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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