TrustList daily digest
Thursday, 8 October 2026
Everything TrustList published on this day, 47 stories, grouped by subject and each in a line of our own.
News24
This group on its own1HR News
Fifteen employment rule changes in nine countries this autumn
Nine of the fifteen tighten duties and six ease terms. Eleven carry a calendar date, the first on 30 October, and Singapore’s rule is not due until 1 July 2028.
2News
CBP proposes bonds and a $1,000 damages floor for low-value imports
Paper filing for informal entries of $2,500 or less would end and mail gets a new entry type 13. The de minimis exemption ends by law on 1 July 2027.
3News
Harness buys Cosmos and Auggie CLI assets from Augment Code
Augment Code is selling select assets rather than the whole company, and Harness says customers can keep their preferred coding tools. No price has been disclosed.
4News
ICANN lists 1,615 new domain applications and opens a swap window
Brand names account for 333 of the applications, and the window to switch to a replacement string closes on 21 October, four weeks before the final list.
5News
USTR asks US firms what the EU carbon border levy costs them
Comments close on 9 November 2026. The Council and Parliament positions would add roughly 300 and 400 products, and EU importers owe their first CBAM payments only from September 2027.
6News
MAS sets AI risk rules for all Singapore financial institutions
The guidelines cover every kind of AI, including models supplied by third parties, and phase in over two years: core duties from October 2027, the rest from October 2028.
7HR News
DOL sets $14.05 minimum wage for older federal contracts from 2027
Tipped workers move to a $9.85 cash wage. The rate covers only contracts signed from 2015 to January 2022 and not renewed since, and starts 90 days after publication.
8HR News
DOL drops plan to pull FLSA guidance out of federal regulations
The Wage and Hour Division had proposed in July 2025 to remove nine interpretive parts from Title 29. It received six substantive comments, four of them opposed.
9News
South Africa opens its national opt-out registry for marketers
Marketers could register from 15 September; consumers can start blocking contact from May 2027. Draft guidelines cite fines up to R1 million or 10% of turnover.
10News
Dutch tax office drops Microsoft 365 for on-premises and open source
The Belastingdienst had moved about 5,000 of 47,500 staff to Microsoft 365 before stopping; mail and calendars come in-house in 2027, with archive tooling still unresolved.
11News
Italy suspends Scoperta imprenditoriale II R&D grants after one day
The scheme funds collaborative projects of 1 to 5 million euros in Italy's less developed regions, with 60% of the money reserved for SMEs and business networks.
12News
FTC asks if ad platforms should answer for impersonation scam ads
The agency's notice covers search, social media and marketplace advertising tools, and cites $16 billion in reported 2025 fraud losses. Comments close on 30 November 2026.
13HR News
US suspends eight IT and software firms from PERM green card filings
Cognizant, Infosys, Tata, Wipro, HCL and Capgemini are named as outsourcers; Microsoft and Adobe are cited for active federal investigations. Duration and effect on pending cases were not stated.
14News
Microsoft 365 will retire Targeted Release in January 2027
Enrolment changes lock in November 2026. Admins must choose between Frontier, Standard and Deferred release, the last of which gets major updates about 30 days after Standard.
15News
South Africa's TIA seeks partners for two rural innovation Living Labs
Each lab can receive up to R4.7 million over 24 months. Applicants must choose one district, and labs already funded under the programme cannot apply.
16Product News
Rutba Office: a free desktop office suite that opens Outlook archives and leaves your files alone
Forty-three releases in a month, no account, no subscription and no telemetry. What the free Rutba Office suite does well today, where it falls short, and who it suits.
17HR News
Ireland lifts PRSI by 0.15 points for payrolls from 1 October
The employee Class A rate moves from 4.2% to 4.35% and the employer rate above EUR 552 a week from 11.25% to 11.4%. Self-employed Class S also reaches 4.35%.
18News
US health plans must post leaner price files under new final rule
The rule applies to non-grandfathered group and individual coverage and takes effect on 7 December 2026. A proposed enrollment-total field was dropped from the in-network rate file.
19News
Edge retires its legacy Windows sign-in from early November 2026
Profiles not yet moved to the OneAuth library will be migrated from Edge version 157, and users may see sign-in prompts. Admins can test now on version 155 or later.
20News
US order sets up America.gov as one front door to federal services
The order covers services with over 100,000 users a year. Agencies must connect their public APIs, dashboards and digital forms and share usage data with GSA and OMB.
21News
Entra lets passkey users change passwords without the old one
Rollout in My Sign-Ins starts mid-October 2026 and finishes in late October. The setting is tenant-wide, with no per-user scoping, and stays off until an admin enables it.
22Product News
ArtCraft publishes free open-source rebuilds of Photoshop, Premiere and Lightroom
ArtCraft's PhotoCraft, FilmCraft and LightCraft were first pushed to GitHub on 30 September and carry MIT or Apache-2.0 licences, but the authors call them young.
23News
Entra ID adds passkeys for guest users, on by default
Guests enabled for SMS or voice get every passkey type automatically, so excluding them from the passkey policy is not enough. External users have no rollout date yet.
24News
Canada tables Bill S-7 to cut red tape across 31 federal laws
Business-facing measures include simpler small-business restructuring and registration instead of certification for low-risk wireless devices. The bill has yet to pass Parliament.
Tech and security7
This group on its own1Security advisories
GitHub fixes secret-scanning flaw that can reach code execution on GHES
Exploiting the high-severity bug needs only push access to a repository with Advanced Security on, and a second, medium flaw lets a collaborator swap a repository's default branch.
2Security advisories
Docker Engine 29.8.2 fixes DNS trick that disables TLS checks
The flaw sits in how the daemon decides a registry is insecure, so removing entries from insecure-registries does not help. Docker names three workarounds for teams that cannot upgrade yet.
3Security advisories
Splunk Enterprise fixes a critical Patroni flaw and 20 other bugs
Four Splunk Secure Gateway fixes ship as an app update as well, and one medium flaw needs a limits.conf change after the upgrade, not just new binaries.
4Security advisories
CISA lists old Strapi, ONLYOFFICE and Struts flaws as exploited
All five flaws were fixed between 2015 and 2023, and the newest is a Strapi admin-panel leak fixed in 4.8.0. Federal agencies have until 11 October to deal with them.
5Security advisories
IBM lists five WebSphere Liberty flaws fixed in 26.0.0.10
The medium-severity bulletin covers every Liberty release from 17.0.0.3 to 26.0.0.9, offers no workaround, and gives October as the expected fix pack date.
6Security advisories
Broadcom fixes 61 Brocade Fabric OS, SANnav and ASCG flaws
Thirty-seven of the 61 are rated high. ASCG carries two unauthenticated flaws reachable from the adjacent network, and Fabric OS 10.0.1 closes both a command injection and a buffer overflow.
7Security advisories
HashiCorp Vault 2.1.2 fixes ACL deny bypass and plugin code flaw
Four Vault flaws were fixed in total, two rated high. Enterprise customers on older lines get patches in 1.21.12, 1.20.17 and 1.19.23, and a policy rewrite is needed first.
Sectors4
This group on its own1Modern Cars
IIHS rates work vans and heavy pickups Poor on crash avoidance
Of 11 vehicles tested, only the Sprinter and BrightDrop 400 earned Good or Acceptable in both tests. Express and Savana vans lack standard automatic emergency braking.
2Robotics & Automation
Siemens will run Galp's 100 MW Sines hydrogen plant from a digital twin
The plant is designed for up to 15,000 tonnes of renewable hydrogen a year, and Siemens estimates its software can save up to 15 percent of the energy used.
3Autonomous Vehicles & Mobility
Waymo closes a $5 billion term loan, its first debt financing
Lenders led by PIMCO, Blackstone and Sixth Street provided the debt, which follows a $16 billion equity investment earlier in 2026 and a fifteenth US city in September.
4Modern Cars
GAC to take over FAW's half of FAW Toyota under a three-way framework deal
FAW, Toyota and GAC signed in Guangzhou. FAW becomes a key shareholder of GAC through a stock issue, and the two Toyota joint ventures will later work together.
Funding and deals10
This group on its own1Funding news
Vinci raises $250m Series B for AI chip and hardware simulation
The Palo Alto company came out of stealth in December 2025 with a $46m seed and Series A, and says its model runs simulations up to 1,000 times faster than conventional tools.
2Funding news
Vesta raises $30m Series B for AI agents in mortgage origination
The San Francisco software maker says revenue is up more than 12 times in a year and that about 40% of tasks completed on its platform are now handled by AI agents.
3Funding news
GMI Cloud raises $223M Series B for GPU cloud capacity
A separate $445 million credit facility led by CTBC brings the total to $668 million. The company says contracted recurring revenue is over nine times its year-end 2025 level.
4Funding news
Rein Security raises $25m Series A to secure AI agents at runtime
Total funding reaches $35m. Rein says revenue has grown eightfold and its customer count fivefold since a January 2026 launch, with Lemonade and Dun & Bradstreet among its users.
5Funding news
Mecka AI raises $60M Series B to supply robot training data
Its $60 million Series A came in two parts, the first $25 million last November. The company says run-rate revenue passed $100 million in June.
6Funding news
TODAY raises €2.8m seed for AI agents serving financial advisors
The Copenhagen and Berlin start-up, founded in 2024 by two former CLARK, Funding Circle and Billie leaders, says more than 3,500 advisers in Germany, Austria and Switzerland already use it.
7Funding news
Manus parent Butterfly Effect raises over $500m after Meta deal ends
Boyu Capital and IDG Capital led the round, the first since the AI agent maker's $2 billion sale to Meta was unwound. Existing backers Tencent, HSG and ZhenFund joined.
8Funding news
EliseAI raises $350m at a $4bn valuation led by a16z and Bessemer
The company says its software reaches 6.5 million apartment units and has passed $200 million in annual recurring revenue. The announcement does not name the funding stage.
9Funding news
Healthleap raises $38m in seed and Series A for hospital AI
The San Francisco company, founded in 2022 by siblings Josiah and Jemima Meyer, starts with malnutrition screening and plans to add heart failure, pressure ulcers and hospital-acquired infections.
10Funding news
Comparables.ai raises $6m seed to widen its M&A search platform
Earlier funding was small: an EU grant, a $700k pre-seed and Business Finland money. The company says a Big Four firm is extending its use to more than ten countries.
Our research2
This group on its own1Blog
Microsoft 365 and Azure: 40 dated changes admins must act on by spring 2027
Ten switch something on by default and 16 retire or restrict a feature. Where Microsoft named a single day, the median warning was 29.5 days; four gave nine or fewer.
2Blog
What North American governments asked of software buyers this autumn
Of 80 items tagged to North America, 17 record a government asking something of businesses; only 8 carry a date, and 4 of those fall on 1 January 2027.
TrustList Weekly
The week in software and IT, in one email
The news that matters to buyers, new rankings and our own research. Every Thursday, free, and easy to leave.