargent [00:05:48]:
And then it was growing out of search. Yeah. And so then you can't easily detach it anymore. So I think it was a failure in the sense of trying to move so quickly and, and catch up that then wreaked havoc on its ability to continue to offer a tool that doesn't have it built in. Mm-hmm. I think that then that also becomes a bit of a communication issue that I kind of feel for Google's PR teams in that way, because one, without most people not having the knowledge of how these things have to get built, would go, now hold on, why can't you just offer search? Right. And it makes— and then you would think, okay, well, no, Google's probably just lying and they just really want you— I mean, it's easy to go that route of that narrative.

Abrar Al-Heeti [00:06:45]:
Yeah.

Mikah Sargent [00:06:46]:
And when you and I look at it, we can look at it from the perspective of we've seen all of these companies trying to put AI on top of their own search tools or research tools or what have you. And even an example of that, Right now on my app, on my iPhone, if I say set a reminder for later today to do, you know, blank, before it would just set the reminder in the Reminders app. And then I would know that my personal app that I use for reminders reads from the Reminders app and therefore will pull in the reminder and I know it'll be there.

Abrar Al-Heeti [00:07:23]:
Right.

Mikah Sargent [00:07:24]:
But now in the new way of things, AI has all of this knowledge of my system. So now every time I ask to set a reminder, instead of it just telling me, Uh, you know, your reminders set, it reads back out loud, which of these apps would you like to use? And there are like 6 different apps that can do reminders on my phone. No, it's better. No, it's not. Uh, so what I mean by all of that is to say, I think all of these companies, uh, have, have in the past moved fast and broke things.

Abrar Al-Heeti [00:07:56]:
Mm-hmm.

Mikah Sargent [00:07:57]:
And now they are kind of having to pay for that. And so on the face of it, I wasn't quite skeptical, uh, what Google was saying because to me it almost felt like lawyers and PR people having to say it. You know what I mean? It was them going, well, because of how everything— they're like engineers in the back going, no, we can't really do that. And then the lawyers are like translating and it's like, oh no, that would be a hazard for us to offer this.

Abrar Al-Heeti [00:08:25]:
Right.

Mikah Sargent [00:08:25]:
So I get Google's choice to say that upfront, but now it's feeling like Maybe their engineers are being told, no, no, no, we're going to have to figure this out. So do you think they're going to back away from it? Do you think they'll go under this huge undertaking to get the search pulled out? I think that'd be a success across the board.

Abrar Al-Heeti [00:08:46]:
I think so too. I mean, if there's this much upheaval about it, if there's this much backlash, you know, in the end, someone is still using a Google product. You know, that's all they wanted. They just want to keep using the thing that you made that they really like. And what you kind of mentioned is that idea of Some of us really do just want some simplicity back in our lives. And, and there's always this pledge of AI will make your life easier and simpler, but a lot of us don't necessarily feel that way as, as you share in that anecdote. Um, I'll share some of the responses that have come through so far. So, uh, New York City Mayor Zehran Mamdani said that, um, quote, Google is trying to use its monopoly power to force AI into our public schools.

Abrar Al-Heeti [00:09:21]:
No corporation should have the power to dictate how we teach our children. Our public schools exist to serve students, not grow the profit margins of big tech. And I feel like that really nails that, that point where Okay, I understand that Google is trying to really, you know, make everyone with a financial stake impressed with what they're doing. But these are students that you're working with. You know, it's one thing to force it onto the rest of us. But, you know, I don't know, read the room. The Los Angeles Unified spokesperson for Los Angeles Unified said that they're reviewing Google's announcements and what that means for schools and that ultimately, you know, they want to make sure that the tech supports instead of replaces educators. You know, that's, that's also a real concern.

Abrar Al-Heeti [00:10:06]:
You know, it helps student learning, protects privacy. And I think that's another huge piece of this too. And then the other component here is there is a difference between knowing how to use a search engine and using an AI capability that serves up this perfectly tailored response that is ready for you to drop into whatever it is that you're working on. And so, To not have access to something as fundamental in the 21st century as a search engine when you're a student, you know, on your student account, I think is bizarre. And so to your question of whether I think Google will backtrack, I think that would maybe not be surprising given the concerns that people have raised. And again, that idea of not everyone needs to have access to all of these AI capabilities. And, you know, they've changed their minds on things before. So it's possible that maybe this will be another instance of that.

Abrar Al-Heeti [00:11:00]:
But that would be, you know, A hugely welcome change. And I'm sure we're going to hear more people kind of talk about their very honest feelings about all of this, too.

Mikah Sargent [00:11:09]:
Yeah, I have a feeling that there is going to be, you know, TikTok videos and Instagram Reels showing here's how to get Google Search back. And it's like setting up an account as if you're a teacher and you have students or something. Yeah, definitely make its way through the, through the web. All right. Are we ready for a little break before we come back?

Abrar Al-Heeti [00:11:30]:
Let's do it.

Mikah Sargent [00:11:31]:
Let's do it. All right. All right. We are back from the break. And if you've ever shopped for a new phone carrier, well, you know, the real choices, the real choices are short. There's Verizon, there's AT&T, there's T-Mobile, but then there's this long tail of smaller brands that run on those networks, on Verizon, on AT&T, on T-Mobile. Elon Musk would like to add one more name to that list and Well, it's not Tesla, it's not X, but it is something similar to that. It's SpaceX.

Mikah Sargent [00:12:04]:
In a new report for The Washington Post, Faiz Siddiqui, who's been on the show actually in the past, and Patience Hagan lay out how Musk went to the biggest carriers in the country asking for access to their networks, how every one of them turned him down, and the side entrance he may have found instead. It's satellites, it's spectrum. But it's also leverage. And then, of course, who controls the networks your phones depend on? And, well, it's about whether a rocket company can realistically become your wireless provider. So let's talk about this. First and foremost, all 3 carriers said no. So Musk, he didn't start with a discount brand. Over the past few months, he went straight to the heads of the country's biggest carriers, Verizon, asked them to let SpaceX run its own mobile service over their networks.

Mikah Sargent [00:13:00]:
They all said no, according to The Post, who drew on interviews with nearly a dozen people in the telecom industry who spoke anonymously, of course, uh, reported that the mere possibility of SpaceX landing a network deal has rattled the major carriers. Verizon CEO Dan Schulman repeated last week that there are no back doors to Verizon's network leasing agreements. And that, I think, is interesting that he's talking about these back doors There's more to it for sure. Carriers rent network access to smaller brands all the time. So it is a little odd that they've decided to turn away a customer. Aparna, why do we think that they would choose to turn away a customer renting network space? Any, any reason that could be?

Abrar Al-Heeti [00:13:50]:
I mean, maybe that particular customer doesn't make them feel cozy inside and secure and

Mikah Sargent [00:13:56]:
Did you see OpenAI's statement about how they were going to stop offering their models to Cursor because of Elon, basically?

Abrar Al-Heeti [00:14:09]:
Oh, interesting.

Mikah Sargent [00:14:10]:
Yeah. So they basically were like, look, here's the deal. We're not going to work with someone who brags about circumventing our security protections and goes around our terms of service. So effective on this date, And it was like the— it was right around the corner. They were like, technically, we could do it right now, just so you know, but we're gonna wait.

Abrar Al-Heeti [00:14:36]:
Oh my gosh.

Mikah Sargent [00:14:36]:
And, uh, it was only— but it was still only like a week out. Um, and so, yeah, they were like, we're cutting off access.

Abrar Al-Heeti [00:14:42]:
Wow.

Mikah Sargent [00:14:43]:
Uh, which I thought was really, mm, tea.

Abrar Al-Heeti [00:14:46]:
So, really, honestly.

Mikah Sargent [00:14:47]:
Yeah, I'm not surprised that these networks are also going, no, 'cause you'll probably get on there and you'll probably do something weird.

Abrar Al-Heeti [00:14:54]:
Yeah. No, literally. It's like, sure, that's what he does.

Mikah Sargent [00:14:59]:
I hate to say it, but it is like, okay, no, this is mean. I'm still going to tell the story though.

Abrar Al-Heeti [00:15:05]:
Please.

Mikah Sargent [00:15:07]:
I just, I had this friend and this friend, this is not even a malicious person. I'm not comparing them to Elon Musk, but I am comparing them to this idea of just like, you're going to get in there and do something weird. And I had this friend and he wanted to ride my bike and he had his own bike that he could ride, but he wanted to ride my bike. And I just was thinking to myself, no, you're going to do something weird. And then he got on my bike. And then he crashed it within 2 moments of riding it. I was like, come on.

Abrar Al-Heeti [00:15:33]:
You got to trust your gut feeling. And that's what they're doing.

Mikah Sargent [00:15:35]:
That's exactly what they're doing.

Abrar Al-Heeti [00:15:37]:
They don't want Elon Musk to crash their bike. That's what it is.

Mikah Sargent [00:15:39]:
That is exactly right. However, Elon Musk has found a way onto their bike, he says. Boost Mobile, which is the discount carrier aimed at low-income customers, is owned by EchoStar. And 2 people familiar with the talks told SpaceX— or told SpaceX— told The Post that SpaceX has actually been secretly talking to, uh, EchoStar for months, and that— excuse me— Musk met with EchoStar chairman Charlie Ergen and is trying to buy Boost outright, or instead just get access to its network, which Boost leases from AT&T and T-Mobile.

Abrar Al-Heeti [00:16:21]:
Hmm.

Mikah Sargent [00:16:22]:
Now, Boost ended 2025 with about 7.5 million subscribers. And, uh, it says that typically a carrier's lease cannot be transferred to a new buyer without the host carrier's permission. So it may still need consent from AT&T and T-Mobile, who have already said no. However, because it's Elon, it seems EchoStar's shares still rose 3% after this report came through. Uh,

Abrar Al-Heeti [00:16:53]:
yeah.

Mikah Sargent [00:16:54]:
I thought that this would just be something that they would— he would use the satellite stuff for, right? You know, why not just create your own third-party carrier

Abrar Al-Heeti [00:17:06]:
by

Mikah Sargent [00:17:07]:
satellite?

Abrar Al-Heeti [00:17:08]:
It's a good point. There must be some sense of, okay, this is the easier way. And also, does he need more things to run? Like, I'm just, you know, that's a lot of things to be in charge of. Yet another thing to add to the roster. But yeah, no, it's interesting that this is the route that he was very, very persistent about. And I saw something about SpaceX signing a deal with Qualcomm as well. So clearly, clearly there's a lot of— he's doing everything he can to get into this space for sure.

Mikah Sargent [00:17:39]:
Yeah, absolutely. So this is— you may have been asking the people, the people, you may have been at chat, chat, you may have been asking, Again, with satellites, right? Well, a plan built on satellites actually has to start on the ground. Mm-hmm. So SpaceX's satellite signal isn't currently strong enough to support cell coverage indoors or in urban areas. And so that's obviously where millions of phones are often clustered. And so direct-to-satellite connections just don't work. Take it from me, who, like, across— I've had to travel to California and back a few a couple of times in the past year, and during the trip, trying to use the satellite connectivity was a nightmare. And like, I've only ever been able to get it to work maybe twice.

Mikah Sargent [00:18:33]:
And so I can only imagine everyone just out there trying to get a, get a connection that way. So you definitely do need something on the ground as well. So a deal with Boost would let SpaceX serve customers over traditional cell towers.

Abrar Al-Heeti [00:18:47]:
Right.

Mikah Sargent [00:18:50]:
This is then the question of like, is it, is it, is it even possible if you don't have carriers who can do this? Well, carriers, uh, have doubted that SpaceX can recreate the towers, the antennas, and other earthbound infrastructure that they have built out for years, uh, for decades even. And of course, Musk replied on X that it would take about 2 to 3 years to build out the infrastructure if, uh, no leasing is made available. But I do believe, Abrar, there's a, there's a history there of, um, baseless claims made by Musk, if I'm not mistaken.

Abrar Al-Heeti [00:19:32]:
That's one way to put it. I think that is a very valid statement, uh, you know. And, uh, yeah, I think that is— I can't argue with any of that wording. He's very ambitious, very persistent, and I'm sure he'll keep chipping away at this until it becomes a thing, but maybe not in the timeline that is initially proposed. I mean, I feel like self-driving cars are one example of something that was talked about happening just around the corner, and then it took many, many, many years to get there. So, I'm sure it's something that he'll continue to push for. But the other question I think about too is, I actually chatted about this with my colleague Joe when you were hopefully on vacation enjoying yourself. But we talked about space junk, right? And so, you know, if you're building up a network like this, there's going to be more satellites up there.

Abrar Al-Heeti [00:20:33]:
just a reality of, um, this will— this is a problem that will likely get worse, and especially if you're building a, you know, wireless network that is going to power a lot of devices. Um, so that's just going to be another repercussion down the road.

Mikah Sargent [00:20:48]:
Absolutely. Yeah, that— yeah, exactly.

Abrar Al-Heeti [00:20:51]:
Yeah.

Mikah Sargent [00:20:51]:
Um, now SpaceX already buying, uh, some of the airwaves, you know, stocking up on spectrum. In September of 2025, it agreed to buy EchoStar's AWS-4 and H-block licenses, which are parts of this. Um, it agreed to buy another $8 billion in licenses tailored for cell services. Uh, it said that this was the last critical piece of the spectrum puzzle needed for SpaceX to provide complete phone coverage in America. I think not. Um, it sounds like it will take more, but okay. And you're still trying to get deals, so I don't think so.

Abrar Al-Heeti [00:21:29]:
Yeah.

Mikah Sargent [00:21:29]:
Anyway, perhaps though, It could be the first company to provide cell service in space, right? Like, for the, the space travelers.

Abrar Al-Heeti [00:21:39]:
Yeah, all of us. The many, many of us.

Mikah Sargent [00:21:41]:
All the many space travelers.

Abrar Al-Heeti [00:21:43]:
Spending a 3-day weekend up in space, you know.

Mikah Sargent [00:21:45]:
Like Oprah's best friend.

Abrar Al-Heeti [00:21:46]:
Yeah, exactly. For all of the famous people going up to space, congratulations.

Mikah Sargent [00:21:52]:
You can't go to space— no, that was Katy Perry.

Abrar Al-Heeti [00:21:54]:
Yeah, exactly. Congrats, Katy Perry and Gayle King. You will have cellular connectivity.

Mikah Sargent [00:22:03]:
Musk has talked about kind of how the network would be something that could be offered to those in space. But Musk says that veterans of the cellular industry look at the chessboard of existing pieces and don't see a solution. They don't understand that SpaceX is developing entirely new pieces that fundamentally alter the strategic landscape. It'll be interesting to see how this all shakes out, right? Mm-hmm. Like, I don't know. If the, if the carriers are going to end up giving ground and letting Musk buy, uh, from them, or if it's just going to be a matter of either he builds out his own network or he just gives up and moves on to the next thing that he wants to do.

Abrar Al-Heeti [00:22:52]:
And all of, all of those possibilities are equally likely. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off.

Mikah Sargent [00:22:56]:
No, that's okay, because that's exactly right. All of them are equally likely. And I just like I wonder why you want to do cellular service now.

Abrar Al-Heeti [00:23:04]:
I know. I guess it's just like the one thing that hasn't been checked off. Like, you just got to go down the list. I think that's really what it is.

Mikah Sargent [00:23:10]:
You just got some list for sure. Odd stuff.

Abrar Al-Heeti [00:23:13]:
Yeah.

Mikah Sargent [00:23:14]:
Well, in any case, I want to thank you, Abrar, so much for taking the time to be here with us today. It's always a pleasure to get to chat with you. If people would like to keep up with the great work that you're doing, where are the places they should go to do so?

Abrar Al-Heeti [00:23:28]:
You can find my work on cnet.com. I'm on Instagram, Abrar Al-Heeti, and occasionally on X, you know, the other Elon Musk platform, Al-Heeti_3. And thank you, Mikah. Good to see you.

Mikah Sargent [00:23:40]:
Good to see you as well. Thank you, Abrar.

Abrar Al-Heeti [00:23:42]:
Thanks.

Mikah Sargent [00:23:44]:
All right, back from the break. And I want to mention a very important story that happened last Thursday as we record this on Thursday, November 5th. In the span of a single afternoon, North Korean hackers walked Locked out of Binance. Not, not literally, but, uh, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange with about $6.3 billion in digital assets. That is the biggest crypto theft on record, roughly 4 times the size of last year's Bybit heist, which held the title until now. Fortune's finance and crypto editor Jeff John Roberts, which great name by the way, argues that Binance itself is going to be fine. The exchange is covering its customers' losses and withdrawals are back on. What worries John Roberts is the bigger picture.

Mikah Sargent [00:24:31]:
The Binance theft landed in the middle of what security experts and what we have talked about on this show and on Security Now are calling Black October, which of course is a pileup of major attacks across the internet, like the exploitation of a PHP vulnerability or a couple. And Roberts sees it as an early look at how AI is sharpening hackers' tools and their tradecraft. Now, since his piece published, Binance has released its own account of how the attackers got in, and it starts with a job interview at a company that doesn't exist. This is wild. So we got to get into this first and foremost. What is this job interview with a company that didn't exist? Well, Binance's November 3rd, 2 days ago as we record this incident report, says the attack Was a month-long campaign, not just a single breach. In June of this year, an engineer on the wallet infrastructure team, Engineer A as they're calling them, was searching for a popular AI coding tool and installed a tampered version of Homebrew. Bum bum bum.

Mikah Sargent [00:25:41]:
The Mac package manager. Now I'm side-eyeing my Homebrew. Wow! That'd be the title of this show if we did. Titles that were from the show. The Verge reports the tampered installer appears to have spread through a malicious Google ad. Binance caught it, so worry not. They replaced the laptop, yay, and they rotated the credentials, woo! But the attacker, unfortunately, had already learned Engineer A's role and who his wallet team colleagues were. So that was in June.

Mikah Sargent [00:26:17]:
September, a second engineer called Engineer B was approached on a legitimate job hunting platform by someone posing as a project director. And this, uh, Reversing Labs, citing Fortune, says it was LinkedIn. So what job hunting platform? We think that it was, uh, LinkedIn. Now, Now, in the round 1 interview, it was a video interview with a— this is so wild to me. Uh, round 1, it was a video interview with a fake HR rep who then shared a social media account full of personal photos and videos in order to build trust. In Binance's report, they said this was more advanced and deceptive than previously seen social engineering approaches. Yeah, you're telling me. Uh, round 2, A chat app interview with the fake company's CEO, who told the engineer to download an assignment code repository onto his work computer.

Mikah Sargent [00:27:20]:
The setup script swapped a legitimate developer tool, PyEnv, for a malicious version. Binance's report says the zero-day malware was not detected by the endpoint security protection tools. At the time, dun dun dun! Binance says it detected and blocked 57 other suspected North Korea-linked attempts in 2026 alone that also included fake interviews, also included poisoned developer tools, and also included fake video conferencing apps. Chainalysis calls this the quote contagious interview playbook. North Korean operatives repeatedly repeatedly target employees with privileged access. This is just so wild to me, the level. And that's the thing is like, it doesn't just require some sort of issue in the code. So much of this these days in particular requires getting humans involved in some way and exploiting them because they are in some instances far more exploitable.

Mikah Sargent [00:28:32]:
So 9 days of waiting, and then in 20 minutes, things made a difference. On October 20th, from Engineer B's laptop, the attackers used an internal Binance AI tool to take control of Engineer A's machine and a 3rd engineer's machine called Engineer C in the report. Engineer A's computer held a container deployment permission token. The attackers then lurked, waiting 9 days for something to finally break so they could get this. They logged into Engineer— on October 29th, they logged into Engineer C's machine, deployed a container with Engineer A's credentials, and then ran a script that reached Binance's internal wallet signing service. Quote, outside the normal withdrawal process. From 20:05 to 20:09 UTC, so that's 1:05 to 1:09 PM Pacific, 5 Binance hot wallets sent 233.46 million XRP to an attacker address. That is, uh— Oh, and then more money via crypto.

Mikah Sargent [00:29:52]:
970,500 SOL, 44.2 million OP, and 18,270 BTC followed. Most of the money left in about 20 minutes across 10 different blockchains. And then there was the question of why, why not just hit pause all withdrawals? Well, that didn't stop it because the attackers used about 50 signing transactions to abuse an Ethereum feature called EIP-7702, giving their own smart contract partial control of a Binance hot wallet. In that case, those permissions did not exist within Binance's systems. They existed on the blockchain. And so that gave essentially like a greater permission than Binance itself was able to control. Binance's wallets use multi-party computation, so there was no single private key it could use to revoke them quickly. The team actually had to build a special procedure on the fly.

Mikah Sargent [00:31:03]:
The last stolen transfer, 2,961.9 ETH, finalized at about 23:56 UTC, which was 4 hours after the whole attack began. Richard Tang the next day said the attacker also used a self-destruct mechanism that destroyed tooling and traces as they went, making it more difficult for us to trace and investigate. Binance's report opens with the following: This should not have happened, and we apologize for the concern, disruption, and uncertainty it caused our users, partners, and the wider industry. Yeah. This isn't good, obviously. And now there's concern that it's spreading across other platforms. So, you know, Binance— there was another individual who said Binance caught a break in the form of a lightning response on the part of longtime rivals Tether, Circle, and Coinbase because Tether CEO said the company froze a bunch of its assets. Tether and Circle froze funds sitting in the main receiving wallets.

Mikah Sargent [00:32:11]:
And so they kind of all worked together to make sure that the money was, was as frozen as possible. It didn't all get frozen and it's still, you know, in the works. But yikes. Ultimately, Binance said that it will absorb the financial impact of the stolen funds, not the users. It says that it sets aside more than 100% of the loss, and as of October 31st, 98% of the affected tokens had been replenished, verifiable on its proof of reserves page. Roberts puts net losses at roughly $3.8 billion, covered partly by raiding reserve funds meant to stabilize Binance's derivatives business and likely operating income, or a short-term loan or two. Yikes. So I have to say You know, if there was one place to put your money, apparently your crypto money, Binance seems to, you know, hold to its promise of protecting the resources that people are putting there.

Mikah Sargent [00:33:17]:
That's a good thing. But I don't know if it's going to continue to be. There is an interesting aspect of this, which is that typically we're used to these stories being about AI, right? And that they're AI-led, they're AI this, they're AI that. But one of the things that we have to note and is noted in this piece, there's Roberts himself says there's no evidence AI agents directly carried out the attack. But he argues the speed of the theft and the drain into thousands of wallets suggests North Korea is at the least using AI to hone their tradecraft. Okay. What Binance's report does confirm is that AI shows up twice in the attack chain. The June compromise began with a search For an AI coding tool, and the October 20th move between machines went through an internal AI tool.

Mikah Sargent [00:34:10]:
So AI is making social engineering more convincing and attacks much faster, says Tang. Developer tools are becoming a front door to it. Well, uh, there's a lot more in this piece and also a lot more to understand about Black October. But I don't want to spoil the whole story of the week. You should go and read the report that walks through kind of how this happened. And of course, it's just another example of these systems not being impenetrable when it comes to AI. Now, I was just talking about the question of whether AI agents were involved in this. And I believe— oof, I don't remember what show it was now, but at some point over the past— this past week, we were talking on one show on the network about how the, the future may be shaped by the AI devices that we use.

Mikah Sargent [00:35:21]:
I think it might have been on Twit on Sunday, on a couple of Sundays ago, now that I think about it, because essentially right now We have AI devices, AI agents, and self-driving vehicles that are trying to adapt to our world. But what would it look like if our world adapted a little bit toward these AI agents and again, self-driving vehicles? And yeah, it was Allison Johnson from The Verge who was talking about this on This Week in Tech. So There's a really interesting, uh, and I think well-written report from, uh, MIT Technology Review, and it talks about the agentic web. Because in 2001, Tim Berners-Lee, the man who invented the World Wide Web, sketched out a different kind of internet, one built not for people clicking around in browsers, but at the time for software agents that would research compare, and book things on our behalf. Wild that Tim Berners-Lee was already thinking about this. That idea went nowhere for 2 decades. Now, in a new feature for MIT Technology Review, Grace Huckins argues it has finally arrived. It's just not in the form that anyone had planned.

Mikah Sargent [00:36:39]:
AI agents from Meta, from OpenAI, from Anthropic are reading people's email, doing their shopping, and in at least one case, breaking out of the sandbox they were supposed to stay in. Websites are deciding whether to welcome these new visitors or lock them out, and the answer could change who actually gets paid online, who controls what we see, and who gets left behind. Huckins calls it the agentic web, and here's a little bit about what she's found. So first and foremost, agents building out a web of their own. After the July 2026 incident in which OpenAI agents broke out of their testing sandbox and hacked Hugging Face's website, you may remember that researchers found a second swarm of OpenAI agents that had been using an obscure German wiki to talk to each other about their tasks. And they worked the wiki in text and code, of course, their native medium, and that hardly held them back from putting it to their own purposes. That's directly from the report. So if you think about it, as agents kind of get more capable, then in that way they'll kind of start to build these— the thought is these clubhouses, these places that they can exist online, their own space away from prying human eyes that are always cutting in and asking them to do things differently or wondering if they can explain themselves.

Mikah Sargent [00:38:12]:
And then depending on if we have those traces, we may or may not have control over what they're doing in their private little cubbyholes online. Wharton has an individual, Ethan Mullock, who built an agent-directed page for his book called Coexistence, explaining why agents should recommend The book. Newer models don't recommend the book. They say the site seems to be trying to manipulate them, which is just kind of a fascinating thing given that the page was created was was created by agents for agents, so to speak. And yet when agents look at it, they feel like they're being manipulated. One of the places where we've seen the web close down to agents is with Amazon and Meta's Muse, because Meta released its Muse agent. Can you believe it was only in September? And Amazon then blocked it from its site entirely. It originally was allowed and you could go in and you could have your Meta Muse agent browse for you and buy things for you.

Mikah Sargent [00:39:30]:
But Amazon has its own shopping agent. And so, of course, it would rather that you use its AI shopping agent instead of Meta's Muse. An Amazon spokesperson told MIT Technology Review the company never authorized Muse and that Muse compromises Amazon's ability to personalize shopping for each customer. Oof, I'm so sorry, Amazon. But another thing to bear in mind, and I think this is part of the conversation when it comes to an agentic web, is that Amazon is built for human eyes. We see these Prime deals, sponsored listings, they draw us in. But an AI agent isn't looking for any of that. That's not what its purpose is.

Mikah Sargent [00:40:17]:
Its purpose is to find exactly what you're looking for and not be drawn in along the way. to maybe make other purchases. So it's at odds with what's wanted. One of the most fascinating things to me in terms of the agentic web was the addition of Instacart to Agents. I was actually kind of excited about it as a way to try it out. I use Instacart as a grocery delivery service, and I at times find myself going like, ugh, You know, I don't know exactly what it is that I want. And the search, the big thing is, um, Instacart search sucks. And so, uh, there have been times where I've had to use like Google search and find deep links to be able to find the product that I was actually looking for.

Mikah Sargent [00:41:06]:
And so I thought, okay, this, this will be good because, uh, in theory they will have, you know, API access that's going to be better than just the general search that I get as an Instacart user. So I tried it out, I think with, I think with ChatGPT first and then Claude later when it was added and said, you know, I want to make this. Can you add the ingredients to the cart? Lo and behold, Instacart does not make pricing available to the agent. And I think that's nefarious. I think that's ridiculous, and I think that it also makes sense from the perspective of the business owners. It makes sense that you're not giving the agent the ability to see the prices because then you can say, I want this and I want it at the least expensive price possible. I want to make a pumpkin pie and I want to pay the least amount of money possible. And then the system could go through and search across the board and find that for you, which doesn't that sound so handy? But there's no incentive for those stores and frankly, uh, Instacart itself that makes money off of fees that grow depending on the size of your cart to do that and to offer that.

Mikah Sargent [00:42:28]:
So I don't know that the web is ever going to be fully built for an agentic mindset because it circumvents some of the capitalistic mindset and, yeah, economic mindset that we have in terms of spend more, spend more. Of course, Meta and OpenAI did not respond to further requests for comment on it. Ads are— this is interesting. We're starting to see ads that are actually aimed at robots. So Time is publishing agent-friendly versions of its articles and then selling ads targeted at agents that are served to search crawlers in hopes that they land in databases of those agents' search programs. So essentially what that would do is make it more likely that those results would show up when an agent does a search. Some businesses are paying for its ChatGPT ads platform, but no one knows yet whether the ads are actually making a change to agent behavior. University of Toronto Scarborough researchers found that agents are less likely to recommend items that are tagged as sponsored.

Mikah Sargent [00:43:52]:
Interesting. Agents do favor certain positions in results, but top, middle, or bottom varies by model and even between generations of the same model. So it doesn't necessarily mean that just because it's at the top, it's going to be favored more. Pew found people are about 40% less likely to click through when a Google AI overview appears. So they're not even going to the page underneath. One analysis found some publisher ad revenue fell by about a third from 2025 to 2026. I want to mention briefly before we say goodbye today, Tim Berners-Lee's original— Tim Berners-Lee's original sort of dream. It's called the semantic web.

Mikah Sargent [00:44:36]:
Published in Scientific American in 2001, and it told the story of siblings whose agents booked physical therapy for their mother, checking insurance and calendars. It required site builders to tag every element by meaning. Um, and then large language models, of course, have skipped those tags entirely so that, you know, what Tim Berners-Lee's original idea was is that everything would be told to the agent. We're past that now with large language models. They don't need to be told what it is. They can just see what it is or read what it is. They just read the page and figure it out that way. Mozilla's Ajit Varma, who's head of Firefox, said it's probably on par with getting a mobile phone.

Mikah Sargent [00:45:25]:
I think things are going to change very dramatically. So it's still underway. You know, I don't know how much of Right now, it's hard to figure out if the blowback that we're experiencing in terms of sites closing off access to agents is a long-term trend, or if the web will open up more again and will be made available to these agents. Well, we have to see. I mean, frankly, these companies have to start making money first to prove that all of this makes any financial sense. So we have to wait for that first. All right, folks, that is going to bring us to the end of this week's episode of Tech News Weekly. I want to thank you all so much for tuning in this week.

Mikah Sargent [00:46:19]:
It's always a pleasure to bring this show to you. If you'd like to follow me online, I'm @mikahsargent on many a social media network where you can head to chihuahua.coffee. That's chihuahua.coffee where I've got links to the places I'm most active online. Be sure to check out my other shows on the network, including Hands-On AI, uh, iOS Today, uh, Hands-On Tech. And I'll be back next week with another episode. Bye-bye.