dispelledTerminal
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Salesforce partners not seeing meaningful revenue from Agentforce AI platform, report says
Salesforce partners say they have yet to see any meaningful revenue from Agentforce, two years after the CRM giant launched its AI platform, promising spectacular growth. That's according to a recent report from TD Cowen, which surveyed Salesforce partners and found muted interest in the technology, designed to let users build AI agents for customer interactions. The survey of partners in the US,…
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AI companies are burning books, advocates complain to FTC
AI companies are buying loads of physical books, hoovering up the texts for model training, and then physically destroying the originals. A group of 18 advocacy organizations on Friday asked the US Federal Trade Commission to investigate the book butchering and knowledge hoarding. Fresh details of the practice emerged earlier this year via document disclosures in Bartz v. Anthropic PBC, a copyrig…
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Homeland security cybercops say patch TrueConf (Russia's Zoom) if you're using it
CISA has ordered US federal agencies to patch two exploited flaws in TrueConf, a Russian-built video conferencing platform, after compromised servers were caught handing malware to unsuspecting meeting participants. The US cybersecurity agency on Thursday added CVE-2026-72529 and CVE-2026-72530 to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog, saying both have been used in real-world attacks. What…
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Musk fumbles the timetable for first Starship catch
CEO Elon Musk says SpaceX probably won't attempt to catch a returning Starship for several months, walking back his earlier suggestion that it could happen on the next test flight. In a post on his social media platform, X, Musk said: "We will probably catch the ship with the tower in a few months." He added that if a tower had been waiting at sea where Starship splashed down last month, "it woul…
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SickKids children’s hospital bandages up careers website after intruder breaks in
Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children, commonly referred to as SickKids, says the data of current and former staff, as well as job applicants, was exposed after an intruder exploited a security flaw in a third-party software application used by the hospital. SickKids, which may ring a bell for those who have kept close tabs on ransomware news in recent years, said the intrusion affected its extern…
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Hackers poison popular Rust crates to steal developers' credentials
Hackers slipped malware into several popular Rust packages this week, turning routine software builds into a route onto developers' machines. The Rust Security Response Team disclosed the supply chain attack on Thursday after receiving a tip about a crate called proc-macro1. An investigation found that its build script fetched malware from a remote server. The attack extended beyond a single dodg…
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AMD grabs more CPU share while pricier PCs punish desktop demand
The processor market is sending mixed signals, with server and mobile shipments rising while desktop CPU volumes decline amid higher system prices. Meanwhile, AMD's House of Zen has taken market share from Intel across every category. For Q2 2026, Mercury Research says total processor shipments were lower than in the same period a year ago, attributing this to much lower system-on-chip (SoC) and…
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'We let you down': GitHub pledges to scale up before developers give up
GitHub's handwringing continued this week as CTO Vladimir Fedorov offered more detail about the August 17 outage – while carefully avoiding the word "sorry." The outage lasted 7 hours and 47 minutes and disrupted developers worldwide. Actions, pull requests, issues, Copilot, and APIs were among the services affected as the platform failed to scale with demand. "If you were trying to ship software…
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$10K phishing kit claims it can plant rogue passkeys for persistent access to pwned accounts
A phishing kit for sale on Russian-language cybercrime forums claims it can enroll attacker-controlled passkeys on compromised accounts, providing persistent access after passwords are changed. Advertised at around $10,000 for the base package, with additional modules sold separately, iAuthFlow v2 aims to solve a common problem for attackers: being locked out after the victim detects the compromi…
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Microsoft lets you swap New Outlook's looks with the face of Outlook Classic
Microsoft is rolling out a setting that makes Outlook on the Web and New Outlook for Windows look and feel like Classic Outlook through a theme that tweaks the visual style and layout. "This update is designed to help users who are transitioning from classic Outlook by providing a more familiar experience while maintaining the capabilities of the new Outlook," Microsoft said. Importantly, it won'…
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Microsoft sounds alarm as perfect-10 Entra ID flaw comes under attack
Microsoft has fixed a maximum-severity vulnerability in Entra ID that attackers were already exploiting in the wild. Tracked as CVE-2026-69836, the vulnerability carries the maximum CVSS score of 10.0 and could allow an unauthenticated attacker to execute code remotely in Microsoft's cloud identity service. Microsoft disclosed the flaw on Thursday, along with the unwelcome news that exploitation…
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Wi-Fi 7's WPA3 protections come with a compatibility catch
Broadband industry research body CableLabs is warning that attempts to make Wi-Fi 7 access points accommodate older devices can create compatibility problems of their own, and wants hardware makers to prioritize support for the industry's workaround. Wi-Fi 7 products have been finding their way into buyers' hands for a couple of years now, with the Wi-Fi Alliance kicking off its certification pro…
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Debian is 33, Haiku is 25, and neither is standing still
This is a quiet time of year in tech circles – perhaps explaining why, 25 and 33 years ago, the people behind two ambitious operating system projects kicked them off. Debian Last weekend, the Debian project turned 33 years old. The Linux kernel first appeared in September 1991, so it was not quite two years old when Ian Murdock announced the new distribution. (Indeed, the term "distribution" itse…
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EE invites mobile users to live life in the 5G Fast Lane – for a price
Mobile operator EE has launched Fast Lane, using 5G network slicing to prioritize subscribers' connections when its network is congested. According to EE, BT Group's mobile network, Fast Lane anticipates congestion and seamlessly moves eligible connections onto a dedicated network slice. EE says this should help Fast Lane users continue streaming or accessing the internet when nearby customers ma…
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Developer given Mission:Impossible - fixing rubbish code that could crash a city - simply chose not to accept it
ON CALL Making it through a working week can feel like a dangerous adventure. That's why The Register offers a little certainty and safety by always using Friday morning to share a new edition of On Call – the reader-contributed column sharing your tales of tech support. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Socrates," who many years ago was the "fresh-faced manager of a small software depa…
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Cisco bug severity warning reads like Olympic gymnastics scores: 10, 10, 9.9, 9.6, and 7.5.
Cisco has revealed its Secure Workload Software, a micro-segmentation tool formerly known as Tetration that is supposed to stop attackers moving laterally across a network, has four critical flaws plus another high-severity bug. CVE-2026-20315 and CVE-2026-20317 are the two perfect-ten-rated bugs. Both relate to improper access control. Cisco has not offered much detail about either, saying only…
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Alibaba Cloud plans to use fewer Western chips, to boost its already huge AI margins
Alibaba has revealed margins from its cloudy AI operation are rising so quickly it will be able to achieve return on investment for new hardware purchases faster than previously planned. Speaking on the company’s earnings call yesterday, CFO Toby Xu said the company runs its servers for five years, and that AI servers produce enough revenue to cover their costs in three years. In the fourth and f…
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Supermicro fired staff after probe into $2.5 billion GPUs-to-China smuggling operation
Supermicro has fired some staff after conducting an investigation into allegations that its execs participated in a scheme to ship $2.5 billion worth of servers packing Nvidia GPUs to China, in violation of US export controls. In March, the US Department of Justice indicted Supermicro co-founder Yih-Shyan "Wally" Liaw, one of the company’s Taiwan-based execs Ruei-Tsang "Steven" Chang, and a man t…
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Russian snoops add OAuth abuse to targeted phishing campaigns
Google is tracking three distinct suspected Russian cyber-spy groups that are targeting individuals in academia, aerospace, defense, government agencies, and think tanks across Europe and the US. The UNC (unclassified) groups, as Google calls them, have been orchestrating these highly targeted campaigns since at least last year, and they remain ongoing. Some of the phishing and OAuth-abuse operat…
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Google tethers Antigravity to enterprise controls amid AI shakeup
Google Antigravity, which came out of the DeepMind AI research group, has drifted into the orbit of Gemini Enterprise app subscriptions, putting the Chocolate Factory's agentic development platform under the influence of Google Cloud controls. Antigravity is an agentic AI coding assistant that can be accessed through various surfaces, including a desktop app (Antigravity 2.0), a command line inte…
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Go updates may delight diehard gophers but displease AI overlords
The keepers of the Go programming language on Wednesday released the latest version, v1.27, and with it come considerable advances in generics. In a nutshell, generics allow developers to write logic where data types are treated as variables, eliminating the need to rewrite (or copy and paste) a separate method for each different data type (int, string, floating point, etc.). It was "absolutely b…
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OpenAI chases Anthropic's biz customers with zero data retention pledge
OpenAI appears to have found a way to balance AI model safety with commitments to retain no customer data, a feat rival Anthropic hasn't yet managed. For orgs concerned about who has access to their data, this could be a game-changer. The free-spending AI biz on Wednesday announced Private Safety Processing, a mechanism for automatically scanning customer model interactions for safety risks witho…
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Waymo has designed a robocar chip to stay ahead of Tesla
To reach their destinations safely, autonomous vehicles have just milliseconds to ingest and process streaming data from more than a dozen cameras. It's a job that's been handled with off-the-shelf AI components thus far, but Waymo has begun rolling its own AI ASICs to optimize the process. It's not alone. Revealed in a blog post Thursday, the Alphabet-backed robo-taxi startup's first custom sili…
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US Bank investigates LockBit's claims as ransomware crims set pay-or-leak deadline
US Bank says that it's investigating ransomware crew LockBit’s claims that it breached the financial institution and stole data, which the crims threaten to leak on September 3 unless the bank pays an extortion demand. "We have investigated this matter and the available evidence indicates that the claim regarding a potential cyber incident is related to a fourth party event that occurred outside…
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Microsoft gives Task Manager another task: Watching AI workloads
Once upon a time, Windows Task Manager was a stone-cold killer. Optimized to within an inch of its life, it struck fear into errant processes. These days, Microsoft also wants it monitoring AI workloads. Task Manager has come a long way from the application Dave Plummer developed in the 1990s, inspired by what he called a "very Unixy impulse." This week, Microsoft highlighted its latest addition:…
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US claims 15 of the world's top 20 hyperscale datacenter locations
The US now accounts for 15 of the world's 20 largest hyperscale datacenter markets, with Northern Virginia alone hosting nearly 12 percent of global capacity. US locations have increased their dominance of the rankings as cloud infrastructure expands, according to Synergy Research. Since last year, Tokyo, Sydney, and South Carolina have dropped out of the top 20, replaced by Indiana, Tennessee, a…
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Researcher tricks Apple’s Find My into sharing location data with Linux
A young security researcher figured out a way to enroll a Linux device into Apple’s Find My network and read live location data from it. Find My is Apple’s app for, you guessed it, finding things – whether AirTags, iPads, or other supported devices and items. It also works for people. Families can track each other's whereabouts for safety reasons, and friends can tell when others are hanging out…
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Slack Code taps into collective vibe, puts AI agents into the group chat
Slack has decided that AI coding agents have spent quite enough time alone with developers and would be better off doing their work where everyone can watch: on Slack. The Salesforce-owned chat factory has introduced Slack Code, which gives coding agents their own project channels where they can work alongside the humans supposedly keeping an eye on them. Slack calls this "multiplayer AI," which…
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Thunderbird to flap twice as fast from September
Thunderbird is moving to fortnightly releases to keep pace with Firefox's accelerated schedule. Mozilla and its subsidiary MZLA updated their flagship apps this week, releasing Firefox 154 and Thunderbird 154, respectively. Since last month's version 153 releases are the latest Extended Support Releases, users who prefer a slower pace can remain on them for the next year. "ESR" is Mozilla's term…
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Ransomware crook poses as recovery firm to steal payments from fellow extortionists
A ransomware affiliate appears to have found a new way to squeeze victims for cash: pose as the good guy and undercut the criminals it was working with. Researchers at GuidePoint Security say an outfit calling itself "Ransom Busters" has been contacting ransomware victims before their attacks become public, offering to recover encrypted files and delete stolen data for a considerably smaller paym…
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NetBSD 11 lands with RISC-V support and lightning-fast VM boots
NetBSD's 19th major release adds 64-bit RISC-V support, improved Linux compatibility, and a MICROVM kernel that can boot in milliseconds. NetBSD 11.0 arrived at the end of July, a little over two years after the project celebrated its 30th birthday with the release of version 10.0. We looked at what was coming last year. After multiple release candidates, the final version is here, and we tried i…
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£37M SAP overhaul could extend Capgemini's run with UK tax collector to 28 years
The UK's tax collector has awarded Capgemini a £37 million contract to help migrate a critical tax system from SAP's legacy ECC platform to S/4HANA, extending a supplier relationship that began in 2004. HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) has hired the French IT services company to move the Enterprise Tax Management Platform (ETMP) from SAP ECC 6.0 to its successor, S/4HANA, a completely re-engineered ap…
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Grok chat duped into swallowing injected instructions
xAI's Grok web chat agent is currently vulnerable to a novel form of prompt injection, according to security researchers with Adversa AI. The technique allows an attacker to create a web page poisoned with malicious instructions that induce an AI model summarizing the page to carry out harmful actions. That describes a well-known attack known as indirect prompt injection. Frontier AI models have…
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French tax authority says break-in exposed data of 600K, including some private messages
France's tax authority says attackers may have stolen the contents of messages exchanged with hundreds of taxpayers during the data raid it confirmed last week. In an update published this week, the General Directorate of Public Finances (DGFiP) said lists of messages exchanged with the authority were exposed. For around 250 people, the compromised information also included the messages themselve…
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OpenAI glitch locks out vetted cyber researchers – and some can't get back in
OpenAI says a technical stuff-up booted some vetted security researchers out of its Trusted Access for Cyber (TAC) program, only for its recovery process to decide some of them aren't welcome back. The problem surfaced this week when participants reported that their previously approved status had vanished without warning. OpenAI's cyber verification page instead invited them to "Start verificatio…
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Microsoft probes reports of games taking exception to Windows 11's August update
Microsoft is investigating reports of games crashing after users installed August's Patch Tuesday update for Windows 11. The company acknowledged the reports on its Release Health page. Affected games may become unresponsive, close unexpectedly, throw an "EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION" error, or trigger an unexpected device restart. Reports of the problem followed the release of KB5121003 for Window…
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Software development and tech services in the cross-hairs as AI marches on
Business transformation, software development, and technology implementation are among the tech job categories likely to be hit hardest by AI, according to new research from Forrester. The global IT analyst company has researched how AI will disrupt various activities within the tech market, both among end users and vendors. It concluded that labor-intensive knowledge-work industries would face t…
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No lift for Swift as NASA abandons orbital rescue
NASA and Katalyst Space have abandoned an ambitious attempt to boost the Swift observatory into a higher orbit and postpone its fiery return to Earth. Katalyst Space's LINK spacecraft will still attempt to rendezvous with and maneuver near Swift, but plans to grapple the observatory and raise its orbit are dead. The problem, according to NASA and Katalyst Space, is an "ongoing commercial spacecra…
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SparkyLinux 8.4 rekindles support for 32-bit PCs
Almost exactly a year after SparkyLinux 8.0 abandoned installation images for 32-bit PCs, version 8.4 has brought them back. The distro remains based on Debian 13 and retains the codename "the Seven Sisters." The Register first checked out SparkyLinux back in 2015, and this vulture took a look at version 7 a couple of years ago. Beyond the changes inherited from the move from Debian 12 to Debian…
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AI agent suggested installing a malware package. Engineer almost took its advice
PWNED Welcome back to PWNED, the column where we make fun of those who are security self-owned, so hopefully you don’t do the same. This week, we have a story that’s hot off the presses about a company almost sabotaging its security by using AI for programming. Have a story about someone leaving a gaping hole in their network? Share it with us at pwned@sitpub.com. Anonymity is available upon requ…
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China marches towards re-usable rockets with successful first-stage landing
Chinese space startup LandSpace has landed a first-stage booster on land, the first time a Middle Kingdom company has achieved the feat. LandSpace flies rockets called Zhuque and has built three generations of the craft. Zhuque-1 only flew once, in 2018. Zhuque-2 became the first liquid oxygen-methane vehicle to reach orbit when it first flew in 2022. It can can carry 6,000 kilograms to a 200km l…
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IBM says super-chill boxes that connect through 'cryogenic tunnels' will get quantum computers scaling
IBM has shown off designs for cooling hardware it says will allow quantum computers to scale. Quantum computers rely on qubits – atoms or circuits put into a state of probability that means they can simultaneously store a value of zero and one – and which computer scientists make using complex circuitry or by suspending an atom with lasers. IBM produces qubits with chips that can only run at temp…
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Microsoft ends one of the last ways to buy VMware without big bundles
Microsoft has signalled it will end one of the last remaining ways to acquire VMware products outside of a big bundle. Redmond’s main offer for Virtzillains is the Azure VMware Solution (AVS), a cloudy affair that includes vCenter, vSAN, vSphere, and NSX and licenses for them all – but not the Software-Defined Datacenter Manager tool that Broadcom uses to package its wares into a centrally-manage…
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AMD inches closer to its goal of making AI suck less ... energy
AI’s thirst for power remains an ongoing concern, but fear not: AMD says it’s making steady progress towards its goal of boosting rack efficiency 20x by the end of the decade. In a blog post published this week, the House of Zen estimates that, as of 2026, its systems are already 4x more efficient than they were in 2024. Certainly, a lot has changed since then. As you may recall, AMD began volume…
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'Not a theoretical risk,' feds warn as attackers use AI-made code to hack critical infrastructure controllers
Attackers are using AI-generated exploitation scripts to break into internet-exposed Siemens S7 Series programmable logic controllers (PLCs) at water, manufacturing, energy, and other critical facilities, in what five US federal agencies on Wednesday called an “active threat.” In this latest round of intrusions against American critical infrastructure, the attackers use open source industrial aut…
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SvelteKit 3 puts heat on Next.js with radical approach to RPCs
In today's sprawling JavaScript ecosystem, Svelte was designed to be a simpler alternative to the React.js front-end framework, and SvelteKit follows the same path, setting out to be a backend framework like Next.js but with fewer headaches and even better support for dynamic content. The new-ish SvelteKit 3.0 release candidate includes an experimental feature called remote functions that rethink…
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Google pits Marvell against Broadcom as it chases AI crown
It's an open secret that the major cloud providers don’t actually design their custom silicon from scratch. There's not much value in reinventing the wheel, so they often outsource big and undifferentiated chunks of chip design to IP houses like Broadcom, Marvell, Arm, and others. Google's partner of choice for its Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) has largely been Broadcom — though the chip giant's…
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Dev taps Claude Code to craft custom printer driver for macOS
There's a new and very helpful use case for AI coding agents: designing drivers for devices, such as old printers, that were never meant to work with a particular operating system. Kuber Mehta, a New Delhi, India-based developer and founder of PolyThink, has published an account of how he coaxed Anthropic's Claude Code into creating a macOS driver for his HP Laser 1008a, for which HP offers only…
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ICE boss to agents: Leave the Meta spy glasses at home
Some ICE employees seemingly needed a reminder not to wear their Meta pervert glasses to work. Because only ICE can spy on ICE. Meta smart glasses are essentially “body-worn cameras,” as they can covertly record video and audio, David Venturella, Immigration and Customs Enforcement acting director, reportedly reminded agency employees on Tuesday. “The use of Meta Glasses or similar devices could…
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Epic Games dismisses Apple's simplified EU App Store fees as 'junk'
Apple's latest attempt to settle its App Store dispute with the European Commission has drawn criticism from Epic Games and a cautious response from a consumer group, which warned that "the devil is in the detail." Announced on August 18, the changes introduce new business terms for applications distributed in the European Union. Apple says the changes "reduce complexity by moving every developer…