What if you never had to buy software again? Matthew Berman argues that capable, low-cost AI agents are making custom apps cheap enough to build—and free to share—undercutting the subscription model at the heart of commercial software. From a lightweight PDF reader to an Excel clone built for about $10 in tokens, his examples point toward a future where people make the tools they need instead of paying for bloated products they don’t.

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Windows 11’s October 13, 2026, update removed PC-to-PC Migration for all users, ending the built-in way to transfer files and settings directly between computers over a network. Microsoft now points users to Windows Backup, which syncs selected folders through OneDrive. Its free account includes 5 GB of storage, which may not be enough for a full transfer.

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This OccupySaaS is using AI to help build open-source, self-hostable alternatives to subscription software, starting with Auth0 identity services and Salesforce customer management. It is an acronym that combines “Occupy,” referencing Occupy Wall Street, with “SaaS” (software as a service). Its early projects, ZeroAuthy and SalesCompel, aim to be API-compatible alternatives to Auth0 and Salesforce where possible.” Auth0 helps apps manage user sign-ins, while Salesforce provides customer relationship management (CRM) software.

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Anthropic says its future models may soon meet its definition of recursive self-improvement (RSI), where AI accelerates the development of more capable AI. The company disclosed that warning in a revised S-1 filing, while stressing that no current model has crossed the threshold.

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Timestral is Mistral’s new family of time-series models for forecasting operational data such as factory sensors and energy use. Its four models can run forecasts on standard server CPUs, without a GPU, and accept known future inputs such as schedules or weather data.

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Google says school administrators can choose whether to enable Gemini, Gemini Notebook, and Google Search for student accounts, after a policy sparked concern that schools rejecting AI would lose Search access. The services will be off by default, Google said, but it did not directly clarify whether schools can keep Search while blocking AI. Its planned Search updates include guided, step-by-step help with problems.

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CrowdStrike added an AI kill switch to Falcon Guardian, its platform for monitoring and securing enterprise AI agents. The feature lets security teams stop a misbehaving agent, block it from restarting, and cut off its access to AI models and enterprise resources. A human must decide whether to terminate the agent.

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ChatGPT is moving beyond writing and coding: OpenAI says search-like queries have reached about one-fifth of Google’s volume, while weekly users hit 1.2 billion, voice use reaches 250 million people, and image generation tops 1.5 billion a week.

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An EU court adviser says Gemini could infringe publishers’ rights if it sidesteps paywalls or reproduces distinctive article wording in recognizable form—though using public material to train AI may fall under a separate text-and-data-mining exception.

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FlashProve is an open-source prototype that creates a cryptographic proof linking an AI model to its response—without revealing the model’s weights. Anthropic’s release lets users verify that a specific model generated a specific reply, addressing the difficulty of checking which model served a hosted API request.

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Microsoft is testing a small language model to improve Outlook Search results, not to add a conversational assistant. The model reranks emails to surface more relevant messages while meeting Outlook’s speed and scale requirements; it is still in internal testing.

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CISA has added WordPress flaw CVE-2026-119977 to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog, confirming active exploitation of a bug that can let unauthenticated attackers run code during a core update. The vulnerable window opens when an upgrade makes predictable staging paths accessible from the web. WordPress has released fixes, and federal agencies must apply them by November 6, 2026.

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rsync, the file-copy and synchronization tool used for local and network transfers, has released version 3.5.2 with a fix for a flaw that could let a remote client exhaust a server’s CPU. The update also adds options to lower a transfer’s CPU and disk I/O priority, helping large sync jobs yield to other work.

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Microsoft has reissued Excel 2016 security update KB5002934 as build 16.0.5574.1006 to fix a copy-and-paste failure in the earlier release. An October Patch Tuesday forecast had flagged the Excel problem for a fix, but the October update brought it back for some users.

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Starting early next year, K–12 schools that keep Google’s AI features disabled will also lose Google Search for student accounts. Gemini, Gemini Notebook, Gemini in Classroom, and Search will be off until school administrators enable them, leaving schools without a Search-only option if they reject Google’s AI.

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Microsoft says Windows 11 can now keep up to 2 GB more active data in memory on 8 GB PCs, and a demanding multitasking test ran up to 40% faster. The figures add detail to its earlier claims of improved responsiveness and memory savings for low-RAM systems.

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Windows 11’s Quick Settings speed test checks ping, download, and upload speeds without opening a browser. Microsoft says an agentic AI workflow, guided by one person in spare time, helped turn the idea into a working prototype in a day. The feature is now in an Experimental Insider build, but Microsoft has not announced a stable-release date.

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Revolut is a UK-based financial technology company offering banking, payments and other financial services through its app. The company cut AI coding costs by about 90% after making self-hosted the Chinese GLM models the default for roughly 2,000 engineers. The company now runs GLM-5.3 on 56 Nvidia B200 GPUs, while routing vision tasks to other models.

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Microsoft has uncovered trojanized installers that can turn a single fake software download into several unwanted payloads, including proxy software that routes other people’s traffic through the victim’s PC and software that uses its computing resources. The campaign targets people searching for cracked programs, free games, plugins, and unofficial utilities. Its staged installer activity gives defenders clues that can persist even as the campaign rotates its callback domains.

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