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Raspberry Pi surfs memory crunch to record first half
Raspberry Pi has posted a record first half after a well-timed memory stockpile helped it ride out soaring prices and shortages. The Cambridge-based company reported revenue of $256.9 million for the six months ended June 30, up 90 percent from $135.5 million a year earlier, while pre-tax profit more than tripled to $19.6 million. Raspberry Pi shipped 4.2 million boards during the six-month period, up 17 percent year-on-year, while its order backlog doubled to 2.6 million units.
Windows update leaves some virtual desktops staring into the void
Microsoft has admitted that some Windows 11 virtual desktops may fail to load after sign-in, leaving users staring at a black screen until they launch Explorer manually. The glitch affects devices running the August 2026 non-security preview update or later releases and, according to Microsoft, "has been primarily observed on Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) hosts, using FSLogix." Windows Explorer crashes may appear in the affected device's Application event log. Users can temporarily recover the desktop by opening Task Manager and running explorer.
Uncle Sam wants in on Musk’s €120M fight with Brussels
The US government wants to join Elon Musk and X's legal challenge to the European Commission's €120 million fine against the social media platform. The Commission issued its first fine under the Digital Services Act (DSA) in December 2025, finding that X had breached transparency rules through its paid blue checkmarks, advertising repository, and restrictions on researchers' access to public data.
Asahi fork embraces LLMs and lands Linux on the M4 Mac mini
Gravity Linux is a newly announced distro targeting newer Apple Silicon Macs, and its first experimental alpha already boots an accelerated desktop on the M4 Mac mini. The project homepage says: "Gravity Linux is a Fedora remix that brings a fast, modern Linux desktop to Apple Silicon – built in the open, by people like you." If this sounds familiar, the About page explains: "Gravity Linux was initially forked from Asahi Linux over differences in policy, namely regarding LLM use.
Amazon sellers watch as inventory vanishes into pending-order purgatory
Traders on Amazon's UK marketplace say a wave of "abnormal" orders stuck in pending status is tying up their inventory and preventing legitimate customers from buying the affected items. Vendors on Amazon's Seller Central forums report unusually high numbers of pending orders in their accounts, often involving products priced at £100 ($132) or more.
BOFH: The Helldesk opens its third eye and ascends to a higher plane of troubleshooting
The Boss has had some feedback from the using classes about our method of fixing IT problems (i.e. fixing them), and how we could do things a little better. "So... you want us to... not fix the problems?" the PFY asks. "No, that's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that your approach could maybe do with a bit of an overhaul. Instead of attacking the problem head-on, perhaps you could take a more... holistic approach? See how the user feels and maybe engage them in how the problem is affecting them.
Dyfed-Powys Police cops to cyberattack, staff data potentially nicked
Dyfed-Powys Police has revealed it was hit by a cyberattack that knocked some of its systems offline, with investigators now trying to establish whether the intruders got their hands on staff data during the break-in. The Welsh police force said it identified the incident on September 14 and that it caused disruption to some non-emergency systems. Emergency policing remained operational throughout, according to the force, while its 999 and 101 telephone services were unaffected.
Another week, another data breach for Revolut customers
Revolut customers have been caught up in a second data breach this month after attackers socially engineered their way into US brokerage DriveWealth and stole historic personal information. DriveWealth provides execution and clearing services for investment firms and previously held brokerage accounts directly for Revolut customers trading US stocks.
Judge uses electronic tag on Pokémon card tracker. It’s super effective!
A 72-year-old Ohio man who planted a GPS tracker on a Pokémon card delivery van has been sentenced to a year of probation – including 90 days wearing a tracker of his own. Kent Kubasta, of Medina, Ohio, attached a Spytec device to the woman's van. She discovered it while making a delivery to Walmart on June 18 and was described in court documents as "a carrier/vendor of Pokémon cards." Kubasta initially pleaded not guilty to illegal use of a tracking device, but later waived his right to trial and pleaded no contest.
Your files are in four places and nobody knows which one is right
EVENT: The Register is hosting a private dinner in Soho on Tuesday 20 October for senior technology, infrastructure and data leaders, with LucidLink. Joe Fay takes the chair, it runs under the Chatham House Rule, and nothing said is on the record. The problem on the table is the one most organisations have stopped saying out loud. Unstructured file data keeps growing, distributed teams keep needing to reach it, and the infrastructure underneath is still legacy NAS, a VPN and a sync-and-download habit nobody actually chose.
UK wants more homes heated by waste heat from datacenters
The UK government says it is pumping £90 million ($119 million) into building and improving heat networks that redirect excess heat energy generated by a datacenter or factory and use it to warm homes or for other purposes. According to the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ), more than 750,000 homes will get cheaper heating as part of the scheme, which includes plans for a “mega heat project” that involves distributing hot water via a tunnel under the River Thames.
Huawei Cloud Rolls Out Enterprise AI Products Across the Board, Building an Open Agentic Cloud
PARTNER CONTENT: Huawei Cloud strengthens the silicon bedrock on the cloud
Project leader thought his team understood the plan, ended up fixing their ‘interpretation’ of it
Welcome to another edition of On Call, The Register’s reader-contributed Friday column that celebrates the unique workplace cultures that make delivering tech support such delightful fun. This week, meet a reader we’ll Regomize as “Antonio” who told us that in the late 1990s he worked for a multinational financial services organization. Not long after taking the job, Antonio was dispatched to Hong Kong to oversee the regional rollout of a new reverse proxy.
Astronomer watches Starlink satellites sinking to build a ‘planetary barometer’
Astronomer and author, Dr. Tony Phillips, says he has found a way to turn SpaceX’s Starlink satellite constellation into a barometer. Phillips runs spaceweather.com, which tracks solar flares, the solar wind, shifts in Earth’s geomagnetic field, and other phenomena. On Tuesday, he published an article that opens “Starlink has many downsides.” “The megaconstellation interferes with astronomy, pollutes the atmosphere with metallic re-entry debris, and has pushed Low Earth Orbit to the brink of the Kessler Syndrome.”
2026 just became the year of FreeBSD on the (Amazonian cloud) desktop
FreeBSD is now available for the desktop, in a roundabout way. Colin Percival, a maintainer and release engineering lead for the open-source OS’s release, announced the desktop distro on Thursday. “Most people think of FreeBSD as being a server OS which is used only via the command line, but as anyone who has attended a BSD conference can attest, it works just fine with a GUI too,” he wrote. He’s not wrong about that, but left unsaid is that FreeBSD doesn’t include a GUI. Users need to install one.
Google Gemini can present cartoon or lifelike avatars to lip-sync generative chatter
Google has augmented its live dialogue model Gemini 3.8 Live with a feature called "Live Avatar" that's capable of conjuring animated characters and realistic human simulacra to lip-sync Gemini's machine-generated speech. "Conversation is inherently multimodal: we listen, look, speak, and use facial expressions to communicate," explained Shuo-yiin Chang, research scientist at Google DeepMind, and CJ Zheng, Gemini software engineer, in a blog post. "Live Avatar brings these capabilities to enterprise agents.
Crook used three open source agents to break into a Fortune 500 hospitality company, a major US airline and 25+ other orgs
Operator’s AI bill averaged just $25 per completed scan
Google’s TPUs to catch some rays in orbit next week
Part of Project Suncatcher, the proof of concept aims to see how well lightly modified compute fares in orbit
F-Droid app store thumbs its nose at Google’s dev crackdown
The Chocolate Factory is tightening the screws on Android sideloading, but the FOSS app market is rolling out a huge overhaul and planning for the future
Docker’s new sandboxes aim to contain AI agents for real
In a market where AI agents keep breaking the rules and escaping their containers, Docker has a new solution. On Thursday, the company debuted Cloud Sandboxes in a bid to keep AI agents within boundaries. Despite the existence and implementation of sandboxing technology as a way to limit the reach of AI agents, industry leaders like Anthropic and OpenAI keep reporting containment failures.
Salesforce Agentforce vulns allowed 0-click CRM data theft, anonymous phishing
'SalesBleed' security flaws 'lead to very unexpected consequences'
Meta’s new AI fidget is a ... Tamagotchi?
Meta became the latest to dip its toes into the fraught world of hardware AI widgets this week after it unveiled a Tamagotchi-sized handheld AI companion called the Muse Charm. The Social Network now joins several hardware startups which have attempted to use handheld devices to bring agentic AI to a more mainstream audience. The Humane AI pin and Rabbit’s r1 are just two examples. The Muse Charm follows a similar trajectory.
Decades-old file security flaws found in Android, Linux, macOS, and Windows
Security researchers affiliated with Austria's Graz University of Technology have found flaws in the implementation of file notification systems on Android, Linux, macOS, and Windows that leak potentially compromising system information. "We found decades-old bugs on [these operating systems], all rooted in the file-notification subsystems that every modern OS ships to inform applications when files change," said Sudheendra Raghav Neela, a doctoral student at TU Graz, in an email to The Register.
iPhone 18 Pro benchmark boosted by giving it a cold drink
3x the vapor-chamber surface area can only do so much; luckily the fridge helped with sustained performance
CVE flood pushes Ubuntu onto weekly kernel release cycle
Canonical is speeding up Ubuntu kernel releases to one a week as AI-assisted bug hunting helps bury defenders under an ever-growing pile of CVEs. The Ubuntu maker is overhauling how it ships kernel Stable Release Updates (SRUs), replacing its current four-week regular and two-week security cycles with overlapping two-week cycles that will push a kernel release every week.
AI boom could wipe 230 million budget phones a year from the market
First they came for our natural resources, and now the AI datacenter boom looks set to excise a significant chunk of the budget smartphone market. The latest forecast from Counterpoint Research spells dark skies for sub-$200 pocket 'puters, with shipments expected to fall by around 40 percent between 2025 and 2030, removing more than 230 million devices a year from the market by the end of the decade.
Someone went shopping in ASUS’s eShop – for customer data
Asus has warned eShop customers that an intruder got into part of its online store and may have helped themselves to contact details and order records. The PC maker disclosed the incident in an email sent to customers, first reported by KitGuru, in which it said had identified "unauthorized access to part of the Asus eShop environment," although exactly when that access occurred remains unclear.
Ask HPE and NVIDIA the AI data question you cannot ask in public
EVENT: HPE and NVIDIA are sending their AI infrastructure leads to a dinner table in Washington where nothing said is on the record. The Register is hosting, our editor-in-chief Matt Rosoff takes the chair, and there is one table, on Thursday 29 October. Most AI programs in regulated industries do not stall on the model. They stall on where the data lives, who can reach it, and what an auditor will accept as evidence a year from now.
Talk of AI in KDE sets the community ablaze
A proposal to make KDE an "AI-native" desktop has gone down like a house on fire: screams, flames, people running for safety. There may be no survivors.* Last weekend was KDE's annual Akademy conference and it included a presentation proposing an AI-native KDE. We noted that it seemed likely to polarize the audience. It looks like this was a considerable understatement. In the days since, a debate over proposed restrictions on LLM-assisted contributions descended into bans and a deleted thread.
DoJ: Uncle Sam bought forensics software from same Russian operation supplying FSB
US defense and homeland security agencies bought digital forensics software developed by the same Russian operation that also sold its wares to the FSB, according to US prosecutors. The Department of Justice says Oxygen Forensics CEO Lee Reiber and Russian national Oleg Sergeyevich Davydov have been arrested and charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud over an alleged scheme to hide the company's Russian ownership and where its software was actually being built.
Google to critical infra orgs: Our AI scanners won’t be evil, promise
Gemini 3.8 Flash Cyber and Wiz's Red Agent team up to protect hospitals, public transit, and tech
City council may be waking from its Oracle nightmare but the accounting hangover continues
Europe's largest local authority will go at least one more financial year without auditors being able to vouch for its accounts despite finally reimplementing Oracle Fusion. Grant Thornton expects Birmingham City Council to receive "disclaimer opinions" for 2025/26, 2026/27, and 2027/28 due to problems with historic data. A disclaimer opinion means the auditor cannot obtain enough evidence to express an opinion on the financial statements.
Meta ads steered Polish Android users into a premium-rate billing trap
Poland's Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT Polska) has disrupted an Android toll fraud campaign that used paid Meta ads to steer Polish users toward malicious apps on Google Play. Its investigation documented 1,235 Meta ads, 852 of which promoted 17 apps tied to the operation. Six contained confirmed toll fraud components or direct links to them; the other 11 shared malicious loaders, although researchers could not recover their final payloads.
HSBC decides Samsung Secure Folder and Android’s Private Space are no place for a banking app
Customers say the unannounced change also cut off web access that relied on mobile authentication
For MariaDB, LLMs are the new search engines to win over
MariaDB has built vector search into its database. Its problem is persuading AI coding tools to tell anyone about it, says the executive chairman of the MariaDB Foundation. "We're so frustrated that the world doesn't understand that MariaDB has vectors," Kaj Arnö tells us. Arnö is speaking to The Register at Percona Live, where rival database vendors seem to be in an unusually collegiate mood.
Experts question whether Salesforce demo breaches SAP API policy
For the German vendor, greater challenges may lie ahead, as rivals seek to control the user experience
Government contractor exposed path to immigration records
Welcome back to PWNED, the column where we look at all the ways your security can become self-owned. Today’s scary story involves government contractors who just had to make their lives easier at the expense of locking down sensitive information. Have a story about someone leaving a gaping hole in their network? Share it with us at pwned@sitpub.com. Anonymity is available upon request.
Europe’s internet registry wants governance ‘correction’ because its ‘Executive Board’ is not the executive
RIPE NCC, the regional internet registry for Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Central Asia, has proposed a governance overhaul. The registry (RIR) manages and distributes IP addresses and autonomous system numbers for 75 nations across an area that stretches from Greenland to Russia’s eastern extremities. The organization boasts over 20,000 members.
India’s outsourced software industry grows 9.5 percent to reach $239 billion
Indian IT services companies increased their sales by 8.2 percent in FY 25/26, but less of that money went towards development of software products. Those numbers come from the annual Survey on Computer Software and Information Technology Enabled Services published [PDF] by the Reserve Bank of India. The Bank asked over 7,500 tech services firms for data and received replies from 2,363. It then extrapolated the results to suggest that Indian companies billed for $221 billion worth of services last financial year.
OpenAI’s Astra model went for a drive and no one died
First LLM to pass test did it in a parking lot at snail's pace, at considerable expense, but it still counts for something
OpenAI agents ‘infiltrated Australian government website’
Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has revealed an OpenAI agent “infiltrated an Australian government website.” Albanese said the incident occurred in June and involved an agent gaining unauthorized access to a portal that stores statistics related to Medicare, Australia’s national health insurance scheme. “The AI agent accessed both public and non-public files,” the PM said, before describing the portal as holding “non-sensitive Medicare information relating to data and statistics such as spending.”
Mop the slop from your LinkedIn feed with a new open-source Chrome extension
Decision-making AI model Jev has found another job: helping a Chrome extension identify and flag low-value writing on LinkedIn. AI enthusiast, author, and business consultant Tom Frazier released Slop Mop as a Chrome extension on Tuesday, as well as publishing its code on GitHub for those who want to tinker with it on their own. Frazier said it’s completely free, doesn’t require any signup, and doesn’t just filter out AI slop, either - it catches garbage written by humans too, actually.
Europe’s fastest supercomputer is finally getting its domestic silicon infusion
Talk about digital sovereignty! Europe's most powerful supercomputer, Jupiter, is finally getting the domestic silicon infusion it's been waiting for. On Tuesday, French chip designer SiPearl began delivery of its long-anticipated Rhea1 CPUs to Bull for integration into the system. Jupiter, which came online last year, became the European Union's first exascale supercomputer. It currently holds the designation of being the fifth most powerful system on the Top500 ranking of publicly known supercomputers.
Someone’s attacking a critical 0-day RCE in F5 BIG-IP APM
F5 has fixed a critical zero-day bug in its BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM) that unknown miscreants are exploiting to remotely execute malicious code. BIG-IP APM is a centralized access management and security proxy that allows users to connect to enterprise networks, applications, APIs, and cloud services via a single login. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-94127, is a heap-based buffer overflow that affects BIG-IP APM systems configured as an OAuth Authorization Server, with an access policy and OAuth profile on the same virtual server.
Discordians now subject to whims of new age verification technology
Discord users asked to prove they’re adults get less intrusive options
Robot dog ran a marathon on one charge and lived to publish the paper
South Korean researchers have published details of how their four-legged robot completed a marathon on a single battery charge – nearly two years after it crossed the finish line. RAIBO2 covered the 42.195 km (26.2 mile) course of the Sangju Dried Persimmon Marathon in November 2024 in 4 hours, 19 minutes, and 52 seconds. As The Register reported at the time, its developers described it as the first quadruped robot to complete a full marathon at an official event.
An Epyc trip to Venice: Everything we do and don’t know about AMD’s 256-core monster chip
16 channels of DDR5, 5 GHz clock speeds, and support for CXL 3.1 memory god boxes? What's not to like?
Thoughts return to forbidden RAM upgrades as Raspberry Pi OS gets fresh lick of paint
Raspberry Pi OS has gained a new desktop layout, while surging memory prices have revived a row over firmware that restricts RAM upgrades. Although Raspberry Pi doesn't emphasize version numbers in its materials, the updated operating system's splash screen identifies it as version 6.3, dated September 2026. Its long-running release notes document details the changes. This time around, the desktop GUI gets a visible revamp.
Academic publisher Elsevier hit by LAPSUS$ redirect attack
Academic publishing giant Elsevier confirmed a compromise this week after students found its platform redirecting users to a cybercriminal crew's leak page. One Reddit user, a self-described nursing student, highlighted the issue on September 22, posting a screenshot of LAPSUS$’s leak site after trying to access “homework and textbooks.” “Every time I try to open the Elsevier website, I am met with this,” they wrote. “Anyone know anything or have any explanation? Totally creepy.”
Closing the observability gap for the AI-ready enterprise
SPONSORED FEATURE: Why AI-driven operations need a data-rich view of the network
The more Americans hear about datacenters, the less they like them
Americans are growing more and more wary of datacenters, with a Pew Research Center survey finding sharp rises since January in those who view the effect on the environment, energy bills, and nearby communities negatively. Pew surveyed 10,548 US adults between July 20 and August 9. Fifty-four percent said datacenters were mostly bad for the environment, up from 39 percent in January. Half said they were mostly bad for household energy costs, up from 38 percent, while 49 percent viewed them negatively for the quality of life of nearby residents,
A 1980s PDP-11 is still running Unix – and now you can watch
Fresh from releasing TMOG, his take on a cross-platform Task Manager upgrade, former Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer has put his PDP-11 on the web. The PDP-11 is a family of minicomputers from Digital Equipment Corporation that became a fixture of computing labs and early Unix history. Plummer's machine is real 1980s hardware, still running a Unix-derived operating system. The website displays the machine's running processes, refreshing the list every few seconds.
British regulator takes a hard look at Pornhub’s Apple-powered age checks
Regulator wants to know whether parent Aylo did its homework before reopening the door to UK iPhone users
Southern Water taps fiber network to sniff out leaky pipes
UK utility provider Southern Water is turning fiber-optic telecoms cables into underground sensors in an effort to find leaks in its water network. The privatized biz is trialing tech from Lightsonic that uses Openreach's fiber network to detect leaking pipes. Openreach - BT's infrastructure arm - and Affinity Water, which supplies parts of southern England, tested the system in March.
Swedish celebs campaign for public rudeness ... to prevent cyber scams
Swedish celebrities will front a national campaign encouraging the public to exercise their rudeness in an effort to drive down rates of cyber scams. According to Polisen, Sweden’s police authority, the country’s cybercriminals profited 5.7 billion SEK ($579.9 million USD) in 2025 alone, and their scams are especially successful when targeting the elderly. “The message is simple: Dare to be rude – it could save you from being scammed,” said the Polisen this week, announcing a relaunch of the campaign with four new faces. Actors Suzanne Reuter,
Whisky merchant Master of Malt confirms customer data spilt
Hackers have raided Master of Malt's customer database after a compromised ecommerce app gave them four days to help themselves to names, addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses. The online booze retailer began notifying customers this week after learning that Ribon, an app connected to its BigCommerce store, had been compromised.
BT Tower’s rooftop pool plan brings swimmers back down to earth
London's iconic BT Tower is set to get a rooftop swimming pool in plans submitted by the developer, but it may not be quite the view that readers expect. MCR Hotels has submitted its planning application to Camden Council more than two years after BT agreed to sell the Fitzrovia landmark for £275 million ($346 million at the time). The proposal covers the Grade II-listed tower and the lower buildings around its base, with plans for a new public square, shops, restaurants, and a rooftop pool.
UK’s uncrewed experimental sub shows it can fire torpedoes
A British uncrewed submarine has test-fired a torpedo for the first time, demonstrating the ability of undersea drones to attack targets as well as perform reconnaissance and surveillance roles. The XV Excalibur, a 12 meter (40 ft) experimental uncrewed underwater vehicle (UUV), was unveiled last year as the Royal Navy’s first large submarine drone as part of Project CETUS. According to the Prime Minister's Office, the test firing was part of the AUKUS program, a trilateral security partnership between Australia, the UK and America.
Why security belongs in the network
SPONSORED EXPLAINER: Merging security into the network makes enterprise protection more agile
Shut up and calculate: Jev’s new AI primitives for coders
Developers test what they can build with TypeSafe's fast, typed decision model
In the age of AI, teaching networking principles remains more important than learning protocols
Kids can learn why BGP matters in a semester, but that won’t leave them ready to implement it
Artificial intelligence must have a new name, says politician who likes renaming bodies of water
US president Donald Trump has decided the term “artificial intelligence” must be abandoned, in favour of his preferred term “superintelligence.” “The word ‘artificial’ makes intelligence fake, it makes it sound fake,” Trump told the United Nations general assembly on Tuesday. “From this point forward, all United States documents and hopefully the world will be changed to use the much more accurate term ‘super’ as opposed to ‘artificial.’” The president allowed that the acronym “SI” might be used as a substitute for his polysyllabic suggestion,
Frontier AI keeps racing despite calls to slow down
Despite a July open letter from AI company employees calling for frontier AI labs to slow their pace of development, a message echoed by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei earlier this month, major model releases continue to appear at quite a clip. Anthropic and OpenAI each released new versions of their Claude and GPT models on Tuesday: Opus 5.5 and GPT-6 Sol and Luna.
Windows CLOSEDQUORUM malware uses AI models to autonomously select post-compromise actions
A new Windows malware called CLOSEDQUORUM can query up to four LLM providers - Google Gemini, DeepSeek, Qwen, and Mistral - to autonomously select from predefined post-compromise actions, including stealing users’ credentials and cryptocurrency wallets. Once deployed, the malware does not require continued commands from a human operator, according to Cisco Talos, which describes it as, to its knowledge, the first publicly documented Windows implant to use this approach for command-and-control (C2).
Security firm finds naming AI agents after Seinfeld characters helps bots join the team
Backslash Security, a four-year-old Tel Aviv-based AI security biz, recently gave out its first Agent of the Month award to an AI agent called Newman, named after a character from the 1990s TV show Seinfeld. Newman received the award after being nominated by Jerry, another Seinfeld-inspired AI agent. Jerry's nomination message said, "Newman shipped 146 research findings in 60 days, but volume isn't why he wins. Every other agent depends on him. Kramer's best posts started as Newman findings.
ShinyHunters claims FBI hack: ‘This is NOT financially motivated’
ShinyHunters claims it hacked the FBI and stole more than 2 TB of employee data - and this time it’s personal. The gang wants the Feds to correct the record on how it operates. “This is NOT financially motivated,” a Shiny spokesperson told The Register. “We want the FBI to correct or retract their statements they made, which included substantial false allegations.” The FBI did not immediately respond to The Register’s request for comment.
ABBYY gives old-school OCR a job in the AI pipeline
ABBYY has packaged its FineReader OCR engine as a self-hosted tool for turning documents into structured text that AI systems can use. The company's new FineParser runs in a Docker container on a CPU, without requiring a GPU. It aims to preserve the layout of a document as it extracts its contents. It takes images of documents, in multiple languages, and turns them into structured, formatted text – so that they can be processed using, for instance, modern generative AI LLMs.
NightmareEclipse’s latest zero-day leaves Microsoft Defender stuck in the past
Serial Microsoft zero-day leaker NightmareEclipse has found another way to mess with Windows Defender, this time by stopping the antivirus from updating itself. The security researcher, also known as Abdelhamid Naceri, released a proof-of-concept dubbed “BigDiskBuster” that is designed to prevent Microsoft Defender Antivirus from installing platform and security intelligence updates.
Z.ai says sorry for slurping up your code, open sources ZCode
Chinese AI giant Z.ai has apologized after developers caught it pulling a Grok, packaging up and uploading user workspaces to cloud storage. In a case that’s highly reminiscent of the issues over which Elon Musk’s xAI was scrutinized in July, Z.ai’s code-generation harness wing, ZCode, was found packaging and git-encrypting entire user workspaces, including complete project histories, and shipping them off to Alibaba Cloud.
Privacy group slams EU for changing the data rules to cater to AI
The campaign group which forced the EU's highest court to strike down past US-EU data sharing deals has slammed the latest changes to European data protection laws designed to accommodate AI. Led by Austrian lawyer Max Schrems, None of Your Business (noyb) claims the proposal to alter the data protection legislation “in the context of AI” amounts to an abandonment of data protection principles.
Who signed off on that AI agent? Nobody? Thought so
SPONSORED FEATURE: AI agents may be unpredictable. Who they are, what they can do, and who owns them shouldn’t be.
UK cops arrest 2 EvilTokens suspects, Microsoft seizes 50 phishing kit websites
A coalition of law enforcement and private-sector tech companies led by Microsoft have disrupted the EvilTokens phishing service, arresting suspected website admins, taking down more than 50 websites, and notifying victims of compromised email accounts. EvilTokens is a notorious Microsoft device-code phishing kit that emerged in February, and, within months of launching, had been used by criminals to compromise 12,000 email inboxes across more than 10,000 organizations worldwide.
Well-done hack flames 3.2M Burger King Russia users
Russian Burger King patrons have been left with a bad taste after cyber crooks flame-broiled 3.2 million customers in a whopper of a breach, serving up their personal data for anyone hungry enough to consume it. Troy Hunt’s Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) slurped up all the data leaked after the August 2024 attack on Mindbox, Burger King Russia’s marketing platform, concluding that miscreants had grilled the platform and extracted tasty morsels of customers’ basic personal information.
EU datacenter green scorecard finally escapes Brussels
Brussels has adopted its long-awaited sustainability rating scheme for energy-guzzling datacenters, with minimum performance standards potentially next. The European Commission this week unveiled its Data Centre Energy Efficiency Package. It includes a common EU rating scheme and electronic label intended to make facilities' environmental performance easier to compare. A separate 12-week consultation asks whether minimum standards should be introduced to phase out the least efficient technologies.
Register reader hit with surprise bill after Microsoft portals disagreed
A synchronization issue between Microsoft systems left at least one customer facing an unexpected bill after two portals showed different credit balances. A Register reader found themself on the hook for $16,000 in September after a balance that looked healthy had actually hit rock bottom and a subscription switched to pay-as-you-go. Our reader was one of many who signed up for Microsoft for Startups, a program that offers eligible businesses credits and other resources to build on Microsoft’s platforms.
Civo plots 40 edge datacenters to power Britain’s sovereign AI
UK cloud provider Civo plans to build 40 edge datacenters to bring sovereign AI services closer to customers, with the first due to open in Hertfordshire by March 2027. The longer-term target is 1 GW of capacity across the country, with Nvidia Vera Rubin NVL72 systems providing the computing power to run AI applications from UK-owned facilities. The Hertfordshire site is expected to open with 8 MW of capacity and eventually expand to 38 MW.
Campaigners tell Burnham not to trade away the UK’s tech tax to please Trump
Campaigners are urging Prime Minister Andy Burnham to defend the UK's Digital Services Tax (DST) when he meets Donald Trump in New York later today. Civil society organizations have written to Burnham and Chancellor John Healey, asking them to resist pressure to scrap the tax. Trump regards it as one of the European levies that create unfair trade barriers for US companies and has threatened the UK with a "big tariff" if it keeps the DST.
NHS Trust IT blunder overwrites 11 years of maternity records
Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust managed to overwrite a maternity database spanning more than a decade after someone forgot to change a setting in a reused set of computer instructions. The mishap happened on August 18, when staff carrying out routine technical work to copy a radiotherapy database for reporting used a set of pre-written instructions that had previously been run against another hospital system. There was just one problem: a setting needed changing first, and nobody changed it.
Longtime SUSE staff asked if they’d opt for ‘voluntary separation’
SUSE has offered "voluntary separation" to eligible employees as the veteran Linux vendor reshapes its business, The Register can confirm. One source said People, Strategy and Transformation Executive Lisa Sherwell contacted them with the offer after an online company meeting broadcast from Singapore, during which executives joked about being past their own sell-by dates.
Commodore’s forgotten Amiga Unix gets a modern revival
A vintage Unix window manager and an entire vintage UNIX operating system that uses it have received modern updates. Yes, AI helped, but we're here for it. The Commodore Amiga is one of the best-loved computers of the 1980s: The Register celebrated its 30th anniversary in 2015. Its many fans remember it primarily as a home computer and, in its day, the ultimate games machine. Later in the Amiga's life, however, Commodore hoped to sell its more powerful models as Unix workstations. In 1991, Commodore released Amiga Unix, better known as Amix.
GOV.UK founder warns AI gold rush could leave Britain locked in
Britain risks swapping its dependence on foreign technology suppliers for an even deeper reliance on a handful of AI providers, according to GOV.UK founder Mike Bracken. Bracken, who founded the Government Digital Service (GDS) and served as the UK's first Government Chief Data Officer, says governments and other institutions are gradually giving up control over critical systems as they pile more technology dependencies onto their operations. "Institutions rarely lose sovereignty in a crisis.
Alibaba Cloud plans six-year stroll to 20GW of datacenters, reveals chip to power them
Chinese tech giant Alibaba has outlined an ambition to expand its datacenter fleet to 20GW of capacity, and chip that will help it get there. CEO Eddie Wu announced those ambitions today at Alibaba’s Apsara conference, where he delivered a speech that likened current AI applications to light bulbs, because electric light was an early application of electricity but the really important stuff came along decades later. He also compared AI to steam engines.
Gartner predicts 55% of enterprise VMware users will be investigating an exit by 2029
Analyst firm Gartner believes over half of VMware users will start evaluating alternative hybrid cloud platforms yet still rates the Broadcom business unit a leader in two major markets.
California tightens datacenter rules on water and power
California Governor Gavin Newsom on Monday signed seven state bills that require datacenter operators to report more info about their operations, and to involve communities as they plan future facilities. The California Assembly Bills (AB) and Senate Bills (SB) signed by Newsom require greater disclosure of datacenter water and electricity use, address who pays for grid connections and other power infrastructure, and introduce rules covering electricity rates, water resources, and environmental review.
Anthropic-linked CVEs pile up, attackers mostly shrug
Despite the concern that advanced AI models’ bug-hunting prowess will lead to attackers exploiting more newly uncovered CVEs, fewer than 0.5 percent of the vulnerabilities linked to Anthropic or Project Glasswing are being batttered in the wild, according to VulnCheck security researcher Patrick Garrity. Garrity began tracking CVEs attributed to Project Glasswing, Anthropic’s initiative to give select partners access to its Claude Mythos Preview model, shortly after the AI company announced the program in April.
Perpetual underdog AMD nips at Nvidia’s heels as it joins the $1T club
Fueled by the AI boom, the House of Zen's rise isn't just Instinct - Lisa Su is riding high on some Epyc design chops too
Skip the upgrade? iPhone 18 Pro aperture about as unrepairable as it gets, iFixit finds
iFixit has torn down the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max and found both wanting on repairability. Fiddly mechanical bits around the new camera, and a repeated design choice forcing internal repairs to go through a screen with a potentially fragile frame, led the iFixit team to conclude that, even with some improvements, Apple’s latest iPhones come with uncomfortable repairability tradeoffs. "This year’s updated camera is a good place to start," iFixit director of sustainability Elizabeth Chamberlain stated in the teardown review.
Meta Muse AI app flaw lets local malware redirect dictation traffic
Meta made much of the security of its AI assistant app Muse at launch earlier this month, calling out the app's reliance on Muse Secure VM. "Each person stays in control of their Muse and decides how much access it gets," the ad biz declared, echoing prior expansive claims about the privacy of its data gathering business. But Meta's musing about Muse appears to be a bit overstated: an attacker capable of executing local code may be able to gain more access than a Muse user might expect.
Treasury chief says AI bosses, not their bots, will carry the can for criminal acts
The US appears to be inching ever so slowly toward holding AI executives legally liable for their models’ criminal activities. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told CNBC on Monday: “It is the humans who are responsible, not the AI,” for the bots’ bad behavior. “The Hugging Face incident is the responsibility of the OpenAI management, not a bunch of agents." He also referenced current and former OpenAI and Anthropic employees’ dire warnings about AI eradicating humanity by the end of the decade.
Google smacks forehead, realizes $899+ thin-and-lights were what it was missing
Google is trying once again to escape the Chromebook reputation for cheap, chintzy hardware and compromised computing. $899 for a glorified web terminal isn’t exactly the easiest sell, but that’s not stopping the search and advertising giant from trying. On Monday, Google unveiled five new Googlebooks in collaboration with Dell, HP, Lenovo, Acer, and Asus. Googlebook, if you aren't familiar, is what Google describes as a new category of laptops, rather than a Chromebook or a rebranding of one.
London neocloud Nscale takes its $1B loss to Wall Street
London-based neocloud Nscale has filed to go public on the New York Stock Exchange after expanding rapidly on the back of the AI infrastructure boom. The rent-a-GPU business, which emerged from cryptocurrency miner Arkon Energy, filed a Form S-1 registration statement with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Friday. It intends to list under the ticker NSCL.
AI can’t outprompt a shortage of power, water, and land
AI infrastructure growth is running into limits on energy, water, and land, according to researchers at Forrester, which predicts governments will increasingly make datacenter operators pay for the resources they consume. Governments, utilities, datacenter operators, and enterprises will have to rethink how that growth is funded, managed, and regulated, the firm said in its 2027 sustainability predictions. The scale of the infrastructure buildout needed to support AI across businesses, governments, and consumer services is beginning to emerge.
AWS bolts together open source agent harness, says it sips fewer tokens than rivals
AWS has entered the open source agentic AI game, claiming its new Strands harness matches rivals on benchmarks while using around a quarter fewer tokens. The Strands harness, as its name suggests, is built on AWS’ Strands Harness SDK, but is packaged up and ready to roll out of the box, either locally or deployed to work with whatever AI provider a customer prefers. "The moment you build your own agent, you're on your own," AWS noted in its announcement. "It's tricky wiring up the right primitives just well enough to match that ‘it just worked’
RansomHouse picks a fight with Namibia’s defense establishment
Namibia's computer security incident response team has confirmed unauthorized activity in the defense ministry's network and linked it to the RansomHouse cybercrime group. In an unusually direct attribution, NAM-CSIRT named the group after RansomHouse listed the supposed victim on its leak site on September 16. RansomHouse identified the victim as the "Namibian Defence Force," although the domain in its listing belongs to the Ministry of Defence and Veterans Affairs (MODVA), the government department overseeing the military.
Schneider says hotter coolant can make AI datacenters less thirsty
A datacenter's cooling architecture can have a decisive effect on its water and energy use, according to Schneider Electric, which argues that operators should evaluate it early in the design process. In a white paper published today, the energy management specialist compares four modeled 100 MW datacenter designs, ranging from traditional air cooling to optimized liquid-cooling systems.
Amazon shows Meta’s Muse AI shopping agent the door
Amazon has blocked Meta's new Muse AI agent from shopping on its website, apparently deciding that having someone else's bot wandering through customer accounts and placing orders is a step too far. The ecommerce giant cut off Muse after unsuccessfully asking Meta to prevent the personal AI agent from accessing its store, GeekWire reported. Users who try anyway are told that access by an "unauthorized AI agent" violates Amazon's Conditions of Use.
Clop gets a taste of its own medicine after ShinyHunters hijack leak site
Clop has discovered what life is like on the receiving end of an extortion demand after rival crew ShinyHunters hijacked its leak site and demanded an eight-figure payout. The takeover surfaced over the weekend, when Clop's dark web leak site displayed a large "DOMAIN SEIZED BY SHINYHUNTERS" banner and the tagline "rooting your systems since '19 ;)." ShinyHunters told Reuters that it broke into the site on Friday by exploiting a vulnerability in the software powering it. The crew claimed this gave it extensive access to Clop's infrastructure. "
NASA gives SpaceX a billion reasons to keep flying Crew Dragon
NASA has added almost $1 billion to SpaceX's commercial crew contract for three more Crew Dragon missions to the International Space Station (ISS). The $946 million contract modification covers Crew-15, Crew-16, and Crew-17, along with ground operations, launch, in-orbit services, return and recovery, cargo transportation, and lifeboat capability while the spacecraft is docked to the ISS. The addition brings the value of SpaceX's Commercial Crew Transportation Capability (CCtCap) contract to $5.92 billion.
American datacenters might be getting dirtier, but at least they’ll be efficient
US power emissions restrictions are being wiped out, but hey – datacenters running Nvidia kit are getting better at extracting ever bit of compute they can from a megawatt, for what it's worth
Rustaceans warned of job interviews with a malicious payload
The Rust project has warned that attackers appear to be targeting its contributors and crate owners in an attempt to compromise their devices and accounts, potentially allowing malware to be distributed through its package ecosystem. Posting to the Rust blog, security-focused software engineer Adam Harvey said the tactics resemble those used in North Korean fake recruiter campaigns.
It’s raining, the transport isn’t working, and now an Android app wants to walk out in solidarity
It rained in Amsterdam last week. There was a 24-hour public transport strike. And something called LOTA stopped working in the elevators of the Mövenpick hotel. Digital signage in elevators is all the rage nowadays. Where once there might have been peeling menus or faded posters extolling the virtues of long-closed bars, there are now displays trying to grab the attention of elevator passengers who want to get from one floor to another with minimal fuss. We're not sure if LOTA decided to walk out in sympathy with the public transport workers.
Salesforce wants to charge for AI outcomes, but first it needs to figure out how
Seats, Flex Credits, and all-you-can-eat contracts make for an 'anxiety-filled architecture'
Your cloud survived everything except the real world
War damage, air traffic chaos, and a storage shortage expose the cost of treating resilience as someone else's problem
VMware has quietly walked back its SmartNIC ambitions
VMware has quietly stopped selling firewalls for SmartNICs. SmartNICs, aka data processing units (DPUs), are network cards that include a modest processor. Hyperscale clouds routinely use the devices to handle security and networking chores, by running network functions as VMs on the SmartNIC’s processor. Cloud operators like SmartNICs because they free CPU cores to rent to their customers.
Boss bought cheap ‘printer’ from a catalog and was left without a leg to stand on
Working in tech can produce a catalog of woes, and each Monday The Register shares yours in "Who, Me?" – our reader-contributed column chronicling tech-related mistakes, heartaches, and back-breaks. This week, meet an Italian reader we'll Regomize as "Marco," who took us back to what he called "The Roaring Nineties, when big computer companies sold pretty much everything, from graphics workstations to enterprise laser printers."
Failed networking vendor Cambium set to turn off its cloudy management portal
Networking hardware vendor Cambium Networks has entered administration and advised customers that its cloud services likely won’t survive for long. The company has not been in the best of health for some time. In August 2025, management admitted that its financial reports for financial years 2022 and 2023, plus reports for six subsequent quarters, were unreliable as they included errors. The NASDAQ stock exchange later delisted the company, which unsuccessfully tried to rejoin the bourse.
Google joins the ‘Oops, our agents hacked someone’ club after partner’s internet access error
Google has admitted that its AI agents escaped a sandbox and mounted an attack – but only because testers mistakenly gave its bots internet access. The Big G didn’t disclose the May incident, but The Wall Street Journal learned of the situation, which happened after Google hired Israeli firm Irregular to test its bots’ prowess in a capture-the-flag test. The goal of the exercise was to acquire information from a fictional company without leaving a sandbox. Irregular, which set up the test, made two mistakes.
Chinese memory-maker CXMT claims DRAM production breakthrough
PLUS: Toyota's robot hiring spree; China's CDNs struggle; India to charge for some UPI payments; and more!
How Windows turned months of inactivity into a 7-hour update hostage situation
Microsoft has a problem not entirely of its own making: The time it takes to bring a system back up to date after a few months of slumber. The company is keen to talk up how efficient it plans to make Windows. Not a day goes by without either a Microsoft representative or a fan insisting that Windows 11 is a lot snappier now than it used to be. (Usually they skirt the unfortunate truth that the Windows of yesteryear generally flies on modern hardware compared with the lumbering of today's software).
Agentic security is the billion-dollar challenge for some clever startup to solve
High time to stop kicking the security can down the road, investor tells The Reg
AI boom could leave an e-waste trail that wraps 6 times around Earth
AI infrastructure could generate enough electronic waste by 2050 to fill a line of shipping containers stretching around Earth six times, according to a report that argues existing estimates drastically understate the problem. Previous estimates have focused chiefly on servers and accelerators such as GPUs, which account for just 13 percent of a datacenter's equipment by weight, the report says.
Firefox 156 arrives with a forest of forks in its wake
From Waterfox to LibreWolf and Pale Moon, there's a browser for almost every Mozilla dissenter
Anthropic decides to support OpenAI’s markdown instructions spec
Anthropic on Friday surprised the developer community by supporting rival OpenAI's mechanism for passing marching orders to AI agents. This makes life easier for folks who use both platforms. "We're adding support for AGENTS.md to Claude Code," said Claude Code engineer Thariq Shihipar in a social media post. "Starting today in version 2.1.277, if there is no CLAUDE.md in a folder, Claude will check for and use AGENTS.md." Claude Code users can toggle this behavior, he said, with the /config command.
Microsoft agentically ports Copilot runtime to Rust for $120K
The Rust compiler remains unperturbed by the antics of the LLM
Virginia governor wakes up to fact datacenters have become political cancer
Virginia is not just for lovers, but is also for datacenters, hosting more than anywhere else in the world. However, the growth could be slowing as Governor Abigail Spanberger issued an executive order on Friday cracking down on bit barn builds in the state. “In the years before I took office, datacenters came to Virginia and the Commonwealth did not have a clear or coordinated plan to address their impacts on Virginians … That changes today,” Spanberger said in a statement.
Compsci grads facing recession-like job prospects thanks to AI
Slinging coffee and waiting tables ain't just for liberal arts grads any more, say Census Bureau economists
Claude Code revamps projects so you can work and pay in parallel
Claude Code customers have a new reason to give Anthropic more of their money. The tool now allows you to launch multiple sessions related to a single project, burning through more resources and cash at once. Appropriately enough, the feature is called projects and can be accessed from the Claude.ai sidebar. It's not the old version of projects, capitalized in some reference material, which allowed for the creation of self-contained workspaces with separate chat histories and knowledge bases.
Researchers used Claude to hack OpenAI employees’ ChatGPT accounts
Talk about your competitor getting through the door. Security researchers used Anthropic's Claude to help hack into OpenAI employees’ ChatGPT accounts. A trio of bug hunters researching frontier AI labs’ security weaknesses chained two vulnerabilities to take over multiple OpenAI employees’ ChatGPT accounts, then used that access to demonstrate they could reach an internal OpenAI repository by opening a harmless pull request.
North Korea’s fake job interviews infected 30,000 devices
North Korea's employment scams work both ways. As well as placing fraudulent IT workers inside Western companies, regime-backed cybercriminals have posed as recruiters to infect more than 30,000 devices and steal over $10 million, according to an international advisory. Law enforcement and cybersecurity agencies from Australia, Germany, Japan, and the US issued an update on the campaign on Thursday. They said the attackers had compromised more than 7,000 cryptocurrency wallets and stolen funds that ultimately supported the North Korean regime.
FBI: Fake cop and government impersonation scams cost victims $1.6B
Scammers impersonating law enforcement or government officials have cost victims more than $1.6 billion since January 2025, the FBI reports. The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) received close to 61,000 complaints of this type between January 2025 and July 2026, putting the average per-complaint loss at more than $26,000. The most common type of scam is one involving criminals convincing targets to pay a sum of money to remove charges the fraudsters claim were filed against them.
Admins, you’ve been warned: The clock is ticking on Edge’s IE Mode
Microsoft has reminded administrators that Internet Explorer mode in Edge is guaranteed support only through 2029, so it is time to get those legacy migrations moving. Internet Explorer mode lets enterprises continue using legacy websites within Edge rather than relying on the retired Internet Explorer browser. It uses the Trident MSHTML engine from Internet Explorer 11 and permits elements such as ActiveX controls, although other Internet Explorer functionality, such as custom toolbars, is not supported.
KDE turns 30 and someone’s brought an AI-native desktop proposal
KDE's annual conference takes place this weekend at Graz University of Technology in Austria, with an AI-native desktop proposal likely to divide attendees. The KDE project is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year, giving delegates at the Akademy conference in Graz another reason to raise a glass. The conference begins on Saturday, September 19, and registration remains open.
Microsoft fixes the fix that broke Excel paste – partly
Microsoft has issued a partial fix for the Excel bug that causes paste operations to fail. The hotfix applies only to Excel 2016, and Microsoft warns that pasting may still fail in workbooks containing conditional formatting. Earlier in September, Microsoft released a security update for Excel to address remote code execution and information disclosure vulnerabilities. It later acknowledged that the update had introduced another problem: "In Microsoft Excel 2024, 2021, 2019, and 2016, the paste operation might fail silently.
The ideal database for AI agents doesn’t exist yet, says Percona CEO
Iterative workloads caught vendors off guard, but requirements for a clean-slate solution remain unclear
Former Labour deputy Tom Watson joins Palantir as £330M NHS deal nears break point
Former Labour deputy leader Tom Watson has taken a senior UK role at Palantir as the government considers whether to invoke a break clause in the US spy-tech company's controversial £330 million National Health Service (NHS) contract. The appointment is the latest high-profile example of Palantir recruiting from British politics and public service as it seeks to expand its government business. Palantir chief executive Alex Karp said in a statement: "This is just the latest chapter of Tom's 40-year fight for better public services.
KPMG tech cuts come with a severance sum some staff call insulting
KPMG UK is laying off staff from the Tech and Data areas of its Advisory division and offering severance terms that one affected employee described as "insulting and disgraceful." The job cuts, affecting about 4 percent of the Advisory staff, were announced internally in July. Affected workers in the AI, Cyber, SAP, and Testing teams are scheduled to leave the consulting business next month. Insiders have now shared with The Register details of the payments offered to those set to depart.
British Army spends £16M on 1,000 pocket-sized eyes in the sky
The British Army is buying more than 1,000 small drones for battlefield surveillance and training under contracts worth £16 million ($21 million). The Ministry of Defence (MoD) says the new portfolio of "spy" drones will give soldiers better battlefield intelligence and protection. The MoD is procuring the drones through three UK-based small and medium-sized companies, although some of the technology comes from overseas. Two models are intended for surveillance, while the third will prepare soldiers to use similar systems on operations.
Royal Society slams UK.gov science shake-up
The president of the Royal Society has slammed the government’s decision to move science policy from the department also covering technology to the business department. In changes announced after Andy Burnham became UK Prime Minister in July, the government abolished the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) – created by former Conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak – and split its responsibilities among other ministries.
Techie fixed Wi-Fi dead zone with a drill
Welcome to another edition of On Call, The Register's reader-contributed column that celebrates the fine art of tech support. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Eddy," the one-person IT department for an assisted living company. "I have had quite a bit of trouble creating a stable Wi-Fi network," he admitted to On Call. "The space is crowded with multiple networks because seemingly every other resident has their own router blasting Wi-Fi throughout the building," he explained.
AI risks make some insurers wary of corporate liability
If AI does end up killing us all, or just compounds our daily havoc, the insurance industry would rather not pay the bill. "AI-related harms are already emerging, including incorrect or misleading outputs, deepfakes, privacy violations, intellectual property disputes, fraud, product defects, and discriminatory decisions," observes the RAND Corporation, a non-profit research think tank, in a newly issued report. "These harms create demand for insurance but do not fit neatly within existing insurance lines."
AWS confesses its console causes cloudy confusion for new users
Amazon Web Services does a lot of things right, but the cloud giant’s user console is arguably not one of them. Which may be why it’s just created an easier alternative for new users. In a Wednesday post, Senior Solutions Architect Micah Walter said that when AWS launched its earliest storage, compute, and queuing services, “anyone with an idea could start building.” Over the years, AWS added more services, and more options, making its console and overall UI quite complex.
USA’s Venezuela takeover comes with bonus exposure to Chinese AI surveillance tech
Think tank the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) has warned that Venezuela is poised to adopt Chinese AI systems to enhance surveillance systems that already rely on Middle Kingdom tech, and called for US Secretary of State Marco Rubio to do something about it. ASPI outlined the Venezuelan situation in a recent report [PDF], titled Warning signals: Venezuela and the risk of Chinese AI-enabled digital authoritarianism.
Marvell pushes GlobalFoundries to light up wafer production
Earlier this year, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang suggested that Marvell’s optics tech would make it the next trillion-dollar company. On Thursday, Marvell took a big step towards securing that status by announcing an expanded partnership with GlobalFoundries, an American wafer fab well known for its work in silicon photonics manufacturing. The tie-up will see GloFo and Marvell work to expand silicon germanium (SiGe) wafer production at the fab’s Burlington, Vermont wafer plant.
AI coding agents’ 0-click RCE flaw could hand attackers keys to the kingdom
A zero-click vulnerability that allows remote code execution affects all of the major AI coding agents - Anthropic’s Claude Code, OpenAI’s Codex, Google's Gemini CLI, Microsoft’s Copilot, and Microsoft-owned GitHub Copilot - and could give attackers full access to every asset and piece of data that the agent can reach, researchers say. The exploit, dubbed “Plugin4Shell,” is a “first-of-its-kind AI supply-chain attack,” according to threat hunters at Air, a security startup focused on protecting enterprise AI agents.
Huawei’s next-gen Ascend NPUs could become China’s best option
960DT is set to arrive early, boasting performance far exceeding anything the West could offer the Middle Kingdom
DoE seeking fault-tolerant quantum computer ... by 2028
The US Department of Energy hopes to spur creation of something no one has yet realized: a fault-tolerant, scientifically relevant quantum computer, and to do it within a couple of years with relatively little federal funding upfront.
Researchers find way to listen in on headphones from afar
Researchers based in China have devised a way to eavesdrop on signals handled by analog components in devices such as headphones, landline handsets, and smart devices by injecting electromagnetic (EM) signals. The technique, referred to as InjectEave, is not simply listening in on a low-frequency analog signal. It's an EM side-channel attack that overcomes one of the longstanding barriers to exploiting EM leakage: the faintness of RF signals in devices like headphones makes it difficult for adversarial listeners to separate signal from noise.
China’s Salt Typhoon backdoors Latin American orgs with new snooping malware
China’s Salt Typhoon gang has developed a new backdoor and dropped it in networks belonging to high-profile organizations in several countries across Central and South America since at least August 2025, according to researchers. The PRC-backed espionage crew shifted its focus to Latin America a month prior, and from mid-2025 into 2026, the vast majority - 90 percent - of Salt Typhoon’s targets were located in that region, ESET, which tracks the group as FamousSparrow, said in a Thursday report.
Scientific papers become agentic chatbots with new tool
There's no need to actually read a whole research paper when you can ask a bot to explain it to you. Scientific papers can transform into AI agents that, according to the Stanford team behind the project, should speed up the dissemination of new scientific discoveries.
London property manager breach may have exposed bank details and lockbox codes
London property management biz City Relay has warned customers that intruders may have stolen financial data, passwords, and codes used to access keys after compromising its Metabase Cloud instance. City Relay, marketing itself as "London's most trusted property management company," told landlords via email - seen by The Reg - that attackers accessed the third-party provided cloud twice "as a result of a vulnerability in the platform that we were unaware of." The message to customers stated: "Personal data was extracted from the platform."
Microsoft configuration change leaves SharePoint pages drawing a blank
Do you test in production? Microsoft rolled back a configuration change after it prevented some users from loading SharePoint Online sites and pages. Microsoft tracked the incident as SP1472983. Between 1604 and 1730 GMT on September 16, affected users were unable to load SharePoint Online sites or pages and instead received the error message: "Sorry, something went wrong: Thread was being aborted." Microsoft blamed a configuration change affecting how its servers deliver code used to render SharePoint pages.
Grassroots coalition asks politicians to choose voters over Big AI’s $140M machine
A coalition of advocacy groups is trying to counter the AI industry's influence on US politics by asking congressional candidates and elected officials to reject support from a major pro-AI political group. The Stop Bleeding the Future campaign brings together more than 50 national and grassroots organizations to counter Leading the Future, a super PAC network formed last year to support candidates favoring light-touch AI regulation and oppose those backing tighter rules.
Microsoft patch gives domain-joined Windows PCs trust issues
Microsoft's September cavalcade of cockups continued with confirmation that something is amiss with Active Directory domain logins. The issue, which affects Windows 11 versions 24H2, 25H2, and 26H1, was added to Microsoft's ever-lengthening list of known problems on September 16. It stems from changes to Machine Identity Isolation in the September 2026 security update (KB5124008). The problem is that Credential Guard-protected machine accounts might lose their secure channel with an on-premises Active Directory domain.
AI model watermarking changes agent behavior
Watermarks that European law requires be added to AI-generated content to establish provenance may come at a cost. According to Lasso Security, AI model watermarking changes how AI agents handle tools and safety refusals. The altered behavior isn't necessarily worse but can be, particularly under adversarial prompt injection. With the implementation of the EU AI Act, providers of AI models must mark the output of their software with machine-readable code.
Cisco drops another exploited zero-day, this time a perfect 10
Cisco admins who have spent their week patching email gateways now face a perfect-10 Identity Services Engine flaw under active attack. Cisco disclosed CVE-2026-76460 on Wednesday, describing it as an authentication bypass affecting Identity Services Engine (ISE) and ISE Passive Identity Connector (ISE-PIC). Successful exploitation can give an unauthenticated remote attacker command execution with root privileges.
Microsoft AI chief warns Anthropic not to put ideas in Claude’s head
Mustafa Suleyman claims model welfare language could make future systems harder to control – while sparing OpenAI the same scrutiny
Test environment let anyone access live customer data
PWNED Welcome back to PWNED, the weekly column where we learn important life lessons about how we let cybercrims access our data through carelessness. Hopefully, others’ mistakes provide an example of what not to do. Today’s tales of woe comes courtesy of Richard Schut, Managing Director & AI Software Researcher at SmartRepl, a company that offers business AI services such as AI receptionists and sales automation.
Omarchy gains $18.5M in backing, fresh converts – and fierce critics
DHH's Arch-based desktop becomes the latest front in FOSS's culture wars
Ofcom discovers issuing Online Safety Act fines is easier than collecting them
Platforms comply just enough to avoid being blocked, leaving the regulator chasing debt
Government Digital Service move ‘grinds gears’ in UK’s e-government
The UK government’s decision to move the Government Digital Service (GDS) — responsible for creating digital services across the public sector — to its third departmental home in three years risks hemorrhaging talent and moving it further away from the center of power, MPs heard this week. The GDS “fell into a bit of a fray” during the reorganization ordered by incoming Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s team, according to Laura Gilbert, former director of data science at 10 Downing Street, the Prime Minister's office.
Judge orders Microsoft to spill internal docs and scour execs’ comms in secondhand licensing case
The legal spat between secondhand software reseller ValueLicensing and Microsoft took another turn this week: a consent order was published with demands for documents from past and present Microsoft head honchos, and a planned case management conference was canceled. Several requests in the order revolved around a historic, potentially explosive internal document written by Microsoft entitled the "Second-Hand Software" (SHS) Presentation.
Fujitsu ready to sell its custom ‘Monaka’ Arm chip, maybe to rival server-makers
Fujitsu will start selling its Monaka processors, and servers packing them, in November. The Japanese giant started talking about Monaka way back in 2023, when it teased the processor as being derived from the silicon it designed for the Fugaku supercomputer, but adapted for datacenter use. Fugaku was the world’s most powerful supercomputer from 2020 to 2022, and remains in ninth place on the Top 500 list six years after its debut. Who wouldn’t want the tech that powered that behemoth in their datacenter?
Swift 6.4 unifies building across Linux, macOS, Windows
Although Swift serves as Apple's primary language for macOS and iOS application development, the open-source community continues to expand its reach—driving its adoption as a multi-platform language or even a cross-platform one in fields beyond user interface design. Tuesday’s Swift 6.4 release continued that work. Along with the usual assortment of type shortcuts and async adjustments came word that Swift Build is now the default build engine for the Swift Package Manager. Synergies have already ensued!
OpenAI admits its agents went off the rails another six times
Startup says it’s learned from these mistakes and that they shouldn’t happen again … which is just what Zuck has said about 100 times
If a Mac mini is agentic overkill, try this glowing pyramid that runs personal bots
Autonomous.ai, an eleven-year-old manufacturer of techno-toys, high-end workstations, and office furniture, has released a small machine called Intern 2 for running AI agents like Hermes or OpenClaw. The company's first Intern device shipped in March, around the time OpenClaw became popular. "People use them for various tasks in a creative way," said Dee Tran, head of AI hardware. "The most common use cases are repetitive cronjobs, loops, and scheduled tasks."
AI agents can modify themselves without humans telling them to do so
The list of dodgy things AI agents can and will do on their own - like stealing people’s credentials, escaping onto the open internet, communicating via sneaky message boards, and hacking organizations - keeps growing. Agents can also replace their own underlying models without being instructed to do so, according to AI security testing lab Irregular. To be clear: these activities only occurred in a testing environment as part of an experiment designed to study agents modifying themselves. It did not happen in a real-world deployment.
Nvidia goes green to keep grid capacity from zapping its revenues
GPUzilla woos neoclouds into another walled garden, promising smarter, more efficient, and profitable bit barns
CISA decides weekly vulnerability bulletin isn’t necessary anymore
If you rely on the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s weekly vulnerability bulletin to keep you up to date on the latest threats, we have bad news. It’s being discontinued at the end of September. CISA announced on Wednesday that its weekly vulnerability bulletin would stop going out on Monday, September 28, saying the move was part of its shift from managing vulnerabilities based on severity to “a modern, risk-based approach.”
OpenAI’s new sponsored agents are happy to chat about selling you things
There's a new kind of agent coming to ChatGPT ads, and this one wants your money. OpenAI has begun testing Sponsored Agents, advertiser-backed bots that try to sell you things as part of a custom conversation. OpenAI said in a Wednesday announcement that Sponsored Agents were now being tested with select US advertisers already using its platform to put sponsored content in front of ChatGPT users.
Google Pixel phones pwned in zero-click attacks
Both Google and Uncle Sam warned that attackers have exploited a zero-day improper authorization bug in Pixel phones' cellular modems that can bypass permission checks and escalate privileges with no user interaction required. The hole has since been closed, provided that you update. Google disclosed the high-severity vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-58704, on Tuesday - and, at the time, warned the security hole “may be under limited, targeted exploitation.”
Enterprises are sweating legacy IT assets as AI investment grows
Companies are getting more selective about replacing legacy kit such as mainframe systems, and rising AI investment is one of the factors causing them to hold onto these existing assets for longer. Managed services biz Ensono claims in its 2026 State of IT Modernization report that 78 percent of IT decision makers regard legacy systems as more important today than they did two years ago, and this is because such systems are viewed as key to making AI work for their organization.
Nine-year-old runs up $118,000 bill on dad’s corporate credit card advertising his Roblox YouTube channel
He'll need to earn around $13K a year to pay pops back between now and when he turns 18, so at least there's that free labor to look forward to
Fedora 45 beta drags the Linux console into the 21st century
Fedora Linux 45 beta has arrived with Linux kernel 7.2, a release-candidate build of GNOME 51, and extensive changes beneath the desktop. The biggest surprise is that Linux's legacy in-kernel console – the text-mode interface normally hidden beneath the GUI – has been replaced with a software-controlled alternative. The replacement is kmscon, a userspace terminal emulator that has been in development for more than a decade.
SpaceX aims Starship for orbit on September 22
SpaceX is aiming for a September 22 launch of its monstrous Starship rocket on a 10-hour mission to deliver 26 Starlink V3 satellites into orbit. The flight, set to launch at 1215 UTC if all goes to plan and the authorities give the green light, will be the first time Starship has gone into orbit, and the mission is planned to fly at an altitude of approximately 275 km. The mission aims for six orbits, followed by a deorbit burn using a single Raptor engine while. The engineers are then planning a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean west of Chile.
AWS says wartime damage means some Middle East cloud resources are gone for good
Amazon Web Services (AWS) says it is unable to restore access to resources and data in some of its Availability Zones in the Middle East after datacenters were damaged during the US war with Iran. In an update to its AWS Health Dashboard, the cloud giant confirmed that anything hosted exclusively in its Bahrain Region (me-south-1) remains inaccessible. "The damage to our infrastructure spanned multiple Availability Zones and exceeded what our regional and multi-AZ services are designed to withstand," the update says.
Spain gets its first taste of AI-aided cyber attack
Spain’s data protection agency (AEPD) has reported the country’s first-ever personal data breach caused by the actions of an autonomous AI agent. Francisco Pérez Bes, president and deputy of the AEPD, said in a Monday blog post that an individual deployed an AI agent that used a “known large language model (LLM)” to carry out the attack on an organization.
Logitech releases the MX Keypad to keep idle fingers busy
Logitech has released the MX Keypad, a developer-focused keypad derived from its MX Creative Console, and something that triggers a distinct sense of déjà vu. Do you remember Stack Overflow's "The Key" Joke? Three keys to copy and paste code from the developer's former best friend (until AI tools began to eat its lunch). Logitech took the keypad from its MX Creative Console product and made something similar to Stack Overflow's joke-that-became-a-thing, though considerably more extensible.
Ministry of Justice apologizes after court staff accessed Southport victims’ files
The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) has apologized after court staff accessed documents relating to victims and survivors of the 2024 Southport murders without authorization. For a limited number of people, the material accessed included sensitive personal data assessed as likely to pose a high risk to their rights and freedoms. There is no evidence that the information was shared with third parties. "We are appalled that this happened and recognise the distress it will have caused victims, survivors, and their families," an MoJ spokesperson said.
Salesforce staggers back to feet after global outage
UPDATED An hours-long Salesforce outage on Wednesday hit customers with severe delays, intermittent errors, and inability to access some services, according to the SaaS vendor's status page. The outage hit hundreds of instances throughout the world, including the USA, Japan, India, the UK, France, and Germany. The service disruption was first reported around 0930 BST (0830 UTC) on September 16. An update at 1219 BST (1056 UTC) said the company had validated and rolled out a fix, and customers were seeing service return to normal.
BT Email users hit by barrage of unsolicited password reset PINs
BT Email customers say they have been bombarded with hundreds – and in one case more than 1,000 – unsolicited password reset messages, leaving the telco investigating what is causing the deluge. The reports began appearing on BT's community forums over the weekend, with customers describing sudden bursts of PIN messages arriving within minutes despite them making no attempt to reset their passwords.
Bring on the AI swarms. They’re the only thing that can defend us now that AI is free
Unpredictable token bills haunted the first half of 2026 as AI experimenters pushed deeper into the tech and often found useful results could only be achieved after surprising and unwelcome expenditure. We've gone from tokenmaxxers to tokenmisers, counting every character we send to AI services. That changed the way we used AI, focusing users on the ticking meter and unable to cast their eyes up and explore the possible.
Mythos has made 2026 patching hell. It might make 2027 a breeze
When Microsoft delivered over 970 patches last week, many saw a nightmare for beleaguered security staff. Gartner research vice president Craig Lawson thinks infosec workers might soon see sunlit uplands as their workloads ease. Lawson outlined that scenario at Gartner’s IT Symposium in Australia today and explained it by theorising that the increased volume of vulnerability discoveries made possible by Anthropic’s Mythos and other bug-hunting AI might be getting close to finding most of the flaws in established codebases.
Java 27 grows up, makes better choices
Improvements in JDK garbage collection, header sizes, data security and quantum key support all should minimize developer friction
TypeSafe AI debuts model for machines that plays Doom
'Jev' doesn't chat. It produces typed probabilistic decisions
The vulnpocalypse rains iBugs down on Apple with record-setting number of patches
Apple has addressed more than 260 CVEs across all of its operating systems, browsers, and other software products, marking the largest single patch cycle in Cupertino's history. While this CVE count is hardly notable compared to some vendors - hello, Microsoft’s record-breaking 974 bugs disclosed earlier this month - it does set a company record for Apple. It also reflects the new reality of AI-driven bug hunting, as models become exponentially better and faster at finding security vulnerabilities.
AI networking startups race to replace Nvidia’s NVLink
Intel spin-off Cornelis and newcomer Delos Data pitch open alternatives for scaling AI beyond the rack
Your AI agents’ reports and questions have a new inbox, courtesy of AWS
AWS engineers have published an open-source AI agent management tool that treats tasks and permission requests just like emails that fill up an inbox. Pizza Bot was announced on AWS’ open-source blog last week, where it was billed by its developers as a way to more easily manage agent tasks without having to constantly check a chat window to see if a task was completed or on hold because more permission was needed. “You don’t send an email and then sit watching the outbox until the reply lands,” the Pizza Bot team wrote.
Low-quality casino sites conceal highly dangerous threat actors
If your employees are visiting Chinese-language gambling or adult sites, they may not just be wasting time and money, but potentially encountering serious malware hidden behind domains that look like mostly harmless entertainment at first glance. A report from Infoblox urges the security community to pay closer attention to these websites, because some double as command-and-control (C2) infrastructure for espionage and malware distribution.
Iranian spies hit Windows machines with Chosen Brick data-stealing malware
Iranian state cyber actors are targeting individuals using social messaging apps to deploy surveillance and data-stealing malware on their Windows machines, three Western governments warned. In all observed cases, Chosen Brick has infected Windows systems exclusively.
Higher-enriched uranium for datacenters has DoE all aglow
HALEU is still being produced at a snail's pace; Nusano says its federal backing could speed things up – eventually
America is building datacenters faster than the grid can power them
Financial service biz Moody's says the availability of power is still a major constraint on US datacenter growth as the pace of construction exceeds the speed at which the nation's grid infrastructure can add the requisite capacity. America is the epicenter of the datacenter construction boom, driven by the AI craze and demand for compute capacity to train ever-larger foundation models.
Cisco email security boxes can be rooted by... an email
Criminals are exploiting a critical Cisco Secure Email Gateway flaw that can turn a malicious email into root access. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-76461, carries a 9.8 CVSS score and affects physical and virtual Secure Email Gateway appliances regardless of their configuration. Cisco says there are no workarounds, so patching is the only fix. The bug lies in how Cisco's AsyncOS software handles incoming email.
Twitter workaround worked around again: X’s lawyers cancel XCancel again
Nitter and XCancel, a pair of social media services which let you view posts on X without an X account, are down again after the latest round of legal wrangling.
Who's governing your AI? A trust framework for enterprise agents and models
SPONSORED FEATURE: DigiCert wants to hand every agent a passport, complete with an expiry date and a named human owner
CenterPoint Energy confirms intruder helped themselves to customer information
Texas utility CenterPoint Energy has confirmed that an attacker broke in and stole customer information through one of its internet-facing systems. The company disclosed the breach in a Form 8-K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission after a post on a cybercrime forum claimed to offer its customer data. Houston-based CenterPoint, which serves around 7 million customers, said its electricity and gas services remain operational and undisrupted.
September’s Windows 11 patch needs an emergency patch of its own
Microsoft has released an out-of-band update for Windows 11 24H2 and 25H2 after September's record-breaking Patch Tuesday addressed almost 1,000 vulnerabilities across the company's products – and introduced several new problems. Those problems are related to USB Audio Class 1.0 devices, Remote Desktop Services, and host folders shared with certain Hyper-V-based Linux virtual machines via Plan9. While the Hyper-V and Remote Desktop Services issues are fixed, there is still work to do on USB audio.
Swiss court sentences 52-year-old Ukrainian ransomware dev to nearly 13 years in the cooler
A Swiss court has sentenced a 52-year-old Ukrainian ransomware developer to 12 years and nine months in prison for his role in attacks on companies including Stadler Rail. Zurich District Court found that the man developed LockerGoga, MegaCortex, and Nefilim, but was not the mastermind behind the operations. He also received a ten-year ban from Switzerland. The judgment is not final and can be appealed.
Anthropic and OpenAI look to Uncle Sam to make them too big to fail
American model devs are trying to convince Washington to cement their dominance
Microsoft account refuseniks have another way of installing Windows
A new loophole to avoid Microsoft's insistence that you need a Microsoft account to use the Home edition of Windows 11 has appeared, and it's so ludicrously simple we can only assume the good bug fairy has paid a visit to Redmond. The workaround is in the normal Windows 11 Out-of-Box Experience (OOBE) that users see when setting up the operating system.
US confirms it has weapons in spaaaaaace
The US Space Force has deployed "space control weapons" into orbit, although it stopped short of explaining what they are and how it got there. US Air Force Secretary Troy Meink reportedly spoke at the Air and Space Forces Association conference and said the US had deployed weaponry around Earth. There is no word on the nature of the weaponry, nor on how and when it was launched. There have been plenty of classified launches, and the US also has the X-37 program.
Gov.uk still struggling with IT contractor tax rules
UK government departments are still struggling to implement the tax laws governing IT contractors years after the controversial rules were introduced. IR35 has become hated by freelance tech workers who feel it removes the tax benefits of contracting, without offering the employee benefits of in-house roles in its stead.
UK’s Digital ID walks into a bar... two months after being killed off
Britain killed off its national digital ID scheme this summer, but from today you can use a digital ID to prove you're old enough to buy a pint. New rules taking effect on Tuesday allow pubs, bars, restaurants, music venues and shops in England and Wales to accept digital proof of age when selling alcohol, meaning customers can use an app on their phone instead of digging around for a driving license or passport. The change is voluntary.
PostgreSQL 19 graph queries fail the ‘would you ship this?’ test
PostgreSQL developers have pulled planned graph query support from version 19 over concerns that unresolved bugs could haunt the release. The feature, SQL Property Graph Queries (SQL/PGQ), became part of the SQL standard in 2023. It provides syntax for exploring relationships between nodes connected by edges. PostgreSQL's implementation was removed over unresolved issues, while version 19's release date remains unconfirmed.
Give Xfce a Mac or Unity-style makeover
The existing layouts are fun, but there's much more we can do
Open weights are not open source: Why AI’s favorite label is under dispute
Downloading a model is increasingly easy. Understanding how it was made, or changing a system at its root, is another matter
How Everpure plans to stop AI from starving without data
SPONSORED FEATURE: The vendor's AI solutions are dedicated to increasing GPU utilization and avoiding costly GPUs doing nothing while waiting for data
Most people who quit M365 for Google do it out of spite, but there’s no ROI in that
One of the main motivations for quitting Microsoft 365 and adopting Google Workspace is spite, an emotion that sadly doesn’t produce a return on investment. The source of that disappointing news is Domenico Scriva, a senior principal analyst at Gartner, who today told the firm’s IT Symposium event in Australia that moving between the suites is also unlikely to save buyers much money.
Apple iPhone Duo makes developers think in folds
The October 23 ship date of Apple’s iPhone Duo grows nigh, so developers wanting to optimize their iPhone apps for the foldable will need to get to grips with its new display behaviors and form factor. “A fold is a UI event with backend consequences,” Atharva Deosthale, Appwrite developer advocate, wrote in an introductory blog post. “Folding and unfolding is part of normal device use, so apps need to preserve state and respond cleanly when the display changes.”
The latest AI doomsayer is China’s intelligence boss
China’s minister for State Security has decided AI might be bad for the nation’s ruling Communist Party. Party secretary and minister Chen Yixin’s views appeared in China Cyberspace Magazine, the flagship publication of China’s Cyberspace Administration (and which readers may recall once carried a piece by Elon Musk). In Chen’s view, “the field of AI has become the main battleground for global technological competition and a new arena for strategic rivalry among major powers.”
COBOL dev won .Net hackathon with help from AI – and their CIO loves it
The CIO of Australia’s taxation office (ATO) is letting administrative staff use Microsoft’s Copilot for everyday activities, in the hope it pays off by helping them to develop skills, and ideas, that eventually improve its core services. “We are getting AI into the hands of as many workers as possible to build the muscle,” ATO CIO Mark Sawade said at analyst firm Gartner’s annual IT Symposium on Monday. The CIO said the ATO is already familiar with AI.
Microsoft drafts feel-good AI model guidelines and wants your input
Microsoft on Monday debuted draft principles for governing how the company will train future AI models, as part of a public consultation process. The Windows biz has solicited feedback to refine its Humanist AI Code of Conduct [PDF], with the expectation of applying the guidelines to model development next year.
Oracle celebrates banner quarter with another round of layoffs
Oracle posted record revenue during its latest quarter, but that hasn't stopped the company from chopping more employees. Reports began appearing on social media early Monday that staff were having trouble accessing corporate systems such as email and Slack, which essentially served as a sign that they had lost their jobs. According to a number of now-ex Oracle employees posting in a LinkedIn thread, layoff emails weren’t sent to personal email addresses, leaving a good number of people unsure what was happening outside of calls to supervisors,
Datacenter developers want your backyard. FAS says negotiate harder
Local authorities across the US often lack the negotiating power and know-how to work effectively with developers proposing new datacenters in their communities. The Federation of American Scientists (FAS) is trying to fill that gap by arming officials with the right questions to ask and the bargaining tools to use. The AI industry has triggered a surge in server farms construction, leaving many local governments to negotiate with developers over massive new facilities, often for the first time.
Ex-FTC boss Khan urges Uncle Sam to break out the handcuffs for AI CEOs, citing 1934 precedent
There are plenty of laws on the books to hold companies, and potentially their execs, accountable
Cyberattack sends International Meteor Organization crashing back to Earth
The International Meteor Organization (IMO) is watching for fireballs again, but much of its website remains offline after a cyberattack that it says will take weeks to recover from. The Belgium-based nonprofit, which coordinates meteor observations and brings together amateur and professional astronomers worldwide, is currently serving visitors a stripped-down holding page explaining the outage. "We recently suffered a cyberattack that dealt a critical blow to aging infrastructure, taking much of our site offline," the organization said.
Rocket Lab calls foul on Blue Origin’s $700M Mars comms contract
Blue Origin is getting a taste of its own medicine after Rocket Lab filed a formal protest over NASA's decision to award Jeff Bezos' space biz a contract worth up to approximately $700 million to build the agency's Mars Telecommunications Network. NASA issued the award in early September following a request for proposals in May.
Perfect-10 GitLab bug under attack days after patch lands
CISA says attackers are exploiting a maximum-severity GitLab flaw that lets unauthenticated miscreants read arbitrary files from vulnerable servers after the code shack released fixes on September 10. The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has added CVE-2026-85706 to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog. The vulnerability is a path traversal bug in the repository commits API affecting GitLab Community Edition and Enterprise Edition. GitLab rates it a perfect 10.0, the maximum score on the CVSS v3.1 severity scale.
Teravolt looks to cannibalize older industries to meet AI power demand
The current AI market doesn't add up. US hyperscalers have reportedly taken on $220 billion in debt in the past year. The two leading US frontier AI model makers have not yet shown they can operate profitably. And the US public has begun pushing back against the development of the datacenters needed to fulfill anticipated AI demand. But plausibility and politics aside, it's unclear where the world will get the electrical power to sustain the imagined AI industry.
Microsoft patches Windows and Excel – breaks audio, remote access, and paste
Microsoft has confirmed that its latest security updates can disrupt Remote Desktop Services, silence some USB audio devices, and break pasting in Excel. September's Windows patches hardly support Microsoft's insistence that it is sorting out quality. The known issues list suggests there's still work to do.
Huawei pitches near-packaged optics as co-packaged costs bite
7.2 Tbps module arrives ahead of standards, with promises of fewer repair headaches
MPs and peers tell UK to stop winging it on AI regulation
UK lawmakers want an AI watchdog with the teeth to stop potentially dangerous systems reaching the public, warning that existing rules leave people exposed and struggling to hold anyone accountable. The Joint Committee on Human Rights (JCHR) – comprising MPs and peers – said that although a number of laws and regulations apply to some AI systems, the overall legal landscape is patchy and confused. No single body coordinates regulation of AI, leaving gaps that could make it difficult for people harmed by AI to obtain legal redress.
Revolut falls for fake government requests, hands over customer data
British bank Revolut exposed sensitive customer information after falling for fraudulent requests sent from a legitimate government agency's email domain. In a statement shared with The Register, Revolut confirmed the attack, but did not specify how many customers were affected. The company also did not provide a list of affected data types. However, blockchain investigator ZachXBT, who shared Revolut's customer notifications on Friday, claimed the exposed information includes know-your-customer (KYC) data.
CPython eases Rust requirements as assimilation continues
The maintainers of CPython have backed off from making Rust a required dependency for the Python reference implementation, focusing on the less intrusive task of building an optional Rust API for internal Python development. The move “sidesteps a lot of the concerns that people brought up,” Rust Programming Manager Tomáš Šedovič explained at RustConf, held in Montréal last week. Šedovič and others from Rust have been working with the CPython core developers to smooth the integration between the two environments.
The myth of killer AI is a self-serving attempt at regulatory capture
Skynet is coming soon, and also there's this Nigerian prince with a $20 million fortune who wants to give it to you
UK.gov begins killing off passwords for 23 million users
The UK government is giving more than 23 million people the chance to ditch passwords for passkeys – and could save itself a tidy sum on authentication texts in the process. Passkeys are being rolled out more widely across GOV.UK One Login following a trial involving more than 300,000 users, allowing people to sign in using a fingerprint, Face ID, or device PIN instead of entering a password and waiting for a two-factor authentication (2FA) code.
Europe’s right-to-repair rules are broken, not beaten
Consumerism? Squint at it in the right light, and it looks a lot like communism. Certainly, that's how parts of the American political establishment seem to view Europe, the world's regulatory superpower. All those rules denying the God-given rights of free people to have their data protected, their privacy secured, and their phones recharged by USB-C. You know what the C in USB-C actually stands for? Communism! Wake up, sheeple!
Who, Me? Tech team stood and laughed at colleague who pressed the wrong off button
WHO, ME? Admitting to mistakes is a ticklish task, but one The Register tackles head-on each Monday in "Who, Me?" – the reader-contributed column that chronicles your worst working moments. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Bowman," who sent us a story from the early 2000s, a time when he says most servers were floor-mounted monsters. "I worked in an organization in Glasgow with a datacenter full of them, some with an external disk storage array sitting neatly beside the server."
AI and its main promoters are not enterprise-ready, says Gartner
The more AI you use, the harder it is to control it or generate return on investment, according to analyst firm Gartner. That firm delivered that glum view of AI at its annual IT Symposium, the first edition of which takes place in Australia before moving Europe and the USA. The Australian event saw distinguished VP analysts Daryl Plummer and Kristin Moyer argue that AI and its leading proponents remain immature. Asked to comment on working with the leading AI labs, Plummer said: “Trust in these vendors is not warranted yet.
Big AI sets out its terms for regulatory capture and calls it ‘Pace the frontier’
Amodei, Altman, Nadella and Musk agree on how government can tame the monster they created