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’s plan to let A.I. companies police themselves comes amid mounting examples that they are failing to put safeguards on the technology.
Queensland’s state government has missed a deadline to sign up to the federal government’s Thriving Kids program before its rollout begins today.
Under the program, state governments will provide supports to children up to 8 years old with mild to moderate autism or developmental delays. They will be made ineligible for federal aid through the NDIS in 2028.
This scheme is helping Australians, particularly young Australians, get their foot in the door and achieve the dream of home ownership. When it comes to housing challenges, we’re tackling it from every angle – making it easier for first home buyers, boosting supply and helping renters get a better deal.
Tapes made in the 90s, including candid conversations between Noel and Liam Gallagher, which were expected to sell for up to £1.6m
A collection of unheard Oasis recordings, including 63 live shows, hours of rehearsals and candid conversations between Noel and Liam Gallagher, has been pulled from auction after legal action taken by the band.
In September Littleton Auctions in Worcestershire, England, listed the collection made by the band’s former sound engineer, Huw Richards, with a guide price of between £1.2m and £1.6m.
Officials investigating missing persons case find bodies in remote area of Lancaster, north of Los Angeles
Law enforcement officials are looking for additional victims after two bodies were found on Tuesday in a remote area of Lancaster, California, a small city about 70 miles north of Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Times reports.
Authorities found the bodies in a shallow grave while they were investigating a missing persons case, according to KTLA. Outside of the sheriff’s department investigating the discovery of the remains as a homicide, little is known about the two people who were found in the shallow grave.
Estonian will navigate narrow ribbon, 160 metres long and 120 metres high, near the city’s famous Gwanghwamun palace on Thursday
Estonian aerial athlete Jaan Roose will attempt to cross a 160-metre long highline suspended 120 metres above central Seoul on Thursday.
Roose, a three-time slackline world champion, will step out on to a narrow polyester ribbon between the Koreana hotel and the Dong-A Media Center, near the capital city’s famous Gwanghwamun palace and square.
Pike, sentenced to death over 1995 murder, set to be executed Wednesday night after justices lift lower-court ruling
Tennessee is set to execute a woman for the first time in 200 years on Wednesday, after the US supreme court lifted a lower-court ruling that put her execution on pause earlier in the day.
Christa Pike, who was convicted of murder 30 years ago, was initially scheduled to die by lethal injection on Wednesday morning until her execution was halted hours earlier by a federal appeals court.
Democratic governor sharply critical of Milla
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for not passing comprehensive federal AI regulations
Governor Gavin Newsom signed laws Wednesday aimed at protecting California workers from the threats of artificial intelligence , including potential job losses and workplace surveillance.
The laws ban employers from using the technology to predict a worker’s emotional state by using their biometric data, require employers to send written notices to workers if AI is responsible for mass layoffs and ban employers from relying on AI to decide to fire someone.
Noem cites irreconcilable differences in filing that comes after husband Bryon Noem involved in tabloid scandal
Kristi Noem, who was fired by Milla
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after a rumbustious stint as homeland security secretary, is divorcing her husband, Bryon Noem, after 34 years of marriage, citing “irreconcilable differences”.
The divorce claim “for settlement purposes only” was disclosed in court records filed in Hamlin county, South Dakota, the state of which Noem was previously governor.
Microsoft has advised users of its ExpressRoute Gateway, VPN Gateway, and Azure VMware service that they may experience degraded or interrupted network connectivity, and struggle to perform some network management operations. This looks like a self-inflicted wound because Microsoft’s status page says it has “paused the infrastructure servicing activity associated with the onset of this event.” The event started at 20:30 UTC on 30 September 2026. ExpressRoute Gateway is a service that connects on-prem networks to virtual networks in Azure, making it an important element of a hybrid cloud. Azure VPN Gateway creates a secure tunnel between on-prem infrastructure and Azure. Microsoft pitches its Azure VMware Service as an ideal way to build a hybrid cloud on VMware. This incident is therefore likely to make life hard for Microsoft’s hybrid cloud customers. At the time of writing, the incident impacts 18 Azure regions: West US, West US 3, North Europe, West Europe, France Central, UK West, UK South, Switzerland North, Southeast Asia, East Asia, Japan West, Korea Central, South Africa North, UAE North, Mexico Central, Germany North, South India, and Jio India Central. The Azure VMware service isn’t impacted in the last four of those regions. As of 23:13 UTC, Microsoft says it is “seeing continued recovery across impacted ExpressRoute gateways and are monitoring this recovery to confirm that it remains durable.” The company also advised that some affected VPN Gateways have experienced reduced redundancy rather than a complete loss of connectivity. “Some supporting network management components have not recovered automatically and are contributing to management operation failures in a subset of affected regions,” the update adds. “Engineering teams are actively restoring these components using alternate healthy instances where available.” Microsoft doesn’t know what happened, or why, but says its investigation “continues to show a correlation between this event and infrastructure operating system servicing activity.” The Register will update this story as Microsoft releases more information. ®
Suspect Benny Caldera Jr held on bond as officials say they received ‘credible’ information about Austin threat
A 40-year-old man was arrested early Wednesday on suspicion of plotting to attack the Texas state capitol, authorities said.
The Texas department of public safety said in a statement that it received “credible information about an individual planning a violent attack” for Thursday in Austin.
French security forces detained over 600 people while dozens of police and gendarmes were wounded as protests that have seen blockades of high schools and violent clashes escalated, the interior minister said.
In his “State of the Force” address, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth focused on the culture war and accused reporters of “treason” over Iran war coverage.
State law makes it harder to prosecute when victims drank willingly. The prosecutor in the Cornell case said that kept him from charging students accused of sexual assault.
The US Supreme Court has ruled that Tennessee can proceed with its first execution of a woman in 200 years, clearing the way for Christa Pike to be put to death by lethal injection for murdering a schoolmate three decades ago.
With their university under fire in the wake of a sexual assault lawsuit, students are having difficult conversations about Greek life, campus rituals and the possibility for lasting changes.
Christa Pike tortured and murdered a classmate in 1995. She had been set to die on Wednesday, the first woman executed in the state in 200 years, until a lower court paused the execution.
Community-funded archaeological excavations of ‘really important’ sixth-century monastery also rewrite story of Lismore
To the residents of the Scottish island of Lismore, population 190, history is never very far away. The tiny island near Oban in Argyll has no row of shops or even a pub – if islanders want to meet for a coffee, the only place to do so is in the lively Gaelic heritage centre that records the many centuries of community life on the island.
This quiet place, documentary evidence records, was home to a monastic settlement in the sixth century AD, when missionaries from Ireland were first moving into northern Britain to spread Christianity. But apart from a few fragments of an early carved cross, there was almost nothing to see from this period of history.
Google has unveiled Gemini 4 Argon, a new frontier AI model that it says leads or ties rivals on 13 of 18 disclosed benchmarks. The model is initially being released only to trusted cyber defenders and select pre-release testers, with broader availability planned later. VentureBeat reports: Google is not claiming that Gemini 4 Argon wins every benchmark. But across the benchmark table disclosed in the company's embargoed materials, Argon posts the highest score, or ties for the highest score, in more categories than GPT-6 Astra or Claude Opus 5.5. Across the 18 benchmarks Google disclosed, Argon leads outright on 12 and ties for first on one. GPT-6 Astra leads outright on three and ties Argon on one. Claude Opus 5.5 leads outright on two. That makes Argon the leading frontier model by total number of benchmark leads or top scores in Google's comparison set, even though the results show a still-close race in which OpenAI and Anthropic retain advantages in several important technical categories.
[...] The result is a more nuanced claim than "best model across the board." Argon appears to have the broadest top-score profile among the three frontier models in Google's disclosed comparison, but GPT-6 Astra remains ahead in several software, science-terminal and computer-use tasks, while Claude Opus 5.5 remains ahead in terminal-agent and post-training workflows. For enterprise buyers, that means model choice is still workload-dependent, even if Argon now gives Google its strongest claim yet to overall frontier leadership by benchmark count. [...] Argon also expands Google's output ceiling. The company says the model supports an industry-leading 1 million output tokens, up from a previous 64,000-token limit. That is a notable distinction for agentic software engineering, audit, migration and legal-review workloads where the value of a model often depends on how long it can sustain a chain of work before handing control back to a human.
Nine online gaming companies - including the makers of Candy Crush, Minecraft, and Clash of Clans - are being investigated by European consumer authorities, including the CCPC, for potential breaches of consumer protection law.
Google said it would withhold its most powerful artificial intelligence model from the public for now, releasing Gemini 4 Argon only to a vetted group of cybersecurity experts to avoid misuse by hackers.
Accused pilot being questioned in Saudi Arabia as Israeli officials investigate if incident was attempted terror attack
One of the pilots of a plane flying from the United Arab Emirates to Israel stabbed his co-pilot and appeared to tryto crash the aircraft, the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has said, as Israeli officials said they were investigating whether the incident was an attempted terror attack on Israelis.
Eyewitnesses reported chaos onboard the flydubai flight, as the attacker tried to barricade himself and the wounded co-pilot in the cockpit, and then attempted to disable the controls, forcing the plane to descend 17,000 feet in just two minutes.
Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president and co-founder, said internally that the super PAC, Leading the Future, had become a “distraction” for the A.I. company.
Xbox CEO Asha Sharma says Microsoft has no plans to sell the gaming business, telling The New York Times that "Xbox is not for sale" and that the company intends to take a long-term view. Windows Central reports: Microsoft's vast layoffs across the summer have hit Xbox in their thousands, with studios like Ninja Theory on the path to being closed, and others like Double Fine being divested completely. Microsoft has effectively shut down Halo Studios itself and handed off the franchise to Call of Duty showrunners instead, as Xbox aggressively seeks to restructure for its next decade.
[...] The NYT interviewed (paywall) Sharma recently covering the Xbox layoffs generally. The outlet said that Asha "did not stall" in declaring Xbox not-for-sale. "Xbox is not for sale. [...] We will do whatever it takes to set the company up for success, and we will look at the right partnerships, the right operating model and everything needed to achieve that. [...] We've got a long way to go with Microsoft and we're going to take the long-term view."
The NYT quite patronizingly called the comment a "bob and weave" seemingly unwilling to let go of the idea of divestiture. It's great shareholder bait; Xbox has long been an aspirational type of product, and it has been a loss leader in some regards. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has remarked in the past about how, despite the fact Xbox isn't a huge profit generator, fandom of the brand has led to lucrative deals for Azure on the business side of things. Yet, shareholders would love nothing more than for Microsoft to quit the difficult and risky game industry to dive all-in on AI psychosis products instead...
About 66 million years ago, the Chicxulub asteroid smashed into Earth, kicking up tsunamis and dropping hot debris that annihilated non-avian dinosaurs and many other species. But not everything it left in its wake was destructive. This space rock hit what is now the partially submerged Yucatan Peninsula, and at the bottom of the ocean, the impact generated enough heat to create a hydrothermal system that persisted for 8 million years and may have been a hotbed of life.
When researchers drilled for samples in the impact zone in 2016, they studied the types of rock that had formed as a result of the asteroid strike. This gave more insight into what happened in the immediate and long-term aftermath of this cataclysmic event.
The collision was intense enough to cause deformation far beneath the surface. Subterranean effects reached 35 km (almost 22 miles) down, and included the melting an immense amount of rock. Exposure to seawater made that rock porous. As hot water seeped into the pores, a hydrothermal system formed. The hot water gushing into an isolated region of the freezing depths could have attracted microorganisms and possibly other life forms that were otherwise struggling to survive.
“I don’t deserve to die like this,” said one passenger on Flight 1073 from Dubai to Tel Aviv. The motive of the cockpit stabbing remains unknown, officials said.
The department identified the deceased as a resident of Lancaster County, which is the epicenter of a raging outbreak that began in late April. The updated case count as of Wednesday is 943 across 39 counties, including 119 cases reported in just the last seven days. At least 176 people have been hospitalized.
Lancaster County has reported 381 cases and three of the five deaths in the outbreak. The previous two deaths were both in infants too young to be vaccinated. That includes a newborn boy and a 6-week-old baby girl. So far, no other information has been released about the county's third death announced today.
OpenAI, which hoovered up vast amounts of internet content amid copyright fights, has accused individuals associated with China’s Moonshot AI of being involved in a "distillation attack" that began July 1. The house of Altman warns that extracting its models’ reasoning at scale could help rivals train capable models without preserving the same guardrails. Model distillation is a machine learning technique that can involve using one model’s outputs to train another – in adversarial cases, by sending bulk queries designed to reproduce the larger model’s reasoning and capabilities. Both the feds and major US AI companies, including Google and Anthropic, have accused Chinese rivals - and specifically Moonshot AI - of using distillation to reproduce capabilities from American models. In a Wednesday blog, OpenAI chimed in, saying it spotted and ultimately disrupted an adversarial distillation campaign that ran nearly all of July. “The operators did not break our encryption, compromise a database, or gain direct access to stored user conversations,” according to the blog. “Instead, they manipulated model interactions so that protected reasoning could be reproduced in forms visible to the requester in a coordinated, scaled manner that violated our terms of service.” The queries began on July 1, and while they started slowly, “we observed high-volume spikes on July 24 and 25 consisting of 16,000 requests using a relevant extraction pattern from over 4,000 users,” OpenAI said. Upon investigating the incident, the AI giant identified related “prompt-pattern activity” across more than 15,000 users. OpenAI fully disrupted the campaign on July 28, we’re told. While OpenAI said that it's unclear whether all of the operators during the July time period were linked to just one rival AI company, the “core cluster” of the theft came from Moonshot AI, which developed Kimi. The Register reached out to Moonshot AI for comment and did not receive an immediate response. We also asked OpenAI which of its models were targeted during the July campaign, but did not hear back. It’s worth noting that, in late July, US President Milla
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’s Assistant for Science and Technology Michael Kratsios also accused Moonshot AI of creating its Kimi K3 model by distilling Anthropic’s Fable. Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5 model, released a week ago, comes with a defense against distillation called "preserved thinking" that it introduced with Fable 5.1. “Adversarial distillation poses safety and national security risks,” OpenAI said on Wednesday, echoing earlier gripes from American companies and government officials. “Extracted reasoning could be used to train another model without preserving the safeguards applied to the original model’s user-facing outputs,” OpenAI added. “At scale, distillation can also accelerate the transfer of advanced capabilities without requiring the same investment in safety. These concerns become heightened as models gain capabilities in dual use domains.” In response, OpenAI said it banned the model-copying accounts tightened signup and infrastructure controls and expanded monitoring efforts. It also “closed a pathway that allowed someone who already possessed another user's encrypted reasoning to replay it and recover its contents,” and worked with service providers to ensure that this type of distillation activity didn’t just move to third-party services. Additionally, OpenAI shared the details of its investigation with other AI firms, through the Frontier Model Forum, and government information-sharing programs.®
An Argentinian-American writer and immigration advocate recently sued the federal government, demanding that it delete data that he believes was copied off of his phone when he re-entered the United States earlier this month.
According to the seven-page complaint, Thomas Kennedy said that a Customs and Border Protection agent at Miami International Airport physically searched his bags, questioned him about his books and magazines, and then demanded that he hand over his phone.
“[The agent] threatened me, saying that if I didn’t give him my phone, my interrogation was going to take much longer and they could retain my phone indefinitely,” Kennedy wrote. “I felt like I had no choice, so I handed my phone to the CBP agent.”
100 Zeros, a collaboration between Google and Range Media Partners, aims to give the tech giant a foothold in movies, TV and emerging forms of entertainment.
The White House's new AI chatbot, America.gov, turns out to be a bit of a sausage fest. Not long after the AI-powered portal went live this week, El Reg readers were met face-to-face with a life size Frankfurter. The prompt? "hotdog." How the apparent Easter egg, a raw dog criminally devoid of condiments, made it onto the site, we can't say. We reached out to the White House for comment on the mystery meat, but sadly haven't heard back. But given the AI chatbot's general lack of polish, it wouldn't surprise us to discover the errant glizzy was the product of a bored and presumably hungry dev, whose work was forgotten and eventually made it to production. It certainly wouldn't be the first time easter eggs made it into a production release. If you don't believe us, go ask Google to "do a barrel roll." Intended as a common gateway for Americans to discover, access, and complete common tasks, America.gov is a potentially hallucination-prone front end to Google's Gemini and SpaceXAI's Groq. The site was supposedly built by the National Design Studio, but looks and feels more like something that was frantically vibe coded by a couple of summer interns who've never heard of QA. As we reported yesterday, the site is packed with rendering errors and features that aren't ready and won't be until at least 2027. These rendering errors it turns out include the hot dog. On at least one occasion, the Easter egg glitched and was generating extra wieners with every press of the enter key. How generous of the Milla
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administration to hand out seconds and even thirds. By the time the site is actually finished, we can only hope our hot dog hero will have snuck in a few more easter eggs. May we suggest baseball or apple pie? ®
Most implants like pacemakers and insulin pumps work in isolation. To help them coordinate with each other, a team of Georgia Tech researchers built a networking system that sends signals through body tissue instead of antennas and radio waves.
Radio problems
Implants that communicate today mostly rely on radio protocols like Bluetooth Low Energy or near-field communication (NFC). Both are a poor fit for in-body data transfer, says Alex Abramson, a Georgia Tech engineer and co-author of the new study.
The first problem is power. “If you want an implant to remain in an active state such that it can respond within milliseconds, it's very difficult to do that with the Bluetooth system,” Abramson said. According to the paper, Bluetooth components, when they’re activated, can cut an implant's battery life by up to 90 percent.
FAI officials appeared before the Oireachtas Committee on Sport for yet another bruising encounter. The controversy around the Nations League games against Israel dominated throughout.
A months-long breach of the Defense Manpower Data Center exposed personal information belonging to roughly 2.8 million living current and former U.S. military personnel and staff, plus records for nearly 300,000 deceased people. Attackers reportedly exploited a file-sharing vulnerability between October 2025 and July 2026, accessing unencrypted records that included Social Security numbers, dates of birth, demographic information, and military service details. TechCrunch reports: The DMDC may not be widely known to the general public, but serves as one of the Department of Defense's records-keeping units. The DMDC maintains over 60 million records for U.S. military and civilian staff and their family members to help determine benefits and entitlements, such as healthcare and retirement. The unit also provides a critical service as the military's "leading identity management provider," which links active service members, employees, and contractors to credentials, such as smart cards and passwords. These are used to access Pentagon computer systems, buildings, and bases.
"We make sure that the right people get access and the wrong people don't: security of identity information is paramount," the DMDC's website reads. The Department of Defense, which oversees the DMDC, said it does not have any indication that the information was misused, but did not say how it reached that conclusion. TechCrunch contacted a Pentagon spokesperson to ask if officials had any communications from the hackers, whose identities are not known, but we did not hear back.
Housing prices are falling in almost every suburb in Australia’s biggest cities, with values dropping faster in Brisbane than Sydney as the slowdown intensifies.
Prices nationally have fallen 5.2% from their peak in March to where they were a year ago, Cotality data released on Thursday shows.
Hackers have been exploiting a critical vulnerability in the Zimbra Collaboration Suite in an attempt to obtain email backups and authentication credentials of vulnerable organzations, Microsoft has warned.
The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-73570, lets attackers remotely issue operating system commands without authentication. Zimbra maintainer Synacor issued a patch on July 20, but didn’t disclose the vulnerability for more than three weeks after that. The security-focused Shadowserver Foundation said last week that its scans found that 274 separate instances of the Zimbra Collaboration Suite had been compromised. The number of servers running the software has fluctuated from 19,000 in the week following the patch to about 12,000 in the weeks following that. Currently, Shadowserver is tracking about 10,000 instances.
Look, ma, no authorization
From July 28 to August 7, Microsoft said Wednesday, the company detected two distinct scanning tools probing the Internet for vulnerable endpoints. The attackers first validated their exploit worked by sending HTTP, requests and DNS, ICMP, and out-of-band identity checks to domains hosted on public services. The probes allowed the attackers to confirm the exploit successfully executed commands on vulnerable servers without actually compromising them. Eventually, the attackers began using their command injection capability to install malicious payloads. Microsoft wrote:
Mechanical calculators are precise, fascinating gadgets that you wouldn’t think would take well to being 3D printed, but a YouTuber has proved that a pocket-sized unit can be made purely from plastic filament. YouTuber 3D all Workshop detailed his working, but limited, build in a recent video. If you’re familiar with the holy grail of palm-sized mechanical calculators, the Curta, also known as the “pepper mill,” you already have a working understanding of how this 3D-printed calculator works. As detailed in the video, Workshop’s 3D-printed mechanical calculator, like the Curta, relies on a more than 200-year-old component known as the Leibniz stepped drum, named for its inventor, German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. The core concept of the calculator’s central mechanism, like that of many other mechanical calculators, is the Leibniz drum’s teeth of different lengths. There are nine teeth per drum, representing values one through nine, while a zero setting engages none of them. Workshop’s 3D printed calculator can take inputs from 1 to 999, with one drum per digit. You use a lever to move a gear up the drum so that it only activates as many teeth as are needed for a particular number. The same concept is used to input values into the Curta, just in a much more precise manner - one of the big benefits of using machined aluminum over 3D printing filament. As a result of wanting to keep the 3D printed calc’s build palm-sized, the YouTuber was forced to restrict what it’s able to do. It can do addition, and the addition of a multi-wheel enables it to also do multiplication by simply performing multiple sequences of adding the same number. The Curta does multiplication in a similar manner, requiring a user to input their base number and the number of times they want to multiply by addition. Unlike the Curta, Workshop’s calculator can’t subtract, nor can it divide - as its creator explains, there simply wasn’t the room to get all those fiddly bits into a palm-sized device. It’s not clear how large it would have to be to add those functions, but if the 3x-sized 3D printed Curta is any indication - its creator said the increased size was necessary - it’d probably be quite large. Scaling down to Workshop’s tiny 3D printed calculator means plenty of issues were bound to arise, and they definitely did. “There were a lot of problems,” he noted, explaining that “even the tiniest inconsistencies when printing can cause problems.” If you’ve ever used a 3D filament printer, you know how often such inconsistencies pop up. Gears kept binding because of tight 3D-printing tolerances, while backlash (the play between mating mechanical parts) could throw the drums out of sync. Pieces kept breaking during redesigns, and even the vibrations from picking up and using the calculator were enough to disrupt its components. The YouTuber went through roughly 100 design iterations over the two-month project, finally addressing the problems with custom-designed 3D-printed springs and a ratchet mechanism that kept backlash from throwing the drums out of sync. All said, the final build ended up with 109 separate pieces, took 17 print-hours to complete, and used 90g of filament. Despite multiple calls on YouTube for 3D all Workshop to publish, or even sell, his design, he has yet to make it available, so no struggling through a day-long print job for a potentially brief moment playing with this one. In the meantime, you could 3D print the giant Curta, or if you have a couple grand lying around begging to be spent, try to get your hands on an original. ®
Manchester City's punishment for breaching Premier League rules should be handed down before the end of this season, senior football figures tell BBC Sport.
Senate Democrats blocked a measure that would encourage, but not require, states to protect consumers from power rate hikes tied to data center growth, and had no limits on A.I. use or deployment.
The national organization of the Chi Phi fraternity at the center of a Cornell University sexual assault lawsuit explained publicly for the first time how it handled the episode.
A new report by the Federal Reserve’s independent inspector general concluded that a nearly $2.5 billion construction project was poorly managed but made no referrals to the U.S. attorney general.
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administration's export control policies governing the sale of AI accelerators to China haven't stopped homegrown Huawei from filling the void. In a Q&A-style release this week, the company's rotating chairman Eric Xu claimed that its Ascend line of neural processing units (NPUs) had exceeded Nvidia in Chinese market share. "It's pretty hard to collect data about the market share of Nvidia in China, but based on the data we have collected, Ascend has surpassed Nvidia," he said. "Chinese people have a keen sense of urgency, and will not accept a future in which others decide whether or not we can have access to certain products." Since taking office, the Milla
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administration has done an about-face on export controls. After imposing new licensing requirements on Nvidia's and AMD's China-spec accelerators in April 2025, the US Commerce Department reversed course that summer, later reaching an arrangement to cut the US government in on a percentage of certain China-bound chip sales. By late last year, the Milla
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administration loosened restrictions further, announcing that Nvidia would be allowed to sell its more potent H200-series parts to approved Chinese customers for the first time ever. However, the damage was already done. While Uncle Sam had given Jensen Huang its blessing to resume sales, the initial blockade of H20s earlier in the year had set off alarm bells in Beijing. Government officials there began pressuring bit barn operators to transition away from foreign accelerators in favor of homegrown alternatives. During Nvidia's Q2 earnings call, executives revealed that while the company had begun shipments of a small volume of H200 accelerators to the region, they amounted to less than 1 percent of its datacenter revenues. "Even though our chips may be less advanced, at least their supply is assured, so that you don't have to worry about chip supply day in and day out," Xu said. "For the Chinese government, for the domestic industry, and for Huawei, the path forward is undoubtedly to push for full self-sufficiency in terms of chips and the entire semiconductor value chain." As we recently discussed, while Huawei's latest accelerators still fall short of Nvidia's or AMD's on paper, they make up for that deficit with scale. Huawei is currently deploying a 256,000-card Atlas 950 SuperCluster, while its newer architecture is designed to support training and inference for multi-trillion-parameter models and scale to as many as one million NPUs. However, as Xu notes, Huawei likely won't be a threat to Nvidia outside of China for a while. "We don't have enough capacity to satisfy the demand in China. We don't have plans to expand the international market in a fully-fledged way," he said, downplaying reports that Huawei had begun supplying friendly nations with its chips. "The balance between satisfying the needs of domestic customers and those of international customers is actually quite easy," he said when asked about the use of Ascend accelerators to power Malaysia's sovereign AI initiative. "We prioritize Chinese customers who are in urgent demand for compute; outside of China we only supply a very limited number of customers who either have no access to alternative solutions or want an alternative solution." Along with pressure from government officials to transition away from foreign chips, changing software paradigms are making the transition easier for model devs, like DeepSeek, which has been working with Huawei's chips for well over a year now. "The first barrier encountered by Ascend is actually not hardware itself," said Liao Heng, chief scientist of Huawei's HiSilicon. "It's primarily the ecosystem barrier, because two years ago there was still a tremendous software barrier for Ascend." Liao is referring to what's often called the CUDA moat, a software hurdle not unique to China but faced by essentially every competing chipmaker. "There have been drastic changes over the past 18 months," Liao said. He explained that, two years ago, AI training was dominated by PyTorch running atop CUDA, but changes in model architectures have pushed model devs to "mega-kernel-style programming." "CUDA was no longer deemed important by the frontier labs, nowhere near as much as two years ago," he said. To this end, DeepSeek reportedly released several software tools this week aimed at making Huawei’s Ascend accelerators more accessible to other AI labs. ®
Judge Patrick J. Schiltz had warned that the administration’s actions “created a grave threat to the rule of law.” The attorney general accused him of “obvious bias.”
Google promised Gemini 3.5 Pro in June, but it spent the summer trotting out smaller Flash models. Now, Google is ready to take on the frontier again with Gemini 4 Argon. The company claims this new AI offers industry-leading performance in coding, knowledge work, and cybersecurity, but you aren't allowed to use it yet.
While most of us will have to wait to test Gemini 4, Google says engineers inside the company are already using the new model extensively. Argon reportedly used "fleet-wide telemetry data" to help Google save 300 TiB of memory across its data centers. Meanwhile, Argon agents have been working to migrate C/C++ codebases to Rust across Google, including thousands of lines in the core re2 and libgav1 libraries and more than 800,000 lines in the Fuchsia OS Zircon kernel.
Google has also come armed with a raft of benchmarks to back up its claims. On the software engineering DeepSWE v1.1 benchmark, Gemini 4 Argon hits 77.9 percent, which is higher than GPT-6 Astra, Fable 5.1, and Opus 5.5. Google promises similar power across a range of long-horizon tasks, pointing to Argon's industry-leading score in the economic analysis Vals Index test.
Google is reportedly testing a program that pays around 100 publishers based on how much their content contributes to its AI-powered search features. According to The Information, one publisher earned more than $1 million over a year, while another has received roughly $50,000 to $60,000." Digiday reports: Once a publisher joins the "AI contribution pilot," they receive an extra AI earnings widget via their Search Console dashboard. This displays a monthly earnings number (with some history), though no other detailed information on how payouts are calculated currently. Payments are based more on value than raw usage, meaning Google only pays when it judges that a piece of content has meaningfully contributed to an AI-generated response. Publishers can opt out at any time.
[...] Digiday has learned that at least dozens of publishers have been approached by Google for the AI contribution pilot, though the program has been more appealing to small and mid-sized, rather than large publishers and has widened far beyond news publishers. Digiday couldn't get final confirmation of the number. Screenshots from Google Search Console, seen by Digiday, show an "AI contribution" panel that appears once a publisher opts into the program. The interface lists the program name and a monthly payout figure.
"It's quite black box," as one exec with knowledge of the matter told Digiday. "Do I wish they were more transparent? Definitely," said one publisher exec who is in the program. "But I'm hopeful that the fact that they're setting a precedent for exploring paying publishers directly for content through this is meaningful," they added.
Soon, Reddit won’t let people use Old.Reddit.com unless they have used the site while logged in within the previous six months.
In July, Reddit started requiring that users be logged in to access Old Reddit. This new requirement is an effort to reduce Reddit’s biggest source of scraping and automated traffic, the company says.
Today, the social media platform announced additional upcoming restrictions on Old Reddit. A Reddit post from an employee, known as "judy-funnie" on the platform, says that “in the next few months, we'll further limit access for logged-in users to only those who have used Old Reddit in the last six months (which covers the vast majority of all Old Reddit users).”
Support such as for white Afrikaners and anti-communism reveals how US is redefining what qualifies as human rights
With hours left before the funding expires, the Milla
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administration is pushing to direct more than $175m of the state department’s flagship human rights fund to a slate of awards that includes a huge $40m grant for an anti-communism fund, support for a group advancing white Afrikaner rights in South Africa, a campaign against Brazil’s supreme court and programs that would reward ideological allies in Europe who protect “western civilizational norms”.
On Wednesday, the state department obligated the funds to the grantees hours before the deadline despite congressional concerns and requests not to do so, according to a source familiar with the negotiations. The state department declined to comment on questions from the Guardian specifically on whether it had obligated the funds and had “blown” holds from Congress due to concerns about the money’s use.
The computer hacker who released documents which led to the Premier League investigation into Manchester City says Gianni Infantino "should have no place in the future of the game".
After more than a decade of public feuding and false starts, Tyson Fury and Anthony Joshua exchange pleasantries, trade jokes and even discuss going for a pint at a news conference in London.
Cristiano Ronaldo says he has left Portugal's international camp and will explain why "in time", hours after head coach Jorge Jesus denied any rift with the player.
At a Make America Healthy Again event Tuesday, anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy opened a "fireside chat" with Vice President JD Vance on the topic of artificial intelligence. While MAHA generally coalesces around things like healthy lifestyles and mistrust of drugmakers, Kennedy quickly turned to extolling the potential of artificial intelligence, surprising Vance, who said he was expecting to discuss "weight loss and acid, not AI."
Kennedy boasted that the Milla
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administration is "making it easy for every American to use AI," which he claimed would free us from the "medical tyranny" of doctors and health experts. He suggested Americans should start using AI to get second opinions about medical recommendations, saying AI is "better informed than any doctor in the country." He also suggested that the technology would confirm his misinformation about vaccines and contrarian views on public health guidance.
"We're never, ever again going to be able to be dominated by public officials who tell us trust the experts, because every American will be able to check their own medical advice," Kennedy said.
There was a call to boycott Disney last fall. The owner of the ABC network had taken Jimmy Kimmel Live! off the air over comments Kimmel made about responses to Charlie Kirk's murder, sending free speech proponents into a frenzy.
Those free speech proponents include me, who, as a reporter, has clear stakes in protecting that right. Although I was on board with halting support for a company I felt had acted wrongfully, truly boycotting Disney proved harder than I expected.
Disney's ubiquity
Canceling Disney+ was simple but threw a hefty wrench into my evening routine. I tend to end many weekdays laughing at comforting sitcom reruns and adult animation. I usually associate Disney with princesses, kids' movies, and, more recently, comic heroes. But Disney also owns Hulu, which exclusively streamed many of my favorite shows for unwinding at the time, like American Dad, Futurama, Living Single, Fresh Off the Boat, and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
What comes next after a moment when companies sell existential risk but pursue public funding and DIY regulation, even as software developers question their life choices? Peter Norvig, distinguished education fellow at Stanford HAI and former Google research director, used his opening keynote at The AI Conference in San Francisco on Wednesday to speculate on the answer. Almost certainly, it's another AI conference – on Thursday in fact – given the two or three dozen of them that have bubbled up in San Francisco this year or are scheduled in the remaining three months. To get to the present, he took a detour through the past. He acknowledged the milestones of AlexNet and ImageNet in 2012, the Transformer architecture for machine learning in 2017, the debut of ChatGPT in 2022, and the emergence of reasoning and coding agents in 2024. He also touched on the sudden competency of AI models for math, noting that two years ago, GPT-4 couldn't count the number of "r"s in "strawberry." Yet as of August this year, he observed, 25 percent of math preprint papers on arXiv acknowledged AI assistance. Norvig went on to cite Linux kernel creator Linus Torvalds' changing attitude toward AI. "Six months ago he was a skeptic, he became a cautious adopter, and now he's a dogmatic advocate," said Norvig. So what now? Norvig says the process of software engineering needs to change. The tech industry has changed many times before, he said, pointing to transitions from plugging wires into mainframes, to assembly language, to higher level programming languages. "At every step you have to change the way you think about what software engineering is," he said. And now we're going to have to change it all again. How do we do specifications and documentation? How do we capture this theory of the evolving program that we're not capturing well now?" To illustrate that point, Norvig recounted some of his recent work. "I did an embarrassing thing the other day, right? So I'm using Codex, [and I] write some stuff that seems to work," he said. He told Codex to send the pull request for review, and his colleague asked why he was checking in 6,000 temp files. "And I said, 'Well, I didn't notice that,'" Norvig explained. "And sure enough, I had written 6,000 temporary files, and Codex thought that it wanted to check those in. So I told [Codex], 'No, don't check them in, just delete them.' At first I thought, shame on me. I should have looked before I asked for a code review on that. And I just skipped that step of looking. Maybe I should be doing that." Then, said Norvig, he thought that the GPT model should have known that he didn't want to save 6,000 temporary files, so as not to burden the reviewer. And then he mused that if you have enough storage and memory, maybe it would be useful to have those files to have a more thorough history of how the codebase changed. "So the expectations of what's good practice and how that's going to change, that's all going to be different," he said. And that's just the start. "We gotta get the security and privacy and data pipelines and supply chains, those are all gonna be different in how they interact with each other," he said. "This idea of continuous integration and recursive self-improvement. How much do we let the systems go off on their own and how are we monitoring them?" Judging by the steady drip of incidents where AI models have hacked into third-party websites, discovered only after someone scrutinized log files, we're not monitoring them. So yeah, there's work to be done. ®
Settler violence in West Bank makes everyday life ‘untenable’ for Palestinians, says ICRC after assault on family trying to return home in Jalud
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has said Israeli settler violence in the West Bank has made everyday life for Palestinians “untenable”, as a mob attack on Palestinians trying to return home prompted one of Benjamin Netanyahu’s main rivals to warn of a campaign of settler terror.
More than 100 militant settlers overwhelmed Israeli security forces early on Tuesday to attack a Palestinian family as they attempted to reclaim their homes which had been seized by settlers in the West Bank village of Jalud. Three Israeli security officials were injured and houses were set on fire.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Amid a number of updates for moderators and developers announced Wednesday comes bad news for supporters of a more open web: Reddit is ending support for RSS feeds. Reddit says RSS has now become a "common surface for large-scale scraping and automated abuse," which is why it's made the decision to wind down RSS feeds on its platform. "We know RSS has been a beloved part of the open web for a long time, and we're grateful to everyone who used it to stay connected to Reddit," the company noted in its announcement, where it also shared a March 2027 shutdown date for its public API. Reddit said RSS support will cease on November 13.
[...] The RSS change was one of several updates issued on Wednesday by the company. Another big change will be the end of its public API. Public API access will also end by March 2027, which will impact any tools that used it for programmatic access to Reddit conversations, including social listening products, those used by researchers, and AI products, such as AI assistants. Today, those assistants can use Reddit to answer questions, but after closing public API access, they will need to forgo commercial deals with Reddit for its data.
In addition, Reddit provided an update on its Rules Hub progress and auto-mod changes, and said it was "adding safeguards" to its classic, text-heavy version of its site known as Old Reddit. The latter will include limiting access to logged-in moderators and recent users -- changes Reddit also said were required because of "abusive scraping and automated traffic." Reddit said in the next few months it will limit access for logged-in users to those who have used Old Reddit in the last 90 days. The company also reminded developers building approved third-party apps and bots to register them with the company before January 12, 2027, to avoid disruption. After that date, Reddit will remove API access for any developer that hasn't registered.
A miscommunication between Arsenal goalkeeper Misa Rodriguez and England captain Leah Williamson gifts Paris FC a late equaliser as the sides draw 2-2 in the Women's Champions League.
Designer showcases wool alternatives and ocean-inspired clothes and says ‘kindness requires real work’
Stella McCartney has been talking about animal rights at fashion week for 30 years. She is usually a lone voice, but the issue is back in the headlines this season. Outcry over the physical restraining of a Peta protester at a catwalk show by Steven Kolb, the president of New York fashion week’s governing body, has put cruelty in wool production – previously considered niche compared to the hot button topic of fur – on the news agenda.
“There is no wool on the runway this season, and I’m proud of that,” McCartney said after her show. She has been working on wool alternatives, including Brewed Protein, a fermented alternative to cashmere and wool developed in collaboration with the Japanese biotech firm Spiber, which was first used in her collections a year ago.
Amid escalating AI security incidents causing OpenAI to halt training and pause releases, Milla
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continues to advocate for the AI industry to regulate itself as the best path to combat emerging risks when developing frontier AI.
In an agreement Tuesday, two dozen tech firms voluntarily committed to implementing controls recommended by the White House, including undergoing independent safety audits that will test whether firms’ internal controls, monitoring, and detecting are actually working. Key focuses for external reviews included “risks related to cybersecurity, biosecurity, chemical threats, and unintended actions by AI models.”
Firms also agreed to regularly meet to discuss best practices and set common AI safety standards and benchmarks. Among signers were leaders like Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, SpaceXAI’s Elon Musk, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, and Alphabet/Google’s Sundar Pichai.
Twelve years after US mission against IS began, Milla
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hails ‘great day for America’ and calls Iraq war ‘a quagmire’
The Pentagon has announced it has formally completed its withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, two years after the withdrawal was agreed to and 12 years since the US mission to fight the Islamic State started.
After the announcement, Iran and its allies celebrated the departure as a victory, while Iraqi security experts worry that the withdrawal could give IS and others a chance to recover.
Senior Downing Street officials reach out to thinktanks and pollsters as they look to test backing for reversing Brexit
Senior Downing Street officials have been reaching out to thinktanks and pollsters as they look to test public support for the UK rejoining the EU.
Aides to Andy Burnham have been talking to EU experts in a range of organisations about how the public would view a promise to rejoin, as momentum builds behind including such a pledge in the next Labour manifesto.
A Republican measure to limit, but not bar, congressional stock trading faltered in the Senate as Democrats thwarted a G.O.P. bid to show progress on an issue that has rankled voters.
Former Kerry manager Éamonn Fitzmaurice has been appointed the manager of the Galway senior footballers on a three-year term, having been ratified at a meeting of the county board on Wednesday night.
A 16-year-old security researcher named Faav found an authentication flaw in Microsoft’s Titan analytics service that allowed him to gain administrator access, submit unauthorized SQL queries with no valid credentials, and potentially reach analytics databases containing an estimated 17.3 trillion stored rows. Titan is an internal analytics platform, and Redmond restricts access via its web interface to Microsoft employees. Faav, with an assist from an AI hackbot he built called Antares, found that he could access Titan’s API through an Azure Cloud Services host because Titan didn’t check the signature on a login token. Microsoft has since locked down the API and paid Faav a $5,000 bug bounty for his research. He says the breakthrough came after 10 days of authentication errors, when he returned to the problem after finishing Friday’s schoolwork and finally managed to execute SQL as a Titan admin after 1 AM Saturday. “It was 2 AM,” Faav said in a blog about his findings. “I wanted to yell, or at least say something out loud, but my parents were asleep. So I just sat there staring at 17,333,335,124,315 and checked the math again.” He also notes that he rewrote his blog post at Microsoft’s request, cut sections and numbers, and reworded the impact prior to publication. “We appreciate the opportunity to investigate the findings reported by Faav,” Microsoft said in a statement provided to Faav for his blog. “Their submission and coordinated vulnerability disclosure helped us to better protect our customers by hardening our services. We value and appreciate safe security research under the terms of the Microsoft Bug Bounty Program and look forward to continuing to work with Faav in the future.” A boy and his bot The research began on August 25 when Antares found Titan’s public API. For the next 10 days, the human and bot tested the service’s JSON Web Token (JWT) authentication checks and email-formatted user principal names (UPNs), eventually finding an unsigned token that could reach Titan’s local user lookup - but not a UPN that Titan recognized. Early on September 5, Faav changed the unsigned token’s UPN from an email-formatted identity to admin. Titan recognized it as a local username, resolved it to local user ID 1, which held an admin role, and allowed him to run SQL. The takeaway, according to Faav: Titan validated the contents of the JWT (tenant, audience, app ID, user) but never verified the signature, the most important part of any authentication check. The authentication checks felt like a hotel where every door had a working keycard reader, but any keycard unlocked any room. Despite all the access-control logic existing in the app, the one missing piece made it all pointless. If you’re a developer (or coding agent) reading this, the most important takeaway from this post is to make sure you verify signatures above all else when building auth. This gave Faav access to Titan’s platform metadata database, and from there he could query application tables directly. The metadata contained: About 25,000 account and email records. 17,990 employee email records. 15,001 employee organization records. 355 database configurations. 20,979 virtual-dataset SQL definitions. 24,569 dashboards, 425,891 charts, and 27,347 dataset definitions. Titan’s user and usage directory exposed employee job titles, departments, and management hierarchy, which the researcher notes could be useful for social-engineering attacks - “though I never tested or demonstrated that,” he added. He also found a Bing analytics sample and tested two rows that contained search info, identifiers, and high-level location information, such as country- or state-level details. Faav said the location values did not contain precise user locations. 17.3 trillion data rows Then he hit the jackpot, testing 56 routing values from an archived configuration and discovering 30 were still active. “Each routing value pointed to a backend configuration, and each configuration contained one or more databases, so the 30 live values resolved through 24 configurations to 17 connected analytics databases spanning 9,863 unique table names,” the bug hunter wrote. The total comes to about 17.3 trillion rows, which Faav says is a storage estimate derived from metadata and likely includes historical, duplicated, and derived data. “But quite the high number nonetheless.” Between September 6 and September 8, Microsoft asked the teen to stop testing and requested his IP address to confirm no nefarious activity beyond the bug bounty research. A day later, Redmond locked down the endpoint and told Faav the “report prompted immediate investigation and remediation to address the remaining exposure.” Microsoft awarded the bug hunter $5,000 for his work on September 17.®
OpenAI's hack of Hugging Face in July 2026 has spurred a lawsuit demanding that the company stop accessing third-party computer systems and halt AI development practices that can harm the public. The lawsuit was filed by Legal Advocates for Safe Science & Technology (LASST), which said yesterday that the hack in which OpenAI "agents stole credentials, uploaded malicious files, and gained control over key parts of Hugging Face’s internal systems... is unquestionably illegal under California law."
California’s Comprehensive Computer Data Access and Fraud Act (CDAFA) prohibits unauthorized access into computer systems, "and it doesn’t matter that a swarm of AI agents carried out this cyberattack. California law makes it clear that it is not a defense 'that the artificial intelligence autonomously caused the harm,'" the group said.
The lawsuit, filed in San Francisco County Superior Court, said OpenAI also violated California's Unfair Competition Law (UCL). "OpenAI’s insistence on externalizing the harms of its unsafe decision-making is a fundamentally unfair business practice," the complaint said, adding that "such risk-taking for private gain at substantial public expense is immoral, unethical, oppressive, unscrupulous, and substantially injurious conduct."
Longtime Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares a report from Mashable: Singapore's government is trying its hand at matchmaking again. The country's Government Technology Agency (GovTech) has launched FirstDate, a pilot dating service for singles aged 21 to 35. For now, it's open only to public officers, according to the service's website. Applications close Oct. 5. FirstDate is designed as an alternative to endless swiping.
Instead of browsing a stream of profiles, users fill out a questionnaire about their interests, habits, values, and preferences. The service then sends them one match per cycle (the time it takes to mutually accept and presumably meet up). Each match includes a compatibility score, a brief description of the person, and a personal note. [...]
The pilot arrives as Singapore's birth rate hits a new low, according to the Singaporean newspaper The Straits Times. The country's total fertility rate fell to 0.87 children per woman in 2025, down from 1.24 a decade earlier. In April, the government announced a new workgroup tasked with addressing falling birth rates, which is expected to report its findings by early 2027, The Straits Times reported. The service relies on the Gale-Shapley algorithm, a well-known mathematical method that solves the stable matching problem by pairing two sets of participants based on their ranked preferences.
Once matched, users have 72 hours to mutually accept before contact details are shared, with optional "Date Quests" and post-date surveys designed to encourage and assess in-person meetups. Accounts are verified through Singapore's Singpass digital ID system to reduce fake profiles, and profiles are only visible to assigned matches. GovTech says user data is protected under government security standards, is not sold to third parties, and can be deleted upon request.
This long-duration image shows star trails above Earth and the blue lights of fishing boats and the yellow lights of Indonesian cities stretching below the International Space Station as it orbited 258 miles above the Banda Sea.
As flight FZ 1073 soared west over the waters of the Gulf towards Israel, its passengers may have bemoaned a 20-minute delay at takeoff. For a low-cost airline route, flydubai’s daily service to Tel Aviv is usually convenient and reliable. The nonstop flight takes about three and a half hours and departs early enough from Dubai that it usually lands at Ben Gurion airport at about 9am local time.
That was not the case for Wednesday’s catastrophic flight. The passenger jet never made it to its scheduled destination. Instead, it dropped thousands of feet in seconds before limping down to make an emergency landing in Saudi Arabia – perhaps miraculously, since photos suggested a large part of the tail of the aircraft was missing.
Met calls move ‘milestone’ moment that paves way for ‘very best possible evidence for charging decisions’
Police investigating the Grenfell Tower fire have asked prosecutors to consider charges including manslaughter and fraud against a range of companies and individuals.
The Metropolitan police announced they had given prosecutors evidence relating to 20 companies and organisations and 54 individuals ahead of charging decisions, in what the force described as a “milestone moment”.
Resolute Raccoon is ready to roll out to existing Ubuntu users. Canonical has flipped the switch, and users on 24.04 will start to get offered 26.04.1. Canonical has marked the occasion with an official announcement that it's time to upgrade your desktop. Normally, a given LTS release of Ubuntu starts nagging offering the upgrade to the new release when the following LTS version gets its first point-release. This time around, there has been a substantial delay: Ubuntu 26.04.1 appeared over a month ago. The company announced a small delay in a post ubuntu-announce mailing list when 26.04.1 first appeared, saying: “Users of Ubuntu 24.04 LTS will be offered an automatic upgrade to 26.04.1 LTS via Update Manager a couple of weeks following this release after some planned backports to address regressions in a recent version of rust-coreutils.” The delay is the fault of Rust language which is aiming to replace C, as promoted by evangelistic developers whom Linux grandees castigate until they go away. This is the same Rust uutils bundle that David Uhden Collado recently ported to OpenBSD, but which was swiftly rejected by determined defender of the C faith Theo de Raadt. (Please read the previous two paragraphs in the most sarcastic tone that you can muster.) If you want to upgrade your Ubuntu box, there are two potential methods – one command-line-based, and one using the GUI – but both are easier than the traditional Debian method. First, though, install any and all outstanding updates. For this, we entering the following the shell command, if only because it’s easier to copy-and-paste: sudo apt update && sudo apt full-upgrade -y ; sudo snap refresh Because Canonical uses phased updates, you may see that some updates are “held back”. If you do, you can just run the main command again to get them: sudo apt full-upgrade -y Second time around, it may install a few more. Then reboot, and with any luck you will get offered the Resolute Raccoon upgrade. If you have Ubuntu installed on a relatively small partition, it may be as well to clear the APT package manager’s cache before you start. This can free up a lot of room. On our test VM, where we do this regularly, we got 1 GB back: liam-proven@noble-vbox:~$ df -h / Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/sda2 24G 18G 4.3G 81% / liam-proven@noble-vbox:~$ sudo apt clean liam-proven@noble-vbox:~$ df -h / Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/sda2 24G 17G 5.9G 74% / We reckon a free gigabyte for one command is pretty good. If you don’t get offered the upgrade automatically, run the “Software Updater” tool. If you don’t see it in your preferred app launcher, you can run the update-manager command in a shell. If you have any outstanding updates to your current version, you will be offered them first. Once they are all done, you should see a message saying: “The software on this computer is up-to-date. “However, Ubuntu 26.04.1 LTS is now available (you have 24.04).” Alternatively, if you prefer to do these things from the shell: liam-proven@noble-vbox:~$ do-release-upgrade Checking for a new Ubuntu release = Welcome to Ubuntu 26.04 LTS 'Resolute Raccoon' = The Ubuntu team is proud to announce Ubuntu 26.04 LTS 'Resolute Raccoon'. We’ve cut this to the first few lines – there are some 60 lines of it in full. As we reported when it came out, there are worthwhile novelties in RR. For instance, in our testing on some machines with older Nvidia GPUs which did not work well with 24.04, the now Wayland-only GNOME 50 drove our geriatric video cards just fine. If you use any other desktop, from Cinnamon to Unity, you still get X11. ®
Detention staff broke with safe standards of medical care for at least six detainees who died in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody in 2025, according to internal reviews posted on — and later removed from — ICE’s website.
The reviews found that staff across multiple ICE detention centers mismanaged medication, skipped physical exams, ignored lab orders, and delayed treatments for sick detainees. Detention staff often failed to properly document or communicate the status of their deteriorating patients. In several cases, they failed to provide timely or appropriate life-saving care during emergencies.
“Rampant systemic medical abuse is a core feature of the immigration detention system.”
“It’s very clear that the rampant systemic medical abuse is a core feature of the immigration detention system,” said Stacy Suh, program director of the Detention Watch Network, upon reviewing the topline findings. “You can’t get well in a detention center.”
At least 56 people have died in ICE custody under the second Milla
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administration. ICE’s own Health Services Corps conducts a “mortality review” following an in-custody death to assess whether appropriate medical care was provided. The findings of this report are based on medical records and staff testimony. (ICE did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
A total of eight such reviews related to detainee deaths from 2025 were published in a trove of 25-plus documents on ICE’s public records library on September 25. Four days later, a little after a lawyer representing this reporter in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit noticed these documents, ICE appeared to have pulled them offline and de-indexed them.
While they were no longer available through internet searches, the records remained live on internet archives of the webpage. The larger trove of mortality reviews was first reported on by The American Prospect and the San Francisco Chronicle.
The eight reports contain granular details of the medical events leading up to 2025 deaths in custody of Johnny Noviello, Lorenzo Antonio Batrez Vargas, Marie Ange Blaise, Nhon Nguyen, Oscar Duarte Rascon, Santos Reyes Banegas, Tien Xuan Phan, and Chaofeng Ge. They provide the most comprehensive view yet into the escalating death toll in detention during President Milla
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’s second term.
“Egregiously Managed Care”
The mortality review for Vargas, a 32-year-old from Mexico, found several clear examples of what ICE’s reviews called “inappropriate” care.
Vargas had complained of dizziness and blurred vision upon arrival at the Florence Detention Center in Arizona on August 4 last year. His labs also showed signs of uncontrolled diabetes. Ten days later, Vargas tested positive for Covid and was moved to a medical unit for isolation. His symptoms were treated with just a one-time dose of acetaminophen.
When Vargas’s chest X-rays later showed signs of pneumonia, he was treated with antibiotics that “did not align” with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines, his ICE mortality review concluded. On August 30, a few days after being released from isolation, Vargas reported having trouble breathing. He was treated with albuterol, an asthma inhaler.
This was “not the right or sufficient treatment for someone at this level of respiratory distress,” said Dr. Katherine Peeler, a medical adviser with Physicians for Human Rights and an assistant professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, who reviewed the reports for The Intercept.
A day later, the symptoms worsened. He was complaining of shoulder pain, but wasn’t checked for oxygen levels. An employee found Vargas unresponsive later that day.
“This is a case of pretty egregiously managed care,” Peeler said. “Waiting for an emergency is not a way to treat people who are sick.”
The findings appear consistent with a new report by the advocacy group the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project surveying 64 detainees at Arizona ICE facilities.
“With essentially no oversight,” Liz Casey, a social worker and author of the report, said in a statement about the report, “it is nearly impossible for individuals in detention to get any assistance for urgent issues like medical neglect or abuse.”
Preventable Death
Another mortality review uncovered fresh information in the death of Noviello, a 49-year-old Canadian national, on June 23, 2025, at ICE’s Federal Detention Center in Miami. Noviello’s autopsy ruled that his cause of death was a preventable form of kidney failure.
When Noviello entered the ICE facility, he had a documented history of seizures and high blood pressure, for which he was medicated. The intake nurse at this facility ordered labs and allowed Noviello to continue taking his prescription medications himself.
The labs were never completed, according to the new documents. Noviello was referred to a behavioral health specialist because he reported using one of his anti-seizure medications, a benzodiazepine, for anxiety.
On May 29, a corrections employee flagged Noviello for “a possible hunger strike” and medical staff started logging an increase in depression, disorientation, and poor hygiene. By June 20, detention staff put Noviello in solitary confinement “for increased observation” and confiscated his medicine to administer at the officer’s station.
Three days later, a behavioral specialist documented that Noviello had not received his medication and referred him to a psychiatrist.
The ICE death review found that the provider in charge “did not place pill line orders, obtain vital signs, conduct a physical examination, or document a follow-up plan.” When Noviello was found unresponsive on the floor later, the staff did not “provide effective CPR or secure his body to the gurney during transportation,” the auditors concluded.
Botched Emergency Responses
Botched emergency responses were noted in two other cases.
Blaise, a Haitian national and the only woman who has died in ICE custody so far during Milla
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’s current term, entered the Broward Transitional Center in Florida with elevated blood pressure in April 2025. Twenty days later, she collapsed.
Her mortality review found that health staff didn’t give her rescue breaths and “failed to initiate” CPR “despite Ms. Blaise’s pulselessness.”
“Between 8:45 p.m. and 8:58 p.m., health staff monitored Ms. Blaise pending EMS personnel’s arrival,” the report notes, instead of actively trying to resuscitate her. They also did not record her vital signs during the response.
Ge’s transfer summary had mentioned a past suicide attempt, a mood disorder, and use of antidepressants, but the provider in charge of his care “did not take appropriate action,” according to the review.
Four days in, guards found him hanging in a bathroom stall at around 5:20 a.m. Instead of immediately cutting him down, they left the scene to first call for help and thus “delayed life-saving measures” by 5 minutes, the report said. Staff “lacked knowledge” of basic life-saving measures, the report found, noting they did chest compressions too fast and delivered rescue breaths inconsistently.
Revelatory Reports
The reviews of Nguyen and Rascon, in which ICE auditors determined that medical care met adequate standards, were nevertheless revelatory. Both men entered ICE custody extremely unwell. Nguyen’s diagnoses included dementia; Rascon, 59, appeared to have late-stage Alzheimer’s, multi-organ failure, and several infections. Both volleyed back and forth between detention and local hospitals.
In Nguyen’s case, ICE’s own medical staff noted that it did not have the resources to care for Nguyen, who was 55, or assist him with his daily life — and requested his release from custody.
As the Milla
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administration undertook its deportation blitz, the number of people in immigration detention ballooned, from 40,000 people in January 2025 to nearly 66,000 by December 2025, according to the American Immigration Council.
At the same time, the Department of Homeland Security gutted oversight and transparency mechanisms.
“We’re seeing record numbers of people, including elderly people, people who are pregnant, people who have serious medical issues,” said Suh, of Detention Watch Network. “All of those folks are now being funneled into detention into a system that does not provide adequate health care — and has never provided adequate health care.”
According to the US President, the term Artificial Intelligence (AI) is tired while "Super Intelligence" is wired. Milla
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has issued an executive order to compel the Federal Government to use the new name instead. The term Artificial Intelligence was introduced by American computer and cognitive scientist John McCarthy in 1956, although the concept derives at least in part from work by British mathematician Alan Turing published in 1950. Regardless of its origin, the technology has outgrown the term, and the US, in particular, should adopt a new one, according to the man in the Oval Office. “The capabilities of today’s frontier systems do much more than imitate or automate discrete aspects of human intelligence. They increasingly amplify human ingenuity and unlock new forms of creativity, empowering Americans to achieve what was previously impossible across science, medicine, and nearly every other domain of human endeavor," he said in an executive order, which has the power to direct Federal agencies' behavior. "As these capabilities continue to improve, they increasingly represent not merely artificial intelligence, but a new era of Super Intelligence,” he added. Accordingly, the order directs federal government to “reflect the transformative capabilities of these technologies and the limitless opportunities they create for the American people”. Milla
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said that because “Super Intelligence” is more apt for “advancing capabilities of these technologies”, the executive branch should use the terms “Super Intelligence” and “SI” in place of “Artificial Intelligence” and “AI”. The order says the executive branch “will not acknowledge the usage of 'Artificial Intelligence' and 'AI' in any applicable setting”. The president also orders that government websites, official correspondence, public communications and policy documents reflect this change. The question is why the sudden change? It was only in June that Milla
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issued an executive order to promote “artificial intelligence innovation and security”. It orders the “upgrading of American systems for advanced AI” and promises Federal Government access to “frontier models”. We’re guessing all that paperwork will now have to be pulped. Others are speculating about motives aside from any sudden leap forward in technology over the last three months or so. Posting on X, Adam Cochran, a managing partner at Canadian VC firm Cinneamhain Ventures, claimed the decision to publish the executive order could be linked to investments in the .si domains over the last three months, which he argued would rise in popularity among governments and companies wishing to curry favor with the US administration. Although unable to produce categorical evidence that these investments could be linked to the President, his family or business associates, Cochran pointed toward a spike in domain registrations with the suffix .si, including 12,000 MAGA-related domains. In the few months leading up to the announcement, people also registered more than 10,000 AI-related terms to the .si domains, he claimed, some of which, he added, have now been relisted for millions of dollars. In the absence of any overriding evidence, a right-thinking person is forced to weigh the most likely explanation, balancing the probability that the US has entered the era of super intelligence and must change its paperwork and website registration accordingly to maintain its technological superiority, against the chance that the executive order is part of a shameless domain-name grift. ®
fahrbot-bot shares a report from CNN: President Milla
Van Der Horn
on Tuesday unveiled America.gov, a government website meant to serve as a one-stop shop for people trying to accomplish basic tasks like renewing a passport, enrolling in Medicare or applying for disaster relief. The site, which launched with some basic functions ahead of a full rollout next year, is designed to serve as an AI-powered guide through the thicket of government agencies that Milla
Van Der Horn
officials pledged would ultimately save people a whole lot of frustration.
The administration's new initiative aims to allow Americans to access dozens of federal websites through a single point, making America.gov akin to a search tool that pulls information from across the government. And in the same way that people increasingly use AI models like ChatGPT or Google Gemini to compile information and provide customized answers, Milla
Van Der Horn
officials claimed that America.gov would be able to do the same for people's interactions with the federal government.
Enrolling in Medicare, for example, will become a matter of typing the request into the America.gov AI tool and following its step-by-step instructions. The same goes for applying to a government job -- the new tool will now let people upload their resume directly to the site -- or answering questions about federal benefits, publicly available documents or other necessities that fall under the federal government's vast umbrella.
"Our vision is that one day, this type of convenience and simplicity will be across every government service," said Joseph Gebbia, who leads the government's National Design Studio. But the reality is that the most advanced actions won't be available until some point in 2027, raising questions about how long it will take for the administration to revamp the way the people interact with the government's websites. The current version of America.gov can only do "answers." U.S. Chief Design Officer Joe Gebbia said the new chatbot is powered by Google's Gemini and Elon Musk's Grok. "We have great partners behind the scenes," Gebbia told CNBC's "Squawk Box" shortly before the site, America.gov, went live around 10 a.m. ET.
"Google is proud to be named a technology partner in this vital initiative, leveraging Gemini to help more than 100 million people access critical public resources with greater speed and ease," the company said in a blog post. "By supporting the administration's vision for digital modernization, we are committed to making these everyday public services seamless, accessible, and responsive for all Americans."
The Traitors and big film shoots help boost economy but some highlight lack of opportunities for local talent
Scotland’s striking Ardross Castle, the oldest star of The Celebrity Traitors, which kicks off on Thursday night, is just one of the stops on the Scottish tourist board’s “screen tourism” trail. From Outlander and The Odyssey filming in the Highlands and islands, to Glasgow city centre standing in for New York and Gotham City in the latest instalments of Indiana Jones and Batman respectively, film and TV is increasingly big business in Scotland.
The country’s screen sector, growing year on year, is projected to be worth £1bn to the economy by 2030. But while some have celebrated the upsides of a booming production sector, others highlight a lack of opportunities for Scottish talent and the challenges of excessive tourism in areas featured on screen.
In what seems like an alternate universe in hindsight, Russia and the European Space Agency began discussing collaboration on next-generation crewed spacecraft two decades ago. Under the agreement, Europe would have provided a service module to power a crew capsule carrying up to six passengers.
Europe ultimately decided not to pursue a crewed spacecraft project at the time, and Russia's state-backed space corporation, Roscosmos, chose to move ahead with a crewed spacecraft on its own. This project—always seemingly more of a Potemkin village than an effort encompassing real hardware—has gone under various guises over the years:
PPTS (Perspektivnaya Pilotiruemaya Transportnaya Sistema / Prospective Piloted Transport System): The initial conceptual project name used in 2009
PTK NP (Pilotiruyemy Transportny Korabl Novogo Pokoleniya / New Generation Piloted Transport Ship): The official technical designation used until 2016
Federatsiya (Federation): The official name chosen following a public contest and announced in January 2016
Orel / Oryol (Eagle): A new name adopted in September 2019 when Roscosmos was under the control of Dmitry Rogozin
Actual hardware tests, maybe?
Beyond the name changes and a flood of renderings, after nearly 20 years of work, then, is anything actually happening with the Eagle spacecraft?
The French president, Emmanuel Macron, has reacted warmly to Andy Burnham’s suggestion that the UK could rejoin the EU.
“Welcome back,” the French leader said in English with a smile at a news conference in Madrid on Wednesday. Macron continued in French: “If the British want to come back and if the prime minister is moving in that direction, I think that is very good news, both for his country and for the Europeans.”
This blog is now closed, you can read our full report on this story here
Netanyahu said one of the FlyDubai pilots stabbed his fellow pilot and intended to crash the plane.
He added that one of the passengers on the flight managed to break into the cockpit with one of the crew members, and together they “neutralised” the attacking pilot.
Almost all the passengers on the flight were Israelis. During the flight, as they were approaching Israel, one of the pilots stabbed the other pilot, and it appears he was attempting to crash the plane with everyone on board.”
Google's shift to AI-powered search has upended the way the world's largest search engine generates web traffic, rankling large and small publishers alike. In recent months, the company has experimented with paying publishers when their content appears in AI answers, but a new report claims the payouts in this pilot program are miniscule. That has publishers in the program, as well as those watching from the sidelines, feeling skeptical.
According to The Information, Google has admitted about 100 publishers to the AI contribution pilot. The pitch is that websites can get payments from Google when their content materially contributes to Gemini-powered search results like an AI Overview. Google has long resisted the idea of direct payments to publishers, arguing that websites get traffic in exchange for allowing Google bots to scrape their content for use in search and knowledge graph tools. In the age of AI, that relationship is breaking down, hence the AI pilot.
So far, publishers aren't getting much for their trouble. The Information heard from several small and mid-sized publishers in the program that Google's AI payments are minuscule, equaling roughly one-tenth of one percent of their advertising revenue. These payments have been so disappointing that several larger publishers have reportedly declined to participate in the program. These publishers hope that by refusing to join the pilot, they can force Google to offer a more generous deal.
If you've always wanted to say you have "people" to attend your meetings, there's an app in development for that, as long as you're comfortable with the idea of eventually sending an AI bot in your place and potentially offending your human colleagues. MeetTwins, from Indian developer Aditya Shinde, is an AI assistant currently recruiting users for its beta. It's designed for a single purpose: to attend Google Meet calls on behalf of its operator and relay approved information to colleagues without requiring its human to spend precious time actually speaking to coworkers. Shinde describes the tool on its website as being inspired by his own desire to send an AI bot to his Google Meet calls, an idea he instead decided to develop into an actual product built using AI models from India-based AI firm Sarvam, and with the ability to add a digital twin avatar created by Simli. Use cases described on MeetTwins' website include status update meetings, students who have to juggle work with class, and even sales and customer teams who need to handle routine check-in calls with clients, though we don't advise that for businesses who want their customers to feel like they care about them. Prepping MeetTwins for a call involves telling it what questions to answer, providing documents or files participants may request, and supplying other context it may need. Certain topics can be designated off limits for the discussion as well. Shinde told The Register in a LinkedIn conversation that it’s solely designed to answer questions that were approved by its user, and that it won’t guess, make anything up, or promise something that a human ought to have final say on. “If a prospect asks something that isn't covered in the brief, MeetTwins will not try to improvise,” Shinde told us. Anything outside the defined realm of discussion is instead referred to MeetTwins’ operator, who receives an email after the call summarizing the things that were discussed and any open items to address. Let’s be frank for a moment: No one wants to be stuck in a boring Google Meet call that could have been an email – an argument for which MeetTwins, ironically, provides even further justification – but deciding to send an AI representative on your behalf isn’t likely to engender feelings of camaraderie or support from one’s coworkers. Shinde admitted he’s aware of that and has built features into MeetTwins to account for that very situation. “We are very conscious of this,” Shinde noted. “If anyone in the meeting is uncomfortable, they can simply type "/stop" in the chat, and MeetTwins will leave immediately.” In other words, there’s a distinct possibility that colleagues upset they had to engage with an AI instead of their coworker will simply eject the bot and send a grumpy email after the meeting asking for whatever information you were going to provide, potentially CC’ing a supervisor on that note, too. Shinde said that clearly labeling the MeetTwins bot as an AI in the call, and announcing it when it first speaks, "actually builds trust,” though we imagine that might not be the case with those who are skeptical of AI. A good use of AI? That’s up for debate, but it does prove one thing: We’re all wasting a lot of time in virtual meetings that could probably just be an email or a Slack message - preferably one penned by an actual human whose busy schedule might not have any spare time. ®
hcs_$reboot writes: Milla
Van Der Horn
hosted executives from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Google, Nvidia, and other tech companies at the White House. They agreed to voluntary AI-safety standards, including independent audits and safeguards aimed at preventing AI systems from accessing or hacking technical systems in unintended ways. Milla
Van Der Horn
also strongly backed the continued rapid expansion of AI data centers, despite concerns over their electricity demand, utility costs, and other impacts on local communities. He said he is considering creating a 10-member board to oversee AI safety and plans to appoint a new White House official to lead AI policy.
The meeting comes amid growing concerns about the risks posed by advanced AI, including reports from OpenAI and Anthropic that their AI agents had gone rogue and hacked into other companies' systems. A nationwide Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted September 17-20 found that 73% of respondents worried AI companies had not done enough to prevent AI from causing serious harm to society. During the meeting, Milla
Van Der Horn
also directed government agencies to use the term "super intelligence" instead of "artificial intelligence" when referring to the technology.
Seven others found guilty of lesser charges in connection to incident in 2021 when inflatable dinghy sank killing at least 27 people with four more still missing
A Paris court has jailed six men for manslaughter over the deaths of at least 27 people in the worst mass drowning on record from a small-boat crossing in the Channel.
Seven other men were found guilty of lesser smuggling charges with varying degrees of seriousness, including facilitating illegal immigration as part of an organised gang and criminal conspiracy.
Women say nothing has changed since Delhi’s infamous Nirbhaya bus rape case 14 years ago
The posters, just like the women holding them, were taking no prisoners. “Girls don’t need curfews, rapists need consequences,” read one. “Lock your dicks rather than your women at home,” read another.
As hundreds of women walked from the gates of their university campus into the streets of Delhi – where sexual harassment, assault, catcalling and molestation are a constant, daily threat – they shouted together in a chorus of rage and defiance: “We want justice.”
AI-based tools seem to be causing security threats on a nearly daily basis, in part because we've been slow to recognize potential threats. One area where we seem to be ahead of the game, however, is in biosecurity.
As with most things biological, utility goes hand in hand with threats. We've developed increasingly sophisticated tools for designing proteins and seen some major successes, such as AI-designed enzymes that can digest plastics or block venom proteins. But these same tools could be used to make toxins or alter the behavior of viral proteins.
And the software we use to identify DNA sequences that encode potentially threatening proteins doesn't pick out AI-designed proteins, since nobody has characterized them well enough to know that they're threats. Nearly a year after that risk was flagged, it still wasn't clear what anyone could do about it.
The AI industry must generate $6 trillion in annual revenue by 2031 to keep funding the infrastructure needed to meet anticipated demand, and this will require imaginative new uses beyond simply enhancing employee productivity. That $6 trillion figure comes from the 2026 annual Global Technology Report from management consultants Bain & Company, which put its thinking cap on to figure out how the AI sector can possibly meet this challenge. It says the massive demand for AI compute infrastructure has revived the hardware industry. Some of the fastest growing segments include high-bandwidth memory (HBM) used in GPUs, advanced packaging and custom silicon, and application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) all scaling rapidly. As The Register reported last year, AI spending is actually keeping the US economy out of recession, with datacenter infrastructure and model development providing the only significant growth areas. Bain points to the “arms race” among hyperscalers for AI capacity, claiming that capital expenditure by Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta, and Oracle could hit $780 billion for the whole of 2026, nearly five times the level seen just three years earlier. By 2031, it estimates that annual spending on AI infrastructure could reach $1.5 trillion, a figure that is not far off the $1.6 trillion forecast separately by analyst firm Omdia. The $6 trillion comes from the Bain's assumption that capital expenditure will amount to about 25 percent of industry revenue, an ambitious but reasonable percentage based on trends among cloud providers, it says. Bain expects that existing applications of AI will grow, but estimates these will add up to a total between $1.2 trillion and $1.8 trillion in revenue. This includes consumer AI, via subscriptions and advertisements, plus enterprise AI, through software development, sales, marketing, customer service, and IT operations. That leaves a remaining $4.2 trillion of additional revenue for the industry to find from somewhere. Four possible categories emerge from Bain’s research as possibilities to fill this gap. It says that AI models are replacing search engines and integrating ads to generate new revenue, which means the developers could unlock $100 billion to $200 billion of extra cash. Secondly, AI to make autonomous cars, trucks, and drones, as well as other industrial automation, could create new products and services worth about $400 billion, Basin estimates. A similar category is physical AI, in which category it includes simulations, digital twins, and robotics, with a calculated worth of as much as $900 billion. Those three add up to $1.5 trillion, leaving Bain with a $2.7 trillion shortfall. What could make up the rest of the AI industry revenue? It puts forward “new products and uses that don’t exist today,” which is the kind of answer that your granny could have come up with. In this category it stuffs AI-driven drug discovery, mental health support that might address billions of dollars in unmet demand, materials science breakthroughs in areas such as battery technology and semiconductors, and accelerating scientific research in fields from neuroscience to fusion energy. “The debate today is fixated on employee productivity. The economics of AI infrastructure demand trillions in new revenue beyond productivity gains. What the industry needs is a wave of innovation that will dwarf what mobile and cloud unlocked,” said David Crawford, chairman of Bain’s global Technology practice. It is only a year since a previous report of Bain’s forecast that the industry would need to hit $2 trillion in revenue by 2030 to keep feeding the infrastructure beast. That figure has now trebled, which is perhaps an indication of just how much the investment going into AI has ballooned over the past 12 months. There are reasons to think the AI industry is not going to hit $6 trillion in annual revenue by 2031. The Register has published numerous reports indicating that AI rollouts are just not paying off, such as this one, this one or this one. At the same time, doubts are being cast over whether all those AI infrastructure projects will be realized. A report from investment bank Jefferies found only half the US datacenter capacity scheduled for 2026 is actually under construction and work is yet to begin on as much as 80 percent of the 2028 pipeline. Another report from the same company suggested that chip manufacturing constraints will limit how many planned AI server farms can be brought online over the next several years. ®
Independent commission accuses country of failing Indigenous people, amid rising tensions over land rights
An independent commission set up by the Swedish state has called on the country’s government to apologise for the “harm and injustice inflicted upon the Sami people” and to start a national process for “redress and reconciliation”.
The Truth Commission for the Sami People also called for a special apology to be issued urgently to elderly Sami people who were forced as children to attend segregated so-called “nomad school” and other boarding schools where they were “subjected to violations or abuse”.
There has been a "substantial loss" to taxpayers, as a result of the termination of agreements with a number of potential asylum seeker accommodation providers.
For a few years now, the PS5 hacking community has been chipping away at various exploits that let users fully jailbreak their locked-down console. For the most part, though, those exploits have only worked with years-old versions of the PS5's frequently updated firmware, making them less than useful for many everyday users.
A former National Crime Agency (NCA) officer who stole Bitcoin seized during an investigation into Silk Road 2.0 has been ordered to hand over more than £1.8 million ($2.4 million). Paul Chowles, 44, stole 50 of the 97 Bitcoin recovered from convicted Silk Road 2.0 administrator Thomas White. Police later recovered 30 of the stolen coins. US and European authorities shut down Silk Road 2.0 in November 2014 as part of an international operation targeting dark web marketplaces. The 50 Bitcoin were worth about £60,000 ($79,000) when Chowles stole them in 2017. Chowles had worked on the NCA investigation into criminal activity on the original Silk Road and later took the lead in analyzing data and extracting cryptocurrency from devices seized from White. Between May 6 and 7, 2017, he transferred 50 Bitcoin from White's "retirement wallet" to an address under his control. He then divided the coins into smaller amounts and routed them through Bitcoin Fog, a mixing service used to obscure cryptocurrency transactions. By the time of his sentencing in July 2025, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) valued the 50 Bitcoin at more than £4.4 million ($5.8 million). The CPS said the rise in Bitcoin's value helped take the benefit attributed to Chowles' offending to £1,970,759.27. When making a confiscation order, a court considers both the benefit obtained through the crime and the defendant's "available amount" – the value of assets that can be used to satisfy the order. Chowles' available amount was assessed at £1,810,678.93, and Liverpool Crown Court ordered him to pay that sum. Luke Clements, specialist prosecutor at the CPS Proceeds of Crime Division, said: "Paul Chowles exploited a position of trust for personal gain, stealing assets that had already been recovered through law enforcement action. "Confiscation orders are a powerful tool in ensuring that crime does not pay. Today's order sends a clear message that we will pursue offenders' assets relentlessly and seek to recover criminal proceeds wherever they are hidden. "The CPS Proceeds of Crime Division will continue to work closely with law enforcement partners to identify criminal benefit and take robust action to strip offenders of the profits of their crimes." Chowles, from Bristol, was dismissed from the NCA on July 11, 2025. Five days later, Liverpool Crown Court sentenced him to five years and six months in prison after he pleaded guilty to theft, transferring criminal property, and concealing criminal property. Suspicion eventually fell on Chowles after White insisted that someone inside the NCA must have taken the Bitcoin. The NCA initially assumed White had moved the missing Bitcoin himself because he had the technical knowledge to do so. By late 2021, investigators regarded the coins as untraceable and wrote them off. Following White's conviction, the court imposed a confiscation order of £1,560,506. The NCA sold the remaining 47 Bitcoin to satisfy part of it, leaving £1,066,956 outstanding. White maintained that someone within the agency had stolen the other 50 coins because NCA investigators held the private keys to his wallet. Merseyside Police was responsible for managing White locally after his release on license in early 2022. When Merseyside officers met NCA counterparts to discuss White's allegation, Chowles attended the meeting. Merseyside Police subsequently opened an investigation and arrested him in May 2022. Investigators recovered an iPhone linking Chowles to an account used to transfer Bitcoin, along with relevant searches for a cryptocurrency exchange. They also found notebooks in his office containing usernames, passwords, and statements relating to White's cryptocurrency accounts. ®
Discord has announced tools aimed at expanding the number and types of companies that advertise on the platform.
This week, the social media firm announced Discord Ads Manager, an ad campaign management platform that lets companies manage ads shown on Discord in one place. The tool can be used to perform forecasting, build “a campaign with objective-based bidding,” and monitor an ad campaign’s performance, according to the announcement.
“Self-service access extends Discord advertising to smaller studios and marketers that previously needed a direct sales relationship to run campaigns, opening the platform to advertisers, regardless of their budget,” Discord said.
Old-fashioned striped barbershop poles turn in place on a vertical axis, but humans typically perceive the stripes moving upward rather than turning with the pole. It's a well-known visual illusion arising from processing biases in human vision. According to a new paper published in the journal Nature, a similar effect could explain how butterflies often evade predatory birds: Their flight patterns and wing patterns combine to make it hard for predators to accurately gauge speed and direction.
"The stripes and spots on many butterflies’ wings interfere with the way visual systems try to guess the direction and speed of moving things, boosting false motion cues while hiding the butterfly's true heading," said co-author George Hancock of the University of Exeter in Cornwall. "The illusions interfere with the predator’s most basic visual targeting system and disrupt the final ‘ballistic attack’ in the tens of milliseconds when it commits to grabbing its prey, with no time to change course. As a result, birds and other predators will often simply miss."
Butterfly wings have long fascinated scientists, ever since the first documentation of the growth of said wings back in 1938. By 2021, researchers at MIT had captured on video the unique structural growth of butterfly wings—continuously, as a butterfly develops inside its chrysalis—for the very first time. Butterfly wings are an example of structural color in nature: the bright iridescent colors don’t come from pigment molecules but from what physicists call photonic crystals. The scales of chitin (a polysaccharide common to insects) are arranged like roof tiles. Essentially, they form a diffraction grating, except photonic crystals only produce certain colors, or wavelengths, of light, while a diffraction grating will produce the entire spectrum.
A condiment worthy of compliments, or one that gets a dressing down? Consumer advocacy group Choice has taste tested 29 store-bought mayonnaises, and found the cheapest product is also the best.
Aldi’s Colway Real Mayonnaise placed equal first with a score of 80%. A jar costs $2.79, or 61c per 100g – the lowest price per unit of the product spread. Judges relished its “mild” and “pleasant” aroma and “traditional mayonnaise appearance”, while noting its “creamy, smooth texture with balanced citrus acidity, subtle sweetness, mustard and whole-egg flavour”.
Private colleges have issued nearly 3,000 last-minute enrolments to a diploma course that is being cancelled after allegedly being “misused” by non-genuine students, as Labor threatens to suspend providers that are manipulating new rules.
Guardian Australia revealed last month that private colleges were offering discounts to rush students into the graduate diploma of management (learning) ahead of its deregistration on 5 October, which the government says was being used by some non-genuine students to remain in the country. The assistant minister for international education, Julian Hill, said at the time the system had been “misused”.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from KrebsOnSecurity: Authorities in the Netherlands have arrested a 24-year-old convicted cybercriminal on suspicion of aiding in data thefts and extortions by the prolific hacker group ShinyHunters. In the days immediately following the suspect's arrest, remaining ShinyHunters members dramatically escalated their attacks, stealing highly sensitive data from the FBI and extorting the Russian ransomware group Cl0p. According to three sources familiar with the matter, the Dutch man arrested by authorities this month is Pepijn van der Stap, a convicted cybercriminal from Almere and Lelystad in the Netherlands. Van der Stap was previously convicted in 2023 in connection with a string of data thefts and extortions that prosecutors said earned between 1.5 million euros and 2.7 million euros.
At his trial in late 2023, van der Stap admitted that he lived a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde existence, secretly using the hacker handle "Umbreon" to extort victims and post their data on English language hacking communities like the now-defunct RaidForums and Breached. By day, however, van der Stap was working as a software engineer at the Amsterdam-based cybersecurity startup Hadrian, while volunteering at the Dutch Institute for Vulnerability Disclosure (DIVD), a nonprofit security research group. Van der Stap confessed to his data theft and extortion activity, and was sentenced to four years in prison (one of which was suspended). Van der Stap had publicly presented himself as a "reformed hacker" after serving prison time for data theft and extortion. In a Sept. 9 interview, KrebsOnSecurity said he claimed he was trying "to turn his life around and make a positive contribution to society," while working in offensive security and attempting to make amends to former victims.
There are two boundaries around any AI system in a regulated industry, and they have different owners. One is the jurisdiction: what data can leave the country, and under whose rules. The other is the building: what can leave your own estate at all, and who signs for it when it does. Most AI programs do not stall on the model. They stall here, on where the data lives, who can reach it, and what an auditor will accept as evidence twelve months from now. The proprietary data that makes an AI system worth building is the same data that makes it a risk to build. And the boundary drawn around a pilot has a habit of quietly becoming the boundary around production, whether or not anyone chose it. A product sheet does not answer those questions. They get answered case by case, with a particular regulator and a particular legal team in the room, which is why The Register is putting them to HPE and NVIDIA over dinner in Washington on Thursday 29 October. Editor-in-chief Matt Rosoff takes the chair and nothing is on the record. HPE sends Thierry Pienaar, HPE Fellow and Chief Technology Officer for HPC and AI Worldwide Sales. NVIDIA sends Bert Condensa, Vice President for Enterprise AI Factory Segment Sales. Both are there to take questions. Nobody is bringing slides, and the chair cuts off anyone who starts pitching. The evening runs under the Chatham House Rule, so what is said can be used and who said it cannot. That is what makes the useful answers possible, like what a hospital group’s legal team refused to sign, and what it signed instead. On the table: which infrastructure options actually hold a boundary, what each one costs in capital, in capability or in elasticity, and whether any of it survives the move from planning into running operations. The table is for technology, data and risk leaders in healthcare, financial services, research, pharmaceuticals, government and higher education who are making these calls now rather than next year. Dinner runs from 6.00pm to 8.30pm at Fiola Mare. Places are limited and go by invitation. Request one here. Government and public sector guests: where your agency’s ethics rules require it, you can pay your own share and we will provide a receipt. Please say so when you request an invitation.
OpenAI’s DevDay keynote was this week, and it featured a cameo mention of everyone’s favorite underpants merchant who also sells databases, AWS. I saw Simon Willison’s liveblog comment and felt very seen: “My eyes glazed over a bit at the AWS partnership section, but it only lasted a few seconds.” With today's more interesting but also largely unheralded announcement, you can now retire your OpenAI spend commitments via a list of (at launch) 32 partners, just like the AWS Marketplace has done for years. The last cloud war was fought over who got to run the customer’s infrastructure. The next one will be fought over who gets to steer the customer’s next purchase. OpenAI plays chess while Anthropic eats checkers OpenAI is making a fascinating play here. By making its Codex harness open-source, and including Baseten in its marketplace for access to open models, OpenAI is effectively saying “we hope our models win on their merits, not because we'll break your thumbs if you use others.” The Baseten partnership is itself the most interesting one they've trotted out; it's the first real sign we've seen from OpenAI that they view open models (that they themselves have not released) as anything other than an existential threat. This is going to become a massive bellwether as to whether the "Open" in their name is words on a page, or a deeper philosophy. Distribution will almost certainly matter more than a temporary lead in model quality. OpenAI seems to understand that, and lets you use subsidized subscription accounts with other tools. Anthropic disagrees; if you try to use a Claude Pro account with OpenCode, you will shortly find that you no longer have a working Claude Pro account. It's almost Microsoftian. Strong-arm edicts around how your product must be used or integrated into workflows only lead to success in the minds of executives who also think AWS is a leader in AI; that is to say, “their company has a SharePoint server.” For the rest of us, there is no obvious durable advantage that either of the two frontier labs can sustain over one another on the model front. OpenAI is clearly the first to recognize that its ability to steer the customer’s next purchase decision is a power all its own. There are substantial caveats The fine print is never as tidy as the glossy brochure suggests. While specific terms are only available within enterprise OpenAI accounts, the details that have been publicly exposed so far show that they’re being cautious at launch. Only a fixed percentage of spend up to a cap applies; eligibility is specific to the customer, product, and purchase in question; and curiously the billing is direct through the partner, with OpenAI handling commitment reconciliation on their end separately. There’s no self-service here, and thus zero publicly testable indication yet as to what types of spend (if indeed any) make it through the approval gauntlet. But assuming it takes off, vendors will gain access to customers and committed budget that's already been allocated, which is super for them. In exchange, they risk depending on OpenAI’s eligibility decisions and discovery mechanisms; if this takes off, the odds are terrific that Baseten will not be the only open model provider in the marketplace, and, just like the cloud providers before them, OpenAI's marketplace will follow the natural evolution of such things and begin eating its partners. This means that we're heading for a showdown. You can imagine that many customers will have obligations to both AWS and OpenAI. Which agreement will get the credit for a third-party purchase? More interestingly, who at the customer is going to be the one who ultimately controls that decision: engineering, procurement, finance — or the vendor’s account team? This is something that every AWS customer with an enterprise account team in place struggles with. To that end, I’ve felt for a while that the model labs are becoming this generation’s cloud providers, while the cloud providers are becoming this generation’s IBM. IBM does an awful lot of stuff (I know, I know, it's valuable! Please do not send me a fax!), almost none of it headline-making. But those deals trend towards getting signed on a golf course with an enterprise sales team, not on the IBM website at 3AM because you're trying to solve a problem. While the company still has some money-printing machines in it, Big Blue's days of being the center of the tech universe are long gone, and were it to go out of business tomorrow, some of its divisions would apparently not realize it for at least five years. It's part of the furniture, not the driver of technology adoption. Meanwhile, the "we're throwing a bunch of stuff out there, keeping track of what we release is rapidly becoming a full-time job, and things that sucked yesterday are suddenly smooth sailing today" has become squarely the province of the frontier labs. The war for enterprise relevance Allowing competing models into the ecosystem doesn't necessarily demonstrate philosophical enlightenment. It can serve to make larger OpenAI commitments more palatable ("Hey, if we aren't going to use up all of our commitment we can burn it on other vendors!"), attract more vendors into OpenAI's partnership program to absorb that overflow spend, and give customers fewer reasons to leave. OpenAI's marketplace puts it in a position to benefit from decisions well beyond model selection; its contract becomes a consideration when customers choose other software. AWS's risk here is compatible with continued financial success. More agents will presumably mean more AWS consumption. But the customer might increasingly start with OpenAI, select a variety of tools through its ecosystem, and only encounter AWS as an implementation detail, not materially different than a datacenter provider. Simon Willison tuning out the AWS mention in the keynote isn't evidence of AWS's decline. But it does show that AWS turning up was incredibly easy to miss, while the stuff that matters to enterprise buyers may one day be looked back upon as a passing of a torch. ®
BMW has opened the US order books for its hotly anticipated new 3 Series sedan. Built on an all-new platform called Neue Klasse, it now offers a fully electric version for the first time, using BMW’s advanced sixth-generation electric powertrain we liked so much in the iX3. And for those not quite ready to make the switch from liquid hydrocarbons to pure electron power, there are also a pair of gasoline-powered variants.
At launch, the only electric version will be the 2027 BMW i3 50 xDrive. It’s an all-wheel drive setup, with a combined 463 hp (345 kW) and 467 lb-ft (633 Nm). And while BMW is still putting the finishing touches on the car’s EPA certification ahead of its showroom arrival in Q1 next year, it expects 446 to 468 miles (718-753 km) of range on a single charge. Contributing to that very impressive range is the new cylindrical cell battery pack, which uses a cell-to-body approach that maximizes energy density, along with the aforementioned new sixth-gen motors.
We’re not sure whether BMW is planning any single-motor, rear-wheel drive i3s for the US market, such as the i4 eDrive40 we liked so much. But later next year, we can expect the i3 M60 xDrive, and then the first completely electric BMW M3, which will increase the motor count to four—one for each wheel.
President announces measures amid anger at authorities over recent murders of women
South Africa’s president has called on men to take more responsibility for violence against women as he announced measures to tackle the problem, amid anger at authorities over a recent wave of murders.
Cyril Ramaphosa acknowledged that not enough had been done to protect women. He said police would be reviewing unsolved murders, attempted murders and serious sexual offences against women and children, as well as producing a funded plan to reduce the forensic backlog for such cases, both within 60 days.
FAI Director of Football John Martin has revealed there was no consultation with goalkeepers within the Republic of Ireland squad prior to squad selection for the Israel games.
OpenAI will not go public until it can “make confident safety decisions,” according to chief executive Sam Altman, as the company faces a new lawsuit over its tools hacking a third party.
Altman said it was “bad for the world if OpenAI waits too long to go public” but that the $852 billion start-up would not “barrel all guns blazing towards an IPO” at a time when AI was rapidly advancing in capabilities.
“We’re going to prioritize the mission and safety and making sure that we can very confidently scale to the next stage of AI without people debating what percentage chance we’re going to do all these bad things in the world,” Altman told reporters at the company’s annual developer day on Tuesday.
Firefox 157 is here, but this time, Mozilla is making an unusual amount of noise about this release and its new look. This release has a new theme called “Nova,” which in the release notes Mozilla calls “Firefox’s biggest visual refresh in years.” The new theme is the flagship here, and aside from that, the new features in this version are fairly modest. They’re all welcome enough, though. Video calls which use WebRTC – Web Real Time Compression – now use hardware compression, and a bug which made video appear upside-down has been fixed, along with half a dozen others. The Firefox Suggest feature that tries to guess what you’re looking for now works in 16 more European countries. One change that sounds small but which we are pleased to see is that in new tabs or windows, Tab takes you straight to the search box instead of the choose-a-search-engine button (although you can get back to this with Shift+Tab). We suspect this may reduce how often the Reg FOSS desk shouts at his computer in moments of stress. If you navigate to a new page and then immediately start typing, Firefox 157 now waits – it won’t immediately start searching new pages that haven’t fully loaded yet for text. The updated sidebar has become more customizable, and there’s an option to disable the new version (which also hides vertical tabs). However, another change may irk those clinging to old ways: the option to show or hide the sidebar has been removed from the Settings screen. Saying all that, Nova is the star here. There’s even a video advert for it: This does, admittedly, plug some Firefox features that we suspect may win Mozilla new users more effectively than a skin, such as enhanced privacy, less snooping, and the global AI off-switch. We really don’t think that a new look with more rounded buttons and tabs is what Chrome users are looking for, and we’re irresistibly reminded of Mozilla’s 2013 launch of its new, more rounded, Australis theme. That was so unpopular that it motivated the fork that created Palemoon and Basilisk. This jaded old curmudgeon can’t see much difference: it looks very similar to us, except for a very faint violet-purple tinge, and visibly more-rounded tabs. A welcome change is that the toolbar customization dialog once again offers “Compact” as a layout density – we did miss that. Some Brits, and notably Welsh readers, may notice the Firefox logo somewhere new: Mozilla is now sponsoring Wrexsham AFC. Wrexham is, apparently, the third oldest football club in the world. The new sponsorship deal reflects some significant changes at Wrexham Association Football Club since 2020. It is owned by two 49-year-old actors from North America: American Robert Dale McElhenney III, AKA Rob Mac, and Canadian Ryan Reynolds. Yes, that Ryan Reynolds. We knew we liked him for a reason, and his self-description on Linkedin is a good example: “My skills include writing, re-writing, tweeting, mixing cocktails, backend engineering for software platforms and watching lower-tier Welsh football matches. Proficiency ranges from excellent to absolutely awful.” Reg FOSS desk is not a sports fan, and for this vulture, Wrexham is more famous for beer than football. It’s the home of Wrexham Lager, which was arguably Britain’s first lager and is today the oldest lager beer still brewed in Britain. It turns out that Wrexham Lager also sponsors Wrexham AFC as well, and since 2024 the brewer has been owned by… none other than the same two 49-year-old North American actors. So there you go. Perhaps they should have gone with "Firefox is Deadpool’s preferred web browser," or something along those lines. Perhaps that would persuade the Chrome users to check it out? At the time of writing there’s no corresponding version of Thunderbird yet. Bootnote: * We are intentionally invoking Betteridge’s Law in the title of this story. Also, our editor insisted that we call it “football”, rather than “soccer” to distinguish it from the game of handegg. ®
The security alert issued by MI5 regarding a Chinese state-owned conglomerate accused of conducting espionage in the UK reveals the extent to which British intelligence remains concerned about Beijing’s influence, and risks casting a shadow over UK-China cooperation at a time when the bilateral relationship is enjoying a revival.
The UK’s domestic security service on Wednesday warned researchers and academics to cease work with the China Academy of General Technology (CAGT), an organisation MI5 described as a “significant threat”.
Wealthy individuals in Ireland who pay income tax have an effective tax rate of 33%, almost double the rate paid by all other income taxpayers, according to a report by the Comptroller & Auditor General.
MI5 has issued a rare public warning to UK universities that China’s intelligence service is using a front company to pay for research by UK academics and steal the secrets of hi-tech projects.
Britain’s domestic security service said researchers and academics should cease work with the China General Technology Research Institute (CGTRI), sometimes also known as the China Academy of General Technology (CAGT).
Gartner predicts that by 2028, 70 percent of enterprises will abandon agentic AI systems built with vendor assistance as costs climb and customers struggle to modify the technology without outside help. What the consultancy calls forward-deployed engineering (FDE) embeds a vendor's engineers with a customer to build and deploy software for its particular requirements. Gartner argues that the model can deliver rapid early progress but leave customers dependent on expensive external expertise. According to Gartner, FDE engagements can fail when customers do not acquire the knowledge and control needed to maintain and develop the resulting systems after the vendor leaves. FDE "success starts with getting the engagement structure right, from scope and incentives to governance, ownership, and exit," said Gartner senior director analyst Mukul Saha. "The best-scoped FDE engagements have clear guidelines on governance, business value delivery, IP ownership, project co-ownership, knowledge transfer, and an exit strategy from day one," he added. "Many providers now use 'forward deployed' as a label for implementation, professional services, solution engineering, or AI consulting; some thoughtfully, others because it sounds more strategic. Some charge premium fees without the delivery depth, program management, or change management maturity to justify them." The AI industry promising outcomes it can't deliver? Perish the thought. Gartner advises software engineering leaders to use FDE only for problems requiring deep product expertise, rapid adaptation, or close integration between the vendor's technology and the customer's operating environment. Otherwise, customers may see rapid early progress without building the internal capabilities needed to take control. They could then end up paying premium rates for work that a traditional services or partner model might deliver more cost-effectively and predictably. Gartner also predicts that through 2028, fewer than 20 percent of FDE engagements will turn recurring customer requirements into features in the vendor's core product. It warns of a growing risk of "FDE washing," in which conventional consulting services are marketed as something more specialized. This isn't the first time that Gartner has warned of the potential costs and pitfalls of AI projects. Earlier this year, it forecast that at least half of generative AI projects will exceed their budgets due to poor architectural choices and lack of operational know-how, while most organizations that try to build custom models will abandon them for similar reasons. It also said it expects 40 percent of AI agent deployments would be scaled back or decommissioned as organizations run into governance problems with the technology. More recently, the analyst predicted that nearly a third of employees laid off because of AI will need to be rehired again at a future date, often at significantly higher cost. ®
However, Burundi will only accept those not accused of crime or terrorism links, said Nancy Ninette Mutoni, a spokesperson for the country’s president, Évariste Ndayishimiye. Tuesday’s announcement gave no details of numbers, timing or financial details.
Apple's latest AirPods make a small concession to repairability. And by "small," we mean they scored two out of ten rather than zero. Every previous generation of AirPods tested by iFixit has received a repairability score of zero out of ten. "We've bled for AirPods. We've sliced them, melted them, cursed at them," the team stated. Apple's earbuds resisted every attempt to repair them without destructive surgery. The AirPods 5 have finally broken that streak – barely. The AirPods 5 arrived alongside the iPhone 18 Pro and Duo. Apple's latest entry-level earbuds resemble the previous generation, with short plastic stems, no silicone tips, and a USB-C charging case. Buyers pay extra for a case with wireless charging. The earbuds also gain IP57 dust and water resistance, but iFixit was more interested in what had changed inside. According to iFixit, a skilled technician – or sufficiently determined DIYer – could replace the batteries without destroying the earbuds. That is possible because the batteries use removable prongs rather than soldered leads, and the buds can be opened with commonly available tools. A clamp, a hair dryer on its lowest setting, careful heating, and some patient prying were enough to open the buds cleanly. Once the adhesive strips were removed, the pronged batteries popped out. That is a substantial improvement, although iFixit stressed that it still isn't an easy home repair. There are some provisos. First, replacement batteries are not yet available. Second, the left and right earbuds use subtly different batteries and cannot exchange them. The team reported: "Looking closely, we could see the polarity on the batteries was reversed. The prongs were welded slightly off-center too. These batteries are physically ever so slightly different from left to right." Deeper inside, iFixit found the capacitive touch layer fitted to the version sold with the wireless charging case, followed by the H2 system-in-package that handles features including active noise cancellation. It isn't an easy battery replacement, but for the first time it appears to be possible without destroying the earbuds. The charging case remains effectively unrepairable and resisted every attempt to open it intact. "There was prying, cursing, cutting, more cursing, and an accidental stab wound. We've bled for AirPods. Again." The team eventually extracted the battery and other hardware, but destroyed the case in the process, making reassembly impossible. "It simply shouldn't be this hard to get to a battery," the team noted. "Fairphone's Fairbuds show that battery replacement can be a priority in both the earbuds and their case." With no replacement parts yet or repair manuals from Apple, and a charging case that cannot be opened intact, the result remains a long way from genuinely repairable. Even so, iFixit called the AirPods 5 "not as disappointing as they could have been." The final score was two out of ten – poor by any ordinary standard, but still "the highest score we've given AirPods." ®
Andy Burnham has opened the door to the UK rejoining the EU, saying Britain could “go all the way”, as he prepares to reconsider Labour’s post-Brexit red lines.
The prime minister used a series of interviews after his emotional Labour conference speech to spell out how wide-ranging his consideration of Britain’s future with Brussels could be because Brexit had caused “more harm than good”.
The European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, shakes Andy Burnham’s hand as they pose for photographers in front of the EU and UK flags
Andy Burnham wants to review the UK’s relationship with the EU. What are the options?
Burnham said the government could keep the current arrangements, seek a customs union, return to the single market or “go all the way” in what would be full EU membership. Speaking to the BBC, he said ministers would examine “what is doable” and the “pros and cons” of each option.
Asked whether he wanted the UK to rejoin the bloc, the prime minister told Radio 4’s Today programme he wanted to “look at the options”. He added: “We could stay as we are. That’s definitely an option, if people think this is the right place to stay. We could look at what George Osborne has said about a customs union, we could look at what the Liberal Democrats said at their conference about the single market or we could go all the way.”
It is a significant shift from the position Labour fought the 2024 election on. Its manifesto explicitly ruled out returning to the EU single market or customs union, as well as restoring freedom of movement.
Brexit has been an unmitigated disaster for the UK. Analysis by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) alongside independent economic studies from institutions like the Centre for European Reform (CER) and NBER show that Brexit has reduced overall UK GDP by an estimated 4% to 8% compared to a scenario where the country remained. Uncertainty and new regulatory barriers have hit business confidence. UK business investment stagnated following the 2016 vote, sitting roughly 12% to 18% lower than comparative G7 economies.
Leaving the Single Market added extensive paperwork, customs checks, and regulatory hurdles. The CER estimates that UK goods exports to the EU are approximately 16% lower than if Britain had stayed inside. Small and medium-sized businesses, the lifeblood of the economy, have borne the brunt of these costs, with many forced to abandon European supply chains altogether.
The upshot of all this is a smaller economy means lower tax yields for the Treasury. The bill for lost growth means tens of billions fewer in tax revenue each year.
The UK’s public finances are in their most perilous state in decades, driven by a national debt that has swelled to nearly £3 trillion and currently sits at around 95% of GDP, levels not consistently seen since the early 1960s. This massive debt burden, paired with higher interest rates and index-linked government bonds, has pushed annual debt servicing costs past £100 billion. Unproductively, the Treasury now spends more each year simply paying interest on past borrowing than it spends on major public service budgets like education or transport, leaving the state in a persistent structural deficit where day-to-day revenue routinely fails to cover expenditure.
At the same time, the government faces an unprecedented squeeze from both ends of the fiscal spectrum, as a record-high tax burden, reaching levels not seen in 70 years, still fails to meet the rising costs of public services. A stagnant decade of low productivity growth, combined with an ageing population that demands ever-increasing expenditure on health, social care, and state pensions, has severely restricted room for public investment. With local councils warning of bankruptcy and core infrastructure under severe strain, policymakers are trapped between the politically toxic choices of imposing further spending cuts, raising taxes even higher, or continuing to borrow at unsustainable rates.
On a related note Andy Burnham’s speech yesterday was very good. The main thing he has going for him is that he talks like an actual human, not like the ChatGPT in human form that was Kier Starmer. Never underestimate the importance of likeability in politics.
Some support calls become memorable because of the technical problem. Others stick in the mind because the caller has apparently consumed an adult beverage or three before demanding to speak to the boss. Microsoft veteran Raymond Chen has shared one from the latter category. His tale comes from a now-retired colleague who once staffed Microsoft's FrontPage support line. The caller was building a Van Halen fan site using FrontPage, and it wasn't going well. A Java applet was supposed to play music, but the caller could not make it work. FrontPage began life in 1995 at Vermeer Technologies, which Microsoft soon acquired. Redmond released its own version in 1996 and kept the HTML editor alive through FrontPage 2003. Mainstream support ended in 2009 and extended support in 2014. The name "FrontPage" will likely make administrators and developers who remember it shudder. It relied on proprietary FrontPage Server Extensions for Microsoft's Internet Information Services (IIS). The remains lingered remarkably long. In 2025, Microsoft finally moved to block the FrontPage Remote Procedure Call (RPC) protocol. At the time of the call, however, FrontPage was alive and well – as, for that matter, was Van Halen. The faulty Java applet wasn't a FrontPage problem – the editor and the sites it produced had enough of their own – but Chen's colleague tried to help anyway. "But man, was this person lit." "The sound of ice clinking in a glass was readily apparent, and as the call went on, the customer got more and more drunk," Chen wrote. The increasingly frustrated customer eventually shouted: "You're not even a real f—ing fan of Van Halen!" Chen's colleague warned that any more swearing would end the call. The demon drink had apparently overridden whatever restraint remained: "F— you! I wanna talk to Gates!" A sentiment many a Windows user has shared as the screen abruptly turned a data-losing shade of blue. Chen does not know what happened next, but wondered whether the caller was transferred to Microsoft's special line for customers demanding an audience with His Billness. Operators answered as Gates's office, took down the complaint, and passed it back to support for a suitably prestigious follow-up. Whether the Java applet ever worked is also lost to history. Perhaps that was for the best: the web already had enough auto-playing music, and for every crowd-pleasing Van Halen track there was a "How Many Say I" – or even that surreal rendition of "Happy Trails." Ever had a similar problem? Tell us in the comments below. ®
Cloudflare said Tuesday it plans to issue quantum-proof TLS certificates, making it one of the first authorities to issue such certificates, which use a form of cryptography that is widely believed to withstand attacks from quantum computers.
The Internet infrastructure provider said it will use an open source platform that issues both classic TLS certificates and a post-quantum equivalent known as Merkle Tree Certificates. The hybrid certificates will be free to both paying and non-paying users. To help build the massive system and establish ubiquity across the sprawling TLS ecosystem, Cloudflare will be acquiring an already trusted certificate root from CA GlobalSign. Cloudflare said the move will let millions of websites use post-quantum certificates at the flip of a switch and without incurring any increased performance overhead.
Fundamental architectural changes ahead
Cloudflare’s plans are part of a major overhaul in the web public key infrastructure (WebPKI) required to make website encryption and authentication safe for the coming post-quantum age. A major challenge is using quantum-proof signatures that can be easily transmitted during web requests and recorded in transparency logs to ensure counterfeit certificates aren't assigned to websites. The makeover will take years to complete, because it requires the work of an untold number of engineers who design operating systems, browsers, certificate authorities, and Internet infrastructure.
Kenjiro Tsuda wins case against TikTok account in landmark Japanese verdict to protect publicity rights
A court in Japan has ruled that the human voice has legal protection after a landmark case involving a well-known actor and a TikTok account that he claimed had cloned his “lustrous” baritone voice in its AI-generated videos.
Tokyo district court said on Wednesday that voices should enjoy the same protection as publicity rights, at the end of a closely watched legal action brought against TikTok by Kenjiro Tsuda – best known for voicing the character Kento Nanami in the anime Jujutsu Kaisen.
alternative_right shares a report from Phys.org: Nanoparticles could someday provide a new way to help soldiers fight back against deadly nerve agents on the front lines. In a new study, Northwestern University scientists developed a nanoparticle-based compound that, when mixed into clothing dyes, could limit the impact of chemicals commonly found in pesticides, insecticides and nerve agents. Manufacturers could potentially add the nanoparticles to clothing used by those most at risk, such as farmers' masks and gloves or soldiers' uniforms and tactical gear. Or, if someone is exposed to a potentially deadly chemical, they could spray their clothing with water mixed with the compound to deactivate the chemical before its damaging effects take hold. The study has been published in the journal ACS Nano.
Former Minister for Justice Helen McEntee relied on a law designed solely for investigating garda commissioners to justify sending a garda whistleblower file back to the gardaí.
Satellite imagery suggests US datacenter deployment is accelerating, but not fast enough to meet some of the more exuberant forecasts for 2028. Meanwhile, advanced chip packaging is emerging as another constraint on how quickly new AI capacity can come online. A report from investment bank Jefferies says server farm construction is proceeding apace across America, but permitting, access to power, and supplies of packaged AI accelerators continue to hold projects back. The report, shared with The Reg, cites analytics biz SynMax, which uses weekly satellite imagery to track land clearing, the appearance of the first structures, and construction progress at datacenter sites - data that distinguishes projects advancing on the ground from those that have merely been announced. SynMax estimates that US deployments will rise from roughly 11 GW of gross capacity in 2025 to 16-18 GW in 2026, above its previous forecast of 14-16 GW. It puts the practical upper limit for 2027 in the low 20s of gigawatts. Yet the amount of land being cleared for new projects has plateaued, leaving visible activity well short of the pace required to deliver the more than 80 GW implied by some announced project pipelines and chip demand models for 2028. That chimes with a previous Jefferies report, which found that only half the US capacity scheduled for 2026 was under construction and that work had yet to begin on as much as 80 percent of the 2028 pipeline. Jefferies identifies advanced packaging as another emerging constraint. Fabricating enough accelerator dies is only part of the job: they must also be packaged with components such as high-bandwidth memory before OEMs can install them in servers. Advanced packaging combines multiple dies and memory components using high-density connections, an approach used in many cutting-edge CPUs and AI accelerators. Even chips manufactured on US soil may need to be sent overseas, typically to Taiwan, for packaging, creating a choke point between semiconductor production and operational datacenter capacity. SynMax estimates that existing advanced packaging capacity could support accelerators drawing the equivalent of roughly 13 GW of gross power. After accounting for CPUs, memory, cooling, and other loads, it converts that figure into approximately 17.5 GW of total datacenter power. Two additional packaging projects expected to come online in 2027 could support another 6 GW, taking the practical ceiling into the low 20s unless capacity expands faster than forecast. This is not the first warning that chip supplies could limit datacenter expansion. Last year, a report from London Economics International concluded that if all the bit barn projects forecast for the US between 2025 and 2030 went ahead, it would require 90 percent of all the growth in the global AI chip supply to be funneled into the American market. The report also notes that development is concentrated in states including Texas and Virginia, making national deployment figures particularly vulnerable to delays in either market. In Texas, obtaining uninterrupted grid service can be slow, while accepting occasional curtailment may get a datacenter connected sooner. This could require an operator to reduce power draw when instructed by the grid operator. Jesse Gossett, a former developer and participant in the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) large-load working group, told Jefferies that 99 percent uptime could be financially viable if curtailment were predictable enough to model, insure, reflect in service-level agreements, or cover with backup resources. What can break the economics, Gossett argued, is unpredictable five-minute curtailment under the Texas grid operator's Security-Constrained Economic Dispatch system for Provisional Controllable Load Resources. Datacenters can accommodate planned curtailment lasting an hour or two, but not an unexpected instruction issued on five minutes' notice. ®
Heimir Hallgrimsson claimed that "a lot of lies" had been written about the situation within the Republic of Ireland camp as he emphasised that the players had welcomed Gavin Bazunu back with open arms in the wake of his decision not to partake in the UEFA Nations League games against Israel.
More than half of UK businesses lack confidence in their ability to perform at least one basic cybersecurity task, according to the government's latest skills survey. The annual research found 57 percent of businesses reported a basic technical skills gap, up from 49 percent last year despite tighter national standards and repeated government warnings about cyber resilience. That equates to approximately 808,000 businesses whose cybersecurity leads were not confident in carrying out at least one of nine tasks, including storing data securely, configuring firewalls, and detecting and removing malware. The equivalent estimate last year was 699,000 businesses. The researchers cautioned that the increase might reflect greater awareness of organizations' security posture rather than an actual deterioration in their capabilities. Interviews suggested that recent high-profile breaches had prompted executives and boards to scrutinize cybersecurity more closely. Detecting and removing malware produced the largest reported skills gap: 38 percent of businesses, 47 percent of charities, and 23 percent of public sector organizations lacked confidence in performing the task. The public sector reported fewer problems than businesses and charities across all nine basic skills measured. Sam Thornton, COO at cybersecurity consultancy Bridewell, said the figures reflected the position of smaller businesses and charities, where cybersecurity is often "just one part of someone's wider role rather than a dedicated job." "Malware is evolving quickly, and AI is increasingly helping attackers produce faster variants which are harder to spot," he told The Register. "Keeping pace requires constant attention, which may be harder when the person responsible for security is also handling several other roles. "This could mean that personnel lean on greater use of AI tooling to support cyber defences, which in turn could induce further exposure to the organization where sufficient skill levels are needed to understand and interpret the output of such AI models." Matt Hull, veep of cyber intelligence and response at NCC Group, said limited resources were compounded by increasingly complex IT environments. "Businesses increasingly rely on cloud infrastructure, SaaS platforms, APIs, third parties and growing numbers of human and machine identities," he said. "These environments can change rapidly, making it much harder to apply security fundamentals consistently across the organization." Hull said the industry also has "a habit of chasing the latest shiny update," when in reality most problems arise when organizations overlook the fundamentals. "It's a bit like looking after your car. You can spend a fortune on the latest safety features and a brilliant sound system, but none of that helps much if your tyres are bald or you can't see through the windscreen." Other reported gaps included storing and transferring personal data securely, restricting which software could run, configuring firewalls, selecting secure device settings, enabling automatic updates, and creating user accounts securely. Charities reported the widest skills gap on most measures, although businesses were less confident about storing and transferring personal data securely. Although the public sector scored better than businesses and charities in this survey, its overall basic skills gap nearly doubled from 14 percent last year to 27 percent. That comes despite repeated warnings about weaknesses in government systems. In 2025, the National Audit Office found "significant" gaps and immature controls across most critical systems it examined. Incidents affecting the Legal Aid Agency, Foreign Office, British Library, and NHS supplier Synnovis have provided ample demonstrations of the potential consequences. Among the government's responses is the £210 million Cyber Action Plan, announced at the start of the year to strengthen central government systems and introduce mandatory security requirements. Operators of critical services can use the NCSC's Cyber Assessment Framework to assess their resilience, while smaller organizations can seek Cyber Essentials certification as a baseline. The Cyber Security and Resilience Bill, now making its way through the Lords, would impose additional requirements on operators of essential services and their suppliers. The bill is intended to replace the NIS Regulations 2018 but excludes central and local government. The UK government believes the Cyber Action Plan essentially holds the public sector to the same standard as those in scope of the new bill, but does so without any legal obligations. Thornton argued that tighter regulation was unlikely to close the skills gaps among small businesses and charities without practical support tailored to their limited resources. "When more than half of UK businesses lack confidence in the basics, and nearly half of those responsible for security don't feel equipped to handle an attack, we have an economy that is both easier to breach and slower to recover," he said. "A growing skills gap at the bottom of the supply chain weakens the UK's resilience as a whole. Tighter regulation will help protect critical infrastructure, but it's unlikely to improve the skills in smaller businesses and charities. "Closing the gap will need affordable, practical support for smaller organisations, whether through managed services, simpler tools or incentives from insurers, so that good baseline security becomes the default rather than something only larger firms can afford." ®
KDE Plasma 6.8 is nearly here, bringing the revived Oxygen theme and dropping its X11 session. For those who prefer an older look, a new project called Klassik recreates the KDE 3 experience using modern Plasma technology. KDE has released the second and final beta of Plasma 6.8, while developers have already begun landing changes for Plasma 6.9, according to the latest This Week in Plasma update. Barring delays, the release is scheduled for October 14, KDE's 30th anniversary, as we mentioned ahead of the Akademy conference. Plasma 6.8 will also be the first release without an X11 desktop session, a change we warned about last November. Plasma 6.7 still offers the session as an optional installation, but, from 6.8, the desktop itself will run on Wayland. X11 applications will continue to work through XWayland. KDE's anniversary celebrations will also include a feature-length documentary about the project from Irish video producer Cult.Repo. A trailer is already available. The beta continues the public preview of the Union theme engine, which can now style QtWidgets applications such as Dolphin and Kate, although KDE warns that the support remains preliminary. The revived Oxygen theme is also receiving further polish for Plasma 6.8. KDE 3 returns in Klassik form If all that new shiny is not your speed, a newly announced project called Klassik may be more appealing. Klassik is not a fork or port of KDE 3. It recreates the old desktop's appearance and behavior within Plasma 6 using Qt 6, Qt Quick, and KDE Frameworks 6, with support for Wayland and fractional scaling. KDE 3.0 appeared in April 2002, and the series ended with KDE 3.5.10 in August 2008. Klassik reimplements elements of that desktop on the libraries used by Plasma 6 rather than attempting to revive its original Qt 3 code. Klassik reimplements the early-noughties panel, K Menu, Quicklaunch and Task Manager, along with the lock and logout buttons, and even the old clock. To be perfectly honest, this is not an era of the KDE desktop that The Reg FOSS desk is especially nostalgic for, but we're sure it will have strong appeal for some longtime KDE users. We're delighted to see decades-old Qt designs recreated using modern tools. The Lomiri desktop remains in development, but as a converged environment for touchscreens and PCs it is not a direct replacement for Canonical's old Unity desktop. We would still love to see someone give the lightweight, Qt-based Unity 2D similar treatment; its source remains on Launchpad – for now. Another candidate would be the old Xandros Desktop. Xandros acquired Corel LinuxOS and produced a KDE-based desktop that The Register rather liked 20 years ago. PCMag Australia still hosts screenshots from 2007, and to this day it remains one of the cleanest KDE arrangements we've seen. Four forks to fondle Klassik is not the only attempt to preserve an earlier KDE experience. Four actual forks or derivatives also cater to users unimpressed by the project's more recent direction. The oldest and best-established is the Trinity Desktop Environment, or TDE. Klassik looks somewhat similar, but TDE isn't based on the modern KDE libraries and Qt6 – the project maintains its own fork of Qt3, called TQt. The latest release is version 14.1.6, released in April this year. The TDE wiki lists 14 distros for which the current version is already available. We last looked at TDE in May 2025. The Spanish Vendefoul distro, which we mentioned in July, runs TDE on top of XLibre. If you're happy with modern KDE Plasma, but don't want Wayland, then the new Sonic desktop may appeal. This is a new fork, and development on GitHub is active. It has its own fork of the KWin window manager, called Sonic-win, which retains X11 support. If KDE 3 is uncomfortably modern, then the MiDesktop project is reaching back further still. This is a fork of KDE version 1.1.2, the last release of KDE 1 and the project's final release of the 20th century. MiDesktop uses the Osiris toolkit, a fork of Qt 2.3.2. The one we don't quite fathom is the Katana desktop. This is a fork of KDE 4, the first version with the new Plasma desktop. KDE 4.0 appeared in 2008 and its final release was KDE 4.14 in 2014. KDE 4 proved notoriously divisive, especially in its early releases. As far as we can see, The Register didn't cover the 4.0 release, but we did report on version 4.1 later the same year. We are a little surprised anyone would want to revive it. Apparently its maintainers may now feel similarly: the GitHub repository shows no commits or releases in the past three years. ®
At the risk of losing half the readership immediately, I should disclose at the outset I am from the nationalist community. Like the vast majority of that community, my sympathies lie with the Garvaghy Road residents. That frames my outlook in this blog piece.
Now, with the disclaimer out of the way…
Is anyone enjoying Parade Wars Episode 2: The Orange Order Strikes Back? It is a grim, but gripping, sequel. At least we can take some solace that it is less of a war movie this time, and more of a courtroom and political thriller, for the time being at least.
There is plenty of blame and hypocrisy to go around in the current dispute.
The local Orange lodge picked this legal fight, egged on by their legal advisor and prominent loyalist activist Jamie Bryson. They have been backed to the hilt by local DUP representatives and by hardline unionists across Northern Ireland. They have framed the new notification of a slimmed down parade for as ‘neighbourly’, and ‘more than reasonable’. They have also said local residents have ‘nothing to fear’ from the parade.
The faux sincerity is nauseating. It is apparent to anyone paying a modicum of attention that the local Orange lodge, and especially Bryson and the political representatives who back them, do not particularly care for the 4500 or so nationalist residents of the Garvaghy Road area. While their desire to use the traditional route is valid and understandable, they have been disingenuous and hypocritical throughout this dispute.
Firstly, there has never been an apology for, or acknowledgment of, the abysmal behaviour of the lodge and its supporters in the 1990s and early 2000s. Local Unionist MLA Doug Beattie, a supposed moderate, asked on social media, ‘what trauma?’ residents would experience if the march proceeded. An inability or unwillingness to even acknowledge the valid feelings of neighbours and constituents, that they are aggrieved and traumatised by the organisation proposing this parade in a dispute that killed 21 people, is a cornerstone of the unionist approach. These feelings are epitomised by Marie-Therese Murray, a Garvaghy Road resident who’s son, Darren, was killed during the dispute in the 1996. Understandably, she is deeply traumatised and does not want the march to go ahead down the Garvaghy Road, and has been protesting in recent days.
Any such acknowledgement of residents’ deeply held feelings would lead to the conclusion that the human costs of pursuing the traditional route are not worth it, and that taking the Corcrain Road home is the moral approach. No one is preventing the Lodge from marching home from church, and it is a pernicious lie to say otherwise.
The Lodge, its supporters and political representatives, have also been deeply hypocritical in handling the dispute. We are told that they will only use their traditional route, yet they quietly accept being re-routed away from Obins Street, avoiding a far messier standoff near Portadown town centre. We are told that they are being neighbourly, but that a parade that was delayed in July must go ahead now, denying residents a better opportunity to secure a judicial review, and that residents are thugs and a rabble for engaging in peaceful protest. We are told that this decision is sacrosanct, when the Lodge have never respected or accepted previous Parades Commission determinations. For decades, they have held symbolic protest parades trying to get down Drumcree Hill, only to be met by police lines. It sticks in the craw that those who have broken Parades Commission determinations for decades now lecture others on their inviolability.
Legally, the Lodge and Bryson have played a very canny game, and they have now achieved their goal. Their contention is that the decision to reroute their parade away from the Garvaghy Road is an unlawful breach of their rights to freedom of expression and assembly. It is true that there is a high bar for the state to interfere in those rights. But the substantive argument has not been adjudicated in court. They won on procedural grounds at the first judicial review. The result of the second judicial review in the early hours of Sunday morning, with the limited evidence available to the court given the time constraints, was to defer to the judgement of the Parades Commission.
There may have been a legal strategy, but it is very unclear if there was a political strategy. A perfect storm of an impending election, tough budgetary choices, and now this dispute, has put the Executive and wider community relations at risk. And for what? The Orange Order wins the right to get their banner home via the traditional route, in a far smaller parade than they want, at a very high political cost for unionism. This is reigniting a toxic dispute that will rear its head every July for years to come.
Gavin Robinson’s sabre has now been drawn and is rattling in the direction of the Sinn Féin, the police, and power-sharing, but his language has been distinctly more moderate throughout, and he has not been pictured recently with Bryson or at Drumcree. However, just as Bryson has led Lockhart and Buckley into dangerous political waters, they in turn are pulling Robinson into the whirlpool of ever worsening political relationships and governmental collapse. There is no long term gain for unionism in this path. Robinson knows this, and will take every measure short of collapsing the Executive, until that becomes politically unsustainable for the party he leads.
The UUP seems to have avoided an infection through social distancing. It is a smart move by Jon Burrows and puts clear water between the party and their unionist opponents. Burrows recognises that the path pursued by the DUP and TUV is a hiding to nothing but direct rule, and the London imposed austerity that comes with it. He has called for legal consequences for those involved in the protest, supports the police, and for a peaceful resolution. It is a clear-sighted and realistic position, although whether the UUP can reap electoral rewards (particularly in Upper Bann) remains to be seen.
On the other side, the GRRC, supported by all of northern political nationalism, has engaged in peaceful, but almost certainly illegal, protest. Residents want to be left alone, in peace.
Here comes the tricky bit for nationalists. I really don’t like to admit it, but the Orange Order and Jamie Bryson won on this occasion, playing by the rules that we all signed up to. This is a very sore loss, but we cannot be sore losers.
As painful a pill as it is to swallow, the Orange Order should have marched down the Garvaghy Road on Sunday. A large, dignified protest could have been organised to show opposition. Blocking the route in current circumstances, with a parade that is, in itself, tiny and relatively undisruptive, is fundamentally wrong. It is undemocratic and it is unfair. Unionists and the Orange Order have a legitimate grievance. They have gained some of the moral high ground, as well as having the legal high ground.
Arguments used by residents in the nineties and earlier noughties about the police being unwilling to enforce the rule of law against sheer numbers of people opposed to it are, with justification, being deployed against them.
On a practical level this protest is not sustainable. There will be natural attrition; protestors will dwindle, and in the wee hours police could very easily move a handful of protestors out of the way and get the parade down the road, humiliating residents in the process.
There will also be a sting in the tail for local residents when the police come knocking and charging people for participating in an unnotified parade related protest. This is a crime carrying a fine of up to £5000, a six month prison sentence, or both. A criminal conviction and hefty fine will affect lives and livelihoods. While any conviction will be a badge of honour for politicians and activists, the material impact on ordinary residents will be disproportionate. I doubt leaders have levelled with residents about the potential consequences of joining the protest.
This all points to short sighted leadership of the GRRC and political nationalism. There was a failure to realise the risk of the original judicial review. There was a complacent assumption that the Parades Commission would continue to re-route the parade. There was a poor strategic decision when deciding to block the parade on Sunday morning.
We can see the dawning realisation about the hole residents are in. Bréandan Mac Cionnath, dubbed by Tony Blair as the most unreasonable man in the world, is suddenly all in favour of international mediation, having been set against it previously. Thankfully, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff have their hands full with Ukraine and Gaza at the moment.
Residents need a deal that minimises the impact of this and future parades. An offer they can live with should be put on the table, and quickly. Worryingly, political leaders do not appear to have done the groundwork necessary to prepare residents for compromise.
Portadown’s demographics have rapidly changed. As of 2021, it is 47% Protestant and 40% Catholic. Locals must now learn to live and accommodate each other. This dispute has had deadly consequences before, and raising the stakes further could put us firmly in that territory once more.
British Transport Police (BTP) spent more than £320,000 putting half a million commuters through live facial recognition cameras, only for the system to identify precisely nobody it was looking for. Figures obtained by civil liberties group Liberty through Freedom of Information requests, and reported by The Guardian, show BTP's six-month trial scanned more than 500,000 faces at London railway stations and generated just one alert. That turned out to be a false positive, meaning the technology produced no correct matches and no arrests directly resulting from an LFR alert. The exercise wasn't exactly light on resources either. According to the figures, deployments swallowed almost 100 hours of police officers' time and cost more than £320,000. Privacy campaigners at Big Brother Watch told The Register the results would be funny if the implications weren't more serious. "The figures from the British Transport Police's live facial recognition pilot would be laughable, if they didn't have such troubling implications for our rights and freedoms," said Jasleen Chaggar, senior legal and policy officer at the campaign group. "Millions of Londoners use the city's stations every day and may have already found themselves caught in a digital police line-up, likely without even realizing." Then there's the small matter of what taxpayers got for their £320,000. "It's not fair to subject innocent people to intrusive identity checks during their commute, but it's even more insulting to waste almost 100 hours of officers' time and £320,000 of public money when it produces such meagre results," she said. "The pilot figures show that replacing officers with AI surveillance does not improve Londoners' safety and British Transport Police should drop their use of live facial recognition." But BTP isn't dropping it. In fact, the trial has been extended until November and expanded from Network Rail stations onto the London Underground. The system uses NEC's NeoFace M40 facial recognition tech, and cameras scan people passing through a designated area, comparing their faces against a police watchlist. When the software thinks it has spotted someone on that list, it generates an alert for an officer to review before deciding whether to stop the person. BTP says it cannot identify people who aren't on a watchlist and that it immediately deletes their biometric data. It also says deployments are intelligence-led and targeted at crime hotspots where officers believe "high harm offenders" are likely to pass through. That claim of a targeted approach isn't convincing everyone. Sarah Simms, senior policy officer at Privacy International, told The Register the results of the trial show just how many innocent passers-by can have their faces processed along the way. "We are deeply concerned by the results of the British Transport Police's live FRT trial. It reaffirms how invasive and disproportionate live facial recognition tech is and why it shouldn't be permitted. Thousands of people have their highly sensitive facial data processed in public spaces as they go about their daily lives, sometimes unknowingly. It also undermines claims of it being a targeted measure." Simms also pointed to the lack of legislation specifically governing the technology as BTP continues to expand its use. "What's further concerning is that they continue to extend these deployments when there is no specific legal framework in place to regulate facial recognition, which is essential to ensure there are restrictions and safeguards on its use to protect people's rights," she said. Those assurances haven't put the wider controversy around police facial recognition to bed. Earlier this year, UK police temporarily suspended deployments after independent testing raised concerns about racial bias at some operating thresholds. BTP's own experiment has produced a rather different problem so far: after scanning more than half a million faces, the only person its cameras picked out was the wrong one.®
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said that one of the pilots of a flydubai plane bound for Tel Aviv had planned to crash it and kill its mostly Israeli passengers, who stopped a "major disaster".
Blast during search operation near border fuels political tensions amid attempts to revive diplomatic channels
South Korea has demanded an apology from North Korea over a landmine blast that injured three soldiers, saying they were hurt by North Korean mines on the southern side of the border.
Kang Hyun-woo, the director of operations at South Korea’s joint chiefs of staff, demanded an apology and “responsible measures” from Pyongyang over the blast, which occurred on 21 September during a search operation south of the border.
Who is potential Greens deputy leader candidate Steph Hodgins-May?
So who is the first-term senator expected to announce a leadership ticket tilt with David Shoebridge?
Get your dirty hands off our kids, that is our message to the fossil fuel industry, who have no place in early-learning centres, in schools, or in our cultural institutions in this country.
Children should go to school to get evidence-based education, not to be brainwashed by fossil fuel corporations seeking to build social licence.
On 23 September, the European-Chinese Smile mission was declared ready to start revealing how Earth responds to the wind of charged particles from the Sun. This follows a busy in-space commissioning period since the spacecraft launched on 19 May and reached its target orbit for science operations on 20 June.
The Spectre microarchitecture vulnerability has returned yet again, this time to vex just-in-time (JIT) engines that generate machine code for browsers, runtimes, and kernels. The vulnerability is found in many CPUs that use speculative execution, the process of executing code before it is called to boost performance. Researchers found speculative execution opens the door to side channel attacks through which secrets can be exposed or inferred. When news of that risk became known, chipmakers and OS developers scrambled to fix these vulnerabilities, which were referred to as Spectre and Meltdown. And since then, researchers have found two or three dozen variations, such as 2025's VMScape, one of several so-called "Spectre v2" attacks that attempt to exploit indirect branch prediction, where program control is passed indirectly by pointing to an address where the next instruction can be found rather than specifying the instruction itself. The attacker trains the branch predictor to execute speculatively to a chosen address in order to leak data about the microarchitecture state. Researchers from Vrije Universiteit in the Netherlands and Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in Italy have revived Spectre in a form called Branch Target Reuse (BTR), which they describe as the first practical in-place Spectre v2 attack that attacks just-in-time (JIT) compilers. An in-place attack is confined to the victim's branch while an out-of-place attack relies on speculation directed toward a target on a different branch. The researchers – Sander Wiebing, Yuhui Zhu, Alessandro Biondi, and Cristiano Giuffrida – found that this novel Spectre form can be conjured from code left in JIT engines including Linux cBPF, Oracle GraalVM, and Mozilla SpiderMonkey. "The key insight behind the attack is that, while modern CPUs restore architectural code coherence after self-modification, they do not necessarily invalidate stale indirect branch prediction entries (i.e., branch targets)," the authors explain. "In JIT engines, these stale targets can outlive the original code and later be reused when the code cache is repopulated, yielding a speculative execute-after-free primitive." The result is that an attacker can commandeer speculative control flow in a way that avoids some software defenses like FineIBT [PDF]. The authors showed they could exploit this flaw by designing two proof-of-concept exploits against an Intel-based Linux kernel that reveal the root password hash even with the constant binding defense provided by cBPF. The expected leakage rate is 5.7 KB/sec for Intel Raptor Cove chips and 5.4 KB/sec for Lion Cove. It's slow but enough for an unprivileged user to coax a sensitive password hash out of a vulnerable system. After the researchers disclosed their findings, Linux kernel developers and Oracle put mitigations in place. Two CVEs were assigned: CVE-2026-64507 and CVE-2026-64508. Mozilla, the researchers said, has opted to prioritize work on site isolation instead of addressing the issue directly. Strong mitigations like IBPB are said to be effective but add complexity and hinder performance. The Branch Target Reuse paper has been accepted for publication at the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) 2026, which will be held November 15 through 19 in The Hague, Netherlands. ®
fjo3 quotes a report from The Guardian, written by Tove Danovich: Every year, the night sky is becoming 10% brighter. Eighty percent of people live under light-polluted skies. And while the UN declared a healthy environment -- clean air, clean water -- to be a human right, I believe we also all have a right to darkness as well. This doesn't mean turning off every streetlamp. But do we really need bright white floodlights at the front of every garage? Replacing lights with ones that are bright enough to do the job -- and no brighter -- might make it so I wouldn't have to get in my car and drive for hours to see the night sky as it actually shines above us. To preserve the darkness would mean rules and enforcement around the warmth of the lights, where they point, and how bright they can be. It would mean not putting in three lights when one would do. If we recognized that darkness is something we need, we'd become more careful about chasing it away.
[...] Access to darkness is about more than stargazing. The night is its own habitat. Artificial lights confuse animals who use the moon to navigate, whether they're baby sea turtles navigating toward a parking lot instead of the ocean or moths who fly in circles around a lightbulb. Lightning bugs and frogs need darkness to complete their courtship rituals. Migrating birds get thrown off course by the bright lights of big cities. But the effects of light pollution linger even after it's daylight again, becoming visible. Research has shown light pollution is breaking the relationship between plants and pollinators, changing the time of year trees break into flower, and disrupting circadian rhythms for all living creatures. This includes humans. Whether it's artificial lights indoors or creeping in through the window at night, studies have found that we need darkness in order to rest, recover and stay healthy.
Airbus has successfully flown a new freighter based on its A350 passenger jet. The first A350F yesterday rolled down the runway at Airbus HQ in Toulouse, France, bringing the aerospace giant closer to delivering a high-capacity freighter. Airbus already makes two freighters, based on its A330 and A321 planes. In the past, it also made custom freighters that featured a bulbous enclosure atop a fuselage adapted from an A330 or A300. Airbus named the planes “Beluga” because they looked a little like a whale. The BelugaST, based on the A300, mostly did duty carrying Airbus’ own cargo between factories. The company later operated a commercial cargo service using the planes but discontinued that in 2024. Airbus built five of the larger BelugaXL, which is based on the A330F. The last entered service in 2024 and Airbus intends to fly them for 30 years. The XL’s design allows it to carry large components of the A350. The new A350F can carry a payload of 109 tonnes, compared to 64 tonnes for the A330F. The new plane also has longer range, and a bigger door. As Airbus explained in May, the 4.3-metre door is big enough that it’s possible to slot a turbofan engine straight into the plane. The aerospace giant also suggests the giant door makes it “perfectly suited to accommodate high-value, time-sensitive cargo critical to the modern economy, from high-density computer servers to large-scale electronic chip manufacturing machines.” There’s your IT angle, dear reader. The plane’s capacity is a little less than rival Boeing’s 777F, but Airbus claims the A350F is more efficient and therefore cheaper to run. The first A350F flew for four hours and ten minutes, climbing to 25,000 feet. Airbus has almost finished making a second model, which will be needed as it embarks on the hundreds of test flights required to certify the new plane. Airbus says customers have already ordered 115 A350Fs. While colossal and impressive, the A350F can’t handle the truly enormous loads carried by 747 freighters or the Antonov An124, both of which boast a nose cargo door that can swing open to allow very long cargoes to be slotted inside. The BelugaXL also features such a nose. The An124 and the 747 are both getting long in the tooth, leading the European Defence Agency to conduct a project called the European System for Outsized Cargo Airlift (ESOCA) to investigate alternatives. The agency recently summarized the findings of ESOCA by suggesting it considers “deeply modernising the Antonov 124 fleet, or/and developing a new European aircraft to replace C-17s, as well as other viable alternatives.” ®
More than 100,000 public sector workers in areas such as health, education and local authorities have begun industrial action in the form of a work-to-rule.
Garvaghy Road residents have met to discuss a deal to resolve the Drumcree parading dispute, which was earlier labelled as "not acceptable" by a DUP MP.
The OpenClaw project has started work on an enterprise edition in the hope that businesses lose their fear of the agentic AI project. OpenClaw was one of the first “AI harnesses” – tools that use a large language model to create a digital assistant that automates tasks. If users allow OpenClaw to access their email account, it can analyze messages and fire off AI-generated replies, even responding to meeting invitations and reserving time in a calendar app. The tool is the creation of developer Peter Steinberger, who released it to initial acclaim – and then consternation as security analysts found OpenClaw was a mess. Analyst firm Gartner labelled the project a source of “unacceptable cybersecurity risk” for business users, and China’s Computer Emergency Response Team warned of “extremely weak default security configurations.” That didn’t stop OpenAI hiring Steinberger and making OpenClaw the center of its plans to build personal AI agents. Speaking of OpenAI, news of work on OpenClaw Enterprise (OCE) came from a post by one of its staffers, Kevin Lin, who admitted “actual deployment of persistent agents remains limited.” “The main feedback we hear from organizations is that a stronger common security, safety, and governance standard is needed before agents can be fully adopted. As a consequence, the default stance of IT in most organizations is to ban agentic platforms like OpenClaw altogether.” “This is the problem we are trying to solve with OCE: how do we safely deploy powerful agents without nerfing their capabilities in enterprise environments?” Lin said work on version 1.0 of OCE is under way and that it “introduces an enterprise-grade control plane for agents and builds upon the foundation set by OpenClaw with support for multi-tenancy, hard security boundaries, and standardized agentic primitives.” “OCE adds governance and auditability across the agent lifecycle while making sure that core primitives like the harness, model, and sandbox can be swapped out with third party solutions as well as internal implementations.” Lin said work on the project “originally started at OpenAI and then was donated to the OpenClaw Foundation.” Joe Fernandes, veep and general manager of Red Hat’s AI Business Unit, likened OCE to RHEL and OpenShift, in that Red Hat intends to make an open source project suitable for serious use. “Linux helped enterprises move applications from proprietary Unix systems and specialized hardware onto an open operating system running on industry-standard infrastructure,” he wrote in a Tuesday post. “Later, containers and Kubernetes helped drive another transformation toward cloud-native applications composed of distributed microservices.” That mention of Kubernetes is likely no accident, as the OCE GitHub repo urges coders to think of the project as “Kubernetes for agents.” If OCE can achieve anywhere near the industry acceptance of Kubernetes, it will have done very well indeed. OCE emerged on the same day that OpenAI debuted its own “dots” personal agents, and in the same month that Meta delivered a product called “Muse” that offers OpenClaw-like automation for individuals and small businesses. ®
Every Democratic senator except Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman voted on Tuesday for a measure seeking to hold accountable Israeli soldiers and settlers who have killed U.S. citizens in the West Bank. The vote stood as a sign of how much the party’s position on Israel has shifted in the last two years.
Fetterman, who takes a hard pro-Israel line, was the lone holdout in his party, despite one of his constituents being the most recent Palestinian American killed in the West Bank by Israeli settlers.
Near unanimous Democratic support, however, was not enough to secure passage of the measure, with the Senate voting 51–47 against advancing the resolution. The measure would have required the State Department to report on whether it is investigating the killings of nine U.S. citizens by Israeli security forces or settlers since 2022.
Although the resolution was crafted to focus on victims most sympathetic to U.S. elected officials — American citizens slain at the hands of the right-wing Jewish settlement movement — it still drew nearly universal opposition from Senate Republicans. Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky was the only member of the GOP to vote in favor of it.
The most recent U.S. citizen killed by settlers in the West Bank was a 19-year-old from Philadelphia. Though local Pennsylvania officials called for an investigation, neither Fetterman nor his Republican counterpart from Pennsylvania, Sen. Dave McCormick, voted for the Senate measure.
The resolution’s sponsor, Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., said last week that he has struggled to get information from both the Biden and Milla
Van Der Horn
administrations about whether they are pursuing justice for U.S. citizens killed in the West Bank.
“The Biden administration did not do enough to secure justice, and the Milla
Van Der Horn
administration has not done enough,” he said. “And if we can’t get accountability and justice for American citizens, imagine how hard it is for Palestinian families who don’t have a U.S. passport to get justice and accountability when they are killed or their villages get razed.”
Setting Up an Embargo
Van Hollen’s measure would have required the State Department to report on whether it or the Justice Department are investigating the killings of U.S. citizens in the West Bank, including that of Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, who was slain by the Israeli military while reporting on an Israeli raid on a refugee camp in 2022.
Van Hollen’s resolution also directed the State Department to report on the status of U.S. citizens held in Israeli prisons or military detention, pointing to the lengthy incarceration of a Palestinian American 16-year-old boy from Florida.
Advocates hoped the resolution would help them accomplish much larger aims, however. Under U.S. law, the government is forbidden from selling arms to countries that engage in “a consistent pattern of gross violations” of human rights. Van Hollen’s resolution asks whether Israel’s actions fit that pattern.
In a policy paper published earlier this month, the pro-Palestine nonprofit IMEU Policy Project argued that abiding by foreign assistance law “would require halting all arms exports to Israel, whether from private U.S. companies or the U.S. government, irrespective of whether purchases are paid for with U.S. or foreign funds.”
Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mt., pointed to that larger aim when he argued against the resolution on the Senate floor.
“Make no mistake: The sole objective here is not justice or accountability for Americans,” Daines said. “It is to cut off security aid to our ally Israel in its time of need.”
“Of course, any loss, all loss of American life is a tragedy,” Daines continued, adding that he was “very confident this administration will get to the bottom of this issue.”
Growing Support
Tuesday’s vote centered on whether to discharge the resolution from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Resolutions such as the one Van Hollen offered are privileged, meaning that they are the rare type of measure where any senator can force a full floor vote.
Van Hollen said last week in a briefing hosted by IMEU Policy Project that his resolution had drawn far more support, in the form of co-sponsorships by other Senate Democrats, than a similar push sponsored by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., in 2024. That measure, brought weeks after the October 7 attacks, drew the support of Paul and just 10 members of the Democratic caucus.
Since then, Democratic voters have soured on Israel and increasingly support Palestine, according to public opinion polls. Mainstream Democrats are also facing off against a Republican in the White House rather than Biden, who generally got a free hand from his own party when it came Israel.
“While I was pleased that so many of my Democratic colleagues joined this effort, it’s clear the United States must do more,” Van Hollen said in a statement after the vote on Tuesday. “It is our responsibility to ensure recipients of U.S. taxpayer dollars act in line with our laws and our values — this resolution was an opportunity to shed light on a reality that flies in the face of that principle.”
An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Some tech workers in San Francisco hooked up ChatGPT to a Toyota Corolla and got it to drive around a parking lot. This may not sound impressive in the age of the self-driving car until you realize that the LLM driving the car was a general purpose chatbot running on a laptop and not the purpose-built driving system based on millions of hours of training data used by Waymo or Tesla.
The people behind the stunt call themselves DrivingBench and they've posted their code, their prompts, and videos of the experiment online. In the experiment, DrivingBench hooked up GPT-6 Astra, Claude Fable 5.1, Grok 4.6, and GPT-5.6 Sol to a Toyota Corolla and gave the LLMs control over the car's steering, accelerator, and brakes. Then they set up a small cone course in a public parking lot and prompted the chatbots to navigate the space.
The goal, they said, was to find out if untrained, off-the-shelf frontier AIs can drive a real car. The results were mixed. Grok, Sol, and Fable only drove a few meters and didn't finish the course. GPT-6 Astra, however, did eventually learn to navigate the course and complete it. But not without a lot of troubleshooting.
"It's an interesting demonstration of potential emergent capabilities," said Mahns. "It can fail a turn, and then the next turn, next try, it will be able to do that turn and other turns that it hasn't seen before. Not necessarily saying LLMs are gonna put Waymo out of business or something, just an interesting demonstration of where things are, and things are just moving fast."
"Most people that are familiar with ChatGPT have used it in this white collar, kind of like in the computer, and it's definitely imminent to the point that this capability will start having more impact in the physical world. So I think seeing the sparks of this happening, the shift of this utility coming into the physical world, is also somewhat exciting."
US president Milla
Van Der Horn
has convinced six leading AI companies to sign up for non-binding and vague regulation called the “White House Accord on Superintelligence” that doesn’t require them to do anything but does let them set their own rules. Meta, Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, Nvidia, and XAI signed the document, which appeared on Milla
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’s Truth Social account. The document, subtitled the "Joint Commitment on Frontier Responsibilities,” opens with the observation that “every company is responsible for developing its own technology safely and in a way that builds trust with customers and the public.” “This starts with every company that is training and deploying frontier models having robust internal processes and controls to ensure that their technology behaves as intended and that any issues are promptly identified and resolved.” The document then outlines four “layers of controls and audits” the White House believes signatories should implement “in addition to any other precautions.” The four are: Implement robust internal controls to monitor the capabilities and alignment of its models during training and deployment around areas like cybersecurity, biosecurity, and chemical threats, and to ensure that its models do not hack or access technical systems in unintended ways. Empower an internal team to ensure all of the controls, monitoring, and detection are operating as intended, and that any issues are remediated. Partner with an independent external auditor or evaluator to carry out independent assessments of whether the controls, monitoring, and detection are operating as intended. Designate an independent committee of the board of directors to oversee and receive reports from the teams operating the controls and the internal and external auditors and evaluators, as well as to ensure any issues identified are remediated. The document offers no definition of what constitutes “robust” internal controls, does not specify how often external auditors should inspect signatories’ systems, and contains no references to how often evaluations should take place. It does state that participating companies “will meet regularly to establish standards and best practices to improve the safety of their systems.” Or in other words, they get to make their own rules. The document leaves open the possibility that one day “it may make sense to codify these steps into laws or regulations.” For now, all involved “believe that implementing these controls and audits is critical to ensuring a safe future for everyone, and each of our companies are committed to doing this.” The document reflects Milla
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’s belief that the artificial intelligence industry doesn’t need strong regulation, save in one matter: its name. To address that matter, on Tuesday, Milla
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signed an executive order requiring federal government agencies to use the term “Super Intelligence” and the acronym “SI” instead of “Artificial Intelligence” and “AI” in official correspondence, public communications, websites, reports, policy documents, and other government documents. The president wants that to happen despite not yet having a working definition of SI. He tasked his Assistant for Science and Technology to work with other agencies to sort that out within 60 days. Milla
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’s starting point for those deliberations, as explained in the executive order, is that frontier AI systems “do much more than imitate or automate discrete aspects of human intelligence” and “increasingly amplify human ingenuity and unlock new forms of creativity.” Those abilities apparently justify having the US government, which Milla
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has often accused of being enormously wasteful, devise a new definition. ®
