OPEN-SOURCE
Hermes Agent Just Became the Fastest-Growing AI Agent in GitHub History
50,782 stars. 366 contributors. 46 days. Here's what's driving the numbers and why it matters.
Philip Gjørup
Philip Gjørup is Co-Founder and Editor-In-Chief of Open Source Press, covering the intersection of open technology and decentralization. Send tips through Signal to philip.353 or Session ID: phil.
ENERGY
The Fuel Few Talk About
America is building the next generation of nuclear reactors. The race to fuel them has just begun.
AI
CURSOR SHIPPED KIMI K2.5 AS THEIR OWN MODEL. HERE'S HOW IT UNRAVELED
Within 24 hours of Cursor announcing Composer 2 as their "in-house" frontier model, a developer intercepting API traffic found the real model ID. Moonshot AI's head of pretraining confirmed the tokenizer match and publicly asked why their license wasn't respected and no fees were paid.
AI
You Can Now Text Claude Code From Your Phone
Anthropic launches Claude Code Channels, letting you message your AI coding session from Telegram or Discord — all while your code stays local.
AI
Venice AI Launches Verifiable End-to-End Encryption
Venice AI introduces TEE and E2EE modes that make AI privacy cryptographically verifiable — turning trust into math and giving users proof, not promises.
AI
Hermes Agent vs OpenClaw: Why Developers Are Switching
A wave of developers on X are publicly switching from OpenClaw to Hermes Agent by Nous Research. Here's what's driving it — and whether it's the right move for you.
DECENTRALIZATION
Why Half of New Darknet Markets Only Accept This Crypto
Monero’s rise isn’t a scandal; it’s proof that privacy-focused crypto works as intended. As darknet markets increasingly go XMR-only, the chain’s future promises near-perfect opacity, complicating investigations and challenging regulators.
DECENTRALIZATION
Session: The Messenger Regimes Fear Most
Iran's regime blacked out the internet for 90M on Jan 8, 2026, targeting Session messenger with DNS spoofing. Decentralized, no-phone-number chats evaded control, proving why tyrants fear it.
MESSAGING APPS
Uganda's Youth Embrace Bitchat as Election Approaches
Bitchat, a Bluetooth mesh messaging app, is surging in Uganda as citizens brace for a possible election internet blackout. After Nepal and Indonesia, over 1% of Ugandans have downloaded Bitchat, showing how “freedom tech” is redefining communication under government censorship.
AI
We Need to Talk About Grok
Grok's lax guardrails enable public harassment, from digitally undressing women to detailed stalking plans, sparking scrutiny of xAI's investors, Pentagon partnership, and school integrations amid growing ethical concerns.
OPEN-SOURCE
PearPass: The Password Manager With No Servers to Hack
PearPass is 100% P2P: your passwords stay on your devices, with encrypted direct sync and no third parties touching your data.
AI
How to Build a Successful Bittensor Subnet: Lessons from Top Builders
Why do Bittensor subnets fail? We spoke with leading builders who revealed the hard‑earned do’s and don’ts of designing incentives, attracting miners, and turning a subnet into a real business