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This was the week the internet pulled its own plug. Governments and hospitals took sites offline over the PHP flaws we covered on Wednesday, in what cybersecurity people are calling "Black October." Away from the panic, a $200M startup announced plans to clone gene-edited military dogs, and Meta lost a $25B privacy verdict. We checked the funding figures, the court filing coverage and the outage reports before writing, and the caveats are in the copy.
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TODAY IN AI
3 things that happened while you were busy
1. A $200M startup wants to clone gene-edited war dogs by 2027.
Warhound came out of stealth with $200M to collect cells from top military, police and first-responder dogs, edit their genomes and clone the best performers. It is backed by Colossal Biosciences' Ben Lamm, who holds equity and a board seat, and Anduril's Palmer Luckey, who is a partner; the CEO is ex-Palantir David Spirk. Early edits aim to cut inherited conditions like hip dysplasia, with later work possibly targeting speed and smell, and Anduril would build the goggles, vests and software. Read TechCrunch's report. The first engineered dogs, mostly Belgian Malinois, are expected in early 2027. The Rundown put the raise at $1.2B, but TechCrunch and Engadget both report $200M, so we used that.
2. A jury hit Meta with a $25B privacy penalty, the largest fine it has ever faced.
A New Mexico judge ordered Meta to pay $25B after a jury found Facebook misled users about who could see their data from 2010 to 2021, in a case rooted in the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Jurors found nearly 44 million violations of state law, and the judge cut a possible $219.5B penalty to $25B, which still works out to roughly $12,000 per New Mexico resident. Under the state constitution the money goes to education. Read Axios's report. Meta is appealing and says the ruling makes it "all but impossible to do business" in the state, per The Rundown.
3. Getty Images filed for bankruptcy as AI imagery eats the stock photo business.
Getty filed for Chapter 11 after its planned merger with Shutterstock collapsed under heavy debt and competition from AI-generated images. The Getty family and Koch Equity Development will take the company fully private, with Koch committing up to $533M in new equity. Getty, valued near $5B four years ago, listed estimated assets and liabilities of $1B to $10B and expects to finish the restructuring by year end. Read the Reuters report. Operations continue as usual for contributors and customers during the process.
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TODAY'S TUTORIAL
Lock down your accounts before the next Black October
When governments are pulling websites offline as a precaution, your own logins deserve an hour of attention. These five steps, drawn from security researcher Peter Wildeford's checklist in Superhuman, are the basics that stop most account takeovers. See why this week made it urgent.
1. Use a password manager. Install one and let it generate a unique password for every account, so one leaked site does not open the rest. Reused passwords are how most break-ins spread.
2. Turn on two-factor authentication. Add a second step to your email, bank and main accounts, and use an authenticator app rather than text messages, which can be intercepted.
3. Switch on auto-updates. Let your phone, computer and browser update themselves. The PHP story this week is a reminder that patches only help once they are actually installed.
4. Freeze your credit. A credit freeze is free and stops anyone opening new accounts in your name. You can lift it temporarily when you need to apply for something yourself.
5. Ask an AI to check your setup. Use the prompt at the end of this issue to have a model walk you through weak spots in your accounts and devices, in plain language.
Good to know: Do the password manager and two-factor steps first. They protect the most and take the least time, and everything else is easier once they are in place.
FROM THE FRONTIER
Black October: the week the web chose to go dark on purpose
The trigger. Two critical PHP flaws, in the language behind most of the web, were patched on October 21, and exploit attempts followed fast. PHP's maintainers urged everyone to update at once, and Cloudflare reported early attacks emerging, though Australia's cyber agency said it had seen no active exploitation. See the Reuters factbox.
The blackout. Rather than risk it, whole institutions went offline. Germany's federal IT provider, France's Interior Ministry prefecture sites, Belgium's foreign ministry, Finland's state web services, the Wikimedia Foundation, and in the Netherlands the Port of Rotterdam and many hospital sites all pulled pages down as a precaution. Most reported no actual breach. See the full list.
The multiplier. Superhuman reports exploit attempts jumping from thousands to millions within hours, which it attributes to agent swarms, and says Microsoft flagged a China-aligned actor hitting hundreds of organizations. Those figures are the newsletter's and have not been independently confirmed here, but they fit the pattern we covered last week, when criminals ran AI agents against 1,100 stores. Read Superhuman's account.
The bill. The same week, Meta's $25B privacy verdict showed the other cost of sloppy data handling. One side of the ledger is attackers who move at machine speed; the other is courts finally putting large numbers on the damage. See the Meta ruling.
The reframe. Taking your own site offline used to be the nightmare. This week it was the responsible move. When defense means unplugging, the quiet advantage goes to whoever patched early and kept their logins clean, not to whoever had the fanciest tools.
MONEY FORWARD
Three ways to turn this week's AI news into income
1. Move small sites off fragile WordPress. Black October hit PHP sites hardest, and many small businesses are tired of patching WordPress. Offer to rebuild them on an all-in-one builder like Grigora, which starts at $12 a month, and charge a one-time migration fee plus optional upkeep. See Grigora's plans.
2. Personal security setups. The five-step lockdown above is an hour of work most people never do. Sell it as a fixed-price "digital safety setup" for families, retirees and small teams: password manager, two-factor, auto-updates and a credit freeze, done with them. See what triggered the scare.
3. AI images instead of stock. Getty's bankruptcy is a sign of where visuals are going. Canva Craft renders legible text in 55 languages at up to 2K, free to all Canva users, so you can sell local businesses a monthly pack of product shots and social graphics without stock fees. Read about Canva Craft.
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IN THE KNOW
What people are actually watching and sharing
Meta's no-vote shares. Meta plans a publicly listed Class C stock with no voting rights, effective January 2027, to fund its AI buildout without diluting Mark Zuckerberg's roughly 61% voting control, after Q3 revenue of $64.6B. Read the details.
SpaceX wants your cell tower. SpaceX is reportedly seeking gear on at least 80,000 US cell sites and paying about $8B for spectrum, a step toward becoming a fourth national carrier, per Bloomberg as reported by The Rundown. See The Rundown's summary.
A cancer vaccine result. Merck and Moderna reported that their personalized mRNA vaccine plus Keytruda cut the risk of melanoma recurrence or death by 42% in a Phase 3 trial. Read the announcement.
BioWare shuts down. EA is closing the studio behind Mass Effect after more than 30 years, canceling the next game and cutting hundreds of jobs. Read BioWare's note.
eBay cuts 1,100 jobs. The marketplace is laying off about 9% of its workforce, per The Verge as reported by The Rundown. Read The Verge's report.
TRENDING TOOLS
5 tools worth a look this week
1. Grigora. An all-in-one website builder with AI content, SEO, newsletters and hosting, pitched as a WordPress replacement, from $12 a month with a free trial and no card. Good fit if you want off the PHP patch treadmill. See Grigora.
2. Canva Craft. Canva's first in-house image model plans the layout before rendering, so text comes out legible, at up to 2K across 30+ aspect ratios, free to all Canva users in Dream Lab. The article did not confirm whether free accounts face limits. Read the overview.
3. Notion Auto. Notion's model router sends quick tasks to cheaper models and hard ones to stronger ones. Notion claims about 90% lower average cost than Opus 5.5, from its own tests. Read Notion's help page.
4. Omnara. Open-source, Apache-2.0 infrastructure that runs AI agents on your machine or a cloud sandbox and saves state so a crash does not wipe the job. Free with your own keys and machines. See the listing.
5. Composio Instant. Gives an AI agent a wallet so it can pay per call for 100+ paid tools without you creating accounts, with $2 of starting credit and failed calls free. Read the announcement.
PROMPT STATION
Turn an AI into your personal security auditor
This prompt works in Claude or ChatGPT and walks you through the weak spots in your accounts and devices without any jargon. Run it this weekend while Black October is fresh, before you forget to bother.
COPY AND PASTE THIS PROMPT
You are a patient personal security coach. I am not technical. I use these devices: [LIST, e.g. an iPhone, a Windows laptop]. My most important accounts are [LIST, e.g. Gmail, my bank, Facebook]. Walk me through a security checkup one step at a time, waiting for my answer before the next step. Cover: 1) which accounts still share a password and how to fix that, 2) where to turn on two-factor and which kind to use, 3) what to update right now, 4) whether to freeze my credit and how, 5) one thing I am probably overlooking. After each step, tell me how to check that it worked. Keep every instruction under three sentences and define any word a beginner would not know.
Tip: Swap the device and account lists for your real ones, and add [I mostly worry about X] such as a hacked email or a lost phone to steer the advice. For a family, run it once per person and ask the model to keep a shared checklist of who has finished which step.