DATE ARCHIVE
2026-09-09
Articles published on 2026-09-09.
Researchers Factor RSA-260 Using GPU-Accelerated Sieve Built by AI Agent
A team at Cognition has factored RSA-260, a 260-digit semiprime from the RSA Factoring Challenge, setting a new public record for the largest RSA number factored. The computation used a GPU-optimized implementation of the General Number Field Sieve (GNFS) developed largely by Devin, an autonomous software engineering agent, and ran on spare compute from LLM training clusters at an estimated market cost of $400,000. While the work demonstrates that RSA-1024 could be factored for roughly $30 million using current GPU hardware, RSA-2048 remains approximately a billion times harder and is not meaningfully threatened.
Automattic Board Forces Founder Matt Mullenweg Into Leave of Absence, Names CFO Interim CEO
Automattic's board of directors voted to place CEO and WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg on a paid leave of absence on September 9, 2026, installing CFO Mark Davies as interim chief executive. The move follows years of controversy including a legal battle with hosting rival WP Engine, mass employee departures, and Mullenweg's threats against WordPress.org community members. Mullenweg learned of the decision 50 minutes before a scheduled meeting and was denied time to seek legal counsel. WordPress.org leadership confirmed the open-source project remains unaffected.
Apple Watch Series 12 Introduces Advanced Health Sensing and Audio Intelligence Features
Apple unveiled the Apple Watch Series 12 featuring a new Health Sensing System with higher-frequency heart rate and HRV measurements, a readiness score, improved step tracking, longer workout battery life, and Apple Intelligence-powered Audio Intelligence tools such as Sound Recognition, Music Recognition with Shazam, Live Rewind, and Siri Recap.