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Live RSSExternal headlines from independent technology and security sources.
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Anthropic Claude subscription plan provides more value than OpenAI's, study says (opens external article)
The rivalry between Anthropic and OpenAI, the two leading US AI model makers, is no contest when it comes to assessing which one gives you more value for your subscription money, according to industry research firm SemiAnalysis. Following changes to OpenAI's $200 per month subscription plan that effectively halved its value, SemiAnalysis looked at the various subscription plans offered by AI comp…
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Permanent daylight saving time could be a public health time bomb (opens external article)
President Trump is pushing hard for the US Senate to make daylight saving time permanent so, among other things, golfers can stay on the course longer, but it may not be such a bright idea. New research out of Canada suggests that, even if Americans would get an extra hour of daylight in the evening, the ill health effects of permanent daylight saving time could outweigh the benefits. A paper pub…
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European AI flag bearer Mistral's new open weights model is 'Le Chonk' (opens external article)
Another week brings yet another open weights model and this one is huge — or at least it is for Europe's AI flag bearer Mistral, which has taken to calling the 1 trillion-parameter large language model (LLM) Le Chonk. Its product name is Mistral Large 4, which is a lot less fun than the cat-meme-inspired "very official" moniker Le Chonk. Nonetheless, the LLM is the French model-dev's biggest open…
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Trump Mobile customers' data dumped - and some never even received their gold device (opens external article)
If you signed up for Trump Mobile, you may be part of an exclusive club of … ransomware victims. Criminals called BYOD claim to have broken into the Trump-branded mobile biz and leaked data belonging to 3,615 people, including names, email addresses, phone numbers, home addresses, and order details. BYOD is a new ransomware-as-a-service operation, and Trump Mobile is only the third organization p…
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Wikimedia Foundation comes forward as latest OpenAI agent assault victim (opens external article)
Wikipedia’s parent organization says that OpenAI agents edited some non-public wiki pages and generated traffic that may have contributed to a partial Wikidata outage in May. This makes the non-profit just the latest victim of OpenAI agents gone rogue. The Wikimedia Foundation’s chief product and technology officer Selena Deckelmann reported several “rogue agent activities” that the foundation ha…
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Microsoft extends the Outlook naughty step with two more file types (opens external article)
Microsoft is adding two extra file types to its Outlook block list to strengthen security. The file types are .msix and .msixbundle, used for Windows application packages and bundles. The change affects New Outlook for Windows and Outlook on the Web in Exchange Online. By default, users of the affected clients will no longer be able to download or open attachments with these extensions, which is…
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Classic Outlook clings to stale search results as Microsoft works on a fix (opens external article)
Microsoft is very keen for Outlook users to ditch the classic version in favor of the new one, and a search bug isn't helping the old client's cause. Results can fail to update after mailbox items are moved or changed, with Microsoft's workaround sending affected users back to Windows Desktop Search. Microsoft has acknowledged the problem. When users move an item from the search results to anothe…
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Zombie instructions on carefully constructed web pages could trick GitHub Copilot CLI into sharing secrets (opens external article)
GitHub Copilot CLI may reveal developer secrets if it comes across instructions that tell it to do so, depending on the underlying model. The coding agent tool was flagged earlier this year for being susceptible to indirect prompt injection. That's when a model ingests text from a source other than the user that directs it to take some action outside the scope of its intended function. This is mo…
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Asos app delivers a data leak threat instead of fast fashion (opens external article)
Asos customers have reported receiving a rogue app notification claiming the online clothing retailer's Snowflake instance has been compromised and threatening to leak data. The notification included a link to a Telegram channel named "Xuanye Wen Gateway" and addressed Asos's data protection officer and IT team. "Dear ASOS DPO and IT, we have fully compromised the Snowflake instance. Engage with…
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Denmark's ID register spills more people's details than the country has residents (opens external article)
An unauthorized party abused a private Danish company's legitimate access to the country's Central Population Register (CPR), exposing names, addresses, identification numbers, and other personal information about approximately 8.8 million people. The CPR administration said in a statement [PDF] that it became aware on October 2 of irregular activity during September and established the scale of…
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Atos lands £350M beat keeping Met Police applications running (opens external article)
The UK's largest police force has awarded French outsourcer Atos a six-year contract worth up to £350 million to manage and secure applications. Atos will provide service management, application management, and application security for the Metropolitan Police Service in London. The deal is intended to support the Met's ongoing modernization and simplification of its applications. Met Police digit…
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Legacy sign-on service comes back to bite school software provider Bromcom (opens external article)
UK education software provider Bromcom has notified customers of a personal data breach affecting its single sign-on (SSO) technology. In a September 24 EduGeek post, an account named Bromcom_Alastair said an unauthorized third party had accessed and retrieved email addresses and limited information associated with affected SSO registrations. The incident involved legacy SSO registration function…
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KPMG tells staff facing the axe: Here's £100, now zip it (opens external article)
KPMG has offered staff facing redundancy £100 to waive their legal rights to appeal or to bring claims over the loss of their job, according to sources. As The Register revealed last month, the consultancy is laying off around 4 percent of the workforce in the UK, equating to some 200 humans being forced to look for new employment in an uncertain job market before Christmas. Staff within the AI,…
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Only the finest Swedish Bork will do for Stockholm station (opens external article)
Sweden is the home of bork, and what better way to mark it than with a huge example of digital signage that shows a GRUB message instead of an ad? Spotted by eagle-eyed Register reader Alexander, the GRUB in question is sadly not the delicious meatballs for which a well-known Swedish furniture maker is famed, but rather the bootloader familiar to Linux fans, usually when something is working as i…
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OpenAI rolls out weak sauce watermarking for AI text (opens external article)
OpenAI is now offering API customers the option to watermark the output of certain models in order to comply with the letter of Europe's AI Act. And within a few weeks, the biz plans to apply a form of digital watermarking – like it or not – to eligible ChatGPT and Codex text output in the European Union. But unlike rival Anthropic, it isn't applying its watermarking technique to content generate…
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Scientists find planet made on new matter recipe, and it formed after a Red Giant ate a solar system (opens external article)
When yellow dwarf stars like our sun die, they swell to an enormous size and destroy their inner planets by either crushing them with massive gravity or evaporating them with astounding heat. While these suns later settle down to become a white dwarf, the process is nearly always game over for planets in an inner solar system. Or maybe not, according to a paper published on Monday titled “Discove…
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Atlassian warns of critical file access flaw in its datacenter products (opens external article)
Atlassian has told its users to patch its datacenter products, pronto, to prevent attackers accessing their files. The Australian collaborationware company on Monday sent users an email that opens with the words “Action required” and points to a security bulletin that explains CVE-2026-21589. The 9.3-rated arbitrary file access vulnerability is present in the datacenter versions of its Bitbucket,…
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Security researcher claims they found KVM guest-host escape flaw (opens external article)
Linux KVM, the hypervisor favoured by hyperscale clouds, apparently has a full VM escape bug. That nasty news came from security researcher Paulos Yibelo, who on X shared a screenshot of a bug bounty award he won for discovering what he described as “Full VM escape zeroday (guest>host root in industry standard hypervisors)!” The bug bounty Yibelo participated in is run by Vercel, a company that p…
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Schneider Electric drops $22.6B on PTC as datacenter boom rains money on infra companies (opens external article)
Schneider Electric's market cap has more than doubled in the past four years as the AI boom has driven unprecedented demand for datacenter power and cooling infrastructure. Now the French multinational is cashing in on its good fortunes to cement its place as a key provider of industrial power and datacenter infrastructure with the $22.6 billion acquisition of American industrial software company…
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Citrix NetScaler security snafus get even worse amid more 0-day reports (opens external article)
The attackers just keep coming after Citrix NetScaler appliances, as both the feds and private security researchers warn that someone found - and has already exploited - yet another Citrix bug before it had a patch. This latest vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-88779, is a memory overflow bug that leads to denial of service attacks. It only affects NetScaler ADC and Gateway appliances configured…
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Cohere offers to put agents in lockdown mode with strict ACLs (opens external article)
While OpenAI and Anthropic stoke fears over rogue agents, Canadian model dev Cohere promises enterprises a safer and more consistent experience. On Monday, the company said it revamped its North agent harness, which launched early last year, to improve collaboration, access control, token spend, and overall security of the platform. As you'd expect from an enterprise focused agent framework, Cohe…
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Get rid of Apple's AI bloatware and reclaim 12 GB of storage with this open source tool (opens external article)
Apple’s attempt to integrate AI into its various operating systems hasn’t been entirely well received, nor has the decision to make Apple Intelligence increasingly difficult to disable completely. Thankfully, the open source community has come to the rescue. A recently released open source tool called RemoveMacAI does pretty much exactly what it says on the GitHub-hosted tin: Aggressively rips Ap…
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FBI confirms 'multiple' arrests related to ShinyHunters hack (opens external article)
The FBI and law enforcement partners have arrested “multiple” suspects as part of an investigation into a September hack allegedly involving data-theft-and-extortion group ShinyHunters, the bureau told The Register. “The bureau continues to aggressively investigate the recent cyber incident allegedly involving ShinyHunters, having already worked with partners to arrest multiple subjects and we wi…
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Windows 11 26H2 blighted by new audio issue (opens external article)
Microsoft Windows 11 26H2 has arrived, and, unfortunately, it's already picked up a known audio issue within weeks of release. The glitch also affects Windows 11 25H2 and 24H2, which share the same code branch. It relates to decoding AC-3 (Dolby Digital) audio and can cause the application using the decoder to crash abruptly or fail to start at all. Identified after the September 22 Windows updat…
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Altman-backed Volantis reveals plan to vault the memory wall by baking photonics into AI accelerators (opens external article)
Sam Altman-backed AI chip startup Volantis has a plan to break through the memory wall using light, and this time it's not just an IP play. Founded in 2022, the San Francisco-based startup is developing an AI accelerator that will use a photonic interposer to dramatically increase memory bandwidth without compromising on capacity. Volantis believes it can pack upwards of 10 TB of memory at speeds…
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OpenAI to flood your eyeballs with visual ads (opens external article)
After adding text-based ads to its chatbot earlier this year, OpenAI announced on Monday that it was adding a new “visual ad format” to ChatGPT, which is precisely what it sounds like: Visual ads, like so much of the advertising content online, will now be part of the ChatGPT experience. OpenAI will initially test these ads during image generation. “Through images showing product inspiration, pro…
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Debian's latest kernel security update has 1,313 reasons to patch (opens external article)
The age of LLM-assisted security vulnerability discovery is really starting to bite. Debian's latest Linux kernel security update comes with a formidable reading list of 1,313 CVE identifiers. The DSA-6528-1 Linux security advisory, published on September 29, covers kernel package version 6.12.111-1 for Debian 13, codenamed Trixie. Debian 13.7 was released on September 12, before upstream kernel…
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The question you would ask HPE and NVIDIA if nobody was recording (opens external article)
There is a question about AI data sovereignty you would ask HPE or NVIDIA if nobody was recording. It is usually specific to your own workload and your own regulator, and it usually ends with whether the sovereign option on the slide survives contact with a procurement team. On Thursday 29 October you can ask it. The Register is hosting a dinner in Washington with HPE and NVIDIA, our editor-in-ch…
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Musk follows Trump's lead, swaps AI for SI in SpaceX rebrand (opens external article)
Elon Musk says SpaceXAI, the company formed by merging SpaceX and xAI, will be renamed SpaceXSI after President Donald Trump ordered US federal agencies to replace "Artificial Intelligence" with "Super Intelligence" in all comms. Trump's September 29 executive order directs federal agencies to switch from AI to SI in official communications and other non-statutory documents. Musk endorsed the cha…
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Games Workshop seeks IT leader to summon the legions in epic saga battling the forces of ERP (opens external article)
Games Workshop is on the hunt for a head of IT to guide the organization through its technological saga for the next two years. The UK-based tabletop games retailer and manufacturer of the globally popular Warhammer figures said that under the fixed-term contract, the heroic individual would take overall responsibility for its global IT and customer technology capability, and report to the Chief…
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Anthropic says its IPO could herald the end of the world as we know it (opens external article)
Anthropic's IPO prospectus leaked this week, and boy was it filled with interesting details. You can listen to the latest episode of The Kettle on this page, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube. You can also subscribe on those platforms to be notified when a new episode goes live For starters there's the fact a third of it is all about existential AI risks, then there's the fact that, despite som…
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Ubuntu 'Stonking Stingray' beta swims out: Deeper Rust 'oxidization' plus LLM speech-to-text (opens external article)
Ubuntu 26.10, “Stonking Stingray,” has entered beta testing, slightly later than planned – it is in fact scheduled to be released on October 15. While many people will stay with the LTS version, there’s some interesting stuff in there. There are already some release notes, but like the OS itself, they aren’t final yet, and there are still some gaps. Canonical does note that the "oxidization" proc…
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Windows 11 market share creeps upwards as cost of staying on Windows 10 set to double (opens external article)
The first year of Windows 10 Extended Security Updates is coming to an end, and Windows 11's market share has ticked up as enterprises weigh up the cost of keeping Windows 10 running a little longer. Windows 11's market share has risen above 70 percent to 71.5 percent, while Windows 10's has dropped to 27.77 percent, according to statistics wrangler Statcounter. Microsoft does not provide officia…
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BT buys TalkTalk out of administration to keep 2.5M customers connected (opens external article)
Former state-owned telco monopoly BT Group has bought TalkTalk's consumer and wholesale businesses out of administration, rescuing services used by 2.5 million customers. BT says it acquired TalkTalk Telecommunications Limited and PlatformX Communications Limited on a debt-free basis. It expects a total cash impact of approximately £400 million in its current financial year, including the acquisi…
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Brighter isn't better and more is less. The AI slowdown is nigh, no matter who says what (opens external article)
There has been much chilly weather in the sunny meadowlands of AI futures. Fortunately, to use an indecently inappropriate adverb, the rest of the world isn’t really looking, being too busy chewing its nails over the very many other intimations of disaster. Sure, rebel swarms of attack agents breaking out of the labs isn’t a good look. OpenAI delaying its IPO and a new model launch likewise. All…
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Buyer missed one option and got 1% of the cable they needed (opens external article)
Every Monday morning The Register kicks off proceedings by asking the same question – “Who, Me?” – the title of the reader-contributed column in which you share your tales of the occasions on which you didn’t quite nail the brief yet somehow found career relief. This week, meet a reader we’ll Regomize as “Terry” who told us that in the 1970s he worked for a defense-related company. “I needed 100…
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Fulcrum Echo promises AI text in the style of any writer, so I tested it (opens external article)
Fulcrum faces an identity crisis, even as it works on creating one by enabling anyone to imitate another person's writing style. The AI startup, founded in 2025 and previously operating at fulcrumresearch.ai, now uses fulcrum.inc and could easily be confused with one of the handful of other companies named Fulcrum or some variation of that. There's Fulcrum (withfulcrum.com), Fulcrum (fulcrumapp.c…
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Revive Raskin's 3 laws of software with humane work that considers a dev's duty of care (opens external article)
In 1942, Isaac Asimov formulated three laws of robotics. 58 years later, Jef Raskin responded with three laws of human-computer interface design. They haven’t been bettered yet. There are rules, and even laws, about designing computer user interfaces. Even after 35 years of Linux, which has brought Unix to the masses, the FOSS world has not yet really grasped this. In the meantime, the proprietar…
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Spies, prime ministers, and balls: The BBC Domesday project @ 40 (opens external article)
Decades before the modern web, the BBC Domesday Project dared to archive an entire nation using…. what else – massive LV-ROM (LaserVision Read Only Memory) LaserDiscs. To mark the impending 40th anniversary of the BBC Domesday Project's release, the UK's Centre for Computing History (CCH) hosted a celebration at its museum on September 19, bringing together several of the original team members re…
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Anthropic's super bug-hunting model Mythos is hardcore good at math, as latest vuln under attack shows (opens external article)
The second Anthropic-linked vulnerability known to have been exploited in the wild saw initial activity from an IP address in China targeting vulnerable hosts in the US and Japan. The vuln is a critical authentication-bypass bug in Rejetto HTTP File Server (HFS) that can lead to full admin access and remote code execution. HFS is an open source web file server that previously appeared on the US C…
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Clever database, but can it run Doom? (opens external article)
"Can it run Doom?" now applies to databases, as the author of DOOMQL has released a far more visually accurate port. There's a saying: "Be careful what you wish for." In 2025, we wrote a piece about a database boffin coming up with a version of Doom that was written in SQL. It was neat, but the visuals were nearer to 3D Monster Maze than to the 90s pixel blaster. We commented, "If persuading SQL…
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Palantir's fondness for French food cooked up tech's latest fad – forward-deployed engineers (opens external article)
“I always laugh at the IT industry’s terms,” says Ryan Sheehan, a senior vice president at $16 billion global solutions integrator SHI. And right now the jargon that gets him giggling is “forward-deployed engineer” (FDE) because, as he told The Register at VMware's September Explore conference, “We have been doing FDE for a long time.” “Doing FDE” involves sending top consultants to a client, wit…
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Google hearts Apple's Swift so much it's pumping out server-side support (opens external article)
After evolving from an Apple-made, client-side language and years of false starts, Swift could finally make it on the server. Google has taken note and has just rolled out Google Cloud API Client Libraries for Swift, evidently convinced Swift has a backend role thanks to its performance and ease of use. The GCP Swift libraries target Swift 6.2+ and take advantage of SwiftNIO's asynchronous event…
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Shut up and take our money: Amazon plows $1B+ into quashing datacenter dissent (opens external article)
Faced with growing opposition to datacenters from residents who don't want the bit barns in their backyards, Amazon plans to invest more than $1 billion over the next five years to indoctrinate the public. The company announced the investment in a whataboutism-packed blog post aimed at convincing readers datacenters are not as bad as they've been led to believe, and that if the common folk don't…
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arXiv imposes rate limit on paper submissions to stem the AI slop tide (opens external article)
arXiv, the preprint paper repository, is seeing so many low-quality submissions, with AI tools helping drive the surge, that it has imposed a hard limit of two new submissions per month per submitter, regardless of whether they were produced solely by humans or with help from AI tools. After becoming an independent nonprofit over the summer following 25 years under Cornell University’s stewardshi…
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OpenAI alerts 100+ orgs that its 'misaligned models' attempted to break in - or worse (opens external article)
OpenAI's agents have repeatedly strayed beyond their intended scope. Two separate reports detail the activity, including one from Sam Altman’s company saying it has notified more than 100 organizations about potentially problematic model activity. OpenAI, in a late Wednesday update to its ongoing Hugging Face investigation, said it has notified more than 100 organizations that “misaligned models”…
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Californian accused of shipping $300M worth of Nvidia chips to China without Uncle Sam’s approval (opens external article)
A California business owner was arrested on Thursday after being charged with allegedly smuggling Nvidia hardware to China without the proper export licenses. Keeping the highest-end GPUs out of Chinese hands has been a priority for the US government. Greg Lui, 38, allegedly tried to export around $300 million worth of Nvidia kit - typically used for artificial intelligence (AI) development - via…
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The VMware exit is a protection upgrade (opens external article)
Leaving VMware forces a fresh look at every layer of the datacenter, and data protection belongs near the top of that list. Most teams plan to move the backup design across as it stands and rebuild it on the new hypervisor. The better plan uses the exit to raise resiliency and recovery speed, keeps the backup application, and gives each layer the work it does best. What the migration touches Back…
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OpenAI's wandering AI agents earn it a California subpoena (opens external article)
California's attorney general has subpoenaed OpenAI as the state investigates what happens when the AI lab's models escape their testing environments and start meddling with systems on the open internet. Attorney General Rob Bonta said his office served OpenAI with an investigative subpoena this week as part of a broader California Department of Justice probe into cybersecurity incidents and risk…
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Power approval set to delay Oracle's Wisconsin AI datacenter (opens external article)
Oracle's Wisconsin AI datacenter could miss its planned 2027 start date because the transmission infrastructure needed to power it is awaiting regulatory approval. Research company Aterio warns that Project Lighthouse, being developed by Vantage in Port Washington with Oracle as tenant, faces a real risk of slipping beyond Big Red's target of delivering capacity to customers in the second half of…