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Dutch open hardware specialist FusionXvision has opened crowdfunding for a design it says can provide lab-grade programmable power from any USB Type-C Power Delivery (PD) power adapter: the BenchVolt PD.

"BenchVolt PD transforms any USB Type-C power adapter into a versatile, multi-channel laboratory power supply," FusionXvision's Suleyman Yasin Dundar says of the company's latest launch. "Designed for makers, engineers, and professionals, it combines portability, safety, and flexibility to put bench-grade power performance in your pocket. With up to 100W of total power, five output channels, and built-in monitoring, it's the perfect tool for powering prototypes, testing circuits, or working in the field without bulky equipment."

 

Who would you rather see showing up in your neighborhood—heavily armed, masked men, snatching random neighbors peacefully going about their daily business, shoving them into unmarked cars and taking them away to unknown destinations? Or people in puffy fanciful animal costumes, surrounded by a crowd singing and dancing, carrying colorful banners and chanting funny slogans?

People living in a very wealthy neighborhood in San Francisco got the better of the deal on Saturday, November 15 when the second type of group appeared on the streets they call home. But then the rich usually get the better of any deal. This event, however, hinted that the deal wasn’t entirely favorable to them.

 

As the attacks on federal workers escalate, and the necessity becomes clearer for disruptive mass action that confronts the oligarchs, the East Bay DSA / Federal Unionists Network (FUN) / Fighting Oligarchy campaign has accelerated its solidarity activities in support of federal workers and begun building the infrastructure needed for mass action. The FUN campaign is linking this work to the DSA National Labor Commission May Day group. Through organizing trainings, social gatherings, canvasses at federal buildings, and turnout to mass events, the campaign is organizing toward May Day 2028.

Because the campaign has relationships with key labor organizations and Bay Area resistance groups, is organizing turnout for mass actions, deepening our solidarity work connecting local and federal labor struggles, and is the priority campaign for the EBDSA chapter, it is well-positioned and resourced to contribute to the local organizing necessary to build a May Day 2028 event at the required scale.

 

A sophisticated phishing campaign is currently leveraging a subtle typographical trick to bypass user vigilance, deceiving victims into handing over sensitive login credentials. Attackers utilize the domain “rnicrosoft.com” to impersonate the tech giant.

By replacing the letter ‘m’ with the combination of ‘r’ and ‘n’, fraudsters create a visual doppleganger that is nearly indistinguishable from the legitimate domain at a casual glance.

This technique, known as typosquatting, relies heavily on the font rendering used in modern email clients and web browsers.

 

Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.5 this morning, which they call “best model in the world for coding, agents, and computer use”. This is their attempt to retake the crown for best coding model after significant challenges from OpenAI’s GPT-5.1-Codex-Max and Google’s Gemini 3, both released within the past week!

The core characteristics of Opus 4.5 are a 200,000 token context (same as Sonnet), 64,000 token output limit (also the same as Sonnet), and a March 2025 “reliable knowledge cutoff” (Sonnet 4.5 is January, Haiku 4.5 is February).

The pricing is a big relief: $5/million for input and $25/million for output. This is a lot cheaper than the previous Opus at $15/$75 and keeps it a little more competitive with the GPT-5.1 family ($1.25/$10) and Gemini 3 Pro ($2/$12, or $4/$18 for >200,000 tokens). For comparison, Sonnet 4.5 is $3/$15 and Haiku 4.5 is $1/$5

 

The following is a summary of an interview John MarienthaI conducted with Silicon Valley DSA officer Jessen Fox on November 9.

Our chapter had a unique experience in working with the local Prop 50 coalition. We endorsed a second, local campaign alongside it: Measure A, a temporary Santa Clara County sales tax that will expire in five years. Measure A passed by a 57%-43% margin.

Measure A created a 5/8 of one cent general sales tax increase, beginning April 1, 2026, to raise $330 million a year to replace the federal funding cut by Trump and the Republican Congress to the Santa Clara County Health System. Starting with the process of endorsement, our chapter allied with the South Bay Labor Council to do both phone banking and canvassing.

 

A series of "trivial-to-exploit" vulnerabilities in Fluent Bit, an open source log collection tool that runs in every major cloud and AI lab, was left open for years, giving attackers an exploit chain to completely disrupt cloud services and alter data.

The Oligo Security research team found the five vulnerabilities and - in coordination with the project's maintainers - on Monday published details about the bugs that allow attackers to bypass authentication, perform path traversal, achieve remote code execution, cause denial-of-service conditions, and manipulate tags.

 

Trump’s had a bad month so far. Although Senate Democrats caved on the shut down, Trump’s numbers have slipped as many voters blame the Republicans for SNAP cuts, federal layoffs and furloughs, and airport chaos. Yucking it up with Saudi Prince MBS failed to distract from his disorganized retreat on the Eptsein files, MTG’s mid-term resignation, and early Wall Street wobbles. Meanwhile, there is a noticeable shift in mood on the left. Katie Wilson won big in Seattle… as did centrists in New Jersey and Virginia. Mainers crushed a Republican referendum to suppress voting rights. Millions turned out for No Kings! rallies in October and significant and sustained opposition to ICE invasions has thrown sand into the gears of Trump’s pet militia. Trump’s chummy approach to his meetup with Zohran Mamdani might indicate he’s feeling vulnerable on the affordability front. All this is to the good, but don’t count MAGA out.

Trump has accumulated a great deal of power. He has succeeded in remaking the Republican Party into a far-right machine and has done lasting damage to the liberal welfare state. He has remade NATO, crippled the Iranian challenge, and is openly pushing for a coup in Venezuela. The Supreme Court rubber-stamps 90% of what he does. And there is more to come. It is easier to destroy than to build. Moreover, Trump and the MAGA right are building a purified imperialist administrative state that will not “go back to normal” even if Schumer and Jeffries claw back a narrow majority in the House. There is little prospect in the short term for completely reversing Trump’s cuts and evisceration of democratic rights, and even dimmer prospects for reforms and spending on the (limited) scale of Biden’s (failed) Build Back Better.

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