OpenAI's Office Was Bugged

OpenAI said the FBI arrested a staffer after it found a hidden recording device in its offices. Netflix cut about 1,000 jobs, Microsoft patched a record 1,416 vulnerabilities, and the FBI shut down North Korean laptop farms in Texas.

• OpenAI says the FBI arrested one of its staffers after the company found a hidden recording device in its offices and used its models to understand the device (X)
• Saudi national Abdulrahman Alfozan, on OpenAI’s product team for over a year, is charged with wrapping a thumb-sized recorder in toilet paper and plugging it into the USB port of a conference room TV (WSJ)
• More on the alleged OpenAI spy: Alfozan, who cited Elon Musk as a role model, was a fixture between Silicon Valley and Saudi Arabia and was due to speak at Stanford last Friday (FT)
• Memo: Netflix is cutting 6% of its staff, or ~1,000 jobs globally across product, tech, legal, and HR, its biggest layoffs since 2022, amid slowing growth (WSJ)
• Microsoft releases updates fixing 1,400+ security vulnerabilities, surpassing September’s record of 972, which was already ~10x the normal monthly patch load (Krebs on Security)
• October Patch Tuesday fixed 1,416 Microsoft vulnerabilities, 85 of them critical including 67 remote code execution flaws, one already exploited in the wild, with over 1,000 across Windows versions (PCWorld)
• The FBI says it worked with CrowdStrike to dismantle 40+ laptop farms across Texas used to help North Koreans get remote US tech jobs under stolen identities (The New York Times)
• A look at OpenAI’s safety concerns over loop transformers before shipping its next major model; Microsoft accidentally confirmed GPT-6.1 Sol uses the technique (The Information)

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