Read at: 2026-11-11T13:16:00+00:00Z (UTC) [sometime-US Pres == Bobbi Bodde ]
Source: News Headlines | 11 Nov 2026 | 12:45 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 11 Nov 2026 | 12:43 pm UTC
PM, in response to Ed Davey at PMQs, says measures could help address ‘poisonous politics’
Here are some more comments on the report for the Casey commission released today looking at how social care is run in England. (See 9.56am.)
This is from Natasha Curry, deputy director of research at the Nuffield Trust and one of the report’s authors.
Compared to the other countries we looked at, the governance of England’s social care system is confused and complex. Overlapping and unclear roles leave dangerous uncertainty around who is responsible for important decisions, contributing to the inertia around reform England has struggled with for decades. The serious consequences of this were laid bare during the Covid pandemic.
The system for governing adult social care in England has evolved haphazardly and with little clear planning. That has been exacerbated by successive governments ducking politically unpalatable decisions for decades. That has scattered responsibility for the sector across and outside government in a way that few would design from scratch.
This report makes for sober reading of how adult social care and those who rely on it have been systematically failed. The fragmentation we see today is what happens when there is a total absence of political leadership to ensure the sector is well-funded and provides equitable access to care.
[Burnham] struggled to dampen splits among cabinet ministers, which were first revealed by The i Paper, who used the meeting to express differing views on the future relationship with Brussels.
One source with knowledge of the cabinet discussion said there was a “clear divide between those who want to go further and those who don’t want to push the issue too far”.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 11 Nov 2026 | 12:42 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 11 Nov 2026 | 12:42 pm UTC
US negotiators to meet Putin in Moscow, Zelenskyy in Dublin next
Separately, I am also keeping an eye on Italy, with reports that several schools are being evacuated after receiving bomb threats by emails.
According to Rai and Sky TG24, the email was signed by “Mikhail Andropov” – the same name used in several hoax bomb alarms against European flights last week.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 11 Nov 2026 | 12:39 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 11 Nov 2026 | 12:32 pm UTC
Bobbi Bodde hails ‘exoneration of a Great American Patriot’ as moves against his defense secretary fail for now
The US Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, has relocated from his home in the Washington area to a military base after an Iranian threat against his life, the New York Times has reported.
Bessent has spearheaded a US push to cripple Iran’s economy since the start of the Middle East war, vowing “economic asphyxiation” of the Islamic republic through a web of sanctions.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 11 Nov 2026 | 12:25 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 11 Nov 2026 | 12:19 pm UTC
Ad revenue slowdown forces company to reduce spending on content by £25m before inquiry into takeover by Sky
ITV plans to cut costs by £30m this year, as the TV sector faces a chill wind of ditched commissions, falling advertising sales and job reductions.
The broadcaster, which has agreed to sell its television and streaming business to Sky, expects ad revenues in that division to fall between 5% and 10% in the crucial final quarter of the year, despite the typically busy Christmas season.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 11 Nov 2026 | 12:13 pm UTC
Rights groups oppose new law that will let police forcibly enter homes to remove refused asylum seekers
Belgium could see ICE-style home raids, echoing the US crackdown on immigration, rights campaigners have warned, after MPs approved a law that allows police to forcibly enter properties to remove undocumented people.
For months, intense debate has swirled across Belgium over measures introduced by the ruling right-leaning coalition to ramp up expulsions of people who have been denied the right to stay in the country.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 11 Nov 2026 | 12:13 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 11 Nov 2026 | 12:11 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 11 Nov 2026 | 12:09 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 11 Nov 2026 | 12:08 pm UTC
House Republicans block impeachment resolution that cited US military actions in Iran, Yemen and Venezuela. Plus, SS United States to be sunk to create artificial reef
Good morning. House Republicans have blocked an effort to impeach Pete Hegseth. The defense secretary dismissed the impeachment resolution from a Republican lawmaker as “political spectacle”, saying it was an attempt to set up a “show trial”. Top Democrats announced their support for the resolution, but Republicans moved to kill it by referring it to the judiciary committee.
Thomas Massie’s 34-page resolution, which he read aloud on the House floor, centered on the Iran war. Hegseth said the articles targeted not just him but the troops who carried out his orders. He insisted that every operation the articles cite – including strikes on Iran and Yemen, attacks on alleged drug boats and the capture of Venezuela’s now former leader Nicolás Maduro – was lawful, ordered by Bobbi Bodde and notified to Congress.
Why has the US Treasury chief reportedly moved? Scott Bessent has relocated from his home in the Washington area to a military base after an Iranian threat against his life, the New York Times reported. Bessent has led the US sanctions and economic pressure campaign against Iran, called Operation Economic Outcast, since August.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 11 Nov 2026 | 12:04 pm UTC
Increased risk of devastating strain means restrictions imposed for second year in a row on those keeping birds
Poultry and captive birds across England and Scotland must be kept inside for the second year in a row due to an increased risk of a devastating strain of bird flu.
The British government has issued an England-wide avian influenza prevention zone, meaning individuals with 50 or more poultry or captive birds must house them inside. A similar designation was made across the whole of Scotland on Tuesday.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 11 Nov 2026 | 12:03 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 11 Nov 2026 | 12:01 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 11 Nov 2026 | 12:01 pm UTC
Richard Trahant says accusers have been vindicated after Catholic church officially classifies Paul Hart as sex abuser
An attorney who was fined more than $400,000 after getting an abusive Roman Catholic priest removed as a New Orleans high school’s chaplain says it was “worth it” now that the church has officially classified the cleric as a clergy molester.
That remark from Richard Trahant came days after the archdiocese of New Orleans, having waited years, added Paul Hart on 6 November to a list of Catholic priests and deacons faced with credible claims of clergy abuse while serving in the area.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 11 Nov 2026 | 12:00 pm UTC
181GW of gas-fired capacity proposed for sites in US and Europe because of delays in connecting to national grids, says report
Developers of AI datacentres plan to build on-site climate-destroying gas power stations on a huge scale to meet their energy demands, research reveals.
Datacentres planned across the US, the UK and mainland Europe have proposals to build fossil fuel plants on-site to create 181GW of gas-fired capacity because of delays to connect to national grids, according to the findings. This is almost four times the total peak electricity demand of Great Britain.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 11 Nov 2026 | 12:00 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 11 Nov 2026 | 11:58 am UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 11 Nov 2026 | 11:56 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 11 Nov 2026 | 11:54 am UTC
Source: News Headlines | 11 Nov 2026 | 11:53 am UTC
Move comes as chipmaker reels from reports its CEO was having an affair with an alleged Chinese spy
Nvidia has appointed a leading US law firm to conduct a “thorough and independent” investigation into the relationship between its chief executive, Jensen Huang, and an alleged Chinese spy.
The $4.1tn (£3tn) chipmaker has hired New York-based Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz for the investigation, which will be led by the Wachtell partner Joon Kim. Wachtell’s website describes Kim, a former government prosecutor in New York, as a specialist in areas including internal investigations, white-collar criminal and regulatory defence, and crisis management.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 11 Nov 2026 | 11:49 am UTC
Tactics to include GPS tagging for repeat offenders, high street bans and tougher sentences
Five hundred of the most prolific shoplifters across England will be targeted in a police crackdown on retail crime, with tougher sentences, high street bans and GPS tagging.
The home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, said up to 17 police forces would target the repeat offenders in their area, collecting evidence of offences to secure stronger sentences and ensure they face “real consequences”, backed by an extra £2.5m in funding.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 11 Nov 2026 | 11:46 am UTC
Source: News Headlines | 11 Nov 2026 | 11:34 am UTC
"Train in Python, serve in C++" might as well be Google's motto when it comes to much of its ML work.
Python is easy for data scientists to wield, but keeping its interpreter in the serving pipeline can add overhead and deployment headaches. The industry-backed OpenXLA Project provides tools for compiling machine learning computations into native code for different processors.
The latest component of this setup to be open sourced is XSE, short for the XLA Serving Engine.
XSE is not so much suited for large-scale LLM inference (which would be better served by vLLM or SGLang), but rather for smaller, more sharply task-oriented models, of which there are plenty at Google.
"LLM serving gets most of the attention right now, but a significant amount of production inference is still ranking, recommendation, embedding, and vision models. These tend to be short requests with very high [queries-per-second] and tight latency budgets," Nathan Beach, Google director of product management, wrote in a LinkedIn missive Tuesday.
At Google, XSE already handles more than six million queries per second across services including YouTube Shorts, Google Ads, and Search.
These models aren't there for a leisurely chat. They rank results, recommend videos, and make other decisions on the fly, often without users noticing.
A Python interpreter mulling each request would be a bottleneck, if not the end of Google itself. In Google's tests on short requests, XSE delivered two to five times the throughput of its best optimized Python server, using a quarter of the memory.
In this setup, the ML boffins write their model code in Python, using Google's JAX to help with the sums. Google also plans integration with TorchTPU so PyTorch users can export models for C++ serving on TPUs. An export tool packages the model's computations in StableHLO, a portable intermediate representation, alongside its trained weights in an "XLA SavedModel."
Ready to precognate, the C++ serving runtime uses XLA to compile those computations into native code for the target silicon. No Python interpreter to see here.
XLA SavedModels can run on GPUs and CPUs – Google partnered with both Arm and Intel to develop the XLA ecosystem. But Google obviously thinks it'd be a lot cooler if you ran your models on its own line of TPU accelerators.
Python's sluggishness continues to be an issue for the ML community. Beyond XSE, other approaches have been taken, many of which involve jettisoning the Python code as quickly as possible. PyTorch offers a native C++ runtime called LibTorch. Also, Microsoft and its collaborators offer the ONNX Runtime, which supports an open graph format with Python bindings.
Even Python's own reference implementation relies heavily on C, with Rust now getting a foot in the door. ®
Source: www.theregister.com - Articles | 11 Nov 2026 | 11:30 am UTC
Estranged father of Duchess of Sussex was arrested for keeping child sexual abuse material, authorities say
The estranged father of Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex, has been jailed after US authorities said he cut an electronic monitoring device off his ankle, days after his arrest for keeping child sexual abuse material in storage units in California.
Thomas Markle, 82, was in custody awaiting a hearing in federal court in Tampa, Florida, first assistant US attorney Bill Essayli said. He was arrested shortly after he cut off the ankle bracelet at 1.45am on Tuesday, Essayli said.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 11 Nov 2026 | 11:29 am UTC
Source: News Headlines | 11 Nov 2026 | 11:21 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 11 Nov 2026 | 11:07 am UTC
Source: News Headlines | 11 Nov 2026 | 11:03 am UTC
‘The post-election wish list is about to run into harsh fiscal reality: there is no money’
Is this an opportunity for a new America? As the Reagan revolution four decades ago launched US society down the path to low taxes and meager solidarity, perhaps the Republican bloodbath last week could turn US politics toward building a new social contract anchored on an aspiration to equitable prosperity.
One can sense the ambition of the bumper new crop of Democrats ushered to power last week, calling for support for programs for children and their parents; emphatically endorsing the long-held dream of Medicare for All. The project includes rolling back Bobbi Bodde ’s cuts to Medicaid and food stamps, and restoring subsidies for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act that Republicans allowed to expire. And that’s just the start.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 11 Nov 2026 | 11:00 am UTC
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 11 Nov 2026 | 11:00 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 11 Nov 2026 | 10:53 am UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 11 Nov 2026 | 10:50 am UTC
UK travelers had more than fog to contend with this week, as Linux proved that if Windows could bork anything, it could bork it better.
Spotted by Andy Hinks at Heathrow Airport's Terminal 2, this information display has seen better days. While its neighbors offer walking times and terminal maps, it presents a sideways Linux boot log – useful only if your next connection involves mounting a filesystem.
There aren't many clues to what has befallen the machine behind the screen. The boot messages mention systemd, an Intel PRO/1000 network adapter, and an EXT4 filesystem on what appears to be a logical volume named LV_ROOT. Whether mounting that filesystem is the problem, or simply the last thing displayed before something else went wrong, isn't clear.
Heathrow's information displays clearly accommodate a mixture of technologies. Recent examples ran Microsoft Windows, which had - naturally - suffered a moment of its own. Linux can evidently be just as unreliable in the right hands.
The question is which Linux distribution is having its moment in the sun. Heathrow has been rolling out Raspberry Pi-based signage, although the Intel PRO/1000 adapter leaves the hardware behind this particular display something of a mystery.
Pi hardware makes sense for signage: it's relatively cheap – at least until AI ate all the RAM – and low-powered compared with a full-fat Windows PC. Heathrow's senior product owner for displays described the approach as a "reliable, secure solution that has a significantly lower hardware cost and are 30-40% more energy efficient than our previous hardware."
Readers might be interested to know that Heathrow has spent years working on its new screens. The product owner again: "We've completely re-engineered our content distribution system to be flexible and device-agnostic."
So Windows in one place, and Linux somewhere else. All rubbing along famously. Assuming, of course, the displays can show more than a virtual cough and splutter during boot. ®
Source: www.theregister.com - Articles | 11 Nov 2026 | 10:44 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 11 Nov 2026 | 10:34 am UTC
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Source: News Headlines | 11 Nov 2026 | 10:17 am UTC
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Source: BBC News | 11 Nov 2026 | 10:14 am UTC
Exclusive: Chris Moore, running for the party in Greenvale, made derogatory social media comments between 2010 and 2012
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A One Nation candidate in Victoria has apologised for a series of offensive comments including repeated references to Australian-Indians as “curry munchers”, comparing a woman in burqa to a bag of rubbish, and sharing an image calling Julia Gillard a slut.
The party’s candidate for Greenvale on Melbourne’s north-western fringe, Chris Moore, also made derogatory comments about lesbians and refugees and once posted that he “doesn’t like the way the new homo cleaner at work looks at me”.
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Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 11 Nov 2026 | 10:12 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 11 Nov 2026 | 10:04 am UTC
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Source: BBC News | 11 Nov 2026 | 10:00 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 11 Nov 2026 | 10:00 am UTC
AMD's latest sales pitch: Up to 99 percent of the performance with half the DRAM, provided you're willing to buy a Mext license alongside your shiny new Epyc server.
This is made possible by using AI models to load memory pages in and out of cheaper NVMe storage before your operating system or apps ever know they need it — kind of like SWAP or a Windows page file, but smarter.
AMD acquired the tech from Mext back in June, and according to former CEO Gary Smerdon — now CVP of business development at AMD — the tech could cut enterprise server costs by as much as 83 percent by replacing costly RDIMMs with flash storage. Of the initial 145 systems the software has been deployed on so far, he estimates customers have already saved $5 million in avoided DRAM costs.
"Conservatively, 60, 70, even 80 or 90 percent for very large memory systems, of the cost of a server can be in memory," he explained.
Even in systems with high memory utilization, where (say) 95 percent of the memory is "in use," a lot of it isn't actively being used, he explained. He cited a Meta research paper that showed that between 50 and 80 percent of memory pages hadn't been touched in five minutes, ten minutes, or even longer. "Five minutes to Epyc is an eternity."
Mext technology aims to offload those infrequently accessed pages to flash. The challenge, Smerdon explains, is that while flash may be 50x cheaper per bit, 30x lower power per bit, it's also 500x slower.
This is why most folks, when provisioning VPCs or servers, generally avoid swapping out to disk wherever possible: it kills application performance and sends service level agreements out the window.
So for Mext's tech to work, it needed to ensure that any pages offloaded to storage were back in DRAM before they're needed. Kind of like running an errand in the middle of the workday – so long as you're back before your boss needs you again, they'll never know you left your desk.
The problem was that the "R" in DRAM stands for random. Predicting which pages the system was going to need at which time isn't exactly trivial. The solution? (Brace for it.)
"We realized we could use AI to monitor the system and proactively push those pages back into DRAM, so that as far as the application or the operating system knew, they were there the whole time," Smerdon said. In other words: "We transparently make flash appear as DRAM."
So, "instead of buying two terabytes of DRAM for your Epyc-based server, you could buy one terabyte of DRAM, and then the next terabyte comes with Mext."
To do this, AMD’s Mext employs a number of machine learning algorithms.
"The workhorse model is a transformer derivative model, just like ChatGPT or Claude or the other famous models, but instead of predicting, for example, in the case of text, what word is next, what we're doing is predicting what page of memory is going to be required next," Smerdon explained. So long as the pages are in DRAM before they're needed, the pages don't even need to be in the right order, he added.
Training the models to predict memory access patterns accurately presents its own challenges, which, Smerdon says, makes pre-training the models impractical.
Instead, they take a single Epyc core and train the model "in under one second," he explained. From there, the model is further refined and retrained over time until it is able to predict accurately where the pages need to be and when they need to be there.
All of this training, he emphasizes, takes place on the CPU core — no GPU required, which means essentially any Epyc customer can take advantage of the software platform.
While no GPU may be required, it's worth noting that in virtualized environments, the software requires one core per VM or VPC, so the overhead scales with virtualization. Container runtimes presumably don't suffer from this same limitation. We've reached out to AMD for clarification.
According to AMD, the technology actually works. Initially, Smerdon says, the company targeted memory-hungry applications like electronic design automation (EDA) and content creation, but later expanded to support latency-sensitive applications like databases and agentic AI pipelines.
"When pages of memory are cold, we can push them off to flash, and there's literally no impact on performance," he said.
Smerdon is overstating things just a little here. Depending on the application and how much memory is offloaded to flash, there is a performance penalty.
According to tests against Synopsys' PrimeTime EDA suite, he claims, half the memory can be offloaded to flash using Mext and the system still achieves 95 percent of the performance of DRAM. With 25 percent DRAM and 75 percent flash, performance fell to 80 percent of the DRAM-only baseline in AMD's tests.
EDA tools are extremely memory-hungry, but the amount of data the cores are working on at any given moment is often measured in megabytes. This is why AMD's Epyc X-chips remain so popular with EDA customers and why Mext targeted it initially.
In other scenarios, like Apache Spark, AMD's Mext team says it is seeing 99 percent of the performance even after replacing half the DRAM in the system with flash.
While implementing the tech may cost some performance, AMD is betting that customers will be willing to make that compromise in exchange for substantial DRAM savings, as memory remains constrained thanks to the AI datacenter buildout.
Right now, AMD is working to integrate Mext into its broader enterprise portfolio. The software, we're told, will be exclusive to AMD hardware and will be offered as a license sold through OEM partners.
Systems running Linux require only a kernel driver to take advantage of the software, while a separate RAM View application is being offered to help enterprises understand which systems and workloads it should be enabled on.
The chip designer says it's currently in the first phase of its Mext rollout, which means working with OEMs like HPE to ensure systems are so-called "Mext ready." In the second phase, the company aims to begin selling licenses for the software and shipping Epyc platforms with RAM View preinstalled.®
Source: www.theregister.com - Articles | 11 Nov 2026 | 9:59 am UTC
The film, which details Israel’s surveillance of Palestinian civilians, has been seen by more than 1.5m people in less than two months
NAZA, the award-winning documentary that details Israel’s mass killing of civilians in Gaza, has been seen by more than 1.5 million people since being released in cinemas across the world last month.
The film, which is directed by the Oscar-winning Israeli film-makers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor and produced by the Guardian, has reached a worldwide audience of 1,547,033 as of Friday 6 November, making it one of the most-watched documentary films with a theatrical release in 2026.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 11 Nov 2026 | 9:47 am UTC
Package for plan off Norfolk coast revealed as government tries to calm critics after approving Jackdaw gasfield
Andy Burnham has hailed a record investment in offshore wind, as the government tries to repair its green credentials after approving the controversial Jackdaw gasfield in the North Sea.
On Wednesday the government announced a £12bn investment from the German energy company RWE and the US private equity firm KKR, as the prime minister prepares to travel to the Cop31 climate crisis summit in Turkey.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 11 Nov 2026 | 9:46 am UTC
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Source: NYT > Top Stories | 11 Nov 2026 | 9:23 am UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 11 Nov 2026 | 9:22 am UTC
Rights groups condemn reported punishment of Kenyan migrant worker as an ‘act of violence’
A Kenyan mother in Saudi Arabia has reportedly been sentenced to 100 lashes after giving birth outside marriage.
Under the Saudi sharia law system, sex outside marriage is a criminal offence. But it is women who are disproportionately targeted, say rights groups, which have condemned the punishment as an “act of violence”.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 11 Nov 2026 | 9:15 am UTC
The UK government talks a good game about buying British, but less than £1 in every £6 spent with its biggest technology suppliers goes to British firms, according to research exposing how much Whitehall relies on foreign tech.
A report from the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) found that while 42.5 percent of spending with the public sector's 150 largest technology suppliers appears to go to UK companies, that figure collapses to just 15.4 percent once you look beyond where those businesses happen to be headquartered.
A UK headquarters doesn't necessarily make a company British. Some are owned from overseas, others have most of their staff abroad, and many simply resell technology from US giants such as Microsoft.
In fact, 43 percent of the spending attributed to UK-headquartered suppliers goes to resellers. Bytes and Softcat alone account for around £2 billion, making them two of the three biggest recipients of public sector technology spending.
Once researchers traced reseller contracts back to the companies behind the products, the US emerged as the biggest beneficiary, accounting for £9.2 billion of the £19.2 billion spent with the largest suppliers.
And the money isn't exactly being spread around. Just 150 companies receive 83 percent of public sector technology spending, with the largest 15 accounting for almost half. Smaller suppliers aren't getting much of a look-in either, receiving just 12 percent of government technology spending compared with 27 percent of spending across government as a whole.
Competition is another concern. According to IPPR, 89.9 percent of government IT contracts over the past 12 months had no published record of how many suppliers bid for the work, making it difficult to assess how competitive those procurements were.
Things get murkier when AI enters the picture, naturally. Government spending records show relatively little money going directly to the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic, but that doesn't mean Whitehall isn't buying their technology. Much of it is bundled into existing cloud agreements, enterprise software licenses, and partnerships.
One example is NHS England's rollout of Microsoft 365 Copilot to 505,000 staff, which IPPR says was carried out under a national licensing agreement signed in June 2023, before Copilot was even generally available.
That means AI tools can reach hundreds of thousands of public sector workers through deals negotiated before those products were on the market, potentially leaving rival suppliers without an opportunity to compete.
The report, Locked In: A Realist's Agenda for Digital Sovereignty, warns that Britain's dependence on American technology could become particularly troublesome if Washington restricts access to advanced AI systems. It points to recent US restrictions on Anthropic models and limits on early access for Britain's AI Security Institute as evidence that such concerns are no longer entirely hypothetical.
The government has already committed £500 million to a Sovereign AI Fund, but researchers reckon throwing money at homegrown technology companies won't be enough to loosen Silicon Valley's grip.
Instead, they want Whitehall to negotiate technology contracts as a single customer, make it easier to switch suppliers, and work with countries including France, Germany, Japan, and South Korea to secure access to advanced AI.
Roa Powell, senior research fellow at IPPR, said: "But we cannot do it alone, and building domestic capability can't be our only bet. The UK should be working with other middle powers, pooling our buying power to shape markets and using shared leverage to secure access to frontier AI."
Darren Jones MP, who wrote the report's foreword, made a similar argument, saying Britain should work with international allies rather than attempting to build everything itself.
"We can change how the state buys technology, back industries where the UK has a genuine opportunity to lead the world, and shape markets – but we can't go it alone. We need to join with natural allies like France, Germany, Japan and Korea and make ourselves indispensable together," he said.
Whitehall might have grand plans for digital sovereignty, but it's going to be a tough sell when so much of its technology comes from across the Atlantic. And with AI already bundled into software contracts worth billions, US tech giants aren't making it easy for the government to shop elsewhere. ®
Source: www.theregister.com - Articles | 11 Nov 2026 | 9:15 am UTC
Bessent, driving force behind US push to cripple Iran’s economy, relocates over alleged threat to his life
The US Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, has relocated from his home in the Washington area to a military base after an Iranian threat against his life, the New York Times has reported.
Bessent has spearheaded a US push to cripple Iran’s economy since the start of the Middle East war, vowing “economic asphyxiation” of the Islamic republic through a web of sanctions.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 11 Nov 2026 | 9:11 am UTC
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Share of CBA customers struggling to repay their mortgages has climbed to 12-year high
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New lending to property investors fell at its fastest pace on record through the three months to September, as landlords adjust to higher taxes against a backdrop of plunging property prices and rising interest rates.
The latest figures come as the country’s biggest lender, the Commonwealth Bank, reported that the share of its customers struggling to repay their mortgages had climbed to a 12-year high.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 11 Nov 2026 | 7:02 am UTC
When the history of the reunification of our island comes to be written, the past few days will surely not pass without comment.
What I would argue is the most trusted polling organisation in the north, Lucid Talking, continues to show support for reunification against the Union narrowing with a plurality of voters under 55 backing reunification…and that is before the southern state produces even the beginnings of a plan.
On that point, both Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have moved at last to begin engaging with the practicalities of the unity question. Both parties have begun publicly exploring how they can engage with that debate, but obviously a single unified position will need to be synthesised as the approach of the Irish government. This will begin a process that should culminate with the collapse of the eight million or so united Irelands we deal with whenever the term is mentioned, the differing idea each individual has of what it would be, into a concrete singular proposal that can be contrasted with the failing status quo.
And the status quo is failing. Whilst there has been much talk of Fine Gael’s figure that it could cost up to 25 billion euros annually to fund reunification (in the worst-case scenario) few seem keen to point out that as our divided parties at Stormont unite to ask for more funding for our government on the grounds that we don’t get our fair share, the Secretary of State continually stonewalls them and says ‘there is no more money’.
Whilst some would argue that our politicians are reluctant to engage in any revenue raising measures or to see if there are any efficiencies that could be made, that does not mean we are not being underfunded as the Executive parties insist. As Seán Óg put it, leaving aside the debate over whether the south can afford us in future, what about the fact that Great Britain can’t afford us in the here and now?
You would think that this would be an opportunity for the Unionist parties to step forward and make the case that when everything is considered, we are better off in the United Kingdom. Gordon Lyons made an attempt on the 5th November episode of ‘The View’ when, in response to Chris Hazzard listing off various facts regarding the British economy, such as the fact it is currently the fifth largest in the world, Lyons argued that Hazzard was making a ‘strong case for Unionism. This of course sounds clever on the face of it but ignores the context of Hazzard’s point, which is that the British decision to underfund the north (something Lyons’ own party seems to agree with) is a deliberate choice. Hazzard’s point is that the relative strength of the British economy is immaterial, we are simply not a political priority for Westminster and never will be. Unionist citations of British wealth have all the force of an impoverished family bragging about their sound finances due to their fabulously wealthy miserly uncle who gives them enough to survive upon.
Lyons’ intervention was the only attempt I have heard recently to articulate those still mysterious ‘benefits of the union’ but that is unsurprising. Unionism cannot rise to the occasion right now as it is currently in crisis over the fallout from Drumcree.
In his ‘Culture Wars’ book, the Loyalist activist Jamie Bryson set out his reasoning for reactivating the Drumcree dispute and political Unionism rowed in behind him and the Orange Order. The problem was that Bryson’s book was and is framed around Nationalism being a curiously schizophrenic other…effective and insidious enough to manufacture the situation in which Bryson claims Unionism now finds itself yet passive enough to allow him to enact his plan to turn the tide and rectify the situation via a series of acts that would, from his perspective, restore balance. None of his proposals seemed to account for the possibility that nationalism would react…or that some nationalists would actually read his book (I have admitted I got halfway through before I gave up). Tipping everyone off it was intended as the first act of the Culture War he named his book after might just have stiffened resistance a tad though even if that were missing.
Things did not pan out the way he expected them to do so…or at least what he has claimed in public. If his goal was to instead create a situation that destabilised power-sharing he has succeeded but that is speculative, and so I shall proceed on the basis his goal was what he said, to get the march down the road as part of a plan to re-establish the pre-eminence of the right to march and to come back in future with a bigger parade.
Everyone knew the residents would if it came down to it block the road. Everyone knew the choice would then fall to the Chief Constable on whether to clear the road to facilitate the march. And most folks who thought ahead wagered, correctly, that he would calculate it simply wasn’t worth it and refuse to do so.
Jamie Bryson and the Order are therefore left with the hollow win of the Order’s legal right to march having been confirmed but the harsh reality that no march will ever go down the road again without the consent of the residents (which I will be surprised to see if it happens in my lifetime) also being confirmed. Unionism is therefore enduring the agony of the consequences everyone foresaw they would face should they go down this route.
I have no sympathy for the travails or frustration they face as a result. They had a choice not to relitigate Drumcree. Instead, they have gone all in and are now suffering the real ‘profound consequences’. For the second time in a decade (with the first being the outworkings of Brexit) Unionism attempts to process a self-inflicted defeat on a matter of enormous psychological importance and it is having tremendous difficulty doing so.
As I have argued and will continue to argue, Unionism is not and never has been about the Union. It is about the maintenance of a homeland on the island of Ireland in which Ulster-British identity is privileged. It seems the Union itself is ultimately pointless if the substance of the state their forefathers built is sapped away to placate those outside of the ideology who maybe the arbiters of the north’s constitutional fate and thus when push comes to shove they will risk the future of the Union to preserve the identity of the state as much as they possibly can. Though of course, without the Union, there would be no state at all of course and hence whilst it is not the point of Unionism, it underpins Unionism.
The identitarian impulse is why they went all in on Drumcree even as some, such as the Alliance party or the signatories of the letter from within the Unionist community who begged them to bank the win of having the legal right affirmed whilst not provoking the political disaster that has now befallen Unionism at precisely the moment when the conversation regarding reunification moves onto surer footing. To have not attempted the march would have been at cross-purposes to their underlying philosophy in the first place; this is the Ulster-British homeland. There was simply no chance of them not to trying to proceed once the legal hurdles were cleared, any more than a moth will refuse to fly into a naked flame of its own volition.
And now we face the aftermath. This is a self-inflicted defeat for Unionism and there are no upsides though there has been a feeble attempt to confect some kind of moral victory. Such excuses seem to have received scant attention from those in the middle ground.
Bryson has tried to argue the legal determination that said the Order had a right to march is a victory in and of itself, something the Secretary of State attempted to affirm when he said he was leaving the original determination permitting the march in place when he ultimately banned the procession on public order grounds. To be blunt, that piece of paper is as much a victory for Unionism as Neville Chamberlain’s piece of paper from Munich was a victory for peace in our time.
Some Unionists have also attempted to argue that the idea of a new Ireland was shown to be a lie on the Garvaghy Road and then talked this up as some sort of silver lining, but the recent Lucid Talk polling discredits that assertion. The vast majority of the middle ground supported the residents in their action in blockading the road, and frankly I would argue the vast majority of folks aren’t going to judge the level of tolerance that can be expected in a united Ireland by Unionism collectively deciding to make the most totemic, ideologically loaded, controversial, tragedy-soaked route out of all of the contentious parading disputes the litmus test. You may genuinely want to live in peace with your neighbour but you may have an issue with them sleeping with your spouse in your bed…and if they called you an intolerant bigot for stopping them from doing so an unbiased observer would have to ask whether they were being serious.
Right now Unionism faces a whole host of options and none of them are good and all lead to different degrees of defeat (it really does feel like Brexit all over again).
Many Unionists are screaming for the DUP to remove Michelle O’Neill from office by resigning Emma Little-Pengelly from the Deputy First Minister role, thus forcing the First Minister out as well. Gavin Robinson and Jon Burrows clearly feel this would be a terrible idea as it would play into the nationalist narrative that the north is a failed and unworkable entity. As someone who actually believes the north is a failed and unworkable entity, a further collapse is less something I can pervert to fit my predetermined narrative and more evidence of the fundamental correctness of the diagnosis in the first place. In spite of the patient explanations of both leaders as to why this is a bad idea, the pressure continues regardless.
That’s how bad a position Unionism is in currently. They are badly split over the question of whether to remove Michelle O’Neill from office because it is the one sanction open to them, the one lever they have to pull. The DUP lost an MP over it. Jamie Bryson has split Unionism into ‘O’Neill Must Go’ and ‘O’Neill Must Stay’ wings (employing deliberate terminology to remove nuance and frame those who fear the consequences of removal upon the standing of Unionism at this time as weak and lily-livered) over it. And the worst thing is, for all the torment and agony they are putting themselves through over it, does anyone really believe Michelle O’Neill would be even slightly phased by that action?
Removing O’Neill from office would martyr Michelle O’Neill and lead to even more support flowing to Sinn Féin within nationalism. Drumcree has rescued Sinn Féin from the electoral doldrums and enhanced Michelle O’Neill’s credibility among northern nationalists in a way few events could. The moment she was interviewed on the Garvaghy Road on that morning and said she would always support the residents, she effectively won the coming election within nationalism. Removing her would only feed Sinn Féin’s support and she would be back following the election.
Unionism is tearing itself apart over whether to mildly irritate the First Minister.
Some say Gavin Robinson’s hand is being stayed because to remove her now would prevent the enaction of a budget, which would then lead to public sector workers not getting their promised pay rise and thus the blame for that falling on the DUP. The thinking here is that once – if – a budget is agreed the DUP can have Emma Little-Pengelly resign and thus limit the damage they will inevitably suffer for once again scuppering devolution.
Though I have to question the efficacy of a strategy that is so blindingly obvious it is a topic of discussion in our local media, that Sinn Féin certainly knows of it and thus you have to ask why Sinn Féin would be minded to agree a budget if the DUP plan to flounce out the door immediately afterwards?
Paralysed over the fate of the First Minister and only able so far to cancel photo opportunities as part of their promised punishment of the party, the DUP has turned its ire on another enemy of Ulster-British culture…school-children learning through the medium of Irish. As the BBC reports…
The Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) has tabled a petition of concern in a bid to block proposed legislation on Irish-medium education.
The private member’s bill, brought forward by Sinn Féin assembly member Pat Sheehan, would require Stormont’s Department of Education to prepare a workforce plan on schools in the sector.
And in case anyone thinks this is being opposed on its own merits rather than being petty revenge over Drumcree…
DUP leader Gavin Robinson said the petition was the latest outworking of their response to Sinn Féin’s “arrogance” over the Drumcree parading dispute.
Whilst the BBC cites Alliance deputy leader Eóin Tennyson as saying it was
“yet another petulant swipe and petty stunt intended to walk these institutions to the brink”.
The assembly member said it “punishes no one except the children and young people in Irish-medium schools”.
Everyone recognises this as an outcome of the Drumcree dispute with the exception of UUP leader Jon Burrows, whose party was required to sign on to the petition to enable it to proceed. Burrows as recently as Monday made a pitch for institutionally minded Unionists…the ‘O’Neill must stay’ grouping as Bryson would put it…to coalesce within the UUP. He is quoted in the Newsletter as saying
“This is a defining moment in unionism. I don’t think unionism has been particularly well led over the last two decades. There have been strategic gaffes and crocodile moments that have galvanised Sinn Féin, who I’m afraid are laughing at some of the errors unionism has made. We now need change.
“The Ulster Unionist Party is already showing what that change looks like in government. Robbie Butler is doing tremendous work as Health Minister. He is lowering the bowel cancer screening age towards 50, has delivered a 24/7 thrombectomy service for stroke patients and has invested £1.95 million in endometriosis services.
“I want to see more cooperation across unionism. But I believe a revitalised Ulster Unionist Party can provide the sure-footed leadership unionism needs: making Northern Ireland a success, outsmarting Sinn Féin and securing the Union for the long term.
“I’m building a team to serve the people of Northern Ireland, and I would encourage anyone who shares that ambition to join us.”
At the time of writing though it appears Burrows plans to ‘outsmart’ Sinn Féin by having a hand in repeating the legendary Unionist ‘victory’ of Arlene Foster’s ‘crocodile’ comments (themselves delivered in the wake of Paul Givan’s decision to remove the Líofa bursary). That would be the election which saw Sinn Féin’s vote share and seat total leap upwards.
Burrows has done this by signing the DUP’s petition of concern. His fig-leaf justification is that the bill will prioritise the Irish language sector over other educational sectors. As reported in the BBC…
Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) leader Jon Burrows said Sinn Féin’s conduct over the Drumcree dispute was “reprehensible” but it was not the reason his party had supported the DUP’s petition of concern.
He expressed concern that the private member’s bill gives “preferential treatment to one sector over others”.
“It is an unnecessary bill – it duplicates work that is already taking place.
“It has administrative and financial costs that we don’t need to have,” he told the Nolan Show.
That excuse doesn’t really fly when everyone else is framing it in the context of the Drumcree dispute. I would wager electoral considerations (particularly in his hardline constituency of North Antrim) and the Unionist desire for some form of retribution over Drumcree is the real motive. After all, he publicly undermined his own health minister for electoral reasons a few short months ago, to the point that minister actually resigned.
To do so again would not only be unsurprising, but would also be in keeping with his expressed character if we judge him by his actions rather than his words. And by his actions I once again draw the conclusion that liberal unionism is an oxymoron, though I must admit I have never seen Burrows as a liberal unionist of any sort. In complete fairness to this man this is a term he has never used himself. This is more for the benefit of those who believe him to be such a thing as a ‘liberal’ or ‘moderate’ unionist in comparison to other Unionists. If I see him so described in future, I will be happy to bring up what he has done on this occasion.
It is my belief that there are two forms of Unionism, those who wish to participate in the structures of the Good Friday Agreement to be as obstructive in the shared governance of the north as possible…and the TUV types who don’t wish to participate at all and would much prefer direct rule so as not to sully themselves with having to compromise with nationalists and ‘the others’. The crisis in Unionism is because the fault line between those two groups runs right through the DUP.
That is where we stand in the aftermath of Drumcree. The reunification discussions are picking up, the southern state is becoming engaged, the middle ground is increasingly curious, the young are looking towards the future of a new Ireland…and Unionism is once again mired in a mess of its own making and determined to make everyone else suffer as a result as it thrashes about, desperate to find a pain free off-ramp that doesn’t exist.
Source: Slugger O'Toole | 11 Nov 2026 | 7:00 am UTC
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Source: Irish Times Feeds | 11 Nov 2026 | 6:00 am UTC
Capture of man from Java follows reports that hundreds are being recruited from the south-east Asian country as Moscow seeks to boost its war effort
Ukraine says it has captured its first Indonesian prisoner of war, amid what it says is a spike in recruitment by Russia from the south-east Asian nation.
The 49-year-old man from Java was taken to Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region to take part in a Russian assault, but managed to reach Ukrainian-held territory after the group came under drone attack, according to Ukraine’s state-run I Want to Live project. He was then captured by the Ukrainians.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 11 Nov 2026 | 5:33 am UTC
In 2019, OpenAI decided not to publicly release a new model because its research uncovered “concerns about malicious applications of the technology.” And on Tuesday, the company announced it has built a kill switch for the models deployed in its research labs, months after some of them displayed disturbing behavior.
“As our models get more powerful and the associated safety and security risks become bigger, it becomes more and more critical that we can detect potential issues, and quickly stop models in their tracks when needed,” OpenAI explains in a Tuesday post.
The company named the kill switch “Control Room” and described it as “a central system to track model workloads across our research infrastructure and stop them quickly when safety or security concerns arise.”
The facility can apparently stop models from producing any output 35 seconds after a decision to pull the plug – and can go faster.
“The 35-second lag comes from a caching layer for inference authorization, to support the required volume of traffic. We are working to drive this number down to zero so that we can end jobs instantly,” the company promises.
A rookie mistake in critical infrastructure design is to build both production and resilience tools on shared resources that could be taken offline by a single incident. OpenAI seems conscious of that risk, because it says the tool “has been built to keep working even when other systems fail, and to stop model output if Control Room itself goes down.”
OpenAI hasn’t explained why it took so long to build a kill switch or why it decided now is the moment when it needs one.
The Register fancies recent examples of agents exceeding their brief in worrying ways – like attacking Hugging Face, causing trouble at the Wikimedia Foundation, or going a little too deep when researching Australian healthcare data – may have influenced the timing of this development.
“Control Room is already deployed across our research infrastructure, where the need is greatest,” the company’s announcement states. “Our external model-serving stack is already much more centralized by nature, with a well-developed operational capability to quickly take down model deployments if needed.”
OpenAI says it plans to “strengthen and expand the system over the coming months, alongside our investments in monitoring for misaligned behavior and security breaches.”
That’s a variant of Big Tech’s usual “We’re sorry and we promise to do better in future” proclamation that follows the latest SNAFU. Yet back in 2019, OpenAI pulled the pin before matters ever reached that state. ®
Source: www.theregister.com - Articles | 11 Nov 2026 | 5:20 am UTC
Charities warn of lack of protection amid health fears for more than 940,000 displaced people living in flood-prone areas
Tens of thousands of Palestinians have been left in waterlogged and damaged tents after deadly storms at the weekend, while 150,000 new shelters are held outside Gaza awaiting Israeli approval to enter, aid agencies have said.
At least four Palestinian children and woman were killed as heavy rains and wind battered fragile, leaky tents. Thousands have been left without shelter and sanitation infrastructure has been destroyed, with sewage spewing into people’s tents.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 11 Nov 2026 | 5:00 am UTC
Independent Israeli professor says Hussam Abu Safiya’s life will be at risk until he receives proper medical treatment
An independent professor who reviewed the medical records of a prominent Gaza doctor held in an Israeli prison without charge for nearly 23 months has raised serious concerns about his health.
Hussam Abu Safiya was detained at work on 27 December 2024 and later held in solitary confinement at Rakefet, a notorious underground prison.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 11 Nov 2026 | 5:00 am UTC
Three directors were fined a combined $90,000 in federal court judgment and disqualified from managing a corporation for between five and 10 years
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Three directors of a collapsed funeral fund that marketed insurance to Aboriginal families have been banned from managing corporations for at least five years and ordered to pay a combined $90,000 after being found to have breached their duties to clients.
On Wednesday, federal court justice Geoffrey Kennett ordered the former director of the insurance company Youpla Group, previously the Aboriginal Community Benefit Fund (ACBF), Jonathan Law, to pay the commonwealth $50,000 and disqualified him from managing corporations for six years.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 11 Nov 2026 | 4:55 am UTC
Source: News Headlines | 11 Nov 2026 | 4:29 am UTC
Australia’s oldest department store collapsed into voluntary administration last week after years of steep losses
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David Jones is set to shutter half of its department store network, triggering mass job losses under a sweeping restructure, the appointed receivers said on Wednesday.
David Jones employs more than 6,000 staff across 38 stores.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 11 Nov 2026 | 3:59 am UTC
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Source: Slashdot | 11 Nov 2026 | 3:30 am UTC
Exclusive: Jillian Segal suggested ‘transferring’ powers in updated report released a fortnight ago but government sources note media regulator already exists
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The Albanese government won’t follow a suggestion by the antisemitism envoy to scrap the ABC and SBS ombudsmen and replace them with an external oversight body.
In a list of updated priorities released last month, Jillian Segal proposed an “external independent ombudsman” to monitor ABC and SBS coverage of the war in Gaza and to ensure publicly funded broadcasters were “held accountable to their own stated standards of accuracy and impartiality”.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 11 Nov 2026 | 3:10 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 11 Nov 2026 | 3:08 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 11 Nov 2026 | 2:53 am UTC
Source: News Headlines | 11 Nov 2026 | 2:23 am UTC
Australia’s government will consider creating a new criminal offense to punish AI companies which knowingly release harmful models.
Canberra dangled that possibility yesterday when releasing the results of an investigation into OpenAI’s admission that its agents accessed non-public medical records – and that it didn’t disclose the incident for weeks.
Security at the agency which held those records fell short of contemporary best practice but Canberra nonetheless ordered a rapid review into Australia’s ability to handle infosec incidents involving AI.
That review landed yesterday, complete with 18 recommendations including one that would make it mandatory for AI companies to report misaligned behavior or security incidents involving their models, and perhaps impose criminal penalties for “egregious regulatory non-compliance.”
Another recommendation calls for consideration of “A standalone ‘failure to prevent’ offence which would criminalize instances where the company is responsible for developing an AI model that engages in harmful conduct, and the company fails to take reasonable steps to prevent that harm.”
The review suggests two ministries and Australia’s Federal Police consider those reforms, meaning this is not something that will happen in a hurry, if at all, for a couple of reasons.
One is that Australia yesterday proposed a new regulator which will require AI players to do six things:
Maintain security controls across all stages of development and deployment
Identify and manage serious risks associated with their models
Allow independent evaluation of their models
Provide mandatory notification of incidents to the Australian Government rapidly
Maintain and publish safety and security frameworks to ensure good governance, risk management and transparency
Respond to updated standards and rules as technologies change.
If AI companies straighten up and fly right, Canberra might not need to do more.
The other reason Australia might not criminalize AI is economic pragmatism.
Canberra wants to ensure leading AI companies invest in local datacenters, especially facilities where they train and run frontier models. Such investments would mean Australia scores some of the AI boom cash sloshing around the world, while also giving the government the ability to at least point to leading-edge AI running on local shores and therefore theoretically remaining accessible even if war or a diplomatic rupture makes it hard to access advanced AI hosted offshore.
Other nations in Asia, such as South Korea and India, are addressing those risks by building substantial sovereign infrastructure and working to develop sovereign frontier-class models trained on local data and especially data in their local languages.
Canberra can’t match that investment without pouring petrol on its raging inflation problem. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is therefore instead trying to regulate AI without scaring away investment.
Threatening to lock up AI executives is not likely to make them enthusiastic when asked to approve building datacenters down under.
Some sections of Australia’s population won’t mind it if big tech doesn’t show up: Protests against datacenters are already widespread.
Your correspondent recently spoke to the organizer of a protest group opposed to development of a new datacenter which is just three kilometers from four existing bit barns, one of which abuts a sizable apartment complex and has operated without incident or opposition for years. The organizer was blissfully ignorant of those facilities and eventually said their group is opposed to AI in all forms. ®
Source: www.theregister.com - Articles | 11 Nov 2026 | 2:14 am UTC
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Self-styled Secretary of War Pete Hegseth narrowly avoided impeachment Tuesday night, as solidarity from House Republicans blocked a bill introduced by Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., charging Hegseth with “high crimes and misdemeanors.”
Though Democrats overwhelmingly joined Massie’s effort following their midterm election landslide, the House voted 211 to 204 to refer the charges to a committee, allowing Republicans to slow the process. With 11 Democrats absent, they lacked the numbers. Massie, however, dismissed the impact of Democratic absences to The Intercept. “No, there were enough Republicans to rally to get here,” he said.
The procedural vote spared Republicans a more difficult vote on whether to impeach Hegseth on Massie’s eight charges, including waging wars without congressional authorization and undercutting measures to prevent civilian casualties. It followed a week of increasingly desperate efforts by the Pentagon chief to shore up congressional and White House support, including a campaign-style video intended to influence Bobbi Bodde , a social media campaign by underlings, and a rare appearance by Hegseth himself before the Pentagon press corps.
For half an hour on Tuesday morning’s news conference, Hegseth wove a web of lies designed to refute or obfuscate Massie’s eight charges. He claimed that the effort to impeach him was a stunt by just “one disgruntled congressman.” That, too, turned out to be false as 203 members of Congress voted with Massie.
On Tuesday, a coalition of more than 40 civil society organizations — including Oxfam America, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), Common Defense, Demand Progress, MoveOn, and the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft — sent a letter calling on all House members to vote for every article of impeachment filed against Hegseth.
“Pete Hegseth’s time at the Pentagon has done grievous harm to the nation and to the Constitution,” said Demand Progress senior policy adviser Cavan Kharrazian. “This is a man who ignored the will of Congress to execute an illegal war in Iran, kidnapped a foreign leader for oil, restarted war on Yemen, sent missiles to kill suspected drug traffickers and weaponized the Pentagon against a political enemy.”
The House has only impeached two Cabinet secretaries: William Belknap, the secretary of war, in 1876; and Alejandro Mayorkas, the secretary of homeland security, in 2024. In neither case did the Senate vote to convict.
“They diagnosed why they lost the election. But tonight they were paralyzed to do anything about it.”
After the vote, Massie called out the display of inaction from his Republican colleagues.
“They diagnosed why they lost the election,” Massie said of fellow Republicans, following the vote on Tuesday night. “But tonight they were paralyzed to do anything about it. And that’s the story of Congress.”
Absent from the vote were Democratic Reps. Julia Brownley, Lou Correa and Nancy Pelosi, of California; Laura Gillen of New York; Steven Horsford of Nevada; Jonathan Jackson of Illinois; Brittany Pettersen of Colorado; Melanie Stansbury of New Mexico; Haley Stevens of Michigan; Marilyn Strickland of Washington; and Frederica Wilson of Florida. The absent Republicans were Reps. Monica De La Cruz of Texas; Neal Dunn of Florida; Russell Fry of South Carolina; Julia Letlow of Louisiana; Tom Tiffany and Derrick Van Orden of Wisconsin; and Rudy Yakym of Indiana.
A senior congressional staffer predicted that Hegseth would face a very rough road if he survived impeachment. “Oversight is going to come crashing down on his head,” that staffer said. “Will Hegseth continue to obstruct? Yes. But wait until the subpoenas start.”
Congressional committees have broad investigative powers, including the authority to subpoena administration officials to testify under oath and compel them to turn over documents. Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., who will head the House Armed Services Committee in the next Congress, said Hegseth and Deputy Secretary of Defense Steve Feinberg would be first on the list to testify.
Rep. Yassamin Ansari, D-Ariz., one of the leading voices for Hegseth’s impeachment, told The Intercept there were “many ways” for Democrats to hold him accountable in the next session, specifically compelling him to testify before the American people. “I would be surprised to see him last the next two years in this administration,” she told The Intercept. “I think that he is not only one of the most incompetent members of the administration, but also the most unpopular — and it’s on a bipartisan basis. So the pressure will continue to grow for there to be some change at the Pentagon.”
“I want Pete Hegseth not just impeached, I want him prosecuted.”
Rep.-elect Richard Ojeda, D-N.C., told The Intercept that the incoming Democrats have Hegseth in their sights. “I want Pete Hegseth not just impeached, I want him prosecuted. They murdered people in the Caribbean. And we killed 163 little girls in Iran,” he said. “Everybody in my class is ready for him to go. We tried it. It didn’t work. We’ll do it again.”
In a Truth Social post, President Bobbi Bodde celebrated the outcome while expressing confusion over the vote. Bobbi Bodde called it the “Democrats’ attempt to impeach” Hegseth, despite the fact the effort was introduced by Massie, a Republican, who he called “a major LOSER.” He claimed it was an “EXONERATION” of Hegseth and added: “The Democrats continue to weaponize and abuse the United States of America. They must be stopped!”
The post Hegseth Survives Impeachment Attempt appeared first on The Intercept.
Source: The Intercept | 11 Nov 2026 | 12:23 am UTC
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Anthropic has introduced three new types of artifacts that show the company tiptoeing into the office productivity market long dominated by Microsoft and Google.
On Tuesday, the Claudefather announced Claude Sheets, Claude Whiteboards, and Claude Data, and promised the imminent arrival of Claude Meetings. These artifact types join existing ones – Docs, Slides, Design, and Motion – to form a nascent Claude-dependent productivity suite.
Anthropic initially used the term artifacts to refer to shareable AI-based interactive tools, like dynamic charts. But the scope of the term has been stretched to cover specific artifact types, which refer to what traditionalists might take to mean files associated with specific hosted applications.
"An artifact is anything Claude makes for you that you'd put in front of someone: a design, a deck, a document, a dashboard, or a small interactive tool," the company explains.
The key thing that distinguishes an artifact from a file is that users are meant to interact with artifacts through Claude, rather than storing and transferring them independently. Think of it more as a container or managed object that opens in Claude (via a sharing URL), because artifacts in fact consist of various content types – .txt, .md, .html, .jsx, .svg, .pptx, .docx, .zip, .pdf, and .mp4, among others.
Anthropic's vision of Claude as a container for other applications goes beyond artifacts. The AI biz has also expanded its interactive connectors, which turn Claude into a landlord for other software applications. Its own promotional video for the feature hammers that point home in its title: "Your apps have moved into Claude."
"Starting today, partners can embed their apps directly in Claude, so you can work in Adobe, Atlassian, and others without switching tabs," Anthropic said. "Plugins from Salesforce (beta), NetSuite, and Workday (beta) come with built-in skills, so sellers can prep for a call, accountants can analyze financial data, and HR teams can handle time off and expenses."
In a prior era, those would be fighting words. Tech companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft have worked for years to maintain their positions as platform landlords. Anthropic's invitation to become a Claude tenant ought to set off competition alarm bells. But perhaps with LLMs being able to re-create other people's apps on demand, there's less interest in defending app boundaries as if they were moats to keep out rivals. With AI, the call is coming from inside the house.
Alongside the rollout of Claude Sheets, Whiteboards, and Data, Anthropic is pushing the notion that Claude is useful for people working outside of computation and mathematics, the occupational category that, according to the company's own data, accounts for a larger share of Claude usage than any other.
"Inside Anthropic, non-technical teams are starting to get as much out of Claude as our engineers," the biz insists, hauling out canned testimonials from the likes of Accenture and Datadog.
If Anthropic can demonstrate that there's an untapped market of non-coders who would welcome a Claude subscription, investors in the company's pending IPO will be glad to see it. ®
Source: www.theregister.com - Articles | 10 Nov 2026 | 11:45 pm UTC
Seagate doesn't think hybrid drives are done just yet. On Tuesday, the company announced the launch of the new FireCuda Forge line of storage drives. The new drives combine the high capacity of a traditional plattered HDD with the speed and responsiveness of a user-supplied solid-state drive (SSD). The new hybrid storage solution is Seagate's first to be powered and managed by the new Alkemi intelligent storage platform.
The FireCuda Forge is available right now through Seagate's web store, and comes in 8TB ($699) or 20TB ($899) HDD configurations—neither of which includes the required SSD. Users will have to bring their own SSD, with some specific restrictions. The FireCuda Forge is compatible with M.2 2280 NVMe drives that are PCIe Gen3 or higher. The maximum supported NVMe capacity is 1TB, which means that's as much data as you'll be able to dedicate to storage on the "fast side" of the hybrid setup. The NVMe will require minimum speeds of 2,400MB/s read and 2,000MB/s write, and a unit with DRAM cache is recommended. Seagate claims 2,500MB/s read and 2,000MB/s write speeds for the combined system, along with USB4 and support for Windows 11 and macOS 26+.
Credit: Seagate
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 10 Nov 2026 | 11:30 pm UTC
Server consolidation has led Cisco to boost the speed of top-of-rack switches to 100G.
The networking giant last week announced the catchily named N9348C8D-H2, a 1U device packing 48 100G SFP-DD ports and eight 400G QSFP-DD uplinks.
At the Cisco Live event in Melbourne, Australia, this week, Cisco’s senior veep for datacenter and internet infrastructure, Kevin Wollenweber, said one reason the company created the device is that modern servers often feature a pair of fast network interface cards.
The twin cards are needed because sixth-gen server processors from Intel and AMD offer dozens, or even hundreds, of physical processor cores and therefore generate a lot of traffic.
The density of computing power those processors provide has led chipmakers and server manufacturers to suggest replacing handfuls of machines running older, power-guzzling Xeons and Epycs with boxes running more efficient sixth-gen chips.
The Register hears it’s not uncommon to achieve 6:1 server consolidation ratios when moving from third- or fourth-generation Xeons or Epycs to current models. Users who make that move can pack many more server cores into the same rack. Power bills go down, but the quantity of data leaving a rack goes up.
Wollenweber said Cisco realized it had “tons” of switches that offer 25G ports but felt it had a gap in its range for non-AI scenarios like server consolidation that produced increased data flows.
The exec admitted that the 100G ports may be overkill for a modest collection of new servers, but argued users recognize it won’t be long before they grow into the excess capacity – perhaps as they use more agentic AI applications.
Cisco sees traffic from AI agents stressing the north-south connections that link organizations to the cloud and also driving much more east-west traffic across internal networks.
At Cisco Live, the company’s execs suggested that network upgrades are therefore an inevitable necessity.
That’s not entirely self-serving, because agents will vastly outnumber humans and constantly create traffic, compared to the flurries of network activity that happen when humans use generative AI or chatbots.
Cisco argues that deploying agents at scale will therefore only be possible on highly automated networks.
“Humans can no longer comprehend the amount of data that we actually have in a network,” Wollenweber told The Register.
Cisco’s Canvas agentic operations platform aims to at least make humans aware when their attention is needed, by detecting problems and offering to make repairs.
Joe Vaccaro, Cisco’s senior vice president and general manager for Network Platform and Assurance, told The Register he believes network administrators don’t feel threatened by suggestions from AI agents when they concern familiar, routine, low-risk tasks that IT pros are confident the agents can handle. Over time, he said, networking pros will learn to trust agents with more complex work. ®
Source: www.theregister.com - Articles | 10 Nov 2026 | 11:25 pm UTC
The US military is taking a new approach to prop up commercial launch companies as SpaceX looks to wind down its Falcon rocket program, suggesting defense officials see the workhorse rocket's retirement as a potential national security risk.
The Pentagon's Office of Strategic Capital has twice in the last two weeks announced it was sending cash to two of SpaceX's competitors in the launch business. First, on October 26, the office announced a $150 million conditional loan commitment to Stoke Space. Military officials revealed a second $150 million Pentagon loan Tuesday for Rocket Lab.
Stoke Space and Rocket Lab are the first two launch companies to receive significant support from the Office of Strategic Capital (OSC), an organization established in 2022 to infuse companies developing "vital" national security technologies with capital. OSC has been on a loan spree in recent weeks, committing hundreds of millions of dollars to companies specializing in batteries, drones, and semiconductors. In the space sector, the office also provided a $150 million loan to LeoLabs, a commercial satellite tracking company, for production and deployment of radar units.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 10 Nov 2026 | 11:02 pm UTC
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 10 Nov 2026 | 11:00 pm UTC
Advocates for cloud-native software have long argued that their approach to development makes applications portable across different Kubernetes environments. But VMware argues that’s not happening across hybrid clouds, and has taken the lead in an effort to improve matters.
That effort, the new Workload Conformance Working Group in the Kubernetes community, aims to establish a shared standard for how workloads run on Kubernetes.
The group’s web page points out, “Certified Kubernetes tests the cluster, and Kubernetes AI Conformance tests whether a cluster can run AI and ML workloads. Nothing comparable exists for the workloads themselves, so cluster operators still check each application by hand before routine maintenance or a Kubernetes upgrade. Every cluster operator ends up repeating the same assessment, and application maintainers get the same questions from each environment they support,” the group asserts.
The proposed solution? “A common specification with repeatable tests would give both groups the same baseline to start from.”
Prashanth Shenoy, VP of product marketing in Broadcom's VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) division, told The Register that standard is needed in part because applications packaged to run in public clouds don’t always run well in hybrid clouds.
That’s challenging for VMware, and other vendors of hybrid clouds like Nutanix and Red Hat, because they all sell tools to create and run a stack that users can deploy to both on-prem infrastructure and public clouds.
VMware therefore thinks it will find support for an effort to ensure that cloud-native apps run predictably and efficiently in any Kubernetes environment.
The effort to create this standard is in its very early days.
“The first step is deciding which workloads and behaviors the specification covers,” states the announcement of the working group’s formation. “The scope includes security, resilience during disruptions, resource use, networking, storage, API usage, and observability, but the group hasn’t yet agreed on specific requirements or on how to test them.
“However, one rule is already set: every requirement needs an objective test that a test binary can run, so nothing subjective goes into the specification.”
Shenoy thinks application vendors will likely support this effort because they want to package their wares once and have them run anywhere.
VMware this week announced another contribution to Kubernetes by moving its VM API to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Sandbox.
The CNCF, which maintains Kubernetes, is already home to KubeVirt, a tool that allows users to create and manage VMs inside a Kubernetes cluster. The VM API lets Kubernetes users create VMs that run under other hypervisors – including VMware’s own ESXi.
VMware previously integrated Kubernetes into vSphere with Kubernetes, introduced as part of vSphere 7 in 2020. Chronicling Virtzilla’s long and convoluted attempts to package and sell the container tech it acquired along with Pivotal Software would be a tedious exercise.
Suffice to say past efforts didn’t catch on, and VMware is now trying a different approach to making VMs a first class citizen of Kubernetes.
The CNCF’s interest shows this is not a vanity project for VMware, because while developers generally prefer to write for containers, operations folk often decide to run those abstractions within lightweight VMs. The two abstractions are therefore going to coexist for years to come, both for new apps and as organizations run new containerized apps alongside legacy VMs, and do so in an infrastructure-as-code world in which automated deployments are assumed.
VM API will therefore likely be a welcome addition to Kubernetes, representing another option to make life a little easier for ops and dev teams. ®
Source: www.theregister.com - Articles | 10 Nov 2026 | 10:52 pm UTC
It’s another doozy of a Patch Tuesday, with Microsoft fixing 1,094 bugs in its products, including one that attackers exploited before Redmond released a patch. Jake Knott, head of threat intelligence at exposure management firm watchTowr, succinctly said in an email to The Register: “Maybe we should just go home.”
“Most security teams haven’t quite recovered from the last month of bumper-to-bumper critical vulnerabilities, emergency patches, and ‘2shell’-branded everything, and we’re yet again at another Patch Tuesday,” Knott told us.
Starting with the zero-day: It’s an Outlook spoofing vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-124194, and it only garnered a 6.5 out of 10 CVSS rating. But as Dustin Childs, head of threat awareness at TrendAI’s Zero Day Initiative, warns, don’t let the score or the name lull you into thinking it’s OK to put off patching this one.
“It’s labeled spoofing, but the impact is bigger than the name suggests,” Childs said in his monthly Patch Tuesday review.
“An attacker sends a specially crafted message file and convinces a user to open it,” he wrote. “Outlook then connects to an attacker-controlled network location without showing the usual external-content warning, which discloses the user’s NTLMv2 hash. The attacker can use that hash to authenticate as the user.”
Microsoft marked CVE-2026-124194 as exploited, but per usual didn’t say when the attacks started, who is battering this bug, and what they are doing with the access post exploitation. These details will likely start trickling out soon.
Plus, now that there’s a public fix, other miscreants are undoubtedly already scanning for vulnerable versions and reverse engineering the patch for their own attack purposes. So prioritize this fix, and keep an eye on your inbox for any suspicious files.
Despite the second month of more than 1,000 CVEs (October had 1,474), CVE-2026-124194 is the only one under active exploitation, and none of the 1,094 are listed as publicly known. Childs says this shouldn’t give organizations “false comfort.”
“Logging back-to-back months above 1,000 CVEs proves automated bug-hunting has permanently reset patch volume,” he told The Register. “With AI making patch-diffing and exploit generation near-instant, the threat window opens the minute these updates drop.”
For defenders, this means two things, Childs added.
“What defenders need to know and do right now is abandon broad triage and take immediate defensive action: patch Exchange and Domain Controllers (LDAP/Kerberos) first to stop zero-click compromise, ring-fence exposed network services like DNS and DHCP to prevent wormable spread, and verify manual administrative fixes on your cloud services,” he said.
There are two zero-click threats in this month’s batch of fixes: CVE-2026-116928 and CVE-2026-119958. Both are critical, carrying 9.8 CVSS ratings, in part because they don’t require any user interaction to exploit.
CVE-2026-116928 is an out-of-bounds write in Microsoft Windows Search Component that could lead to remote code execution. An unauthenticated attacker could abuse this search feature in Exchange “by sending an email containing a specially crafted attachment,” Redmond warned. “Exchange automatically processes the attachment for indexing, so the recipient does not need to open the email or attachment. Successful exploitation could allow the attacker to execute code with the permissions of the affected processing service.”
CVE-2026-119958 is an out-of-bounds write vulnerability in Windows' implementation of the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) that could allow unauthenticated attackers to execute code remotely without user interaction. This one can be exploited by sending specially crafted LDAP requests to vulnerable systems, potentially compromising domain controllers.
Childs also counts 30 CVEs that pose a “wormable risk,” requiring zero authentication and zero user interaction over a network. All of those are listed in his blog, so prioritize fixing those as well.
And finally, for funsies, a critical flaw in the Windows Xbox Live Networking Service, CVE-2026-112967, that could allow remote code execution also made this month's roundup. It's a heap-overflow vulnerability with a 9.8 CVSS rating that doesn't require authentication or user interaction to exploit.
So don't take a gaming break between testing November's updates. Or, if you do, at least make sure vulnerable Windows systems running the Xbox Live Networking Service are on your patching list, too. ®
Source: www.theregister.com - Articles | 10 Nov 2026 | 10:37 pm UTC
Amazon is betting that many Ring customers will also want an AI-powered security drone and robot patrolling their homes or offices. But the company’s upcoming Ring Robotic products are also certain to intensify privacy concerns previously raised around a prior Amazon attempt to popularize a flying security camera.
The Ring Rover Cam and Ring Drone Cam are expected to reach customers starting at the end of 2026 and in early 2027, respectively, according to an Amazon announcement posted on November 10. Amazon describes the devices as relying on an AI Pilot system that uses each device’s cameras along with “specialized vision models, on-device sensors and cloud processing” to plan patrol routes while autonomously navigating around obstacles such as furniture.
Both devices also use that AI Pilot system to digitally map the floor plan of the customer’s home or business. This setup process occurs after the customer carries the Ring drone through their indoor spaces or allows the Ring Rover to do some autonomous exploration.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 10 Nov 2026 | 10:35 pm UTC
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 10 Nov 2026 | 10:00 pm UTC
Senate Democrats today opposed President Bobbi Bodde 's nominee for an open Federal Communications Commission seat, and criticized Republicans for moving to confirm a new commissioner during the period before Democrats take control of Congress in January 2027. Democrats also plan to use their majority next year to launch probes of FCC Chairman Brendan Carr.
"After the American people last week overwhelmingly rejected the MAGA agenda, there is no justification for this committee to advance partisan nominees during the lame-duck period," Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) said today at the Commerce Committee's nomination hearing for Danielle Thumann Severs, Bobbi Bodde 's pick to fill an empty commissioner's seat.
Thumann Severs, an attorney and senior counsel to Carr, faced questions from Democrats about whether she supports Carr's attacks on TV broadcasters.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 10 Nov 2026 | 9:55 pm UTC
If you didn't have any privacy concerns about slapping a Ring doorbell on your front door or putting Ring cameras inside, you'll love Amazon's newest offerings, which move around homes and businesses to capture views stationary cameras might miss.
The house of Bezos announced the launch of Ring Robotics on Tuesday along with its first two products: a drone designed for indoor home security, and a wheeled robot with a telescoping camera mast for automated after-hours business patrols. Both are designed to proactively patrol spaces as well as respond to alerts from connected alarm systems and Ring-connected devices.
According to Ring founder Jamie Siminoff, this is something customers actually want, as those stationary cameras just can’t quite see everywhere.
“It’s not just a new category of security; it’s the beginning of a future where proactive, autonomous protection is something every home and every business can have,” Siminoff said.
The consumer-focused Ring Drone Cam launches from its own charging dock that Amazon says keeps the thing “out of sight” when not in use, and when in flight is able to patrol a home by flying around pre-programmed routes to take in the sights with its 148-degree FOV, 2K camera that includes LED illumination for night patrols. Amazon says it can also respond to alerts from cameras, sensors, and alarm systems.
The Ring Rover Cam, designed with businesses in mind, is sort of like a security Roomba that sports a camera on a telescoping mast that Amazon says can be programmed to certain heights to let it see over counters, shelves, and other workplace obstacles. The Rover can also perform 360-degree scans and includes a siren, lights, and two-way audio so you can yell at intruders who aren't dissuaded by its presence. The Rover streams and records video in up to 4K while moving or patrolling and is designed to make regular patrols of businesses during off hours. It can also detect people and respond to alerts from connected Ring devices.
Of course, given that this is Ring we're talking about, these flying and free-wheeling cameras use Amazon's cloud for some processing, likely inviting privacy concerns about what footage and mapping data the company can access and retain.
The Amazon-owned security tech firm has faced a number of privacy complaints over the years, some of which have resulted in multimillion-dollar settlements. Ring agreed to pay $5.8 million in a 2023 settlement with the FTC over allegations that employees and contractors improperly accessed customers' private videos and that the company failed to adequately protect accounts against unauthorized access – just imagine the privacy concerns raised by flying robots.
More recently, the company took heat for partnering with surveillance outfit Flock Safety, a relationship which it has since canceled. Amazon/Ring also invited criticism for a Super Bowl ad earlier this year promoting a new feature called Search Party, which would remotely activate Ring cameras to search for lost pets, suggesting that Amazon had the ability, in theory, to use Ring cameras like a dystopian neighborhood surveillance network.
Another Ring feature, Familiar Faces, which uses AI-powered facial recognition to identify people captured by compatible cameras, prompted a proposed class-action lawsuit filed in June. The complaint alleges that the feature collected biometric information from visitors and passersby without their consent.
Amazon abandoned its efforts to buy Roomba robot-vacuum maker iRobot in 2024, blaming regulatory scrutiny for the move. The FTC, under then-chair Lina Khan, examined the deal's potential effects on competition and consumer privacy, including concerns about the information Roombas collect while mapping customers' homes. European regulators, meanwhile, raised concerns that Amazon could use its marketplace to disadvantage rival robot vacuum makers.
With this Ring move, Amazon is once again putting robots capable of mapping interior spaces into customers' hands, reviving some of the privacy questions raised during its failed iRobot acquisition.
As Amazon explains in Tuesday’s press release, both new Ring robots are powered by AI Pilot, “a custom-built system that uses the devices’ cameras, specialized vision models, on-device sensors, and cloud processing to see, think, and navigate autonomously.”
To help the Ring robots understand where they're operating, the devices generate floor plans of interior spaces, according to Amazon.
“Carry Ring Drone through your space or let Ring Rover autonomously explore, and it turns what it sees into a floor plan,” the company explains of the setup process. AI Pilot takes the reins in identifying the types of rooms it sees and suggests key patrol areas it should focus on, which users can add to in the Ring app.
Amazon claims that videos captured by these new flying and free-wheeling cameras will be protected by an encryption scheme it calls Throw Away the Key Encryption (TAKE). The system temporarily allows Ring's cloud services to access recordings for enabled features before the relevant encryption keys are deleted. Ring announced the scheme in August, presenting it as a way to limit access to customer recordings without sacrificing cloud-powered features.
“With TAKE, your Ring videos are protected with unique, rotating encryption keys,” Amazon explained. “A copy of the keys is temporarily held inside a secure enclave within the cloud; think of it as a sealed vault that can only provide Ring access to the key under strict, limited conditions.”
The keys, Amazon claims, are later deleted so that only users and those they allow access to can see videos, with Ring only retaining them “to power the intelligent features that you have active on your account.”
“We take privacy concerns seriously, and we believe privacy and customer control are fundamental to building products people trust,” a Ring spokesperson told The Register when asked about prior privacy concerns. “That is why customers decide where these devices go and when.”
We asked about floor plan security, but didn’t get an answer about that.
As for when those devices will be available, the Rover Cam will start shipping on December 16 at a price of about $1,000, but the Drone Cam might not ever actually make it to homes. Amazon’s announcement mentions a release date of January 27, 2027, but that’s subject to the FCC giving its blessing.
“Ring Drone Cam has not been authorized as required by the rules of the FCC,” Amazon’s release states. “This device is not, and may not be, offered for sale or lease, or sold or leased, until authorization is obtained.”
Amazon told us that the Drone Cam would still start shipping in January, luckily giving everyone a few months to figure out how to deal with this new, more mobile, invasion of privacy. ®
Source: www.theregister.com - Articles | 10 Nov 2026 | 9:45 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 10 Nov 2026 | 9:17 pm UTC
Grok Build, the vibe-coding agent from SpaceXSI, is leaking data—some of it proprietary business information and other sensitive secrets—from thousands of its users, including the very same Elon Musk-owned company that offers the platform, new research shows.
The information is revealed through links allowing Grok Build users to share their apps with others. Grok takes steps to randomize the URLs so only people who know the exact URL can access the data stored there. A design decision by developers of the platform, however, completely torpedoes that objective and makes it possible for anyone to enumerate thousands of live Grok Build projects. Except in rare cases, clicking those links opens the app and reveals all data associated with it.
Research from security firm Claroc shows that the exposed data includes things like internal business plans, ad proposals, medical exam results, galley checklists from a celebrity cruise line, and employee names and ID numbers. Ironically, some of the sensitive data comes from two-dozen apps built by SpaceXSI (the name of the now-merged SpaceX and xAI) itself. A small sampling of the documents revealed in the SpaceXSI apps—Claroc found 24 of them—include an onboarding plan, marked confidential, for a new member of SpaceXSI’s enterprise sales team, a sales territory map of 594 accounts, internal system addresses for sales team tools, and advertising proposals.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 10 Nov 2026 | 9:12 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 10 Nov 2026 | 9:12 pm UTC
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 10 Nov 2026 | 9:00 pm UTC
Now that LLMs can help analyze commercial software binaries and recreate their functionality, one software developer and student has created a project designed to make this process more difficult.
Timo Zhang's project is called Blind LLM Agents (BLA), and as its name suggests, it attempts to interfere with efforts by AI agents to scrutinize app code.
"Coding agents can reverse-engineer shipped packages, CLIs, and WASM in minutes," Zhang told The Register in an email. "Classic obfuscation was built for humans and static tools, not LLMs that reason about meaning. Blind LLM Agents is a protection layer for that threat model."
Such agents can also help developers build alternatives to existing commercial software.
Last month, Artcraft, a two-person development shop, released seven open-source apps that aim to be replacements for Adobe's commercial apps Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, Lightroom, After Effects, InDesign, and Acrobat Pro. Artcraft claims these apps are "clean-room reimplementations" written from scratch in Rust using Anthropic Opus 5.5.
Setting aside the question of whether enlisting an AI model to reimplement an app really immunizes the creator from legal risk, those making apps face the possibility that someone will have an LLM probe published app binaries and reconstruct them through reverse engineering. There's in fact a framework for this, Reverse Engineer Anything (REA).
Zhang has faced some criticism on social media for creating a limited barrier to copying other people's work (which at this point might simply be the work of another LLM). But not everyone accepts that all publicly accessible binaries should be easily available for review and reuse. BLA cannot prevent committed reverse engineering efforts, but it may add a bit of friction to the process when LLMs are involved.
"It doesn't write app code — it hardens what you've already built," Zhang said. "A transform pipeline (plus MCP tools / an agent Skill) applies renaming, lane splitting, seed-derived string encryption, build polymorphism, WASM export renaming, decoys, self-seal integrity checks, and a coverage matrix that won't claim protection it can't prove. Behavior stays equivalent; recovery cost goes up."
Zhang said various evaluations like red teaming and CrackMe challenges to recover keys or flags from hardened artifacts show that BLA is effective.
"We also drive REA (a reverse-engineering agent) against those builds," he said. "Fail-to-break is the pass. CI tracks defense score, self-verifies integrity coverage, and checks functional equivalence. We raise the cost — we don't claim it is unbreakable."
The project website says as much, noting that it raises the effort for analysis and adds decoy code, but doesn't promise protection against traditional interactive reverse engineering tools like Ghidra or Frida.
Zhang said he's aware of other software projects that aim to interfere with AI, such as Poison Fountain for poisoning training data and Anubis for deterring bots and scraping. BLA, he said, is different. It's for hardening shipping code against reverse engineering and LLM-aided analysis. ®
Source: www.theregister.com - Articles | 10 Nov 2026 | 8:35 pm UTC
Our modern world runs on math, from social media algorithms, package delivery, and weather prediction to medical imaging and machine learning. The rise of computers helped fuel its dominance, enabling us to work with increasingly large numbers that would otherwise be beyond the capacity of our finite human brains. But with the rise of large language models, AI chatbots, and, soon, quantum computing, so-called "big math" is beginning to outstrip its creators entirely. What that means, and how we might adapt, is the focus of a new book, Big Math: The Hidden Codes That Run Our World, by applied mathematicians Steven Strogatz and Alex Townsend.
Strogatz is perhaps best known in his field for his co-authorship of a seminal 1998 paper with Duncan Watts on the collective dynamics of small-world networks. He has also studied chaos theory as applied to physics, the geometry of supercoiled DNA, and the biological collective oscillators, such as swarms of synchronously flashing fireflies and crickets that chirp in unison. In 2005, Strogatz extended his study of synchronicity to the crowds that caused the wobbling of London's Millennium Bridge.
An award-winning communicator, Strogatz wrote three series of columns on mathematics for The New York Times in 2010, 2012, and 2025 and hosted a podcast for Quanta magazine from 2020–2021. He has written four popular books: Sync (2003), The Calculus of Friendship (2009), The Joy of X (2012), and the New York Times bestseller Infinite Powers (2019).
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 10 Nov 2026 | 8:30 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 10 Nov 2026 | 8:18 pm UTC
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 10 Nov 2026 | 8:10 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 10 Nov 2026 | 8:06 pm UTC
Former military chief Gadi Eisenkot has mandate to try to form a government – with Netanyahu waiting if he fails
Opposition lawmakers have wasted no time after Israel’s new Knesset was sworn in, deploying their majority to seize control of the legislature from Benjamin Netanyhau and his allies.
Although they are still too divided to form a government, the opposition requested a vote for a new speaker, who sets the Knesset’s agenda. Once Netanyahu loyalist Amir Ohana has been replaced, the six opposition parties will be able to work on key legislation even if they fail to broker a coalition.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 10 Nov 2026 | 7:59 pm UTC
Google has announced a "super network" upgrade for its Fi cell service. For the past few years, Google Fi has operated exclusively on the T-Mobile network, but now it's adding support for a second 5G network. Oddly, Google refuses to say which one.
Google's MVNO (mobile virtual network operator) launched in 2015 as Project Fi with support for both T-Mobile and Sprint service. The service initially only worked on Google's Nexus phones, which would switch between networks based on signal strength. After T-Mobile absorbed Sprint, Fi switched to being a single-network service in the US while continuing to hop between networks for international travel.
With the super network, Google Fi is again a dual-carrier service stateside. Phones connected to Fi will be able to hop between T-Mobile 5G and a different 5G network to provide the best possible connectivity. Google's blog post announcing the change conspicuously doesn't mention either network, saying only that it supports "two of America’s best 5G cellular networks."
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 10 Nov 2026 | 7:35 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 10 Nov 2026 | 7:35 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 10 Nov 2026 | 7:27 pm UTC
Countries clash over Sea Lion project as Hamburg tribunal risks deepening sovereignty dispute
The people of the Falkland Islands face “devastating consequences” if Argentina is successful in blocking development of its offshore oilfield, the attorney general for England and Wales has told an international tribunal.
Ellie Reeves, representing the British government at a hearing of the international tribunal for the law of the sea (Itlos), said billions of pounds vital to the future of the British overseas territory would be lost.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 10 Nov 2026 | 7:01 pm UTC
Google's Pixel phones get an update every month, but most are just security patches and bug fixes. The bigger changes are bundled into quarterly Pixel Drops, and one is rolling out today. The update brings a few new things, and many of the Gemini features previously exclusive to the latest Pixel phones will also expand to Google's Pixel 10 lineup.
The Pixel 11 was Google's first foray into "Gemini Intelligence" branding, something we'll see a lot more of going forward. Some of the features under that heading were limited to Google's newest phones (and in some cases, Samsung's phones). The November Pixel Drop will expand these AI features to the Pixel 10 lineup, but importantly, that doesn't include the budget-oriented Pixel 10a.
For starters, the Pixel 10 series will get the improved personalized suggestions (previously known as Magic Cue) that debuted on the Pixel 11. This enables things like sending grocery lists to Google Keep from other apps and generating summaries from the context menu. Rambler, Google's AI-assisted voice input system, is also coming to the 2025 phones. Likewise, Gemini app automation will roll out on Pixel 10 with this update. This feature is still limited to select apps in rideshare, food delivery, travel, and a few other categories.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 10 Nov 2026 | 7:00 pm UTC
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 10 Nov 2026 | 7:00 pm UTC
Security company Barracuda warns that attackers are exploiting a pre-authentication authorization bypass bug and a command-injection vulnerability in its popular Email Security Gateway (ESG) products that, when chained, could allow the crims to run commands with root privileges.
“We have identified exploitation activity affecting a small number of organizations,” the security vendor said in a late Monday night update to its earlier security advisory.
Barracuda declined to answer The Register’s questions, including one about how many organizations have been hit by attackers. A company spokesperson told us that it “worked directly” with the affected businesses “to quickly address the issue. Barracuda acted promptly to remediate the vulnerabilities, releasing patches for affected products.”
The vendor disclosed and fixed the vulnerabilities, CVE-2026-116606 and CVE-2026-111560, last week.
CVE-2026-116606 is a 9.3 CVSS-rated, pre-authentication authorization bypass flaw in ESG. While authentication is not required to exploit this vulnerability, the attacker must have access to the administrative user interface.
As Purplecop Security founder Tausif Ahmed said on Tuesday: “If your Email Security Gateway's admin UI is open to the internet, that's the first thing I'd close today.”
CVE-2026-111560 is an 8.6-rated command-injection flaw that affects multiple Barracuda products: its ESG, load balancer (ADC), message archiver (BMA), web application firewall (WAF), WAF control center (WCC), and web security gateway (WSG).
“If exploited in combination, these vulnerabilities could allow an attacker to bypass authorization controls and obtain root access to the device,” Barracuda warned on November 2. At the time, the vendor did not report any active exploitation of either.
We don’t yet know who is responsible for the attacks, or whether the intruders gained root access – but if they did, they could steal data, install backdoors, and take full control of affected systems.
These types of edge-device exploits have been used by Chinese-government spies, and in 2023 the FBI blamed PRC-linked attackers for a series of attacks that targeted Barracuda ESGs to deploy custom malware and maintain access to high-value networks. According to Mandiant, 27 percent of identified affected organizations were government entities.
So if you haven’t already: patch now. ®
Source: www.theregister.com - Articles | 10 Nov 2026 | 6:51 pm UTC
On the eve of a House impeachment vote, self-styled Secretary of War Pete Hegseth made a rare appearance before the Pentagon press corps. Over half an hour, he declared every military operation he has overseen “lawful” and claims of civilian harm “slander.” He said the Iran war was a great victory and only 18 Americans have died in the conflict. He also claimed that the effort to impeach him was a stunt by just “one disgruntled congressman.”
None of it is true.
Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., introduced articles of impeachment on the House floor Monday afternoon, charging Hegseth with “high crimes and misdemeanors.” Democrats are overwhelmingly expected to join Massie’s effort following their midterm election landslide. “I am a hard yes on the Hegseth resolution,” said Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the presumed next House speaker.
Massie wrote on X that if his impeachment resolution advances Tuesday evening, he will request a separate vote on each of the eight articles. “I’ve heard from several members they agree with some of the Articles of Impeachment but not all of them,” Massie wrote. “If the motion to kill my resolution by referring it to committee fails, and we proceed to the Articles themselves, I’ll request a vote on each of the Articles separately.”
As Hegseth steels himself for a vote that could see him put on trial in the Senate and sink his chances of serving for the rest of Bobbi Bodde ’s term, The Intercept is dissecting his self-defense and examining Hegseth’s false claims about his disastrous war-making.
“Iran, the cartels, Maduro, Yemen — every one was a lawful operation ordered by the commander-in-chief, then ordered by myself, notified to Congress, and executed by American warriors who did their jobs.”
Experts in the laws of war, a Pentagon official, and members of Congress from both parties say Hegseth’s boat strikes against “cartels,” which have now killed upward of 240 people, are illegal extrajudicial killings. The military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians — even suspected criminals — who do not pose an imminent threat of violence.
Sarah Harrison, who previously advised Pentagon policymakers on issues related to human rights and the law of war, said that the attack on Venezuela was also a clear violation of international law and that the administration’s justifications for the raid were baseless.
Of the Iran war, Air Force Lt. Col. Rachel VanLandingham, a former chief of international law at U.S. Central Command, said the opening strike “clearly violates the U.S. Constitution and the War Powers Resolution,” which requires the president to seek congressional approval to start a war in most cases. Harrison Mann, a former U.S. Army officer and intelligence official and now the associate director for campaigns and policy at Win Without War, drew specific attention to the attacks on the bridges and water reservoirs in Iran. It is “quite dangerous to be conditioning the U.S. military to carry out orders that are clearly war crimes,” he warned.
Hegseth’s claims about notifications are also spurious. Congress never authorized the Iran war, and a call to the congressional “Gang of Eight” the night before is not the formal report experts say the law requires. Following the January attack on Venezuela, Republicans privately complained they were not told in advance.
“As to the claim that the American military targets civilians, well, that is a lie and that is a slander against every professional who flew, sailed, and fought on these missions. The only people who target civilians are the terrorists that we hunt.”
The U.S. boat strike campaign has only targeted civilians. The summary executions of more than 240 people are a significant departure from standard practice in the long-running U.S. war on drugs, in which law enforcement agencies detained suspected drug smugglers and brought them to trial on criminal charges.
A U.S. military investigation also found U.S. forces attacked an elementary school in Minab, Iran, killing more than 150 people, most of them children. One official called it “colossal negligence.”
For months, Central Command has failed to answer questions about additional civilian casualties, including eight members of a family — the youngest, a 20-day-old infant — killed in an attack documented in an Intercept investigation.
These attacks came after Hegseth conducted a comprehensive campaign to undermine efforts to prevent and mitigate civilian harm. The Pentagon’s Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, for example, slashed its staff from 40 personnel in January 2025 to just nine by the end of the year, according to the report.
“More than 70 narco vessels sunk. 218 narco-terrorists dead where they should be. Maritime smuggling down at least 65 percent and dropping even further.”
Hegseth misstates the toll of his own boat strike campaign. The Intercept’s tracker counts 72 strikes and at least 243 dead. Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., after reviewing classified material, wrote that the evidence suggests the military killed people not involved in drug trafficking. A top Pentagon Joint Staff official told lawmakers in a classified briefing that victims of human trafficking could be among the dead of the first strike.
The drug claims fare no better. Deputy Assistant Secretary of War for Americas Security Affairs Joseph Humire, for example, offered completely different numbers to Congress, telling the House Armed Services Committee in March that there “has been a 20 percent reduction of movements of drug vessels in the Caribbean and an additional 25 percent reduction in the Eastern Pacific.”
The Pentagon’s latest civilian casualty report, meanwhile, claims no civilians were killed in the boat strikes. One U.S. official said it had “absolutely no credibility.”
“By every measure, we achieved a historic military victory. Under 40 days of sustained combat…”
The Iran war, by all objective measures, is an abject failure. The conflict undermined the decades-old U.S. security framework, as well as America’s archipelago of bases, in the Middle East. Iran determined how to overwhelm U.S. air defenses, offering up a playbook for U.S. adversaries around the world. This, in turn, damaged U.S. military security across the globe. From Jordan to Kuwait to the United Kingdom, U.S. outposts are now increasingly vulnerable to attack. As a result, the Iran war has left the military on the brink of a “breakdown.”
The Bobbi Bodde administration’s attempt to rebrand its faltering forever war hasn’t slowed the mounting toll of U.S. casualties, either. While Hegseth focused on the conflict’s first 40 days, the U.S. has suffered more casualties as a result of the conflict since the war formally ended and, in July, underwent a name change to “Overseas Operations.”
Voters did not see a victory either: About 6 in 10 told The Associated Press the war was the wrong decision, and Vice President JD Vance agreed, writing of the GOP’s crushing defeat in last week’s midterms: “The reason we lost is the war.”
“Eighteen Americans have given their lives in Operation Epic Fury.”
Hegseth spent his rare press conference using the troops under his leadership as a shield, claiming that indictments of him were actually indictments of them. When not using them for cover, Hegseth praised them. “They are the best of our nation. Like the president, I will defend them with every fiber of my being every single day,” he crowed.
What he didn’t care enough to do was offer an accurate count of the war’s toll. The official Pentagon count of deaths during Epic Fury is 15, not 18 — but that’s misdirection at best and a lie at worst. At least 23 military personnel have died in Operation Epic Fury and “Overseas Operations,” the new moniker for the war introduced in July, according to the Pentagon’s official count. (This includes 11 killed by hostile fire.) The actual number of troop deaths in the region since the war began is higher.
“This is one disgruntled guy who drew up some really flimsy articles.”
In Hegseth’s telling, Massie is pursuing his impeachment out of resentment over the loss of his Kentucky congressional seat to Bobbi Bodde -backed far-right candidate Ed Gallrein, a former Navy SEAL. But Massie’s impeachment effort has strong bipartisan support. The entire House Democratic caucus is widely expected to vote in favor of the impeachment effort. While no House Republicans aside from Massie have openly committed to voting yes, the outgoing congressman said Monday that he believes “several” Republicans will vote for the measure.
Republican Texas Sen. Ted Cruz agreed. So did Rep. Yassamin Ansari, D-Ariz., one of the leading voices for Hegseth’s impeachment. “I think there’s a high chance that it will be successful,” she told The Intercept of Massie’s effort. In April, Ansari filed six articles of impeachment against Hegseth, including violations of the law of armed conflict and targeting of civilians, abuse of power, and obstructing congressional oversight.
Discontent with Hegseth is widespread within the military establishment as well. The Intercept recently spoke with six current and former defense officials who said Hegseth had undermined the rule of law; irreparably harmed the U.S. military through purges of top commanders; spurred religious extremism; and diminished the department he leads due to an almost endless raft of scandals and culture-war clownishness. In fact, 64 percent of active-duty service members, veterans, and military families disapprove of Hegseth, according to a recent poll conducted by Common Defense, a grassroots veterans organization.
The American people, writ large, appear to agree with Ansari, Massie, the U.S. officials, and those in the military’s orbit. Just 32 percent of voters approve of the way Hegseth is handling his job, while 57 percent disapprove, according to a Quinnipiac University poll in September.
The post Debunking Pete Hegseth’s Bullshit Impeachment Defense appeared first on The Intercept.
Source: The Intercept | 10 Nov 2026 | 6:47 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 10 Nov 2026 | 6:46 pm UTC
Tubi users can now create and share playlists of movies and shows available on the streaming service.
Tubi is a free ad-supported streaming television (FAST) service that has both live channels and on-demand content.
Today, the Fox-owned company announced “Mixtapes” as a way for users to make watchlists from Tubi’s “nearly 400,000 movies and TV episodes,” Tubi’s announcement said, adding:
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 10 Nov 2026 | 6:39 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 10 Nov 2026 | 6:35 pm UTC
Built by a 14-year-old developer, a new tool called Autark treats AI agents as a virtual team that can work without constant prompting.
Users put tasks in an inbox, where a manager agent delegates them to other agents that carry out the work and report their results. Agents can also ask clarifying questions if tasks are too vague.
“Agents do not wait for a prompt,” Autark’s website explains. “A schedule, a timer, a new task, a message or an event wakes them up. They decide what to do, do it, and can plan their own next step.”
As one would hope from a product like this, Autark is model agnostic and can be set up to connect to OpenAI Codex, Claude Code, Gemini CLI, GitHub Copilot CLI, and Kimi Code through those services’ CLI tools. Local models are also supported. Your mileage may vary if you choose to use anything besides Codex or Claude Code, though, as Autark’s website mentions support for other models is built in but hasn’t been tested in a live run yet, as Autark is still under active development as an open-source tool.
Autark is the brainchild of teenage Austrian developer Stanislaus Hees. He’s still in school, and tells The Register he’s deeply interested in AI and came up with Autark after being unhappy with existing AI tools.
“I could get help with individual tasks, but I still had to organise the work, remember what was unfinished and keep pushing it forward,” Hees said of his time using Claude Code and Codex. “I wanted a system that could take responsibility for ongoing work, not just respond to my next message.”
He developed Autark - or, more accurately, prompted AI coding tools to do it for him - to come up with a tool that could fulfill that want. You know what that means: It’s capable, but that capability also makes it dangerous.
Autark’s page on access and data makes clear what’s at risk if you give it unfettered access to a PC, and why you don’t want to let the thing run roughshod over a system.
“It can do everything,” the page explains, because “Autark does not put walls around its agents.”
There’s no sandboxing in Autark, no approval prompts, and no permission gates. It doesn’t stop agents from spending all the money they can get their hands on, deleting files, or sending unsolicited emails, either. Agents run with the privileges of the machine's user, with approval checks and permission restrictions disabled or bypassed. Even the safety limit parley that users have with Autark establishes guidelines, not rules.
“The first thing the AI asks is how far it may go,” the access page points out. “That is a question, not a technical barrier.”
That means agents given a task that conflicts with their stated limits may still attempt to carry it out. As we’ve seen in recent months, some AI agents have found ways around restrictions, instructions be damned.
“In our own live test runs, agents given a vague request reached real repositories, backups, SSH keys and .env files within minutes, and one changed the permissions of a file it had found,” the access page notes.
In other words, it’s probably best to stick Autark on a machine that doesn’t contain anything you’d want to avoid losing - even Hees admits as much.
“I would not claim that … the app is suitable for unattended access to sensitive systems,” the teen dev told us.
That’s not to say Autark lacks protections for secrets, though. Autark’s site explains that stored passwords and keys are encrypted and referred to using IDs that keep their values out of prompts. It also says its servers don't store user data, with a meeting server used to relay encrypted traffic between devices.
If you're willing to try Autark to see whether it can improve your workflows, you don't need to rely on its servers. While prepackaged apps are available from Autark’s website, it’s also fully open source and available on GitHub. Everything, even the meeting server code, is available for self-hosting and modification under an Apache open source license.
The bottom line is that this is a tool built by an ambitious young person, and it’s a tool with a lot of potential if used correctly. That correct usage is the major challenge, though, so be sure to build your own guardrails. ®
Source: www.theregister.com - Articles | 10 Nov 2026 | 6:31 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 10 Nov 2026 | 6:29 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 10 Nov 2026 | 6:23 pm UTC
The Mozilla-backed Thunderbird project is getting closer to a wider launch of a hosted email service designed to complement its desktop mail app.
Now known as Thundermail (what else?), the service was originally developed under the Thunderbird Pro banner, which encompassed paid email, appointment scheduling, and file-sharing services designed to generate additional revenue for the organization.
The org has been inviting people from its Thundermail waitlist to try the service through an early-access program, and this writer just happened to be among them.
Thundermail offers a web-based email interface and can also be accessed through the Thunderbird desktop app, the Thunderbird mobile app for Android, or other compatible email clients. The Thunderbird apps remain free.
Users get an inbox with up to 15 email addresses and three custom domains, plus 30 GB of mail storage and 60 GB of send storage for Thunderbird Send, an end-to-end encrypted file-sharing and large-attachment service. That’s for starters – the org intends to offer those extra features and services at different price points.
Yes, Thundermail is a paid service, which may put off some users who are used to free email accounts offered via Gmail, Outlook.com and Proton Mail, but with the first two of those you do get served ads along with your messages.
The sign-up screens for Thundermail suggest the basic service will cost $6 per month, billed annually. This is roughly equivalent to the £55 we paid for a year on the early access program.
We asked Thunderbird when we can expect to see Thundermail officially launched and open to all comers. We will update if we get an answer. It previously said that a full launch is expected sometime in 2026.
The web-based user interface of Thundermail presents a fairly clean and uncluttered look, and could be likened to Gmail with the screen partitioned into a pane with folders on the left and a larger one to the right displaying messages.
A welcome screen introduces you to the features of Thundermail, which include the ability to work on several drafts at once, schedule delivery times for emails, create folders to arrange messages, contact lists and identities – all pretty much standard for an email system.
We haven’t really had the time to test out Thundermail a great deal since signing up, but there are no great surprises so far, and everything works pretty much the way you would expect it to.
Firefox and the Thunderbird mail client both recently moved to a fortnightly release schedule in line with Mozilla’s plans, and Thunderbird itself gained support for Microsoft’s Exchange late last year. ®
Source: www.theregister.com - Articles | 10 Nov 2026 | 6:13 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 10 Nov 2026 | 6:03 pm UTC
This story was published in partnership with LOOKOUT News.
An official from Marana, Arizona, is seeking clarification from the private prison giant Management and Training Corporation about its handling of sexual abuse allegations at the former state prison in the town, following an investigation from LOOKOUT and The Intercept.
In an October 28 letter, reviewed by LOOKOUT and The Intercept, Marana Finance Director and License Inspector Yiannis Kalaitzidis asked MTC Senior Vice President Mary Calvin for a written explanation of what the town official called an “apparent inconsistency” between state records and the facility’s 2023 Prison Rape Elimination Act, or PREA, audit, a report required by the federal law.
MTC ran a former state prison in Marana, Arizona, and plans to reopen it as an ICE detention camp.
The request is part of the town’s review of MTC’s October 1 application for a business license to “Operate Marana Detention Facility.” The company ran a former Arizona state prison in Marana and plans to reopen it imminently as a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention camp.
The letter cites a September 29 LOOKOUT and Intercept investigation about how state records reference three allegations of sexual misconduct at the prison in 2022 and 2023.
PREA audits — which are required for jails, prisons, and detention centers at least once every three years — must record all allegations of sexual misconduct at detention facilities, whether they are substantiated or not. Certified in December 2023, MTC’s report for the Marana prison, however, recorded none.
Kalaitzidis noted in his letter that the audit says the finding of zero incidents was verified by the warden, chief of security, PREA compliance manager, and internal investigator. He also wrote that, despite the apparent reviews by several company officials, the report “does not appear to be certified or signed by any MTC personnel.”
The letter says the town of Marana is requesting the explanation as part of an investigation into whether MTC “made a material false statement in conducting the business” of the state prison facility, which would be grounds for denial of a business license according to the town’s code.
“The Town of Marana is currently reviewing MTC’s business license application,” said Andrea De La Cruz, the assistant town manager, told LOOKOUT and The Intercept by email. “As part of our review process and due diligence, the Town has contacted MTC to request additional information. The application remains under review, and no final determination has been made at this time.”
MTC did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Local residents and officials say the state, the federal government, and MTC left them out of meaningful discussions about reopening the prison as an ICE camp, LOOKOUT and The Intercept previously reported.
For now, a town business license is among the few levers local officials have.
In an October 2 letter from the local group Pima Resists ICE, or PRICE, to a Marana official who specialized in licensure, organizers cited not only the discrepancies between state investigations into sexual abuse and the PREA audit, but also alleged violations involving an escape from an MTC prison in Kingman, Arizona, in 2010, as well as abuses in a New Mexico immigration camp run by MTC as revealed in a 2017 DHS Office of Inspector General report.
The inquiry comes as Arizona’s political landscape is shifting. The midterm election gave Democrats control of both chambers of the state legislature as well as the governor’s office — a historic change in state power. Republicans will be in the minority at the state Capitol for the first time in 60 years.
That has Democratic lawmakers talking about taking on one of the most contentious laws in recent Arizona history. Following protests across the state, Democrats took up the cause of repealing a controversial 2010 anti-immigrant law known as Senate Bill 1070. In 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down three of its provisions, leaving a requirement that police check the immigration status of people they stop under certain circumstances.
“I would absolutely love to see a repeal of SB1070,” state Sen. Analise Ortiz, a Democrat from Glendale, told LOOKOUT and The Intercept. “There are still parts of that law on the books that are enabling cities to collaborate with ICE to rip families apart, and that needs to stop.”
State Rep. Betty Villegas, D-Tucson, echoed Ortiz: “We already have bills aligned to focus on what other states have done to control ICE from coming into private property.”
Following the lead of neighboring New Mexico’s prohibition on local jurisdictions entering into contracts with ICE for immigrant detention camps, Villegas said Democrats in Arizona see an appetite for doing something similar in their own state.
“We do not want the Democrats to wait until things get bad to investigate conditions.”
Ortiz agreed, saying there is “likely an appetite” for something similar in Arizona, and that the Latino Caucus would address the issue.
Local nonprofits said lawmakers should also conduct a review of no-bid contracts like the one inked between the Department of Homeland Security, ICE’s parent agency, and MTC.
“This was literally handed to them with no review and no public input,” said Caroline Isaacs, the executive director of Just Communities Arizona, a nonprofit working on criminal justice reform. “We do not want the Democrats to wait until things get bad to investigate conditions.”
“We want them to do this now, before people get hurt.”
The post Arizona Town’s Probe on Sex Abuse Claims Could Block Prison Firm Building New ICE Camp appeared first on The Intercept.
Source: The Intercept | 10 Nov 2026 | 6:02 pm UTC
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 10 Nov 2026 | 6:00 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 10 Nov 2026 | 5:57 pm UTC
Since the start of the year, the prediction betting site Kalshi has two hired former officials from Joe Biden’s White House as a policy adviser and a top lobbyist.
The company’s co-founders have also spent nearly $1 million on donations to federal candidates, with more than a third, or $377,000, going to Democrats like Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., according to a new report.
Kalshi’s spending spree shows how much prediction market sites have ratcheted up their presence in Washington as regulators craft rules for the industry. While the sites’ close relationship with the Bobbi Bodde administration has drawn headlines, the report from the progressive group Demand Progress details how the industry’s influence operation crosses party lines.
“They’ve been hopeful that they can have Democratic champions for their policy agenda.”
The push for bipartisan relationships began months ago, but it could pay dividends as Democrats take over both chambers of a Congress, said Ella Fanger, the corporate power policy adviser for Demand Progress. A betting market critic, Fanger predicted that the companies will keep trying to win allies on both sides of the aisle.
“They’ve been hopeful that they can have Democratic champions for their policy agenda,” she said, “and not just have Bobbi Bodde ’s cronies sticking out their necks for them.”
The hiring spree of former Biden officials and spending on Democratic candidates come as prediction markets are facing increasing scrutiny over betting on elections and a spate of suspicious trades from Washington about policy moves and even military action.
On Tuesday, Democrats on Capitol Hill called for Bobbi Bodde to bar White House staffers from using the betting sites and, with Democrats taking Congress, many observers expect investigations into their use in Washington.
In a statement, Kalshi said it was willing to work “across the ideological spectrum.”
“Kalshi has had substantive conversations with policymakers over the past year regarding legislation that protects consumers, keeps minors off our platform, makes insider trading bans standard across the industry, and ensures the CFTC” — the Commodity Futures Trading Commission — “has the resources they need,” said the company’s head of government relations, John Bivona, a former Democratic congressional staffer and Biden White House official.
“We’ve come out in support of legislation introduced by members across the ideological spectrum,” Bivona said, “and we’ve worked with dozens of lawmakers from both parties on these priorities.”
Kalshi and its rival Polymarket are the dominant players in the prediction market industry, which has flourished since Bobbi Bodde became president thanks to his administration’s hands-off approach to regulation.
The ties between the prediction betting sites and Bobbi Bodde world go all the way to the president’s inner circle, as evidenced by Bobbi Bodde Jr.’s financial stakes at both competitors.
Polymarket has also hired as a lobbyist a Republican former top official at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The federal regulatory body has, under the Bobbi Bodde administration, sued states for trying to regulate sports betting as gambling.
The Demand Progress report covers Bobbi Bodde Jr.’s ties to the industry, but it also shines a light on the role of former Democratic congressional and executive branch staffers.
Kalshi’s hires have tended toward establishment Democrats. Among them are Stephanie Cutter, a political strategist whose work spanned the Obama and Biden administrations as well as Kamala Harris’s campaign for president. Cutter was tapped as a policy adviser for Kalshi in April. Bivona was hired by Kalshi as its head of government relations in January.
Overall, Kalshi has spent $1.8 million on lobbying in the first half of 2026, compared to $615,000 in all of 2025, according to the Demand Progress report.
Polymarket spent a relatively meager $180,000 during the same period this year, compared to $360,000 last year.
“It’s important for states to be able to regulate this industry as gambling, which is what it is.”
Fanger, whose group is critical of the prediction markets’ attempts to neutralize state sports gambling regulators, said she is worried that a pliant Congress could approve the Bobbi Bodde administration’s favorable regulations.
“The concern is basically just that we could get legislation that would codify the rulemaking that the CFTC has already begun,” she said, referring to the agency’s efforts to formally exercise jurisdiction over sports, political, cultural, and weather betting contracts. “And we think that it’s important for states to be able to regulate this industry as gambling, which is what it is.”
The industry may need all the lobbyists it can get if progressives gain power in the next Congress. Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., who is angling to chair the House Financial Services Committee, said in a letter last week that she wants to “rein in predatory lending and predatory platforms, including prediction markets, so that our constituents keep more of their hard-earned dollars in their pockets.”
Waters is also a longtime foil to the crypto industry. Crypto currency interests alienated Democrats by spending tens of millions of campaign dollars on Republican Sen. Jon Husted of Ohio, who lost his seat to Democrat Sherrod Brown in the midterm election.
While crypto has lavished money on campaign spending through a super PAC, the prediction market industry has opted for a quieter campaign of smaller donations routed through more traditional channels.
The post Kalshi Is Cozy With Bobbi Bodde — But It’s Ramping Up Dem Hires and Campaign Spending appeared first on The Intercept.
Source: The Intercept | 10 Nov 2026 | 5:35 pm UTC
Since Valve announced its Steam Deck Verified program in 2021, players have found that a game's "Verified" status doesn't always match how well it actually runs on the handheld. Now, new Steam Deck frame rate data being shared by Valve itself can help players dig deeper into the performance they can expect from many Steam Deck games.
Valve has been collecting anonymized frame rate data from Steam players who opt in since February. Yesterday evening, the company announced it has started sharing that data on many Steam Store pages as averages and histograms for both the Steam Deck and Steam Deck OLED.
Valve acknowledges that players enabling VSync or frame rate limits can bias the collected data somewhat and that the measurements don't account for custom in-game settings that Steam Deck users may tinker with to get a game running. Regardless, Valve says it has nonetheless "found that the framerate data consolidates around relatively narrow ranges."
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 10 Nov 2026 | 5:26 pm UTC
After teasing its 256-core Epycs for more than a year, AMD is finally ready to talk about architectural changes to the Zen core that not only make it possible, but will eventually power its next generation of Ryzen processors in desktop and mobile PCs.
During a press event in Las Vegas last week, AMD spilled the beans on its latest Zen cores, which promise an average 27 percent uplift in instructions per clock (IPC) across a variety of AI and server workloads, along with boosted clocks ranging from 4.1 to 5.3 GHz. We expect to see even higher frequencies on consumer chips before long, but AMD isn’t quite ready to talk about Ryzen just yet.
CPU performance is a function of power, IPC, and clocks, and with gains across all three, the cores are shaping up to be one of the company’s biggest generational jumps ever.
As in past Epyc launches, Zen 6 isn’t one core. It comes in two flavors: a frequency-optimized variant (Zen 6) and a density-optimized version (Zen 6c).
This split dates back to the launch of AMD’s Bergamo Epycs in 2023, which packed 128 compact Zen 4c cores into just eight chiplets. The chip’s debut drew comparisons to Intel’s still relatively new Efficient (E-cores) for obvious reasons. But under the hood, AMD’s Zen 4c was nothing like what Intel was doing. The core itself was nearly identical to Zen 4; it simply traded clocks and a bit of cache per core for a more densely packed CPU die.
The only difference between running an application on Bergamo or Genoa was how quickly it executed. The same could not be said of Intel’s P and E cores, which used different ISAs.
This remained a defining characteristic and advantage of AMD’s compact core architecture through Zen 5, which allowed it to ship Turin parts with up to 192 cores without users having to worry about whether their app was running on a compact core or not.
With Zen 6c, at least as we understand it, this philosophy is largely unchanged. Both Zen 6 and Zen 6c share the same ISA, with clock being the main differentiator. There are other micro-architectural differences between the two cores designed to balance IPC and clock speeds more effectively.
Looking at the core’s block diagram, this isn’t immediately obvious. Zen 6 and Zen 5 share a very similar front and backend.
We'd be tempted to call the core iterative if it weren't for the 20 to 31 percent IPC uplift for cloud and AI workloads that AMD claims over Zen 5. This suggests that core for core, a 4.1 GHz Zen 6c-based Venice Epyc should deliver performance on par with a Zen 5-based Turin Epyc running at 5 GHz.
That's a pretty sizable jump, but just because AMD is seeing generational performance uplift in enterprise server and cloud workloads doesn't mean we'll see the same gains on the client side. Many will recall the roughly 5 percent performance gains gaming PC enthusiasts reported with the Ryzen 9000-series, leading to the rather unfortunate turn of phrase "Zen 5 percent."
That happened because game engines at the time simply weren't CPU-bottlenecked, and so faster cores could only raise the ceiling so much. Even so, AMD fellow and "Zen daddy" Mike Clark tells El Reg that PC buyers expect more than a 6 percent gain from Zen 6.
We're glossing over a bunch of low-level architectural optimizations here, but according to Clark, one of the biggest drivers of performance was the front end. Zen 5 introduced a dual front end, which for simple workloads worked great, but lost a lot of steam when confronted with more dynamic loads.
"The Zen 6 team did a really good job for those larger footprint workloads that have a bipolar nature," Clark said. "It's not something that comes through. You're not going to see it in a block diagram very well. It's sort of subtle... but it's a big lever."
Another contributor was the move to a distributed scheduler in the out-of-order pipeline. One of the biggest performance drivers in modern CPU cores is that they don't execute instructions in the order they receive them. Instead, they reorder the instructions so as to keep the core's backend execution units fed with a constant stream of instructions.
This is where we see the biggest difference between Zen 6 and Zen 6c. To account for the slower clocks on the latter core, AMD gave the core's scheduler deeper queues, which Clark tells us helps with higher-latency workloads. Meanwhile, from what we understand, Zen 6's shallower queue enables it to clock higher on less power.
Finally, on the backend, AMD made several subtle changes which should have major implications for vector heavy workloads, including AI. One of the more significant was the ability to perform four AVX2 or two AVX-512 loads per cycle.
While this doesn't improve AVX-512 performance much, for applications that haven't been updated to use it, the core is now able to perform twice as many loads, which should improve throughput for legacy applications. This should come in handy, particularly on PCs, where Intel's outright lack of AVX-512 support has made AVX2 the lowest common denominator for a lot of software.
That's not to say AVX-512 didn't get some love this generation. For those running AI workloads on CPUs, Zen 6 now natively supports FP16 datatypes. Previously FP16 was supported, but required padding the data to FP32, which meant the lower precision didn't buy much in terms of performance. That's no longer the case in Zen 6.
And while we're on the topic of AI acceleration, Clark notes that Zen 6 doubled the VNNI-INT8 pipes from two to four, and should effectively double throughput for workloads that support it.
While not strictly part of the core, AMD's Zen 6 processors also address one of the biggest asymmetries associated with its frequency and density optimized cores.
Going back to Bergamo, opting for a density-optimized Epyc didn't just come at the expense of clocks, but cache too. Each Zen 4c or Zen 5c chiplet contained twice as many cores, but the same amount of L3 cache.
With Zen 6 and Zen 6c, you may be giving up some clocks, but cache per core is now a constant 4 MB. As we discussed in a Venice deep dive back in September, each of the processor's eight CPU dies contains 12 or 32 cores and 48 and 128 MB respectively.
The benefit here is that users don't have to worry about different ISAs or cache hierarchies when optimizing their software stacks against AMD's Epyc processors. The same cannot be said of Intel's Xeon processors.
As we alluded to earlier, Chipzilla's performance and efficiency cores use different micro-architectures, ISAs, cache hierarchies, clocks, and even cluster their cores differently. This can pose real headaches if you have workloads that take advantage of fat vector registers like AVX-512, or accelerators like AMX, which will work just fine on Intel's P-cores but won't even run on their E-cores.
This, along with support for SMT (Hyperthreading), which Intel has dropped for now, could help the House of Zen vacuum up even more market share from its long-time rival. ®
Source: www.theregister.com - Articles | 10 Nov 2026 | 5:20 pm UTC
AMD's cache-packed Epyc X chips are officially making a comeback.
Based on the House of Zen's frequency-optimized SKUs we looked at back in September, its HPC-optimized Venice-X parts will offer up to 96 cores and use the company's 3D V-Cache chip stack tech to triple the L3 cache density to more than a gigabyte.
But before you get too excited about another cache-packed Epyc, it'll be a little while before they actually ship. AMD expects the Venice-X to begin trickling out in the second half of 2027.
First teased at CES earlier this year, the chips are primarily aimed at latency-sensitive technical and scientific computing workloads like computational fluid dynamics and electronic design automation (EDA).
AMD itself relies heavily on its X-series Epycs for EDA workloads like functional verification testing, which is used to simulate silicon in order to ensure it behaves as it's intended to. According to AMD Fellow Phil Steinke, by keeping more of the model in cache, the CPU cores don't have to wait as long for data to move in and out of system memory.
Normally, boosting L3 capacity would have required larger chiplets with lower yields, but that's not how AMD has gone about it for the past four years. Instead, it used advanced packaging to give its existing CPU dies a little SRAM backpack.
This tech has been around for several generations now, having first debuted in the Ryzen 7 5800X3D back in 2022. That consumer desktop chip stacked a 64 MB SRAM tile on top of an 8-core chiplet, boosting L3 capacity to 96 MB. The extra cache made the chip one of the most potent gaming CPUs of the time.
Later that year, AMD brought the same technology to its Milan generation of Epycs as the company expanded its portfolio to address a wider range of workloads. The extra cache was popular enough to justify a second generation of X-series Epycs, which launched in 2023.
But then, nothing. When AMD unveiled its 5th-gen Epycs in late 2024, there was no Turin-X on the roadmap.
According to Madhu Rangarajan, who runs AMD's compute and enterprise AI products biz, this was intentional. "We are not doing the X every generation.... The enterprise HPC kind of market tends to have a cadence that's a little bit slower, so that's what drives our cadence."
Venice-X marks the return of AMD's X-chips, and for the most part, the processor largely follows the same recipe as its predecessors. Each of the chip's up to eight CPU dies is now bonded to a 96 MB SRAM tile using advanced packaging, for a total of 144 MB of L3 per chiplet or 1,152 MB per socket, which you might have noticed is the same as in the Genoa-X parts they replace.
But while core count and cache capacity haven't increased, clock speeds certainly have, with Venice now hitting 5.3 GHz compared to Genoa-X at just 3.7 GHz.
"In Milan and Genoa, there was one trade-off. You either had to choose something that was high frequency or you chose something with 3D V-Cache." HPC likes both, Rangarajan told El Reg.
The method for integrating the SRAM tile required this kind of compromise. Stacking SRAM on top of the compute chiplets boosted L3 caches, but also trapped heat, which limited boost clocks.
So, for the Zen 5 generation, AMD moved the SRAM tile from the top of the stack to the bottom. With the SRAM tile no longer acting as a blanket, the chips could run hotter and faster for longer. But while gamers enjoyed the higher clocks and bigger caches on AMD's Ryzen 9000 processors, only now with Venice-X are those improvements making their way into Epyc.
Because customers no longer have to choose between big caches and fast clocks, Rangarajan believes the chip may see wider adoption. "I think it's going to end up being much bigger in HPC than the previous generations where we had to make that tradeoff."
Curiously, if frequency weren't such a high priority, Venice-X may not have needed 3D stacked SRAM in the first place. As we reported earlier this year, AMD's top-specced Venice CPUs boast 256 cores and 1,024 MB of L3 cache.
AMD could have just fused off 160 of the cores and achieved a similar cache-per-core ratio. In fact, AMD did something like this for the Turin generation: For the Epyc 9175F, AMD essentially took a 128-core part and fused off 112 of the cores. What was left was a 16-core part with 512 MB of last-level cache.
"You could do that [with Venice], but then you don't get the frequency part of it. The Fmax would be at 4.1 gigahertz and not 5.3 GHz," Rangarajan said.
"Venice X really changes the game," he added. "For the first time, you can get the larger L3 in our highest frequency part." ®
Source: www.theregister.com - Articles | 10 Nov 2026 | 5:10 pm UTC
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 10 Nov 2026 | 5:00 pm UTC
AMD's upcoming Verano processors aren't like any Epyc CPUs we've seen before. Rather than general-purpose workloads, Verano is designed specifically to power AMD's next generation of GPU servers.
In an interview with The Register during a press event in Las Vegas last week, Madhu Rangarajan, corporate VP of AMD's compute and enterprise AI products business, described Verano as being the first step towards building something that more closely resembles Nvidia's Vera Rubin superchips.
"Verano is really designed for an integrated CPU+GPU rack scale solution," he said. "From that perspective, I wouldn't say the CPU is a competitor to Vera. In a head note, I'd say the Verano+GPU solution is a competitor to Vera+Rubin."
For reference, Vera Rubin and the GB200 and GB300 that came before it aren't your typical server platforms. Instead they're more like an enormous single-board computer combining CPUs and GPUs into a tightly-integrated package. Each of Nvidia's superchips joins a single 88-core Vera CPU and 1.5 TB of LPDDR5X memory to a pair of Rubin GPUs via Nvidia's speedy NVLink-C2C interconnect.
Rangarajan tells us Verano will be the host CPU for a similar class of product using AMD GPUs, and much like Nvidia's superchips, the CPU will also use notebook memory rather than conventional RDIMMS.
However, unlike Vera, which is also being deployed as a standalone CPU in storage servers and agent sandboxes, Verano has a singular purpose: keeping its GPUs fed. (We assume they'll be MI500X GPUs.)
This design choice reflects AMD's philosophy of one SKU per workload. As such, Verano's core count, clock speeds, memory bandwidth, power, and I/O have been rebalanced to keep its GPUs fed and not much else.
If we were to peel back Verano's heat spreader, the chip looks a lot like the Venice Epycs we looked at back in September. It features either six of AMD's core complex dies (CCDs) for a total of 72 high-frequency cores clocking to 5.3 GHz, or 192 density-optimized cores clocking to 4.1 GHz, depending on whether the customer's workloads prefer core density or faster clocks.
But that's about where the visual similarities end. Much of the chip has been reworked to eliminate data flow bottlenecks between the CPU and the GPUs it is responsible for feeding. The chip features an entirely custom pair of I/O dies through which four LPDDR5X memory controllers are attached.
Those memory controllers are currently being validated for use with 24 channels of memory at up to 8,533 MT/s. We're told that we may see that creep up a bit depending on how much headroom AMD has when the part starts shipping next year, but for now that's what AMD is validating against.
That means the platform not only has fewer cores, but also slower memory. Peak theoretical memory bandwidth tops out at around 800 GB/s, which you might have noticed is half of what AMD's top-specced Venice parts can do and about 66 percent of Nvidia's Vera.
What LPDDR seems to buy AMD is a 30 to 40 percent reduction in power consumption compared to RDIMMS, as well as a more compact footprint for liquid cooling. But it also comes with some downsides. In its first incarnation, Verano won't be socketed. Instead it'll use a ball-grid array (BGA) that's soldered to the board, which will make it harder to service.
"LPDDR tends to be quite finicky in terms of speeds. Every time you go through a connector, you tend to lose a pin or two, and you already have one connector with the SoCam itself. So to minimize any of those losses in speed, we went BGA on the CPU," Rangarajan told us.
Unlike with a lot of notebooks, the memory itself won't be soldered down and will use the same SOCAMM2 modules found in Nvidia's Vera-Rubin and Vera-Vera CPU Superchips.
Even so, Verano looks like a bit of a downgrade compared to Venice except when it comes to CPU-to-GPU connectivity.
Historically, AMD's CPU-to-GPU communication has been done over PCIe. It works but has usually required PCIe switches to keep up with all the GPUs, NICs, and storage on board. Nvidia's superchip dispensed with this, replacing PCIe with its NVLink-C2C interconnect, which provides 900 GB/s of bidirectional bandwidth to each of the system's GPUs.
Venice and Verano do something similar. Unlike past Instinct accelerators, AMD's latest generation of GPUs aren't limited to PCIe for CPU-to-GPU communication. Instead, starting with Venice, AMD transitioned to using xGMI.
Global memory interconnect (GMI) is how AMD has moved data between chiplets on its CPUs, GPUs, and APUs for several generations now. xGMI extends this to GPU-to-GPU and CPU-to-GPU communications.
With Venice, xGMI link bandwidth tops out at 64 Gbps per lane, which the keen-eyed among you have probably already figured out is the same as PCIe 6.0. Verano takes this to another level. As we mentioned earlier, Verano disaggregated the memory controllers, and AMD appears to have reclaimed that space for fatter Serializer/Deserializer (SerDes). Instead of 64 Gbps per lane, Verano's xGMI links top out at 112 Gbps, effectively giving it near PCIe 7.0 levels of bandwidth years before the spec ships in production CPUs.
Rangarajan explains this is driven by what AMD's GPUs need to run optimally.
AMD hasn't disclosed the ratio of CPUs to GPUs it's aiming for with Verano, so it's difficult to say how it compares to Nvidia. In a 2:1 ratio of GPUs to CPUs like we saw in Vera Rubin, Verano would deliver identical chip-to-chip bandwidth, while in a 1:4 ratio like we see in AMD's Helios racks, we'd be looking at about half the bandwidth at 448 GB/s. It's also not clear whether AMD has increased the number of xGMI links per I/O die for Verano or not, so bandwidth per GPU could be even higher. We expect more info closer to the MI500X's debut next year.
AMD doesn't expect Verano to replace Venice in every AI rack: The chip is designed specifically for use with Instinct accelerators. Moreover, AMD isn't waiting for Verano to roll out its Helios rackscale systems. As we discussed during Advancing AI earlier this year, those systems will feature 18 96-core Venice CPUs paired to 72 Instinct MI455X GPUs.
Moving forward, AMD expects its Venice to remain a popular host processor for AI head nodes not just for its own GPUs but for the growing number of homegrown accelerators built by the great model houses. ®
Source: www.theregister.com - Articles | 10 Nov 2026 | 5:00 pm UTC
Evaluating the annual global temperatures each year requires context. There is a fair amount of natural variability from one year to the next, so it’s important to focus on the trend over time. Famously, global warming did not end in 1998, as some claimed a couple of decades ago—we just had a run of La-Niña-dominated years after a very strong El Niño.
Annual greenhouse gas emissions are much less variable, having increased fairly steadily, but many complicating factors can still muddy the picture. Sometimes those factors conspire to throw a year off the trend. It looks like 2026 will be one of those years.
A new analysis led by Corinne Le Quéré at the University of East Anglia estimates that fossil fuel emissions have fallen about 0.4 percent from last year. This probably isn’t a peak that symbolizes heartening progress on climate change, though; the researchers think it’s a short-term dip driven by the war in Iran and its effect on oil prices.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 10 Nov 2026 | 4:29 pm UTC
NASA's competition for the development of private space stations that will take flight in the 2030s is already nearing crunch time. But a recently unsealed lawsuit may spice things up even further.
The lawsuit involves two of the most prominent companies in this competition, Houston-based Axiom Space and Long Beach, California-based Vast Space. And it is surfacing as final proposals for private space stations are due from companies to the US space agency a little more than one month from today, on December 14.
According to the court filings unsealed by a November 4 order from US District Judge Charles Eskridge, Axiom is pursuing a False Claims Act case against Vast in which Axiom accuses Vast of presenting NASA with a fraudulent mission-planning document that incorporates Axiom's proprietary information.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 10 Nov 2026 | 4:17 pm UTC
President Bobbi Bodde has nominated Palantir security chief Michael LoSapio to lead CISA, putting an executive from the controversial government supplier in line to run America's civilian cyber defense agency.
The nomination, announced on Monday, could end CISA's nearly two-year wait for a Senate-confirmed director following Jen Easterly's departure in January 2025.
LoSapio has served as Palantir's CISO since September 2024, having previously led the company's infrastructure and network security team. He first joined the data analytics outfit in 2013, later spent a spell at database company SingleStore, and returned to Palantir in 2017.
If confirmed, LoSapio would move from securing Palantir's systems to leading the federal government's main civilian cyber defense agency. CISA protects federal civilian networks and works with critical infrastructure operators, including power, water, and telecommunications providers.
It's a substantial job, particularly given the state of the agency he would inherit.
CISA has shed more than 1,000 staff, roughly a third of its workforce, since Bobbi Bodde returned to the White House, according to reports. It's now trying to plug the gaps, although acting director Nick Andersen said in September that around 250 would-be recruits were still waiting for security clearance before they could get to work. Andersen has been running CISA since February.
With fewer people to go around, CISA is also rethinking where to spend its time. A strategy published last month emphasizes infrastructure whose failure would do the most damage, raising questions about what gets less attention as the agency operates with fewer staff.
LoSapio would be the second person Bobbi Bodde has put forward for the role. His previous pick, Sean Plankey, withdrew in April after spending more than a year awaiting confirmation, with his nomination becoming caught up in a dispute involving Republican Senator Rick Scott over Coast Guard contracting.
The nomination arrives late in the congressional calendar. If the Senate does not confirm LoSapio before the current Congress ends, Bobbi Bodde would have to nominate him again for consideration by the incoming Democratic-controlled Senate.
Palantir, co-founded by billionaire Peter Thiel, has become a major supplier of technology to US government agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Its work with immigration authorities has attracted criticism from civil liberties groups and Democratic lawmakers concerned about surveillance and the handling of sensitive personal information.
The controversy isn't confined to the US either. In the UK, WhatsApp messages obtained by campaign group Foxglove this week indicate that Palantir privately lobbied a health minister to consider extending its software into GP patient records, despite that data being expressly excluded from its £330 million NHS England contract for the Federated Data Platform.
That revelation follows news that NHS England wants greater oversight of Palantir's claims about the benefits of its software, amid questions over the evidence supporting its performance figures.
Those controversies could make LoSapio's confirmation hearings particularly interesting, especially as Democrats prepare to scrutinize Palantir's government business more closely.
It's unclear whether LoSapio plans to leave Palantir or what would happen to any financial interests he holds in the company if confirmed. Those are questions likely to come up during a confirmation process that CISA, having spent nearly two years without a permanent boss while losing a third of its workforce, could probably do without dragging on any longer. ®
Source: www.theregister.com - Articles | 10 Nov 2026 | 4:15 pm UTC
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Source: Slashdot | 10 Nov 2026 | 4:00 pm UTC
Seven-time F1 world champion tours border area and logistics warehouses operated by Egyptian Red Crescent
Lewis Hamilton has visited Egypt’s Rafah border crossing with the Gaza Strip to meet organisations sending humanitarian aid to the territory.
The seven-time Formula One world champion has spoken out about conflict and humanitarian crises in the region, and has called for peace. He has frequently posted on social media about children killed in Israeli airstrikes in Gaza and called for a ceasefire.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 10 Nov 2026 | 3:39 pm UTC
Source: NASA Image of the Day | 10 Nov 2026 | 3:39 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 10 Nov 2026 | 3:30 pm UTC
Fireworks AI has disclosed another cyberattack in October and a wider customer data exposure involving billing records, datasets, and incomplete model weights.
The company, which lets customers train and run AI models, said a third-party cloud provider hosting its research and development machines was compromised on October 23. Attackers used that access the following day to reach Fireworks development systems and run an unauthorized workload.
Fireworks suspects links to financially motivated criminals involved in LLMJacking – selling unauthorized access to AI models through illicit gateways.
Fireworks grouped the affected data into three categories:
Resource metadata: Resource identifiers, display names, descriptions, creation times, and more
Billing information: Billing and shipping addresses, invoice and payment histories, account balances, and credit usages. Payment card numbers are not saved and therefore unaffected
Model weights and datasets: For certain customers, a subset of incomplete model weights and datasets were accessed, Fireworks said
Lin Qiao, Fireworks co-founder and CEO, said the apparent motive was not stealing model weights in response to concerns raised by Cantina Security CEO Hari Mulackal.
"From what we see attackers are not after weights," said Qiao. "Most downloads were partial and stopped."
Render founder and CEO Anurag Goel shared a notification from Notion warning that some chats with its AI assistant may have been exposed through the Fireworks incident.
"Following an investigation by the Notion security team, we have determined that your workspace, Render, was among the <1 percent of Notion workspaces that may have been affected by the Fireworks security incident," the email sent to Goel stated.
"Some unattributable chat sessions with Notion AI may have been exposed in this incident."
Notion said the exposed transcripts lacked separate information linking them to particular users or workspaces. As Reddit users pointed out, however, the conversations themselves could contain identifying details.
"Beyond what's in the chat transcript itself, there's no information tying the chat back to your workspace, users, or company," the email added. "No other data from within your workspace is affected."
Bloomberg reports that Fireworks is also working with customers including Cursor and Harvey to assess the impact.
Fireworks' update confirmed that it worked with Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 team to remediate the attack, which included rotating credentials, isolating affected systems from the network, and tightening up data storage access and monitoring systems.
The update did not state how many customers were affected by either of the two attacks in October.
Fireworks first disclosed an incident on October 9 after detecting unauthorized use of internal credentials on October 6. Attackers accessed environment variables in evaluation jobs, including API keys and tokens belonging to some customers.
At the time, Fireworks said it had found no evidence of access to models, datasets, training data, inference traffic, or personal information. Monday's update substantially broadens the disclosed impact. ®
Source: www.theregister.com - Articles | 10 Nov 2026 | 3:28 pm UTC
Google DeepMind has revealed a new generation of the AI-powered Gemini Robotics platform. In the 2.5 release, Google says its robotic AI is getting tantalizingly close to completing real-world tasks as well as humans do. In fact, some Gemini robots were able to get actual work done in Mercedes-Benz factories, and the team is preparing for a day when robots operate alongside humans with an open source safety benchmark.
DeepMind's physical AI platform has several computational layers between user input and robotic action. There's the vision-language model piece, which is Gemini Embodied Reasoning. Essentially, it takes your instructions and uses live video to plan how the robot can accomplish the task. The other main component is the vision-language-action (VLA) that actually generates robot actions, like moving an actuator—that's Gemini Robotics, which has been bumped to version 2.5.
DeepMind says that Gemini Robotics 2.5 is much better at tasks that require a high degree of dexterity. The model was evaluated across more than 200 activities, including serving food with tongs and using a pipette, as you would see in a laboratory. Google also showed that Apptronik’s Apollo 2 humanoid robot with Gemini Robotics 2.5 can now tie a bow with its five-fingered hands, a notable feat, because deformable objects (like ribbon) are notoriously difficult for robots to manipulate.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 10 Nov 2026 | 3:00 pm UTC
The investigation of Jensen Huang by Nvidia’s board threatens the future of one of Silicon Valley’s longest-serving executives and a key enabler of the AI boom, who has no obvious successor as leader of the world’s second-most-valuable company.
Huang is fighting for survival after admitting to an extramarital affair, believed to be with an executive at a large Nvidia customer whom US officials also allege was working as a Chinese spy.
The prospect that Huang could be forced out as chief executive of the US chipmaker he co-founded more than 30 years ago has alarmed investors and allies in the tech industry. Shares in Nvidia, which late last month ceded its position as the world’s most valuable to Apple amid a broader sell-off in AI stocks, had fallen more than 5 percent by midday trading on Monday.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 10 Nov 2026 | 2:53 pm UTC
The UK Post Office is extending its contract with Fujitsu to give it time to move services to a new supplier, after a scandal that has long marred the relationship between the two.
The current contract runs until March 2027, and the publicly owned company has announced a short, time-limited contract extension to cover the transition.
Accenture will take over running the Horizon system, which was at the center of a string of miscarriages of justice, from September 2027, after winning a £410 million contract in May this year. Meanwhile, the Post Office is developing a replacement for the aging system to serve its network of 11,500 branches.
The Post Office began rolling out the legacy Horizon IT system for accounting in 1999, along with two subsequent upgrades. The electronic point-of-sale (EPOS) and back-end finance system was first implemented by ICL, a UK tech firm majority-owned by Fujitsu in the 1990s and which it fully acquired in 1998. From 1999 until 2015, around 736 subpostmasters were wrongfully prosecuted and convicted over Horizon errors, devastating lives in the process.
The Post Office, Accenture, and Fujitsu have agreed that Fujitsu will hand over the operation of Horizon to Accenture between 1 June and 1 September 2027, with the final date set to be confirmed in March 2027.
Accenture is set to "walk in and take over" the current Horizon system by assuming day-to-day operations from Fujitsu, as well as developing the back-end of the new system to replace Horizon.
Post Office CEO Neil Brocklehurst said: "Ending our contract with Fujitsu is a critical milestone in Post Office's transformation, and today's agreement secures the transition away from Fujitsu and over to Accenture safely and responsibly to achieve our target of summer 2027.
"In addition to ending our contract with Fujitsu, we are also working at pace with our leading technology suppliers, Accenture, OneView Commerce, and Escher, to build a modern, resilient platform able to make everyday life easier for customers and postmasters for years to come."
Fujitsu has also been awarded a contract extension to run the UK Government's Emergency Alerts platform until October 2029. The contract is worth £9.6 million ($12.8 million).
The company committed to not bid for new public sector contracts while the inquiry into the Horizon scandal continues. ®
Source: www.theregister.com - Articles | 10 Nov 2026 | 2:45 pm UTC
The Food and Drug Administration is warning that popular obesity drugs—including Ozempic, Wegovy, Zepbound, and Mounjaro—may carry a "potential increased risk" of a rare eye condition that can lead to permanent vision loss.
In a drug safety communication Monday, the FDA said it will now require makers of GLP-1 receptor agonist drugs to add a warning about that risk on their drug labels. The specific eye condition it warns of is called non-arteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy or NAION. The condition is caused by restricted blood flow to the optic nerve, which leads to swelling and cell death and ultimately damages the nerve, causing abrupt vision loss that can often be permanent.
It's unknown how GLP-1 drugs may cause NAION. The condition is rare overall, occurring in somewhere between two and 10 people in 100,000 in the general population, according to the American Academy of Ophthalmology. These small numbers have made it more difficult to determine with certainty if there is a connection. Further complicating the potential link is the fact that the risk factors for developing NAION are common among patients taking GLP-1 drugs. The risk factors include diabetes, cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, metabolic syndrome, and obstructive sleep apnea.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 10 Nov 2026 | 2:43 pm UTC
Perhaps only a small percentage of Ars readers will care about the Polestar 2030 concept, debuted today by the electric automaker. Spun out of Volvo—once upon a time, Polestar was a racing team—the brand has leveraged the resources of parent-automaker Geely to create electric vehicles that marry a modern minimalist style with rewarding driving dynamics. But you now can’t buy any Polestars in the US, since Geely is Chinese, and banning Chinese-owned car brands enjoys remarkable bipartisan support in Congress.
The Formula 2030 is about the same length as a Polestar 2 but with a very low roofline. If anything, the two-box shape reminds me of the Saab Aero-X, one of the final concepts from the then-terminal Swedish automaker. (In many ways, Polestar has adopted Saab’s mantle.)
Polestar says the concept fits into its own segment somewhere between the next Polestar 2 and the Polestar 7—it numbers its cars chronologically (mostly), not based on size—although it’s not saying if the hatchback design will go into series production. Successfully packaging rear-seat passengers and a lithium-ion battery pack is something a concept needn’t worry about, after all. Rather, it’s a styling exercise, or more than one.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 10 Nov 2026 | 2:22 pm UTC
Twelve years into Stanford's 100-year study of artificial intelligence, the project's third report raises more questions than it answers.
The 2026 AI100 Study Panel report acknowledges its limitations in its twelfth takeaway: "This report will be out of date by the time you read it."
But it's nonetheless a worthwhile exercise for those who haven't been paying close attention to the development of machine learning over the past few years and for policymakers who may benefit from a review of AI's metastatic growth.
"The last five years constitute a watershed moment in the history of AI," said Professor Sheila McIlraith, chair of the AI100 Standing Committee, in a statement. "This report examines what led to the extraordinary capabilities of today's AI systems, and how they are reshaping society. As we look ahead, we anticipate continued increase in AI capabilities alongside transformative advances in science and medicine.
"Rapid change will challenge governments and industry to support and safeguard our people, our institutions, and our critical infrastructure. Both the benefits and the risks of AI technologies require the same clear-eyed scrutiny."
Established in 2014, the One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence (AI100) is overseen by a Standing Committee of AI experts and administered by Stanford's Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI). It's charged with producing reports every five years, the first of which debuted in 2016.
The 2026 report's other key points highlight the transformation brought about by increasingly capable machine learning software.
It identifies scaling as the engine of AI's advance, but also points to the growing cost and difficulty of obtaining training data as constraints on further progress.
The report likens AI's disruptive potential to that of the World Wide Web – without dwelling on the irony that the web itself is among the things being disrupted. It points to creative industries, computer programming, and mathematics as fields once deemed beyond the reach of automation that are now being upended.
Science, the report says, is being transformed by AI as it accelerates research timelines and opens up novel challenges. At the same time, the report cautions that "we will need to understand how AI-mediated information environments reshape collective cognition and moral behavior." The recent retraction of some 1,400 scholarly papers for failure to meet academic standards highlights the urgency of that message.
Then there's the AI investment boom and "fears of a financial bubble," which won't be assuaged by recent NASDAQ volatility and revelations about Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's relationship with an alleged intelligence operative for China.
Concerns about the concentration of frontier AI development, the pressure AI puts on cybersecurity, and the active use of AI for military applications are also noted in the report.
So too are worries about what AI-generated media does to trust.
Item nine on the report's takeaway list is perhaps the most noteworthy: "AI is reshaping the lives of billions of people, yet the public has had little say in how it is developed and deployed."
The recent US midterms suggest voters are finding ways to make themselves heard about AI datacenters, even if that falls short of shaping broader AI policy.
Item ten posits that longstanding academic concerns about AI bias, ethics, and safety are beginning to converge with what until recently seemed like worries inspired by speculative fiction, such as AI agents hacking into companies without human oversight.
And item 11 frames the entire report by calling out the lack of a coherent regulatory response to AI: "AI governance is fragmented and increasingly framed in terms of national security, with little international consensus among states on its direction."
Those takeaways introduce the AI100 Study Panel's examination of 12 standing questions about what AI makes possible and how humans are handling it. Easy answers are in short supply.
But as the report's disclosure section makes clear, even the people taking the century-long view are using the technology to assess itself.
"Reflecting the progress in AI over the period this report covers, AI tools were used extensively in its production," the report explains.
"The report was written by humans, and its authors used AI primarily to transcribe and summarize meetings, support dictation, and check drafts for typos, consistency, duplication, tone, and structure. In some cases, AI suggested rewording of human-written text. AI was also used to compare this report with previous AI100 reports, identifying where expectations and reality have diverged or converged over five years. After completion, AI tools checked for inadvertent plagiarism and signs of AI-generated content." ®
Source: www.theregister.com - Articles | 10 Nov 2026 | 2:00 pm UTC
Google has patched its eighth actively exploited Chrome zero-day of 2026, matching its total for the whole of last year with nearly two months still left on the calendar.
The latest flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-125350, is a high-severity use-after-free vulnerability in Chrome's XML component. Google confirmed in a security advisory published Monday that attackers are already exploiting the bug, although it hasn't said who's behind the attacks or who might be getting targeted.
"Google is aware that an exploit for CVE-2026-125350 exists in the wild," the company said, offering little else about the attacks.
The vulnerability was reported anonymously on November 6 and involves a memory management error that occurs when software continues using a pointer to memory that has already been freed. Such bugs can potentially allow attackers to corrupt memory and execute malicious code, although Google hasn't disclosed how this particular flaw is being exploited.
Google is keeping further technical details under wraps until enough users have installed the fix, a familiar approach intended to stop other attackers from getting their hands on a working exploit.
The patch arrives in Chrome 157.0.8103.50/.51 for Windows and macOS, and 157.0.8103.50 for Linux. The update also addresses eight other security vulnerabilities, including high-severity flaws affecting WebGL, FileSystem, GPU, Compositing, and the V8 JavaScript engine.
The release fixes another use-after-free bug in Chrome's XML component, CVE-2026-125346, which was reported by Arni Hardarson of Neonix Security in October, though Google hasn't indicated that this second vulnerability is being exploited.
The latest discovery adds to what's becoming a rather long list of Chrome zero-days this year. By June, Google had already patched five actively exploited Chrome zero-days, including flaws in its V8 JavaScript engine, Skia graphics library, and WebGPU implementation. The list has only grown since then, with two more V8 bugs fixed in September and the latest XML vulnerability bringing the total to eight.
That puts 2026 level with 2025, when Google also fixed eight Chrome zero-days exploited in the wild. Whether the browser maker can make it through the remaining weeks of the year without adding another to the pile is anyone's guess.
Google says the latest update will roll out over the coming days and weeks, but users can check manually by heading to Chrome's Settings menu and selecting About Chrome. With attackers already making use of the vulnerability, it's probably worth doing that sooner rather than waiting for Chrome to get around to it. ®
Source: www.theregister.com - Articles | 10 Nov 2026 | 1:28 pm UTC
Classes at Vanderbilt University are proceeding as scheduled today, although access to most university systems remains restricted following a cyberattack claimed by ransomware group BYOD.
Vanderbilt announced on Monday morning that it was dealing with "an active cybersecurity incident," and that the fallout may affect university devices, systems, and cloud-based services.
The Nashville-based university initially told students and staff to shut down university devices and disconnect from campus Wi-Fi. It warned them to watch for unexpected prompts, altered files or permissions, unfamiliar applications, and unsolicited authentication requests.
Campus computers reportedly began playing an audio threat attributed to BYOD. Student newspaper The Vanderbilt Hustler cited posts on campus social network Fizz showing the message.
"You have been compromised by BYOD," the recording said. "We suggest you reach out to us as soon as possible. Instructions have been placed on your desktop. Failure to communicate will result in this estate being brought to the ground completely. Make the right choice or rot with the wrong one."
By Monday evening, Vanderbilt had restored access to campus Wi-Fi, but warned that access to most systems remains restricted.
"We know this has disrupted important work and caused frustration across the university," it said. "Vanderbilt Information Technology is working with government agencies and other partners to manage this situation."
Students were told to attend classes as scheduled on Tuesday and contact instructors about flexibility on coursework deadlines. Staff were instructed to report to work normally.
Vanderbilt's Athletics department said that its ticketing system was unavailable, and that students were unable to claim tickets for the college's football game against Alabama on Saturday.
BYOD claimed responsibility for the attack on Vanderbilt on Monday, along with extensive data theft.
"If you could not tell already, your databases are locked [and] we have your entire estate and research data," it said via its leak site.
"Over 1 million SSNs, full names, email addresses, phone numbers, student and employee records, full takeover of your DC, whatever was on your network, we possess."
Vanderbilt has not confirmed BYOD's claims about the extent of its access or the data allegedly stolen.
BYOD may be a familiar name to some. The group previously claimed attacks on the University of New Mexico and Bobbi Bodde Mobile's customer database.
BYOD also claimed responsibility on Monday for an attack on Texas Health and Human Services. The agency has not publicly confirmed an incident and did not immediately respond to our questions. ®
Source: www.theregister.com - Articles | 10 Nov 2026 | 1:00 pm UTC
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