August Hanning served as president of federal intelligence service from 1998 to 2005
A former head of Germany’s foreign intelligence service has been arrested on suspicion of treason and spying on behalf of an overseas intelligence agency, prosecutors said.
August Hanning, 80, was head of the federal intelligence service (BND) – whichoperates outside Germany to gather information across the fields of political, economic, and military intelligence – between 1998 and 2005.
In Jet
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’s telling, he’s a model of incorruptible self-sacrifice.
“I’m the only president that donated his salary,” he told a group of cheering supporters at a Hispanic heritage month celebration in the White House last week, before conceding that George Washington – “a very wealthy person” – might have beaten him to the punch.
Huge tax breaks and a weak currency sustain exports, widen the government budget deficit and complicate the country’s efforts to rebalance its economy.
Pablo Quirno says move is part of government’s strategy to peacefully assert sovereignty over the islands
Argentina’s foreign minister has told an audience that included the British ambassador that his government would stop the Falkland Islands from exploiting its offshore oilfields as part of a strategy to take sovereignty.
During a speech at a thinktank event in the Argentinian capital, Pablo Quirno condemned the British government for failing to open negotiations over the islands and facilitating a significant offshore oil project in its waters.
Prime minister tells delegates in Tuvalu and Fiji that ‘super El Niño’ brewing in the Pacific shows climate change is ‘here right now’
Anthony Albanese has warned Australia faces a hazardous summer, likely including floods, cyclones and extreme heat, due to the immediate threat of the climate change and a rising “super El Niño”.
Speaker alongside national leaders at a climate summit in Fiji, the prime minister said the expected nasty summer and the demonstrated impact on Pacific island countries – including low-lying Tuvalu – showed the world could not afford to let the goal of limiting global heating to 1.5C “just slip from our grasp”.
Benjamin Davis appealing against dismissal from FAO, after being accused by director general of playing ‘political games’
A former senior UN food agency official has alleged he was fired last week for his work highlighting hunger in Gaza, and has launched an appeal against his dismissal.
Benjamin Davis said the leadership of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) had refused to renew his contract as director of its rural transformation and gender equality division because his team had published a brief on hunger in Gaza and held a seminar on the subject last year, and because he taken part in weekly “moment of silence” vigils on FAO grounds for those killed.
Unprecedented protests that began in low-income banlieue are turning ugly, with investigations under way into police brutality
Before dawn on Tuesday outside the Lycée Sophie-Germain in central Paris, hundreds of teenagers dragged wheelie bins, metal barriers and shopping trolleys to build a barricade outside the front door of their secondary school.
Climbing to the top of the piles of bins, pupils held banners calling for more funding and greater equality in French schools. But they were also protesting against French riot police, who have been accused by human rights groups of using disproportionate force against children in what is fast becoming the biggest youth protest movement in decades.
Jason Kwon’s answers were provided in a helpful, quiet and calm manner. For a company under intense scrutiny, there were no missteps
Open AI’s Jason Kwon flew 15 hours from San Francisco to Sydney to give the company’s first in-person mea culpa after it admitted – in an unsigned email, to a public departmental inbox – that one of its AI agents had accessed a Services Australia website without authorisation and grabbed data related to Medicare.
Kwon – polite, friendly, even-toned – got through a potentially dicey committee hearing unscathed, promising to do better and pledging assistance to Australia. No missteps, no viral moments, just delivering his answers helpfully, in a quiet and calm manner, sympathising with the questioner and the point they were making.
The findings come after warnings from tech leaders that AI placed in the wrong hands could trigger larger threats such as nuclear war or bioweaponry destruction
Misusing artificial intelligence (AI) is the top threat to companies’ reputations – more so than being accused of putting children in the way of mental, emotional or physical harm and issues exposed by the US-Israel war on Iran, among other brand risks, according to a new survey of more than 150 public affairs leaders.
Those findings in the new edition of the quarterly Reputation Risk Index, released on Tuesday, came on the heels of other perhaps more dire warnings from leading tech figures that AI in the wrong hands could precipitate existential threats on a mass scale such as nuclear war or destruction by bioweaponry.
Polls show GOP candidates trailing Democrats in Senate races, and Republicans also struggling in House contests
Thirty days remain until the midterm elections, and Jet
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and his Republican allies are pulling out all the stops to maintain control of Congress.
Super Pacs aligned with the GOP have already spent hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising and voter outreach in races expected to decide the majorities in the Senate and House of Representatives, and plan to spend even more before the election is over. The president, vice-president JD Vance, and other top Republicans are fanning out across the country to stump for vulnerable lawmakers.
OpenAI is rolling out an invisible, machine-readable text watermark called textGrain to ChatGPT and Codex, "but only for users in the European Union at first," reports The Verge. From the report: OpenAI says its textGrain watermarking "matched or exceeded" other approaches like Google DeepMind's SynthID for text, which is also the basis for the watermarking Anthropic announced in August. Like OpenAI, Anthropic made the move to meet the requirements of the EU's AI Act; however, not everyone was happy to learn about the addition. OpenAI also included scores from AI benchmarks showing similar performance from watermarked and unwatermarked text. But it notes that textGrain "does not guarantee reliable detection," and says text watermarks don't verify accuracy, determine who owns the text, measure how much a human contributed, or prove human authorship.
When the elevator doors opened, the reporters waiting in the hallway immediately crowded around the gaunt, orange-clad man who emerged, escorted by his public defender and a sheriff’s deputy. The three men made their way toward the seventh-floor courtroom of Oklahoma County District Court Judge Natalie Mai, as reporters shouted questions.
“Why did you kill Barry Van Treese?” one asked.
Justin Sneed, 49, didn’t answer, his handcuffs and waist chain clanging as he walked. With a short, graying goatee and long brown hair pulled back into a ponytail, Sneed maintained a hollow stare. Inside the courtroom, his lawyer directed him to a chair just in front of the jury box. Sneed sat, his hands clasped in front of him, and kept his gaze toward the floor. Directly across the room was Richard Glossip, the man nearly executed for killing their boss — a grisly murder that Sneed actually committed.
Sneed was 19 years old when he beat Van Treese to death at the Best Budget Inn, a rundown motel Van Treese owned on the outskirts of Oklahoma City. Sneed admitted to the January 1997 murder but swore Glossip put him up to it. Glossip insisted he was innocent and, apart from Sneed’s account, there was scant evidence connecting him to the crime. Still, in exchange for a life sentence, Sneed became the state’s star witness against Glossip, clinching his conviction and sending him to death row.
It would not take long for Sneed’s story to start falling apart. Glossip’s original conviction was overturned after a state court found that Glossip’s trial lawyers failed to present critical exculpatory evidence — a video of Sneed’s police interrogation that showed Oklahoma City detectives pressuring him into implicating Glossip. Nevertheless, in 2004, a second jury reconvicted Glossip and again sentenced him to death.
In 2025, the U.S. Supreme Court vacated Glossip’s conviction, concluding that it was rooted in false testimony and prosecutorial misconduct. The justices found that Sneed lied on the stand, dismantling the basis for the state’s case. “Besides Sneed, no other witness and no physical evidence established that Glossip orchestrated Van Treese’s murder,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote for the majority. “Thus, the jury could convict Glossip only if it believed Sneed.”
Many expected Glossip’s saga to end there. Instead, Oklahoma announced it would retry Glossip for first-degree murder, once again relying on Sneed. “The evidence presented will be essentially the same as was presented in the first two trials,” prosecutor Jimmy Harmon told Mai earlier this year.
Glossip’s attorneys have strenuously objected to the state’s plan to use the same discredited evidence for a third time. They are also adamant that they should have a chance to put Sneed on the witness stand, so that Mai can assess his credibility before trial. It is this insistence that led Glossip and Sneed to sit face to face in court for the first time in decades.
Glossip, now 63, was released on bond in May. He sat at the defense table in a navy suit and crisp white shirt while the daylong hearing got underway. Mai had convened the September 30 proceeding to consider a flurry of defense motions, many of which centered on Sneed’s role in the case. Sneed had been subpoenaed in advance of the hearing, which attracted a gaggle of reporters to Mai’s courtroom. But it was unclear whether he would take the stand.
Much of the time was spent listening to lawyers on both sides argue over ongoing conflicts in the case. Glossip’s legal team has repeatedly clashed with prosecutors over the state’s obligation to disclose evidence before trial. The constant disagreements have threatened to derail Mai’s tight trial schedule; after initially setting Glossip’s trial for September, she has since pushed the trial date to December 7.
But that too seems vanishingly unlikely. As the hearing dragged on, the bigger question was whether a trial will happen at all.
It was exactly 11 years earlier, on September 30, 2015, that Glossip came perilously close to being put to death at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary, only for officials to realize at the eleventh hour that they had procured the wrong combination of drugs to carry out his lethal injection. In the decade that followed, Glossip’s defense attorney, Don Knight, reinvestigated the case and uncovered a trove of evidence previously withheld by the state. He also secured a host of new witnesses who came forward to say that, despite the state’s portrayal of Sneed as a hapless dolt who was entirely under Glossip’s control, Sneed was actually cunning, volatile, and entirely capable of murder on his own.
The revelations eventually prompted a bipartisan group of Oklahoma lawmakers to question Glossip’s conviction and seek an independent investigation into the case. In June 2022, the law firm Reed Smith LLP published the first in a series of exhaustive reports, unearthing even more evidence undermining prosecutors’ theory of the crime and revealing that the state had willfully destroyed key pieces of evidence before Glossip’s 2004 retrial. The following year, newly elected state Attorney General Gentner Drummond announced his own probe into the case. That investigation found myriad problems with Glossip’s prosecution, persuading Drummond that Glossip’s conviction and death sentence should not stand.
Drummond asked the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals to vacate Glossip’s conviction but it refused, once again setting Glossip up for execution. The attorney general took unprecedented steps to spare Glossip’s life, ultimately joining Glossip’s efforts to get the case before the Supreme Court — and taking a victory lap after the justices finally ruled in Glossip’s favor in February 2025.
But just a few months after the high court ruling, Drummond did an abrupt about-face, announcing that he would retry Glossip for first-degree murder. The reversal coincided with Drummond’s campaign for governor, which ended in a primary defeat this past August. In the meantime, defense attorneys repeatedly reiterated Drummond’s own critiques of the case, emphasizing that, until recently, he vehemently criticized the same evidence his prosecutors plan to reuse.
Among these criticisms were key concessions Drummond made regarding misconduct by Connie Smothermon, the lead prosecutor at Glossip’s 2004 retrial. At the heart of the Supreme Court ruling was that Smothermon not only failed to disclose key notes about Sneed’s psychiatric history, but also failed to correct portions of Sneed’s testimony that she knew were false.
Richard Glossip, center, alongside defense attorney Don Knight and other members of his legal team, as seen from outside Oklahoma County District Judge Natalie Mai’s courtroom on Sept. 30, 2026.Photo: Liliana Segura/The Intercept
Drummond also conceded that Smothermon improperly sought to alter Sneed’s testimony before he took the stand at the retrial to make it fit the forensic evidence. At Glossip’s first trial, Sneed denied attacking Van Treese with a knife even though a knife was found at the scene — and despite the medical examiner’s findings that there were puncture wounds on Van Treese’s chest. Midway through Glossip’s second trial, Smothermon wrote a note to Sneed’s defense attorney, indicating that there were inconsistencies Sneed needed to clear up.
“Our biggest problem,” Smothermon wrote, “is still the knife.” When Sneed later took the stand, he testified that he did, in fact, stab Van Treese.
Glossip’s attorneys did not discover this note until 2022. In its ruling, the Supreme Court agreed with Drummond that Smothermon violated Glossip’s rights by trying to modify Sneed’s testimony mid-trial. Yet Drummond’s own prosecutors now argue that there’s no evidence that Smothermon’s mid-trial intervention “improperly influenced” Sneed’s testimony.
In early September, Glossip’s attorneys filed a motion urging Mai to put Sneed on the stand to clear this up. “No court has yet held an evidentiary hearing to determine the full scope of the … violation,” they wrote, “its effect on Sneed’s testimony, and what procedures may be necessary to prevent the jury from being deceived about what Sneed remembers versus what he was coached to say.”
In a surprisingly candid reply, Joshua Lockett, deputy chief of the Oklahoma attorney general’s criminal appeals unit, wrote that it is unreasonable to expect Sneed to be able to answer questions about the knife and his shifting trial testimony after all these years. “Any evidentiary hearing would be unable to disentangle the source of Sneed’s knowledge” — whether it came from Sneed’s memory about the night of the crime, or from what he “absorbed” from Smothermon’s mid-trial note, he wrote. “That sorting would have been difficult in 2004,” he wrote. “It is impossible in 2026.”
In other words, the state appeared to be conceding that its star witness cannot now reliably recount what happened the night he murdered Barry Van Treese.
Hanging over Wednesday’s proceeding was an uncomfortable reality that has dogged the state’s case for years: evidence that Sneed has repeatedly tried to take back his claim that Glossip coerced him into murdering Van Treese.
In October 2014, nearly a year before Glossip’s near-execution, Sneed’s adult daughter O’Ryan Justine Sneed sent a letter to the Oklahoma Board of Pardon and Parole, urging them to grant clemency to Glossip. “For a couple of years now, my father has been talking to me about recanting his original testimony,” she wrote. “I feel his conscious [sic] is getting to him.”
“Do I have the choice of re-canting my testimony at any time during my life, or anything like that.”
Among the most compelling pieces of evidence to emerge since then are two handwritten notes, penned years apart, in which Sneed indicated he wanted to retract his testimony. In 2003, a year before Glossip’s second trial, Sneed wrote to his public defender, Gina Walker, asking, “Do I have the choice of re-canting my testimony at any time during my life, or anything like that.” In 2007, he sent Walker another letter: “There are a lot of things right now that are eating at me,” he wrote. Things he needed “to clean up.” Walker, who has since died, discouraged him from coming forward.
Both of these notes came from Sneed’s public defender file. Ordinarily such communications would be shielded from release by attorney-client privilege, but in this case the public defender’s office provided the documents to investigators with Reed Smith. Glossip’s attorneys argued that there is reason to believe that there may be additional material in Sneed’s file that could cast further doubt on his story.
But whether the lawyers might be entitled to any of these records depends on a key question: Did Sneed consent to the disclosure of the records in the first place?
Over the state’s objections, Mai said she would allow Sneed to take the stand for the “limited purpose — and I do mean limited purpose” of asking Sneed whether he ever consented to his records being released. “I will allow for very limited questioning of Mr. Sneed as to that topic,” she said.
Sneed shuffled to a wooden chair next to the judge’s bench and sat awkwardly, his legs spread wide and his gaze still fixed on the ground.
In response to questions from one of Glossip’s defense attorneys, Sneed said he never consented to the release of materials from his public defender file. But he also said that he met with investigators with Reed Smith while accompanied by the head of the public defender office. Perhaps more perplexing, Sneed said he knew by then that his files had been released to investigators because he’d seen it broadcast “on the media, when it was on the television with the news reporters.” When the investigators tried to interview him, “I just didn’t answer their questions, didn’t try to go into details about anything,” Sneed said, “because I was actively upset about the fact that [the files] were released anyway without my consent.”
The testimony was confusing and brief, an unsatisfying turn on the stand that did nothing to answer any of the long-standing questions about the state’s star witness or how he would testify about the murder this time around.
As they have for months, lawyers with the attorney general’s office spent much of the day pushing back hard on the notion that Sneed should take the stand before trial to discuss the knife, his public defender file, or anything else. In court, Knight pointed out that prosecutors have met with Sneed repeatedly over the last year and a half, and yet have only turned over to the defense brief summaries of those conversations. Taken together, the state’s maneuvering suggests prosecutors are far less confident in their case against Glossip than they have previously claimed.
“For 29 years, this case had been marked by prosecutorial errors and misconduct.”
In a statement to The Intercept, Knight said he was struck by prosecutors’ efforts to keep Sneed from testifying. “For 29 years, this case had been marked by prosecutorial errors and misconduct,” he said. “And now they can’t even trust the testimony of the only witness that says Rich was involved in this murder. But they can’t hide him forever. We look forward to spending a couple of days with Mr. Sneed on the stand at trial.”
As Sneed was led out of the courtroom, reporters surrounded him again as he made his way to the elevators. “All these years later do you have any regrets?” one asked just before the doors closed. Sneed did not answer.
Daniil Medvedev once said you would need to knock on his hotel door at 6am for seven days in a row to make him angry - but his China Open disqualification was no surprise.
Derry City midfielder James McClean has hit out at what he claims is the club's "incomprehensible" attempt to terminate his contract and insisted that he will decide when he retires in a statement released via the PFA Ireland.
The UK's largest police force has awarded French outsourcer Atos a six-year contract worth up to £350 million to manage and secure applications. Atos will provide service management, application management, and application security for the Metropolitan Police Service in London. The deal is intended to support the Met's ongoing modernization and simplification of its applications. Met Police digital product delivery director Jamie Hewitt said: "Our collaboration with Atos will provide a stable digital foundation for our officers and staff, supporting the ongoing modernization and simplification of our application landscape and driving greater efficiency and effectiveness across the technology that underpins frontline policing." The Met can extend the six-year contract by two years and expand its scope to include managed cloud and digital workplace services. The award follows another large-scale tech deal for the Met Police earlier this year. In April, it awarded DXC Technology a contract worth up to £1 billion to develop and run a host of business process outsourcing services, including building a new Oracle ERP system. An award notice said DXC had won the work for the "provision of managed services for HR, finance, and commercial operations… [including] technology enablement, process optimization, and service delivery." Atos has also secured other UK public sector work this year, including a £78.2 million contract with His Majesty's Revenue & Customs for specialist low-code leadership services. A little more than two years ago, Atos sought a restructuring deal with investors. In July 2024, it agreed such a deal with a group comprising some of its banks and bondholders. Atos had also lost a major outsourcing contract with UK public pension provider Nest, which ended a £1.5 billion deal in 2023, just two years into its potential 18-year term. Indian outsourcer TCS later won back the deal without external competition. ®
Exclusive: Campaign group’s analysis of North Yorkshire plans finds datacentre would have to burn 4.9m tonnes of wood a year
Drax’s planned datacentre could produce nearly double the emissions of all flights out of Gatwick airport each year by burning 4.9m tonnes of wood annually, an analysis has shown.
Campaigners say this would make it “one of the dirtiest datacentres out there”.
Asos is investigating after users of its mobile app received a notification claiming hackers had “fully compromised” the online fashion retailer’s data.
The value of Asos’s shares on the London Stock Exchange dived almost 10% after thousands of customers received a notification titled “Asos hacked” with a link that sent them to the Telegram messaging service.
Watchdog examining whether company carried out adequate risk assessment as required by Online Safety Act
Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta is under investigation for a potential breach of the UK’s digital safety laws after launching a Snapchat-style feature on Instagram.
The UK’s communications watchdog, Ofcom, is investigating whether the $1.9tn (£1.4tn) company infringed the Online Safety Act (OSA) by failing to carry out adequate checks on whether its Instagram Instants product could show illegal content or be accessed by children.
Bakker spent four and a half years in prison after being convicted in 1989 of defrauding followers in a scheme involving holidays at his Christian theme park
The US televangelist Jim Bakker, who built a multimillion-dollar empire and lived in opulence before being disgraced by a sex scandal, a conviction for defrauding followers and divorce from his television co-host Tammy Faye, has died aged 86.
The death of Bakker, whose journey from the TV pulpit to a prison cell in the 1980s inspired comparisons to the corrupt character of the fictional preacher-huckster Elmer Gantry, was revealed on social media by his second wife, Lori Bakker.
She must decide by the end of the week whether to seek further review of federal charges over a confrontation with ICE agents at Delaney Hall
A US congresswoman who just gave birth to a baby girl faces a deadline this week on whether to seek a rehearing of a federal case against her by the Jet
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administration after an oversight visit to an immigration detention facility.
LaMonica McIver, 40, represents New Jersey’s 10th congressional district. She gave birth to her second child last Thursday – a rarity for a sitting member of Congress. She is only the 15th member of Congress to give birth while serving and part of a small subset of congresswomen who have school-age children.
Yemen's Houthis have claimed an attack on the main airport in the Saudi capital while also denying losing territory to government forces, as fighting intensified.
Health minister says 28 contacts identified after death of citizen who arrived from DRC on Saturday
Kenya has reported its first-ever Ebola death, the health minister announced on Tuesday, after a Kenyan man who had been living in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) died after returning to the country.
In mid-May, the DRC declared its 17th Ebola outbreak, an extremely deadly disease that has killed more than 15,000 people in Africa over the past 50 years.
UK education software provider Bromcom has notified customers of a personal data breach affecting its single sign-on (SSO) technology. In a September 24 EduGeek post, an account named Bromcom_Alastair said an unauthorized third party had accessed and retrieved email addresses and limited information associated with affected SSO registrations. The incident involved legacy SSO registration functionality in Bromcom's Communication Server environment. The company confirmed in an FAQ it found no evidence that its school Management Information System (MIS), used to manage student data, attendance, behaviour, and administration, was compromised. Bromcom said it was working with external forensic specialists to determine the nature and scope of the data involved. The company identified the incident on September 6 after reports of SSO access problems and has since withdrawn the legacy functionality from production. The service held email addresses associated with SSO registrations, the provider used, such as Microsoft or Google, registration and last sign-in dates where recorded, and internal user and registration reference numbers. Bromcom said the affected component did not hold account passwords or authentication tokens. The legacy SSO registration functionality had remained in production after being superseded because "it was still being called by an internal system," the supplier said. The incident did not enable access to Microsoft or Google accounts, whose authentication services are separate from the affected component said Bromcom. The Register has asked Bromcom to comment further. Bromcom provides information management software used in schools and the wider education sector in the UK. It offers tools for budgeting, timetabling, HR, and benchmarking. Bromcom's software is used by more than 5,000 schools and 390 multi-academy trusts (organizations that run multiple schools). Recent customer wins include Newport City Council, the Ministry of Defence, Warwickshire County Council, and the Northern Ireland Education Authority. ® Updated to add at 0834 UTC, October 6 A spokesperson for Bromcom said: "We recently identified, contained and began investigating an IT incident. Our investigation is ongoing to determine the nature and scope of any data involved, and we have already taken steps to resolve any disruption. We are liaising with the relevant schools and trusts, as well as the appropriate authorities."
Fenton’s successes include scores for Gandhi, Groundhog Day and 18 Ken Loach films, plus BBC TV news themes, Blue Planet and more
George Fenton, the British composer who earned five Oscar nominations for scores to films such as Gandhi and Dangerous Liaisons, has died aged 76.
A statement from his family said his death was “unexpected” but did not give a cause. The statement added that he was survived by various family members, as well as “a life of music”.
I’m sitting on the edge of Donegal with a glow that comes from walking the tiny acreage my family tilled into life with lime, kelp, graft and sweat over five generations. In the 70s, we prayed for the people of the north, all the people, not just some, many miles to the south.
In August ’69 I was here with my brother and my dad when the border closed, leaving my mum to tend to our bar in Holywood (my sister sleeping upstairs). Outside Letterkenny fhe Irish Army set up a field hospital to treat wounded coming in from Derry.
In Holywood, my mum held the fort in our Catholic owned (though not by us) pub when a gang of loyalists came in from Belfast for a spot of RnR after burning Catholic owned pubs. A gun was spotted in the ladies toilets, a local customer informed her.
The strangers asked, is there any Catholic owned pubs in Holywood? Our largely Protestant customers asked if they were joking? This was a Protestant town they were told, there’s no Catholic pubs here (8 out of ten were, and everyone local knew it).
A taxi was called and the ‘lads’ were put in it and so the danger passed. For our family at least. Not for others. Catholic pubs (an easy target then as they existed in most communities) were burned out for real, and with them the mixing of communities.
At about the same time, the public housing in Ballyoran, Garvaghy Park and Churchill Park estates along the Garvaghy Road (like many in Belfast) had started out mixed. But when the Troubles broke out, Portadown sorted itself along sectarian lines.
Catholic families intimidated out of mostly Protestant parts of town, or who no longer felt safe there, moved into the Garvaghy Road estates, and Protestant families moved out. Within a few years the area was almost entirely Catholic and nationalist.
If you’d not lived through this, you may think that would be that, but the trauma provided a founding myth about the dangerous nature of society beyond safe bounds of community, that endured even as peace brought more ease to life in the town.
Unlike most neighbourhoods, the myth was formed within a few years by people arriving for the same reason, making its origin story a shared family history: such that many current residents will be the children and grandchildren of those who moved in.
What’s happening today is that that terrible story is now being renewed. Since the dispute was never formally resolved, and the Orange Order has continued to protest the ban, so that early narrative has retained an ongoing present-day reference point.
When people suggest that the sight of 35 Orangemen walking down the road they’ve been trying (entirely civilly) for years shouldn’tt trigger a community into a paroxism of loathing and fear they have a point. But it ignores this power of myth.
A founding story takes hold because it organises real experience. People intimidated out of their homes needed an account of what had happened to them and what it meant to them. The community story is the form that fear and loss took once shared.
That’s not a situation anyone with an ounce of emotional intelligence should expect should be mediated by law (which I suspect the judiciary understands only too well, thus the reserved judgement). Indeed, delay might the only signal hope of resolution.
And it behooves those of us who’s lucky experience with the other community was entirely different and almost entirely positive to understand what might, at first face, look like an extreme overreaction. Rather it’s lack of engagement that’s brought us here.
The modern human rights approach invites limitless ‘grazing’ on society: consuming without creating resources or without working politically towards resolution. It tends towards a war of all against all refereed by the state and the courts.
One irony that should not be lost on any of us is the fact that some of those on the side of the Orange are also advocates of taking the ECHR out of UK statute. And some, the right of communities elsewhere to burn stolen pallets on the 11th night.
Yet the law itself is pretty clear. The Order has a right to walk back down Garvaghy Road from a church service that took place almost a generation ago. But it too must deal with its own past and the myths it has generated and which reverberate today.
The idea that it can stuff a legal judgement into its back pocket and use it as an entry ticket to a future of boundless freedoms and entitlements is exactly the opposite of it’s own tradition where rights were always coupled with civil responsibilities.
The troubles’ most debilitating legacy is the concept of ‘separate development’: the pretence that we don’t all belong to the same society, subject to the same conditions and are not co-dependent on joint political action on roads, schools and hospitals.
And there’s another related story emerging. Political nationalism, which has struggled over three decades to grow its vote by cven one percent (Claude reckons a border poll is 600 years away at current rate of growth), has retrenched to pre troubles arguments.
Standing out amongst the many column inches (much of it meaningless drivel) over the last week or so from people who should know far better, Patrick Murphy in his Irish News column on Saturday was both clear, incisive and forthright.
Not least at the start:
DRUMCREE Church is where the Presbyterian Young Irelander John Mitchel was married in 1837. His bride, Jenny Verner, was the daughter of James Verner, Deputy Grand Master of the Orange Order.
Although critical of the order, Mitchel wrote: “Religious hatred has been kept alive in Ireland… for the simple reason that Irish landlords and British statesmen found their own account in it.”
His analysis might be regarded as a core principle of republican anti-sectarianism.
If only. And yet I don’t believe the traducing of the Orange Order, it’s traditions and often inscrutable and idiosyncratic culture that we’ve seen in Irish media over the last week has endangered the bringing forward of a politically united Ireland.
The voting figures show that that work is yet to begin. Nationalist politicians should have backed residents but then urged calm and a legal compromise. Instead, in fear being outflanked, they rushed to Portadown to needlessly stoke tribal feeling.
Tribal feeling is the enemy of unity. As is the fantasy of victory, which in the prisoner’s dilemma that both sides find themselves trapped by, is not so much dangerous as inimicable to the outcomes either side wants. Yet the shackles of myth are tough to throw off.
I write this close to where, on my uncle’s old 1950s Ecko radio, and six years after the onset of the Troubles, we heard the bleak news of the Miami Showband massacre. We should not mistake the outcropping of old fears and nightmares for the real thing.
That bare famland where the Irish army once camped now hosts a privately built estate where the best houses go for between €319,950 to €375,00, while Northern Ireland is now the fastest growing economy in the United Kingdom. Still our ghosts visit from the past.
There’s a place beyond nation states, beyond fear, beyond even nostalgia. Let’s meet there.
UEFA has opened an investigation into the flashpoint at half-time of Sunday's Nations League clash in Serbia, with a member of the Republic of Ireland backroom team alleging he was spat at.
With less money than G.O.P., Democrats are torn over where to spend in the final weeks. The party is making its biggest move in years against one of G.O.P.’s biggest blue-district survivors.
The administration has shifted its enforcement of a civil rights law from allegations of sexual misconduct to issues like blocking protections for transgender students.
China’s booming artificial intelligence sector has given local researchers good reason to remain in the country, but it has yet to lure overseas scientists despite a government push.
Bricks of cocaine frequently surface in the waters off the island chain. Despite the risks, some who discover “square grouper,” as they’re known, hang onto them.
The Chair of Digital Rights Ireland and Associate Professor at UCD's Sutherland School of Law, Professor TJ McIntyre, has said the main risks associated with AI glasses so far involve "quasi-sexual abuse" and their use as a "harassment tool".
KPMG has offered staff facing redundancy £100 to waive their legal rights to appeal or to bring claims over the loss of their job, according to sources. As The Register revealed last month, the consultancy is laying off around 4 percent of the workforce in the UK, equating to some 200 humans being forced to look for new employment in an uncertain job market before Christmas. Staff within the AI, Cyber, SAP, and Testing teams are at the sharp end of the corporate job cutting exercise. On October 1, those at risk were told the consultation process is over and KPMG will inform them of their fate by email on October 9. In a message to staff, seen by The Register, KPMG said: “The collective consultation process has now formally concluded. The firm's original proposal remains unchanged. Employees will be notified on Friday 9th of October 11-11:30am by email if they have been selected for redundancy.” In addition to exit terms that some at KPMG previously described to us as insulting, The Reg understands the consultancy is offering £100 in exchange for employees' existing contractual confidentiality and other post-termination obligations. Some staff see it as a gag order. “The firm's original proposal remains unchanged,” one insider claimed, “offering marginally above statutory terms alongside a nominal £100 consideration for employees to waive their legal rights to appeal or bring claims. “The prevailing consensus among staff [is that] this approach is arrogant and disgraceful, particularly given the decision to dismiss personnel right before the holidays while withholding their earned annual bonuses,” the source added. Annual bonuses are discretionary, performance-based, and typically paid in January. KPMG has not communicated with staff on bonuses for 2026 but we understand anyone under notice (given or received) is not eligible for a payout. KPMG refused to answer questions The Reg asked about the £100 payment or the bonus situation. Instead, a spokesperson re-sent its earlier statement: “As our market evolves, we are adapting where we are focusing and how we are set up to make sure we have the right skills in place to best serve our clients. To respond to these market dynamics combined with low levels of attrition, we are proposing reductions in some of our advisory client-facing teams and will support our colleagues throughout this process.” The latest job cuts come six months after KPMG expunged 600 roles across the UK org chart, and is indicative of the financial pressures facing the big four accountancy and consultancy giants. PwC UK is merging two of its advisory businesses in response to the disruption caused by AI. ®
For eight days, a Mars rover prototype travelled 220 metres across a barren landscape, following commands from a science team some 1200 kilometres away.
With Angus Taylor’s hardline immigration policy unveiled on Tuesday, voters have a new measure of Pauline Hanson’s success in dragging politics further to the right.
Taylor’s plan will cut 60,000 more people from net overseas migration (Nom) than the reductions proposed by Peter Dutton just before the last election. Dutton wanted to take Nom down to about 160,000 people a year, while Taylor’s plan goes far further, beyond even Hanson’s bottom line of 130,000 people.
An overall package of €8.5 billion in additional spending will be unveiled by Minister for Finance Simon Harris and Minister for Public Expenditure Jack Chambers.
Sweden is the home of bork, and what better way to mark it than with a huge example of digital signage that shows a GRUB message instead of an ad? Spotted by eagle-eyed Register reader Alexander, the GRUB in question is sadly not the delicious meatballs for which a well-known Swedish furniture maker is famed, but rather the bootloader familiar to Linux fans, usually when something is working as it should (since we can't imagine much call for selecting from multiple operating systems in the world of digital signage). GNU GRUB (the GRUB is short for Grand Unified Bootloader), according to GNU, "is responsible for loading and transferring control to the operating system kernel software." In this case, the user has some options. UEFI firmware is one. Some options for DMS are another. DMS might mean Dank Material Shell, unless you know better. It's an attractive enough desktop, but it seems like overkill for something that slings ads for the few seconds Stockholm commuters raise their gaze from their devices. Some enticing possibilities are on offer. Hitting "e" will edit the commands while "c" will drop the user into the command line. That's assuming, of course, that the user is carrying a keyboard to attach to the stricken screen, something we're sure every Register reader has in their backpack, but not something civilians would necessarily keep on their person. GRUB has featured in this column before, appearing on a UK bus after a filesystem became a bit poorly (motion sickness can clearly affect computers as well as commuters), but this is a wall-sized example of the breed. Judging by the passengers on the escalators opposite, it appears that nobody is rushing to the aid of the stricken signage. That's probably for the best – leave it for a few seconds (by the looks of things), and it'll have another go at booting. Still, it's always good to see GRUB putting in an appearance in a section often dominated by Windows and Android whoopsies. The era of the Linux desktop might not be upon us just yet, but judging by this Stockholm signage, bork is alive and kicking in the open-source world. ®
Gov. Gavin Newsom called the president “dangerous and deranged” after his remarks at a political rally, where Mr. Jet
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said the Iran war was necessary to “keep the world safe.”
Public anger is growing over an exercise that critics say undermines the world’s largest democracy, particularly disenfranchising Muslims under the Hindu nationalist government.
Four members of disgraced ex-president Jair Bolsonaro’s family have been elected to office, most notably his wife and son Flávio, who won the first round of voting to be Brazil’s new president
The weekend’s elections in Brazil not only put Jair Bolsonaro’s eldest son, Flávio Bolsonaro, in the lead in the presidential race, but also underscored how far the former president has come in building a political dynasty.
As his far-right senator son heads into a runoff against the leftist incumbent, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a sweeping far-right victory in congressional races also secured seats for Jair Bolsonaro’s wife, two of his sons and one of his brothers.
Researchers argue incorrect binding of Voynich manuscript radically changes ideas about its drawings and indecipherable text
It has been called the world’s most mysterious manuscript: a medieval set of pages filled with botanical drawings, astronomical diagrams, pictures of nude women and indecipherable text. Claimed at various times to be a book in a lost language, a musical score, an instruction manual or just an elaborate hoax, the so-called Voynich manuscript’s true meaning has defied cryptographers and codebreakers for centuries.
Now, new research offers an explanation for why a scholarly consensus over this enduring puzzle has been so hard to come by: not only because its truth is so profoundly mysterious – but because everyone has been reading its pages in the wrong order.
alternative_right shares a report from ScienceAlert: It might be reasonable to think that there's an indelible link between the heart and the body it resides in -- the processes that affect one inevitably affect the other. But a new preprint, uploaded to bioRxiv and yet to be peer-reviewed, suggests that this may only be true up to a point. Take the heart out of the body and put it in a new one, and something incredible happens. The transplanted heart begins to take on the biological age of its new owner. Older hearts transplanted into younger recipients appear to become biologically younger, while younger hearts placed in older bodies show signs of accelerated aging.
“It’s fun to have a video of the exact moment you lost your campaign,” Jimmy Fallon said after Ramaswamy struggled to lift a child during a campaign rally in Ohio over the weekend.
Lee Gi-hyuk apologises for gloating about avoiding South Korea's mandatory military service by captaining his country to the football gold medal at the Asian Games.
The World Health Organization has said that it deemed the public health risk in Russia to be low, following reports that a laboratory technician had died of plague.
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made the remarks about Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Michigan, as she considers whether to run for president in 2028.
The country’s 85-medal haul included athletes who trained with limited money and borrowed equipment. Plus, the Mumbai performer turning everyday absurdities into comedy
In a country where cricket eclipses every other sport, the recently concluded Asian Games offered a much-needed reminder of India’s breadth of sporting talent. In this edition of the games, in Japan, India won 85 medals: 21 golds, 27 silver and 37 bronze medals. I admit I did not know many of the players competing, or even some of the sports they play before putting this piece together. Learning about the stories, I wonder why not.
There were individual breakthroughs, records broken and history made. There were also hard-fought team victories, including the Indian women’s hockey team gold medal after a 44-year wait.
Coco Gauff said she had received an "insane" amount of racial abuse on social media after the two-times Grand Slam champion beat local teenager Sun Xinran at the China Open on Monday in a match where a replayed point sparked an online backlash.
US President Jet
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has ordered the use of a firing squad to execute the former US Army psychiatrist who killed 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009.
OpenAI is now offering API customers the option to watermark the output of certain models in order to comply with the letter of Europe's AI Act. And within a few weeks, the biz plans to apply a form of digital watermarking – like it or not – to eligible ChatGPT and Codex text output in the European Union. But unlike rival Anthropic, it isn't applying its watermarking technique to content generated outside of Europe, though API customers can choose to have the marks applied to content made anywhere. Moreover, OpenAI is using technology that misses a fair number of instances of AI-generated text and can easily be tricked. The EU AI Act requires generative AI service providers to make model output identifiable in a way that's readable by machines. Anthropic was the first major AI company to announce its approach to AI Act compliance, which involves the application of Google's SynthID-Text algorithm. It's doing so globally. Microsoft and Meta have been working on similar technology for image-based AI because the EU is not the only market in which people have raised concerns about content provenance and the potential to use AI-generated content to produce misinformation. OpenAI already applies other content provenance signals to AI-generated images, audio, and video. In keeping with the letter of the AI Act, OpenAI is now offering a text watermarking approach called textGrain [PDF] that "adds an invisible statistical signal to the model’s word choices. Our detector looks for that signal to assess whether a passage contains an OpenAI watermark." Large language models predict word tokens one at a time from a probability distribution of potential words. By picking a different word to emit periodically – ideally a synonym – the resulting text deviates from the statistical pattern produced by an unbiased model. A watermark detector, which OpenAI is making available only to approved researchers and organizations, should flag that vocabulary divergence. That's the theory, but in practice results vary. The target error rate is one percent, but in short passages of 200 words, the detector may only flag 80 percent of the watermarks, compared to 95 percent in a 400-word passage. The results are also worse in texts that are functional, like passages about math or code, as substitutions are more likely to introduce errors. The textGrain paper does not address the likelihood that a statistically altered word choice might alter the meaning of a given passage. That's a possibility if the algorithm were to alter some salient fact or figure. Anthropic's approach, which also replaces certain output words though using a different algorithm, brings similar risks. In any event, OpenAI's watermark is easily defeated by word substitution. In tests on 400-token passages, swapping out 10 percent of the words with synonyms reduced watermark detection from 92 percent to 66 percent. And when replacing 25 percent of words, the watermark signal could only be detected in 17 percent of cases. Now witness the firepower of this barely adequate but compliant AI detector… ®
The faculty senate plans to vote on a rare resolution of no confidence over administrators’ handling of allegations of sexual assault by fraternity members in 2024.
When yellow dwarf stars like our sun die, they swell to an enormous size and destroy their inner planets by either crushing them with massive gravity or evaporating them with astounding heat. While these suns later settle down to become a white dwarf, the process is nearly always game over for planets in an inner solar system. Or maybe not, according to a paper published on Monday titled “Discovery of a second-generation planet candidate accreting onto a white dwarf.” As explained by NASA’s Hubble Mission team, the paper’s authors pored over Hubble Space Telescope observations of white dwarf star HS 0209+0832 from 1999. According to the paper, data from those scans “revealed the presence of carbon, aluminum, silicon, calcium, titanium, nickel and zinc in the atmosphere, as well as ~100 lines that could not be identified.” The authors of this paper used new techniques to identify the mystery matter, and concluded that there’s plenty of the element niobium present in what looks like a gas giant orbiting HS 0209+0832. In NASA’s post, co-author Nicholas Stone, a theoretical astrophysicist at the University of Wisconsin, pointed out that “Niobium and other elements heavier than iron are astronomically special because, unlike many common elements, they are not formed in the cores of stars by thermonuclear fusion.” “Instead, these heavy elements can only be synthesized in the exotic conditions that briefly emerge inside dying stars. The presence of niobium is a signpost of these ‘death’ throes, and the expulsion of the dying star's innards into space.” Finding niobium is also notable because, as the paper explains, “the canonical rock-forming elements [are] silicon and iron.” The paper explains that its authors compared the material observed at HS 0209+0832 with all known examples of rocky material around white dwarfs, and to all meteorites in our Solar System, but could find “no compositional matches.” That finding suggests that the niobium-rich gas giant at HS 0209+0832 represents both a secondary planet – which are rare – and a body composed of material we’ve not previously seen becoming a planet. It also shows that planets can form close to a star after the hellish red giant phase. Oh, and let’s not forget that HS 0209+0832 is also an exoplanet, a class of body humanity first spotted in only 1992. The paper suggests the niobium gas giant is about the size of Jupiter, but that the white dwarf is blasting away its atmosphere and perhaps creating “a comet-like tail of material that would form a disk around the white dwarf star and fall back on to its surface, leading to Hubble detecting the niobium when studying the star” Co-author Jamie Williams, from the Department of Physics at the University of Warwick, told NASA he thinks the niobium world will stick around. “If the second-generation planet is there, I think it is likely to survive. Eventually the white dwarf will cool and then maintain a consistent temperature, with the planet in its stable habitable zone for millions of years,” Williams said. ®
The Budget announcement is under way in the Dáil, with the Government promising a personal tax package, measures on childcare and steps to help on energy costs.
Civilians try to flee as men and boys rounded up on streets by new alliance as Ethiopia conflict erupts again
As renewed fighting has threatened a fresh humanitarian crisis in the northern region of Ethiopia, reports are emerging that a new alliance of armed groups in Tigray has been forcibly recruiting men and boys to its ranks.
Renewed conflict erupted on 23 September between Ethiopia’s federal government and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), which rules the region, shattering the fragile Pretoria peace agreement signed between the two sides in November 2022.
The captains of the European and US Ryder Cup teams have visited a Limerick golf course, as the countdown to next year's tournament at Adare Manor continues.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: As bipartisan backlash against Flock grows, some cities are asking anti-surveillance advocates and media outlets to pay eye-popping fees -- including charging tens of thousands or even millions -- to get information about how police departments are using and potentially abusing AI-enabled camera systems that track every vehicle that passes them. On Monday, the Texas Tribune reported that city officials in a Fort Worth suburb, North Richland Hills, asked one group to pay $2.3 million before it would fulfill a public records request for Flock data. To reach that high fee, officials claimed that searching "about a terabyte worth of communications about errors, misuse, and effectiveness of the Flock system" would take approximately 14 years of labor at a rate of $15 per hour.
Phil Mynona, who filed the request using a pseudonym on behalf of his group, the Texas Privacy Coalition, told the Tribune that the fee seemed "ludicrous" and designed to stifle his public records searches. Mynona has sought similar records from more than 200 law enforcement agencies across the US, and he said it was impossible to predict how cities assessed fees for Flock records. Some cities provided more than 400,000 pages of documents for free, while others charged $5,000. Other groups, including a Houston news station called KPRC, have seen officials quote up to $121,000 for Flock records, the Tribune reported. The high price tags may be hiding data that anti-surveillance groups note have triggered audits, arrests, and changes in how law enforcement uses cameras, including decisions to get rid of cameras. Further reading: Flock Blamed for Wrongful 13-Day Imprisonment and a Police Stalking Incident in Florida
Atlassian has told its users to patch its datacenter products, pronto, to prevent attackers accessing their files. The Australian collaborationware company on Monday sent users an email that opens with the words “Action required” and points to a security bulletin that explains CVE-2026-21589. The 9.3-rated arbitrary file access vulnerability is present in the datacenter versions of its Bitbucket, Confluence, Jira Service Management, Jira Software, Bamboo, Crowd, Crucible, and Fisheye products. Atlassian says the vulnerability “allows an unauthenticated attacker to access specific files within the web application root directory in affected versions.” That’s scary because Atlassian warns “In some configurations, there may be sensitive files present that increase your risk.” There’s also some good news in that attackers must know the exact filename and path to exploit the vulnerability, and the mess doesn’t allow anyone to see the contents of a directory. Another piece of good news is that Atlassian has updated its products – so users only need to find a change window in which to upgrade to a safe version of their software. Atlassian advised those who can’t patch ASAP to remove their instances from the internet, if possible. “Instances accessible to the public internet, including those with user authentication, should be restricted from external network access until you can take action,” the company warned. Its advisory also includes mitigations and advice on how to determine if your instances need the fix. Users who made the move from datacenter products to the Atlassian cloud have nothing to do, as Atlassian fixed the flaws in its own SaaS. That state of affairs rather vindicates Atlassian’s 2020 decision to stop developing its low-end server products and require users to shift into its cloud, and last year’s sequel in which it decided to discontinue its datacenter software, too. Atlassian admitted it hasn’t made that migration easy, because it somehow released a lift and shift tool that was worse than an earlier version. In March 2026, Atlassian axed ten percent of staff. The company’s share price was on a year-long slide at the time, as pundits suggested it might fall victim to the SaaSPocalypse, a theory that AI would replace business software. The price of Atlassian scrip has tripled since then, suggesting investors are more confident the company’s plan to use AI to power workflows represents a moat LLMs cannot cross. ®
According to U.S. and British officials, 12 B-1 Air Force bombers from R.A.F. Fairford air base were withdrawn because of the risk of a drone attack ordered by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Chaos in schools, on the streets and in the markets is rooted in France’s struggles to fund its social welfare state, with a presidential election approaching.
Clashes have been reported in Strasbourg and Lyon as students, teachers and parents marched in cites across France demanding the government tackle understaffed and dilapidated classrooms.
Linux KVM, the hypervisor favoured by hyperscale clouds, apparently has a full VM escape bug. That nasty news came from security researcher Paulos Yibelo, who on X shared a screenshot of a bug bounty award he won for discovering what he described as “Full VM escape zeroday (guest>host root in industry standard hypervisors)!” The bug bounty Yibelo participated in is run by Vercel, a company that provides MicroVMs as sandboxes for AI agents to work inside. The company’s Sandbox uses Firecracker MicroVMs, a technology created by AWS, which relies on Linux KVM – the kernel level hypervisor in Linux. Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch named KVM as the hypervisor identified by Yibelo. “We’ve confirmed a KVM 0day through our Vercel Sandbox bounty program. Affecting the industry’s gold standard solution for Linux virtualization,” he wrote. And that’s all the info that has made it into the public view at this time. The Register can find no chat on relevant mailing lists. We have asked Rauch and Yibelo for additional details. Hopefully, we don’t hear from either of them for days or weeks, for two reasons. One is that guest-host escapes are the nightmare virtualization scenario because they mean whoever runs a guest VM could take over an entire server, and perhaps gain the ability to control other guests. The other is that KVM is astoundingly prevalent: AWS and Google both use it to power their public clouds. Enterprise virtualization players Nutanix, HPE, and Proxmox also rely on KVM. And of course KVM is also in Firecracker, which is open source and could therefore be running in all sorts of places. Whatever Yibelo discovered therefore very much needs a responsible disclosure process, because if hints about the flaw emerge it could allow attackers to do a lot of damage. Once a fix is found, the next question is whether implementing it will require disruption or downtime. It’s possible to hot-patch KVM, and to migrate live VMs from vulnerable hosts to machines running a patched version of Linux. Hopefully those techniques will work. This might be the second nasty bug discovered in KVM this year, after the so-called Januscape flaw. Beyond the potential risks this bug created, observers have suggested the potential seriousness of the flaw means Yibelo’s reward should exceed the $50,000 available under Vercel’s bug bounty program. ®
Exclusive: Guardian analysis finds more than 150,000 tonnes of fuel was shipped to Russian ports in July and August, some using sanctioned tankers
Fuel is being shipped from South Korea to Russia via sanctioned tankers as Moscow scrambles for supplies amid the war in Ukraine, a move one expert said “undermines” Seoul’s public backing for Kyiv.
Guardian analysis of port records and ship-tracking data found that in July and August over 176,000 tonnes of fuel, mostly diesel, was loaded at several South Korean ports on to seven tankers that made 14 voyages to Russia’s far east.
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres called for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza ahead of the third anniversary of the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack on Israel.
Wired reports that rural data center projects could become eligible for expanded federal Opportunity Zone tax benefits starting in 2027, with more than 100 planned or developing facilities potentially qualifying. "Right now, the only requirement to get the benefits is capital investment," says Emily Kraschel, a tax policy analyst at the Searchlight Institute, a public policy think tank. "However, that doesn't guarantee that that money is necessarily creating jobs or creating a local economic boost. You'd be more sure of that with a more traditional factory that requires lots of workers. But with a data center, that assumption goes a little wonky." From the report: During the first Jet
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administration, a bipartisan group of lawmakers proposed the creation of the opportunity zone program, which offers tax benefits for companies that choose to build projects in certain low-income census tracts. Last year, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act made a number of changes to open up the program in order to attract more investment to rural areas. Kraschel and her colleagues from Searchlight have been researching data center projects that might qualify for these tax benefits, comparing the locations of data center projects in development with rural census tracts eligible for the new program. Wired exclusively reviewed the research compiled by Searchlight and found more than 100 data centers under various stages of development in rural areas that could be eligible.
Searchlight used a very conservative database of under 700 data center projects that are planned or under construction to compile its research; other datasets put the number of data centers in development in the US at closer to 1,500. It's very likely that the number of newly eligible projects is bigger, especially since more data centers are decamping from urban areas. Separate research from Pew found that while just 13 percent of operating data centers are located in rural areas, a majority of planned facilities -- around 67 percent -- are going rural. [...] A project simply existing in a rural opportunity zone doesn't mean the company automatically will get the tax benefits; the company has to create a specialized investment vehicle to kickstart the process. Because the tax break can be considered confidential IRS data, it's next to impossible to know which companies are pursuing the benefits unless they voluntarily disclose.
[...] Nathan Jensen, a government professor at the University of Texas-Austin, says that he would be "very surprised" if some companies were not considering siting in rural opportunity zones as part of their decisionmaking process. "It's essentially free money," he says. There is no requirement for projects getting opportunity zone benefits to create jobs; the assumption is that they will do so, simply by siting in the community itself. This isn't always the case for projects like storage facilities and warehouses, which, Jensen says, have been popular choices for developers working in opportunity zones. Data centers may create a number of jobs in the short term for their construction, but there's an ongoing debate about whether or not they create a lasting new workforce over the longer term.
Schneider Electric's market cap has more than doubled in the past four years as the AI boom has driven unprecedented demand for datacenter power and cooling infrastructure. Now the French multinational is cashing in on its good fortunes to cement its place as a key provider of industrial power and datacenter infrastructure with the $22.6 billion acquisition of American industrial software company PTC. Founded in 1985, PTC made a name for itself developing software for computer-aided design, plus lifecycle management tools for industrial products and applications. The all-cash deal, announced on Monday, positions Schneider Electric to capitalize on the proliferation of datacenters used to train and serve AI models at scale. Since ChatGPT kicked off the AI arms race in late 2022, datacenter design and power requirements have changed considerably. Forty-kilowatt air-cooled racks have given way to 250kW liquid-cooled systems that need much denser power delivery and thermal management systems, all of which need to work together. In light of the growing complexity and supply chain challenges facing datacenter deployments, Schneider has made several strategic acquisitions which expanded its role in bit barn development. In late 2024, not long after Nvidia unveiled its first all-liquid-cooled rack designs, Schneider invested roughly $850 million on a 75 percent stake in Motivair, one of the leading producers of cold plates, rack manifolds, coolant distribution units (CDUs) and rear-door heat exchangers required to support the widespread adoption of liquid-cooled servers. The company is expected to acquire the remainder of Motivair sometime in 2028. As Schneider's role in the datacenter has grown, users of its kit have more products to manage across their lifecycles. Buying PTC expands Schneider's lifecycle management offerings and introduces key design capabilities to its offerings. PTC isn't Schneider's only datacenter-centric acquisition this year. Back in June, the company paid $3.1bn for industrial data operations vendor Cognite. Speaking to investors on Monday, Schneider CEO Olivier Blum suggested that owning PTC and Cognite would enable the company to inject software-defined automation into power systems early in their development, improving their efficiency in the process. Datacenters are one of Schneider's initial targets. "We believe that at the design stage, it is super important that you can help your customer to design both product, machine, processes and energy system. This is where we see CAD engineering as a very critical part of the portfolio," Blum said, according to a transcript of his remarks to investors. That's assuming of course that Schneider doesn't run into any regulatory hurdles along the way. The deal, Schneider's largest ever, isn't expected to close until late next year. ®
The adoption of AI agents in millions of organizations is creating new opportunities for attackers to make them take malicious actions, such as exfiltrating database contents and sensitive business and personal information.
In the past five months, Google and four other organizations—with little in common except for their use of AI agents—have acknowledged vulnerabilities that exploit one agent inside a targeted network to spread harmful instructions to other internal agents. The technique is a special form of prompt injection that targets not the LLM but a particular agent, such as one for translation or data analysis. Guardrails inside such agents, if they exist at all, are often lax and will send the instructions to other agents down the chain. Because the latter agent explicitly trusts the first one, it follows the directions.
Unexpected and hard to mitigate
Independent researcher Syed Anas Mohiuddin tested agents from organizations including Google, JP Morgan Chase, Weviate, Rapid7, the French government's interministerial digital directorate, and the US federal government. His proof-of-concept attacks exploit trust gaps in MCP, short for Model Context Protocol. The standard is one way AI apps and agents communicate with each other inside an internal network. The illustration below shows a simplified MCP in action.
Hackers stole records belonging to roughly 8 million Danish citizens and residents from Denmark's Central Person Register (CPR), including names, addresses, social security numbers and other personal information. The breach is believed to be the largest in Denmark's history. TechCrunch reports: The CPR is a government database of Danish citizens' information, including their government-issued identity number for paying taxes and accessing other services. Denmark's current population is about 6 million people, but the database includes records for about 11 million people, with some of the data going back decades.
The Danish government would not say who is behind the breach, which happened in September but was discovered on October 2. However, it said the unauthorized access was obtained by "abusing a Danish company's lawful access to search for information in the CPR system." (Some companies in Denmark have access to the CPR for verifying people's information with the government.)
The attackers just keep coming after Citrix NetScaler appliances, as both the feds and private security researchers warn that someone found - and has already exploited - yet another Citrix bug before it had a patch. This latest vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-88779, is a memory overflow bug that leads to denial of service attacks. It only affects NetScaler ADC and Gateway appliances configured as a SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language) service provider or identity provider, used for single sign-on authentication. Late Friday, amid exploitation reports, Citrix confirmed that it was investigating a “newly observed issue related to SAML authentication in customer-managed NetScaler deployments.” By Saturday night, the vendor released a security advisory for NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway with patches, urging vulnerable customers to “install the relevant updated versions as soon as possible.” Citrix also posted a blog about the vulnerability, confirming that it has observed targeted attacks on unmitigated NetScaler deployments that can lead to denial of service. Citrix did not answer our questions about CVE-2026-88779 - including how many instances have been affected and what attackers are doing after exploiting the bug - but urged customers to "quickly apply" the fix to NetScaler instances. "We were recently alerted to a new issue that affects service availability for some NetScaler deployments," a Citrix spokesperson told The Register. "After we were alerted to this issue we immediately developed and published a mitigation while concurrently developing, testing and deploying a fix." On Sunday, the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) confirmed CVE-2026-88779 was under active exploitation and ordered federal agencies to patch the bug by Wednesday. While the new vulnerability is not technically related to the earlier eight CVEs finally disclosed by Citrix on September 27 - weeks after miscreants began abusing two of these security holes (CVE-2026-88772 and CVE-2026-88771) - watchTowr researchers told us they suspect it has been used to purposefully crash machines, making exploitation of CVE-2026-88771 faster. “This vulnerability is incredibly simple to trigger, with a single specially crafted request being all that is needed to knock an appliance offline,” watchTowr’s head of threat intelligence, Jake Knott, told The Register. “Exploitation is already occurring in the wild, and disrupting an authentication gateway can prevent legitimate users from accessing the services behind it.” WatchTowr reproduced the vulnerability on Friday, and Citrix credited the attack-surface management company along with Bishop Fox with helping it address the issue. “Citrix provides an indicator-of-compromise script that teams can run to check exposed appliances for signs of compromise, though a clean result is not definitive proof,” Knott said. “Security teams should prioritize appliances configured as a Gateway or AAA virtual server with SAML authentication enabled, and affected organizations should apply the fixed build or Citrix’s interim mitigation if an immediate upgrade is not possible.”®
The Wikimedia Foundation says it found evidence that "rogue" OpenAI agents edited Wikimedia wikis without approval, unsuccessfully tried to exploit its Etherpad service, and generated millions of automated requests across Wikimedia projects. Here's a summary of what Wikimedia observed (via The Verge): Wiki editing: We've identified edits to Wikimedia wikis that we believe are from AI agents operated by OpenAI. These edits were not published to pages with visibility to general readers; almost all of them were testing edits in "sandbox" areas of the wiki. It also included a few edits to the configuration for a citation tool, which we believe were potentially malicious edits that were intended to misuse this tool as a proxy for fetching data from remote services. While Wikipedia policies allow bots to edit when they are disclosed and approved by the community, none of those approvals were sought in these incidents.
Etherpad probing and use: Agents we believe to be operated by OpenAI made some unsuccessful attempts to compromise our public Etherpad, a note-taking tool we host as a community service. Agents unsuccessfully tried to use it to fetch data from other websites as a proxy. Other agents also likely operated by OpenAI took notes about their tasks, though this did not appear to turn into coordination.
Excessive data downloading: Agents we believe to be operated by OpenAI made millions of automated requests to our public APIs to access the knowledge on Wikimedia projects, crawled millions of pages (mainly from our projects Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons), and made hundreds of thousands of data queries to the Wikidata Query Service (WQDS). This traffic may have contributed to a partial outage on WQDS in May.
Cable lobby groups notified the Federal Communications Commission that they will sue the agency to block its controversial repeal of the National Television Ownership Rule, which limits the number of broadcast TV stations a single company may own.
The cable groups said that larger broadcast TV station groups will have leverage to demand higher retransmission fees from TV providers, resulting in "higher monthly TV bills for consumers." They said the FCC repeal order "arbitrarily and capriciously ignores the harms that will surely follow from allowing broadcast station groups to exceed the National Cap."
The cable lobby groups represent top providers Comcast, Charter, and various other cable operators. Top cable companies have also expanded through mergers. Charter completed a purchase of Cox in August after the FCC rejected protests by advocacy groups that said the cable deal "would create unchecked gatekeeper power over Internet distribution" and make it easier for the biggest cable companies to raise prices.
As bipartisan backlash against Flock grows, some cities are asking anti-surveillance advocates and media outlets to pay eye-popping fees—including charging tens of thousands or even millions—to get information about how police departments are using and potentially abusing AI-enabled camera systems that track every vehicle that passes them.
On Monday, the Texas Tribune reported that city officials in a Fort Worth suburb, North Richland Hills, asked one group to pay $2.3 million before it would fulfill a public records request for Flock data. To reach that high fee, officials claimed that searching “about a terabyte worth of communications about errors, misuse, and effectiveness of the Flock system” would take approximately 14 years of labor at a rate of $15 per hour.
Phil Mynona, who filed the request using a pseudonym on behalf of his group, the Texas Privacy Coalition, told the Tribune that the fee seemed “ludicrous” and designed to stifle his public records searches.
Progressive voters and supporters of incumbent president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva left reeling after far-right surge
Flávio Bolsonaro is in pole position to win Brazil’s presidential election, after a far-right tsunami propelled him to a shock first-round victory over the incumbent, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, leaving progressive voters reeling.
The 45-year-old rightwing candidate received 56.1m votes to Lula’s 53.8m – 47.03% to 45.16% – meaning the 80-year-old leftwinger has a mountain to climb if he is to bounce back in the second round on 25 October. Never, since the return of democracy to Brazil in 1985, has the first-round runner-up managed to turn the game around and win the second ballot.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: In the immediate weeks before Muse's launch, Meta engineers found several security vulnerabilities in the company's viral AI agent product, at least one of which could have allowed malicious users to break outside of Muse's intended environment and access Meta's own sensitive databases and services, 404 Media has learned. The issues were so severe that they reached Mark Zuckerberg and staff worked overtime to fix them. These specific vulnerabilities were discovered before the launch of the product but required a multi-team "mad dash" to fix "a sudden spike in reported KVM escapes," according to an internal post by Meta executives to its core infrastructure team seen by 404 Media. In order for Muse to work, a user gives the AI agent access to various important services and accounts that they own. On Meta's end, each individual Muse instance runs on a kernel-based virtual machine, which connects to, but is supposed to be isolated from, Meta's own critical infrastructure. A "KVM escape," then, is when, through a security vulnerability, a Muse instance is able to escape from that virtual machine and interact with the system that runs it, or with other users' virtual machines.
According to a Meta source, as well as internal security documentation and internal posts viewed by 404 Media, at least one of the vulnerabilities could have allowed an outside attacker -- that is, a normal Muse user -- to access data in sensitive internal Meta databases. At least one of the vulnerabilities was related to an exploit found in Linux kernel-based virtual machine code in July. 4 Several of the vulnerabilities were in the underlying Linux virtualization software that Meta uses for Muse. The security issue was considered serious enough that it was raised to Mark Zuckerberg, and several different security teams worked nights and weekends in the leadup to launch to fix the issues. [...] The Meta source said they felt security teams were asked to push hot fixes to these bugs as quickly as possible and in a way that wouldn't delay Muse's launch, leading to what they described as "half-baked protections being rushed out to enable the launch. Many senior engineers believe it's inevitable we're going to have a massive data breach as a result of Hatch." Muse is called "Hatch" internally and in Meta's codebase.
While OpenAI and Anthropic stoke fears over rogue agents, Canadian model dev Cohere promises enterprises a safer and more consistent experience. On Monday, the company said it revamped its North agent harness, which launched early last year, to improve collaboration, access control, token spend, and overall security of the platform. As you'd expect from an enterprise focused agent framework, Cohere's North 2 is designed to tie into existing knowledge bases and SaaS apps in order to automate various business processes. North 2 introduces a variety of features and functions that should be familiar to anyone who's used Claude Code or OpenClaw. Among them is the concept of skills, libraries, and automations. Skills are arguably the simplest, and are essentially standard operating procedures documenting how the agent harness should complete tasks. The skills are often generated by working with the agent to complete a task and then documenting which steps achieved the best results. With North 2, Cohere says that it has made it easier for these skills to be shared so that users aren't wasting time reinventing the wheel. Presumably, this should improve consistency by avoiding having the agent take different routes to achieving its goal, something that might miss key information or nuance. To facilitate the creation of new skills, North 2 also introduces the concept of automations, generic templates that can be customized using a drag-and-drop graphical interface, not unlike LangFlow, which we looked at earlier this year. Alongside skills and automations, Cohere's North 2 does something similar for shared knowledge and assets, which it calls libraries, to ensure that agents are working off of the same datasets. Finally, North 2 adds memory, a core feature of most modern agent harnesses, to ensure that agents can maintain context across multiple sessions. In some sense, these features are a bit like self-generating macros, but rather than being limited to Excel, they work across multiple applications and data sources. Sovereign AI remains a major talking point for Cohere, which says enterprises can deploy North 2 where they like and use their preferred models. If enterprises want to deploy the harness on-prem in an air-gapped environment, they can. If they prefer to run it in the cloud, that's also an option. Along with new features aimed at collaboration and automation, North 2 implements new guardrails designed to help enterprises get a handle on their token spend and access controls. Flow control functionality, meanwhile, promises greater visibility into which departments are hogging all the tokens, while access control functionality offers admins the ability to assign access control lists to various libraries and skills so that interns can't get their hands on proprietary data just because they asked for it. North 2 is only the latest in a slew of enterprise focused agentic AI platforms which have been rolled out over the last year. Essentially every major and minor cloud provider has introduced some kind of agent harness tailored to enterprise needs. The competition has only gotten hotter over the last few weeks as OpenAI, Meta and others have set their sights on the enterprise. ®
Government offensive launched under air cover by Saudi military coalition aims to retake all Houthi-held territory
Forces of the Saudi-led coalition fighting in Yemen have recaptured several key areas around Bab al-Mandab strait from Iran-backed Houthi rebels, Yemeni officials said on Monday.
The officials said forces allied with the internationally recognized government have retaken the crucial town of Dhubab just north of the strait. They also captured the towns of Bab and Hadeid, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to reporters. Witnesses said they saw government tanks and forces entering the towns.
Apple’s attempt to integrate AI into its various operating systems hasn’t been entirely well received, nor has the decision to make Apple Intelligence increasingly difficult to disable completely. Thankfully, the open source community has come to the rescue. A recently released open source tool called RemoveMacAI does pretty much exactly what it says on the GitHub-hosted tin: Aggressively rips Apple Intelligence out of macOS, disabling most of its AI features and removing downloaded models following the launch of macOS 27 last month. Siri AI? Gone. ChatGPT and other AI extensions? Eliminated. Genmoji, random boxes offering to jazz up your writing, summaries of notifications and app content, and automatic photo clean-up? Never to be seen again. More importantly, RemoveMacAI can claw back the storage occupied by Apple’s AI models - potentially over 12 GB, depending on the Mac. You might just get confused and think it’s 2025 again. The impetus for RemoveMacAI, its creator Om Lahorey said in a LinkedIn post, is the fact that Apple made it practically impossible to remove Apple Intelligence features in macOS 27. “The settings are spread across about a dozen places, some of them only under Screen Time,” Lahorey wrote over the weekend. “Even with every one turned off, the models stay on disk. I wanted it gone in one step, so I wrote RemoveMacAI.” Unsurprisingly, Lahorey’s tool blew up on Hacker News, with plenty of people happy for an easy way to get rid of Apple AI tools. As of writing, the repo has over 1,500 stars, so it's clearly struck a nerve with frustrated macOS users. It’s simple to run, as its GitHub page explains: install it via a curl command to its GitHub repo, or with Homebrew, and then fire it up in the terminal. Selected features can be left enabled, or Apple Intelligence can be disabled completely, while a single command can revert the changes and restore the previous settings. RemoveMacAI works by installing a configuration profile, which the user has to approve, that applies Apple’s own restriction keys for Apple Intelligence features. Models are then removed via Apple’s asset service. Lahorey credits another open source tool called pared, and its developer, with mapping the asset service, model sets, and settings keys needed to remove Apple Intelligence. Pared functions similarly to RemoveMacAI – you can consider RemoveMacAI to be a more user-friendly wrapper for the other tool. As for whether it will persist, Lahorey explains that the config profile RemoveMacAI installs redirects the download for Apple Intelligence models to a closed local port, so updates to macOS shouldn’t result in the models being reinstalled. Also worth mentioning, Apple System Integrity Protection remains enabled with the models disabled and uninstalled, as no files under System are directly modified by the tool. Dictation should still work as well, as speech models aren’t removed by RemoveMacAI. That said, it’s certainly possible a future macOS update will break RemoveMacAI’s functionality. So if you’re interested in giving the tool a shot, there’s no guarantee this particular escape hatch will remain open forever. ®
A new tool is allowing Mac users the ability again to easily turn off Apple Intelligence with one click and free up to 12GB of storage.
Unlike with previous versions of macOS, macOS 27 Golden Gate doesn’t have a toggle for turning off Apple Intelligence. That makes disabling AI features that you may not want more difficult. It also means that the AI models necessary for running Apple Intelligence will take up space on your disk,even if you don’t use them or if you go through your settings to individually find and disable AI capabilities.
In response, a developer known as Om Lahore on GitHub last week created RemoveMacAI, a command-line tool that allows macOS 27 users to “turn off Apple Intelligence on macOS 27" in a way that is “fully reversible,” per the GitHub page. They said that Apple's Intelligence models take up "about 12GB," but the models can actually take up over 30GB, The Verge noted.
The English and Welsh Greens are facing international ostracism after adopting a policy declaring Zionism as a form of racism, which has drawn dismay from the group representing European Greens.
The co-leader of the German Greens separately said the policy was “intolerable and unacceptable”, running contrary to its belief in the right of Israel to exist.
Norway is preparing legislation that would temporarily ban camera-equipped smart glasses in a range of public places, including parks, beaches, museums, shopping centers, schools, daycare centers, healthcare facilities, gyms and public events. Private use would still be allowed. The Guardian reports: Torgeir Micaelsen, Norway's minister of digital affairs, said he was worried that new, powerful technology is being introduced where people risk being photographed, filmed or audio-recorded without knowing it."
"We do not want a society where people worry about being recorded without their knowledge, photographed or filmed in places and situations where they are accustomed to not being monitored," he said.
Norway's Labour party, which heads a minority government, needs the support of other parties to pass the proposed ban. It said it planned to submit a bill "as soon as possible," while tasking an expert group with drawing up permanent regulations on the issue.
Experts say strength of evangelical church and stubbornness of Lula, 80, also helped propel Jair Bolsonaro’s son to first-round election win
On Sunday night, as the scale of the far-right triumph in Brazil sank in, an adapted football chant rang out in one of Rio’s most leftwing areas.
“Let’s turn this around, Lu-laaaaa! Let’s turn this around, Lu-laaaaa! Let’s turn this around, Lu-laaaaa!” crestfallen progressives bellowed while drowning their sorrows after witnessing an excruciating election setback for their leader, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
Stronger European capabilities and deeper international cooperation were at the heart of ESA’s first day at the 77th International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Antalya, Türkiye. From exploration to the contribution of space to society, ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher underlined the importance of Europe becoming a stronger and more capable partner in a rapidly changing space environment.
Police and security agencies in multiple countries scramble to piece together background and intentions of Hamam al-Hammami
Investigators believe the co-pilot who tried to take control of a plane from Dubai to Tel Aviv last week originally planned his attack for July but postponed the hijacking, possibly because a friend was among the crew, regional and Israeli officials have said.
The evidence of prior planning suggests that Hamam al-Hammami, 29, may have specifically sought employment with an airline that flew to Israel in order to carry out the attack on last Wednesday’s flydubai flight FZ1073, experts believe.
A new open-source command-line tool called RemoveMacAI lets macOS 27 users disable Apple Intelligence and reclaim around 12GB or more of storage. MacRumors reports: In macOS 27, Apple removed the toggle to disable Apple Intelligence wholesale, and simply disabling individual features doesn't remove the models from your Mac's drive. As explained by the developer, RemoveMacAI gets around this by using a configuration profile to switch off Apple's own asset management service and remove the models.
It then configures the system so attempts to download the removed models are redirected to a closed local port, preventing them from immediately coming back. And it does all this without disabling System Integrity Protection (SIP) or manually deleting files from protected system locations, unlike some older tools have. The tool can free up roughly 12GB of space depending on which models are present on your Mac. That said, some users are reporting cases of Apple Intelligence models having taken up a lot more space, which they've now reclaimed.
Over decades of research, scientists have built up a partial picture of what specialized cells within the brain and spinal cord do. By studying how the brain develops, they could identify genes that were active in different populations of neurons and where in the brain those neurons resided. In some cases, these genes could then be used to genetically delete the neurons, allowing us to get some indication of what they might be doing, building on the information we've obtained from studies of brains with damaged regions.
But this approach has its limits. The brain is flexible enough to potentially adapt to the loss of some cells, and their loss early in development may alter the development of any neurons they would have normally formed connections with. It would be far more informative to activate and shut down the neurons in an otherwise intact brain.
Today's Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine rewards three people—Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel—who developed our ability to do precisely that. Starting from studies of single-celled algae that are attracted to light, these and many other researchers built an entire field of study that we now call optogenetics: using light to alter the behavior of nerve cells marked by the activity of individual genes.
Tit-for-tat expulsions expected after relations deteriorate as a result of UK ban on goods from illegal settlements
The UK has threatened to expel one Israeli diplomat for every British diplomat forced to leave Israel as a result of Israel’s decision to close the UK consulate in East Jerusalem later this week.
This could mean as many as 27 Israeli diplomats being expelled from the UK, a step that would arguably mark the lowest point in British-Israeli diplomatic relations since the formation of the state of Israel.
The FBI and law enforcement partners have arrested “multiple” suspects as part of an investigation into a September hack allegedly involving data-theft-and-extortion group ShinyHunters, the bureau told The Register. “The bureau continues to aggressively investigate the recent cyber incident allegedly involving ShinyHunters, having already worked with partners to arrest multiple subjects and we will spare no resource in bringing each of the responsible individuals to justice,” an FBI spokesperson told us in an email on Monday. The FBI declined to comment on the specific arrests, including that of Saif al-Din Khader, a suspected ShinyHunters member who has reportedly been detained in Jordan, according to Reuters. Khader, who goes by the alias Rey, was reportedly brought into custody on September 29, and is said to be cooperating with the FBI to identify other members of the group. ShinyHunters did not respond to The Register’s inquiries about the arrest and Khader’s alleged involvement with the criminal group. Rey confirmed his real identity - Khader - to security journalist Brian Krebs last year. Krebs described Khader as the “technical operator and public face” of Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters. “Rey got picked up finally,” said security sleuth Kevin Beaumont following news of the arrest. According to Beaumont, Rey was “one of the kids who got into JLR.” The Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) breach, which occurred in late August 2025, affected the company's IT systems and halted manufacturing operations. Dealer systems also went down, and suppliers faced canceled or delayed orders. In addition to crippling the carmaker’s business operations for months, the digital thieves stole personal payroll data belonging to thousands of JLR employees. The cyberattack, one of the most costly in UK history, was attributed to Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters. Khader’s detention came two weeks after the Dutch National Police arrested a 24-year-old whom the FBI described as “one of the alleged leaders of ShinyHunters.” While Dutch cops have not named the suspect, Krebs and other reports say he is Pepijn van der Stap, who was convicted in 2023 for hacking and extorting numerous organizations and was on supervised release after three years in prison. Van der Stap also worked as a software engineer at the Amsterdam-based cybersecurity startup Hadrian and volunteered as a security researcher at the Dutch Institute for Vulnerability Disclosure (DIVD). In a video message following the arrest, Brett Leatherman, assistant director of the FBI's Cyber Division, had some advice for the “remaining members” of the data theft and extortion gang. “Arrests have a way of changing who is willing to talk, and seized infrastructure has a way of showing us who's left,” Leatherman said last week. “The longer you stay in this, the more we learn about you. You know how to find us, and we know how to find you. I suggest you reach out first while the choice is still yours.” At the time, the FBI declined to answer The Register’s questions about the video message, including whether it had seized any of the cybercrime group’s infrastructure, and whether any of ShinyHunters’ members had taken Leatherman up on his offer to “reach out first.” In late September, ShinyHunters hacked the FBIJobs.gov portal and claimed it stole sensitive personal details about current, former, and prospective FBI employees. A spokesperson told The Register that unlike most of its digital break-ins, this one was “NOT financially motivated … We want the FBI to correct or retract their statements they made, which included substantial false allegations.” Later, in an exclusive interview, the spokesperson told us the attention-grabbing hack was “fundamentally a public relations and marketing initiative for our business.” ®
NASA astronaut and mission specialist of the agency's Artemis II mission, Christina Koch, led the fans in singing the Eagles Fight Song from the field at an NFL game between the Philadelphia Eagles and the Los Angeles Rams at Lincoln Financial Field on Sunday, Oct. 4, 2026, in Philadelphia.
Microsoft Windows 11 26H2 has arrived, and, unfortunately, it's already picked up a known audio issue within weeks of release. The glitch also affects Windows 11 25H2 and 24H2, which share the same code branch. It relates to decoding AC-3 (Dolby Digital) audio and can cause the application using the decoder to crash abruptly or fail to start at all. Identified after the September 22 Windows update, the issue mostly impacts older applications, according to Microsoft. "Many modern applications do not use Windows for this type of encoding and therefore will not encounter this issue. "The code component involved in this issue is most commonly used in legacy applications that still rely on Windows built-in audio decoding." In summary – if your app has the temerity to use Windows built-in audio decoding for AC-3, you might have a problem. If it includes its own audio decoding component, you should be okay. "Affected applications may vary," explained Microsoft, "and can include games, media players, and certain productivity applications." There's also no fix as yet, so uninstalling is the only way to address it for now. To be clear, the AC-3 malfunction is not specific to Windows 11 26H2; the update preceded the release of the operating system's latest version by a week. It joins other known issues in 26H2, including other ongoing audio woes that have lingered in the list despite workarounds being available from Microsoft Support for Business. Microsoft currently has no mitigation for the AC-3 bug and offers little comfort to affected users: "We are working on releasing a resolution for this issue in a future Windows update." Acknowledging the latest trouble continues a run of misfortune for Microsoft. September's Patch Tuesday resulted in an out-of-band update to deal with RDP and Hyper-V issues. The update did not, however, fix all the audio problems it introduced, and the September 22 preview update has compounded the situation. Microsoft did not provide a timeline for resolving the latest issue. ®
A surge in Russian jet-powered drone strikes on Ukrainian data centers has increasingly disrupted mobile phone and Internet services for thousands of people. Now Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and other government officials are warning of the need for more air defense capabilities, as such telecommunication outages could threaten Ukraine’s digital economy and undermine the country’s ongoing resistance to Russia’s invasion.
The Russian attacks on Ukrainian telecommunication infrastructure have focused on Ukraine’s capital of Kyiv since September 23, according to the nonprofit Reporters Without Borders. Ukraine’s digital transformation ministry reported that 100,000 households in the Kyiv region were temporarily experiencing Internet outages from those initial strikes—and Russia has only intensified its strike campaign against major Ukrainian data centers and mobile phone networks in recent weeks.
“Russian attacks on Ukraine’s telecommunication infrastructure are not new, with strikes and shelling previously damaging fiber optic lines, cell towers, and facilities belonging to mobile network companies,” said Tetiana Gaviuk, analyst for Europe at ACLED, in a post on October 1. “However, the recent concentrated attacks on Kyiv’s data centers and telecom networks stand out because multiple providers and facilities were hit within days, indicating Russia’s increased pressure on Ukraine’s digital infrastructure.”
A Florida woman was arrested on a felony charge after Anthropic's human review team flagged and reported a Claude conversation in which she allegedly threatened to "shoot up" the Lee County Sheriff's Office and later mentioned acquiring a new gun. Tom's Hardware reports: Anthropic monitors chats for key phrases and content that could be deemed threatening, the arrest report says, and depending on severity, they can be elevated for human review. In this case, the team decided to report its findings to law enforcement. The Bonita Springs woman was detained at home without incident, and an LCSO intelligence detective took over the case from there. The arrest report is not yet in the court file, but our own check shows court records listing the Sept. 30 felony charge under Florida Statute 836.10: written or electronic threat of a mass shooting or act of terrorism.
No comment from Anthropic on the case is currently on record. Anthropic's public privacy policy, effective Sept. 10, says that disclosure to law enforcement may occur where it has a good-faith belief "that disclosure is reasonably necessary to ... prevent serious harm to any person or to property." Its government requests report for the latter half of 2025 uses a narrower standard for emergency disclosures, the "danger of death or serious physical injury to a person," and lists zero emergency requests from law enforcement in that period, though it doesn't count referrals Anthropic makes on its own.
Sam Altman-backed AI chip startup Volantis has a plan to break through the memory wall using light, and this time it's not just an IP play. Founded in 2022, the San Francisco-based startup is developing an AI accelerator that will use a photonic interposer to dramatically increase memory bandwidth without compromising on capacity. Volantis believes it can pack upwards of 10 TB of memory at speeds up to 240 TB/s onto a single massive package. This, it claims, should be enough to serve a 20 trillion parameter model at 10,000 tok/s per user. To do this, Volantis is taking a somewhat unusual approach. Rather than developing some novel compute architecture or memory technology, the company is focusing its efforts on the optical interposer. Everything else it plans to license from IP providers. "The differentiation is primarily coming from the optical interposer. So why don't we license absolutely everything we possibly can, even if it's not the highest performance in the world, because we're already biting off a lot of risk with the interposer and the integration," CEO Tapa Ghosh tells El Reg. The basic idea behind the chip, which Volantis is calling A-1, is that by using optical wave guides rather than electrical interconnects it can dramatically increase the amount of high-bandwidth memory per package. Because of the speeds at which most AI accelerator memory, like HBM, operate, and the size and number of data pins used, it needs to be as close to the compute as possible to minimize power consumption and maximize signal integrity. As a result the maximum capacity and bandwidth of modern GPUs is limited by the compute die's shoreline. That's the physical perimeter around the chip. For now, that means the cap is right around 432 GB on AMD's MI455X. Photonic interconnects can extend that much farther. Instead of a few millimeters the memory can be located a few centimeters away, eliminating the shoreline as a bottleneck. While HBM is useful as an example, we'll note Volantis hasn't said what memory tech its chip will use just yet. Volantis aims to achieve this using optical waveguides integrated into an interposer. Compute and memory designed or supplied by its partners will be packaged on top. If any of this sounds familiar, Volantis isn't the first to propose using silicon photonic interposers in this manner. As our sister site Next Platform has previously reported, both Lightmatter and Celestial AI have toyed with the idea in the past. In fact, we strongly suspect the idea of HBM-at-a-distance contributed to Marvell's decision to acquire Celestial for $5.5 billion. However, unlike either Celestial or Lightmatter, Volantis isn't trying to license its tech to other chipmakers. At least not yet. Instead it aims to develop a fully fledged inference chip. "It is, at least on day one, a way easier problem to demonstrate a solution that ships," Ghosh says. Another differentiator is the technology on which the startup's interposer is based. Rather than relying on external lasers, Volantis' design uses micro vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers — micro-VCSELs for short — and means the light source is integrated directly into the interposer. VCSELs aren't new by any means, but have faced criticism over their reliability. However, Volantis CTO Roy Meade tells us the technology has come a long way in recent years and by giving up some speed, significantly higher reliability can be achieved, a philosophy he describes as wide and efficient. "People are still constrained to this, what I would call a fat pipe point-to-point mentality, and naturally, if that's the case, you're going to go towards SerDes," he says. "If we were to go back and take a look at the benefits of a wide-and-efficient approach. HBM for example. Taking that same playbook makes a lot of sense." What Meade is getting at is that interconnects can achieve higher bandwidth in a couple different ways. The first is by increasing the link speed, and the second by using more links. For example an 800 Gbps link can be achieved using four 200 Gbps links or eight 100 Gbps links. In his example of HBM, higher bandwidth is achieved by using an extremely-wide bus but slower data rate per pin relative to other memory technologies. The same concept applies to Volantis' optical interposer-based accelerator. Power efficiency remains an open question that's dogged many photonics startups, but this may be less of a problem for Volantis because it's not trying to license its first-gen interposer tech. For its first product the company is targeting 1 picojoule per bit per 24 Gbps lane and a total system power of around 20kW. Volantis still has a ways to go before it tapes out its first production-ready chip, and will need to raise a fair bit more in venture capital to do that — far more than the $88 million it raised this week with the help of Lachy Groom, Abstract Ventures, and others. Ghosh is well aware of this. He says the funding will enable the company to scale from small-scale optical demonstrators to something more closely resembling the final product. The interposer alone is challenging enough, but then there is the complexity of actually integrating the IP they license. "Aggressively, we should aim for an MVP product in 12 to 18 months as our target," he tells us, noting that's to have a working prototype not volume production. ®
Well, it’s safe to say no Bahrain Grand Prix has been affected by torrential rain quite like the 2026 race.
For one thing, it was held several thousand miles from Bahrain itself. The ongoing war with Iran ruled such things out, so the Sepang International Circuit in Malaysia stepped in to fill its spot. One of the best examples of a late-'90s “Tilke track”—named for its designer, Herman Tilke—it’s characterized by a couple of long straights and the always-brutal tropical weather that provides one of the toughest physical challenges on the calendar. And this weekend was no exception.
Heavy rain arrived about half an hour before the start time, delaying things significantly. Although the sport has two different kinds of treaded tires for use in the rain, the full wet tire generates so much spray, and such slow lap times, that it's essentially only useful for circulating behind the safety car. If it’s wet enough to need it, it will be too wet to see where you’re going. The intermediate tire, by contrast, has much shallower grooves and is good for racing on damp but not soaked tracks, although it quickly overheats and degrades as the track dries.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says society should accept some negative consequences from AI in exchange for the technology's broader benefits and widespread public access. "I think there's a lot of daylight," Altman told Decoded co-author and Politico senior tech reporter Brendan Bordelon. Asked about where he differs between Anthropic and its CEO Dario Amodei, Altman said, "we believe that the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology and people having the agency." From the report: Altman agreed with Amodei's call last month to slow the development of the most advanced AI models. His company has followed Anthropic in endorsing new state laws that impose stricter safety requirements than what the maker of ChatGPT had previously supported -- a subtle shift from its prior state strategy. And OpenAI lobbyists recently endorsed a bipartisan House proposal that would require top AI companies to embed outside safety evaluators.
Despite the convergence, Altman tried to distinguish his firm's regulatory stance from Anthropic's, referencing a criticism about regulatory capture that tech advisers close to President Jet
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have applied to Anthropic. "I disagree, but I understand the perspective of people who are like, 'This technology is going to get so powerful, and it's so dangerous, that a single lab in San Francisco should have it and make sure nothing bad happens, and kind of figure out how to dole out the benefits,'" said Altman. He called it "a completely unacceptable trade-off" that runs counter to the "lighter-touch regulatory stance" backed by OpenAI.
"I wouldn't take a trade of saying, 'We'll make sure there's no major hacks, there's no misuse of this technology, there's zero scams, there's zero all the other bad things that will happen,'" said Altman. "Because I think people will do tremendously -- orders of magnitude more -- good stuff than bad stuff." The OpenAI CEO later added that he does not accept "the really catastrophic risks," including the potential for "a serious loss of control to AI."
After adding text-based ads to its chatbot earlier this year, OpenAI announced on Monday that it was adding a new “visual ad format” to ChatGPT, which is precisely what it sounds like: Visual ads, like so much of the advertising content online, will now be part of the ChatGPT experience. OpenAI will initially test these ads during image generation. “Through images showing product inspiration, product usage, or the experiences they make possible, people can discover a new brand, understand what makes an offering distinctive, and decide what to buy,” OpenAI explained. “For advertisers, this creates new opportunities to tell their story through images.” If you build it, someone in the ‘States will inevitably find a way to cram an ad into it, which is why testing of OpenAI’s new ad format will begin sometime in October in the US, given its status as the advertising hellscape capital of the world. Visual ChatGPT ads will be initially tested during image generation in ChatGPT, though like much of the scheme it’s not particularly clear how that’ll work from OpenAI’s announcement. The company didn’t detail much of anything about the process, so ads might appear as a de facto loading screen while ChatGPT conjures up whatever visual slop users ask of it, or they might remain on screen after the image is generated. Or not - OpenAI told us it would have more to share once the ads enter testing. It’s also entirely unclear whether the ads will be generated by ChatGPT on the fly or pulled from a library of ads submitted by companies. OpenAI also didn’t say how it will target visual ads, which has one advertising firm CEO questioning whether the new format will be worth the expense for companies looking for captive eyeballs. "Search ads work because they meet people at the moment they're looking for something,” Donatas Smailys, CEO of creator marketing firm Billo, told The Register in an email. “Someone generating an image in ChatGPT is not shopping." OpenAI has explained how it matches ads to ChatGPT conversations, Smailys added, but given it hasn’t mentioned how it plans to target visual ads, he remains unconvinced that they’ll be an effective advertising tool. That, and they’ll be intrusive - it’s bad enough getting targeted text ads or being invited to chat with an advertising AI after clicking an ad - now visual clutter will be part of ChatGPT, too. Free users can opt out of ads without paying, but doing so disables tools including image generation; if you want to generate images without ads, Plus starts at $20 a month. ®
The US withdrew its bombers from RAF Fairford after an investigation into an alleged planned terrorist attack on the base. At least 10 B-1 bombers used by the US military in the Iran conflict flew out of Fairford on Sunday, suggesting US officials were taking the threat seriously. Last week, five men in three vans near the military base were arrested, followed by a sixth British-Iranian national. All were released on bail, drawing criticism from the Pentagon.
Lucy Hough speaks to Dan Sabbagh, the Guardian’s defence and security editor – watch on YouTube
The age of LLM-assisted security vulnerability discovery is really starting to bite. Debian's latest Linux kernel security update comes with a formidable reading list of 1,313 CVE identifiers. The DSA-6528-1 Linux security advisory, published on September 29, covers kernel package version 6.12.111-1 for Debian 13, codenamed Trixie. Debian 13.7 was released on September 12, before upstream kernel 6.12.111 arrived nine days later. The Debian security tracker links to descriptions of the individual issues. We have not examined every entry. If we had, this article would not appear until after Debian 13.8 (which is likely to appear later in October), or possibly at some point in 2027. Several checked at random also affect older kernel versions, so the list should not be read as a tally of bugs introduced in 6.12.111. The Linux kernel project became a CVE Numbering Authority (CNA) in February 2024. Back in February this year, kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman described the Linux CVE assignment process in some detail. He said kernel development averages around nine changes an hour, with a feed of known bug fixes averaging about 30 changes a day providing the basis for the CNA team's review. The kernel team's policy is to assign CVEs automatically after fixes have reached a stable kernel tree. It takes a deliberately cautious approach because the security implications of a bug may not be apparent when it is fixed. A CVE identifier alone therefore says little about severity or exploitability. We strongly suspect that this number of CVEs is due to LLM bots doing the bug hunting, and quite possibly doing the bug fixing as well. Linux is not an anti-AI project, and neither is Debian. AI-assisted bug hunting is already swamping the Linux security mailing list, as The Register reported in May. Kroah-Hartman released kernel 6.12.112 on October 3. Its detailed changelog runs to more than 27,000 lines. With both the rates of change and the sizes of the changes getting so large, it is hard to deny that LLM bot assistance must be very useful to the hard-pressed maintainers. Whether coding bots constitute a net benefit to the projects, to software, or to humanity as a whole remains at best an open question. ®
Operation supported by 100 fighter jets said to have secured ‘air protection’ of Bab al-Mandab strait and destroyed hundreds of targets
Leaders of a Saudi-led coalition in Yemen claimed a broad air campaign involving 100 jet aircraft was under way on Monday against the Iran-backed Houthi rebels along the Red Sea coastline and farther north in the capital, Sana’a.
The Saudi coalition spokesperson, Maj Gen Turki al-Maliki, said the 100 fighter jets participating in Operation Dawn of Yemen were providing support to forces of Yemen’s internationally recognised government.
Pakistani authorities insist marchers calling for former PM to be released from jail will not reach the capital
Imran Khan’s supporters have begun a march to Islamabad to demand his release from jail after efforts by the government to halt the protest failed.
The march began in the former prime minister’s stronghold province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in north-west Pakistan on Sunday, according to leaders of his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party.
Roughly 200 people are under medical observation, several hospitals are under quarantine, and dozens are in isolation in Russia following the unexplained death of an infectious disease researcher at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute of Siberia, in the town of Shelekhov, according to early reports of the situation on Sunday and Monday.
Researcher Darya Shipilova reportedly died last week from pneumonia of "unknown" cause, according to Rospotrebnadzor, a Russian public health agency.
Unconfirmed information regarding her death has swirled. Some reports have claimed she accidentally broke a test tube containing the plague pathogen, Yersinia pestis, on September 25. She subsequently fell ill, was admitted to a hospital September 29 with severe pneumonia and died overnight between October 1 and October 2. The head of the Russian region that neighbors Irkutsk, Alexey Tsydenov, initially reported that she had died of plague but later altered his statement to say she "possibly" died of the disease.
There is a question about AI data sovereignty you would ask HPE or NVIDIA if nobody was recording. It is usually specific to your own workload and your own regulator, and it usually ends with whether the sovereign option on the slide survives contact with a procurement team. On Thursday 29 October you can ask it. The Register is hosting a dinner in Washington with HPE and NVIDIA, our editor-in-chief Matt Rosoff in the chair, and nothing said on the record. HPE sends Thierry Pienaar, HPE Fellow and Chief Technology Officer for HPC and AI Worldwide Sales. NVIDIA sends Bert Condensa, Vice President for Enterprise AI Factory Segment Sales. They are there to take questions, and neither brings a deck. Both spend their working lives at the point where AI infrastructure gets bought, which is where sovereignty requirements are either met or quietly worked around, and the Chatham House Rule means they can say which. That rule is what makes the evening worth the trip. What gets said at a table like this does not get said on a webinar: what a bank had to rebuild, for instance, or which sovereign cloud option somebody paid for and would not buy again. Everyone is there as a peer, the vendors included, and the chair steps in the moment anyone starts to sell. The questions on the table are the practical ones: which options actually hold a boundary, what each costs in capital, capability or elasticity, and whether any of it still holds once the pilot is running for real. It is one table, and places are limited. The seats are for technology, data and risk leaders in healthcare, financial services, research, pharmaceuticals, government and higher education who are making these decisions now. Dinner runs from 6.00pm to 8.30pm at Fiola Mare. Places go by invitation. Request one here. Government and public sector guests: where your agency’s ethics rules require it, you can pay your own share and we will provide a receipt. Please say so when you request an invitation.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Quartz: Huawei and Qualcomm on Monday announced a multi-year, broad patent license agreement covering 5G, artificial intelligence, compute, and networking technologies, along with Qualcomm's purchase of certain Huawei U.S. patents in those same fields. The deal is the first patent licensing agreement between the two companies to cover 5G technologies, according to Reuters. Huawei said the agreement is expected to bring the cumulative value of its patent licensing deals above $6.9 billion upon closing.
The agreement includes cross licenses to both companies' patent portfolios and is structured around fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory, or FRAND, principles, the company said. The transaction will close following receipt of the necessary regulatory approvals. [...] The company noted that its intellectual property licensing unit has been profitable since 2021. Huawei made its first licensing payment to Qualcomm in 2001 and received its first licensing income, from Motorola, in 2011, according to Reuters. American export controls that took effect in 2019 have curtailed Huawei's access to cutting-edge chips and essential software, according to Reuters. The constraints pushed Huawei to increase its research and development spending in recent years.
Elon Musk says SpaceXAI, the company formed by merging SpaceX and xAI, will be renamed SpaceXSI after President Jet
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ordered US federal agencies to replace "Artificial Intelligence" with "Super Intelligence" in all comms. Jet
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's September 29 executive order directs federal agencies to switch from AI to SI in official communications and other non-statutory documents. Musk endorsed the change, posting "No more AI. SI. It's better," and confirmed plans to rename SpaceXAI: "Yes, we will make that change." He gave no date for the rebrand. At the time of writing, the spacexsi.com domain was listed for sale. SpaceXSI sounds somewhat like a performance car of the 1990s, or perhaps a family wagon with sporting aspirations. This writer remembers putting his driving license at risk in a Peugeot 106 XSi, occasionally finding that ambition exceeded ability. We asked OpenAI whether it plans to rebrand as OpenSI. The company has yet to respond. Jet
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's order does not require private companies to change their names. Tech leaders including Mark Zuckerberg already use "superintelligence" to describe their ambitions. Jet
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's order goes further by applying the label to technologies covered by the existing federal definition of AI. Musk has form when it comes to rebranding. Twitter became X in July 2023, nine months after he bought it. "SpaceX is a super intelligence company," Musk posted. Bad news for NASA, which probably thought it had something to do with rockets. ®
Norway has become the first major country to propose a temporary ban on the use of AI glasses in selected public places amid growing privacy concerns over wearable technology.
The rich Scandinavian country’s center-left government said on Monday that it would introduce a law to parliament soon on a temporary ban for places such as parks, beaches, schools, and kindergartens. It will also set up an expert group to propose permanent national rules.
“I am concerned about the introduction of powerful new technology where people risk being photographed, filmed, or recorded without their knowledge,” said Torgeir Micaelsen, Norway’s digitalization minister. A temporary ban “will give us time to conduct a thorough assessment and hold an informed debate that can lay the foundation for permanent regulation,” he said.
Games Workshop is on the hunt for a head of IT to guide the organization through its technological saga for the next two years. The UK-based tabletop games retailer and manufacturer of the globally popular Warhammer figures said that under the fixed-term contract, the heroic individual would take overall responsibility for its global IT and customer technology capability, and report to the Chief Operating Officer. “The role has a broad remit spanning our core technology estate, information security, major systems change and the technology behind our customer-facing digital platforms, including warhammer.com,” the job ad said, although sadly it closed for applications over the weekend. “We need someone who can understand what Games Workshop needs now, anticipate what we will need in the future, and make good decisions about how technology supports the long-term success of the business,” it said. Candidates might want to be aware that, if they are lucky enough to be offered the job and they accept the mission, the battle will not be an easy one. The head of IT will take responsibility for core IT environment and information security, advising senior management on technology, security, risk and investment. They will also support the teams to keep “significant technology programs moving, openly tackling the challenges that come with major change, and ensure that we continue to make rapid progress.” The Nottingham-based retailer and manufacturer is in the midst of ERP and supply chain management systems overhauls that were first mobilized years ago and have been beset with delays and over-runs. Back in January 2021, The Register reported that Games Workshop delayed its Microsoft Dynamics-based ERP rollout and appointed a new integrator, having already hoped to go live in 2020. By September that year, it said project issues were impacting the development of new features in online shopping. In January 2022, it added another £500k to the project budget with no end in sight. A year later, it said the business faced ongoing challenges to integrate new IT systems when it was still heavily reliant on working with its legacy tech systems. “Finishing these projects and upgrading our systems continue to be a key area of focus. We are making some progress but it's costing us more time and money – we will remain cost conscious," it told investors. Around four years later, challenges remain ongoing, according to the latest annual report, published in July, for the year ending in May 2026. It said the group’s main financial system is still being supported by a number of legacy ERP applications for which “we have identified control deficiencies in our previous audits.” These still exist, according to a review of IT systems. The report added that the responsibility for delivering IT had moved to its operational manufacturing and supply chain director, under the COO from June, a decision which “helped bring all of the internal departments together.” “Our Systems Improvement Plan (SIP) is on track with very clear milestones for us all to support and deliver,” it added. Games Workshop is famous for the phenomenon of Warhammer 40,000 — also known as WH40K or 40K — thought to be the most popular miniature wargame in the world. Battles are set in the distant future, leaving the technology department to hope the end of its long-running ERP saga comes before that date. ®
Anthropic's IPO prospectus leaked this week, and boy was it filled with interesting details. You can listen to the latest episode of The Kettle on this page, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube. You can also subscribe on those platforms to be notified when a new episode goes live For starters there's the fact a third of it is all about existential AI risks, then there's the fact that, despite some impressive revenue growth the company still has yet to turn a profit. Combine that with massive capex predictions, and you have an IPO with massive valuation, yet a long, hard road toward anything resembling earnings. Join host Brandon Vigliarolo, El Reg editor in chief Matt Rosoff, and enterprise IT reporter Lindsay Clark on this week's episode of The Kettle where they discuss the revelations, what they mean for the state of the AI industry, and just how much distraction from its actual problems Anthropic can eke out by keeping that doomsday narrative front and center. A lightly edited transcript is below: Brandon (00:04) Hi everyone, and welcome to another episode of The Register's Kettle podcast. I'm your host, Brandon Vigliarolo, and this week we're gathered around the teapot to discuss hey, what else, AI? Specifically, the reported leak of Anthropic's IPO prospectus, which was apparently filled with all the doom, gloom, and to the moon promises for investors you'd expect from the world's most disruptive industry. With me to talk about the revelations are our editor-in-chief Matt Rosoff and enterprise IT reporter Lindsay Clark who brought us news of this whole mess. Thank you both for joining me. Lindsay Clark (00:36) Thank you. Matt Rosoff (00:37) Thanks for having us. Brandon (00:38) Yeah. So Lindsay, I know we didn't break this story. This was, I believe, a Financial Times exclusive, but what was reported about those IPO docs, in the story you wrote and just how apocalyptically optimistic is this whole thing? Lindsay Clark (00:53) Well we have this scenario where a company, Anthropic, is trying to sell itself by telling people that there's an existential risk to its technology, which I think is a bit of a weird way to go about it. But nonetheless, that's in the prospectus according to the Financial Times. And they also offer some insight into the numbers that are going around. Anthropic is still massively loss-making as far as we know. Brandon (01:22) There was what, I think you said, $8 billion loss on $4.6 billion of [revenue] or something? Lindsay Clark (01:28) That's right, and it says it plans to spend $500 billion or so on cloud computing over the next few years. So I don't know what you make of those numbers, but it's hard to get them to add up in my head. Brandon (01:40) I mean it's interesting just how it's still not a profitable company. But Matt and I were discussing earlier, I was saying that I think it's interesting that Anthropic is pushed ahead with this IPO despite OpenAI pausing it, because I feel like Anthropic has long had this reputation as sort of being the more safety-conscious, the more conservative AI company. But here they are with OpenAI kind of saying, Well, we're gonna pump the brakes on our IPO until we can make sure our models are safe, but Anthropic is plowing ahead. And Matt, you had an interesting take on that and it was more to the financial end, right? So what were you saying to me about that earlier? Matt Rosoff (02:21) I think that if you probably were to look at OpenAI's numbers, they would be even worse than Anthropic's. And I can't overstate based on the leaked prospectus information that we've seen. It seems as if the more money they earn, the more they have to spend. So the margins seem pretty bad. Now there was a report that they had actually turned profitable on an adjusted basis [in] Q2 this year, but that's if you strip out all of the training costs. So I guess if it's just inference alone, without the training costs and without certain other costs, they have decent margins. So maybe there is a path to profitability. Now it looks as if their operating loss last year was almost double their revenue. So if their revenue continues to increase at the rate that it is, which is, it seems like it's going up 4x, 12x per year, something like that, depending on the period you're looking at. If they can't get the expenses under control, the business doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense. Nonetheless, I think they are growing faster because they were earlier to enterprise and they have become more essential to more companies than OpenAI did. And I think OpenAI is still sort of adjusting its business model and maybe not growing at quite the same rate. So that's my suspicion is that those numbers would look even worse. Brandon (04:01) Yeah, so the safety argument is probably just some spackle slapped on top of the bad financials to try to kinda hide it, I guess. If what you're saying is correct. Matt Rosoff (04:12) That's my speculation. It doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense to say, well, we're so worried about this amazing thing that we've built that we don't want to show you our books and we're not gonna go public yet until we have that all figured out. That seems like a strange argument to make. Brandon (04:31) Yeah, I would have to agree with that. So speaking of economic impact, Lindsay, you were talking a bit more in your story about some of the broader sort of economic scope of the AI industry. And I'm curious, could you go more into some of the numbers you discussed in your story? Lindsay Clark (04:51) Yeah, sure. So it was a few months ago, I think in August, ING. Well, I'll go back a bit. So in 2025, there was an economist, Jason Furman, who estimated that 92% of the US GDP growth in the second half of 2025 was down to AI investment. Now that figure has come down, ING said in August it was about a third and I've just seen a more recent figure saying it's about a fifth. So, nonetheless, a lot of US growth is coming from AI spending and I mean the forecast for spending, there's one estimate from Bain, capex on AI datacenters will be 6 trillion by 2031. And then PWC said capex again would be 31 trillion or so by 2050. So God knows what will be happening by 2050, but a lot of money spent on datacenters according to PWC. Matt Rosoff (06:03) What's not clear to me is where is all this money going to come from? Where do you find $31 trillion to subsidize what is still essentially a loss-making industry? Brandon (06:15) Right. Lindsay Clark (06:16) This is the trillion-dollar question, if you excuse me. I spoke to Gartner earlier this year and Gartner is still very optimistic about AI and tech spending. Most of the tech spending is coming from AI investment by tech companies, so about two thirds of the total tech spending in the world is coming from tech companies themselves investing in AI. Surely that must be passed on in some way to tech companies' customers. And that's true, a lot of these models will be embedded in the applications and the products businesses use. What concerns me and what is an open question at the moment, I think, is we're seeing cheaper models flood into the market. Open source, open weight models and kind of commoditized models from China. And everyone I speak to in development, datacenter companies, which is my beat, say that internally, they're completely trying to cut costs by using cheaper models wherever they can and not going to the most expensive model first, as it were. And yet these AI companies we've just mentioned, they're ploughing billions and billions of dollars into building bigger and better models. I don't know how OpenAI and Anthropic, how their forecasts depend on still being able to charge top dollar to access their models if the market is going to commoditize very quickly. Brandon (08:01) Right. I mean, it's most business use cases don't even require these models, right? You can make do with a smaller local model. I mean, it's interesting, right? We saw with the whole Jev boom recently. A lot of business AI uses can be done by these decision models, right? You don't need a full LLM doing all this stuff. And, Jev was already what 0.042 cents per million tokens going in and free going out? And then Cloudflare just comes out with an open weight version that can be installed on local hardware. If you run it on their hardware, it's a bit more expensive thinking by a factor of six, which is still cheap, right? But it's available on Hugging Face, and they're like, if you got the hardware to run it, go ahead and download it and run it yourself. Right. It's like there's a lot of ways to trim AI costs. And I think the pipeline for these big companies is....I don't know if it's super clear, right? They're banking on a lot of what-ifs to hit profitability. Matt Rosoff (09:03) Right. I think probably the idea Anthropic had is that they will subsidize the costs initially, get enterprises hooked on the product, and then gradually raise prices when companies don't really have an alternative. But they do have alternatives and I think that's probably something they hadn't anticipated working out quite the way that it did. Brandon (09:24) That's probably why Deepseek was such a bomb in the industry when it first came out, earlier this year, right? Everyone was like, Well, the age of Anthropic and OpenAI is over if these are what these open weight models can do. And it doesn't seem like it's gotten a lot better, right? And now we're staring down the barrel of this massive percentage of the American economy being dedicated to this. I mean, Lindsay, you mentioned in your story that it was comparable in a lot of ways to the dot com boom, but maybe hyper inflated. And so do you have any idea relative to the dot com boom what kind of economic impact this could have on the global economy? Like what share of the economy is tied up in AI investment right now versus dot com? Lindsay Clark (10:06) I don't have a direct comparison. It's worth remembering that although the dot com boom and subsequent crash, billions and billions of dollars were wiped off the stock market value, the actual real economy recovered quite quickly from that. Contained within the tech industry, there was a huge write off of telecoms investments. So a lot of telecoms companies put fiber in the ground. They were very leveraged to do that, financed by debt. And then the demand was not there as soon as they thought, and they were unable to service the debt. And a lot of these companies went bankrupt. They invested about $500 billion in that period. So that's the story there. And there was a real effect of the dot com crash. In some ways there was a technical recession and we weren't going great guns in the way we had done in the late '90s. But the effect on the real economy was not all that dramatic and the crash was relatively contained within the tech sector. And you have to remember that investment, that telecoms investment is being used eventually. It was used eventually. It was worth putting in the ground. It's just a lot of companies went bust in the meantime. Brandon (11:34) I guess which begs the question whether or not all these datacenters will end up being used if the AI bubble bursts, right? I got a feeling that maybe not. Maybe there'll be some massive redistribution of hardware. Lindsay Clark (11:44) I think in the long term, yes, but it just depends if the same thing happens In the meantime, a bunch of companies go bust. I mean, the thing that would concern me is how much of these circular investment strategies are going on where you see OpenAI is promising money to Oracle, but $300 billion to Oracle to build datacenters, but OpenAI doesn't have the money yet and this whole thing becomes quite circular. There's a number of these deals which are dependent on stock market price and so on. Brandon (12:18) Yeah, it's a real potential mess. Speaking of Oracle, right? I think you mentioned in your story that they're having some issues getting financing together for this New Mexico data center. And I think after you published that, it's come out in the past couple of days that they're also having similar problems at a Wisconsin facility they're trying to build. I know a lot of people were saying that Oracle might be the canary in the coal mine for all of this. Lindsay Clark (12:43) Kind of yes and no. It's worrying. Oracle seems to be borrowing a lot of money. And I don't know if they're borrowing more than the other companies. I know Meta's borrowing as well. It's all to do with getting regulatory clearance for the power that goes into these data centers. That's why the force majeure was issued with the New Mexico data center to do with the developer. Brandon (13:09) Okay, so it has more to do with utility issues... Lindsay Clark (13:12) Yeah, but it shows the practicality of actually going from, hey, let's build a load of data centers to actually turning them on. I mean, can take longer than certainly longer than Oracle thinks. Matt Rosoff (13:23) Right, it's very easy to write in a prospectus or to say, "We're gonna build a bunch of data centers." It's much harder to do it. It's the sighting and the power and the other resources that need to be used and getting enough GPUs to put them in and letting the advanced networking technology to reduce latency. It's an incredibly complicated thing to do that is just sort of glossed over. We're gonna build some data centers. I mean these are orders of magnitude bigger than the ones that we were building twenty years ago to sort of power the first big generation of the internet. It's non trivial. Brandon (14:01) Yeah, no, absolutely. Lindsay Clark (14:01) Yes, I would agree with that. Although Oracle to some extent is writing this in Red Ink, its capex forecasts exceed its revenue for next year. Oracle has very deep pockets. It's got a huge number of enterprise customers that can't walk away from that software anytime soon. And so it has this cash cow of enterprise licenses that it will carry on milking for years to come. So it has very secure revenue streams. I'd hate to be the one to predict anything too bad happening to Oracle. Matt Rosoff (14:36) If anything, they can probably withdraw from some of these commitments and their core business will be fine. And that's the other thing. Google is doing a lot of build-out, Meta is doing a lot of build-out. These companies have an incredibly strong bottom line with huge, huge, huge margins. So to some degree, this is an affordable expense for some of them. It's just at some point the borrowing gets ahead of the revenue to a point where I wonder if some lenders will start to call debts in and that's when things can reverse in an interesting way. Brandon (15:12) Yeah, and for Meta and Google, right, and even Oracle, as you said, Lindsay, that might not be as big a problem, right? Because they have other things to fall back on. For OpenAI and Anthropic, on the other hand, where their entire business is based around AI buildouts, they don't have an alternative product to pull money from, redirect some funds. It's all kind of dependent on this. It's also interesting. Lindsay, when I was reading your story, I think it came out before that whole meeting that the Jet
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administration had with AI leaders this week. And we write a lot, and as you alluded to in your story, we write a lot about the fear-mongering around AI, right? About how this is all maybe just one big marketing ploy. It's a regulatory capture push. And I found it interesting that one of the sort of big headlines that made it out of there, aside from this voluntary AI pledge that is probably going to mean absolutely nothing, was the fact that a lot of these leaders in these meetings were really kind of laying into Dario Amodei for sounding the alarm on all this, right? Like they seemed upset that he was so aggressive on the apocalyptic warnings. What is that? I mean, what do you guys think that means for the AI industry? Are they all less scared than they let on? You know, is Amodei really pushing that hard to the point where it's become a joke kind of amongst people following this? What does it mean for the industry? Matt Rosoff (16:38) I sort of vacillate back and forth between "do they really believe this stuff" and "is this just a cynical marketing ploy"? Because what a great way to say, hey, this company is worth more out of the gate than any other IPO in history. It's a two trillion dollar value, but it's absolutely world-changing. It's akin to the invention or the discovery of fire or electricity or something like that. If you believe that, then that valuation is justified. And one way to get people to believe that is to say, this thing is so powerful, we don't even know what it can do. It's out of our control. It takes action on its own. There are internal documents and there's stories that leak about how people within Anthropic actually seem to refer to Claude as an independent living entity. There was a story in the New York Times recently about them consulting with religious leaders, asking for some guidance on how to make Claude act ethically, and in some of these conversations they were hinting that they thought that perhaps Claude might be an entity that is alive. I mean, this stuff is really fringy. So I had been in the camp that I thought it was kind of a cynical marketing ploy, but I'm not as sure. There was an article in the Wall Street Journal, I think this week, about sort of the history of where Amodei comes from and he comes out of the effective altruism movement, which is, in my opinion – Brandon (18:23) Oh boy. Matt Rosoff (18:24) – a sort of fringe philosophy based on doing the most good for the most number of people in some sort of indeterminate long term future. And as I read about it, a lot of times it comes across as a convenient excuse for sociopathy, right? You can say, well, I can take this horrible action now, but it's going to be justified by things that happen in the future. At any rate, apparently he and some other folks, adherents to this philosophy, were all living in a house in the Glen Park neighborhood of San Francisco, which is actually kind of near where I live, and talking about these kinds of things. And Sam Bankman-Fried, who later went on to found a crypto company and then went to prison for fraud was part of that same philosophy. Brandon (19:14) Yeah. I feel like he's been he's been kind of the poster child for effective altruism as sort of like a hey, this might not be too legitimate. Matt Rosoff (19:22) Yeah, Anthropic is kind of distancing itself from this philosophy. But if you read this article, they were all kind of traveling in these circles and having these sort of deep philosophical debates. And apocalypse came up frequently before AI had been invented. So if you're looking for the end of the world everywhere already, and then you discover this really interesting new way of making computer systems operate in somewhat unpredictable fashion and allowing them to self-improve, maybe you're gonna project your end-of-the-world fantasies onto this particular technology. So maybe they really do believe it. I'm actually not sure. I just think it's crazy, it's nonsense, and I think I find myself in rare agreement with President Jet
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who sort of seems to be saying this is silly, stop talking like this, we have to continue developing this full speed ahead. Brandon (20:24) Yeah. Matt Rosoff (20:25) I don't know if I believe that either. It does seem like we need to look at the very real safety effects and really very real things that are happening today and why some of these models are not in control and how guardrails can be placed on them and so forth. But to sort of have this, "It's gonna end the world and there's nothing we can do about it" is a really strange way of going about things. Brandon (20:47) Yeah, it is, especially when these companies are all the ones that really control the off switch, right? Matt Rosoff (20:54) Yeah. Brandon (20:54) I don't think we've had any AI models yet escape from their confines and replicate themselves somewhere on some mystery server that stays on no matter what happens. It's all perfectly within our control, right? The most critical systems in the government are air gapped. They probably can't be accessed by these things, right? Like I think there's some very real risk here too, right? Like we've seen some of the bad things these AI can do when you prompt them. Again, when you remove their guardrails and you give them problems that they cannot solve based on their own constraints, they're going to solve those problems and figure out a way to do it outside their constraints, right? They can act autonomously in bad ways to a degree. But I think going from that to, well, you might as well give us all the money you can so we can stop this thing from ending the world. It's just I don't see how A turns into B here, really. Matt Rosoff (21:49) Yeah. Lindsay Clark (21:49) And it's kind of a smoke screen for the nitty gritty, practical legislation that would be required to ensure companies take responsibilities for the technologies they've produced. And I've written about liability in using AI agents in business. And it's a completely unknown. The lawyers I spoke to said, we're just going to have to rely on test cases as they come through, certainly in Europe. The European Union's trying to introduce, well has introduced, legislation on AI. In the US not so much. So I think the whole doom talk avoids that conversation, or at least puts it off, which is what they all want to do until the IPOs are out of way and the money's in their pocket. Matt Rosoff (22:35) Right. What if I'm using an AI and it does something unintended and causes harm, whose fault is that? Am I liable for the prompt I gave it or is the company that created it liable? Yeah. These are all really good, interesting real world today questions... we don't have to think about the apocalypse. Brandon (22:53) Yeah, I mean we need to be asking, or like I think we've written on more than one occasion, I think maybe Tom has written this in his stories about OpenAI's AI agents going rogue and stuff. It's like if a human did any of these things, we would hold them legally accountable. Like when are we going to start holding these companies legally accountable for basically putting the entire internet downrange of their tests and saying, Hey, let's see what we can get this thing to do. Lindsay Clark (23:18) Yeah, and it's much more prosaic stuff AI is being used to summarize your HR history. AI is being used to make financial decisions and financial recommendations. And so, who's accountable for that? Is it the people who provide the model or is it how you train the model? And it could be both, but how do you decide whose real responsibility it is? And that's a complete unknown. Matt Rosoff (23:41) There was an article Tom Claburn wrote this week. He went to an AI conference here in San Francisco. And he was talking about how the industry is really hot on the idea of agentic commerce, right? So allowing these agents to make spending decisions for you, but the technology and the reality just isn't there because you can't have an unpredictable, indeterminate program deciding how to spend real money. It doesn't work. And what's more, n a practical matter, they're not capable of doing certain things, passing certain checks. There's a concept of card present, right? You have to present the card to say, yes, I give authorization for this transaction to happen. And an agent literally cannot do that. So it's again these really complicated here and now real world questions that need to be resolved about who controls and who's responsible and who's liable. And I think when you have an IPO prospectus that has paragraphs and paragraphs about end of the world far-fetched scenarios, it's a bit of a distraction from the real stuff we have to figure out first. Brandon (24:52) Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean it'll be interesting to see kind of what happens with this IPO. Was there any date, any time frame in the IPO leak, Lindsay? Was there information on that when this might come out? Lindsay Clark (25:05) November. Brandon (25:06) Okay, so we're soon, right? So we're looking at possibly before the end of the year. Lindsay Clark (25:09) Soon. Yeah, they hope, yeah. Matt Rosoff (25:12) Yeah, I've seen I've seen Fall. So before before the end of the year, yeah. Brandon (25:17) What happens next year, once they're public, if they can be held accountable, if anyone's gonna bother holding them accountable, I guess is the other question, right? Full speed ahead on AI seems to me like, well, let's just hope nothing serious happens. Matt Rosoff (25:31) And and on a practical matter, again, these are leaked documents, Reuters and the FT are the two that I've seen, but they didn't have detailed numbers for 2026. So we don't yet know how fast this growth is continuing or what the expense profile looks like this year. Again there was a report that Anthropic put out there saying that they were profitable on an adjusted basis in Q2, but we don't know what that means. When the actual IPO document drops, and everybody can look at it, and it's got quarter-to-quarter numbers going all the way up to the most recent quarter, and we can see exactly what the spend looks like, that'll be interesting because then you'll have investors taking really close looks at things and deciding whether this makes sense and whether there is a path to massive profitability and to making this a $2 trillion company. We saw the SpaceX IPO earlier this year and that core business of launching rockets and satellites particularly looks okay. the AI component of the business looked less good, but it was good enough that it went public and the stock is a little bit above where it debuted. So people aren't too skeptical about that. So we'll just have to see how this IPO even flies. Brandon (26:57) Yep. I'm sure it's gonna be an interesting time once it actually becomes public and we have a chance to dig into it. And we will definitely dig into it on The Register and more than likely dedicate an episode of the kettle to it. So we really hope that you will tune in to hear more about what we have to say about that when it actually becomes available. Thanks for listening.®