NerdNews

November 2025 saw significant cybersecurity consolidation, with industry leaders integrating AI, observability, and exposure management into their offerings. Key deals include Palo Alto's acquisition of Chronosphere, Bugcrowd's acquisition of Mayhem, and Zscaler's acquisition of SPLX, highlighting a push toward AI-driven security automation.

Google's biggest AI advantage lies in its ability to personalize responses based on user data. The company's AI technology can learn from user interactions across various services, making it uniquely helpful. However, this raises concerns about data privacy and the potential for AI to feel like surveillance rather than service.

Nvidia announced new infrastructure and AI models, including Alpamayo-R1, an open reasoning vision language model for autonomous driving research. This model is based on Nvidia's Cosmos-Reason model and is available on GitHub and Hugging Face. The company also released new step-by-step guides and resources to help developers use and train Cosmos models.

Nvidia invests $2 billion in Synopsys to integrate its AI hardware and computing capabilities into Synopsys' electronic design automation and simulation software, strengthening its influence over the chip-design stack.

OpenAI is being sued by authors over the use of pirated book datasets to train its AI model, ChatGPT. The company deleted the datasets, but the court has ordered it to share internal communications about the deletion, which could reveal whether the company willfully infringed on copyrights. The outcome of the case could have significant implications for OpenAI and the use of AI in copyright infringement cases.

OpenAI has taken an undisclosed ownership stake in Thrive Holdings, a management-focused offshoot of private equity heavyweight Thrive Capital. Thrive will use OpenAI's tech in its managed services and accounting businesses, with plans to automate certain processes and create a 'repeatable model' for other industries.

HPE is upgrading its Private Cloud AI stack with Nvidia technology, including the latest RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs, and planning to open an AI Factory Lab in France. The company is also integrating Juniper technology and adding support for GPU fractionalization to optimize utilization and lower costs.

A malicious npm package, eslint-plugin-unicorn-ts-2, contains hidden code designed to mislead AI-driven security scanners. The package, with nearly 17,000 installs, uses typosquatting and harvests environment variables, highlighting concerns about AI manipulation and supply chain security.

OpenAI takes an ownership stake in Thrive Holdings, which operates like a private equity firm for AI. The deal involves OpenAI sending employees to work with Thrive's companies to accelerate AI adoption and boost efficiency. This partnership follows a pattern of circular dealmaking for OpenAI, which has also invested in infrastructure partners like Advanced Micro Devices and CoreWeave.

Amazon's AI chatbot Rufus saw a surge in adoption on Black Friday, with a 100% increase in sessions resulting in a purchase compared to the previous 30 days. The chatbot helped shoppers find products and drove sales, with a 75% day-over-day increase in sessions that included Rufus and resulted in a purchase.

The increasing demand for energy to power AI data centers is causing a delay in the retirement of coal-burning units, with 30 units delayed to supply energy to data centers. This is despite the negative environmental impacts of coal, with 460,000 deaths attributed to coal power plant emissions between 1999 and 2020.

The Zig programming language foundation has quit GitHub, citing Microsoft's AI obsession as the reason. A bug in GitHub Actions went unaddressed for months, causing issues with the Zig project's CI system. The foundation has moved to Codeberg, a non-profit git hosting service.

Flock, a surveillance camera company, uses gig workers from the Philippines to review and classify footage from its cameras in the US, raising concerns about data privacy and security. The company's AI-powered cameras are used by law enforcement to monitor and track individuals, and the use of overseas workers to train its algorithms has sparked questions about who has access to the footage and how it is being used.

The AI boom is leading to higher pay for construction workers building data centers, with some seeing pay jumps of 25-30% or more, and receiving perks like heated break tents and daily incentive bonuses, as tech giants like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft race to build hundreds of new data centers

Google and Amazon Web Services have introduced a new tool that allows customers to connect to both cloud providers within minutes, providing a possible safety net in case of outages. The tool comes with a proactive monitoring system and coordinated maintenance to minimize service impact.

Varda Space Industries has successfully proven the concept of space manufacturing, bringing back crystals of ritonavir, an HIV medication, from orbit. The company aims to make space manufacturing commercial and scalable, with plans to expand its operations and reduce launch costs. Varda's technology allows for the creation of uniform crystals with improved stability, purity, and shelf life, which can translate into real benefits for the pharmaceutical industry.

A seven-year malicious browser extension campaign infected 4.3 million Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge users with malware, including backdoors and spyware. The attackers published legitimate extensions, accumulated thousands or millions of downloads, and then pushed a malware-laden update that auto-updated across the entire user base.

South Korea's largest retail platform, Coupang, has admitted to a data breach that exposed the personal details of 33.7 million customers. The breach, which occurred on June 24, includes customer names, email addresses, phone numbers, shipping addresses, and partial order histories. Coupang has blocked the unauthorized access route and strengthened internal monitoring, but the company is likely to face a significant penalty.

HSBC has partnered with Mistral AI to accelerate the adoption of generative AI across the bank, aiming to save employees time and improve processes. The multi-year deal will provide HSBC with access to Mistral AI's commercial models, and the bank plans to combine its internal technology capabilities with Mistral AI's expertise to enhance current AI initiatives.

A new Android malware family called Albiriox has been discovered, offering full device takeover and real-time fraud capabilities. It targets over 400 banking and cryptocurrency applications worldwide and is sold as a Malware-as-a-Service (MaaS) on Russian-speaking cybercrime forums.