Ledger Confirms Hardware Implant Behind $86M Wallet Theft as Apple Details HomeView Smart Home Push

Ledger Confirms Hardware Implant in $86M Wallet Theft

Hardware wallet maker Ledger says a theft of more than $86 million from hundreds of its wallets involved devices sold by reseller CryptoBilis and confirms a hardware implant was responsible, according to The Verge. The company has not yet detailed how the implant was introduced or how many devices were affected.

Apple Lays Out HomeView Smart Home Strategy

Mark Gurman of Bloomberg reports that Apple's smart home strategy centers on a HomeView display hub, alongside a new HomePod mini, Apple TV, and second-party accessories from LG and Schneider. The countertop HomeView with a speaker base will come in space gray, silver, starlight and pink, while a wall-mounted version will come in space gray and silver. The new HomePod mini will be offered in midnight, green, white, blue and pink.

On chips, the HomeView will use a standard A18, the Apple TV moves to a standard A19, up from the A15, and the HomePod mini gets the S10, up from the S5. The HomeView is not expected to ship until around mid-November, while the new Apple TV and HomePod mini are on track to arrive October 30, with preorders opening this coming week.

Apple says the HomeView will not have an App Store and will run a limited set of Apple apps, with Siri and connected accessories at the center of the experience rather than third-party apps. The name HomeView, rather than HomePad, reflects Apple's intent that users look at the display and control it primarily with their voice. Apple has also tested two features for the new Apple TV: built-in microphones in the set-top box for hands-free Siri without the remote, and a refreshed remote with a speaker for Find My.

Ukraine Drone Strikes Knock Out Third Yandex Data Center

Yandex says a Ukrainian drone strike shut down a data center in the Russian city of Vladimir early Sunday morning, October 11, disrupting more than 80 services including Yandex Cloud and YandexGPT. Users reported outages across banking and taxi apps. The strike is the third attack on Yandex's data centers in four days, with the Sasovo site hit earlier housing two of the three supercomputers used to develop Yandex's AI models.

Cloudflare data shows traffic from Yandex Cloud dropped sharply after the Sasovo strike, and bot traffic from Yandex's network has fallen to nearly zero after the Vladimir attack. YandexPay, YandexGo, YandexMusic and YandexTaxi were among the services reported non-functional.

Silicon Valley Adopts Super Intelligence Rebrand

Elon Musk, Marc Benioff, Jensen Huang and Satya Nadella have all adopted the super intelligence rebrand pushed by Trump, according to The Verge. Benioff announced on X that the era of Super Intelligence is here and that AIForce is officially SIForce. Separately, NVIDIA announced a commitment of $1 billion to advance US science over the next five years.

Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon, meanwhile, said AI companies are starting to do phones and asking Qualcomm to support running 100-billion-parameter local LLMs continuously by 2028.

Sources: Techmeme