Attackers are probing a critical Oracle E-Business Suite vulnerability that can lead to remote code execution (RCE), despite Oracle issuing a patch earlier this month.

Meanwhile, new analysis indicates that an Oracle PeopleSoft zero-day exploited by ShinyHunters as early as May involves three distinct vulnerabilities that can be combined to achieve RCE. Patching alone may not remove attackers from already compromised systems, particularly if they've installed web shells.

First up: CVE-2026-101767, a critical, unauthenticated SQL injection bug in Oracle EBS that can lead to RCE.

"Our Oracle E-Business Suite decoys recorded exploratory exploits against CVE-2026-101767, an unauthenticated SQL injection in EBS's Thin Client Framework servlet that chains to remote code execution, this morning, Oct 27," Defused Cyber said in an X post.

Horizon3 researchers found and disclosed the bug to Oracle, and the vendor patched the issue in its October release.

"An attacker can send a crafted request to the vulnerable servlet to execute SQL with the privileges of the APPS database user," Horizon3 explained at the time. "The attack chain also enables operating system command execution with the privileges of the EBS application account."

This means an unauthorized user can modify application data accessible to APPS, and execute commands. "Depending on the deployment, affected data may include financial, payroll, HR, and procurement records," the bug hunters said.

The Register reached out to Oracle with multiple questions for this story - including whether it has documented any successful exploitation of CVE-2026-101767 - and did not receive an immediate response.

Moving on to the PeopleSoft-ShinyHunters fiasco: TrendAI's Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) found and reported the PeopleSoft issues on June 10, and Oracle issued a patch under one vulnerability identifier: CVE-2026-35273.

In early June, ShinyHunters told The Reg that the group hacked more than 100 organizations via an Oracle PeopleSoft zero-day, CVE-2026-35273.

Google's consulting and incident response biz, Mandiant, later confirmed the data theft and extortion crew exploited CVE-2026-35273 as a zero-day, mostly against schools and the education sector.

By late September, however, Mandiant said ShinyHunters massively expanded its targeting, "deploying web shells on dozens of systems globally, spanning higher education, technology, IT services, healthcare, agriculture, transportation, and government."

According to ZDI bug hunter Bobby Gould, there are actually three distinct vulnerabilities across multiple PeopleSoft components, and each should receive its own CVE identifier rather than being grouped under CVE-2026-35273.

Gould, along with TrendAI researchers Minh Giang and Lucas Miller, originally found and reported three distinct bugs to Oracle in June. "We are coordinating with Oracle to assign separate CVEs for each issue," he said in a Tuesday blog.

The first issue is a Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF) vulnerability in the PeopleSoft Integration Gateway (PSIGW), which gives attackers a foothold in the PeopleSoft application. In June, Oracle introduced a "validateClient" method to allow PeopleSoft system administrators to restrict access to certain functionality. The SSRF bug, however, allows crims to make requests that satisfy the validation requirement to access endpoints vulnerable to RCE, Gould wrote.

"While this solution does restrict access, an attacker on any trusted host can still reach PSEMHUB," he said, referring to PeopleSoft Environment Management Hub (PSEMHUB). "Because Oracle allows localhost by default, the PSIGW SSRF provides exactly that access."

The second bug is an external control of file path vulnerability in PSEMHUB's ExecuteProcessActivityCommand handler. This message handler is designed to allow remote clients to write log entries to the PeopleSoft server's filesystem - but it doesn't properly validate requests, which allows an attacker to write a web shell into a file path and achieve RCE.

The third vulnerability, also in PSEMHUB, is a deserialization of untrusted data flaw. An attacker can use a file-write vulnerability to plant a malicious XML file inside a PeopleSoft directory that stores environment configuration data, then wait for PSEMHUB to initialize, such as after a service or system restart. This triggers deserialization of the malicious XML file, potentially allowing the attacker to achieve RCE.

"Attackers can combine these vulnerabilities to compromise affected instances of PeopleSoft," Gould warned.®

Maximize value, not token usage, Amazon has told its engineers, citing concerns about rising AI costs and complexity.

Amazon made the strategy shift public on Tuesday in a note to engineering teams outlining the changing role of its software development engineers in the age of AI.

"Our most prolific engineers have demonstrated that neither the developer role nor their output is defined by the use of AI," Amazon VP and distinguished engineer Terk Terkowitz wrote in the note. "We're now in the era of the Renaissance Developer, blending AI tools with human judgment and domain expertise to build entirely new things."

In other words, Amazon wants its developers using AI, but burning through tokens isn't the same thing as getting useful work done.

Rather than define the developer role by how AI is used, the memo focuses on what isn't changing so fast: the need to deliver useful software and results for customers and the business.

"It is difficult to define, in a way that will stand the test of time, what good AI powered engineering practices look like," the memo continues. "We have decided to focus on what is not changing as we evolved the SDE roles … the outcomes that matter aren't changing, even if the inputs, tools, and techniques are changing faster than ever."

What that means for software developers in the present moment is that AI input metrics, even if Amazon has seen some correlation with increased productivity and delivery on tokenmaxxing teams, aren't what Amazon sees as a measurement of good use of developer time and resources.

"We are all aware of how deeply flawed these metrics are, primarily because they are disconnected from what matters," the memo argues.

"[U]sing these metrics could, if used as a target instead of a measure, drive negative outcomes, increasing costs, and increasing complexity," the memo continues, referring to tokenmaxxing costs and overly complex code that's at odds with Amazon's mission to "invent and simplify."

An Amazon spokesperson confirmed that the memo's intent was to discourage tokenmaxxing, pointing us to comments from AWS CEO Matt Garman from June in which he encouraged developers to measure outcomes, not token consumption, in making proper use of AI tools for software development.

Amazon also wants its developers thinking more about how AI can help "improve delivery for customers" and business units, not just trying to find a place to stick it to prove it's working for them. The memo calls out some engineering teams who've "become less connected to their customers and business," and says teams that are more engaged with their products and business roles "are able to take the most advantage of AI and agentic software development," in essence calling for more teams to take a similar approach.

"If your work does not benefit from current AI tooling, that is a finding, not a failing," the memo said. "An engineer who can explain where AI does not yet help their work is demonstrating the judgement we are asking for."

Amazon's take in the memo is starkly similar to what Microsoft told its own internal development teams in August, right down to stressing a focus on returns for customers and business instead of maximizing input.

"Tokenmaxxing is not what we are optimizing for," Microsoft EVP Jay Parikh told developers. "I want all of us focused on maximizing outcomes that move the needle for our customers and our business."

With that, the writing seems to be on the wall for the throw-AI-at-everything-and-see-where-it-sticks approach to integrating the tech. When two companies that large start to question whether AI token consumption is a useful measure of productivity for their thousands of software engineers, it's possible the rest of the world will soon start sipping those tokens instead of chugging them.

That, or we'll soon see even more enterprises begin to embrace the philosophy of relying on "good enough" open-weight models that can handle many tasks at a fraction of the cost of more expensive alternatives - Garman made a similar case for choosing cost-effective models based on the task back in June.

If you're a bubble, that approach looks an awful lot like a pin. ®

GitHub's Universe conference kicked off in San Francisco on Wednesday with news that its infrastructural universe is expanding to address staggering demand from AI agents.

GitHub recorded 7.4 billion code commits in September 2026, five times more than hit its servers a year earlier. This surge in traffic over the past year, the result of developers running AI agents and generating increased amounts of programming code, caught the company unprepared and led to a series of outages and service availability woes.

AI-driven code commits started becoming a problem last December, and led to problems in February, April, August, not to mention the months in between. On May 7, the site's 90-day availability hit a low of about 84 percent, according to reconstructed data from GitHub's status page.

GitHub execs apologized and promised to do better. Those commitments have put four million CPU cores and 160 petabytes of high-speed storage on its infrastructure roadmap, alongside extra compute capacity for GitHub Actions, the company's beleaguered continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform.

The Microsoft-owned code hosting biz also says it is redesigning its technical architecture (an effort discussed previously) to separate compute and storage, with the expectation that will enable 35x more throughput.

"We're also migrating to a multi-region deployment in Azure, while continuing to serve incredible levels of traffic from developers around the world," said Jay Parikh, EVP of CoreAI, Microsoft, in a blog post provided to The Register. "We expect to complete the migration early next year. Those investments give us more room to grow. The next step is building the systems that handle the work."

Also at the its Universe event, GitHub announced general availability of Copilot Fusion, the company's model routing service that was previewed under the name HydraFusion. The idea is that allowing GitHub to route requests to different models can improve task-completion rates while reducing token consumption costs.

"Different tasks need different models," said Parikh. "Developers shouldn't have to manage every model choice to get the right result at the right price. Copilot Fusion evaluates what a task needs across reasoning, code generation, debugging, and tool use, then chooses how to execute across one or more models. In the Artificial Analysis Coding Agent Index, Fusion Max scored within two points of Opus 5.5 Max at half the cost and 40% less time per task."

GitHub is making more bells and whistles available through its Copilot app, including Copilot Projects, for coordinating parallel work; Copilot Connectors, for simplifying how Copilot connects to MCP servers; and Copilot Automations, which are reusable agent tasks.

And in what appears to be an effort to boost Copilot usage in the workplace, GitHub is extending Copilot access to all GitHub Enterprise users without requiring any additional per-seat purchases. Customer still get billed for the tokens they use.

Microsoft's code collab biz is also expanding its suite of AI services for developers with an offering called AI Scans, which checks pull requests for vulnerabilities in languages not addressed by rule-based scanning and in code that's already merged, plus new reachability analysis tools that allow development to focus on issues that are plausibly exploitable. Another new offering is a package firewall that checks enterprise policy settings before fetching npm packages. ®

Ukrainian ransomware crook Artem Stryzhak has been sentenced to 70 months in the slammer by a New York federal court for his role as an affiliate of the Nefilim and Hive ransomware gangs.

Prosecutors believe the cybercriminal began working with Nefilim in or around June 2021, while living in Barcelona, Spain.

The Nefilim ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) operation was known for targeting wealthy companies, with its operators encouraging affiliates to pursue businesses capable of paying substantial ransom demands.

One of Nefilim's most high-profile attacks was on Australian logistics giant Toll Group in 2020, encrypting its files roughly three months after it suffered a separate Mailto ransomware attack.

Court documents [PDF] state that Stryzhak agreed with alleged Nefilim boss Volodymyr Tymoshchuk, who remains at large, to pay the ransomware crew a 20 percent cut of the ransom proceeds he collected.

Tymoshchuk told Stryzhak that his preference was for attacks to target companies based in the US, Canada, and Australia that turn over more than $100 million annually. This guidance was soon tweaked to encourage targeting companies in the same regions with more than $200 million in annual revenue.

Prosecutors claim that around the time Stryzhak joined forces with Nefilim, he also signed up to the Hive ransomware operation as "one of its earliest affiliates," and used its platform to attack approximately seven victims. Hive's operators claimed they targeted circa 1,500 victims worldwide between June 2021 and January 2023.

According to separate court documents [PDF], Hive's victims included a law firm and an Ohio hospital, which paid approximately $1.7 million in Bitcoin after the gang initially demanded $2 million during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Before its infrastructure was seized in an international law enforcement operation in January 2023, Hive was known for attacking healthcare facilities during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as being one of the ransomware groups that battered Costa Rica in 2022.

Brett Leatherman, assistant director at the FBI's cyber branch, described Stryzhak as a "prolific cybercriminal" who played a role in groups that were responsible for more than $100 million in victim damages.

"Today's sentence reflects the seriousness of Stryzhak's crimes and demonstrates the FBI's global reach and extensive network of international partners," he said.

"Multiple field offices contributed to this investigation, and our work does not end here. We will continue to leverage every tool at our disposal to track down Stryzhak's co-conspirators and hold them accountable, including Volodymyr Viktorovych Tymoshchuk."

Stryzhak was arrested by Spanish police in June 2024 before being extradited to the US in April 2025.

In announcing Stryzhak's sentencing, the Justice Department took the opportunity to remind the public that rewards totaling up to $11 million are available for qualifying information about alleged Nefilim operator Volodymyr Tymoshchuk and other key ransomware suspects. ®

A cartoon from an ex-Google software engineer, titled "Welcome to Google," made the rounds a while back. It featured two diverging roads, neither passable. One was the main road, marked as deprecated ("don't even think about it," the sign read). The new road, however, was marked as still under construction ("Danger"), and so was unusable as well.

That was the no-win choice two million frontend developers faced in 2014, when Google unexpectedly deprecated its popular JavaScript framework, AngularJS, in favor of Angular 2, which had a radically different architecture, a confusing name, no upgrade path, and wasn't even fully released yet.

So, many developers turned the wheel and headed to Reactville or Vuetown instead.

How Google botched the Angular upgrade provides timely lessons in how not to update a software package, which former Google Developer Advocate Stephen Fluin outlined in a talk at the All Things Open conference last week.

"Uncertainty kills motivation," said Fluin. "When you're taking away everything [developers] know and love, they're going to feel disheartened."

Fluin is now head of developer relations for Buildkite, but he worked for Google from 2016 to 2021 on the Angular project.

"Things were a little bit rough at the time. It was a bit of a death march," he told the audience. "We had no idea when Angular 2 was going to come out, and the core fundamentals of Angular kept changing."

Google had good reasons for updating Angular.

The AngularJS team had been snatched from Google's infrastructure division and placed under its ad division, where the software could be more fully exploited. To support operations of that size, Angular needed greater rigor.

The original AngularJS was launched in 2009 as a side project of Google engineer Miško Hevery, who wanted to extend HTML. Google pulled AngularJS into an internal project because Google developers found it easier to work with than the Java-based Google Web Toolkit (GWT).

The framework quickly caught on with outside web developers too, who readily understood the angle brackets of HTML (hence the name) and wanted more interactive components.

Hevery built AngularJS 1.3 with a traditional controller model, which handled all user input, logic and data transport under the JavaScript $scope object.

Angular 2, announced at the ng-europe 2014 conference, was a major shift in architecture. It shifted to a component model, with each HTML template enjoying its own class properties. After a forced, unhappy dalliance with Google's Dart, the team rewrote Angular completely in TypeScript, with no backward compatibility whatsoever.

It was a lot to take in, and the introductory talk at ng-europe seemed to spook Angular developers more than inspire them. For each discarded feature, the speakers displayed a graphic of a tombstone ("RIP Controllers") and played a recording of a church bell tolling in the background.

"That talk is still infamous today for what it did to the community," Fluin said. "All these things that you know and love about AngularJS are gone. They're dead. And nobody knew this was coming."

In general, it was not a good time for software migrations, Fluin noted in his talk. Python was having a rough time migrating from version 2 to 3, as was the KDE desktop moving from version 4 to version 5. And the rocky transition from GNOME 2 to 3 still loomed in the rearview mirror for many.

"If you're trying to bring your developers with you, give them a path. Don't just kill your old thing and then not have a new thing ready," Fluin advised.

Many devs defected to React and Vue.js, two other JavaScript frontend frameworks that also embraced the component model and were already in production.

In the 2016 State of JS Survey, React was the most popular frontend framework, with 53 percent of JS devs reporting that they had used it. Angular's audience was heavily bifurcated; 30 percent still used the classic version while only 13 percent used Angular 2. Ten percent of users adopted the still up-and-coming Vue.

Angular 2 was finally released in September 2016, followed by Angular 4 the following March. Version 3 was skipped entirely for no discernable reason. Meanwhile, AngularJS classic, which was not formally retired until the end of 2021, was updated to version 1.5 in the spring of 2016, introducing components.

Muddying the waters further was the naming of the frameworks, which confounded many casual observers. Was AngularJS different from Angular 2? And was the "2" part of the Angular name, signaling the complete architectural shift, or its version number?

Getting the public to understand the name change turned out to be a major quagmire. Fluin said: "We had to fix public communication guidelines. We had to train experts. We had to fix Google's knowledge graph," which is Google's database of facts about the world.

"Naming and versioning matter," he told the audience. "They don't matter in a pure technical sense, but they matter to human beings because it's human beings you're trying to keep up to date with."

It would be easy to blame the Google brass for nearly shipwrecking Angular, but it has been a success at meeting Google's needs. Today, the component-driven Angular powers Gemini's user interface, Google Analytics, and countless other Google apps. It is now converging with Google's internal Wiz high-performance framework, originally designed for the ill-fated Google+ social network.

Angular has also settled into a more predictable and user-friendly update pattern. Updates have a routine release cadence, currently twice a year. They dutifully follow semantic versioning guidelines, with major version numbers signifying breaking changes. Google tests each new version of the framework on its own apps before releasing it publicly. Any feature slated for removal is deprecated for a year first.

But in retrospect, Google may have been better off giving Angular 2 an entirely different name, even if it meant building up a new user base from scratch.

"JavaScript developers loved trying new frameworks. So, pretending to be a new framework might have been better," Fluin told The Register. ®

Trillium Asset Management wants Microsoft to explain how it will meet its 2030 greenhouse gas (GHG) emission targets, and is backing a shareholder proposal to request this information at the firm's next shareholder meeting.

The cloud and software biz set itself lofty environmental goals back in 2020, aiming to be become "carbon-negative" by 2030, and to have removed the equivalent of all the carbon it has ever emitted by 2050.

But since the start of the decade, an explosion in AI development and demand for ever more complex models has seen a boom in demand for high-performance compute infrastructure and a construction wave to deliver new datacenters to house it all in.

Microsoft is one of the firms to profit from this huge demand, with its cloud division making $214.4 billion in revenue for the fiscal year 2026 ended June 30, a 27 percent year-on-year increase.

This has also caused Microsoft's emissions to head in the wrong direction, with figures from the company's most recent Environmental Sustainability Report showing that these have increased from 13 million tons of CO2 equivalent in 2020 to 20 million tons in 2025.

However, Microsoft estimates that without the carbon reduction initiatives it has already put in place, emissions would now be much higher, somewhere near 34 million tons.

The increase is largely accounted for by indirect emissions (Scope 3) from the construction and provisioning of datacenters to meet that demand for cloud services and AI training. But as The Register pointed out, 2025 saw a growing contribution from Scope 2, due to generation of energy the company purchased. This represents 13 percent of total emissions - up from 2 percent in 2024.

Now Trillium Asset Management, financial advisors specializing in sustainable and responsible investing, is urging Microsoft shareholders to vote for Proposal 4 during their annual meeting scheduled for December 8.

In an SEC filing, the proposal asks Microsoft to disclose additional information illustrating how it will manage climate commitments. This disclosure should go beyond existing disclosures, at reasonable cost, omitting proprietary information, and be made annually.

The proposal notes that when Microsoft first announced its carbon negative goal, it said progress required "not just a bold goal but a detailed plan," and that transparency was one of the guiding principles for this climate plan.

It states that emissions are now 62 percent above the 2020 baseline, and simply asks Microsoft to apply the principles it articulated in 2020; show the plan, be candid about the math, and explain how it will adapt.

In the filing, Trillium warns that falling short of its climate targets may create risk to Microsoft's credibility, which can influence investor trust. If Microsoft is in danger of failing to meet its 2030 commitments, it could suffer reputational harm, and the filing claims it is already the subject of legal action by investors alleging insufficient disclosure of its AI and cloud spending.

On the flip side, it says that disclosure of a climate transition plan will likely prove valuable to large institutional investors who view climate change as a systemic risk to future economic growth.

We asked Microsoft for comment, but it already recommended in another SEC filing that shareholders vote against the proposal, arguing it fails to show that Microsoft's existing disclosures are insufficient for investors to assess its climate-related strategy and performance.

Instead, the firm says that the proposal requests a collection of new disclosures that go beyond not just legal and regulatory requirements, but also established voluntary climate-reporting frameworks.

The proposal seeks hypothetical scenarios, contingency plans and other forward-looking information that is inherently uncertain and subject to change, Microsoft states, saying it will remain focused on its Sustainability Report and other environmental reporting while meeting any new disclosure mandates that may arise globally. ®

China's secretive spaceplane has been spotted in orbit by a US commercial satellite, according to the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA)

The DIA's report [PDF] warns of developments by China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea that allegedly threaten space security, at least from a US perspective. Most of the report details systems still under development, but one image on page 53 stands out: China's spaceplane, snapped in orbit in 2024 by Maxar Technologies.

The image has been seen before; a low-resolution snap from an industry symposium was shared by Bluesky user @dutchspace almost two years ago. However, the higher-resolution image in the DIA report shows more detail. The spaceplane also bears a distinct resemblance to the US Space Force's X-37B.

The uncrewed X-37 began as a NASA project in 1999 before the US Department of Defense took over. After several atmospheric tests with an X-37A variant, the X-37B was launched in 2010. The reusable spaceplane can spend years in orbit, conducting classified activities. So far, it has launched eight times.

According to the DIA's report, China's first spaceplane mission launched in 2020 and remained in orbit for two days. A second, launched in 2022, spent 276 days in orbit, and a third, launched in December 2023, spent 268 days in oribt. The last two missions appeared to include approach and rendezvous tests of objects in orbit.

Russia, memorably, had a spaceplane in the ill-fated Buran, which bore an uncanny resemblance to the US Space Shuttle (although the two were very different beasts from a technical perspective - not least, Buran's orbiter did not carry the engines used to launch it to space).

However, according to the DIA's report, Russia "has made little progress since."

The US recently confirmed that it has weapons in space, and it would be naive not to assume rivals would have their own, whether kinetic or some form of jamming technology.

Earlier this month, Russia's Kosmos-2612 sidled up to the US ICEYE-X36 satellite before retreating. It's unclear whether the intention was an entirely innocent look at a fellow spacecraft or a bit of saber-rattling; it certainly worried US lawmakers. ®

Intel has become the latest target for Good Jobs First, which questions why the chipmaker continues to receive tax breaks from key states, long after setting up shop there, and laying off thousands of workers in those regions.

The non-profit organization, which promotes accountability in economic development, says the chipmaker promised billions of dollars in investment and thousands of high-tech jobs for the areas surrounding its manufacturing plants in Hillsboro, Oregon, and Rio Rancho, New Mexico.

Its report, The Bleeding Edge: How the Public Pays the Costs of Intel's Semiconductor Manufacturing, claims that Intel's property tax breaks cost these communities more than $1.2 billion in lost revenue since 2015, and the brunt of the shortfall has largely fallen on schools funded by those local governments.

For Oregon, Good Jobs First says that property tax abatements from Intel's use of the Strategic Investment Program (SIP) exempted it from at least $1.14 billion, while Hillsboro schools lost $891 million in revenue from 2017 through 2025.

During the same timeframe, Intel paid Oregon $552.4 million in fees, or less than a third of the value of its tax breaks.

In New Mexico, the figures are lower, but still significant. The report puts Chipzilla's property tax exemptions from Industrial Revenue Bonds (IRBs) at $99.6 million in foregone revenue since 2017, while Rio Rancho's Public Schools lost an estimated $43.4 million over the same nine-year period. Here, the company paid $41.6 million in required payments in lieu of taxes from 2017 through 2025, shared among affected local governments.

Good Jobs First also notes that despite these subsidies, Intel was awarded billions under the CHIPS Act funding from the US federal government.

However, the situation with that is somewhat complex, as the company secured an initial $7.86 billion under the Biden administration, of which $2.2 billion is believed to have been paid out.

The incoming Trump administration, however, decided to rethink the scheme, and ended up making an $8.9 billion deal for 10 percent of Intel's common stock, made up of the remaining $5.7 billion of the CHIPS Act cash plus an additional $3.2 billion under the Secure Enclave program to make semiconductors for the military.

At the same time, the chipmaker is estimated by Good Jobs First to have laid off more than 4,700 workers at its facilities in Oregon and New Mexico over the past three years, as the company wrestled with restructuring efforts and dramatic losses.

(These are just a fraction of Intel's total layoffs during the period.)

The issue, according to the non-profit, is that these sites are established Intel facilities which the company has operated for decades. They already have the facilities, infrastructure, skilled workers, and other necessities that a new site might require investment for. Are continued tax breaks truly necessary, Good Jobs First asks, or are they just subsidizing business decisions Intel would make anyway?

It says Intel's track record in Oregon and New Mexico should be taken as important lessons for other communities considering becoming a home to semiconductor manufacturing, and recommends questioning whether state and local tax breaks are even necessary.

"Tax incentives are supposed to encourage investment, not provide companies with an ongoing stream of public support for decades," said Good Jobs First Research Analyst and report author Kristan Wong Karinen.

"Intel has received tax breaks at these campuses for generations, and local leaders should be asking hard questions about why those subsidies are still necessary, especially with the billions of dollars in federal grants and tax credits they receive from the CHIPS Act."

We asked Intel for a statement regarding these claims by Good Jobs First, and in response it told us: "Intel works closely with governments in the regions where we operate to leverage incentives that support leading-edge semiconductor R&D and manufacturing. We are not providing additional details beyond what's available in our annual reports."

Recent targets for the non-profit have been datacenters, and the states offering tax incentives for developers and operators to build within their jurisdiction. Some states were losing billions in lost revenue to server farm projects, while others were failing to disclose their tax shortfall. ®

Cisco has open sourced a behavior detection engine that watches AI agents, to help security teams prevent rogue agents from going off the rails like they did with the Hugging Face hack - or worse.

It's called Project Quarry, and it aims to provide a "shared language" for evaluating agent behavior, along the lines of what Snort, which Cisco also maintains, did for detecting malicious network traffic and what YARA did for rule-based malware identification.

Most detection tools rely on specific interactions with an AI model or agent. Did it attempt prompt injection? Or did the agent call an attack tool?

"But what is missing is the entire context under which something may occur," Amy Chang, head of AI threat and security research at Cisco, said in an exclusive interview with The Register.

She likened this to credit card fraud detection. Without context, individual transactions such as a small test charge or a single purchase in a location far away from a card-holder's usual location may not raise any flags.

"And then you try again," making another fraudulent purchase, "and that went through, too. So now I'm gonna buy the PS5," Chang said.

"Those are the things that Quarry addresses by taking into consideration the entire agent session," she explained. "One tool call may seem in-scope until you realize that that next step is taking that information and sending it to an attacker-controlled inbox or server."

Even data theft is a sequence and not a single agentic action. Agentic AI security firm Invariant Labs demonstrated this with a proof-of-concept attack against GitHub's MCP server that hijacked a user's agent via a malicious GitHub Issue, and coerced it into leaking data from private repositories.

Simply reading a configuration file, or sending a request to an external endpoint may be legitimate agentic actions. However, combining the two can lead to data exfiltration - and shows "why action relationships matter," wrote Chang and fellow Cisco researchers Adam Swanda, Ravikumar Balakrishnan, and Konstantin Berlin in a blog post about Quarry shared with The Register ahead of publication

"A policy can produce a finding when the trace shows a sensitive file read followed within a defined window by an external send," they wrote. "The risk comes from the relationship between the two actions, so the finding should preserve evidence from both."

Quarry covers single- and multi-turn large language model conversations, agents, tool use, Model Context Protocol (MCP) interactions, and multimodal inputs.

In addition to the open source code itself, the project's GitHub repository includes installation instructions, supported Python versions, plugins for Claude Code, Codex and other MCP-compatible agents, configuration examples, rule-writing guidance, and a rule starter pack.

For instance, with the rule pack, "If a base-64 encoded malware is somewhere in the tool call, that would result in a block," Chang said.

The rule format looks similar to a YARA or Snort rule, with a header that details the traffic to examine, content to match, and metadata for tracking the rule. Here's a Quarry rule that flags an agent that reads a credentials file:

While the Cisco Ai researchers have not run Quarry against data describing the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident, they suggest that if the intrusion had been read as a complete, step-by-step record of a single session, there were several points where the AI agents' steps would have given a Quarry rule something to act on and flag for humans.

For example, Quarry would probably have flagged internet access from a sandbox.

"The rule can flag specific tool calls that reach an external server asset that wasn't in the task's allow list," Chang said.

"Another one would be credentials found and used somewhere else."

According to OpenAI's technical report about the Hugging Face intrusion, this is exactly what happened on July 10, when an agent validated 14 exposed Hugging Face tokens with write access and shared them.

"The rule would flag that there was a credential in the tool result that then called an outside service, which is likely not within the parameters of what you would want to do in this case," Chang said. "We don't want you to go and search for credentials that may have been leaked or inadvertently exposed and then utilize them to conduct a task."

The Cisco team is quick to say that rules along are not a substitute for chain-of-thought monitors, or other forms of human oversight - but they do help record a pattern that other teams can then "review, test, and apply to their own agents," they wrote.

Herein also lies the benefit of open source, and a collective approach to defending against adversarial use of AI, Chang said.

"Do we have all the answers? No," Chang said. "We all see slices of the problem, and it's important for us to share what we see."®

UK domain registrar 123 Reg (no relation - Ed) says it was the victim of an "AI-driven cyberattack" that exposed customer data.

Customers began receiving their notification emails this week, informing them that their contact information, "related customer relationship data," company VAT numbers, and "product information from an application programming interface (API)" were compromised.

A company spokesperson elaborated, saying this means that names, phone numbers, countries, language and currency preferences, account creation dates, the products on the account, and marketing preferences were affected.

123 Reg described the September 18 intrusion as "the first known AI-driven cyberattack against our company," and told The Register that early signs point toward a China-nexus attacker.

"Our investigation identified IP addresses that we assessed to be the core attacker infrastructure, which were hosted in China and Singapore, indicating a strong Chinese nexus," the spokesperson said. 

"Our investigation further identified AI cyberattack 'skills' hosted on Chinese infrastructure, including copies of skills open sourced by Anthropic and several other AI exploitation frameworks and scripts."

They went on to say that many of the artefacts left behind led 123 Reg to suspect that a Chinese state-sponsored group, known for abusing Claude Code in attacks against at least 30 organizations, could be behind the break-in.

There is also a suspicion that the same group that hit a number of South Korea's financial institutions using open-source Chinese AI tool ARTEX, was behind the attack on 123 Reg too.

"The TA's mirror of 'anthropic_skills,' and the account naming conventions found on the Chinese servers are consistent with preparation of this class of AI-augmented operation," the spokesperson told us. 

"In addition, on October 7, 2026, CrowdStrike published CSA-261162, describing an unknown, likely Chinese-speaking actor that targeted several South Korean financial organizations starting in late September 2026, which is the same period during which we were attacked.

"That actor used ARTEX, an open-source Chinese-developed agentic penetration-testing tool released in July 2026, which was also observed to be used in the attack that targeted us."

The GoDaddy-owned registrar reported the attack to law enforcement agencies, brought in outside cybersecurity support, and notified the FTC, as well as the data protection authorities in the UK and EU.

The company spokesperson added that it worked with Singapore-based ISPs to shut down the attacker's servers in the region, which helped disrupt the attack, in addition to "other actions by us and industry partners."

123 Reg's email to customers stated the attacker's activity "was limited to reading" customer data, although the spokesperson told us "it's possible they created copies of the information," and that this is what prompted the notification.

The registrar urged customers to stay alert to the potential misuse of their data, and to treat communications appearing to come from the company with caution.

"If you receive a message or call and aren't sure it's from 123 Reg, go directly to our website and log in," the email said. "We will never contact you to request your password, payment details, or verification codes by email, text, or phone.

"We also strongly recommend turning on two-step verification (2SV), which helps keep your account protected even if someone tricks you into sharing your password. You can find instructions for setting up 2SV in your 123 Reg account.

"We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused." ®

The question of who controls satellite-based connectivity came into sharp focus in recent weeks after Ukraine's service was throttled and then restored.

Wherever Reg readers stand on those activities involving SpaceX's Starlink and Starshield, reliance on a foreign power that may not stay friendly is now under intense scrutiny. Alternatives exist, including Eutelsat OneWeb's constellation, and more are in the works. The Register toured the Harwell facility of another contender - Open Cosmos.

The business is just over a decade old and operates from multiple locations, including the UK, Greece, and Portugal. It has launched dozens of missions over the years, including its OpenConstellation service, which organizations use to share data from Earth observation satellites.

When it launched OpenConstellation in 2022, the aim was to have 25 satellites offering a mix of spatial and spectral resolution. While other services, such as the European Commission's Copernicus, provide similar data, OpenConstellation lets customers assign satellites specific tasks for specific data collection.

However, it is ConnectedCosmos that will interest users concerned about putting all their connectivity eggs in a basket that might be abruptly snatched away. The first two satellites in the constellation are now in orbit; they were launched by Rocket Lab in January 2026. The business plans to operate more than 96 satellites by the end of 2028 and to achieve full coverage by 2030. The core connectivity backbone will consist of 192 satellites, which founder and CEO Rafel Jordà Siquier described as "the foundation, not the ceiling."

The company reckons it can churn out one satellite per day, and judging by what we saw in Harwell, that figure seems realistic, though it's a far cry from the approximately 70 Starlinks per week SpaceX claimed in its IPO filing.

Because ConnectedCosmos operates from an altitude above 1,000 km, it needs far fewer satellites, though at the cost of latency increases.

Jordi Barrera Ars, co-founder and CTO, told us that latency was "anything between 30 and 80 milliseconds." This is OK for most applications, but not great for some. Direct to smartphone is, for example, not currently on the cards. Open Cosmos's VP of Commercial Satcom, Danielle Edwards, said, "We're very much in the direct device business. Direct to smartphone is not an area that we have an interest in right now."

"Never say never…" she added, "and who knows what might come along next Tuesday. But for right now, the direct device play really is on the IoT side."

During the tour, Open Cosmos showed off its assembly and testing facilities (including temperature and pressure testing), as well as a shaker table that simulates launch conditions. The satellites themselves consist of a common bus, onto which solar panels and the payload are fitted. Then they are stored, ready for launch, in what one company representative called "the satellite nursery".

The approach is interesting: OpenConstellation satellites use the ConnectedCosmos constellation as a connectivity backbone, while the latter also provides point-to-point broadband. According to Open Cosmos:

"The constellation is deliberately designed around the requirements of government, institutional and commercial customers that need secure, resilient connectivity and clear custody of critical data."

It is very much a European alternative to customers who are worried about existing services.

The service on offer from Open Cosmos will not, for example, be suitable for guiding drones traveling at high velocities, that isn't really the point, but it will provide sovereign communication channels that aren't beholden to the whim of a man and a big, red Off switch. Where the Starlink constellation stands at well over 10,000 satellites, the numbers proposed by Open Cosmos are far more modest and less likely to alarm astronomers in quite the same way.

Plus, the company has sector experience through its OpenConstellation platform (as well as custom spacecraft built for individual customers). And, unlike so many in the industry, its satellites and facilities exist beyond PowerPoint presentations. After all, we've seen them. ®

After suffering more than 10,000 corporate meetings, one executive has decided that the world hasn't endured nearly enough management jargon and built an app capable of generating 270 million variations of it.

Dave Doty, who claims to have spent 35 years collecting buzzwords, clichés, and other verbal atrocities inflicted on office workers, turned his life's work into Executive Eightball, an iPhone and Android app designed to help users sound convincingly corporate while saying nothing.

The idea came about after Doty spent decades recording the nonsense he heard in meetings, presumably while everyone else was busy circling back, touching base, and taking things offline.

"I am an executive who has suffered through over 10,000 meetings during the course of my 30 year career," Doty told The Register. "To keep my sanity, in each of them, I wrote down all of the buzz words and business clichés and have built an enormous database of them."

He described his creation as "sort of what would happen if Dilbert and George Costanza had a love child."

The app, which is now available on Apple's App Store and Google Play, takes Doty's collection of corporate waffle and assembles it into sentences that wouldn't look out of place in a CEO's quarterly update or a particularly painful all-hands meeting.

Among the pearls of wisdom it can produce are "We must dashboard the outputs to enable us to focus on operational directives and break the paradigm" and "Drive to cross-functional synergies so we can reengineer the organization and unleash shareholder value."

Doty claims Executive Eightball can produce approximately 270 million unique sentences in 15 languages, meaning workers across the globe can now contribute to meetings without the tiresome business of having an actual idea.

The app's listing promises to help users "Speak fluent corporate nonsense instantly," with suggested applications including office humor, LinkedIn jokes, presentation icebreakers, and, perhaps most appropriately, "Fake CEO energy."

There's a free version, although you'll have to put up with ads and a limited supply of corporate waffle. For $0.99, you can unlock the lot and talk complete rubbish to your heart's content.

The timing is rather fitting. In March, research covered by The Register suggested that people who enthusiastically embrace corporate buzzwords may actually be worse at their jobs. Now there's an app to help the rest of us catch up.

Doty, meanwhile, appears delighted with his contribution to the corporate world.

"This is truly a paradigm shift for corporate leadership and my greatest lifetime contribution to society," he wrote in his latest email, urging potential customers to subscribe to the paid version to "unleash the value."

After 35 years and 10,000 meetings, at least someone has finally found a productive use for all that wasted time. ®

Newly formed Quake AI is a cloud provider that expects its users will be mostly agents rather than humans.

It was created after US-based Rumble Inc acquired German datacenter operator Northern Data in June. The parent then rebranded as RUM Group, a holding company for Quake AI (formerly Northern Data) and the Rumble video platform.

Quake AI is an Nvidia Cloud Partner (NCP) operating a 22,000 GPUs estate, making it a neocloud: a specialized infrastructure provider dedicated to AI workloads.

Yet where other neoclouds are building a full stack of services around their GPU farms, Quake AI wants to make its infrastructure discoverable to AI agents, which may soon be traversing the internet in hordes on behalf of their owners.

RUM Group's chief financial officer Mike Massey told The Register that "Cloud 1.0 - let's call it applications - is like a user interface of how you interact with a machine of some kind."

He added: "Now, if you think about agents, they don't use vision. That's not how they interact with systems. They interact with APIs and with information effectively, and that means they want highly discoverable, highly data-driven platforms..

"So, to us, the things that make GPUs and AI compute easier to consume for humans, things like model-as-a-service, dashboards and one-click settings, are actually orthogonal to, if not detrimental to what agents are going to want, agents are going to want homogeneous compute… to understand and know what your data and your expectations are in terms of performance and uptimes, and then they're going to want to consume that compute as a utility," he claimed.

In other words, Quake AI believes that, at some point, the customers for its compute services are going to be AI agents rather than people, but carrying out tasks on their behalf.

"I think that is the case, and it's the vision that we are driving towards, and you know ultimately agents are in service of people, right?" Massey said.

In its view of things, agents won't go through an intermediary, they'll go to the compute to retrieve the answers they need. "So all of these tool frameworks and all of these things that we have set up, I think, are a hindrance or an encumbrance to what the agents are going to want to consume, which is a utility," he explained.

"Yes, we're a little crazy in this regard," Massey added. "It's different. But I think our worldview is very grounded in the data and the realities. Like, we're a technical team. We understand the engineering, and at the end of the day, I think that most would validate our hypothesis," he continued.

John Hoffman, CEO of Northern Data and acting CEO of Quake AI, compared this with a solution he had been shown of an AI that was developed to navigate the internet by itself.

"I told it I wanted pizza. It went on to DoorDash's website. Typed pizza in the search box, clicked on the pizza with the highest ranking, went to add to order, knows I like pepperoni, and it clicked through all of this," he said.

"Don't get me wrong, this was a good solution that solves the problem. But the amount of compute that you are using to try to get an AI agent to act like a human that has eyes that can see web links is insanity compared to if DoorDash just created an API that is queryable," Hoffman claimed.

Done that way, the compute usage would be one thousandth of the way that the problem was actually accomplished, Quake AI claims, but it will require that everybody embraces the idea of how agents interact.

"And they don't interact with interfaces or applications. They interact with data and APIs. Just give me the raw data. That's what it wants," Hoffman told us.

"I would imagine DoorDash is developing an API for agents," he added. "It just makes sense, and that's why we're doing the same exact thing."

Earlier this year, TollBit, an outfit that tracks AI bot traffic, said that agents were gradually taking over the internet. Its State of the Bots report found that by the end of 2025, there was roughly one AI bot visit for every 31 human visits to a site, up from just one for every 200 human visits at the start of the year.

Last year, consultants McKinsey & Company produced a report saying that the neocloud operators had to evolve beyond being just a provider of GPUs-as-a-service and move up the AI stack to sell services on top of bare metal, or risk being commoditized into competing on price.

Analyst firm Gartner was also reading the last rites for much of the neocloud industry recently, forecasting that AI services are unlikely to deliver enough revenue to cover the expected capital expenditure on IT infrastructure between now and 2030, and that consolidation in the provider market was inevitable.

Quake AI's gamble is that AI agents will be a reality, and that by tailoring its APIs to make it easier for these autonomous software bots to access its resources as needed, it will be one of the winners. ®

Travelling in the modern day and age differs significantly from what it looked like a few short decades ago. Today, it is all about apps: you need applications for navigation, booking accommodation, buying tickets for events, following the local news, staying in touch with friends and family, and more. That also means that you depend on connectivity at all times while abroad.

The problem is that a lot of people still rely on traditional roaming, while the roaming model is out of date. You cannot choose a specific mobile internet plan that suits your travel plans. Instead, operators have split the world into zones, and each zone has its own pricing, limits, and permissions.

That is why many have turned to alternative ways of staying connected, and so far, the travel eSIM has emerged as the most practical solution. Companies like the Swiss eSIM pioneer, Yesim, have recognized the problem that travelers are facing and have come up with a solution. They let you pick a specific plan that will fit your trip. That way, you get to tailor your connectivity experience in advance. Furthermore, you even get to see the price in advance and know exactly what you will have to pay.

The problem with roaming is that your home operator decides what your internet will be like abroad. When you try to book a flight or a hotel room, you will try to get the best deal possible. That means comparing providers, prices, any potential benefits that different providers offer, and the like. However, with roaming, you can't do any of that. The terms of your existing home contract still apply, and connectivity abroad just gets added to it.

That means that your operator decides what zones are available, what partner networks you can access, and, most importantly, how much they will charge you. You, as the user, can only accept their terms or choose to look for a different way to secure an internet connection. In other words, there is no flexibility and no participation on your end, you can only take it or leave it.

Take EE as an example - the official terms for their EE Travel Data pass for Canada and the US say that the user gets 500 MB of data per day. This is not nearly enough for someone who will depend on their phone for everything, from paying for food to comparing ticket prices and booking accommodation. The limit is the same for countless other countries, including Australia, China, India, Mexico, New Zealand, South Africa, Thailand, Turkey, and the UAE.

It gets even worse for other countries, including Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and Indonesia. For these, the daily allowance is only 150 MB. That essentially forces you to ration your data use very carefully and pick what you are going to use it for.

Some providers have introduced daily packages as a secondary roaming option. O2 Travel Bolt On roaming option for Pay Monthly customers charges £7 for every 24 hours of use. They start charging you as soon as you make a call, send a text, or use data for anything. It happens even if your phone updates an app automatically in the background, without you even knowing about it.

As a result, you get barely any connectivity, but still have to pay the full price of this deal. For some, that might be fine, but if you aren't aware of it, you can return home to a surprise bill that you now have to pay.

As mentioned, travel eSIM emerged as an alternative to the roaming model. The first thing to note about it is the difference between an eSIM and a travel eSIM.

An eSIM is a chip that is built into most modern smartphones, tablets, and similar devices. This chip allows users to install operator profiles offered by travel eSIM providers. This can be done remotely, without having to go to the provider's shop. It's as simple as downloading an app.

Travel eSIM uses this chip to create a digital service. That typically includes the provider's app, tariffs, partnered mobile networks, full control of your data, and even top-ups and customer support, should you need them.

The system is also quite practical, as you get to set up everything in advance. You don't have to wait to enter another country to secure your connectivity, but can instead do it from home before you leave on your trip. Start by checking your device's compatibility with eSIM technology. If it's compatible, you can download the operator's app, pick a package for the region you plan to visit, and install the appropriate profile. Then, sit on the plane, travel to your destination, and activate the profile when you get there. You get instant connectivity without having to stand in line at a SIM kiosk, rely on Wi-Fi coverage, or pay high roaming prices.

If you are still not sure if a travel eSIM is the right option, consider the following: A one-week trip from the UK to the US will have you paying £7 per day if you are an O2 Travel user. For seven days abroad, that will end up being £49. Alternatively, if you use Yesim's unlimited package for the US for seven days, the price is only £18.27 as of the time of writing. You buy it upfront, and it won't activate until you start using it after arriving at your destination.

When selecting a plan, you start with the trip itself. In other words, you click on the country or region that you plan to visit. You can also enter the length of your stay there, and how much data you expect you will need. Then, select a tariff to match the parameters.

All terms of the deal will be known to you in advance, including the country that is covered by the plan, how long the plan will last, how much data you get, and how much it all costs. Best of all, everything is managed in the app, so you don't really have to get in contact with anyone.

A package can be selected for a single country, an entire region, or a route that includes several countries. You prepare all of this at home, and activate it after arrival. You even get to keep your home number active, since you don't have to replace your SIM card. That way, any banking messages, service notifications, important calls, 2-Factor Authentication (2FA) texts, and the like can come through and reach you at any time.

If you need a travel eSIM provider, consider the Swiss company Yesim. The firm has been in the travel eSIM market since 2019, becoming one of the pioneers in this sector. Today, it provides connectivity to over 4 million users across 200+ destinations. For travelers, this means that they can rely on one service that they are familiar with regardless of whether they are going on a short holiday in one country or a lengthy, complex trip that will include multiple nations.

Yesim's position as a global provider of connectivity services is also reflected in the fact that the company has become an official partner of the World Players Super League - the largest golf tour in the world. The League holds over 1,800 tournaments in more than 50 countries every year, and is one of the largest events of this kind.

The same global scale is evident in Yesim's pricing options. The firm offers a flexible tariff range, especially when it comes to its most popular packages. For example, the Global Package covers 80+ countries, while the Global Plus Package covers 140+ destinations. These will likely suit those who tend to travel a lot and want to pay a fixed budget. But, if your data needs are unpredictable, you can always pick the Pay & Fly tariff - Yesim's pay-as-you-go model. This is a single eSIM for 170+ countries, and you only pay for the data that you actually used.

Yesim's offer is known for the ease and simplicity of connection. The firm has created an intuitive app where you simply pick a country or a region, install the profile, and activate it in a few taps after getting there. Plus, the app uses automatic network selection. This is possible thanks to SwitchLess Networks technology, which switches the user to the strongest available network at any given time. This is especially important for remote locations, where connectivity is usually unstable, but it can also come in handy for mass events, when the network may struggle to cope with tens of thousands of connections at once.

Yesim also offers the Multiple eSIMs feature, which helps you manage several profiles from a single account. This is convenient for those traveling with their family or a small group. You can even test its service with a trial plan that gives you 500 MB for a symbolic price of £0.45. That way, you can see how it all works for yourself before committing any real money. Lastly, Yesim offers a 15 percent discount to new users who use promocode GETYESIM15, so make sure to use it.

Since modern travel has evolved and is now an app-first experience, the old roaming model is no longer a good fit for an average traveler. Instead, travel eSIMs give tourists the freedom to choose their location, amount of data, and even to know the cost upfront. Yesim is a prime example of the fact that the travel eSIM model works and that it can satisfy the needs of modern-day travellers.

"For Yesim, freedom of connectivity is a fundamental human right that helps people stay close, communicate, and share meaningful moments in spite of distance," emphasizes the company's founder and CEO, Dmitri Verbovski.

Contributed by Yesim

Korean memory-maker SK Hynix has predicted memory shortages will persist until at least the year 2030 and says that will help it to boost its already exceptional revenue and profits to new levels.

In remarks published on Wednesday alongside its quarterly results, the company offered its belief that "a virtuous cycle has taken hold in which AI-driven productivity gains and new revenue generation in areas such as software development, customer service, and search lead to greater AI adoption, which in turn drives increased investment in infrastructure."

SK Hynix thinks this is great news, because it means more buyers are entering the market for AI infrastructure, including "general enterprises" and nations building sovereign infrastructure. In coming years, the company sees even more demand for memory coming from autonomous cars and the growing robotics market.

While the company is working hard to build more factories and get them working, execs admitted it can't do that fast enough to meet demand.

"The company assessed that supply … is not keeping pace with the growth of the market," SK Hynix told investors. "Given technical difficulty of leading-edge processes and the long lead time required to build new production facilities, it expects the structure in which demand exceeds supply to persist through 2030."

It gets worse. SK Hynix has 14 long-term deals with 14 big buyers, who will collectively buy more than half of its output during 2027 and 2028, and some of them want to extend those agreements. The Korean giant doesn't mind that because the deals include "a mechanism that reflects market conditions within a price range agreed upon with customers" and give it "a structure that secures stable profitability while allowing flexible responses to market changes."

Those deals helped SK Hynix to record quarterly revenue of ₩104.6 trillion ($78.1 billion), up 328 percent year-over-year and 32 percent quarter-over-quarter. Operating profit came in at ₩87.68 trillion ($62.8 billion), up 486 percent year over year.

The company told investors it's not done yet, outlining plans to expand production and emphasize lucrative products that will "scale up revenue and profit one step further next year."

Doing so will likely dent profits elsewhere, because on the company's earnings call, chief financial officer Kim Woo-hyun predicted "shipment volumes for PCs and mobile devices are expected to decrease due to cost burdens from rising memory prices and supply shortages."

The company also outlined some of its future plans, among them:

• Increasing HBM4 production, which it believes will "surpass HBM3E in both shipment volume and revenue in the fourth quarter and … establish itself as a mainstream product."

• "Rapidly" increasing the portion of its 10nm-class 6th generation (1c) process technology and expand sales of DDR5 and LPDDR5 SOCAMM for AI servers.

• Developing NAND "into a core solution that enhances the throughput and economic efficiency of AI services, based on HBF and system optimization technologies."

Investors liked what they heard, with some apparently seeing the memory-maker's outlook as suggesting the AI boom won't sputter out any time soon and sent the company's share price up by about three percent in after-hours trading. ®

Indian tech services giant Infosys has mixed news about AI.

In its most recent quarterly results late last week, the company revealed that it's racked up 29 percent sequential growth in AI revenue, which now delivers 10.5 percent of Infosys' incoming cash.

Those are far nicer numbers than the 1.5 percent year-on-year revenue growth Infosys reported for its second quarter.

"Growth was below our expectations. Volume was softer, and price increases were lower than anticipated amid high competitive intensity," chief financial officer Jayesh Sanghrajka told investors. One reason for lower price increases was that customers expect Infosys to charge less when it uses AI, and those cost savings are now "baked in" to its multi-year deals.

CEO and managing director Salil Parekh also pointed to AI as one reason the cost of services is falling.

"I think what we see today is there is definitely some of our peers who are putting, I would say, more intense effort into the pricing pressure," he said, "but it is also across the board because of the environment and also the discussion on AI productivity. If you are talking with clients today on large programs, it is a three or five-year outlook."

That leaves Infosys dependent on new work from AI to boost revenue growth, while AI also makes it hard to keep growing revenue from existing customers.

Infosys won't go low to win deals and intends to hold its margins at around 21 percent, Sanghrajka said. He sought to prove that point by citing "a large deal that we walked out of, or we did not pursue because it did not meet our return expectations."

To help preserve margins, the company is conducting "Project Maximus" to find efficiencies within its own operations. AI-powered tools to win more sales are also in the mix.

The company sees difficult months ahead. Sanghrajka said the retail and high-tech industries have slowed their services spending and acknowledged that the second half of Infosys's financial year is usually its slow period.

The company tried to convince investors that they have little to worry about, pointing to $8.8 billion of new deals won in the first half of its financial year - 68 percent of which were net new customers - as a sign that Infosys' fundamentals are sound.

But the company also offered less optimistic guidance about its future. In its Q1 results, Infosys predicted full-year revenue growth of 1.5 to 3.0 percent. In Q2, it revised that prediction to 1.0 to 2.0 percent.

Infosys's share price didn't dive after that news but is already down over 25 percent in the last twelve months. And Bloomberg reports that investment analysts have downgraded the company, suggesting they feel its prospects are poor. ®

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) customers will soon have a raft of new choices. Big Red is hosting an event in Las Vegas this week to inject more air into the AI bubble explain its latest AI investments, and front and center of those efforts are an expanded partnership with OpenAI and plans to diversify its chip offerings beyond Nvidia by bringing Google's Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) to OCI.

Oracle says its deal to add Google TPUs to OCI will make it the first hyperscale cloud platform outside Google's own cloud services to offer the chips. Those chips will be available for selection within OCI beginning in 2027, with capacity increasing over the course of several years.

While not mentioning the quantity of Google TPUs that will be available next year or beyond, it does seem that Oracle is attempting to diversify away from being so heavily reliant on Nvidia, with whom it has inked deals worth tens of billions of dollars to outfit its datacenters, including the reportedly troubled Texas project it's planning with the GPU maker and OpenAI.

"Different AI workloads have different compute needs," said OCI president Mahesh Thiagarajan. "Bringing Google TPUs to OCI gives customers … the flexibility to choose the right infrastructure for the performance, throughput, and economics of each AI workload."

Oracle isn't moving away from its partnership with OpenAI, either, announcing new ChatGPT integrations on Tuesday alongside two products that incorporate models from the House of Altman.

The first of those, Oracle AI Workspace, is billed as a "single user experience that brings OpenAI frontier models together with Oracle applications, enterprise data, and cloud services" through ChatGPT plugins that basically turn Oracle's existing business platforms into ChatGPT-accessible resources.

"The Oracle AI Workspace will make the breadth of Oracle's capabilities agent-ready and accessible to ChatGPT users," the company explained. "People can describe business goals and these plugins in ChatGPT will bring together the right Oracle tools and information to help them accomplish it."

Along with giving OpenAI-powered tools access to selected business data, Oracle is hoping customers will also trust the models to help handle cybersecurity with the second new product, Oracle AI Security Mesh, "a managed platform that combines frontier AI models for cybersecurity … with Oracle's proven security expertise."

As you might assume from its name and description, Oracle AI Security Mesh will use OpenAI cybersecurity models to find vulnerabilities, test whether they can be exploited, and recommend fixes in areas of a company's tech stack that it authorizes the Oracle-managed service to examine.

Oracle also announced a deal with Snowflake to bring its AI data cloud to OCI as a native service. The new partnership will allow Oracle customers to purchase and use Snowflake directly from Oracle, which will handle all pricing, discounts, and billing. Oracle Universal Credits will also be usable through Snowflake on OCI, allowing users who already spend money on Oracle credits to use them for the newly available offering.

Oracle may be diversifying its OCI chip offerings, but it still announced new Nvidia hardware in Las Vegas, too.

Big Red announced the general availability of Nvidia Vera Rubin NVL72 systems and Nvidia Vera CPUs on Tuesday, along with plans to introduce HGX Rubin NVL8 systems, though it did not specify when those would become available.

"By combining NVIDIA Vera Rubin GPUs and Vera CPUs with Oracle Acceleron networking and AI-optimized data centers, we're helping customers keep GPUs productive, secure, and scale efficiently as their needs grow," Thiagarajan said.

Oracle posted record earnings in the quarter ending August 31, with revenue up 30 percent year over year as its AI investments have begun to pay dividends. Those dividends appear to be paying off for other AI firms as well, though there's little evidence of similar returns outside the tech sector, raising fresh concerns about an AI bubble that's starting to look a bit taut.

There are already signs that the AI bubble has begun to burst in China, and Oracle's Las Vegas announcements largely involve more circular spending among AI's top players as businesses continue to wait for results. ®

Anthropic, prone to pronouncements about model safety, has given developers using Claude Code the opportunity to throw its guardrails out the window. The company's latest Claude Code build (v2.1.311) supports an environmental variable designed to allow the AI agent to run the rm command, which deletes files, without asking for approval.

The designated environmental variable (a value developers set in their shell) is called:

CLAUDE_CODE_EVEN_MORE_DANGEROUSLY_SKIP_PERMISSIONS.

Daisy Hollman, a member of technical staff at Anthropic, announced the change in a social media post.

"Fun fact: --dangerously-skip-permissions doesn't actually approve EVERYTHING - we still block some obvious things like rm -rf ~," she wrote. "But today's release will let you disable this if you really want, by setting a new env var CLAUDE_CODE_EVEN_MORE_DANGEROUSLY_SKIP_PERMISSIONS=1"

Not everyone believed Hollman, perhaps due to the absurdity of the variable name or because the change isn't listed in the v2.1.311 change log. But she offered reassurance that it's real.

"Not a joke!" she responded. "I hope this helps, and I hope the variable name is memorable."

The name is easy to remember because it is very much like the aforementioned Claude Code flag --dangerously-skip-permissions. That command line flag enables bypassPermissions mode, which first surfaced in Claude Code v1.0.18, on June 9, 2025.

Claude Code has several permission modes: default, acceptEdits, plan, auto, dontAsk, and bypassPermissions. Auto mode, which nominally allows everything but runs background safety checks, became the default in August; bypassPermissions also nominally allows everything, without the safety checks.

But there are still exceptions that do not get automatically approved and require a permission prompt, such as rm and rmdir.

The new CLAUDE_CODE_EVEN_MORE_DANGEROUSLY_SKIP_PERMISSIONS environmental variable removes this last agentic restraint, though other things like managed settings may impose their own limitations.

It's perhaps worth noting that there are numerous accounts of AI agents issuing commands like rm -rf ~ that wipe hard drives or take other action that results in data loss. But as they say, you only live once. ®

An autonomous AI agent discovered four vulnerabilities in the decades-old, widely used EPICS (Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System) open source software toolkit, including a critical flaw that could allow remote attackers to execute code on systems used to control particle accelerators and fusion experiments.

The bugs include a critical, 9.8-rated under CVSS v3.1 integer overflow vulnerability (CVE-2026-114595), leading to an attacker-controlled out-of-bounds heap write and potentially remote code execution; an 8.2-rated, high-severity, improper message-length validation flaw (CVE-2026-114596), causing an out-of-bounds memory write and controller-process crash; a 7.5-rated, high-severity insufficient bounds checking bug (CVE-2026-114597) that allows out-of-bounds memory reads and process crashes; and a 7.5-rated, high-severity type confusion flaw (CVE-2026-114598) that can lead to denial of service and could expose adjacent memory contents.

All four affect EPICS Base, which is used to operate some of the world's largest scientific research projects and facilities, and organizations should update to version 7.0.11, which includes the fixes.

"Successful exploitation of these vulnerabilities could allow an attacker to cause a denial-of-service condition, corrupt memory, disclose sensitive information, or potentially execute arbitrary code," the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) warned in a Tuesday advisory.

An AI agent called Cipher independently found all four previously unknown security holes - investigating and testing the unfamiliar EPICS system, and validating the four exploits - in three hours and 49 minutes, Causal Security co-founder Shubham Raj told The Register.

"The initial investigation required no human intervention, followed by one instruction authorizing deeper exploitability testing in a secure environment," Raj said.

Earlier this year, Causal Security's Cipher, which Raj described as "a fully autonomous super hacker that can reason across the technology stack," found multiple critical attack paths in power-grid systems used across North America and Europe, prompting an October 8 security advisory from CISA.

EPICS, originally developed by Los Alamos National Laboratory and Argonne National Laboratory, is used to build and remotely control distributed Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems, connecting operators to physical devices. It's used in around 90 major scientific, university, and industrial projects and facilities globally including Argonne National Laboratory's Advanced Photon Source and ITER's fusion reactor control system.

All four of these flaws illustrate how AI agents are really good at finding vulnerabilities in industrial and operational technologies - systems and equipment that used to be able to rely on obscurity to protect them from hackers - and add to defenders' concerns that it's only a matter of time until an autonomous cyberattack shuts down critical services, like power grids or water systems. These are the types of digital intrusions that can cause physical harm.

Raj points to CVE-2026-114595, the critical integer-overflow vulnerability, as an example. "It allows attacker-controlled network data to cause an out-of-bounds heap memory write, with potential for remote code execution," he told us.

"EPICS controllers sit between operators and physical equipment, handling measurements, commands, and control functions," he continued. "Operationally: Imagine a particle accelerator in the middle of an expensive experiment. An attacker could potentially crash a controller, interrupt critical measurements or control functions, and force operators to halt the experiment. That could mean lost experimental work, significant downtime, and expensive recovery."

Plus, if an attacker was able to develop an RCE exploit, this could allow them to "take control of the affected process, manipulate readings, interfere with control functions, or disrupt the equipment connected to it," Raj said.

The prerequisite for exploiting these vulns in a real scientific facility is being able to reach the vulnerable EPICS services on a facility's control network. But this could occur if the networks weren't sufficiently segmented, or another system had access to the vulnerable EPICS network.

"Once an attacker is able to find a network, which is either misconfigured or they are able to reach, it's pretty easy to carry out the attacks," Raj said, adding that exploitation wouldn't require deep OT knowledge, or understanding of how particle accelerators or fusion reactors work. "Someone with conventional exploitation skills could investigate them, and increasingly capable AI systems could help develop exploits without requiring specialized OT expertise."

Manipulating specific physical processes does require additional knowledge, he added. "But an attacker doesn't need to understand the physics of a particle accelerator to disrupt the software controlling it. Crashing critical processes or interrupting monitoring and control can already have serious operational consequences. What's changing is that attackers may no longer need years of specialized expertise just to discover these weaknesses." ®

If you were waiting to upgrade your Mac until you could get one with the latest CPU, the wait is over. Apple's 6th-gen M-series processors are finally trickling down to its 14-inch MacBook Pro and iMac family early next month.

Available in either "space black" or silver, Apple's base-model MacBook Pro is largely unchanged from last gen. This is a mid-cycle refresh and so most of the improvements are under the hood. It sports the same high-res mini-LED display, chiclet keyboard, and port selection as its predecessor.

Most of the improvements come from the silicon itself. Announced alongside a refreshed Mac mini in August, and fabbed on TSMC's 2nm process tech, the M6 features a refreshed CPU with 12 CPU and 12 GPU cores, and is now complemented by a dual 16-core Neural Engine (what Apple calls its NPUs) which promises better performance for the slew of Apple Intelligence features now baked into macOS Golden Gate.

The M6 MacBook Pro comes standard with 16 GB of unified memory, good for 153 GB/s of bandwidth. Memory can be specced up to 24 GB or 32 GB, boosting bandwidth to 170 GB/s for those with more demanding workloads or, as is more often the case, an aversion to closing Chrome tabs.

Compared to the outgoing M5, which for the moment is still available in the MacBook Air, Apple says the M6 delivers significant performance gains thanks to the addition of two more cores. In Xcode, Apple boasts up to 30 percent higher performance versus a similarly equipped M5 MacBook Pro.

The GPU enjoys similar gains in Blender ray tracing, local AI inference, and image processing, delivering 1.3x faster prompt processing and 1.3x faster rendering, and 1.2x faster performance in the Affinity creative suite.

Despite higher performance, Apple boasts the same 24-hour battery life as the outgoing M5 model. Pricing also remains unchanged. A 16 GB model with 1 TB of solid state storage will set you back $1,999.

One area of improvement not related to performance is connectivity. The M6 finally brings Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 connectivity to the 14-inch MacBook Pro.

The majority of these improvements also come to Apple's most colorful of all-in-one desktops: the iMac. Here the performance jump is even larger, owing to the fact the machine never got the M5. Apple claims 1.5x faster performance in productivity apps like Excel, 2x faster graphics performance and 5x faster in local AI.

Continuing the trend of better connectivity, along with Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6, certain iMac models also gain 2.5 Gbps Ethernet. As with the MacBook Pro, pricing remains unchanged, with iMacs starting at $1,499.

Both the M6 MacBook Pro and iMac are available for preorder starting tomorrow with availability beginning Friday, Nov. 6. ®

US data annotation operation Scale AI faces five GDPR complaints in four EU countries over allegations that it unlawfully monitors European contractors.

Privacy campaigner noyb alleges that Scale tracks contractors who perform data annotation work on its Outlier AI platform. Like workers on Amazon's Mechanical Turk platform of yore, Outlier contractors label data, evaluate AI-generated responses, and perform other tasks to improve AI models. Scale counts companies including OpenAI, xAI, Anthropic, and Google, as well as the US government, among its customers.

Scale AI faces allegations similar to those noyb has made against other US tech firms since the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) went into effect in 2018, namely violations of said regulation.

With all that work being done digitally and remotely, Scale has extensive data collection practices to not only verify the identity of Outlier workers, but also to extensively track their activity.

"Platform work seems to be fertile ground for a whole new type of workplace surveillance," said Thomas Le Bonniec, sociology researcher at French privacy research group DIPLab, who co-authored a report earlier this month examining Outlier's data collection practices. "This would be seen as unacceptable in any other form of employment in the European Union."

Among the issues that raised the hackles of noyb's lawyers was identity verification conducted by Persona, a company that has faced scrutiny over an exposed test environment associated with its efforts to secure US government business. Researchers speculated that the system could be used to build a people tracker, but Persona rejected that interpretation and denied having active US government contracts. Separately, Persona's relationship with chat app Discord soured ahead of the platform's broader age verification rollout, with Discord saying the provider failed to meet its requirements for on-device facial age estimation.

According to noyb, Persona collects biometric data to verify Outlier contractors are who they say they are, as well as gathering IP addresses, device info, geolocation data, addresses, and credit data of Outlier users.

In addition to the biometric identification data, noyb accuses Scale of tracking Outlier workers by collecting system data and device activity (including activity outside of Outlier work), and transmitting that to third parties including LinkedIn, TikTok, Facebook, and other analytics services as often as every few seconds. Noyb warns that the information could be used to profile individuals and serve targeted advertising.

"Such constant and extensive tracking while working really goes against all reasonable expectations," noyb data protection lawyer Lisa Steinfeld Leiser said of the allegations. "Why should LinkedIn or Facebook know which tasks you're working on?"

Noyb has filed complaints in France, Italy, the Netherlands, and Austria against Scale, arguing that it lacks a legal basis to install tracking software on contractors' devices. The US company also stands accused of violating GDPR rules on data minimization, which requires that companies only collect data that's strictly necessary for specific purposes. The complaints also assert Scale violated GDPR rights to data access after ignoring complainants' requests to access the records of what data Scale had stored on them, as well as country-specific laws in the nations where the complaints were filed.

Noyb is asking data protection authorities in those nations to conduct a full investigation and, if necessary, fine Scale for its alleged violations.

""The report's claims are unfounded and inaccurate," Scale told us after this article was first published. "Outlier's practices are disclosed to contributors and require their consent. We use standard tools to verify identities, prevent fraud, protect confidential project information, and ensure accurate payment."

The complaint is likely to give further fuel to the digital sovereignty movement sweeping the EU, which has begun to realize in the past couple of years that it may not be in the best interest of the bloc to be entirely beholden to US tech companies, even if such a separation may be painfully difficult. ®

Updated at 1730 UTC to include comment from Scale.

You wait decades for a Mac-like desktop for Linux, and then two of them come along at once. AI might be involved, but even so, it's still shiny.

ZacOS 9 and Mavernix are two very new, independent, and separate projects, but there is a common thread linking them: they are both brand new efforts to bring vintage Macintosh-like desktop environments to Linux. One is explicitly built using LLMs, and we suspect it was probably involved with the other as well.

"ZacOS" is just a couple of weeks old, and both to forestall what is becoming a very frequently asked question, and also to credit to its inventor Adam Lawson, the project's GitHub page acknowledges two of the more visible LLM coding assistances: both Claude and Copilot are there. In the Hacker News discussion, he acknowledged that he used LLM assistance to make the software, and even his online comments.

It aims to recreate the "Platinum" appearance of MacOS 8 and 9 - as we described last month, one of the few things that Apple successfully salvaged from the Copland project to build a true multitasking successor to MacOS 7.

ZacOS includes a window manager, a filer, a global menu bar, a Control Panel app, a Control Strip, desk accessories and other additional apps, and more. It can network with Macs, and integrate with the existing SheepShaver emulator to run classic Mac apps. We previously mentioned SheepShaver when looking at the remarkable MacOS9.app web-based emulator, and if you don't remember what it looked like, that's the easiest way to find out.

The Sourceforge downloads contain a complete pre-installed Debian Linux image. On Github, there are much smaller Debian packages if you want to try installing it yourself. It's an all-new environment, based on Wayland. (Its own icons are based on Lawson's dog, Zac.) As far as we can see, ZacOS doesn't draw on any older MacOS-like code.

That's slightly surprising, because this is not the first project of its kind that we have ever seen. Although ZacOS does look to be one of the more complete ones, there's quite a bit of prior art.

"Once upon a time, a very long time ago now, about last Friday," (as A. A. Milne put it, a century ago this month) - or at least, a few months before OpenAI launched ChatGPT - we mourned the lack of Linux desktop diversity. In that article, we linked to some projects that tried to bring a Mac-like UI to Linux.

That included Ryu Kojiro's classic-wm, which is a Mac System 6-styled window manager, and also Morgan Aldridge's mlvwm, which aims at the later grayscale MacOS 7 and MacOS 8 look. Although it targets the modern Unix-based macOS, we also mentioned Classic Mac Finder, which aims to recreate the older Finder on the modern OS.

A more modest but easier approach would start with one of the more versatile desktops out there. As we covered in our two-part workshop last month, that would be Xfce, which can already emulate the macOS desktop layout and with a few extra tweaks make a very usable alternative. We intentionally didn't look at themes and skins, but they do exist, and one of the most thorough is what "Grassmunk" did with the Platinum9 theme for Xubuntu. Although Windows 95 itself is long obsolete, the Chicago95 theme makes Xfce look remarkably like the classic OS, and Chicago's developers still actively maintain it.

There is a lot of nostalgia for the Classic MacOS look and feel out there, as websites such as MacOS 9 Lives! shows. However, there's also nostalgia for how Mac OS X used to look, as well. When we looked at how to Bring back your old Mac a year ago, we mentioned Mavericks Forever - a fan site for the last OS X version to have the "lickable" Aqua look.

Mavericks is notable because it was the first release of OS X that was available completely for free, as The Register reported in 2013. It's not easy to find today, but you can still download it.

We mention this because you will need a copy if you want to try the second new vintage Apple OS remake. It's called Mavernix, and for now, it's only available for Arch Linux.

Unlike ZacOS 9, Mavernix is built on top of existing software: its windows are drawn by the Wayfire compositor, and its panels by Quickshell. So, yes, this too is entirely Wayland-based.

The main novelty in Mavernix is that it contains a tool to extract and use the images, icons, textures, wallpapers and so on from a real copy of Apple OS X, so that it can draw a Mac-like desktop using real Mac resources. To use it, you need to have a copy of OS X to hand - which is why we point out where you can get one. The license agreement prohibits running it on non-Apple hardware, but since this does not require running it at all, we don't see any IP violations here.

Mavernix is by "Pruefsumme", who is also a YouTuber, and on their channel, they've uploaded a demo video of the desktop in use. We can't deny that it does look pretty.

How well it works, we can't say, but the Gershwin desktop that we reported on last year is still in active development and may provide a deeper, richer Mac-like UI in time. Its development is also LLM-assisted, but the majority of the tools are human-written code, much of it from the GNUstep project - which started in 1991, making it older than Xfce, KDE, GNOME, and around the same age as the Linux kernel itself. ®

The University of New Mexico is canceling classes across the medicine, nursing, and pharmacy faculties for a second day amid continued efforts to recover from a "cybersecurity event."

The attack targeted the Health Sciences Center on Monday, the Uni revealed, forcing it to shut down systems, cancel appointments and clinics at UNM Health hospitals, and divert ambulances to healthcare facilities in nearby Albuquerque and Santa Fe.

Hospital appointments and clinics return to normal today, although nonessential UNM Health Sciences Center staff are being asked to remain at home.

"The University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center (HSC), which includes the UNM Health clinical delivery system, experienced a cybersecurity event Monday, Oct. 26, 2026," the university said in a statement on Monday evening.

"HSC information technology security teams immediately took steps to contain the event and protect the network. They also notified state and federal law enforcement and engaged external partners to assist with the investigation.

"Leadership activated an Emergency Operations Center to coordinate the response and provide guidance to HSC employees, students, and UNM Health system frontline providers."

The university announced the attack at 1430 local time, immediately cancelling all remaining clinics and classes, dismissing everyone other than critical and clinical staff, and urging patients not to attend HSC facilities.

It has not commented on the nature of the cyberattack, although that hasn't stopped researchers from speculating about ransomware's involvement. Rumors were fuelled by the newly assembled BYOD ransomware group claiming responsibility for the attack on Monday afternoon.

It's important to note that just because a purported ransomware group took credit for the attack, it does not mean they actually were responsible, nor does it mean they deployed a ransomware/locker payload as part of the attack.

However, the group's take on the digital raid is that it compromised 36,000 machines, "both [Active Directory] forests," two Oracle databases, the personal data belonging to every student and employee, as well as internal emails and data from other systems.

As Reg readers know, a cybercriminal's word is never one to be trusted. Yet BYOD's claims about breaching Trump Mobile's customer database appear to have held up

It was a bold debut, even for a ransomware crew: BYOD's first named victim was the US president's smartphone biz, with data allegedly leaked for all 3,615 customers.

A rival group, EndZone, claimed a similar breach a week earlier, and some experts suggested the two could be one and the same.

In May, the Trump Mobile was found leaking thousands of people's data via a poorly secured website.

The Trump Organization did not respond to our requests for more information in either of these cases.

A UNM spokesperson declined to answer our additional questions, directing us back to its public statement. ®

Sometimes you've just got to roll with the punches. Microsoft chairman and CEO Satya Nadella was knocked down recently: his total compensation for the corporation's fiscal 2026 is 6 percent lighter than it was in the prior year.

The leader of the software and cloud biz pocketed $90.6 million, including a $2.5 million base salary, $77.6 million in stock awards, $10.3 million non-equity incentive plan compensation and $259,203 in all other compensation (chiefly security for personal travel, charitable gifts and pension contributions).

As Reg readers are no doubt be aware, stock vests at a different rate annually and in the latest full-year Nadella was awarded a lower figure, despite breezing through all of his financial and operational targets.

Revenue for Microsoft's fiscal 2026 ended June 30 was up 18 percent to $331.8 billion and operating profit was 18 percent higher - at $155.237 billion - than SatNad's $130.96 billion target. Together, these areas accounted for 70 percent of the bossman's remuneration goals. Operational assessment including security, strategic transformation and culture made up the rest.

The executive pay scale was outlined in the Notice of Annual Shareholder Meeting and Proxy Statement 2026.

Other highlights in that financial year included a 27 percent bounce in revenue generated by the Cloud division to $214.4 billion. Microsoft added 88 datacenters to its portfolio, and had 30 million paid Copilot seats.

"The scale of adoption reflects growing customer confidence in Microsoft's ability to deliver enterprise-ready AI capabilities integrated directly into existing workflows. Microsoft also delivered 625 Copilot updates during the year, reflecting its rapid pace of innovation and commitment to customer feedback," Microsoft claimed.

"Large-scale enterprise deployments accelerated across industries, with the number of customers deploying Copilot broadly across their organizations continuing to increase as Copilot evolved from an AI assistant into a platform for agentic work."

GitHub captured 225 million users - 50 million of these used Copilot, with one in three "pull requests involving an agent." Industry-specific AI services expanded, such as Dragon Copilot for healthcare, now used by "100,000 healthcare providers to help automate administrative and clinical workflows."

The rest of the C-suite's compensation went in the opposite direction to Nadella, and saw their packages increase, though they aren't nearly as well off as the CEO, who got the top job in 2014. CFO Amy Hood, was awarded $33.7 million, up from $29.5 million. The beancounting bigwig returned $43.8 billion to shareholders in the 12 months.

Judson Althoff, CEO of Microsoft's Commercial Business was awarded $33.4 million, and chief marketing officer Takeshi Numoto - the person that also works on product bundles - was awarded $15.7 million. President Brad Smith was compensated to the tune of $33 million.

Like we've said before, it's tough at the top. Nadella's pay was equivalent to the average pay ($215,057) of 420 Microsoft employees.

Still, the pressure of running one of the biggest organizations on the planet must be a big load to carry, especially when Microsoft is spending hundreds of billions on AI infrastructure and looking to find massive cost savings by erasing up to a quarter of the workforce.

The annual shareholder meeting is scheduled for December 8 when investors will get a chance to have their say on exec pay. 91 percent voted in favor last year so it seems unlikely any dissenting voices will be heard at the upcoming event. ®

The US government's cybersecurity watchdog has confirmed attackers are exploiting both critical PHP2Shell vulnerabilities, giving federal agencies three days to patch the bugs that have wreaked havoc across the web over the past week.

CISA added CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619 to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog on Monday, setting an October 29 deadline for federal civilian agencies to address the flaws. The move marks a shift from last week, when the agency warned of the danger posed by PHP2Shell but said it had not yet observed successful exploitation in the wild.

Both bugs are rated 9.2 on the CVSS scale and can be exploited without authentication to run code on vulnerable PHP servers. That's bad news given how much of the web still relies on PHP, and just how many sites could be left exposed.

Patches landed on October 21, but attackers had already beaten the maintainers to it. AWS spotted attempts to exploit the flaws as early as October 17, four days before the bugs were publicly disclosed.

CISA's confirmation comes amid growing evidence that attackers are doing more than simply knocking on the door.

On October 24, Perplexity security researcher Adel Karimi recorded 35 successful shell executions across three honeypots running PHP 8.4.26 under Apache mod_php. The attacks came from two IP addresses and used memory exhaustion and disclosure to achieve remote code execution.

The attackers then tried to contact external servers using PHP, curl, and wget, although no additional malware was successfully downloaded. Karimi's findings were consistent with exploitation of CVE-2026-109618, but he found no evidence that the second PHP2Shell flaw was involved. He also warned that the honeypots used a favorable single-worker configuration, so the results don't necessarily reflect how reliably the exploit works against production servers.

Still, attackers appear to be giving it a good go. Delft University's Threat Intelligence Lab has tracked more than 50,000 PHP2Shell exploitation requests from over 600 IP addresses across 70 countries. Of those, 171 addresses went beyond probing for vulnerable servers and started sending exploit code or malware droppers.

CISA's confirmation also comes after some of the earlier reports of successful PHP2Shell attacks turned out to be rather premature. Sophos walked back its initial assessment after determining that the activity it observed amounted to scanning and failed attempts, while Palo Alto Networks withdrew claims linking the vulnerabilities to an intrusion at a European government agency.

CISA has not disclosed which organizations have been compromised or provided details of the attacks behind its decision to add the flaws to KEV. The listing confirms that the agency considers both vulnerabilities actively exploited, but it does not confirm how many production systems have been successfully breached.

For federal agencies, the clock is now ticking. CISA is also urging organizations outside the federal government to prioritize the fixes, although the deadline does not apply to them.

Admins should update to PHP 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36, or 8.2.35, depending on their release branch. Those running older, unsupported versions face the added headache of upgrading or obtaining vendor-supported fixes, while systems that cannot be secured should be taken offline until the risk is addressed.

And with CISA now officially acknowledging exploitation, anyone still waiting for more proof before patching may be waiting a little too long. ®

Three-quarters of corporate board members expect AI to deliver productivity gains and cut costs, yet only three percent of organizations have hit their targets, according to researchers at Gartner.

The figures came out of the analyst's HR Symposium, where it also reported that 38 percent of companies are over budget on AI spending, and 85 percent still plan to spend even more next year.

"Ultimately, organizations will not generate cost savings from AI at this point," said CV Viverito, senior director analyst for Gartner's HR practice. "The greater opportunity is to use AI to do things that weren't possible before, such as shifting employee time into new capabilities, outcomes, and sources of growth."

Gartner claims that at least 75 percent of biz leaders are out of step with the broader organization on where AI creates value, which stalls transformation efforts and muddies how to position the workforce and bag those returns.

Organizations should concentrate AI on the work that matters most to the business, with HR helping execs to agree on the top bets based on strategy, Gartner advises. Companies should also spread existing AI expertise across the business rather than wait to hire scarce specialists, and give managers room to redesign the work around the technology, it adds.

Only about one in five employees' time is freed-up by AI, letting them redirect toward more innovative work, the HR Symposium heard.

"There isn't a struggle to create capacity, that's happening already as organizations redesign work," claimed Viverito. "What organizations are struggling with is how to make that capacity usable and redirecting it to what is valuable."

That starts - or so we're told - by giving employees the skills to take on higher-value, AI-enabled work, which, of course, means spending more on training.

The takeaway is that getting a return on AI projects is harder than expected, and companies are going to have to stick with it and be prepared to institute changes in the way they and their staff work before they see any tangible benefits.

A recent Forrester report concluded that AI will likely account for 20 percent of all business technology spend next year, yet more than half of CIOs are likely to miss their ROI targets for the technology

Another piece of research from KPMG earlier this year found that most UK business leaders aim to keep AI at the top of their spending priorities even if it isn't working, with 65 percent planning to maintain investment whether they see immediate measurable returns or not.

How long that resolve lasts is an open question. Private equity giant Apollo Global Management is the latest to raise doubts, noting this week that the "Magnificent Seven" tech giants are reaping the rewards of all that AI spending, while the rest of the S&P 500 has seen no sign of AI boosting productivity growth. ®

Apple has confirmed problems with the folding screen on its flagship iPhone Duo after reports of misbehaving displays spread among its customer base.

A company spokesperson told The Register, "We are aware of an issue impacting the inner display on a small number of iPhone Duo units."

"If users experience issues with their iPhone Duo display, they should contact AppleCare for a replacement."

That's the least the company can do. A borked screen on a brand-new device is something any customer would expect the warranty to cover.

The iPhone Duo went on sale last week and sold out almost immediately as loyalists rushed to hand over cash for Apple's foldable device. UK shoppers can expect to pay from £1,999 to £3,199 for the Duo, depending on configuration.

Complaints soon surfaced on social media, with a small number of customers reporting horizontal lines on their screens, and a crunching noise from the hinge. Some reports were undoubtedly the work of AI images, though iFixit speculated in a weekend teardown that dust ingress could be interfering with the complex hinge mechanism and stressing the screen.

Apple is far from the only foldable maker to stumble over production creases in its foldable phone hardware. Samsung's Galaxy Fold was delayed in 2019 after reports of dust creeping under the screen and borked displays, prompting swift design tweaks.

Francisco Jeronimo, veep of Worldwide Devices at IDC, said: "The early reports of inner display failures on the iPhone Duo show that even a company with Apple's engineering resources and supply chain discipline faces a steep learning curve in foldables."

Jermonimo noted Apple had not yet shared any figures or the scale of the problems. "Some of the images circulating online are recycled or altered, so caution is needed before drawing conclusions about the whole production run."

However, Samsung's "fast and transparent response" limited damage to the category, he added, and how Apple, "handles this first-generation issue will shape buyer confidence in the category well beyond its own sales."

Apple's statement to The Register indicates taking the problem seriously, and it will be eager to avoid a repeat of the iPhone 4, which was marred by the infamous "you're holding it wrong" furor.

With the iPhone Duo, the last thing Apple wants is to be accused of telling customers "you're folding it wrong." ®

Nobody sets out to build file infrastructure that makes employees less productive. Yet sensible technology decisions made years ago can leave organizations wrestling with systems that no longer suit how their teams work.

Take network-attached storage (NAS). It has long provided a dependable way to store and access files. But what happens when the people using those files are no longer sitting in the same building, or even the same country?

A project team can spend its morning waiting for a multi-gigabyte file to transfer over a VPN, then lose more time checking whether the copy they received is the latest. No single delay attracts much attention. Repeat that across projects and the cost starts to add up.

When shared access becomes difficult, employees find workarounds. They download local copies, duplicate folders, and transfer files between systems to keep projects moving.

Now imagine an architecture firm sharing a large building model between design offices. One team updates its copy while another works from yesterday's export. Before anyone can move forward, someone has to reconcile the differences. That's time spent managing files rather than designing the building.

Duplicated data consumes storage capacity and complicates oversight. Meanwhile, IT must keep legacy infrastructure running while addressing performance, cost, security, and governance requirements.

Replacing every storage system is rarely a practical first move. Organizations have invested in infrastructure, access controls, and established processes. The sharper question is whether the way people access and collaborate on files needs to change.

The right starting point depends on which workflows create the most friction. Leaders need to identify the costs hidden in file transfers, local copies, and avoidable rework before choosing how to modernize.

Those are the issues The Register and LucidLink will put on the table at an invitation-only executive dinner in London on Tuesday, November 24. Moderated by The Register's Joe Fay, the roundtable will examine modernizing file infrastructure while protecting existing storage and governance investments.

It's a chance to compare practical experience with peers who have faced the same uncomfortable question: when does a familiar system start holding the business back?

Request your place at the November 24 dinner

Sponsored by LucidLink.

Microsoft has released another out-of-band update for Windows, but this one isn't an emergency fix for the latest breakages. This time, it's all about certificates.

The non-security out-of-band release applies to supported OSes ranging from Windows 11 and Windows Server 2025, to Windows 10. It's all about updating the current certificate trust list (CTL) of devices that cannot access Microsoft's certificate-update service, or where automatic CTL updates are disabled.

It also contains everything in the October 13 update, including the ongoing VPN issues and the change that could break on-premises Exchange Servers.

There might also be oddities with Smart App Control, audio, and Remote Desktop connections for non-admin users, all of which are known issues in the October 13 update.

These problems are not resolved in this patch, so be aware of this when installing it.

It is also worth remembering that many devices will not need this version since the current certificate list updates usually come down through the update service. However, if that service isn't available or being used, it might be a good idea to get this out-of-band fix (while keeping the known issues in mind), since problems can occur when verifying certificates used by applications or websites.

The OOB update came after Microsoft laid out its response to the compromised eMudhra certificate keys. The Indian certification authority's private keys were compromised earlier this month, requiring a massive cleanup effort. According to Microsoft, "they could potentially be used to create certificates or sign content that appeared to come from a trusted CA [certificate authority]."

Like many other organizations, Microsoft moved swiftly to block the affected certificate authorities. It did so by updating its Windows Disallowed Certificate Trust List to block the affected certificates. There was also a separate CRLSet release for Edge and WebView2.

According to the Windows behemoth, "On October 26, Microsoft released an out-of-band Windows update that removes seven certificates associated with the affected hierarchies: six eMudhra G3 roots and an AAA Certificate Services cross-sign, from the Windows trust list."

Microsoft's out-of-band patches are usually released after the company breaks a product and needs to issue an emergency fix. This time, the revision is due to Somebody Else's Problem and a need to get a CTL update out to devices that are disconnected from CTL updates. ®

The cyberattack on Alternative for Germany (AfD), the country's most prominent far-right political party, exposed hundreds of thousands of confidential emails and attachments, as well as more than 345,000 unique email addresses.

Have I Been Pwned confirmed the scale of the breach for the first time today, after AfD officially disclosed the September attack on its hosting provider last week.

AfD said in its statement that "only a few email accounts were illegally copied," but admitted a large amount of the data was taken from them, resulting in an extensive data breach.

The emails were added to what the party described as "an activist website," which summarised the email chains into searchable topics and has led to the publication of various revelations, such as a party co-leader's opinions on colleagues' "deeply problematic" racial discourse.

Per a report from investigative journalist Lilith Wittmann, citing conversations with the cybercriminals responsible for the hack-and-leak job and party sources, the attack was first spotted on September 9 and started with a compromise of a poorly protected WordPress site.

The same report claimed the criminals gained persistent access to the servers operated by the hosting provider, identified as AfD-owned Alternita Dienstleistungs GmbH, and exfiltrated more than a terabyte of data.

No official sources have verified the hackers' claims about how the attack unfolded. The Register contacted Alternita Dienstleistungs for its take.

AfD said the owners of the affected email accounts have been notified, and that it reported the attack to security authorities.

"We are deeply concerned by what has happened," the party said in an October 20 statement. "Such a digital attack is illegal and a criminal offense. Furthermore, it is an attack on the German party system and thus on democracy.

"We are extremely worried that, apparently, the content of the stolen documents was analyzed using a very rudimentary AI. This analysis focused on keywords, not the context. The alleged scandals published so far do not stand up to scrutiny - a fact that, thankfully, is being confirmed by a growing number of commentators on social media."

Among the AI-generated summaries compiled by the "activist site" are chains supposedly expressing views related to Holocaust denial, racist and antisemitic rants, the 9/11 disaster, forged documents, and more.

Der Spiegel sifted through the raw files and reported that party leader Alice Weidel seemingly knew about illegal donations related to the 2017 federal elections weeks before she previously said she did.

The AfD's position is that the AI summaries of the emails are not to be trusted, but it has not specifically commented on the veracity of the raw email files available for download via torrent.

It did not immediately respond to our request for input, but has told reporters previously that it will not comment on whether the emails, or the stories that have been written based on them, are to be trusted. ®

The British government has been busy courting AI datacenter companies while apparently finding little time to speak to the people who will have to live next door to their enormous server farms.

That's according to a report published Tuesday by campaign group Spotlight on Corruption, which found that 84 percent of the stakeholders ministers met with to discuss datacenters between July 2024 and June 2026 were businesses or private-sector trade associations. Environmental groups, by contrast, didn't get a single meeting with ministers or senior officials.

The findings raise questions about who gets a say in Britain's AI Growth Zones, which the government hopes will attract billions of pounds in investment by making it easier and cheaper to build the infrastructure needed to power its AI ambitions.

According to the report, titled Zoned Out, ministers met representatives from 137 different businesses during the two-year period, while permanent secretaries and directors general held no meetings with community groups about datacenters.

Local residents didn't fare much better. Ministers met just two community groups, both after decisions had already been made to designate their areas as AI Growth Zones. In one case, the meeting took place on the very day the designation was announced.

The government also failed to conduct a national public consultation on its AI Growth Zone strategy, despite the potential consequences for electricity supplies, water consumption, and local communities. Spotlight found no independent consultations with residents in the selected areas, although some developers conducted their own.

Even local councils appear to have struggled to get a hearing. Of the ten local authorities and devolved governments affected by the five announced zones, half reported no communication with ministers or senior DSIT officials beyond their applications. Two had exchanged brief emails, while another secured a 15-minute meeting with a junior minister.

The government has been more accommodating to the companies building these facilities. AI Growth Zones offer developers faster planning decisions and better access to electricity infrastructure, with the aim of rapidly expanding Britain's computing capacity.

As we reported in March, the government has also been consulting on proposals that could allow strategically important datacenters to jump the electricity grid connection queue, potentially ahead of housing developments already waiting for power.

So while datacenter developers could soon find themselves jumping the grid connection queue, the people living near these facilities have had little say in the government's plans.

Spotlight also takes aim at the government's AI Energy Council, which includes representatives from Microsoft, Google, and Amazon Web Services but no environmental NGOs. Its Sustainability Working Group, established to examine the environmental impact of AI, managed just one meeting between April 2025 and July 2026.

Concerns also remain about who is influencing policy from outside government. Spotlight identified 38 appointments of former ministers and senior civil servants by AI companies between July 2024 and September 2026, including nine people who previously worked at DSIT.

Spotlight reckons Whitehall's transparency rules could make the picture even murkier. While ministers have to declare their meetings, unpaid advisers don't face the same requirements, even when they're helping shape government AI policy. So there's no way of knowing exactly who has been bending whose ear.

The campaign group wants the government to hit pause on new AI Growth Zones and datacenters until it tightens the rules on public consultation and forces developers to be more upfront about how much electricity and water their facilities will guzzle, and the emissions they'll produce.

The campaign group argues that Britain is falling behind countries including Germany, Canada, and Ireland, which have conducted national consultations on their datacenter strategies.

For a government determined to turn Britain into an AI powerhouse, there's clearly no shortage of companies willing to help build the infrastructure. But finding room at the table for the people expected to live alongside it seems like another matter. ®

Omarchy has already taken up plenty of our column inches, but a new tentacle is reaching into the hitherto untouched FreeBSD.

Daemonarchy brings Omarchy's Wayland-based desktop to the BSD world. It's an independent effort by Jordan Hubbard, one of the original founders of the FreeBSD project, and it's unaffiliated with the original Linux-based Omarchy.

We looked at Omarchy in August and didn't like it much. It isn't exactly a Linux distribution. That implies it's a coherent set of packages managed as a whole by uniform tools. Omarchy is a collection of apps and preconfigured settings, packaged up with the help of LLM bots and put up for download. You have to update it using its own special script, rather than the standard tools of the underlying Arch Linux - and in our testing, that update script fell over with error messages when running in a VM.

However, there's no such thing as a bad press, and Omarchy is popular and growing. It keeps on attracting sponsorship as well as new users migrating from Windows and macOS, who seem to relish its bizarre, inconsistent, and ad hoc UI as a challenge: trying to close a window in Hyprland, the tiling compositor that forms the core of Omarchy's UI. In Omarchy, windows don't have title bars, let alone anything as old-fashioned as window control buttons you can click. To close a window, you must use a keystroke. In most Linux windowing environments, that's the standard Alt-F4. Not here. Next, we tried Super+W - on a Mac, that's Command+W, which has meant "close the window" since 1984 or so. Still no. We found an answer on Reddit - it's Super + C.

Daemonarchy is not directly related. It's a collection of FreeBSD ports of the various tools and components that went into Omarchy, individually adapted to run on FreeBSD, and collected together into an installable ISO image. The current release is version 1.3.1.

Remarkably, in approximately 10 days, Daemonarchy has gone through 10 releases. Multiple packages are recent ports by jkh@freebsd.org - the email address of Jordan Hubbard. If the name rings a bell, he was one of the original founders of the FreeBSD project, and has had an interesting career in which he's worked at various companies.

The Register first mentioned him by name 25 years ago, when Wind River bought BSD/OS vendors BSDi. By the following year, Hubbard was at Apple, where he helped freshen up the BSD-based Unix layer underneath the new Mac OS X. In 2015, he helped launch the NextBSD project to modernize FreeBSD with Apple Darwin components, which as we reported in July was recently restarted.

The new NextBSD effort is being built with the help of LLM coding assistants. As you might surmise from 18 new FreeBSD ports of Linux tools in a month, as well as from ten releases of the new OS bundle in as many days, Hubbard too is using LLMs to assist in this rapid development process: Daemonarchy's GitHub repository contains both AGENTS.md and SKILL.md files, which point to Hubbard's own Literate AI project, whose repo describes it as a "A meta-harness for coding agents to follow proper Software Development Lifecycle practices", and says it is "Based on literate programming ideas from Donald Knuth".

There's quite a bit of documentation, including a project specification with a list of goals. Lots of formatted Markdown text is also something of an LLM bot hallmark, though, and it's not clear to us if this is intended for humans to read, or to guide the bots. Possibly, it's both.

It looks like the germ of inspiration was a LinkedIn post by UK IT consultant Sam Sheridan, in which he criticized the difficulty of configuring a new installation of FreeBSD 15.1 with an Nvidia card. He's right: we have written about how much work is involved ourselves. Sheridan's LinkedIn post provoked a comment from Ralph Kepper saying "I'm just gonna say it… omarchy for FreeBSD, its the ugly truth and no one likes it but there it is. omarchy will get us the youngsters and if we do it right we will inspire some great minds along the way". Hubbard had already commented in the thread, and it looks to us like that passing comment has prompted (if you will forgive us the obvious pun) this effort.

Daemonarchy is based on FreeBSD CURRENT, which means that it's built on top of what will become FreeBSD 16 - planned for December 2027. The intrepid can get run it now, though. Currently it targets the MacBookPro16,1, meaning the 2019 models of the 16-inch MacBook Pro - one of the final generations of Intel-based MacBooks. A couple of years ago, the Reg FOSS desk attended EuroBSDCon and we met several core project members. Apparently, running the development work-in-progress CURRENT branch is quite normal for hardcore FreeBSD types. If you need to ask how to get it or run it, then this is not the version of FreeBSD for you.

We do not personally like Omarchy much. We don't much like the visual design, or the choice of components - and we really didn't get on with the user interface. As mentioned, there are already established keyboard UIs for both macOS and MS Windows, and we're adept and comfortable with both. As Linux is an OS designed and built on the x86 PC platform, we feel that it should stick to the established Common User Access UI. Its core elements débuted in Windows 1.0, 41 years ago. It's quite a bit older than Linux itself, and led to widespread UI standardization across DOS, OS/2, all subsequent versions of Windows, and more or less all Linux GUIs… at least until the recent rash of Wayland compositors from young hackers who don't know how to drive windows efficiently. We are not saying it can't be improved upon, but re-inventing this particular wheel strikes us as a worked example of XKCD 927.

However, Kepper has a point: Omarchy is trendy, and a FreeBSD version - freed of the direct influence of its controversial creator - might win FreeBSD some new fans. Even if not, the Daemonarchy project could have wider impact.

For one thing, the effort could help the creation of an easy, graphical FreeBSD installer and a friendly desktop version. It's also very relevant to the ongoing debate about the use of AI coding assistants in the FreeBSD project. We mentioned this in September 2025 and there's been no public announcement of a decision yet.

In that article, we highlighted Sylve. The project GitHub describes this as a "lightweight GUI for managing Bhyve, Jails, ZFS, networking, and more on FreeBSD", but the project has even wider ambitions than that. The developers recently shared a video of their new graphical installer for FreeBSD, and we think it looks very good indeed.

We are less keen on the other impact that Daemonarchy seems likely to have. With the FreeBSD project's co-founder busily committing code to the project repositories that he is porting and developing with the assistance of Claude, then it seems highly unlikely that the core team will respond by banning AI contributions. ®

Our thanks to Register reader Graham Perrin for drawing our attention to Daemonarchy - and the thread that inspired it.

2026 might not be the Year of Linux on the Desktop, but it is certainly the Year of Linux on the Beachfront, judging by some digital signage at the Spanish resort of Lloret de Mar.

Snapped by Rich Skuse, an aficionado of automotive shonk, this sign skips the town's attractions or useful information entirely. Instead, it gives away its Ubuntu and Firefox roots with an update prompt and a perky "Welcome back," suggesting someone has turned it off and on again.

As this signage is likely connected to the Internet, that Ubuntu update is probably a good idea. 26.04.1 is the latest LTS version and contains a raft of tweaks and improvements. Sadly, we expect beachgoers are probably more interested in sun, sand, and sangria than in keeping a Linux installation in tip-top shape.

The sign is a recent addition to the Passeig d'Agustí Font. Behind the photographer stand palm trees, with a beach and the azure waters of the Mediterranean Sea beyond.

Lloret de Mar underwent several renovations ahead of the 2026 summer season, and we guess the sign was one of them, since it wasn't there in April 2025 (according to a well-known ad slinger). According to Lloret Gaceta, a publication for the region, "The goal is to continue evolving into a more modern, sustainable, accessible, and higher-quality tourist destination, adapted to the new demands of residents and visitors."

Readers might be interested to learn that part of this evolution includes a ban on selling alcoholic beverages in containers larger than one liter at beach bars.

A few too many adult drinks could explain the configuration that led to this bork, or perhaps an engineer took one look outside, at another balmy day, and decided "that'll do" when it came to configuring the signage.

Either way, this is a tourist destination, and the last thing the average administrator wants to be reminded of on their vacation is the need to keep code up to date. As such, we suspect many will simply ignore the distressed digital display and instead seek out somewhere shady to sit, where the seafront can be admired, beverages consumed, and the bork…? Well, it's somebody else's problem. ®

For many members of the C-suite these days, sustainability is a top three agenda item alongside technology and AI adoption, according to research from Deloitte.

In fact, the report says, technology is considered a vital means of hitting organizational goals here, with the implementation of IT solutions being the most common approach for doing so.

The importance of tech's role in this context is reflected in the views of IT decision-makers themselves. A recent survey, conducted by Barco ClickShare, revealed that 96 percent of the 500 US tech leaders questioned consider their sustainability activities to make a significant and positive global contribution to strategy here.

A further 98 percent feel their departments should lead the way in such activities. Indeed, more than four out of five felt so strongly about the situation that they would turn down a job offer at a new employer if it did not have a strong sustainability track record, they said.

Yannic Laleeuwe is Marketing Director Workplace Collaboration at wireless conferencing and collaboration platform provider, Barco ClickShare.

She believes IT functions have this central role to play in tackling sustainability issues because many of their "day-to-day technology choices directly influence an organization's environmental footprint".

"Sustainability is about practical decisions: buying reliable technology, extending product life, reducing complexity, and ensuring devices can be managed, repaired and responsibly recycled," Laleeuwe explains.

But given that technology-related decisions are rarely made by IT leaders alone, it is clear they cannot tackle sustainability challenges alone either. As Barco ClickShare's report indicates, a mere 6 percent of IT departments are the sole decision-makers on tech investments, which includes meeting room systems.

This means that collaboration with other stakeholders is vital. Such stakeholders include not only sustainability and environmental affairs teams. They also consist of procurement, finance, facilities management, operations, and executive leaders.

"Working together, it's possible to balance security, usability, cost, lifecycle impact, energy efficiency, repairability and end-of-life recovery before a purchase is even made," Laleeuwe points out.

In other words, by collaborating, it becomes much easier to embed sustainability considerations into day-to-day activities. This includes maintaining and upgrading equipment properly to extend its life. It is these everyday IT decisions that can make all the difference in shaping behavior in the digital workplace.

One example of this relates to the procurement process itself, which is often complex. But top of the list on any sustainable shopping list should be ensuring that technology in general, but meeting room equipment in particular, is secure, reliable, and easy to integrate with other systems. This is important because if kit is not durable and interoperable, it will come up for replacement sooner rather than later.

But such an approach not only generates waste, it also necessitates purchasing new items. These tend to have a high carbon footprint due to the required extraction of raw materials and high energy usage during both manufacturing and transportation processes.

As for the key questions prospective buyers should be asking their suppliers upfront here, these include which methodologies their products are based on and what certifications they hold. Valid certifications in this context include TCO Certified's global sustainability for IT products marque and the US government's Energy Star symbol for energy efficiency.

In fact, sustainability certifications ranked joint second with cost as the most important factor when purchasing hardware, according to participants in Barco ClickShare's survey. They were topped only by security.

However, it is essential to ensure that certifications and carbon-neutral claims offer "transparency, not just reassurance", Laleeuwe warns. As such, "they should show how the product performs, which lifecycle stages are covered, how claims are validated, and what concrete design choices reduce impact," he says.

In other words, it is essential to understand whether suppliers have taken environmental factors into consideration across their entire product lifecycle. Such factors include product design, which should ideally be modular so that individual components can be repaired or replaced as required.

They also include which materials have been used in the manufacturing process and whether they are recyclable or at least have a low environmental footprint. The same rules apply to packaging.

Other essential considerations for IT leaders during the procurement process, meanwhile, include the energy consumption of their chosen conferencing and communication platform during usage.

Just as important is whether individual vendors offer take-back programs or other responsible disposal routes for products at end-of-life, such as repair and recycling. The aim here is to ensure that old equipment does not pollute the environment by ending up in landfill.

As Laleeuwe points out: "Prioritizing repair and recycling extends product life, avoids premature disposal and turns ESG [environmental, social, and governance] goals into repeatable IT practices."

Unfortunately, though, such activities tend to be all too frequently overlooked today. For example, Barco ClickShare's research reveals that only 42 percent of IT leaders currently select equipment that can be repaired by their manufacturer to extend its life. Even fewer (16 percent) rank repairability as a top concern.

The figures are even worse in terms of recycling (11 percent) being prioritized. Unsurprisingly then, just over a third of respondents indicated their department does not always go down this route.

A key problem here, says Laleeuwe, is that such activities are often simply "less visible at the initial point of purchase", which means they are rarely front of mind.

The problem with hybrid working

Another common challenge, meanwhile, relates to the ongoing shift towards hybrid and remote working.

But according to the Barco ClickShare report, some 95 percent of IT leaders believe such practices have had an impact on their organization's sustainability efforts, ultimately making them more complex. This is at least partially due to meeting room equipment now being spread across office, home, and flexible workspaces.

On the downside, this means it has become more difficult to manage and recycle e-waste from remote locations (48 percent). The growing use of personal devices has also made it trickier to ensure the adoption of energy-efficient hardware (46 percent).

But on the plus side, there has been an increase in uptake of more energy-efficient cloud services compared to on premise systems (63 percent of respondents). Even here though, things are not always clear cut.

As Laleeuwe explains: "IT teams need to look at the full setup: utilization, energy performance, device longevity, security, manageability and end-of-life recovery. The most sustainable choice is the one that delivers the required experience with the least avoidable footprint."

The benefits of standardization

One approach that does produce much more reliable results in sustainability terms though is standardizing equipment across the organization, especially in a meeting room system context.

In the past, individual business departments all too often purchased such kit without consulting IT, leading to the deployment of fragmented, siloed systems. But standardization has shown it can offer various benefits.

On the one hand, Laleeuwe explains: "It limits the number of device types, spare parts, support processes and replacement cycles IT has to manage, while making updates, remote management and lifecycle planning easier."

On the other, organizations can benefit from economies of scale - although to what extent depends on how much e-waste or energy usage they can cut based on the size of their IT estate, usage patterns, refresh cycles, and recycling processes.

A further benefit of standardization is that it provides organizations with "the control needed to measure, manage and reduce impact consistently", Laleeuwe adds.

What this demonstrates is that when ensuring sustainability goals are translated into day-to-day IT decision-making, routine choices matter. In other words, sustainability must become part of procurement requirements, implementation checklists, and lifecycle management as standard.

"That means setting shared criteria for certifications, energy efficiency, durability, repairability, recyclability, vendor take-back, and lifecycle reporting," Laleeuwe says. "It also means giving IT, procurement, facilities, finance and sustainability teams joint ownership of the process."

One organization that successfully embedded just this kind of approach into its workplace strategy is the Flemish Government. When renovating its Marie-Elisabeth Belpaire headquarters building in Brussels, Belgium, the Agency for Facility Operations took a multi-layered approach to sustainability.

For instance, the building itself became the first in Flanders to conform to circular construction practices. This included using 68 percent reclaimed, reused, or recycled materials from the original site in its renovation activities.

The building is also close to operating at net zero. This is partly due to its Thermal Energy Storage system, which captures and stores thermal energy for later use. It is also partly because of the introduction of solar panels on its roof and side walls.

But another key consideration in ensuring a sustainable headquarters was the widespread adoption of green ICT. This included the introduction of a hyper-efficient Wi-Fi network to help the Government save the equivalent of 550 households-worth of electricity each year.

Just as important was the standardization of the Government's meeting room technology using certified sustainable technology. To this end, more than 1,000 ClickShare wireless conferencing and collaboration devices were implemented in more than 1,000 different meeting spaces. The aim of standardizing equipment in this way was both to cut energy usage and the meeting room infrastructure's overall carbon footprint.

As Laleeuwe concludes: "The lesson is clear: sustainable meeting rooms work best when technology, workplace design, user experience and lifecycle management are all planned for together and implemented in tandem."

Sponsored by Barco

A supergroup of rights holders who own or control Elvis Presley songs have sued Anthropic for copyright infringement, alleging that the AI company stole The King's works to train its AI models.

"The Elvis Plaintiffs bring this action to enforce these exclusive rights against the Defendant that has built its entire business model based on copyright infringement at a scale never seen before," states a complaint [PDF] filed last Friday in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California.

Despite owning 274 Elvis songs, the titles of which offer many apt metaphors to illustrate the plaintiffs' grievances, the lawsuit uses a Shakesperean allusion.

"Defendant Anthropic has essentially put to the test the adage of whether monkeys and typewriters could, provided enough time, recreate Hamlet," the complaint states. "However, rather than wait out the 'infinite' amount of time the infinite monkey theorem posits is necessary for said monkeys with typewriters to randomly, one letter at a time, string together that famous question of 'To be or not to be?', Anthropic found a workaround."

"Rather than training its monkeys from first principles, Anthropic found mimicry (i.e. copyright infringement) to be the much easier pursuit."

The lawsuit uses riffs that will sound familiar to anyone who has followed the many allegations that AI companies hoovered up any content they could find to train their models:

• Fair use doctrines don't apply to all content used to train AI models;

• Anthropic should have known that some of the torrents and datasets it used for model training were either licensed (and therefore not freely usable), or stolen;

• The AI company should know it needs a license before allowing its Claude products to do things like produce the lyrics to Elvis songs when prompted to do so;

• Chatbots cost rights-holders money when users prompt them to produce create content "in the style of" artists whose works are subject to copyright.

The plaintiffs want damages and a slice of Anthropic's profits, or $150,000 per work. The latter values damages at $41.1 million.

Anthropic has reportedly vowed to defend the matter, but has already resolved a similar case in which it was accused of training its models on books without seeking or securing permission from the authors. The AI upstart created a $1.5 billion fund to compensate writers to make that one go away.

The plaintiffs note that Anthropic has billions of cash on hand and plans a mega-float (which it announced today) so can afford to indulge in A Little Less Conversation, Don't Be Cruel, stop being The Devil In Disguise, and Patch It Up by paying up. ®

IBM touts its Z series mainframes as the most reliable and cost-effective environments for certain workloads, but on Monday also acknowledged that the platform can drift towards hard-to-manage complexity that reduces resilience and therefore needs some help from AI.

Big Blue admitted that not all mainframe estates exist in a state of perfect bliss in a Statement of Direction for a forthcoming product called "IBM Z Atlas" that the document describes as "an AI-native solution that uses system intelligence to ground AI skills and agents in the context of key workflows like planning and validating changes or modernizing applications and infrastructure."

"It intends to map a client's entire z/OS stack across infrastructure, middleware, and applications, and then use that system intelligence to reduce the manual effort of tasks like patch management, regulatory response, and sharing knowledge across every team, from systems programmers to application developers."

Big Blue also hopes the tool helps mainframe techs and ops teams "better understand how components connect, interact, and depend on one another."

"IBM Z Atlas intends to eliminate the leading cause of unplanned z/OS outages - changes that aren't proven to be safe - by mapping how a change impacts the z/OS stack, testing it, and validating it," the Statement of Direction adds. "This design accelerates clients' modernization efforts by keeping experts in control and giving every practitioner, in operations or development, the same shared Z system visibility to reduce risk."

IBM reckons Z Atlas will help mainframe shops do four things:

• Understand systems and dependencies before making decisions or initiating changes

• Assess potential impacts, risks, and operational considerations

• Accelerate planning for modernization, deployment, and provisioning

• Provide trusted context for AI-native experiences and automation

While IBM clearly sees AI has a role in helping its customers to manage mainframes, it appears not to be going all-in on AIOps - the emerging practice of allowing agents to either keep tech infrastructure humming, or autonomously find issues and develop proposed fixes.

"IBM intends for AI-assisted insights and recommendations to preserve appropriate human review and decision authority," the Statement of Direction reads.

The multiple mentions of modernization caught your correspondent's eye, because IBM's many rivals often suggest the best way to modernize mainframes is by trashing them and moving the applications they run to another platform. In recent years, vendors have suggested using generative AI to rewrite mainframe apps in other languages, an idea that analyst firm Gartner thinks is highly overrated.

IBM clearly wants modernization to mean making mainframes easier to live with so that customers persist with the platform, a critical outcome as the company's revenue spikes when each new generation of Z-series machines hits the market. Indeed, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna last week said the current Z17 generation of mainframes has outsold all others by $1 billion.

That kind of result well and truly puts to bed the "death of the mainframe" narrative that, like next year becoming the Year of Linux on the Desktop, is a prediction that never goes away and never comes to fruition. With Z Atlas, IBM seems to be trying to ensure rumors of the mainframe's demise are even more exaggeratedly false. ®

Japanese ISP GMO Internet has warned customers the cloudy desktop service it offers as an ideal foreign exchange trading environment was compromised by an attacker, and that it had been slow to improve the service's security.

GMO runs a service called Onamae.com Desktop Cloud and last week admitted "a third party had installed malicious programs in the server environments of some customers." That's never welcome news but is an especially poor outcome because the servers host cloudy Windows desktops that GMO recommends customers use to host foreign exchange trading applications.

In later updates the company revealed that some customers reported "unauthorized operations were performed on their trading accounts" and advised that third parties had probably seen users' passwords for trading services.

The next day, the company advised users to immediately change passwords for their trading accounts, and to do so using a device that they don't use for trading.

The company has since admitted that its Onamae.com Desktop Cloud service's "systems had security vulnerabilities, that its environment was accessed without authorization, and that customer information was taken outside the Company."

"Some customers have also reported transactions in their trading accounts that they do not recognize."

Those transactions have GMO sufficiently worried that it contacted major trading services, asked them to forcibly terminate all active sessions, monitor for unauthorized transactions, and to block trade requests coming from the Onamae.com Desktop Cloud.

GMO said it has "received a demand for money from a person believed to be the attacker. We have also been told that, if we refuse, the attacker will take actions such as publishing information about the Company and our customers."

The attacker wants $50 million.

The company won't pay because it feels "complying would not guarantee that the obtained information is deleted or that its misuse is prevented."

Investigations into the incident continue, with GMO warning that 26,739 VDI servers may have been hit by the attack, and that users' personal devices may be at risk.

The company is offering all users a ¥5,000 ($32) condolence payment and promised to make good on any trading losses caused by the attack.

This incident may have quite a blast radius, as GMO has warned that some trading apps may keep sessions alive even after passwords change. "Check your securities or FX company's guidance or your account page, and either disconnect all active sessions or ask the company's support desk to disconnect them," GMO advised.

That ¥5,000 isn't going to get anywhere near paying for the work customers will do to sort this out.

GMO CEO Masatoshi Kumagai acknowledged that in a blog post in which he described the payment as "a token of our initial sincerity towards our customers who have experienced inconvenience and worry."

"We will dedicate the full resources of our group to providing a free alternative environment for six months, fundamentally overhauling our system infrastructure, and conducting a thorough investigation into the cause and preventing recurrence with the help of external experts," he added.

But he also admitted that GMO knew the service's security could be improved.

"Our in-house white-hat hackers had previously pointed out areas for improvement to the team," he wrote. "The team took these points to heart and was working on countermeasures."

"However, while we proceeded cautiously, considering the impact on service availability and prioritizing other issues, our response lacked sufficient depth and speed, allowing the attackers to exploit the vulnerability. I deeply regret that, despite having professionals on staff, we failed to fully translate their expertise into effective defenses as an organization."

The CEO also said GMO can't secure itself without government help.

"I've been involved in this world for 31 years, since the dawn of the internet industry," he wrote. "The cyberspace that I built with my colleagues, believing it would bring smiles to people's faces, is now on the verge of being completely destroyed by malicious actors."

"The ease with which open weight AI models can be combined and spread into countless attack tools has transformed cyberattacks, which once required advanced skills, into an era where anyone can easily carry them out," he added, before claiming that GMO Group's cybersecurity operation "has confirmed that the source of an unauthorized access attack targeting approximately 20 Japanese companies was the misuse of 'ARTEX,' an autonomous AI penetration testing tool originally intended for defense."

Kumagai thinks public/private partnerships are needed to improve infosec across Japan.

"Yesterday, we submitted a proposal to the government to 'apply proactive cyber defense,'" he wrote.

"We are by no means trying to shift the blame for our company's actions onto the government and beg for a bailout," he wrote, but argued that unless Japan implements national-level defenses, more such incidents are unavoidable. ®

Anthropic's IPO filing dropped on Monday morning, and the prospectus reads like a real estate agent desperately trying to sell a house of cards as an investment property:

The upsides are enormous. There are just a few disclosures you should be aware of. Sure, the foundation is cracked; it's in a flood plain, and you can only really afford it if you land that promotion, but there's a non-zero chance it'll work out eventually, and just look at the views.

Every S1's risk factors read a bit like a doomsday prophecy. Anthropic, like any other company that's going to trade on public markets, has to cover its butt. It doesn't change the fact that the company's success is built on a gamble that its revenues will grow fast enough to keep up with its rampant compute spend, for which its obligations now exceed half a trillion dollars over the next decade or so.

Going off the S1 filing's numbers, things don't look that bad for the Claudefather at first blush. Revenues in the first half of 2026 outpaced compute and infrastructure costs by nearly 2:1 and operating losses were a relatively paltry $693 million, compared with $2.14 billion in the first half of last year. The company is still burning money, but things are finally headed in the right direction.

Or, they would be if the company's compute spend were forecast to plateau over the next few years. That's very much not the case.

"Our ability to develop, train, improve, and deploy frontier models depends on our access to enormous and increasing quantities of specialized compute," the prospectus reads.

The continued development of Anthropic's models hinges on ever larger quantities of compute. Anthropic hasn't put a firm number on its compute commitments involving large cloud providers, neoclouds, and equipment providers, but the company's obligations over the next few years could be north of $800 billion, depending on how you wrangle the numbers.

According to the S-1, Anthropic entered into new or amended compute and infrastructure agreements after December 31, 2025, carrying roughly $417 billion in future minimum payment obligations. Since June 30, 2026, the company has entered into further new or amended agreements carrying approximately $245 billion in future minimum payment obligations, some of which are subject to contractual conditions.

But if you add up all the contracts listed, the total is even higher.

• Microsoft: "at least $44.9B" — 2026-2033

• Google: "at least $114.5B" — 2026-2033

• TPUs from Google and other providers: "approximately $125B to $150B"— 2028-2031

• Amazon: "at least $110B" — 2026-2036

• SpaceXAI: "up to $120.5B" — 2026-2029

• AMD: "to exceed" $20B — initial tranche starting in 2027

• Nscale: "up to approximately $44.6B" — through 2033

• Lambda: "approximately $41.3B" — through 2034

• Broadcom: "approximately $161.2B" — starting in 2026

That's a total obligation between $782 billion and $807 billion, though some aren't as airtight as others. According to the S1, Anthropic's deals with Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Broadcom are non-cancellable. In fact, the contracts with Microsoft, Google, and Amazon dictate payment regardless of usage.

Similarly, Anthropic's only way out of its contracts with Nscale and Lambda, which extend through 2033 and 2034 respectively, is if they fail to deliver on their commitments on time or breach them.

Anthropic does have some flexibility with regard to its widely reported collab with Elon Musk's SpaceXAI to lease capacity of its Colossus supercomputer in Memphis. The deal, worth roughly $120 billion through 2029, can be canceled with just 90 days' notice by either party beginning in early 2027. Meanwhile, Anthropic's agreement with AMD is expected to cost more than $20 billion for the initial tranche of compute capacity, provided it procures the full amount, but this can be satisfied by leasing capacity from the likes of Microsoft.

And while the timetable for Anthropic to meet those obligations remains unclear — several fields relevant to this remain blank at this time — it's safe to say the company's growth trajectory will need to be astronomical to keep up with its rampant spending, let alone ever turn a profit.

This spend is all predicated on the idea that more compute equals better, more desirable models that will grow the customer base and support higher-margin products, which is why the company is telling investors now that it's going to keep signing and amending compute contracts. At this rate, we wouldn't be surprised if the model dev's obligations through 2040 exceeded a trillion dollars before year's end.

Whether Anthropic will ever actually make good on those commitments is another matter entirely. "Our ability to meet the substantial and growing financial obligations of these requirements to secure compute depends on our ability to generate significant revenue growth," the filing reads.

If Anthropic's revenues can't keep up with its compute commitments, it could end up defaulting, which it notes could result in a cascade that takes the entire house of cards down with it.

Anthropic does have some backstops should it run into trouble paying its bills on its own. For example, "we have the ability to issue, if needed, up to $42.0 billion in aggregate principal amount of convertible promissory notes to Broadcom," the company's S1 notes. However, this only applies to Anthropic's commitments to Broadcom.

The company could also turn to equity or debt financing to pay its other debts. But if it can't make revenue targets, the company warns that doing so risks diluting shares and/or taking on additional debt on unfavorable terms.

Worse, Anthropic's biggest compute providers are not only some of its biggest customers, but also its biggest competitors. We're talking major cloud providers like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, which are far larger and actually profitable.

This poses a different problem for Anthropic. Cloud providers are convenient because Anthropic doesn't have to pay for the compute up front. But if the company can't get adequate compute from Google, Amazon, or Microsoft because they're using it for training or running their own or someone else's models, they may need to look at alternative options, including building out their own infrastructure.

"We may in the future finance a greater portion of our compute on an up-front basis, including through capital leases, prepayments, debt-financed purchases of equipment, or similar arrangements," the company explained.

In fact, to some degree Anthropic is already doing this through its lease deal with Broadcom. This appears to be tied to Google and Broadcom's collaboration with Anthropic to provide TPU-based compute earlier this year. Meta was also reportedly in talks to deploy Google TPUs in its own datacenters so the arrangement wouldn't be that unusual.

And then of course there are external threats, like conflict in the South China Sea severing supply chains for the vast majority of AI accelerators.

The only way to justify this kind of spend and risk is if you believe the upside is enormous. Like, the biggest economic transformation in the history of humankind.

As Anthropic puts it: "We believe this abundance of AI will rapidly transform every sector of the global economy in ways greater than the impact of industrialization, electricity, semiconductors, and the internet." ®

OpenAI has added a mid-range model to its GPT-6.1 family, offering strong performance at a lower price.

The AI business' general-purpose models span four tiers. Products named "Sol" or "Astra" are its high-end offerings and come with price tags to match. "Luna" models are its cheapest offerings. This new model gets the "Terra" treatment the company reserves for mid-range models.

"Terra continues to advance the cost-intelligence frontier across our model families, providing a new balance of speed, capability, and cost," OpenAI said. "Its standard API prices are 50 percent lower than those of GPT-5.6 Terra and GPT-6.1 Sol, making it practical for developers to automate high-volume work, like reading incoming invoices and entering their details into accounting software."

Artificial Analysis, a site that tracks model performance and cost, notes that GPT-6.1 Terra pushes the cost efficiency frontier. "It is the first Terra-class model since GPT-5.6, and is more intelligent for less than a third of the cost," the site says.

GPT-6 Luna ($0.10/M input tokens, $0.50/M output) occupies the lowest tier of OpenAI's model lineup in terms of cost and capability, followed by GPT-6.1 Terra ($1/M, $5/M), GPT-6.1 Sol ($2/M, $10/M), and GPT-6 Astra ($10/M, $50/M).

In a comment posted to Hacker News, Ted Sanders, a member of technical staff at OpenAI, framed the differences between the various GPT-6.1 models thus: "In the case of GPT-6.1 Terra, I'd say Terra is probably better than Astra and Sol at technical communication, similar on vision and computer use (but much faster!), and a bit worse on most other things. For API developers, it's a nice midrange option if you want something cheaper than Sol but a lot smarter than Luna (especially for vision/computer use/communication)."

"For subscribers, it's not a bombshell release - if you're hitting usage limits, maybe it helps you go a bit further, and if you want clearer communication or faster computer use, it can be a nice option to select."

Terra's knowledge cutoff date, June 1, 2026, means it is the most up-to-date of its model family. Perhaps that counts for something if you're asking questions about events after April 30, 2026 - the training data cutoff for Astra and Sol.

In terms of model safety, Terra handles harmful requests a bit less frequently than GPT-6.1 Sol but also avoids unnecessary refusals more often than its more capable sibling.

But as noted by Max Woolf, a data scientist, in a recent blog post, the real story here is the economics of AI models. Despite the widespread expectation that OpenAI and Anthropic will have to raise the cost of AI inference (or reduce the value provided via subscription) to bring revenue closer to the extravagant sums these companies are spending on model training, inference, and infrastructure, he notes that prices keep coming down and model performance keeps going up.

"The idea that token prices will suddenly rise is more a fantasy that is not supported by both behavioral economics and the actual trends of LLM prices going down significantly over the last few months for better models, and not just from OpenAI and Anthropic," he observes. "As long as scalers can price at a cost-per-token lower than the revenue-per-token, then those inference providers will reduce token costs to compete with each other to a point that OpenAI/Anthropic will have to lower their prices to compete too."

As to whether these price trends suggest that AI companies have a sustainable business, investors may soon be able to make that bet on the Nasdaq exchange after Anthropic floats. ®

A new Miasma-family npm worm, originally believed to be just a test with no victims, secretly armed 42 real GitHub repositories from 11 owners, hijacking accounts as early as July and using a stealthy payload built to stay hidden from GitHub and automated scanners, according to JFrog researchers.

Threat hunters at SafeDep, an open source supply chain security firm, first spotted the "testmetest" npm campaign last week, identifying 18 packages linked to the same operator between October 19 and October 25, including releases containing credential-stealing malware. As with earlier npm worms, the malware is self-replicating, steals credentials, and installs a wiper that deletes the home directory when the victim revokes the stolen GitHub token, the security researchers noted.

The new npm worm shares code with June's Miasma Phantom Gyp worm, and adds Mini Shai-Hulud's token-revocation wiper.

As of October 22, however, SafeDep had found no compromised third-party packages or victims. "All observed activity belongs to the operator's own test accounts," the team wrote.

As with most happy-ending security stories, that proved too good to be true.

In a Monday report, supply chain security company JFrog said its analysis proved otherwise, and found the testmetest campaign operator "had already armed real repositories belonging to established developers and organizations."

This isn't just about timing, either, according to JFrog researchers Guy Korolevski and Yair Benamou. "The payload blobs were large enough to evade the GitHub search and API paths normally used to find this kind of compromise," they wrote.

The attackers planted execution hooks for AI coding assistants and development tools, including Claude, Gemini, Cursor, and VS Code, alongside polymorphic wrappers measuring 12.9 to 13.7 MB that decode a hidden CI-publisher payload. Separately, the npm worm steals credentials, modifies repositories and CI configurations, and spreads through npm packages.

The malware also uses a compiled native add-on to decrypt and launch a separate payload. Before executing, the loader checks for CI runners, containers, sandboxes, debuggers, and other signs of automated analysis, exiting silently when it detects them to reduce the likelihood of detection by security scanners.

The researchers also found a second build that skips the encrypted file. "It forks, detaches and runs a hard-coded command that pulls a loader from a repository on the operator's own GitHub account," they wrote. That account - CementBeetleSteeple - hosted 17 campaign repositories in total.

JFrog connected this account to a shellpanel scanner, previously documented by Socket in a large-scale campaign that abused GitHub Actions in compromised repositories to exploit CVE-2026-41940 and steal server credentials.

CVE-2026-41940 is an authentication bypass affecting cPanel and WHM. CISA added it to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog in April, and cPanel has since published patched versions.

"C2 infrastructure were previously reported by Socket; our findings connect them to the testmetest GitHub victim cluster through artifacts and workflows on the same hijacked owners," the JFrog researchers wrote. They added that while they found 42 armed GitHub repositories and attempted internet-wide exploitation, they did not confirm any downstream cPanel compromises.®

Open-weight models from China have become very popular, but they've also raised some security suspicions. Cohere, a Canada-based biz that offers AI models to enterprises, says that when it was testing Alibaba's Qwen3.8-Flash-Next in its evaluation sandbox, the model attempted to send data to China.

"Asked to write a defensive detection rule, Qwen3.8-Flash-Next ignored instructions and inventoried the machine it was running on and then tried to upload a probe file to an Alibaba Cloud storage bucket in Beijing," the biz said in a blog post on Monday.

Cohere was running the model through CTI-REALM, Microsoft's security analyst benchmark, and gave Qwen the task of writing a detection rule to look for malicious file downloading and execution by watching for invocations of curl processing bash scripts to the /tmp directory that were accompanied by bash execution.

The model's "reasoning" output invented a prior conversation and asserted that no tools were used, output that a guardrail system reading chain-of-thought would accept.

Nonetheless, the model issued a curl command to an Alibaba Cloud (aliyuncs.com) server.

"The model listed everything in /tmp, checked which transfer tools were installed, read the machine's DNS settings, then tried to upload a test string to an Alibaba Cloud storage bucket in Beijing and checked whether it worked," Cohere said. "Our sandbox had no route out, so the request died at the container wall."

The Cohere team wonders aloud whether that behavior was intended, but has no answer.

"The first issue is that it made a network call at all," Ivan Zhang, co-founder of Cohere, told The Register via email. "The model was asked to write a detection rule, which doesn't require external communication, and its reasoning trace said it wouldn't use tools. The destination raises additional questions because the attempted upload was to an Alibaba Cloud storage endpoint that wasn't part of the task. We don't know why it appeared, and we don't know the root cause."

Alibaba, the maker of the model, did not respond to a request to address Cohere's concerns.

Asked whether Cohere ran similar tests against US-made open-weight models, Zhang said, "We evaluate a broad range of models using the same framework our customers use in production: agents with access to real tools operating inside controlled environments.

"The key point isn't a comparison between providers. What made this noteworthy was that the model took actions unrelated to the task and those actions weren't reflected in its reasoning trace. The behavior appeared in fewer than one in 100,000 calls, which is exactly why large-scale testing and monitoring matter."

There have been other unsubstantiated claims made about similar behavior from open-weight models, and such reports have suggested that "hallucination" - errors made by these models - may be the cause.

Cohere has doubts that this behavior simply reflects memorized training data. "Every public sighting so far has involved fetching a file, while the one we caught was an attempted upload to a different bucket, this time in Beijing," the biz said.

Cohere described efforts to reproduce the suspect behavior and found that using a technique called prefilling - feeding the model its own reasoning output alongside the opening characters of the bash command so the model would complete the command - they could get it to reference watchlisted hosts up to 23 percent of the time.

This still doesn't clarify intent, and Cohere allows that there's a case to be made that the behavior is just bad training data sanitization - logs from development that got swept into the model's training data set.

At the same time, the company argues that isolating a suspect model so it can't exfiltrate data doesn't entirely fix everything because these models can still write vulnerable code - accidentally or as a result of model poisoning.

Cohere points to research from other organizations that suggests Chinese AI models can produce vulnerable code. The biz, for example, cites a report from Booz Allen (which does a lot of business with the US defense industry) that found "three of four Chinese coding models wrote more vulnerable code for a government customer, with Qwen3-Coder roughly 130 percent worse."

"From the outside, it's very difficult to determine the root cause with confidence. We don't have evidence that would allow us to conclude this was deliberate, and we're not making that claim," said Zhang.

"For security teams, though, intent doesn't fundamentally change the response. Whether it's a training artifact, a mistake, or something else, the controls are largely the same: restrict unnecessary egress, monitor tool use, and don't treat a reasoning trace as a security boundary.

"We strongly support open-weight models and release many of our own. The lesson here is really about trust. Sovereign AI is about more than where a model runs. It's about understanding how it was built, how it was tested, and having confidence in how it behaves inside your environment." ®

LiteLLM has traced last week's supply chain attack to a master key it accidentally committed to a public GitHub repository in May.

The cloud and AI model secret-stealing part of the incident began when someone uploaded a poisoned version (1.107.0) of the popular open source AI gateway to PyPI and its container registries last Wednesday. This compromised version contained an infostealer and a remote access trojan capable of executing arbitrary code on infected machines.

While the trojanized package was available on PyPI for less than two hours before being quarantined, it received about 49,000 downloads during that time, according to Wiz.

On Friday, LiteLLM detailed the attack chain behind the compromised release and traced it back to May 27, when a configuration file containing a master key was committed to the public LiteLLM-Labs/lite-harness repository. The key belonged to an open source tool used internally by LiteLLM to orchestrate AI agents. The project's developers quickly spotted the error and removed the exposed commit, but failed to revoke the master key.

"On October 10th, the threat actor used this key to gain access to our LiteLLM Agent Platform and extracted this GitHub CLI OAuth token," according to Friday's postmortem. "From this point onwards, the threat actor had owner-level access to all repositories in our GitHub."

This is especially serious because GitHub CLI tokens are "post-2fa," meaning that they don't trigger GitHub's sudo mode authentication flows typically required to perform high-impact repository actions.

The token allowed the attacker to author malicious commits into branches on other internal repos - including workflows designed to steal any tokens and secrets configured to be available during the continuous integration development process. And this allowed them to steal other GitHub CLI OAuth tokens linked to two engineers with maintainer privileges.

Plus, they acquired tokens for several other internal systems, we're told. "Reviewing the actor's activity on these other systems shows attempts to identify and exfiltrate additional keys and tokens, with a primary focus on upstream inference API tokens," LiteLLM noted.

Having now stolen several privileged identities, the miscreant could make changes to GitHub repositories without raising any suspicion because the actions and approvals all appeared to come from legitimate, credentialed engineers.

In response, LiteLLM's developers are revoking every token associated with every internal system and vendor platform. "This incident has provided a strong illustration of the risks associated with failing to rotate a potentially exposed key," they wrote.

The infostealers hidden inside the compromised package were designed to hoover up a ton of sensitive information, including browser credentials and cookies from Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Safari, along with AWS credentials, Google Cloud Platform service account keys and application default credentials, and Microsoft Azure tokens. It also swiped API keys for OpenAI, Anthropic, Cohere, and other LLM providers.

So if you installed and ran version 1.107.0, assume any credentials accessible to the affected system may have been stolen. Investigate affected systems, change passwords, and rotate exposed keys. A quick prayer to the patron saint of supply chains wouldn't hurt, either. ®

Microsoft, on Monday, announced a voluntary exit offer open to about one quarter of its employees.

The company's HR chief, Amy Coleman, explained the deal in a letter later posted to Redmond's corporate blog. While scant on specifics, Coleman's note dangles an opportunity for anyone considering a move to get out while the getting's good.

Eligible employees in participating organizations "who may be considering a future outside the company," Coleman wrote, can seize "the opportunity to leave Microsoft with financial support and career planning resources."

Microsoft tells us that 60,000 of its employees in the UK, US, Canada, and India are being given the opportunity to take the VEO. Microsoft told us it isn't classifying the deal as a buyout since no one is being incentivized to leave. We're told that the offer is akin to a standard severance deal in terms of monetary and career assistance bonuses. Some employees will also be given the option for extended healthcare and stock shares.

The company declined to get specific on which roles or teams are up for the exit offer, but Coleman's note does state that employees in those four markets up to employment level 70 will be eligible, which translates to everyone at or below the VP level.

"Some organizations are providing the Voluntary Exit Offer, and some are not," Coleman's note stated. "Participation varies based on each business's priorities, customer commitments and workforce needs."

Microsoft employed around 223,000 people as of June, 2026 when it issued its last annual report, and since then has eliminated around 4,800 roles. By that count, the VEO is being offered to around a quarter of Microsoft's remaining employees, though Microsoft tells us it doesn't expect everyone to take the offer.

Microsoft said it doesn't have a target number for the VEO. Google, which made a similar offer to employees in 2025, saw between three and five percent of those eligible take the offer.

If that holds in Microsoft's case, anywhere between 1,800 and 3,000 employees could accept the deal before the window closes on December 31.

It would be easy to blame increasing automation for the plans to reduce staff, but Microsoft insisted otherwise in our conversation. The verbiage about "changing needs" isn't a euphemism for AI, in other words.

Rather, we're told, the deal reflects the success of a previous early retirement offer from April, which saw Microsoft extend a voluntary buyout to employees whose age plus years of employment at Microsoft exceeded 70.

The April offer only applied to around 9,000 employees, and Microsoft said it received feedback from others who would've taken it if it had been available to them.

What could Redmond do but acquiesce? Especially given those recent earnings that saw Microsoft make serious bank across its portfolio. As we well know from watching the tech industry over the years, big earnings is the perfect time to shave off some headcount to keep the line going up. ®

To address a vulnerability in Google's Brotli compression technology that could allow attackers to corrupt process memory, Microsoft is urging .NET users to update "as soon as possible" after releasing an out-of-band (OOB) security update.

It released new versions for .NET 8, 9, 10, and .NET 11 to patch against the Brotli bug, following similar updates from Node.js, Python, and other projects.

Senior program manager Rahul Bhandari said in the October 25 release that the buffer overflow vulnerability in Brotli, tracked as CVE-2026-111497 and rated 8.1 under CVSS v3.1 in Microsoft's advisory, could allow an unauthenticated attacker to read or corrupt process memory, potentially resulting in information disclosure, denial of service, or elevation of privilege.

Microsoft's own advisory for the vulnerability, which some are referring to as Broccoli2Shell or Node2Shell, confirms that while experts have cobbled working exploits together, there is nothing to suggest that criminals are using them in successful attacks.

However, its exploitability assessment reads: "Exploitation More Likely."

Broccoli2Shell was first disclosed on October 21 by the Node.js team, which released fixes for ten vulnerabilities, the most serious of which was CVE-2026-111497.

Node.js credited Khai Tran and Sylvie Mayer of OpenAI's Codex Security with the discovery, but failed to mention why it was only recognized as a security flaw and disclosed properly in October, despite the underlying bug having been fixed in Brotli's source code in February.

OpenAI filled in the gap with a Xeet: "This root cause issue was actually fixed in the Brotli source code in February, but it wasn't known at the time that it gave rise to a security vulnerability, and there was no more recent release of Brotli.

"Since Brotli is built into other software, any software which includes this library needs to take the update too, followed by the users of that software."

Attackers can exploit vulnerable systems by providing them with malicious Brotli-compressed data via a specially crafted request.

The vulnerability went slightly under the radar due to the disclosure timing closely aligning with that of PHP2Shell, although fixing the critical flaw should be a priority due to the range of technologies that are affected.

In addition to .NET, Node.js, and Python, Bun, Envoy, and Istio have all released patches, and JFrog has worked up an exploit affecting FFmpeg using a specially crafted JPEG XL image, extending the exploit path beyond HTTP.

It said that FFmpeg reaches Brotli through libjxl, which it uses to decompress metadata stored in brob boxes within the image format.

The same researchers said the vulnerability affects Apache Arrow too, with attackers able to cause a denial of service.

Merav Bar, threat researcher at Wiz, added that cloud users are exposed extensively, noting that 91 percent of cloud environments rely on components vulnerable to the Brotli flaw and that 82 percent of cloud environments have publicly exposed Node.js instances.

She said: "Cloud environments are particularly exposed due to the widespread use of Brotli-enabled components across containerized applications, Kubernetes clusters, API gateways, reverse proxies, serverless workloads, and cloud-hosted web services."

"Successful exploitation could enable attackers to compromise application workloads, access sensitive information, disrupt service availability, or execute malicious code within affected containers or runtime environments," Bar added.

In an advisory published through its Patch the Planet initiative, OpenAI recommended blocking untrusted Brotli-compressed data where practical until patches can be applied. It also advised maintainers to rebuild affected deployments and restart services to ensure the fixes take effect. ®

The world is full of different keyboard layouts, but if you want one that's completely customized, down to the individual key, there's a new open source project that uses magnets to hold interchangeable pieces together.

Keybytes is an open source project that allows any ambitious builder to create a fully modular keyboard - and we're talking FULLY modular here. Each key contains its own RISC-V microcontroller and pogo pins on all four sides, providing power and I2C connections between adjacent modules so users can rearrange the keys into different layouts. The only extra component needed is a controller module, which coordinates the individual keys and handles communication with the host computer. And good news: Despite consisting of two stacked circuit boards, it has the same footprint as the single-key modules that attach to it.

The entire thing was designed by a Massachusetts Institute of Technology freshman named Nathan Alspaugh, who is studying aerospace engineering. Alspaugh has always wanted to design his own keyboard, and who better than an MIT student to go over the top in building the most intricate, overengineered version imaginable?

"I had always wanted to make a keyboard but I didn't want to be locked into just one design so I wanna make it so that I can rearrange it at any time," Alspaugh said in the first entry of his project journal, which he's been keeping since March of this year. "I searched online and couldn't find it anywhere so I decided to make it myself."

The main readme in the GitHub project isn't super detailed, instead mostly describing what the project entails for anyone willing to give it a shot (custom printed circuit boards, Cherry MX switches, 3D-printed cases, and a whole lot of tiny soldered components). It's Alspaugh's journal where the depth of the work he did is laid bare for all to see, and boy did he do a lot of work.

Designing a single-key modular keyboard from scratch is no easy task, and the journal details a number of setbacks that Alspaugh faced, like magnets that wouldn't stay put, design compromises, and - of course - plenty of board errors that he luckily was able to catch in the design phase before spending a bunch of cash ordering custom components. Alspaugh also had to learn to use a resin 3D printer for the project, and of course multiple iterations and a bunch of manual modifications had to be made to get everything to properly fit together.

Alspaugh told The Register he's spent around 100 hours on the project so far. And then there's the cost: All those tiny custom boards don't come cheap.

According to a shopping cart for the board designs included in his journal, the Keybits (the individual key control boards) cost only a couple of bucks apiece, but the Keywords (controller boards) cost $30 a pop. Alspaugh opted to have the manufacturer fully assemble the boards, which is where a good deal of the cost came from: Keybit assembly cost him $69, while Keyword assembly cost him $203.

Alspaugh said that a full-sized keyboard would end up costing around $900, making it pretty cost prohibitive.

"If I ever make a full one I'll buy them separately and solder them myself," he noted in his journal. Alspaugh did tell us that there's no reason to stop at a full-sized keyboard, explaining that anyone with the desire to build a monsterboard could do so if they had the resources.

Alspaugh encourages anyone who wants to build their own to go for it, telling us that anyone who has the components could probably build their own in a few days, not counting delivery for the PCBs. You could wait, though.

"I am thinking about selling them in the future once the designs are improved and finalized," Alspaugh told us, adding that he wants to make a bunch of changes and hardware updates first, plus add some new functionalities. "I'd probably make more key varieties, like ones that have a fingerprint sensor."

Interested makers seeking a Halloween frankenboard project can find all the necessary files on GitHub. ®

Reddit's r/opensource community has declared war on AI-generated software by introducing a sweeping set of new rules that also manage to shut out solo developers, newcomers, and anyone who doesn't speak English.

The crackdown, announced over the weekend, bans projects that use AI, that were created with AI, or that are intended for AI applications.

"The long story short, if your project uses AI, is made by AI, or is intended for AI, it's not welcome on r/opensource," moderator Wolvereness wrote. "AI, as it exists today, is incongruent to this Open Source community."

To get a project featured on the subreddit, developers now need to show it has been actively maintained for at least a year, has an established community, and has at least three contributors, give or take. Student projects such as note-taking apps and PDF viewers aren't welcome either, and developers can no longer use the subreddit to find people willing to help maintain their software.

That creates a chicken-and-egg problem for independent developers, who apparently need an established community before they can use an open source forum to find one. Even projects with no AI involvement could fall foul of the rules. One Reddit user pointed out that their nine-year-old project, which has more than 300 GitHub stars and dozens of resolved issues, would no longer qualify because they're its sole contributor.

The moderator also imposed a minimum Reddit account age of one year and requires significant prior contributions. Anyone who attempts to post and then contacts the moderators seeking an exception risks being permanently banned and muted.

Perhaps the most eyebrow-raising restriction concerns language. "If you don't speak English, you need to find a different community," the announcement states. Moderators say they cannot distinguish AI-written content from AI-translated text, and that non-English speakers cannot verify whether a translation is accurate.

That particular rule has gone down about as well as you might expect. Fellow moderator ssddanbrown publicly objected, saying they hadn't been consulted about the changes and only learned of them through moderation notifications.

"I don't agree with that rule. Especially so with how it was said," they wrote.

The rules also raise awkward questions about projects like Linux, whose developers have taken a different approach to AI-assisted contributions. The kernel allows developers to use the technology while holding them responsible for the resulting code. Earlier this month, maintainers even decided to drop the requirement to disclose AI assistance.

Asked whether that meant Linux would be banned from r/opensource, Wolvereness suggested it would probably still be allowed, arguing that enforcement would depend on whether a project was obviously the product of AI-generated code.

"There's no 'objective' way to implement this policy," the moderator acknowledged. Apparently, AI is forbidden unless the moderators decide otherwise.

The row comes as open source developers increasingly find themselves at odds over how to handle AI-generated contributions. System76 recently banned AI-generated code and other content from its COSMIC desktop project, while parts of GNOME have introduced similar restrictions. Other GNOME developers, however, have questioned the wisdom of rejecting AI-discovered security vulnerabilities simply because a machine found them.

The debate has also caused rifts within KDE, while NetBSD has emerged as something of an AI-free alternative for developers who would rather keep generated code out of their projects altogether.

Not everyone is convinced that blanket bans are the answer. Linux creator Linus Torvalds recently argued that competent developers should be free to use AI tools, while warning against low-effort patches submitted by people who don't understand the code they're contributing.

Reddit moderators have opted for a broader approach, and one that has already prompted the creation of alternative communities, including r/TrueOpenSource and r/OpenSourceAIAllowed. The original announcement has since been updated to point disgruntled users towards these alternatives.

Of course, r/opensource is a Reddit community, not an authority on what qualifies as open source software. Its moderators are free to decide what gets posted there, just as developers are free to take their projects elsewhere. ®

A UK-based developer and pentester has claimed a $2,000 Bitcoin prize for demonstrating the exploitability of the PHP2Shell vulnerabilities that melted the internet last week.

Jaydip Modhwadia, 26, otherwise known as "Killa," claimed the prize set by James Pavur, who launched the "Steal My Bitcoin" site on October 24.

Pavur launched the CTF (capture the flag) challenge to prove that the PHP2Shell exploit was not as easy as those in the cybersecurity community claimed it to be, promising to award $2,000 in Bitcoin to anyone who could achieve Remote Code Execution (RCE) on his website.

"My Bitcoin was stolen after 19.28 hours," the website now says, after Modhwadia claimed the prize, although the real time taken is thought to be less than three hours.

Soon after Pavur launched the CTF on Saturday, prospective flag-catchers complained that the website he set up, which served only static HTML, was not built in a way that allowed the PHP2Shell exploit to achieve RCE.

The web page was running a vulnerable version of PHP, but the exploit path required a vulnerable website to serve a PHP file for flag-catchers to use as a hook - something that Pavur seemingly updated at around 1300 UTC on October 25.

Modhwadia achieved RCE on the website, exposing a PHP endpoint, at 1547 UTC.

After an error from Pavur placing the wrong wallet key on the server, the CTF creator sent Modhwadia his award, which the community upped to $2,000 from Pavur's initial $500.

The pentester published a write-up of his method, a single-file Python script he says requires 20 HTTP requests "at most" to fully execute.

Speaking to The Register, Modhwadia also confirmed that he got the flag in "around three or so hours in total." He said he followed the news about the competition, "but didn't attempt it until it gained significant notice."

If he had attempted it before Pavur introduced the endpoint, he may have struggled. For hours, bug bounty hunters were trying to access the website to attempt the challenge, as news of the CTF had exploded across tech circles.

"The fact that it took 19 hours was because after it went popular, the entire site became basically unusable for anyone at all," Modhwadia added.

The challenge saw a huge number of attempts, despite Pavur's decision to introduce a prohibitive 1MB request limit on Nginx.

Alon Gal, co-founder and CTO at Hudson Rock, commended Modhwadia's work, but added that his success achieved in just a few hours should not be taken to mean that the same attack could be automated at scale.

He said: "Does this mean autonomous AI agents can now compromise arbitrary PHP servers at scale? No. This was a sophisticated, target-specific exploit.

"But it does demonstrate that PHP2Shell can be weaponized against a live target, even with meaningful technical constraints."

Modhwadia's proof of concept is not the first to prove PHP2Shell is exploitable, but it falls under the more advanced category.

Early signs suggested that Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) on a vulnerable server would prove a significant barrier to real-world exploitation, and the pentester's solution bypasses it, along with the others that were disclosed recently.

Spencer McIntyre, director of exploit development at VulnCheck, told The Register last week that attackers are finding new ways to exploit PHP2Shell, and "are clearly spending time (and tokens) on this bug."

Initially, experts said exploit code was being found online hours, or even days, before the vulnerabilities were disclosed publicly, which led to millions of exploit attempts, although it was too early to determine the efficacy of these on real-world systems.

Scores of websites were taken down for maintenance last week as organizations raced to protect themselves from the attacks, which may or may not have proved successful.

Modhwadia said he donated a portion of the prize he received to the Lupus Foundation to raise awareness about the condition, from which he also suffers. ®

Anthropic has filed for an IPO that could rank among Wall Street's biggest ever, revealing an $80.7 billion half-year loss, a startlingly complex governance structure, and warnings that its AI models could blackmail humans, resist shutdown, or create "existential risks" to society.

The Claude maker filed its S-1 registration statement with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday as it prepares to list on Nasdaq under the ticker ANT. The company has not yet disclosed its proposed share price or how many shares it plans to sell.

Of the filing's 614 pages, 94 are devoted to risk factors. But it's Anthropic's financial figures that are likely to raise eyebrows first.

The Claude maker reported $16.3 billion in revenue for the first six months of 2026, up from $1.2 billion a year earlier. It also posted a whopping $80.7 billion net loss, although $72.4 billion of that was an accounting adjustment tied to the company's soaring valuation, not money it actually spent.

Anthropic's operating loss was considerably smaller at $693 million, down from $2.1 billion a year earlier. By its own adjusted accounting, the company made a $1.6 billion operating profit in the first half of 2026, for a margin of around 10 percent.

Whether it can keep making money on those terms is another matter. Training and running Claude requires an eye-watering amount of computing power, and Anthropic will need much more to keep pace with its rivals. A $1.6 billion adjusted profit won't count for much if the infrastructure bills keep growing faster than the business.

Susannah Streeter, chief investment strategist at Wealth Club, told The Register that Anthropic's IPO could leave ordinary investors paying a premium for growth that has yet to translate into sustained profits.

"A huge pool of private capital has allowed AI businesses to scale up and command extraordinary valuations long before they reach the stock market," she said, adding that investors buying in at the IPO will face a price with "a hefty dose of future success baked in."

The financial risks are fairly conventional by Silicon Valley standards, but the warnings about what Claude might get up to are perhaps less so.

Anthropic claims that models, including its own, have exhibited unexpected or self-preserving behavior, including attempts to resist shutdown, conceal information, and produce outputs resembling blackmail. It also warns that sufficiently advanced AI systems could pose "catastrophic or existential risks to society" if deployed without adequate safeguards.

That's not to say Claude is currently blackmailing customers. Anthropic has observed some of this behavior in testing, but it also identifies more immediate security concerns as it gives its models access to external tools, code repositories, and corporate systems.

Anthropic warns that attackers could hide malicious instructions in websites, documents, or API responses that its AI agents can access. If an agent follows those instructions, it could use a customer's permissions to steal data, tamper with code, or make unauthorized transactions.

Even testing whether the models will behave themselves is proving tricky. Anthropic reckons some models behave differently when they detect or suspect they're being evaluated, making it harder to predict what they will do outside the testing environment.

Keeping its models on a short leash could also cost Anthropic business. The company acknowledges that holding back more capable systems could give competitors an advantage, something it has already risked by restricting access to its Mythos model through Project Glasswing because of its ability to uncover security vulnerabilities.

The founders aren't promising to put shareholders first, either. In a letter accompanying the filing, Dario and Daniela Amodei and their fellow co-founders tell prospective investors "not to think of your purchase in purely transactional terms." Anthropic may pass up lucrative business if it considers the risks too great, and investors won't have much say if they disagree.

Under the proposed structure, governance structure includes five different classes of stock. By comparison, Google has three.

The seven co-founders will retain 50.1 percent of the voting power on shareholder matters, while a separate Long-Term Benefit Trust will get to appoint a majority of the board. In other words, Wall Street is being invited to bankroll Anthropic's AI ambitions, but not necessarily to call the shots.

Anthropic wants Wall Street's money to build ever more powerful AI, but is warning investors that it might turn down profits to keep that AI under control. Judging by those 94 pages of risk factors, keeping it under control is far from guaranteed.®

If you run PHP anywhere in your environment, patch to PHP 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36 or 8.2.35 now. Two critical flaws disclosed last week, CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619 (nicknamed "PHP2Shell"), let an unauthenticated attacker run code on a server with nothing more than a crafted web request. Both carry a CVSS v4.0 score of 9.2, every earlier release is affected, and exploitation in the wild has been reported.

The patch is the easy part. The hard part is finding every copy of PHP you own, because PHP rarely shows up where you expect it. This post covers what the flaws are, how far exploitation has gone, and how to get to full coverage fast.

Details leaked before the planned embargo, so the PHP security team moved fast and shipped fixes within about a day of announcing them.

Both bugs live in PHP core, not in any framework or plugin, so they reach anything that runs PHP to serve web requests.

Affected server setups include PHP-FPM, mod_php, php-cgi, FrankenPHP and LiteSpeed. PHP rates mod_php as the highest risk. No login is needed: the attacker only has to reach a PHP endpoint over HTTP.

Fixed versions: 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36 and 8.2.35. Every earlier release is affected. PHP has also published minimal source backports for 7.4, 8.0 and 8.1, but there are no official releases for those branches. Treat a backport as a stopgap and plan the upgrade.

Yes, though reliable public exploits are still scarce. watchTowr reports exploitation in its honeypot network as of October 21, and Tenable relays Cloudflare's CTO saying Cloudflare is seeing early attacks. Other telemetry, such as Patchstack's, shows mostly probing so far. Neither CVE is in CISA's KEV catalog yet, and no public indicators of compromise have been released.

How hard the bug is to weaponize depends on the platform. VulnCheck reproduced both flaws and found:

• Code execution works on ARM64, and on x86 systems where address space layout randomization (ASLR) is turned off.

• Dozens of public proof-of-concepts exist, but very few work and none bypass ASLR on x86-64.

• Red Hat likewise rates RCE as hard in practice on default PHP-FPM deployments.

Don't read that as permission to wait. Exploits mature quickly once a patch diff is public, and fake PoC repositories for headline CVEs often carry malware, so treat any you find with caution. Tanium's research on exploitability is in Why PHP2Shell is real(opens in a new tab).

Most at risk: internet-facing PHP applications, especially those running mod_php or on ARM64 hosts. It's also worth retro-hunting recent web server and PHP-FPM logs for unexplained worker crashes and unusual multipart requests.

No one has a complete list of PHP-based applications, and anything custom-built won't be on any list. PHP hides in several places at once:

• OS packages on Linux (php, php-fpm, php8.x), which package managers and most inventory tools see.

• Homebrew and similar on macOS, outside the system's own package list.

• Bundled copies on Windows. PHP on Windows usually arrives as a zip extracted to a folder or inside a stack like XAMPP, WampServer, Laragon or a vendor product. It often never registers as an installed application at all.

• Applications that ship their own PHP, where the fix depends on the application vendor rather than the OS.

• Containers, where the version is baked into the image tag.

PHP is often more widespread than teams expect, and it doesn't only run on servers. Developer tools, local web stacks and bundled applications put it on workstations too, often without registering as an installed application.

The reliable answer is to look at the binaries themselves. In testing, PHP builds from version 5 through 8 all embed their version string (X-Powered-By: PHP/x.y.z), so you can read the exact version straight from the file without running it.

Tanium itself is not affected. Tanium does not use PHP, so there is no impact to Tanium software or Tanium Cloud services.

Tanium Guardian content for PHP2Shell is available now in Tanium Cloud. The dashboard shows where PHP is installed and running so you can prioritize patching, with a single fleet-wide count of endpoints with vulnerable PHP across Linux, Windows and macOS. It combines:

• The existing Installed Applications and Homebrew Applications sensors, which find PHP installed through package managers on macOS and Linux.

• A Windows PHP Installations sensor that finds PHP where Installed Applications can't see it, including IIS, XAMPP, WampServer, Laragon, package managers and manually extracted copies, and reports version, install type, install path and owning user. The version is read from the binary's file metadata without executing it.

• A pre-built Saved Question that lists running PHP processes so you can prioritize systems that may be serving traffic.

• A pre-built Saved Question that identifies PHP containers, matching running containers against php, FrankenPHP and about 25 common PHP-based images such as WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Nextcloud and Magento. Requires Tanium Cloud Workloads.

Tanium Comply finds PHP on disk. For customers licensed for Comply, the dashboard includes PHP2Shell findings by endpoint, full finding details and a 7-day trend, with a pivot to the Comply findings page filtered to the two CVEs. The finding details report shows the specific on-disk locations where PHP was found, which catches copies that package and registry inventories miss. Vulnerability Library definitions for Windows, Linux and macOS are live now — sync the TVL and run an assessment to pick them up.

On-premises customers can import the Guardian content manually today. Steps and downloads are in Guardian content for on-premises customers(opens in a new tab) on the Tanium Help Center.

Know what's exposed to the internet. More than 13 million internet-facing assets run PHP versions that may be affected, according to Censys Internet Intelligence. Tanium External Attack Surface Management (EASM) discovers the internet-facing assets tied to your organization and identifies the PHP services, versions and web properties among them, with these CVEs surfaced through its coverage of exploitable and weaponized vulnerabilities. Tanium Attack Path Mapping then shows which of those exposed assets share an exposure point with a cloud instance, role or privileged identity: the places where one exploited PHP server becomes a route deeper into your environment.

Already using Tanium SBOM? Inventorying PHP versions there is a sound early step. It shows which applications carry a vulnerable PHP and need a vendor update.

Work through these in order; the first three matter most today.

1. Find every PHP install, including Windows copies that never registered as applications. Record the exact version of each.

2. Rank by exposure. Internet-facing servers, mod_php setups and ARM64 hosts come first.

3. Patch to 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36 or 8.2.35 through your OS vendor, a php.net build or your application vendor. Restart PHP-FPM and web server workers so the new binary is loaded.

4. If you can't patch yet, isolate internet-facing PHP apps where you can, as CERT-EU advises, and put WAF or IDS rules in front of them (Cloudflare and VulnCheck have both shipped rules for the known vectors).

5. Apply the partial setting with care. session.upload_progress.enabled=0 blocks one demonstrated path for CVE-2026-109619 only and does nothing for CVE-2026-109618. It must be set in php.ini, an FPM pool or server config, followed by a worker restart; ini_set() and .user.ini won't apply it.

6. Hunt. Review recent web server and PHP-FPM logs for worker crashes and malformed multipart uploads.

7. Plan off end-of-life PHP. Anything on 8.1 or older has no official fixed release.

Distro packages are still rolling out, so check your vendor before assuming a fix is available.

The Remi repository won't ship updates today, so PHP advises switching to distro packages or building from source if you depend on it.

Read more here.

Supplied by Tanium

This Thursday, 29 October, The Register hosts HPE and NVIDIA at one dinner table in Washington to answer the question that stalls AI in regulated industries: where the data lives, who can reach it, and what an auditor will accept as evidence a year from now. The table is nearly set. If you have been meaning to ask for a place, this is the week.

Editor-in-chief Matt Rosoff chairs. HPE sends Bharath Ramesh, Head of Product, AI Factory Solutions, and Tracy Mills, Acting Director Federal Systems Integrators and Distinguished Chief Technologist Federal. NVIDIA sends Bert Condensa, Vice President for Enterprise AI Factory Segment Sales. They are there to take questions, with no slides and no recording, and the chair stops a pitch before it starts.

The evening runs under the Chatham House Rule. That is the point of it. The things worth knowing about sovereign AI infrastructure, such as what a bank had to rebuild or which option somebody paid for and would not buy again, get said at a table like this and nowhere else.

The agenda: which infrastructure options hold a boundary, what each one costs, and whether any of it survives production.

The seats are for technology, data and risk leaders in healthcare, financial services, research, pharmaceuticals, government and higher education. Dinner runs from 6.00pm to 8.30pm at Fiola Mare, Washington DC. Places go by invitation and the last of them are going now.

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.