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A West Virginia woman has been charged with multiple felony fraud counts after she allegedly spent more than $50,000 using someone else’s debit card and transferring funds to Cash App. The case involves $52,928.33 in 204 approved charges plus 219 attempted charges on a Mountain Valley Bank card, reports The Inter-Mountain. According to a criminal complaint filed by West Virginia State Police, Jessica Fay Michaletz, 36, of Elkins faces 10 counts of fraudulent use of an access device. Investigators say a replacement debit card mailed to an outdated address was used for a wave of Cash App transfers, and the…

In brief OpenAI confirmed it parted ways with three people for violating policies on handling sensitive information, which they allegedly shared with an outside AI safety organization. OpenAI has not identified the three people or the receiving group, and names circulating on X are unconfirmed rumors. The case follows months of OpenAI agent incidents—at Hugging Face, U.S. government sites, and an Australian Medicare portal—and two pauses in model training. OpenAI has parted ways with three safety researchers who allegedly shared confidential company information with an outside AI safety organization, per the Wall Street Journal.An OpenAI spokesperson said the three violated…

In brief Evernorth cleared its final hurdle to go public after Armada Acquisition Corp. II shareholders approved their merger Sept. 30. The transaction and related placements raised over $1 billion for what the company calls the largest publicly traded pure-play XRP treasury. Backed by Ripple, Pantera, Kraken and others, it joins the crypto-treasury trend, with fortunes tied to XRP’s volatile price. Evernorth, a treasury company built around XRP, has cleared the last major obstacle to going public, with shareholders approving its merger and setting the stage for a Nasdaq listing next week.The company said Wednesday that shareholders of Armada Acquisition…

In brief Meta communications chief Andy Stone said Wednesday that Muse’s Messages integration on Mac is opt-in, requiring both Full Disk Access and the Messages connector. Inc. columnist Jason Aten says Muse synced his Messages database up to row 187,462 even though his Mac showed Full Disk Access as off. Separately, YouTuber Matt Robb says Muse gave his home address to a Facebook Marketplace buyer; Meta’s David Singleton says Muse asks permission in such cases, and Robb disputes that. Meta says its Muse AI agent can’t read your Messages on a Mac unless you let it, disputing an account from…

In brief OpenAI says a campaign that began July 1 sent 16,000 extraction requests from more than 4,000 users on July 24-25 alone, within a cluster of over 15,000 users. OpenAI attributes a core cluster of the activity to individuals associated with Moonshot AI, maker of Kimi, and says it is unclear whether all operators came from a single actor. The target was the hidden “reasoning” OpenAI’s models generate before answering, which OpenAI says could train another model without the original safeguards. OpenAI claims to have shut down a coordinated effort to copy the way its AI models think, and…

In brief The TRUMP meme coin’s top 185 holders will attend a Nov. 22 gala dinner with President Trump at his Virginia golf club, though no attendee will get a private meeting with him. The event follows the Clarity Act’s Sept. 15 Senate failure, where restrictions on Trump’s crypto holdings were a central sticking point. Trump earned more than $635 million from the meme coin in 2025, mostly from licensing royalties, according to his financial disclosure. President Donald Trump is putting another dinner on the table for his biggest meme coin backers, just weeks after a fight over his crypto…

In brief Chainalysis attributed the $387 million Bitget hack to North Korea-linked actors, saying it pushed Pyongyang’s 2026 crypto theft total past $1 billion. Within three hours, the funds moved across 23 transfers onto Ethereum (49.7%), XRP (40.8%), Zcash (7.6%) and Tron (1.8%). The firm said it used in-house AI to accelerate tracing—compressing 20+ hours of work into minutes—echoing earlier DPRK assessments from Bitget’s CEO and Elliptic. Blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis has pinned last month’s $387 million Bitget exchange hack on North Korea, adding its weight to a growing consensus that Pyongyang’s hackers were behind one of the year’s largest…

In brief PewDiePie said in a new video that OpenAI banned his account twice while he built Ajax, a small AI model meant to run on a home computer. Tech City Authority found no public response from OpenAI. He says he used GPT-5.6 Sol to generate training data after his account was restored, then stripped the model’s refusals with the open-source tool Heretic. Ajax is reportedly a 9-billion-parameter model built on Alibaba’s Qwen 3.5. A countdown on its download page ends at 08:25 Japan time on October 3. YouTuber PewDiePie says OpenAI banned his account twice while he built Ajax,…

Trusted Editorial content, reviewed by leading industry experts and seasoned editors. Ad Disclosure TL;DR Optimism has released op-node v1.19.8 and recommends it particularly for sequencer operators using `–l2.follow.source`. The release fixes recurring slow block builds around L1-origin transitions and strengthens validation of hardfork activation ordering. Sepolia OP Stack operators must be on op-node v1.19.5 or later before the October 6 Glamsterdam hardfork. Optimism has shipped a focused op-node update aimed at keeping sequencers fast and configuration mistakes from turning into upgrade problems. Version 1.19.8 was released October 1 and is recommended particularly for sequencer operators running with `–l2.follow.source`. This is…

In brief Pope Leo XIV said in an Oct. 2 post on X that there is an “ontological difference” between human art and what machines generate. He said the Church wants to renew an alliance with artists and cultural institutions to “safeguard our humanity.” The post follows a May encyclical on AI and a Sept. 25 speech in Paris in which he cited it. Pope Leo XIV said Friday that there is an “ontological difference” between human art and what machines generate, and that the Church wants to renew an alliance with artists and cultural institutions to “safeguard our humanity.”The…

Leveraged funds’ reported Bitcoin futures shorts fell by about 5,300 BTC-equivalent in the week to Sept. 29, narrowing their net short even as their aggregate long exposure shrank.The Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s latest futures-only figures, released in the Oct. 2 reporting cycle, cover CME standard and micro Bitcoin futures plus Coinbase Derivatives’ nano Bitcoin and nano perpetual-style futures. The totals convert different contract sizes into BTC-equivalent exposure; they describe futures positions, not transfers of physical bitcoin.Compared with Sept. 22 positions, the funds’ reported shorts fell 5,299.69 BTC-equivalent and longs fell 908.99 BTC-equivalent. Their net short consequently narrowed by 4,390.70 BTC-equivalent,…

In brief The SEC proposed a tailored framework for how registered investment advisers and regulated funds can custody crypto, seeking to clarify which arrangements satisfy the “qualified custodian” standard that has long kept firms hesitant to offer digital-asset strategies. The plan would permit self-custody under certain conditions, allow state trust companies to serve as custodians, and update audit and broker-dealer custodial rules. It’s the latest in the SEC’s post-Clarity Act build-out, alongside the innovation exemption and Regulation Crypto Assets. The Securities and Exchange Commission is moving to settle one of the thorniest questions in institutional crypto: how professional money managers…

Trusted Editorial content, reviewed by leading industry experts and seasoned editors. Ad Disclosure TL;DR Optimism has released op-reth v2.5.0 and recommends it for all op-reth operators. The update removes two legacy pre-Bedrock import commands and patches security issues in `rustls` and `imbl` dependencies. Operators relying on the removed import workflow need to switch to the Bedrock state-bootstrap process before upgrading. Optimism’s latest op-reth release is a maintenance update with two things infrastructure teams tend to take seriously: breaking command removal and dependency security patches. Version 2.5.0 was published October 1 and is recommended for all op-reth operators. The release does…

In brief The U.S. added only 29,000 jobs in September versus 84,000 expected, and odds of an October Fed hike plunged to roughly 14% from 70% earlier this week. Bitcoin trades at $86,152, about 1.4% below its $87,354 September high. Where does BTC go next? Here’s what the charts are saying. Bad news for the economy is, once again, good news for risk assets.The U.S. added just 29,000 jobs in September, far below the 84,000 economists expected. The two previous months were revised down by a combined 60,000, and unemployment ticked up to 4.2%, according to the Bureau of Labor…