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        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.theregister.com/a/5258087</guid>
        <link>https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/06/18/estonia-intends-to-recognize-ai-agents-with-digital-ids/5258087</link>
        <pubDate>Thu, 18 Jun 2026 01:12:47 +0200</pubDate>
        <title>Estonia intends to recognize AI agents with digital IDs</title>
        <description><![CDATA[ I am not a number! I am a free agent (that just happens to have a number) ]]></description>
        <category>ai and ml</category>
                <lab:kicker><![CDATA[ AI + ML ]]></lab:kicker>
                <content:encoded><![CDATA[ Estonia plans to allow AI agents to have their own digital identities so they can act on behalf of people in a way that can be verified and audited. The initiative, backed by the country's Eesti.ai advisory board, calls for the development of ID codes that AI agents can use to take actions, subject to some unspecified authorization and task delegation process. Academics and corporate technical folk have already made related proposals in recognition of the absence of agentic technical infrastructure. Last month, researchers under the flag of OWASP proposed the Agent Name Service for agent discovery and interoperability. DNS for AI Discovery is another such project. But these have more to do with platform plumbing while Estonia, known for its embrace of technology, is more focused on permission and punishment. Establishing digital identities for AI agents and authorizing limited powers will help avoid scenarios where individuals are required to delegate broad authority to an agent at the expense of their rights, the government says. "In the future, AI will increasingly carry out digital tasks on our behalf, compiling reports, preparing declarations or interacting with information systems," said Prime Minister Kristen Michal in a statement. "To that end, it must be clear who is acting on whose behalf with what rights, and who is ultimately responsible." By taking this step, Estonia casts itself as "first country to create digital identities for AI agents." Two weeks ago, Argentina's President Javier Milei endorsed a similar idea, legislation to allow "non-human corporations," managed by software, with limited liability. "Limited liability is not a luxury for such entities; it is a precondition for their existence," Milei wrote in a Financial Times op-ed. Several decades ago, IBM took a similar line on liability but reached the opposite conclusion about automated decision making: "A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision." Despite the citation of that passage from IBM's 1979 Training Manual in a 2025 blog post, Big Blue's designated author Doug Bonderud sounds less certain about the impermissibility of AI action these days. "Should AI be used for management decisions?" he mused. "Maybe. Will it be used to make some of these decisions? Almost certainly." While governments work on legal changes that will allow AI agents to operate, private sector companies are already taking a stance, at least with respect to external AI agent usage by customers. Target Corporation earlier this year revised its Terms & Conditions with a section titled Agentic Commerce and Delegated Access. It states, "Purchases and other actions taken by an Agentic Commerce Agent that you have authorized are considered transactions authorized by you." American Express meanwhile has taken the opposite tack by assuming liability for errant agentic commerce. "In the future, if a Card Member authorizes an AI agent to make a purchase and that agent sends American Express the customer’s authenticated purchase intent, American Express will protect eligible customers from charges related to AI agent error," the company said in April when it introduced its agentic commerce developer kit. In a pre-print paper last year titled "AI Agents and the Law," Georgia Institute of Technology professors Mark Riedl and Deven Desai observe that once AI agents have the ability to act in a way that changes the state of the world – e-commerce transactions as opposed to output that requires human interaction for effect – concerns about harm become more pressing. They note that while the law is well equipped to deal with conflicts arising from human agents, it's not well-suited to the possibilities of software agents. "Put simply, although computer science and law have similar notions of agents, a software agent is not the same as a human agent," they write "For example, agency law disciplines agents by imposing legal liabilities on agents when they misbehave. Human agents can face financial and even criminal penalties; that is not so for software agents." To date, AI companies have done their best to limit liability for AI harms. But they've not been entirely successful: A Canadian court held Air Canada liable for bad chatbot advice, and a German court held Google liable for inaccurate AI Overview content. It may be a while before the rules for AI agents get hammered out and harmonized to whatever extent is possible. But in the interim we'll at least have digital identifiers to call out bad agents by name. ® ]]></content:encoded>
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        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.theregister.com/a/5257978</guid>
        <link>https://www.theregister.com/devops/2026/06/17/git-good-with-epic-games-new-open-source-vcs-lore/5257978</link>
        <pubDate>Wed, 17 Jun 2026 22:49:00 +0200</pubDate>
        <title>Git good with Epic Games' new open source VCS, Lore</title>
        <description><![CDATA[ Got big binaries? Tired of other version control systems that treat them like inferior files? Lore might be worth a look ]]></description>
        <category>devops</category>
                <lab:kicker><![CDATA[ devops ]]></lab:kicker>
                <dc:modified>Wed, 17 Jun 2026 21:15:52 +0000</dc:modified>
                <content:encoded><![CDATA[ Fortnite maker and Apple nemesis Epic Games has decided to git good all on its own with the open-source release of its homemade version control system, dubbed Lore. The project began life as Unreal Revision Control, and was used by internal teams and as the version control system (VCS) built into Unreal Editor for Fortnite. Now, Epic is ready to share its handiwork with the world. Lore is a centralized, content-addressed VCS that’s meant to be more flexible for developers, as it's licensed under the less restrictive MIT License instead of the copyleft requirements inherent in the GNU standard. MIT is generally considered more permissive because, unlike GNU, it doesn't require derivatives to be licensed in the same way (e.g., a fork of Lore could be proprietary). Lore can be installed on macOS, Windows, and Linux and its server side is designed to be transportable into different cloud services as well. The biggest difference between Lore and other VCS is its equal treatment of text files – e.g., code – and binaries. “All content is treated as opaque byte streams on the hot path,” Epic explains in its system design explanation document. “Text-aware features are layered on top, never assumed by the storage or transport paths. Binary content gets the same first-class treatment as text.” With that in mind, it’s obvious who Epic is targeting with the release: Game developers. Lore is purpose-built for projects that use large binary files such as games, Epic said, but that doesn’t preclude other use cases with heavy binary loads, like AI model builders, systems developers, and others who work with large amounts of machine-readable data alongside their own code. We have lots of VCS data, so why do we need Lore? There are plenty of VCS options out there: Git, Perforce, Mercurial (and its descendent Sapling) are all mentioned by Epic as alternatives that resemble Lore in its design and use. So, why a new VCS? That’s easy, says the Fortnite studio: None of ‘em do it all. Git, says Epic, has great revision graphing, but treats binaries as “second class citizens” and lacks multi-tenant isolation that ensures users on the same infrastructure can't access each others work. Perforce requires multiple server round trips to conduct standard operations, making it too slow. Mercurial and Sapling elegantly solve “the scale of source repositories” via their distributed architecture, but again treat text as king and everything else as second-class data. “The motivation is not that prior systems are bad,” Epic explained. “What Lore offers that the prior art does not is the union” of all those features, and some others too. Key design goals Epic had in mind when designing Lore included the aforementioned binary-first design, a sparse-by-construction architecture that only downloads necessary fragments from the server to clients to ensure fewer round trips, the elimination of partially-applied revisions, in-between states are invisible to readers, and a full-surface API that allows Lore to work with a variety of programming languages. If you want to give Lore a spin Epic has published a thorough quickstart guide, and pre-built binaries are available, ironically enough, on GitHub. ® ]]></content:encoded>
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        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.theregister.com/a/5257951</guid>
        <link>https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/06/17/smelly-config-files-will-make-your-agents-waste-tokens-researchers-warn/5257951</link>
        <pubDate>Wed, 17 Jun 2026 21:32:16 +0200</pubDate>
        <title>Smelly config files will make your agents waste tokens, researchers warn</title>
        <description><![CDATA[ Researchers urge developers to see that less is more when it comes to instructions ]]></description>
        <category>ai and ml</category>
                <lab:kicker><![CDATA[ AI AND ML ]]></lab:kicker>
                <dc:modified>Wed, 17 Jun 2026 23:29:22 +0000</dc:modified>
                <content:encoded><![CDATA[ If you're exposing your agent to a strong odor, it's time to clean up your instructions. Risky or poorly structured code patterns are known as "code smells," and it turns out coding agent directives can be similarly redolent, leading to wasted tokens and worse output. Coding agents rely on configuration files that summarize expected agent behavior. These context-enhancing files are commonly written in Markdown and named either CLAUDE.md for those using Anthropic models or AGENTS.md for pretty much everyone else. They include various text instructions that advise the coding agent about desired behavior and tool use. And they can get rather wordy. Anthropic advises no more than 200 lines of text because longer files consume model context and may hinder model coherence. Researchers affiliated with the computer science department of the Federal Institute of Minas Gerais in Brazil recently scoured some 532,000 files to build and analyze a dataset of 100 popular open-source projects containing either an AGENTS.md or a CLAUDE.md file. "Our results show that configuration smells are widespread," the authors state. "Lint Leakage was the most common smell, affecting 62 percent of the files, followed by Context Bloat (42 percent) and Skill Leakage (35 percent)." Linting is the process of running automated tools to check code for programming and style errors. Lint Leakage refers to agent instructions that repeat rules already enforced by linters, format checkers, and static analysis tools. Duplicative rules waste tokens by burdening the underlying model with guidance for a task already handled reliably by programmatic tools. Context Bloat, as its name suggests, describes the tendency of developers to overspecify code agent behavior. "Bloated configuration files increase token consumption, raise costs, and reduce the visibility of important instructions," the authors observe, pointing to Anthropic's recommendation of no more than 200 lines of text. Skill Leakage, another common configuration smell, occurs when rarely used tools or practices get added to the AGENTS.md file, which gets loaded in every agent session. The agent instructions would be better in a separate skills file (e.g. SKILLs.md) that gets loaded only when needed. Skill leakage also expands the agent's context unnecessarily and potentially distracts agents from other things. Other agentic odors include: Blind References, which happens when configuration files reference external documents (e.g. via URLs) without explaining when that resource becomes relevant; Init Fossilization, configuration details set up upon a project's initialization that are no longer relevant; and Conflicting Instructions, which occur when agent directives contradict each other. The study authors say that they found at least one of these six smells in 91 of the 100 AGENTS.md files tested. "These results suggest that developers could benefit from catalogs and tools designed to spot configuration issues in agent configuration files," they conclude in the preprint paper, entitled "Configuration Smells in AGENTS.md Files: Common Mistakes in Configuring Coding Agents." The authors are Helio Victor F. dos Santos, Vitor Costa, Joao Eduardo Montandon, Luciana Lourdes Silva, and Marco Tulio Valente. The message here is that less is more when it comes to code agent configuration files, perhaps even to the point that anything is worse than nothing. Similarly, when ETH Zurich boffins examined the impact of context files for agents a few months ago, they found [PDF] that developer-generated instructions raised costs and only improved code performance about 4 percent, while LLM-generated instructions had a small (3 percent) negative impact on agent-generated code. They concluded "unnecessary requirements from context files make tasks harder, and human-written context files should describe only minimal requirements." ® ]]></content:encoded>
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        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.theregister.com/a/5257909</guid>
        <link>https://www.theregister.com/networks/2026/06/17/nvidia-backed-optics-vendor-to-boost-wafer-output-by-4x-to-meet-ai-interconnect-demand/5257909</link>
        <pubDate>Wed, 17 Jun 2026 20:12:38 +0200</pubDate>
        <title>Nvidia-backed optics vendor to boost wafer output by 4x to meet AI interconnect demand</title>
        <description><![CDATA[ Jensen can't risk semiconductor supply chains derailing the AI hype train ]]></description>
        <category>networks</category>
                <lab:kicker><![CDATA[ NetworkS ]]></lab:kicker>
                <content:encoded><![CDATA[ As AI systems grow larger, optics are playing a larger part in their design – so much so that at Computex earlier this month, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang proclaimed the technology would make Marvell the next trillion dollar company. Now, Nvidia-backed photonics vendor Coherent plans to boost indium phosphide (InP) wafer production at its Sherman, Texas, fab by 4x in anticipation AI proliferation will trigger an explosion in optical interconnect demand. Supply chains must be ready to meet that demand when (or if) it materializes, and Coherent is one such supplier. The company operates eight wafer fabs across the US that produce semiconductors used in laser light sources and optical modules. These supply chains are so important to Nvidia’s future growth that, in March, the GPU slinger invested $2 billion in the optics vendor to bolster its production capacity. Coherent is wasting little time putting those funds to use. Along with $20 million in funding from the Texas Semiconductor Innovation Fund and the Sherman Economic Development Corporation, and up to $50 million in CHIPS and Science Act funding, Coherent plans to plow $650 million into its Sherman plant, effectively doubling the factory’s footprint and quadrupling InP wafer output. InP semis are commonly employed in lasers, photodetectors, and modulators found in optical interconnects. As rack scale AI systems grow from a few dozen accelerators to hundreds or thousands, copper is no longer sufficient and optics are now required to achieve this scale. We expect this trend to dramatically increase the number of optical components employed by these systems over the next couple of years. Coherent claims that the Sherman expansion will create about 1,000 new jobs, roughly 550 of which are directly related to advanced manufacturing, engineering, and technical roles. The company hasn't shared a timeline for when the expansion will be completed. We've reached out for comment and will let you know if we hear anything back. Coherent is not the only optics vendor Nvidia is bankrolling. This spring, GPUzilla also invested $2 billion in Lumentum, which produces a variety of optical products used in datacenters including pluggable transceivers, optical circuit switches, and laser modules. Less than a month later, Nvidia plowed another $2 billion into Marvell in part to accelerate its silicon photonics roadmap. ® ]]></content:encoded>
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        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.theregister.com/a/5257877</guid>
        <link>https://www.theregister.com/cyber-crime/2026/06/17/massive-password-stealing-attack-hits-75k-fortinet-firewalls/5257877</link>
        <pubDate>Wed, 17 Jun 2026 19:27:40 +0200</pubDate>
        <title>Massive password-stealing attack hits 75k Fortinet firewalls</title>
        <description><![CDATA[ Why are you even reading this?! Rotate your passwords!! ]]></description>
        <category>cyber-crime</category>
                <lab:kicker><![CDATA[ CYBER-CRIME ]]></lab:kicker>
                <dc:modified>Wed, 17 Jun 2026 20:19:41 +0000</dc:modified>
                <content:encoded><![CDATA[ UPDATED If you have a Fortinet firewall, it's time to stop and change your passwords. Intruders somehow gained access to around 75,000 Fortinet firewall devices and stole credentials belonging to major corporations across 194 countries, in some cases leading to full network compromise. Security researchers say that they have verified the data, and the cracked FortiGate passwords belong to accounts spanning multinational corporations including FoxConn, Samsung, Comcast, Siemens, Lenovo, FedEx, PxW, Accenture, Oracle and many others. Check to see if your organization made the list of affected domains – and immediately rotate all passwords associated with Fortinet VPN and administrative interfaces. Make sure multi-factor authentication is turned on, too, as this type of massive credential leak can lead to very serious consequences, giving attackers full, remote access to not only the firewall but the entire corporate network. Hudson Rock, which analyzed the data, said the leak affects 21,632 unique domains. “The scale of this breach touches nearly every sector of the global economy, sparing no industry. The threat actors have built a verified database of working credentials for some of the largest enterprises on the planet,” the security shop said on its Infostealer blog. Researcher Volodymyr “Bob” Diachenko first spotted the intrusions and attributed them to a Russian-speaking group. “They intercept SSL VPN authentication, crack hashes on a 45-GPU cluster managed via Hashtopolis, and pivot into internal Active Directory environments,” he wrote on LinkedIn. “The operation processed 1.16 billion credential attempts against 320,777 FortiGate targets and 2.1 billion attempts against 163,650 MSSQL servers.” Plus, according to Diachenko, the criminals fully pwned at least four organizations, including a Turkish NATO defense contractor, and, in that case, stole classified defense documents. Security sleuth Kevin Beaumont, who also verified the stolen credentials, said “the data is legit.” “I have worked with several orgs listed, and can confirm the logins and passwords are real,” Beaumont wrote. “Many of the devices sampled are on fairly recent patches.” According to device search engine Shodan, the massive heist comprises about half of all internet-facing Fortinet firewalls. Plus, Beaumont noted, most of the compromised Fortinet devices remain online. So if you’re still reading this story: stop now, and go reset your Fortinet firewall passwords stat. After we first published this story, Fortinet responded to us, denying that the attacks are fresh and claiming that the data showing up on the dark web comes from prior breaches. "Based on our analysis, the data involved is a resharing of data from previous incidents, as well as bruteforcing of credentials, and is not related to any recent incident or advisory," a Fortinet spokesperson told El Reg. Organizations that follow routine best practices, including regularly refreshing security credentials, as per guidance in this March blog, face minimal risk from credential compromise detail referenced in the reporting.” The Register reached out to the companies affected by the so-called FortiBleed campaign for comment, Lenovo said it was looking into it; we didn't receive responses from the others. ® Updated at 2118 with a statement from Fortinet. ]]></content:encoded>
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        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.theregister.com/a/5257854</guid>
        <link>https://www.theregister.com/systems/2026/06/17/uncle-sam-bets-500m-that-alphabet-spinoffs-ai-can-dig-up-new-semiconductor-materials/5257854</link>
        <pubDate>Wed, 17 Jun 2026 19:05:19 +0200</pubDate>
        <title>Uncle Sam bets $500M that Alphabet spinoff's AI can dig up new semiconductor materials</title>
        <description><![CDATA[ AI drug discovery is so last year, even though it hasn't accomplished much yet ]]></description>
        <category>systems</category>
                <lab:kicker><![CDATA[ systems ]]></lab:kicker>
                <dc:modified>Wed, 17 Jun 2026 17:05:34 +0000</dc:modified>
                <content:encoded><![CDATA[ In order to move more semiconductor manufacturing onshore, the US needs to depend less on foreign-sourced materials. Now, the government is giving an Alphabet spinoff $500 million in CHIPS Act funds to find domestic minerals, molecules, and chemicals needed for this process. SandboxAQ (that’s AI and Quantum, for those wondering), which spun off from Alphabet in 2022 under the chairmanship of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, announced the award Wednesday. The company won’t be doing any manufacturing – this is just an R&D grant to turn the startup's AI simulation software toward discoveries necessary to build a domestic chip industry. According to SandboxAQ, the $500 million awarded to it by the Department of Commerce will go toward developing “novel molecules and formulations for semiconductor manufacturing," including chip production materials that are free of PFAS ("forever chemicals"), new semiconductor fabrication catalysts, magnets that don’t rely on foreign-sourced neodymium and other rare earths, and fab-powering batteries that don’t rely on majority foreign-sourced materials like lithium. The CHIPS and Science Act, signed into law by President Biden in 2022, was designed in part to dole out $52 billion to US firms to reignite domestic semiconductor manufacturing, which has mostly fled the country for more favorable production environments overseas. Four years on, the government’s many investments have seen some payoff, like the acquisition of a 10 percent stake in Intel to help keep the company afloat, but there’s still a lot of work to be done to reduce dependence on foreign supply chains and manufacturers. SandboxAQ relies its own large quantitative models (LQMs), which it describes as “AI systems trained on the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology, not human language.” That, the company asserts, means they’re well-suited to discover new materials needed to eliminate harmful PFAS and foreign-sourced materials from the semiconductor supply chain. The hope is that the LQMs will be able to generate their own material predictions that researchers then test in the lab – essentially the same process that’s undergirded the years-long effort to use AI to help synthesize new drugs. Despite AI industry leaders prognosticating we’d be popping AI-designed drugs in 2025, AI has yet to design a functional medicine, according to the US National Institutes of Health. Why, then, should we presume an AI will succeed at replacing critical battery and chip manufacturing components where drug research has failed? In fact, according to SandboxAQ’s announcement, its LQMs aren’t even necessarily grounded in real-world data. They rely in part on synthetic data, which is then fed into the company’s LQMs and used to train their design-make-test workflows. A company spokesperson told The Register in an email that it still uses real-world data where possible. “Where experimental data exists, we incorporate it,” SandboxAQ told us. “Where it doesn't, we can still move forward and solve the problem.” When asked whether an error in the reasoning process could compound, leading to considerable lost time for researchers and a lack of results, the company admitted that such a potential is exactly what “any rigorous AI-driven materials program has to answer.” “Our models are trained on the laws of physics and chemistry, so they are anchored to physical reality, rather than free to drift,” the spokesperson told us, adding that lab testing is the final check on AI accuracy. “A material either performs in the lab, or it doesn’t, and that validation gate is precisely what prevents a chain of reasoning from running away with itself.” SandboxAQ added that it is not starting from zero in any of the four target areas, having done previous work on catalysts, battery materials, alloy discovery, and PFAS breakdown that will be incorporated into its CHIPS Act-funded work. “In commercial deployment, we’ve already cut development timelines from months to weeks” at the candidate screening stage, the SandboxAQ spokesperson explained. SandboxAQ said that some of the work it's doing, like PFAS mitigation, could be rolled out to existing fabs, as could new batteries and the like, but it admitted that the various verticals will operate on different timelines. “Qualification in the semiconductor industry is genuinely rigorous and does take time – we wouldn’t minimize that – but the path runs through validation and industrial qualification with existing manufacturers, not through standing up new fabrication capacity from scratch,” SandboxAQ told us. ® ]]></content:encoded>
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        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.theregister.com/a/5257781</guid>
        <link>https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/2026/06/17/only-half-of-us-datacenter-capacity-planned-for-2026-is-actually-under-construction/5257781</link>
        <pubDate>Wed, 17 Jun 2026 17:55:16 +0200</pubDate>
        <title>Only half of US datacenter capacity planned for 2026 is actually  under construction</title>
        <description><![CDATA[ Another fun example of AI hype and reality colliding ]]></description>
        <category>on-prem</category>
                <lab:kicker><![CDATA[ ON-PREM ]]></lab:kicker>
                <dc:modified>Wed, 17 Jun 2026 15:58:51 +0000</dc:modified>
                <content:encoded><![CDATA[ Don't count your bit barns before they've at least started to hatch. Developers continue to announce new datacenter construction projects, but construction work for many due to come online this year or next appear not to have commenced, while planned capacity may have been overestimated. According to financial analyst Jefferies, known promises to build new stateside datacenters suggest 160 GW worth of infrastructure will be operational in the country by 2032 In a research note shared with The Register, the firm reports pervasive delays and claims that only 12 GW out of 24 GW of datacenter capacity scheduled for 2026 is currently under construction. The situation is even worse for the 2027/2028 timeframe, as substantial construction of as much as 80 percent of the planned capacity does not appear to have started yet. The reasons for the delays are familiar: zoning and/or permitting challenges, interconnection setbacks, problems accessing energy supply, labor shortages, and the signing of commercial contracts with end users. Power availability is a well-known issue, as are grid connection setbacks. The latter have grown so bad – reports of seven-year delays - that the US Energy Secretary directed the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to implement new rules to speed the process for customers such as datacenters. Jefferies highlights another factor, that of duplicative counting inflating the planned total capacity due to hyperscalers making multiple requests to various energy utilities. For this reason, it does not expect the majority of the extra load forecast for 2026 and 2027/2028 to materialize. Some investor expectations do not reflect real-world constraints, primarily labor, the report says, suggesting that 15-20 GW of capacity coming online per year is more realistic than the 40+ GW forecast by some for 2027-28. Announced capacity should not be considered a reliable way of evaluating data campus load growth, Jefferies says, citing offtake agreements, permitting progress, financing, and a realistic construction timeline as better indicators. The report points to strategies that operators are taking to circumvent the issues outlined above. Behind-the-meter and hybrid models are solutions to the power problem, with “hybrid” referring to datacenters tending to take all they can get from the grid first, before later turning to behind-the-meter sources - typically on-site power generation. Jefferies says that the build pipeline is shifting increasingly toward regions with more attractive interconnection and permitting options, pointing out that Texas had 14 GW of new capacity announced in the second quarter of this year alone. ® ]]></content:encoded>
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        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.theregister.com/a/5257652</guid>
        <link>https://www.theregister.com/personal-tech/2026/06/17/smartphone-market-to-shrink-15-percent-this-year-due-to-memory-crisis/5257652</link>
        <pubDate>Wed, 17 Jun 2026 17:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
        <title>Smartphone market to shrink 15 percent this year due to memory crisis</title>
        <description><![CDATA[ Buyers put off by rising prices expected to turn to second-hand phones instead  ]]></description>
        <category>personal tech</category>
                <lab:kicker><![CDATA[ Personal Tech ]]></lab:kicker>
                <dc:modified>Wed, 17 Jun 2026 14:32:28 +0000</dc:modified>
                <content:encoded><![CDATA[ Unless your personal tech budget has bloated, prepare to stick with your current smartphone for a while thanks to AI-driven demand that has driven up memory prices and made new handsets so expensive that sales are falling dramatically. So says research firm CCS Insight, which expects smartphone shipments to fall by 15 percent this year as some entry-level devices have already seen their sticker prices go up by more than 50 percent since last year. The firm found that the primary smartphone market (meaning new devices) contracted 4.4 percent in the first quarter of this year, despite sales channels front-loading (meaning stockpiling) product inventory, as device prices begin to rise sharply. As CCS notes, this casts an ominous shadow on the outlook for the rest of the year, and it seems things have worsened since The Register first started reporting on the smartphone memory woes. Back in January, the forecast was for handset price rises of 6-8 percent, while the most pessimistic outlook was that the global market might contract as much as 5.2 percent. By February, analysts were expecting to see a decline in shipments of around 8 percent across the global market, and for prices to increase by about 14 percent. The root cause of all this is the AI craze, which has seen huge demand for high-performance GPU-filled servers to process it all. Chipmakers have moved to capitalize on this by prioritizing production of high-margin memory components for those servers, rather than making the plain old DRAM and NAND needed for PCs and phones. This is different from the usual boom-bust cycle of the memory market, where prices rise because of production issues constraining supply. Instead, it is demand-side pressure from hyperscalers that has tipped the balance, leading to a memory supercycle that may last until 2028. "The memory chip crisis shows no sign of slowing down in the near future, ramping up the pressure on manufacturers and consumers. Memory components now account for more than 30 percent of a manufacturer's bill of materials in some smartphones.,” said CCS research analyst Ben Hatton. “The full impact has yet to be felt in many regions, but it's clear that device prices will accelerate over the rest of the year.” As expected, budget devices are the worst hit, as memory and storage costs make up a higher proportion of their bill of materials, hence some entry-level devices seeing a 50 percent jump in price. In contrast the organized secondary market (meaning traders in pre-owned devices) grew by four percent during the first quarter, as consumers in search of low-cost phones increasingly see used devices as a suitable alternative. CCS therefore believes the second-hand smartphone market will grow by 15 percent this year. But there’s a snag. With fewer people buying new phones, the supply of pre-owned models will tail off as well, as it relies on people trading up. This was highlighted by a report in May, which found that replacement cycles are getting longer as consumers often hold on to their devices for more than four years, rather than the couple of years that used to be typical. There are also fewer smartphone vendors these days, meaning fewer launches every year. “The secondary market has an opportunity to serve some of the demand that will be unfulfilled by the primary market,” commented Hatton. “The major challenge in the near term is to grow supply during a fallow period of flagship launches.” Countries with mature trade-in programs will be in a stronger position to capitalize on this opportunity and see higher growth rates in the pre-owned market. As The Register reported last year, this probably doesn’t mean Europe, as less than a third of consumers there trade in or sell their old phones, limiting the supply of second-hand devices. ® ]]></content:encoded>
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        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.theregister.com/a/5256365</guid>
        <link>https://www.theregister.com/devops/2026/06/17/aws-hypes-continuous-agentic-devops-puts-kiro-in-your-pocket/5256365</link>
        <pubDate>Wed, 17 Jun 2026 17:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
        <title>AWS hypes continuous agentic DevOps, puts Kiro in your pocket</title>
        <description><![CDATA[ Trust is the biggest barrier to AI adoption, says AI chief, claiming that new features in Bedrock AgentCore will prevent bad outcomes ]]></description>
        <category>devops</category>
                <lab:kicker><![CDATA[ DEVOPS ]]></lab:kicker>
                <dc:modified>Wed, 17 Jun 2026 09:34:45 +0000</dc:modified>
                <content:encoded><![CDATA[ AWS today introduced new and enhanced agents aimed at DevOps and code security at its New York Summit, including previews of Continuum for identifying and fixing application vulnerabilities, and an iOS mobile app for its Kiro coding tool. Matt Wood, chief AI and technology officer, said in a press briefing that the company sees AI tools operating continuously in the background, rather than being used on demand. AWS Continuum, now in closed preview, is a set of agents that "continually provide security continuity using artificial intelligence, building on penetration testing and code review," he said. Sounds expensive? According to Wood, the cost of using AI tools is falling despite the rising price of tokens. "While the cost of a token at the frontier continues to go up, if you normalize for a particular point of intelligence, the cost continues to decrease year by year," he claimed. AWS Continuum currently includes two products. Continuum for code vulnerabilities performs vulnerability scans of an AWS environment and is claimed to prioritize findings that are actually reachable in a production path, with exploits demonstrated in a sandbox. The tool will also generate suggested fixes such as network changes or patches for the code. The existing AWS Security Agent will be renamed "Continuum pen testing" and "Continuum code scanning". The AWS DevOps agent, first previewed at the company's re:Invent conference in late 2025, is billed as an AI tool that can resolve and prevent application outages and optimize application reliability and performance. It was made generally available in March. DevOps Agent is gaining release management capabilities, now in preview, which assess code readiness and run software in an AWS-managed isolated environment to verify the builds. The new feature follows other enhancements to DevOps Agent introduced earlier this month. DevOps Agent has always had support for calling tools via Model Context Protocol (MCP) but now exposes its own MCP endpoint, enabling other tools to call the Agent API. There is also support for the Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol, introduced by Google last year to assist agent collaboration. These new endpoints are in addition to the standard AWS REST API. DevOps Agent is designed to use other observability tools as input, including AWS CloudWatch, Datadog, Dynatrace, New Relic, and Splunk, as well as code from repositories such as GitHub and GitLab. It can also connect to Microsoft Azure and Azure DevOps. AWS Transform, an AI service for migrating and modernizing workloads and application code, gets a new preview feature called continuous modernization. AWS suggests it as a tool to cover both the day-to-day work of upgrading and patching libraries, and larger projects such as moving to a more recent framework or runtime for Java or .NET applications. Kiro is an IDE and service for specification-driven AI coding. Kiro can be extended with "powers," wrappers for one or more MCP servers available from GitHub. Powers exist for AWS services such as DevOps Agent and Lambda, as well as for third-party services such as Datadog and Dynatrace. Now in closed preview, the Kiro mobile app for iOS can launch and manage remote sessions. There are three modes of interaction: chat, spec for continuing a specification workflow, and autonomy for delegating tasks. The app shows the live state from cloud sessions, and renders code diffs as cards that the company says are legible on a small screen. According to AWS, it is a true native app, not a wrapper for a web application. In addition to DevOps tools, the company also previewed AWS Context, a service for mapping company data into a knowledge graph for agentic search. It is similar to search in the existing Amazon Quick service, except that Context is designed to be organizational rather than personal. Context publishes its metadata into Amazon S3 tables in Apache Iceberg format. According to AWS, all queries are identity-aware to prevent users from accessing data they are not authorized to see. Amazon Quick will use the same underlying technology as Context. Quick is also getting the ability to create autonomous agents via voice prompts, or to choose from a library of pre-configured agents. Hundreds of connectors add integration with third-party services such as Gmail, Slack, and Microsoft Teams and SharePoint. Finally, Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, a platform for custom agents, adds a managed knowledge base, web search, and the ability for agents to spend money on paid content such as financial market feeds. Companies going all-in on agentic AI will find it costly. Services like Quick are subscription-based, and others like DevOps Agent are based on per-second usage, currently the same for incident response, evaluations (incident prevention), and on-demand tasks such as chat. Pricing is somewhat opaque because the time an agent will take for a task is unknown. There are also additional charges for AWS services an agent consumes, such as CloudWatch queries. Another issue is reliability. In its post on AgentCore, AWS acknowledges that "the most dangerous agent failures aren't the ones that throw errors. They're the ones that look fine on dashboards: an agent that confirms an order modification it never executed, one that fabricates product availability when an API times out, another that skips an approval step while dashboards show a 99 percent success rate." AWS claims new AgentCore features address this with "failure, intent, and trajectory insights across hundreds of sessions." AgentCore also has policy capabilities that define what an agent can and cannot do, and Bedrock Guardrails, which run at a gateway layer outside the agent and evaluate actions for prompt injection, harmful content, and data exposure. "Trust is the single biggest barrier to adoption for artificial intelligence systems inside most organizations," said Wood. He said that AWS is trying to build agents that "exhibit and communicate trusted outcomes to their users," using Bedrock AgentCore policy and guardrails to make AI agents safer and more reliable. ® ]]></content:encoded>
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        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.theregister.com/a/5254631</guid>
        <link>https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/06/17/digital-sovereignty-needs-an-operating-model/5254631</link>
        <pubDate>Wed, 17 Jun 2026 17:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
        <title>Digital sovereignty needs an operating model</title>
        <description><![CDATA[ PARTNER CONTENT Europe wants control over its own technology, but what does that look like? ]]></description>
        <category>security</category>
                <dc:modified>Fri, 12 Jun 2026 03:06:34 +0000</dc:modified>
                <content:encoded><![CDATA[ Europe, like much of the world, is living through a period of heightened geopolitical uncertainty in which sanctions risk, legal divergence, and cyber disruption have moved from abstract concerns to board-level variables. Digital sovereignty is shifting from aspiration to operational requirement, driven by resilience expectations, critical service dependency, and rising geopolitical and cyber risk. Definitions of sovereignty vary, ranging from blanket data localization edicts to industrial policy to national security, but the absence of an agreed definition should not be mistaken for an absence of intent. Sovereignty is already shaping procurement, regulatory compliance, and technology strategy. From my years working at the intersection of government and the technology industry, I have seen how quickly digital policy can harden into operational constraints. I have also seen how easily "sovereignty" becomes a stand-in for broader concerns: dependency, geopolitics, and the fear that critical services may not remain available during a crisis Two issues are at play. First, policymakers are right that over-dependency on foreign technology can become a national resilience problem. Cloud market concentration is a case in point: last year across Europe, the three leading cloud providers accounted for around 70 percent of the market, while European providers' collective share remained around 15 percent. Concentration is not, by itself, a security failure, but it is a strategic dependency that can become acute when legal regimes diverge, access is contested, or a geopolitical shock tightens the room to maneuver. It also amplifies the "ripple effect": disruption at a small number of providers can cascade across thousands of organizations and supply chains. Second, business leaders are right to worry that blunt sovereignty initiatives raise costs and regulatory complexity. A hard localization mandate or a "sovereign-only stack" duplicates infrastructure, slows modernization, and in practice keeps organizations tied to legacy systems longer than planned while limiting access to leading technologies. The same tension is shaping Europe's competitiveness debate. Former Italian prime minister Mario Draghi has argued that security is a precondition for sustainable growth and that deep dependencies can leave Europe vulnerable to coercion as geopolitical volatility increases. The question is not whether sovereignty matters but how to pursue it without turning it into a counterproductive procurement ideology. From policy to platform choice A recent decision by the French government to restrict certain foreign-made video conferencing tools in favor of a homegrown alternative illustrates the direction of travel across the EU. Whether one agrees with the decision or not, it signals something larger: sovereignty is becoming a set of practical constraints that can reshape technology choices quickly. Many organizations are responding with a third, damaging outcome: delay. In a recent Zscaler-commissioned survey, 73 percent of respondents said digital sovereignty concerns had caused them to delay or cancel transformation initiatives. That "pause dynamic" is dangerous because it prolongs exposure to legacy risk, weakens cyber readiness, and leaves organizations less able to absorb disruption from ransomware, supply chain compromise, systemic outages, or sudden changes in cross-border rules at a time when the threat landscape is shifting faster than ever. If Europe wants sovereignty that strengthens resilience rather than undermines it, political and business leaders need a framework that is practical, measurable, compatible with open markets, and informed by the technology sector's expertise. Here is one: control, choice, and continuity. An outcome-based framework Sovereignty begins with what an organization can control in practice: who can access data, who can administer systems, whether a vendor can see customer content, where logs are stored, how keys are managed, what subcontractors can see, and how policies can be enforced. Control is not about isolation; it is about enforceable governance and reducing hidden dependency. Sovereignty also requires choice: credible options when assumptions break. Too many organizations discover too late that their "vendor strategy" is really a dependency strategy, with few realistic alternatives. Choice is not achieved by buying two of everything. It is achieved through architecture and contracts that keep an organization mobile and avoid vendor lock-in: portability for data and configurations; full transparency on who they rely on, where access sits, and which jurisdictions and subcontractors are in the chain; and pre-agreed exit paths that can be executed under time pressure. It also requires leaders to prevent the sovereignty debate from becoming an excuse to stop transformation. Every program facing sovereignty constraints should be forced through a decision path: redesign, mitigation, or exit on a timeline. The third C is continuity: keeping critical services running during any kind of disruption. If sovereignty is meant to reduce strategic vulnerability, continuity is where it either becomes real or becomes theater. Continuity is measurable through recovery time objectives, tested failover, supplier-failure drills, and exercises for jurisdiction-change scenarios. Across Europe, the urgency is reinforced by the threat environment. Zscaler ThreatLabz data shows rising numbers of damaging ransomware attacks year over year across the region: Spain (+116 percent), Germany (+74 percent), Belgium (+73 percent), Italy (+53 percent), and France (+34 percent) among others. Separate research on resilience found that 52 percent of IT executives believe their current security measures are insufficient to defend against existing or emerging threats such as agent-based AI and quantum computing. The UK's National Cyber Security Centre, meanwhile, reported a 130 percent rise in "nationally significant" incidents over the past year. AI is accelerating these risks. It already gives "bad actors" new capabilities to increase the speed, scale, and sophistication of their attacks. The question is not whether disruption happens, but whether systems can withstand it. Mandate outcomes, not vendors Business leaders argue that sovereignty will raise costs, increase compliance friction, and shrink access to leading technology. That is often true. Policymakers' concerns are also legitimate: strategic dependency can undermine national security and resilience. The mistake is writing sovereignty rules that dictate which vendors to buy rather than what controls buyers must have to keep services running during shocks. The most useful sovereignty requirements are outcome-based: enforceable control over access and data, credible choice through portability and exit, proven continuity through testing and recovery. They create room for organizations to use global platforms safely while meeting local requirements, without freezing modernization. If sovereignty is now an operating requirement, every stakeholder has a role. Boards should define what "sovereign enough" means for their organization, then require regular reporting and testing, with incentives tied to resilience outcomes. CEOs and COOs should treat sovereignty as continuity, fund the modernization that reduces brittle legacy dependency, and force decisions on blocked programs. CIOs and CISOs should map and minimize third-party access, implement localization and multi-region resilience where required, and build plans for supplier failure and jurisdiction-change scenarios. Regulators should clarify definitions, harmonize requirements where possible, and create compliance pathways with transition periods that reward modernization rather than incentivize delay. The approach must be risk-based and agreed in consultation with industry. Scaling control, choice and continuity To make control, choice and continuity achievable at scale, two additional disciplines are required: collaboration and compliance. Collaboration keeps sovereignty compatible with openness through interoperability, shared incident readiness, transparent subcontracting, and trusted vendor partnerships that reduce concentration risk instead of merely relocating it. Solutions must be tailored for local demands and drive investment in local ecosystems. Compliance makes sovereignty measurable through clear definitions, auditable evidence, and regulatory approaches that focus on operational controls so that organizations are pushed to modernize rather than to delay. Sovereignty on European terms should be judged by outcomes rather than rhetoric: whether organizations can govern access, keep options open, recover quickly when incidents happen, and continue delivering critical services when dependencies fail. Done well, digital sovereignty becomes a catalyst for resilience, innovation, growth and competitiveness; done bluntly, it becomes a brake on the very transformation it is meant to protect. Contributed by Zscaler. ]]></content:encoded>
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        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.theregister.com/a/5257598</guid>
        <link>https://www.theregister.com/personal-tech/2026/06/17/surface-tension-rises-as-microsofts-latest-kit-starts-at-a-pricey-1499/5257598</link>
        <pubDate>Wed, 17 Jun 2026 16:25:25 +0200</pubDate>
        <title>Surface tension rises as Microsoft's latest kit starts at a pricey $1,499</title>
        <description><![CDATA[ Snapdragon X2 silicon and recycled aluminum are nice, the sticker shock less so ]]></description>
        <category>personal tech</category>
                <lab:kicker><![CDATA[ PERSONAL TECH ]]></lab:kicker>
                <dc:modified>Wed, 17 Jun 2026 14:45:46 +0000</dc:modified>
                <content:encoded><![CDATA[ Microsoft has unveiled new Surface hardware at prices that could keep customers away until the hardware supply chain sorts itself out. Two devices were announced – a new Surface Pro and Surface Laptop with Snapdragon X2 silicon. The 13-inch Pro has, according to Microsoft, 53 percent faster graphics performance than the previous generation, and the 13.8 and 15-inch Laptop deliver 58 percent better graphics performance. The batteries should last all day, and the touchpad on the Laptop features haptic technology. Of course, there is dedicated NPU silicon for those on-device AI tasks that have yet to become a killer application. Still, nice to have. Less nice is the price. The Pro starts at $1,499, and the Laptop $1,599. The base Pro comes with 16 GB RAM and a 256 GB SSD, as does the base Laptop. The base 15-inch Laptop ups the storage to 512 GB, although the price starts at $1,699. The devices look great and appear well built. Microsoft has claimed they are "designed with sustainability and repair in mind," with 100 percent recycled aluminum enclosures and a new Surface Repair Tool to guide users through repair workflows for components such as the battery or display. But there is no getting around the prices, which are a hike on top of the increases Microsoft rolled out in April. Remember the Surface Laptop 7? It came in at $999 when it launched in 2024 and included a 256 GB SSD and 16 GB RAM. The new Surface Laptop is a whopping $600 more. Microsoft is not the only company affected by rising component costs, and has attempted to soften the blow a little. There's a free keyboard on offer for Surface Pro 13-inch buyers, and a free Surface Arc Mouse for Laptop purchasers. There's also up to $900 on offer for trade-ins. It is, however, difficult to recommend the devices or indeed any premium device in the current hardware climate. The problem Microsoft faces is the rise of portables like Apple's $599 MacBook Neo. While it is a vastly underpowered device when compared to the latest Surface Laptop, it is more than adequate for most purposes and an attractive proposition for customers reluctant to drop another thousand dollars on Microsoft's (or any other premium vendor's) latest and greatest. The latest Surface devices represent a missed opportunity for Microsoft. Although a price hike for a premium device is difficult to avoid, considering component shortages, other vendors appear capable of releasing more basic hardware at a price point that is not so heart-stopping. Dell, for example, has launched a new XPS 13 laptop for $699. In Microsoft's last earnings report, revenue from Windows OEM and Devices was down 2 percent. It is difficult to see how the newly announced Surfaces will change this trend as customers consider whether a premium device is worth quite such a premium price. ® ]]></content:encoded>
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        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.theregister.com/a/5257621</guid>
        <link>https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/06/17/cisco-adds-another-sd-wan-box-to-max-severity-bug-advisory/5257621</link>
        <pubDate>Wed, 17 Jun 2026 15:45:00 +0200</pubDate>
        <title>Cisco adds another SD-WAN box to max-severity bug advisory</title>
        <description><![CDATA[ Updated at the time? No sweat. Check those logs, though ]]></description>
        <category>security</category>
                <lab:kicker><![CDATA[ Security ]]></lab:kicker>
                <dc:modified>Wed, 17 Jun 2026 13:20:59 +0000</dc:modified>
                <content:encoded><![CDATA[ Cisco has updated a February security advisory, adding another product to the list of those affected by the maximum-severity CVE-2026-20127. Switchzilla made a small amendment to the original advisory on Tuesday evening, noting that Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Validator, formerly vBond, was also among the boxes attackers could pop open. Readers may remember the fuss over CVE-2026-20127 (10.0) a few months ago. The make-me-admin improper authentication flaw prompted a Five Eyes alert since attackers could essentially gain persistent root access to all vulnerable instances. In other words, it's a far-from-ideal situation that could could create espionage opportunities, given the prevalence of Cisco's SD-WAN offerings in Western networks. Cisco said at the time that attackers could exploit CVE-2026-20127 to gain admin rights, access NETCONF, and reconfigure the SD-WAN fabric, before exploiting CVE-2022-20775 (7.8), a path traversal flaw discovered in September 2022, to gain root access. Cisco Talos, the company's threat intel arm, posited that the bug could have been exploited for as long as three years by the time it was discovered. Talos attributed the exploitation activity to a group it tracks as UAT-8616, whose activity dates back to at least 2023, according to its researchers' estimates. No one has formally attributed UAT-8616 to a specific country or group of individuals, but experts say that it is a highly sophisticated outfit that has a history of targeting critical infrastructure sectors. Ollie Whitehouse, NCSC-UK's CTO, said at the time: "Our new alert makes clear that organizations using Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN products should urgently investigate their exposure to network compromise and hunt for malicious activity, making use of the new threat hunting advice produced with our international partners to identify evidence of compromise. "UK organizations are strongly advised to report compromises to the NCSC, and to apply vendor updates and hardening guidance as soon as practicable to reduce the risk of exploitation." The Register asked Cisco for more information, but it did not immediately respond. Customers should not have to make any new changes, provided that they upgraded their software to a fixed version across all systems when the advisory was first published in February, not just SD-WAN Controller and SD-WAN Manager. The update comes weeks after Cisco disclosed another zero-day affecting Catalyst SD-WAN, suggesting that it had been exploited for at least a week at the time. Tracked as CVE-2026-20245, it marked the sixth SD-WAN flaw disclosed this year, and the second to be exploited as a zero-day in as many months. ® ]]></content:encoded>
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        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.theregister.com/a/5257570</guid>
        <link>https://www.theregister.com/devops/2026/06/17/homebrew-60-released-with-new-security-mechanism-linux-sandbox-and-more/5257570</link>
        <pubDate>Wed, 17 Jun 2026 15:31:00 +0200</pubDate>
        <title>Homebrew 6.0 released with new security mechanism, Linux sandbox and more</title>
        <description><![CDATA[ Homebrew was "less vulnerable 10 years ago than npm is today," project lead tells us ]]></description>
        <category>devops</category>
                <lab:kicker><![CDATA[ DEVOPS ]]></lab:kicker>
                <dc:modified>Wed, 17 Jun 2026 13:06:26 +0000</dc:modified>
                <content:encoded><![CDATA[ The Homebrew team has released version 6.0 of this popular open-source package manager for macOS and Linux, with a new mechanism for trusting packages and support for sandboxing on Linux, to align with existing sandboxing on macOS. Homebrew 6.0 introduces tap trust, a "tap" being a collection of formulae, casks (a package of pre-compiled binaries) and commands which usually reside in a Git repository. The tool trusts official Homebrew taps by default, but requires an explicit agreement before it will trust third-party taps (which can include arbitrary Ruby code) before they install or run any code. Tap trust is part of Homebrew’s approach to supply chain security, which has a number of distinctive features. Package maintainers are Homebrew maintainers, not the authors of the package. Names are maintainer-curated, so typosquats (giving a package a misleading name designed to be similar to one that is popular) can be rejected. Each download is pinned to a sha256 checksum. Package binaries are built from source, which protected Homebrew from incidents like the Trivy compromise earlier this year when official Trivy binaries were replaced with malicious versions. These and other features of Homebrew security are described in the documentation. Project leader Mike McQuaid told us that "Homebrew was less vulnerable 10-15 years ago than npm is today. The trust model is radically different and, even today, we are much quicker to break backwards compatibility in the interest of security." A new security feature is sandboxing on Linux when Homebrew compiles software. This was already implemented on macOS (and has been for a decade). Version 6.0 adds a Linux implementation based on the Bubblewrap project, and this will be on by default for developers. A new Homebrew sub-command, brew vulns, will check installed packages for known vulnerabilities, by checking against the OSV (vulnerability database for open source). The commands brew install and brew upgrade will now show a dependency summary and require a conformation prompt before running, called ask mode, following a developer survey earlier this year where this was highly requested. Another new command, brew exec, will run a Homebrew-provided executable, similar to the way npx works for npm packages. Homebrew startup performance in 6.0 is said to be faster, thanks to parallelised bottle fetching (a bottle is a pre-built package) and other optimizations. Apple is phasing out support for Intel macOS both for future versions of macOS and for Rosetta, the Intel compatibility layer. Homebrew is following: in September this year no new bottles will be built for macOS Intel and from September 2027 macOS Intel will be "unsupported entirely and all related code deleted," according to the post introducing Homebrew 6.0. Homebrew is well-liked by developers, and becoming more popular on Linux as well as macOS. There is some frustration though regarding the dropping of Intel support. "The deprecation of Intel support is agressive! Every Mac enthusiast I know who uses a Mac as a server uses their old machines, which are pretty much all Intel. We'll lose support from you guys a year before Apple!," said one. McQuaid replied noting that Homebrew will still work for a year after support is dropped to "Tier 3”, meaning almost unsupported, and added that "there’s nothing stopping you for doing the work to setup ‘Intelbrew’ and support it for the community." Another issue he mentioned is that GitHub is dropping macOS Intel runners for continuous integration towards the end of 2027. It is notable that Homebrew 6.0 made extensive use of AI coding. A document on responsible AI usage takes the line that AI contributions must be disclosed and human-reviewed, and that AI is not responsible for any code, rather the human contributor is responsible. "AI is great if used responsibly which means a human reviewing all changes both before PRs submitted and a maintainer reviewing before PRs are merged. I have found despite using it responsibly it has been a huge personal accelerator," McQuaid told us. ® ]]></content:encoded>
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        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.theregister.com/a/5257384</guid>
        <link>https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/06/17/apples-webkit-performance-tax-leaves-ios-browsers-stuck-in-the-slow-lane-says-microsoft/5257384</link>
        <pubDate>Wed, 17 Jun 2026 15:02:56 +0200</pubDate>
        <title>Apple's WebKit performance tax leaves iOS browsers stuck in the slow lane, says Microsoft</title>
        <description><![CDATA[ Rival rendering engines could make pages load almost 30% faster on iPhones, Redmond claims ]]></description>
        <category>software</category>
                <lab:kicker><![CDATA[ Software ]]></lab:kicker>
                <content:encoded><![CDATA[ Critics and competitors have long complained about the "Apple Tax" – the sales commission developers are obliged to pay on App Store sales and in-app purchases. Now Microsoft engineers have documented a performance tax – the performance hit that iOS users today endure because Apple requires iOS browsers, with theoretical exceptions, to use the WebKit browser engine that powers Safari. The performance tax comes to 28.6 percent, almost as much as Apple's 30 percent commission rate. Browser rendering engines handle the heavy lifting for web browsers. "They determine how web standards are implemented, how security and privacy protections are enforced, and which actors ultimately shape the evolution of the web," as Mozilla recently explained. Just three major engines dominate commercial deployments: Blink, the foundation of Chrome and its Chromium-based siblings Edge, Vivaldi, Brave, and Opera, among others; WebKit, the foundation of Safari; and Gecko, the foundation of Firefox. Firefox holds about 2 percent of the global browser market share, according to StatCounter. That helps explain Mozilla's concern that the lack of browser engine diversity, a consequence of the market power of Google and Apple, threatens the open web. According to DigitalApplied, Safari owns 23.4 percent of mobile browsing on iOS globally and 51.2 percent of mobile browsing in North America. But due to Apple's platform rules, every browser that runs on iOS is WebKit-based, so there are few opportunities for competitive differentiation outside of interface elements. Browser rivals, advocacy groups, and web developers have argued that Apple should relax its platform rules and improve its web technology for years. Europe's Digital Markets Act (DMA), plus regulatory action in Japan and elsewhere, have amplified hope that Apple will allow more competition on its mobile OS. The latest such investigation comes from the Italian Competition Authority. Microsoft has now highlighted the cost of the iOS browser engine monoculture – time lost to Safari's slowness. On Monday, Kyle Pflug, group product manager for the Microsoft Edge Web Platform, published benchmark test results using Apple's Speedometer 3.1 and other test tools that show how a Chromium-based iOS browser using the open source Blink rendering engine compares to Apple's Safari browser, which relies on the open source WebKit rendering engine. Edge is a Chromium-based browser, and if it were implemented for iOS using BrowserEngineKit, a framework Apple introduced in March 2024 to comply with Europe's Digital Markets Act (DMA), it would score 28.6 percent better (49.27 vs 38.3 on Speedometer 3.1) than Apple's Safari browser under iOS 26.5.1. It would also outperform Safari on the JetStream 3 benchmark (JavaScript and Wasm performance) by 13.1 percent (306.35 vs 270.9) and on the MotionMark 1.3.1 benchmark (graphics rendering) by 2.1 percent (4,773.52 vs 4,673.68). "To be clear, this is a research prototype, not a product announcement; and these are preliminary numbers from my own device, not lab results," said Pflug. "But it does prove out the opportunity to close real capability gaps and deliver new competition on performance." Rick Byers, principal Chrome engineer at Google, took note of the results. "Given how Chromium and WebKit are always vying for the top spot in Speedometer on macOS, it's really striking how big the gap is on iOS!" he said in response to Pflug's post. "And we haven't even really tried to optimize performance for that platform yet! IMHO this is what you should expect to see when there's a lack of competition!" Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The EU has enforced competition through browser selection screens, with some success. In theory, the bloc's rules should promote browser engine competition on iOS. The DMA allows EU-based developers to build browsers with rendering engines other than WebKit. Since March 2024, Apple has provided tools to do so. Yet more than two years later, no browser maker has launched an alternative browser. As Microsoft has done with Edge, Google and Mozilla have prototyped Blink and Gecko-based versions of their respective browsers for iOS. But no such browser has been released. That may be because building a new browser means scaling considerable technical hurdles that Apple hasn't rushed to lower, such as BrowserEngineKit bugs. Browser makers therefore consider the Apple rule compliance process too onerous. For example, if Microsoft were to release a Blink-based version of Edge on iOS, it would have to be a separate app from the WebKit-based version of Edge – leaving Redmond to reacquire its entire iOS user base. Alex Moore, executive director of Open Web Advocacy, a group that has lobbied on behalf of web developers against Google and Apple's platform rules, pointed to citations [PDF] in US court filings (the US 2024 antitrust case against Apple is ongoing) and UK regulatory documents that highlight the problem posed by Apple's platform power. In February 2020, these documents say, Apple's vice president of iPhone marketing proposed that the company should "set a stake in the ground for what features we think are 'good enough' for the consumer" rather than investing and innovating. "This is a clear example of the costs Apple imposes on consumers and businesses worldwide, costs created by its 17-year ban on competing browser engines," Moore told The Register. "Even in the EU and Japan, where Apple is now required to allow browser vendors to use their own engines, the barriers it has put in place ensure browser vendors are prevented from porting their own engines to iOS. Given that Apple has now had more than two years to produce a compliant solution, the European Commission needs to open a specification proceeding to instruct Apple, in precise terms, how these barriers must be removed." "If Apple can restrict browser engines on iOS, it can limit what the mobile web is capable of, and keep businesses dependent on native apps and app store rules. This is, in our view, the most critical intervention the EU could possibly make, and the one most likely to reshape the entire mobile ecosystem. No other intervention comes close." ® ]]></content:encoded>
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        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.theregister.com/a/5257487</guid>
        <link>https://www.theregister.com/systems/2026/06/17/intel-starts-cooking-up-enhanced-18a-p-silicon-for-would-be-foundry-customers/5257487</link>
        <pubDate>Wed, 17 Jun 2026 14:14:00 +0200</pubDate>
        <title>Intel starts cooking up enhanced 18A-P silicon for would-be foundry customers</title>
        <description><![CDATA[ Chipzilla claims 9% speed bump without extra power draw but is compatible with designs for 18A ]]></description>
        <category>systems</category>
                <lab:kicker><![CDATA[ SYSTEMS ]]></lab:kicker>
                <dc:modified>Wed, 17 Jun 2026 11:59:59 +0000</dc:modified>
                <content:encoded><![CDATA[ While Intel ramps up production of its 18A process node, the chipmaker has started limited output of its enhanced variant, 18A-P, promising 9 percent higher performance at the same power. At the IEEE's 2026 VLSI Symposium in Hawaii, Intel disclosed that it has started risk production using 18A-P, the first of its planned enhancements for the 18A process, and potentially the first to be used for commercial customers of Intel's foundry biz. Risk production refers to initial low-volume output to qualify a new manufacturing node. Chipzilla says reaching this stage means it is meeting timelines it has shared with customers and partners. The x86 giant launched its first chips made with the base 18A process back in January, in the form of the "Panther Lake" Core Ultra Series 3 processors. But it had already detailed plans for updated versions of the manufacturing tech last year, as reported by The Register at the time. Intel claims 18A-P delivers 9 percent better performance than 18A while consuming the same power as 18A silicon, or, alternatively, 18 percent lower power consumption for the same performance. It achieves these performance and power benefits through a mix of transistor, interconnect, and design technology co-optimizations, the firm says. But a key factor is that 18A-P is said to be fully design rule compatible with 18A, meaning that any chips designed for 18A should be easily transferable for production with Intel's newer process. Industry talk is that Intel's first foundry customers may therefore skip straight to 18A-P. Previously, the chipmaker planned to offer the upcoming and more advanced 14A node as its first mainstream commercial offering but it is understood that chief exec Lip-Bu Tan changed that plan. Intel is also reportedly in talks with Apple to manufacture some of its silicon on 18A or 18A-P. "Our updates and presentations at VLSI signal to Intel Foundry customers and partners that we are fully committed to leading edge process innovation over the long term," said Intel Foundry EVP Naga Chandrasekaran. The other process node variant Intel is working on is called 18A-PT, which is optimized for designs requiring through-silicon vias (TSVs). This is to allow a final product to be assembled by stacking multiple chips or chiplets on top of one another. Industry watchers believe Intel expects AI accelerator designers will favor 18A-PT, as it allows memory tiles to be manufactured separately and integrated during packaging. Also at the VLSI event, Intel disclosed several technologies still under development. These include CFET (Complementary FET) using vertically stacked NMOS and PMOS devices for increased transistor density, and integration of gallium nitride power devices with silicon logic, enabling digital control circuitry alongside high-power transistors in a single process. Speaking at a conference earlier this month, Intel chief financial officer David Zinsner admitted that the firm had bitten off more than it could chew with 18A, referring to the delays in getting it into production last year. "I would say it this way, I don't know, early last year, I think the challenge around 18A was two things. One, we tried to do too much at once. And it took a while to get that settled. And I think second is, we were trying to play performance and yield and trying to improve both at the same time. It was like trying to fly the plane and fix the wing at the same time, basically," he said. ® ]]></content:encoded>
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        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.theregister.com/a/5256343</guid>
        <link>https://www.theregister.com/os-platforms/2026/06/17/windows-devs-rerolled-old-code-to-save-precious-bytes/5256343</link>
        <pubDate>Wed, 17 Jun 2026 14:01:00 +0200</pubDate>
        <title>Windows devs rerolled old code to save precious bytes</title>
        <description><![CDATA[ There really was a time when Microsoft cared about every KB ]]></description>
        <category>os platforms</category>
                <lab:kicker><![CDATA[ OS PLaTFORMS ]]></lab:kicker>
                <dc:modified>Wed, 17 Jun 2026 12:44:03 +0000</dc:modified>
                <content:encoded><![CDATA[ Microsoft's latest Windows update might or might not have improved performance for the company's flagship operating system, but there was a time when its engineers cared about performance. A lot. Veteran Microsoft engineer Raymond Chen on Monday hearked back to that time by telling another war story from the glory days of Windows, when a team was working on an x86-32 emulator for an unnamed processor (though it isn't particularly difficult to identify potential candidates). The emulator used binary translation – native code was generated for the original x86-32 code. Chen explained, "This offered a significant performance improvement over emulation via interpreter. You can imagine that x86-32 is just a bytecode, and the emulator is a JIT compiler." The team came across a function that needed to allocate 64 KB of memory. Simple enough stuff – check that there is enough memory available, subtract 65536 from the stack pointer, and then initialize the memory in a loop. Use the comments to correct me, but this sounds like loop rolling, where repetitive code gets condensed into a loop. However, it appeared that a compiler had … optimized … the code "by unrolling the loop into 65,536 individual 'write byte to memory' instructions, each 4 bytes long." Perhaps a bit quicker, but goodness – quite the memory hog. "All in all," wrote Chen, "it took this program 256 kilobytes of code to initialize 64 kilobytes of data." Almost like a glimpse into a future where operating systems don't appear to give two hoots about efficient use of storage. What would that look like? As for the engineers working on the CPU emulator, Chen said, "This offended the team so much that they added special code to the translator to detect this horrible function and replace it with the equivalent tight loop." It would be interesting to know what that same team would make of the internals of some Windows binaries today, but it is heartening to know that, at one point, engineers cared about memory efficiency enough to reroll something. Sure, there might, just might, have been a performance hit, but spitting out 256 KB of code just to initialize 64 KB of data? Naughty. Very naughty. The much younger version of this hack, optimizing the heck out of code to fit within the confines of computers from yesteryear, would have been horrified. ® ]]></content:encoded>
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        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.theregister.com/a/5257545</guid>
        <link>https://www.theregister.com/public-sector/2026/06/17/ukgov-links-up-with-linkedin-for-jobs-market-intel-from-40m-accounts/5257545</link>
        <pubDate>Wed, 17 Jun 2026 13:30:57 +0200</pubDate>
        <title>UK.gov links up with LinkedIn for jobs market intel from 40M accounts</title>
        <description><![CDATA[ What anonymized data taught me about B2B sales... and reliance on the private sector for statistical info ]]></description>
        <category>public sector</category>
                <lab:kicker><![CDATA[ Public sector ]]></lab:kicker>
                <content:encoded><![CDATA[ The UK's Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) will draw on 40 million UK LinkedIn accounts to get a better understanding of local job markets. DWP said it plans to use anonymized data to help it find trends such as mismatches between local job ads and the skills possessed by local people. The department won't scrape the Microsoft-owned social network, instead relying on Redmond to analyze data and pass its findings to Skills England, a DWP agency whose officials are already working on the project. "This partnership with LinkedIn will give us a clearer understanding of the jobs market – what employers need, where opportunities are, and how people are building their careers, in order to boost economic growth," DWP minister Pat McFadden said in a canned statement. He added that more detailed insights into local workforces could particularly help young people. Skills England intends to use LinkedIn data to investigate how people move between jobs to help them develop new career options and support businesses in widening their recruitment nets. LinkedIn has nearly four million more UK-registered accounts than the 36.2 million adults who were working or looking for work in the first quarter of this year, according to figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS). However, the service is open to students and retirees, so perhaps that accounts for the discrepancy. The Reg knows some users have more than one account on the site as well. The UK government increasingly draws on commercial data to supplement its official statistics. For example, the ONS publishes "real-time indicators" that include monthly data on new online job adverts, based on Textkernel scraping information from 90,000 job board and recruitment pages. The ONS has suffered from falling response rates for official data-gathering exercises such as its Labour Force Survey, making commercial sources more attractive. A recent report from Germany-based digital policy group Interface suggests that other arms of government are also taking advantage of commercial data, with Hungary's intelligence services using location data gathered for mobile advertising and equivalent organizations in other countries likely to be doing similar. ® ]]></content:encoded>
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        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.theregister.com/a/5257506</guid>
        <link>https://www.theregister.com/personal-tech/2026/06/17/brit-competition-cops-order-google-to-make-search-rankings-less-mysterious/5257506</link>
        <pubDate>Wed, 17 Jun 2026 13:01:07 +0200</pubDate>
        <title>Brit competition cops order Google to make search rankings less mysterious</title>
        <description><![CDATA[ New rules cover organic rankings, AI Overviews, and user-approved search data sharing ]]></description>
        <category>personal tech</category>
                <lab:kicker><![CDATA[ PERSONAL TECH ]]></lab:kicker>
                <dc:modified>Wed, 17 Jun 2026 11:05:14 +0000</dc:modified>
                <content:encoded><![CDATA[ The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has imposed two new conduct requirements for Google's search services, to improve transparency and fairness in result rankings and allowing users to port their search data to third parties. The requirements follow the CMA's actions in early June that let publishers opt out of having their work appear in AI Overviews, while requiring attribution and clear links to sources. "More activity is expected over the summer," the regulator warned. The fair ranking requirement arises from complaints from UK businesses that Google's current approach is "neither fair nor transparent," as the web giant makes changes without sufficient notice and does not offer an easy way to complain. Google sees it differently. A spokesperson told The Register: "Our ranking systems are fair, transparent and show the most relevant, highest quality results. "We are committed to protecting the integrity of our systems, and will work constructively with the CMA to ensure that we can uphold the high quality of Search for our users." Be that as it may, the CMA's conduct requirements call for Google to provide businesses with more transparency into how its rankings work and to introduce "clear processes" for raising concerns about the Big G's practices. Furthermore, "organic" search results must be ranked using "objective and non-discriminatory criteria." The requirement also encompasses Google's AI Overviews, but not sponsored results. Google has six months to implement the ranking requirements. It has three months to implement a data portability requirement, but this is more about putting the voluntary processes already in place via Google's UK Data Portability API on a legal footing. According to the CMA, "the rights of UK users will now be on a par with those in the EU (under the EU's Digital Markets Act)." Businesses, unsurprisingly, are keen to get hold of that data. The CMA wrote: "Using this data would allow third parties to offer people more personalized features – like tailored travel suggestions, more relevant shopping deals, and rewards (including cashback and discounts)." Will Hayter, Executive Director for Digital Markets at the CMA, said: "These new measures will ensure search results are ranked fairly and objectively, with clearer information about changes and effective routes to raise concerns. "At the same time, innovative businesses will have the confidence that they can access search data in practice, unlocking investment and innovation in new products and services for users." The CMA slapped Google with Strategic Market Status (SMS) in general search and search advertising in October 2025. This designation was a recognition of Google's market power, although it does not, by itself, indicate the company has acted anti-competitively. It does, however, give the CMA more power to introduce interventions such as the conduct requirements above. Google is not the only company facing scrutiny. The CMA recently launched a fourth SMS investigation into Microsoft's business software ecosystem. ® ]]></content:encoded>
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        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.theregister.com/a/5257454</guid>
        <link>https://www.theregister.com/cyber-crime/2026/06/17/helpdesk-scammers-are-making-house-calls-to-make-their-lies-feel-more-real/5257454</link>
        <pubDate>Wed, 17 Jun 2026 12:38:35 +0200</pubDate>
        <title>Helpdesk scammers are making house calls to make their lies feel more real</title>
        <description><![CDATA[ 15-year-old among six arrested after Dutch cops target suspected bank fraud call center ]]></description>
        <category>cyber-crime</category>
                <lab:kicker><![CDATA[ Cyber-crime ]]></lab:kicker>
                <dc:modified>Wed, 17 Jun 2026 10:59:11 +0000</dc:modified>
                <content:encoded><![CDATA[ Six people suspected of bank helpdesk fraud are in custody after Dutch cops stormed an Amsterdam residence and caught them in conversation with a potential victim. Police say the individuals were aged between 15 and 30 and operated out of a makeshift call center they had established in an Amsterdam home. Authorities believe the accused committed bank helpdesk fraud, which has become increasingly popular across the Netherlands. Offenders were recently targeted as part of Game Over?!, a novel law enforcement scheme that successfully shamed criminals into submitting themselves to authorities. Helpdesk scammers typically operate call victims on the phone, using methods similar to voice phishing, or "vishing." They present themselves as bank employees contacting victims under various guises, all designed to steal their money. In this case, police say the alleged criminals tried to convince victims to "increase their limits," and in "several" cases, succeeded in stealing funds from their accounts. The precise cover story is largely irrelevant, however. The aim of the game is the same each time: Convince a prospective victim to surrender enough details to access their bank accounts and steal their money. While these scams mostly take place remotely, Dutch police said in their announcement on Tuesday that the crew sent members to visit victims in person, purportedly offering hands-on assistance to secure their accounts. The same tactic can often be observed with fake police officer shakedowns, which have also become popular in the country. Police say tens of thousands of elderly people, who make up the majority of targets for such scams, have fallen victim to the confidence scams. In these cases, fraudsters visit elderly individuals' houses and pretend to represent law enforcement, offering a service to safeguard their valuables. The crooks then steal those valuables, and police say previous cases have turned violent. Some have also ended in fatalities. Multiple victims of the helpdesk frauds reported their respective cases, according to the cops. The National Intervention Team for Digital Crime was called in to investigate, and during a raid on June 10, officers found the suspects mid-call with a potential victim. Officers seized multiple laptops and phones after apprehending the six suspects, and found several bank cards at the property. Further arrests have not been ruled out. ® ]]></content:encoded>
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        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.theregister.com/a/5257425</guid>
        <link>https://www.theregister.com/personal-tech/2026/06/17/windows-update-leaves-third-party-office-document-launches-in-limbo/5257425</link>
        <pubDate>Wed, 17 Jun 2026 11:56:54 +0200</pubDate>
        <title>Windows update leaves third-party Office document launches in limbo</title>
        <description><![CDATA[ Microsoft won the OLE vs OpenDoc wars. Now it's saying OLE dependencies don't matter ]]></description>
        <category>personal tech</category>
                <lab:kicker><![CDATA[ PERSONAL TECH ]]></lab:kicker>
                <content:encoded><![CDATA[ Microsoft's June Windows update has upset some third-party applications that use Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) automation to open or control Office apps, leaving users with failed document launches and, in some cases, no error message to explain what went wrong. According to Microsoft, "reports indicate that this issue may affect applications such as CCH Engagement, Workpaper Manager, dental software (such as Dentrix and Softdent), and Zotero; other similar applications might also be impacted." The workaround is to "open the application or document directly instead of launching it from the affected third-party application." Microsoft was quick to point out that this wasn't its problem. The third parties concerned are "independent of Microsoft." "We make no warranty, implied or otherwise, about the performance or reliability of these products." That would be fair enough were it not for the fact that these third parties are relying on Windows plumbing that has been around since the 1990s, and abruptly breaking or changing something in a Windows release doesn't give those vendors much time to deal with the problem. OLE allows one application to control another – for example, firing up a Word document or Excel spreadsheet from an accounting application. When it works properly, users don't need to switch between applications. The process should be seamless. If opening the file directly, which somewhat defeats the point of OLE, doesn't help, ordinary users will have to wait for a fix in "a future Windows update." There is a mitigation for affected devices within organizations, though obtaining it requires contacting Microsoft support for business customers. Veteran techies may find this mess ironic, given that in the 1990s Microsoft went all-in on OLE and ultimately saw off the rival OpenDoc tech backed by Apple and IBM. The issue is the first that Microsoft has acknowledged in the patch, although the company's forums are full of users complaining about other difficulties, including OneDrive and BitLocker problems. ® ]]></content:encoded>
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        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.theregister.com/a/5255258</guid>
        <link>https://www.theregister.com/personal-tech/2026/06/17/system76-boss-reckons-he-can-liberate-the-entire-pc-stack-just-give-him-another-15-years/5255258</link>
        <pubDate>Wed, 17 Jun 2026 11:15:00 +0200</pubDate>
        <title>System76 boss reckons he can liberate the entire PC stack... just give him another 15 years</title>
        <description><![CDATA[ Bootstrapped Linux box-botherer flogs new Thelio kit, talks up COSMIC, and politely declines to bolt AI onto everything ]]></description>
        <category>personal tech</category>
                <lab:kicker><![CDATA[ personal tech ]]></lab:kicker>
                <dc:modified>Wed, 17 Jun 2026 10:01:39 +0000</dc:modified>
                <content:encoded><![CDATA[ INTERVIEW There are only a handful of dedicated Linux PC vendors. One of the best-known is the 20-year-old American company System76. It's not just a business that installs Linux on PCs. System76 is building something rare in 2026: a vertically integrated Linux‑first computing stack that treats open source as an engineering north star, not just marketing copy.  We spoke to founder and CEO Carl Richell about where System76 began and where it's going. When Richell started System76 20 years ago, he had "$1,500 in my basement" and no venture capital. He only had a bet that there were enough serious Linux users to sustain an honest, Linux‑only PC company. It has since grown organically into a factory operation in Denver, where raw aluminum sheets and billets come in one end and finished Thelio desktops roll out the other, complete with in‑house firmware and Linux preloads. It wasn't an immediate success. The growth curve was incremental. The company started in a basement, moved to a tiny office, then a slightly larger office, a still bigger one in downtown Denver, and, more recently, System76 operates out of its own factory. There, the company says, its servers, desktops, and laptops are "designed by nerds. Engineered by experts. Handcrafted by humans." All this was funded, Richell said, by reinvested profits and conventional machinery loans rather than venture capitalists. This was by design. That choice means there's no VC partner demanding an "exit" or pushing for a pivot away from Linux and open source; Richell says they "work for our customers and we work for each other," and have "never had to really roll the dice on the company," just take calculated risks. That deliberate pacing also shaped the culture. Many of the engineers who could "go work at Google" stay, he argues, because their "true beliefs align" with System76's open source‑first mission, not a retrofit of openness onto an ad business. For a niche OEM in a hostile, margin‑thin PC market, that ideological stickiness might be as important an asset as any product spec sheet. System76 likes to talk about its community roots, but the company's survival story is written in purchase orders. More than half of its sales are business‑to‑business, and Richell says there are "very few Fortune 500 companies that we don't ship products to," even if those deals are typically developer and engineering rigs rather than sprawling, company‑wide rollouts. Those systems often land in engineering departments and university labs as developer desktops, AI workstations, or high‑end Linux boxes for research workloads rather than accounting PCs. The pitch is a fully integrated Linux platform: hardware designed and manufactured for Linux in Denver, Pop!_OS and COSMIC developed in‑house, and open firmware that can be audited, modified, and redeployed. In a year when AI datacenters have driven up the cost of memory and storage, System76 entered 2026 expecting "much harsher headwinds" from component prices. Instead, demand stayed strong, and the business continues to grow year‑over‑year, suggesting that for a certain class of customer – developers, researchers, and Linux‑centric organizations – the premium for a well‑supported Linux workstation is easier to swallow than the friction of fighting Windows or bespoke dual‑boot setups. System76 keeps that business by pairing the product with the kind of operational plumbing most open hardware upstarts never quite build. That includes tightly coupled support, sales, and engineering teams (support is "ten feet from the sales team") and the ability to trace customer pain directly into product changes. It's a Linux company built like a small enterprise vendor, not a boutique enthusiast shop. On the hardware side, 2026 is the beginning of a new design era, centered on the freshly redesigned Thelio desktop family. Mira is the high‑performance mid‑tower, aimed at users who need serious CPU and GPU throughput in a comparatively compact box. Thelio Major stretches into high‑end desktop territory with support for Threadripper‑class CPUs, ECC memory, and dual power supplies to feed multiple top‑end GPUs. Richell describes Mira as the "beginning of that new desktop design refresh," a platform that lets System76 relearn thermal dynamics, structural design, and manufacturability at scale. They put the chassis through adhesive and mechanical torture tests – robots repeatedly pulling the side and front panels off thousands of times – to ensure the new modular construction would withstand years of use and field servicing. Next up is the Prime, a mini‑ITX desktop that shrinks the new design language into an "adorable, tiny desktop" now going through thermal testing. Further out is "Paleo Mega," an AI workstation designed to carry the thermal and power lessons from Mira and Major into multi‑GPU, AI‑first configurations, where cooling and power delivery are often the limiting factors. The product cadence shows a company that now thinks in platform terms: reuse chassis and thermal designs across a family, and then specialize for AI, compact workstations, and other niches. COSMIC and Pop!_OS as a buildable desktop If hardware is where System76 proves it can build real machines, software is where it tries to shape the broader Linux ecosystem. COSMIC, its Rust‑based desktop for Pop!_OS and other distros, is explicitly designed to be "modular and composable," with components you can replace, extend, or use as building blocks for entirely new UI experiences. Richell argues that before COSMIC, there "wasn't really a Linux desktop… designed to build things" in the way the kernel or the LAMP stack are foundations for other work. COSMIC's components have strict, well‑defined dependencies and are built to be reassembled – by OEMs, distro maintainers, or specialized platforms – into custom desktops for different devices and use cases. In System76's ideal world, COSMIC becomes the UI layer you reach for when you're building your own Linux‑based system, not just the default skin on Pop!_OS. On the user‑facing side, COSMIC is already shipping as a rolling‑release desktop, with new features and fixes flowing into users' machines as soon as they clear QA rather than on slow, monolithic schedules. Since its December 11 release, the project has seen roughly 1,200 merges from 172 contributors, a pace more reminiscent of a popular upstream project than a vendor‑specific shell. That rolling strategy matters right now in gaming, where System76 is devoting fresh attention. The team has recently added support for Wayland's pointer capture protocol, so first‑person shooters and "infinite scroll" scenarios behave correctly, fixed full‑screen window handling for workflows like Steam Big Picture, and tightened a long list of "around the edges" behaviors that used to require user workarounds. In Richell's telling, the aim is to make gaming "just work" on Pop!_OS + COSMIC without hidden incantations, a necessity if Linux gaming is going to be credible outside the hobbyist circle. Pop!_OS itself runs atop Ubuntu LTS, with System76 adopting what Richell – over some internal grumbling – still calls a "hardware enablement stack": newer kernels, Mesa, and related bits to keep up with GPUs and emerging hardware, while COSMIC continues to roll on top. The current release tracks Ubuntu 24.04 LTS; Pop!_OS 26.04 is expected to follow roughly a month after its upstream release, with some delay thanks to Canonical's recent DDoS‑related infrastructure issues. Critically, Pop!_OS has gone "entirely over to Wayland." That move, Richell says, freed the team from trying to build a cutting‑edge desktop on top of legacy X11 stacks and let them align COSMIC with the latest graphics and input pipelines from the start. Ask any Linux vendor about AI in 2026, and you'll likely get a flurry of product names; System76 is more circumspect. While Canonical, for example, is busy wiring "agentic AI tools" into Ubuntu so they're easy to add, Richell says System76 is still "thinking about it" and sees "more questions than answers" for now. The areas where he does see clear value for AI are pragmatic, Linux-user-focused ones, including accessibility features that can leverage AI, and smarter launchers that go beyond fuzzy string matching to actually understand user intent when they hit Super and start typing. In that world, the launcher might answer questions, locate files, or trigger workflows that shrink the distance between "I want this" and "it's done." But AI features will have to be optional, he insists, and designed with "the community's concerns around AI" in mind. For now, the company's to-do list prioritizes HDR, gaming polish, and foundational desktop work over embedding language models everywhere. That restraint might frustrate some early adopters, but it aligns with System76's tendency to ship infrastructure first and pretty features later. On the hardware side, AI shows up more directly in plans for the Paleo Mega workstation and in the market forces buffeting System76's bill of materials. GPU and memory prices are being driven upward by datacenter AI demand, which in turn raises the costs of high‑end desktops and workstations. The surprise for Richell is that demand for System76's boxes has held steady despite those increases, suggesting a base of customers who see local, Linux‑native AI workstations as a necessary capital expense rather than a nice‑to‑have. If there's a single idea that animates Richell when he talks about System76's next decade, it's the dream of "liberating the entire stack." Open source has already transformed the operating system and much of the software above it; he'd like to see hardware follow, turning the motherboard, firmware, and even some silicon into something you can read, fork, and improve. To that end, he said, "anything that we design inside of System76 is open hardware." System76 wants to go further with open hardware by creating reusable components that others can build into their own designs. Think of chassis elements, power distribution boards, or controller modules that can be dropped into third‑party projects – hardware analogs to open libraries and frameworks. The obstacles are obvious: CPUs, memory, and most major silicon are still dominated by opaque supply chains, NDAs, and closed firmware. RISC‑V offers a path toward open instruction set architectures, and System76 is watching that space as a way to eventually reduce its dependence on closed processor platforms. In the meantime, it has chipped away where it can, shipping its own open EC (embedded controller) firmware and adopting coreboot‑based system firmware on many laptops, closing a gap Richell once thought might never be solved. "It took us 15 years, but we got there," he says about open firmware. That timeline is probably the right yardstick for the rest of the hardware vision. Over the next decade, he wants System76 to take on more design and manufacturing in‑house, build more of its own components, and gradually expand the platform's surface area that can be studied, modified, and reused by others. The company will never be able to satisfy the most uncompromising free‑software purists – Richell readily admits they can't "work in a totally purist fashion" and stay in business – but its trajectory is pointed toward more openness, not less. For many developers and organizations who want control without giving up modern hardware, that may be enough. In 2026, most stories about PCs involve consolidation, commoditization, or retreat from the desktop toward cloud services and locked‑down devices. System76 is betting on a different future: one where there's enduring demand for machines you can understand, repair, and reimagine, running an OS that treats you as the operator rather than the product. It's a risky path. The company operates in a small, noisy niche where many rivals have tried and failed; Linux‑only hardware vendors have come and gone, often leaving behind little more than a blog post and some unfulfilled orders. System76's answer is to behave less like a startup and more like a craft manufacturer crossed with a small enterprise vendor: design your own hardware, invest in a factory, write your own desktop, and grow slowly enough that you never lose sight of the people actually using the machines. If the next ten years look anything like what Richell hopes, System76 could end up not just as "the company that still makes Linux desktops," but as the reference implementation for an open, full‑stack computing platform. In a world increasingly defined by black‑box AI and sealed hardware, that might be its most radical feature. ® ]]></content:encoded>
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        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.theregister.com/a/5256133</guid>
        <link>https://www.theregister.com/virtualization/2026/06/17/tesco-is-sprinting-to-quit-vmware-and-broadcom-despite-rapid-migration-risks/5256133</link>
        <pubDate>Wed, 17 Jun 2026 09:30:00 +0200</pubDate>
        <title>Tesco is sprinting to quit VMware and Broadcom despite rapid migration risks </title>
        <description><![CDATA[ Supermarket giant has turned to third-party support as court sets date to hear licensing dispute ]]></description>
        <category>virtualization</category>
                <lab:kicker><![CDATA[ virtualization ]]></lab:kicker>
                <dc:modified>Wed, 17 Jun 2026 08:59:05 +0000</dc:modified>
                <content:encoded><![CDATA[ UK retail giant Tesco is replacing VMware with an alternative product and pressing ahead with its licensing lawsuit against the virtualization pioneer's parent company, Broadcom, which will be considered by the UK's High Court no sooner than November 2027. The roots of the dispute are a January 2021 contract that saw Tesco acquire perpetual licenses for VMware's vSphere Foundation and Cloud Foundation products, plus subscriptions to Virtzilla's Tanzu products. The supermarket giant also signed up for support services and software upgrades until 2026, with an option to extend that deal for four years. Computacenter signed up as a reseller and relied on Dell as the distributor of VMware's products. Tesco also uses some of Broadcom's mainframe software, and wanted to extend licences and support for that too. Tesco and VMware struck that deal before Broadcom acquired VMware. After the acquisition, Broadcom stopped selling standalone services for customers who did not adopt subscriptions for its software bundles. Broadcom was therefore unwilling to extend support for Tesco's VMware estate. The supermarket chain sued Broadcom in mid-2025, alleging breach of contract and anti-competitive behavior. The case picked up again in late May with a flurry of filings that The Register has just digested. The new documents reveal that Tesco has decided to quit VMware and Broadcom's mainframe products, is rushing to migrate to alternatives, has turned to third-party support providers for its VMware estate, and alleges Broadcom is abusing its market power. "Faced with Broadcom's abusive conduct, and given the criticality of virtualization and mainframe software and services to its business, Tesco has been forced to incur material costs to procure alternative solutions with reduced functionality, and to migrate to that software in a manner, and on a timeframe, that creates very significant risks to its business," the filing states. Those costs include payments for third-party VMware support because Broadcom stopped supporting the virtualization software in January 2026. The supermarket hopes to be off VMware by the end of 2027 but says that target is its earliest possible date and will require it to work "at exceptional pace." Elsewhere in the filing, Tesco says "the timeframe in which that migration must be undertaken has created and continues to create operational and commercial risk, and at material ongoing cost and disruption to the business." The risks aren't abstract: Tesco says it uses Broadcom mainframe software to order products for its stores and process its payroll. The retailer is also worried about data security and protection because the virtualization product it has chosen as a VMware replacement isn't compatible with the Veeam and Zerto tools it uses. Rejecting offers Broadcom appears to have made Tesco at least four offers, including a "Strategic proposal" in July 2024 that covered virtualization and mainframe products. Another offer delivered on January 9, 2026, offered separate terms for VMware products and mainframe software – the first time Broadcom dangled discrete deals. Tesco struggled to process it because Broadcom offered the deal just 19 days before the end of its existing agreements. Two offers arrived in April. Tesco says one proposed charges of $23.5 million (around £17.4 million) for a year of VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 and Mainframe Software and Support Services. The retailer says that offer represented an increase of "around 175 percent" compared to the prices Tesco believes it was entitled to under its 2021 contract for VMware software and services, and a 350 percent increase for the mainframe products and services. The retailer described those price hikes as "manifestly unfair and excessive." Broadcom's amended defence rejects that characterisation, and also Tesco's claim that it deserves damages as it could not find an alternative supplier before its deals expire. Now that Tesco has found alternatives, Broadcom thinks the retailer can't easily point to losses that deserve damages payments. Other recent filings reveal that the matter is due to be heard in the UK's High Court during a window that opens on November 1, 2027, and closes on February 25, 2028. That doesn't mean the trial will consume all that time – it's an indication of when the court thinks it will have time to consider the matter. Broadcom has fought other high-profile cases over its licensing changes, most notably with AT&T and Siemens. The telco giant reached a confidential settlement, but the Siemens case is ongoing. On The Reg's reading of Tesco's filings, the retailer appears comfortable with litigating its claims with an argument that Broadcom refused to honor past agreements and that its main defense – it can't support products that don't exist since it reorganized VMware – is weak. Broadcom execs have told The Register they have an enormous dislike for providing extended support for old products and a huge preference to shift customers to subscriptions for the company's flagship Cloud Foundation (VCF). They argue that that continuing to use old VMware software sold under perpetual licenses is an act of corporate self-harm because VCF is so powerful it quickly pays for itself by improving IT department operations and improving business efficiency. But those messages aren't landing with some customers. We've reported organizations including Western Union, GEICO, and Computershare moving away from VMware, and even some VMware partners like Rackspace reducing their use of the virtualization giant's wares. We've also just learned that Belgian technical secondary school Scheppers Instituut Wetteren shifted to local contender Whitesky.Cloud to avoid a 400 percent price hike, and made the move without needing any new hardware. ® ]]></content:encoded>
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        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.theregister.com/a/5255316</guid>
        <link>https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/06/17/developers-build-the-best-tools-for-developers-and-are-now-defanging-the-ai-menace/5255316</link>
        <pubDate>Wed, 17 Jun 2026 08:31:00 +0200</pubDate>
        <title>Developers build the best tools for developers – and are now defanging the AI menace</title>
        <description><![CDATA[ Fear and even grief are natural reactions to machines that do your job. The next reactions – acceptance and innovation – are more useful ]]></description>
        <category>ai and ml</category>
                <lab:kicker><![CDATA[ AI and ML ]]></lab:kicker>
                <dc:modified>Wed, 17 Jun 2026 11:01:57 +0000</dc:modified>
                <content:encoded><![CDATA[ Forty years ago, while working for a tiny subsidiary of a gigantic telco, I stumbled through pre-Git source code management and tried to avoid explosively devolving into a mess of conflicts after every merge. Thankfully, modern practices make it possible to work in massive, distributed teams, swarming around a codebase, working independently toward a collective goal. That sounds a lot like what we're heading toward with agents, and here it touches a nerve: nearly everyone in software engineering feels a deep terror as an invasion of agentic systems sweep all before them. Now that Stack Overflow has gone agent-first, what's left for us meatsacks? Shoulder-to-shoulder with the flesh-based cohort most immediately under the pump at a conference called AI Engineer Melbourne, I heard conversations about the future of software engineering working their way through denial, anger, bargaining, and depression, to ... coupon clipping? Now that organisations have been weaned off earlier 'all you can eat' subscription plans and onto 'pay-as-you-go' metered token consumption, they're all in various stages of sticker shock. Several talks at the conference discussed managing token costs, such as AJ Fisher's exploration of 'diffusion' models. Analogous to the diffusers used to generate images, they generate text at lighting speed, making them cheaper to operate while also being less accurate than the pricey and slower “autoregressive” frontier models. Fisher's solution? Use a low-quality model and make it iterate on a problem (that new classic, the Ralph Wiggum loop) until it gets a satisfactory solution. This approach delivers the same result as a full-fat model, for anywhere from one half to one tenth the spend. Google released its DiffusionGemma model, which produces text at prodigious speed, just days after Fisher's talk, giving everyone the ability to try this approach. But some engineers reject AI in 'all the things'. Annie Vella, author of the seminal essay "The Software Engineering Identity Crisis" shared what she's learned about the feelings of grief experienced by a cohort of software engineers, provoked by AI tooling. We've seen the field divide into 'all in' and 'never ever' camps (even in the pages of El Reg), with a broad middle cautiously getting their feet wet. That divide has roots in two styles of work: those who look for outcomes, and those who look for learning, for whom the journey into understanding is the whole point of the exercise. Short circuiting that journey with AI tools makes folks for whom the journey is the reward feel cheated. How do we breach the divide? Annie suggests sensitivity, listening, and openness to change on both sides - highlighting human qualities in the machine age. Kaggle and fast.ai alum Jeremy Howard took a different tack, reminding the audience of the importance of critical thinking - really, a plea to just keep thinking, a refrain we'll be hearing a lot as we struggle to avoid nodding off in the warm bath of machine thoughts. He followed up with a demo of SolveIT, his still-in-beta tool combining some of the best aspects of Python notebooks, Mathematica, Wikipedia, and a chatbot, offering up a counterexample of an environment designed for swimming in the sea of knowledge, rather than floating off into mindless oblivion. Finally, Daniel Rodgers-Pryor's "Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Engineering" blew my mind with a practical, working vision for AI in the engineering department. Rodgers-Pryor's entire CI/CD pipeline feeds all of its metrics, messages, logs and user feedback into a set of AI agents that quickly identify issues, find the underlying problems, fix them, integrate solutions into the codebase, test them, and push them out to users. What sounds like a recipe for disaster turns out to be a formula for a self-healing, 'anti-fragile' system that improves as the pressure on it increases. More users? Good. More metrics? Great! More messages and logs? Even better. Agents eat all of that data and use it to improve the performance of the overall system. Rodgers-Pryor's "closed feedback loop" reminds me of a 20th century production line worker dipping into the stream of bonbons (or widgets) eyeing a few for quality, then tossing them back into the stream. "This is your job now," he concludes. "How can you can make those feedback loops shorter and tighter?" Software engineers have been forced to absorb more change in the last three years than in the previous thirty, and have every right to be a aggrieved about that. Yet as AJ Fisher, Annie Vella, Jeremy Howard and Daniel Rodgers-Pryor all portrayed in their own ways, adopting AI looks less like rolling over before the dictates of the machine, and more like exploring a whole new world. Like any journey into a new realm, perils and hardships await. Who's to say that's not the price of admission for a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity? ® The author attended AI Engineer Melbourne as a guest of the conference. ]]></content:encoded>
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        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.theregister.com/a/5256321</guid>
        <link>https://www.theregister.com/cyber-crime/2026/06/17/cyberattack-sees-crops-kept-in-the-ground/5256321</link>
        <pubDate>Wed, 17 Jun 2026 04:16:00 +0200</pubDate>
        <title>Cyberattack sees crops kept in the ground</title>
        <description><![CDATA[ Bitter harvest for Australia's Mackay Sugar, attacked in peak cane crushing season  ]]></description>
        <category>cyber-crime</category>
                <lab:kicker><![CDATA[ CYBER-CRIME ]]></lab:kicker>
                <dc:modified>Tue, 16 Jun 2026 15:16:36 +0000</dc:modified>
                <content:encoded><![CDATA[ A cyberattack on Australia’s second-largest sugar producer has forced farmers to keep crops in the ground, and looks like denting their incomes. Mackay Sugar, based in the Australian state of Queensland, processes sugar cane farmed in nearby districts. The company disclosed a cyberattack on June 10 and limited operations while it dealt with the fallout. Some operations remain restricted, but the company said on Monday that it managed to perform some manual crushing at its Farleigh Mill site, working with sugar cane that was harvested before the attack. “Significant progress has been made over the weekend in restoring the systems that support cane supply, harvesting, and mill operations,” Mackay Sugar said in a statement. “Steam trials are now underway, and subject to final validation activities, some harvesting is expected to recommence this week in preparation for the staged restart of crushing operations later this week.” While the company is optimistic it can resume crushing, it's advised growers not to harvest their crops for the time being. That edict works for Mackay Sugar because sugar producers need to process crops within 48 hours of harvest. Doing so preserves high sugar content and overall yield. Delaying the processing for any longer after harvesting could result in sucrose converting to simple sugars, unwanted fermentation, and lower yields. But late harvesting can reduce the quality of cane, reducing the price they earn for their crops. Interrupted harvesting also impacts the railways used to move cane from farms to mills. Mackay Sugar acknowledged the impact its downtime could have on growers and other partners, and committed to restoring systems safely. “We are communicating directly and regularly with our employees, growers, and key partners,” it said. “We recognise the impact this incident is having on our growers, and we are doing everything we can to support them and to safely resume full operations as soon as possible. “We take our responsibility to protect our systems, operations, and information very seriously. We apologise for any disruption this incident has caused and will continue to provide updates as we continue our investigation.” The company operates three mills across Queensland, two of which were operating at a limited capacity due to the attack. Its Racecourse Mill, described as the heart of the business and home to its corporate offices, was among those affected. Racecourse Mill typically generates 213,000 tons of raw sugar and 58,000 tons of molasses a year, and the site’s cogeneration plant generates 156,000 MWhs of renewable electricity a year, around 71 percent of which is sent back into the national electricity grid. Mackay’s mill in Farleigh, the company’s oldest, was also affected. It typically produces around 196,000 tons of raw sugar and 49,000 tons of molasses per year. The company’s largest and most productive factory, Marian Mill, was unscathed. Ungentlemanly conduct Cybercrime group The Gentlemen claimed responsibility for the attack on Mackay Sugar, posting the company to its data leak site without offering any details about the attack or whether it stole data to use as leverage for extortion demands. Cyber threat intelligence professionals have known of the group for almost a year, after spotting it in July 2025 and classifying it as a ransomware-as-a-service provider. However, there is no evidence that ransomware was used in the attack on Makay Sugar. The company has never mentioned ransomware in its statements, referring to the attack only as a “cyber security incident.” However, The Gentlemen is known for using file-encrypting malware in its double extortion attacks. The group caught the attention of Microsoft’s researchers, who last month published a deep dive into how it carries out attacks. Microsoft’s report noted that not only do The Gentlemen affiliates have access to a powerful file encryptor, but also one that self-propagates, which “increases the likelihood of widespread impact once initial access is achieved.” It has also recently established a partnership with BreachForums, which allows the group to recruit prospective new affiliates with different skillsets, such as penetration testers and initial access brokers. ® ]]></content:encoded>
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        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.theregister.com/a/5257352</guid>
        <link>https://www.theregister.com/systems/2026/06/16/amds-mext-buy-shows-how-ai-could-solve-the-ram-shortage-it-created/5257352</link>
        <pubDate>Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:09:32 +0200</pubDate>
        <title>AMD's Mext buy shows how AI could solve the RAM shortage it created</title>
        <description><![CDATA[ Running low on memory, can't afford more? The House of Zen's latest acquisition puts an AI spin on flash-based memory expansion ]]></description>
        <category>systems</category>
                <lab:kicker><![CDATA[ SYSTEMS ]]></lab:kicker>
                <content:encoded><![CDATA[ With no end in sight to the memory crunch, AMD thinks that AI, the main cause of the shortage, could be part of the solution. This week, the House of Zen acquired predictive memory startup Mext for an undisclosed sum, setting the stage for a world where bots decide which data to put into RAM and which to store in less-expensive flash. Founded in 2023, the Mext proactive memory platform uses machine learning algorithms and learned heuristics to proactively offload "cold" memory to flash storage, and, based on data access patterns, restore it before its needed again. Modern flash arrays are already approaching main memory in terms of aggregate bandwidth, but swapping to disk still imposes a stiff latency penalty. Mext claims it can expand the effective memory of a system by 2 to 4x using flash, which gig for gig is still vastly less expensive than DRAM. This flash memory is exposed to the operating system like regular memory simply by running the Mextd daemon. Memory tiering is nothing new and has seen various reincarnations over the years with some being software based and others, like Intel Optane persistent memory, using special 3D XPoint memory tech co-developed by Micron. Mext stands out for its use of machine learning to migrate data from hot memory to cold storage almost like a branch predictor — something AMD has an awful lot of experience with. Mext isn't using one model to decide when to shuffle your data. Instead it uses a series of heuristics, long short term memory, and modern transformer architectures depending on which combination renders the best results. “This approach has the potential to reduce infrastructure costs, improve resource utilization, and help customers more effectively scale general-purpose and AI workloads,” Dan McNamara SVP of AMD’s compute and enterprise AI biz wrote in a blog post this week. Beyond enterprise applications, the technology could have implications for AI serving. Modern mixture of experts (MoE) models are, as their name suggests, comprised of multiple sub-models. For each token predicted, a different selection of experts may be used. In practice an LLM may use some experts more frequently and others rarely. We wouldn't be surprised to see AMD use Mext's prediction algorithms to offload infrequently utilized experts from HBM to slower system memory, enabling enterprises to take advantage of larger more capable models with fewer resources. That’s just speculation of course, but we've reached out to AMD for comment; we'll let you know if we hear anything back. ® ]]></content:encoded>
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        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.theregister.com/a/5256591</guid>
        <link>https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/06/16/the-new-siri-makes-one-of-apples-most-convenient-os-features-a-cumbersome-mess/5256591</link>
        <pubDate>Tue, 16 Jun 2026 22:47:37 +0200</pubDate>
        <title>The new Siri makes one of Apple's most convenient OS features a cumbersome mess</title>
        <description><![CDATA[ Goodbye, useful Spotlight; hello force-fed Apple intelligence bloatware that feels distressingly like Google AI Overviews ]]></description>
        <category>ai and ml</category>
                <lab:kicker><![CDATA[ ai + ml ]]></lab:kicker>
                <content:encoded><![CDATA[ HANDS ON That new AI-juiced Siri that Apple rolled out last week at WWDC was supposed to set a new paradigm for on-device AI. But don't believe the hype coming out of Tim Cook's final big event. After a week-long test drive, it seems like Apple just crammed Google AI Overviews on top of the most useful parts of its various operating systems and made the whole ecosystem more cumbersome to use. But hey, it has more AIs! I’ve been running the iOS and macOS 27 developer betas since they were made available on June 8, and I was blessed by the waitlist gods with access to the new version of Siri a few days after that. There are definitely some useful new features: Siri now carries on actual conversations, which makes it far more useful than the ask, get a response, we’re-done-here flow of the old Siri that left no room for clarifying questions or follow ups. Siri is now able to find things on my device more easily too – at least on my M1 MacBook. My iPhone 15 Pro has been telling me it’s still re-indexing my device after the update for more than a week, but I was still able to use it to conduct web searches and find some things on my phone – it's possible this message itself was an error. The dedicated Siri app is also nice in its own way, as it shows a record of every conversation I’ve had with the new Apple Intelligence front end for later review, but that comes with a caveat, too. Even the most brief questions – the overnight weather forecast, for example – is now stored in perpetuity, cluttering up the list of chats we’ve had until I manually delete it. The only apparent alternative is setting an expiration window for past chats and losing records of the more useful conversations we’ve had. Who turned out my Spotlight? Those are small inconveniences, however, compared to my biggest gripe with Siri AI: It’s completely ruined Spotlight. I’ve come to rely on Apple’s embedded search/launcher feature almost exclusively for digging up apps that I don’t keep a shortcut for, and on my iPhone, it’s the main method I use to kick off a web search because it's so simple. Swipe down from the center of the screen, type what I want to search for, and tap on the item that points to my query as a Google search in Safari. Swipe, type, and a tap and I’m perusing a search result page. Not anymore. The new Siri-first interface that presumes that if you’re searching for anything but an app or file, you must want Siri to feed you a few links of Apple Intelligence’s choosing. Getting to a web search from a Spotlight query now requires multiple taps: Type your query, tap “Show Results” (careful: hitting enter will trigger Siri to craft a response, eliminating the possibility of seeing any actual Spotlight content), tap on “Show More” next to the list of Siri-surfaced web results, scroll down until you see Search Google (or whatever engine you have set as your default), then tap that. Maybe I’m being a grumpy old journalist who likes things the way they used to be, the transformation of Spotlight into a Siri interface seems like intentional degradation of a basic feature in order to front-load an AI that in my experience so far is largely an inconvenience. Overall, the experience reminds me of Google’s much-maligned and often wrong AI Overviews, which push actual search results down the page in favor of force-fed info from Google Gemini. There's a logical reason for the similarity. At the end of 2025, Apple replaced its former AI chief John Giannandrea, formerly Google's SVP of search and AI, in a bid to right the Siri ship. Taking his place was another Google alum with even closer ties to The Chocolate Factory’s AI strategy, Amar Subramanya, who spent 16 years there, including a turn as the head of Gemini engineering. Subramanya, now Apple’s VP of AI, now reports directly to Apple's SVP of software engineering, Craig Federighi, who himself has assumed responsibility for Apple’s machine learning initiatives, including the construction of Apple foundation models. As we learned at WWDC last week, Apple has leaned heavily on a partnership with Google to build its foundation models, and it appears Subramanya has brought some of that Google AI ethos with him as well. So, what’s the alternative to the new AI bloat in iOS 27? Siri can still be turned off entirely in the Settings app, so there’s that, but I’ve decided to take another tack and use one of Apple’s other AI features to get what I want. As the iMaker mentioned at WWDC, you can now create shortcuts (tiny scripts that automate basic tasks) by making a natural language request to Siri. In my case, I asked it to build a shortcut I could drop on my home screen to do a Google search with whatever text I input. It works perfectly, and is available to duplicate on your own iDevice should you see fit. Again, this is a developer beta, so it’s entirely possible that Apple will wise up and stop burying basic Spotlight search functionality before its 27 series of OSes release to the public this fall. We asked Apple if the change was intentional, but didn’t hear back. ® ]]></content:encoded>
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        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.theregister.com/a/5256632</guid>
        <link>https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/06/16/python-dev-saved-from-disaster-by-intuition-and-ai/5256632</link>
        <pubDate>Tue, 16 Jun 2026 22:15:06 +0200</pubDate>
        <title>Python dev saved from disaster by intuition... and AI</title>
        <description><![CDATA[ I'm sorry, Dave. I can't install that repo that will totally hose your system ]]></description>
        <category>ai and ml</category>
                <lab:kicker><![CDATA[ AI AND ML ]]></lab:kicker>
                <dc:modified>Wed, 17 Jun 2026 08:05:02 +0000</dc:modified>
                <content:encoded><![CDATA[ Python developer Roman Imankulov nearly took the bait. The fact that he didn't can be chalked up to human intuition and AI code vetting. A person claiming to be a recruiter from a small crypto startup got in touch through LinkedIn, looking for help with what she described as proof-of-concept code that didn't work. The company, she explained, needed a lead engineer. As Imankulov described the exchange in a blog post, the recruiter asked him to look into an issue with a deprecated Node module. Something about the request seemed off. "I'd heard, as probably all of us have, about those types of attacks," Imankulov explained in a phone interview. "And I was like, 'what if this could be I could be the target?' It was just based on the past experience that I had." So he took the unusual step of spinning up a VPS on Hetzner where he cloned the repo. He then used his Pi coding agent (running Codex) to conduct a read-only analysis of the code. "I ran an agent to test how it worked, and I was almost certain that it would return to me 'everything is clear, the code is ugly but in general it's safe to run and just go ahead and perform your review,'" he explained. "To my surprise, almost immediately the agent returned a response like, 'Don't run this code, just walk away because there's a trap.'" The AI model had flagged one of the files, app/test/index.js. The file contained a backdoor. It took the form of a server URL, fragmented to look like a test suite configuration, and a network request that will run anything the server sends in response to the request. Imankulov credited his AI agent with catching details that he had missed. "I opened this code myself and I skimmed through this code and it looked to me like just, you know, a regular sloppy file written by a sloppy developer," he said. "So I just scroll down, [thinking] 'Yeah, yeah, it's awful, but you know if they can pay me to fix this code, I don't mind.' But the agent in the very same file found the exact vulnerability that I overlooked." Just installing the repo using npm would have been sufficient to trigger the backdoor. The repo's package.json file contained a "prepare" post-installation hook designed to run the script following the installation process. The referenced malicious repo is no longer accessible – presumably GitHub removed it in response to Imankulov's complaint – but a clone can still be found. "What makes this attack insidious is how it hijacks standard developer workflows," explained Devashri Datta, independent open source and security architect, in an email to The Register. "The adversary didn't rely on the target executing a suspicious binary; they relied on the target running a routine command: npm install. "By burying the execution logic inside the prepare lifecycle hook within package.json, the malicious payload triggers automatically during dependency resolution. This isn't a novel technique, but it remains highly effective precisely because developers run npm install on autopilot. The string fragmentation used to assemble the malicious URL, piecing together a domain from small constants, was deliberate obfuscation designed to defeat static analysis tools that scan for hardcoded indicators of compromise." Imankulov said that the commits in the malicious repo appeared to be the work of a developer with an established web presence and body of work. But when he contacted the supposed author, the dev said he had been impersonated on GitHub more than once and didn't write that code. The recruiter's LinkedIn profile referenced a real arts journalist, though Imankulov believes the associated profile was faked. His online interactions with the recruiter suggested a level of technical knowledge not evident in her work history. LinkedIn likes to talk about the tens of millions of fake accounts it catches and removes before they interact with anyone. But hundreds of thousands of accounts still get created and interact with people before being detected and flagged. And that number keeps growing. In the period from January through June 2025, LinkedIn restricted 386,000 accounts after user reports. That figure was 266,000 in the prior six month period. And it was a mere 86,000 in the January through June 2021 period. These sorts of software supply chain social engineering attacks have become commonplace. Earlier this month, we noted how North Korean-linked scammers have been running various campaigns to compromise developer accounts using fake interviews and job offers. Other developers have reported nearly falling for these scams (and also being saved by their AI agent) and have posted code analyses. Datta said Imankulov's response highlights a shift in how security-conscious developers are approaching code review hygiene. "Historically, the guidance was to sandbox untrusted code or review it manually," she said. "Here, Roman deployed a local AI agent in a constrained, read-only environment to analyze the codebase before executing anything. This is a useful counterpoint to the dominant narrative around AI as an offensive threat vector. Used defensively at the developer endpoint, an AI agent isn't susceptible to fatigue or social pressure; it simply surfaces anomalous behavior, such as a test suite initiating an outbound network connection to retrieve unverified code, in seconds." npm 12 could change the game If it's any consolation, the relevant attack vector should be addressed next month. GitHub, which maintains npm, is preparing to release npm 12 which changes the behavior of the npm install command. The allowScripts setting will be defaulted to off. "npm install will no longer execute preinstall, install, or postinstall scripts from dependencies unless they are explicitly allowed in your project," GitHub explains. "Install-time lifecycle scripts are the single largest code-execution surface in the npm ecosystem," explained GitHub product manager Leo Balter in a community discussion post last week. "Every npm install runs scripts from every transitive dependency, so a single compromised package anywhere in your tree can execute arbitrary code on a developer machine or CI runner. Making script execution opt-in closes that path while keeping it one command away for the packages you trust." Imankulov said he doesn't have a strong opinion about that. "From my perspective, just for the sake of personal safety, I switched to pnpm just to make sure that I don't execute those scripts by default," he said. Datta said the incident underscores why enterprise software supply chain security had to extend beyond the perimeter of the corporate network. "Attackers are now shifting left all the way to individual engineering endpoints before a single line of code enters the corporate supply chain," she said. "When a developer's local workstation is compromised during what appears to be a routine job interview, that machine frequently holds active SSH keys, cloud provider tokens, and live access to internal repositories." Proper defense, Datta contends, requires enforcing technical guardrails such as isolated developer containers or secure cloud workstations for evaluating third-party or untrusted code. "Emerging frameworks are beginning to extend exploitability context down to the workstation layer itself, recognizing that VEX-style signal needs to travel further left than the enterprise SBOM inventory if it is to intercept threats at the point of introduction," she said. ® ]]></content:encoded>
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        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.theregister.com/a/5256535</guid>
        <link>https://www.theregister.com/hpc/2026/06/16/intel-born-networking-tech-resurfaces-as-infiniband-alternative-for-doe-supers/5256535</link>
        <pubDate>Tue, 16 Jun 2026 22:03:59 +0200</pubDate>
        <title>Intel-born networking tech resurfaces as InfiniBand alternative for DoE supers</title>
        <description><![CDATA[ Omni-Path lights up Lawrence Livermore system at 400 Gbps ]]></description>
        <category>hpc</category>
                <lab:kicker><![CDATA[ HPC ]]></lab:kicker>
                <dc:modified>Tue, 16 Jun 2026 20:16:36 +0000</dc:modified>
                <content:encoded><![CDATA[ When it comes to networking supercomputers, Nvidia's InfiniBand rules the roost, but a new competitor is sneaking into the space with its own solution. This week the Department of Energy powered on a new cluster at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and gluing it all together is Intel spinoff Cornelis Network’s Omni-Path interconnect tech. Lynx is a relatively modest bit of iron, at least as DoE supers go, packing 952 Dell Technologies PowerEdge nodes powered by Intel’s aging 4th-gen Xeon Scalable processors, codenamed Sapphire Rapids. The system, commissioned by the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) will provide additional compute capacity for some of America’s most secretive workloads. But what sets the machine apart isn’t the compute, but rather its choice of interconnect. Most DoE systems today either use HPE Cray’s proprietary Slingshot 11 or Nvidia’s InfiniBand networking. Lynx uses neither, instead opting for Cornelis Network’s CN5000-series Omni-Path switches and NICs. “The collaboration between the NNSA ASC program and Cornelis has been rooted in a shared commitment to advance high-performance computing. Lynx reflects the results of that public-private R&D investment and will support the modeling, simulation, and analysis capabilities that underpin the modern NNSA complex,” Matt Leininger, a senior principal HPC strategist at LLNL, said in a statement. If Omni-Path sounds familiar, that’s because it’s been around in one shape or form for the better part of a decade. Originally developed by Intel in 2015 for HPC applications, the lossless interconnect is similar in many respects to InfiniBand. Several DoE Labs were early adopters, including Los Alamos National Lab’s Trinity super and the Cori machine, before Intel pulled the plug in 2019. The division was eventually spun off in 2020. For many, this is where the story ended, but in 2025, the company unveiled its CN5000 family of NICs and switches to the world, promising 400 Gbps connectivity with near linear performance scaling. The tech quickly attracted the attention of the DoE which tapped the niche networking startup’s tech for its Lynx system last summer. Omni-Path not only offers the agency an alternative to InfiniBand for non-Cray systems, but is now one of the fastest interconnects at their disposal. The majority of the Cray systems deployed by the DoE labs operate at 200 Gbps. InfiniBand technically can accommodate higher port speeds, but is in extremely high demand for AI compute clusters. For Cornelis, the deployment represents a significant proof point for the company’s next-generation Omni-Path protocol and networking systems. “It's laying that foundational proof point for the industry to see that the most demanding customers out there have run it through its paces and are seeing really good results,” Cornelis CEO Lisa Spelman told El Reg. In particular, Spelman says the deployment allowed Cornelis to demonstrate the scaling efficiency of its CN5000 portfolio. As compute clusters grow larger, network interconnects can quickly become a bottleneck. “We were able to show a 91% network scaling efficiency, which is great for this size of cluster,” she said. This scaling is so good, in fact, that Spelman expects to see Lynx outperform similarly sized clusters using more modern processors simply because the interconnects are more efficient. Lynx won’t be the last supercomputer Omni-Path finds its way into. The company is working on additional systems, including some, we’re told, that will make use of some non-traditional accelerators. “We're looking forward to the next chance to prove it at 2,000, 5,000, 10,000 and just keep going up from there,” Spelman said. Cornelis is also working to bring faster 800 Gbps equipment to market later this year, timed with the release of PCIe Gen 6.0-compatible CPUs from Intel, AMD, and others. PCIe 5.0 connectivity effectively caps conventional NICs at 400 Gbps. Nvidia and some others have side stepped this problem by integrating large PCIe switches into their NICs which offers additional bandwidth, but adds cost and complexity that Spelman says Cornelis would prefer to avoid. CN6000 is expected to launch in the second half of this year, and is expected to bring with it support for Ethernet connectivity allowing for greater cross compatibility with existing networks.® ]]></content:encoded>
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        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.theregister.com/a/5256492</guid>
        <link>https://www.theregister.com/science/2026/06/16/ai-and-brain-computer-interface-allow-speechless-als-patient-to-work-a-full-time-job/5256492</link>
        <pubDate>Tue, 16 Jun 2026 20:44:12 +0200</pubDate>
        <title>AI and brain-computer interface allow speechless ALS patient to work a full-time job</title>
        <description><![CDATA[ The hardware isn't new, but a UC Davis research team's machine learning-powered method of translating brain activity in an ALS patient into sentences with 92% accuracy is ]]></description>
        <category>science</category>
                <lab:kicker><![CDATA[ science ]]></lab:kicker>
                <content:encoded><![CDATA[ Imagine being paralyzed so badly that not only can't you move your hands or feet, but you can't speak either. For years, brain computer interfaces have presented the tantalizing promise of reading brainwaves well enough to allow a person to communicate and access a PC. Now, a new breakthrough shows how someone can talk and even work a job while afflicted with a motion-robbing disease. A team of scientists from the University of California, Davis, published a paper Monday detailing a years-long study of a brain computer interface (BCI) system implanted in a patient with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease), which destroys motor neurons and causes loss of motor control and eventual paralysis. According to the team, their patient, Casey Harrell, has been living with BCI implants since 2023 that are still working today, giving him the ability not only to control a computer cursor with his thoughts, but also to speak. The Davis team is part of a broader coalition of universities with the US Department of Veterans Affairs known as BrainGate. They're working on a variety of neuroscience projects to do things like restore speech, use computers, and, in some cases, restore movement. In Harrell’s case, the Davis team was trying to figure out how to turn experimental tech into something long lasting and practical for use outside of a laboratory. Davis neurosurgeon David Brandman, co-principal investigator and co-senior author of the paper published Monday, as well as the surgeon who placed Harrell’s implant, described the results his team published as the crossing of a threshold in BCI technology: Not only has Harrell’s implant been working well with daily use since 2023, but it’s also incredibly accurate. In controlled tests, the system managed to synthesize sentences from Harrell’s brain activity with 99 percent accuracy; outside of the lab in daily use, Harrell still assessed it as being accurate 92 percent of the time. “The key thing to me is that it’s enabling everyday communication for a guy who wants to talk but can’t,” Brandman told The Register in an interview. “Despite being paralyzed [Harrell] has gone back to work full time and has meaningful conversations with his daughter who’s never heard the sound of his voice.” Prior work in the BCI space, Brandman told us, has either required researchers to be in a patient’s home whenever they’re using the tech, or for the patient to come to the researchers. That’s not the case here, with the system allowing Harrell’s home care team to hook him up to the system themselves, enabling him to use the device for more than 3,800 hours in the past few years. Based on the time the study was filed (It published Monday but went into peer review in July 2025) that would mean Harrell was using the device for more than five hours a day, on average. “It is a life that is more full of dynamic action and with friends and family, with colleagues, and it is something that allows me to communicate more in my natural way of communicating than any other technology that I have experienced,” Harrell told UC Davis via his BCI system. An actual practical use of AI Brandman is no stranger to BCI technology: Along with being a key figure in the BrainGate consortium, he’s also worked as study principal in investigating the safety of commercial BCI tech from Paradromics, one of the leading companies in the space alongside Synchron and Neuralink. As Brandman explained it, the Davis study didn’t involve any purpose-built hardware, instead making use of an existing BCI design produced by Blackrock Neurotech. The big advancement, says the Davis neurosurgeon, is with his team’s use of machine learning technology. The lab has built its own software platform for operating BCI devices known as Brain-computer interface for Rapidly Adaptive Neural Decoding (BRAND, which Brandman told us was coincidentally named), which UCD postdoctoral fellow Nick Card built machine learning algorithms for. BRAND is now used across the BrainGate consortium, and is where the secret sauce of the project’s success lies. According to the paper, BRAND’s AI algorithms are able to translate activity in Harrell’s ventral precentral gyrus, the part of the brain that controls motor function in the face, mouth, and jaw, into English-language phonemes. Additional algorithms in the software map those phonemes to words, and words to sentences. The end result is some very precise speech synthesis that allows Harrell to work full time as an environmental advocate. As for when the technology being developed by the UCD team might hit the commercial market, Brandman tells us that other technologies in the BCI space, such as those from Neuralink and others, are all working on tech with the same sorts of goals. His team’s objective is just to prove that BCI systems are more than just dead-end laboratory experiments. “My job is to derisk it,” Brandman told us. He likened the current state of BCI technology to early pacemakers, which started off in the 1950s having to be wired to hardware outside the body that was often connected to large batteries or directly tethered to the wall. Fast forward seventy years, and pacemakers are so simple to implant they’re often done in an outpatient procedure. “We’re at the early stages of this kind of technology,” Brandman said. “Casey has demonstrated that this kind of tech is practical.” Harrell may be wired up to a bunch of bulky external computers now, but combine the Davis UCD team’s AI advancements with the hardware work being done by other firms, and the future looks brighter for a lot of people whose lives are limited by paralysis and other impairments. “I want desperately to not be unique or special, because that will mean I no longer have the disease or that everyone that has the disease like me can get [BCI] prescribed to them,” Harrell said. BrainGate is currently accepting applications for future study participants. ® ]]></content:encoded>
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        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.theregister.com/a/5256461</guid>
        <link>https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/06/16/three-critical-fortinet-sandbox-bugs-splattered-by-unknown-attackers/5256461</link>
        <pubDate>Tue, 16 Jun 2026 20:27:12 +0200</pubDate>
        <title>Three critical Fortinet sandbox bugs splattered by unknown attackers</title>
        <description><![CDATA[ All have patches, so make sure you upgrade to a fixed version ]]></description>
        <category>security</category>
                <lab:kicker><![CDATA[ Security ]]></lab:kicker>
                <content:encoded><![CDATA[ Three critical flaws in Fortinet’s sandbox that allow remote attackers to bypass authentication, escalate privileges, and execute malicious code are under active exploitation, according to threat intelligence firm Defused. Fortinet patched two of the three flaws, CVE-2026-39813 and CVE-2026-39808, in April and the third, CVE-2026-25089 last week. All three bugs received 9.1 CVSS ratings, and, at the time, the vendor said that there were no reports of active exploitation. CVE-2026-39813 is a path traversal bug in the FortiSandbox JRPC API that allows an authentication bypass using specially crafted HTTP requests. It affects FortiSandbox 4.4.0 through 4.4.8 and 5.0.0 through 5.0.5. Patch to 4.4.9+ or 5.0.6+, depending on the branch, to fix the flaw. Fortinet security analyst Loic Pantano found this one. CVE-2026-39808 is an OS command injection flaw in FortiSandbox that allows unauthenticated attackers to execute unauthorized code or commands via HTTP requests. It affects versions 4.4.0 through 4.4.8, and upgrading to FortiSandbox 4.4.9 or above patches the hole. Fortinet credited KPMG Spain researcher Samuel de Lucas Maroto with finding and reporting this bug. Finally, CVE-2026-25089 is another OS command vulnerability in FortiSandbox, FortiSandbox Cloud and FortiSandbox PaaS WEB UI that allows unauthenticated attackers to execute unauthorized commands using specifically crafted HTTP requests. FortiSandbox 4.4.0 through 4.4.8 and 5.0.0 through 5.0.5, FortiSandbox Cloud 5.0.4 through 5.0.5, and FortiSandbox PaaS 5.0.4 through 5.0.5 are vulnerable. Upgrading to a fixed version patches the hole. Fortinet did not respond to The Register’s inquiries about these three CVEs and if the vendor had also observed any attacks against them. According to Defused, the exploitation began over the weekend. “We are observing exploitation of multiple Fortinet FortiSandbox vulnerabilities during the past 24 hours,” the threat-intel firm said in a LinkedIn post on Monday. “Per our research a working exploit for CVE-2026-25089 has not yet been publicly disclosed,” the company added, noting that the exploit for this flaw appeared to be vibe coded and may be faulty. We do know that all manner of miscreants love to abuse Fortinet flaws, so if you haven’t already, patch now. Earlier this month, Check Point VP of research Lotem Finkelstein warned that ransomware crims had exploited a critical authentication bypass vulnerability affecting Fortinet's Remote Access VPN and Mobile Access deployments, and said that the same crew was also likely abusing other VPN-related vulnerabilities in Fortinet products. ® ]]></content:encoded>
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        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.theregister.com/a/5256186</guid>
        <link>https://www.theregister.com/personal-tech/2026/06/16/commodore-gets-into-the-phone-biz-with-sailfish-powered-retro-callback/5256186</link>
        <pubDate>Tue, 16 Jun 2026 20:01:00 +0200</pubDate>
        <title>Commodore gets into the phone biz with Sailfish-powered retro 'Callback'</title>
        <description><![CDATA[ Ships sans email, web, or socials, but with plenty of beige plastic ]]></description>
        <category>personal tech</category>
                <lab:kicker><![CDATA[ Personal tech ]]></lab:kicker>
                <dc:modified>Tue, 16 Jun 2026 12:28:36 +0000</dc:modified>
                <content:encoded><![CDATA[ Retro computing brand Commodore has brought its pre-internet sensibilities to the mobile phone market with a $500 flip handset that proudly ships without social media, email, a web browser, or most of the things people typically buy smartphones to use. The company unveiled the device, dubbed Callback, this week and pitched it as a privacy-focused antidote to doomscrolling. Built in partnership with Finnish outfit Jolla, whose Sailfish OS traces its roots back to former Nokia engineers, the Linux-based handset attempts to split the difference between a feature phone and a smartphone. If your idea of progress is deleting half the apps on your phone, Callback may be for you. Commodore has removed email, social media, web browsing, workplace chat apps, and AI assistants, while bringing back physical controls and T9-style texting. Instead, buyers get a flip phone with a 48 MP Sony camera, FM radio, HD audio support, a selection of Commodore-themed games, and enough Android compatibility to run "99 percent" of Android applications through Sailfish OS's compatibility layer. "Phones were fun. Then they got too smart for their own good, and ours," said Commodore chief executive Peri Fractic, who said the idea grew out of his own efforts to reduce screen time before becoming a father. The company leans heavily on privacy as a selling point, promising no hidden data collection, no account sign-ins, encrypted storage, and what it describes as a "private not profit" business model. For many tech veterans, however, the real selling point may simply be the badge on the front. Long before smartphones, app stores, and algorithmic feeds, Commodore systems occupied bedrooms, classrooms, and living rooms around the world. For a generation of geeks, the brand still evokes cassette tape loading screens, SID-chip soundtracks, and countless hours spent typing programs from magazine listings. That's also why the company keeps getting resurrected. Commodore International collapsed in 1994, but the brand has spent much of the intervening decades bouncing between various owners eager to capitalize on the affection still attached to the name. Callback will initially launch in five versions, ranging from a $500 BASIC Beige model to a $640 Founders Edition complete with a 24-carat gold Commodore button. Whether nostalgia translates into sales remains another matter. Privacy-focused and minimalist phones have appeared regularly over the past decade, such as Punkt, usually attracting plenty of headlines and relatively few customers compared with the hundreds of millions of mainstream smartphones sold each year. Still, for anyone nostalgic for the days when hanging up the phone actually ended the conversation, Commodore has an answer: snap it shut and walk away. ® ]]></content:encoded>
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        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.theregister.com/a/5255964</guid>
        <link>https://www.theregister.com/systems/2026/06/16/there-is-no-one-cpu-to-rule-them-all-agents-otherwise/5255964</link>
        <pubDate>Tue, 16 Jun 2026 18:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
        <title>There's no such thing as an agentic CPU</title>
        <description><![CDATA[ AI agents are a general-purpose workload no different from any other ]]></description>
        <category>systems</category>
                <lab:kicker><![CDATA[ SYSTEMS ]]></lab:kicker>
                <dc:modified>Tue, 16 Jun 2026 12:22:54 +0000</dc:modified>
                <content:encoded><![CDATA[ OPINION Do AI agents need a new kind of CPU? That's what Arm, Nvidia, and a growing number of chip designers would have you believe.  Arm named its first datacenter silicon the "AGI CPU." Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang described Vera as a "CPU for agents," and AWS's Graviton 5 marketing is chock full of references to agentic AI. None of these Arm-based processors are going to bring about the singularity. They're not even AI accelerators. Don't let the spin doctors fool you – these chips are nothing more than general-purpose processors that have received an AI glow-up. Sure, AI agents and their harnesses need CPUs. No argument there. But agents aren't one workload. They're simply a bridge between the AI model and the same applications we've been running for decades. And the tools those agents end up running often look wildly different. Some will benefit from a higher ratio of memory bandwidth to compute, some will perform better on chips with large unified caches or dedicated compression engines, while others will prefer high frequency over core count, or vice versa. There's a reason AMD and Intel don't just build one Epyc or Xeon SKU, and why all of the "purpose-built" agentic CPUs look so different. If you look at what Nvidia has built with its 88-core Vera CPU, the chip promises high single-threaded performance with gobs of memory and interconnect bandwidth. As Huang explained it during his GTC Taiwan keynote, this combination of compute and bandwidth is key to keeping latency as low as possible. "There will be billions of agents and these agents are going to be using the CPUs with very little patience because the cost of the GPUs they sit next to is too high," he said. But of course Huang would say that – he's in the GPU-slinging biz. Vera, just like Grace, was designed to keep data flowing between the CPU and GPU as smoothly as possible. Data movement is literally Vera's thing. Arm's AGI CPU, meanwhile, looks to be a bog-standard Neoverse V3 processor with 136 cores that's been stripped of anything an agent is unlikely to need in order to keep power consumption as low as possible. No simultaneous multithreading or dedicated accelerators, minimal vector extensions, but loads of memory bandwidth. Amazon's 192-core Graviton 5 processors, announced at Re:Invent last winter, are essentially a scaled-up version of Arm's AGI CPU, right down to the Neoverse V3 cores, but arguably even more generic. To echo Corey Quinn, "please, for the love of all that's holy, stop calling them 'AI chips.'" Not to be left out of the fun, Intel and AMD have also been keen to recast their flagship Xeons and Epycs as the ideal platforms for running AI agents. At Computex earlier this month, Intel showed off a couple of reference rack designs packing as many as 36,864 x86 cores into a 100 kW rack. Meanwhile, AMD, following an initial round of Vera CPU benchmarks, went on the defensive last week, arguing that concurrency, not latency, is the metric that matters most when running agents at scale. The House of Zen projects that for a 100 kW power envelope, its 256-core Venice Epycs, due out later this year, would deliver 3.3x higher throughput per rack than Vera. If it feels like everyone has a different opinion on what the ideal agentic CPU should look like, that's because, as with any other datacenter workload, there's rarely one right answer. We see this in early benchmarks of Nvidia's Vera CPU. Late last month, FOSS-friendly publication Phoronix got early access to the chip and ran a subset of its test suite that Nvidia apparently felt was representative of its target market. The chip achieved a geo-mean score 10 percent higher than AMD's 128-core Epyc 9575F, and 55 percent higher than Intel's 128-core Xeon 6980P. That's a strong showing. But looking closer at the results, it becomes clear that Vera performs better in some apps than others. And this gets to the crux of it all. There has never been one CPU to rule them all, and as the AI hype cycle enters its agentic era, there certainly isn't one now. ® ]]></content:encoded>
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        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.theregister.com/a/5256390</guid>
        <link>https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/06/16/firefox-152-understands-sssh/5256390</link>
        <pubDate>Tue, 16 Jun 2026 17:48:31 +0200</pubDate>
        <title>Firefox 152 understands 'Sssh!'</title>
        <description><![CDATA[ As Google continues crippling Chrome ad-blockers, it's a good time to try Firefox ]]></description>
        <category>software</category>
                <lab:kicker><![CDATA[ Software ]]></lab:kicker>
                <dc:modified>Tue, 16 Jun 2026 18:45:30 +0000</dc:modified>
                <content:encoded><![CDATA[ Firefox 152 is now available for download, after no fewer than four minor point releases to its predecessor, last month’s Firefox 151. And quieting noisy tabs has never been easier. It’s a good time to check out the Fox: recently, this patch to the Google Chromium codebase, continues closing the door to Manifest V2 extensions, as The Register warned you was coming early last year. As the W3C documents, the forthcoming Google Chrome 150 turns off the last workarounds available for full-power ad blockers, and Chrome 151 will nuke them altogether. Firefox 152 revamps the layout of the Settings page. To be honest, we had no particular problems with this before, but it’s a good thing to make it easier to twiddle the knobs and dials that make Firefox arguably the most extensible and customizable web browser. The new version also understands that sometimes you just want it to shut up. When a tab (or, worse, multiple tabs) are playing audio, if you go to the address bar and type “mute” (or “sssh” or “hush”), then a new Quick Action button appears beneath it offering to immediately silence all tabs in all windows at once. For some streaming services, there are also improved media playback controls on the tab context menu, but we don’t use streaming much around these parts and weren’t able to test this. If you admired the cleverness of the JPEG XL format as much as this Vulture , then we have glad tidings. Back in 2022, we reported that Google was dropping JPEG-XL support from Chromium and Chrome. Back in January, Mountain View changed track on this, and now, Firefox 152 has experimental JPEG XL support too. The functions for sending tabs to other devices, and for copying URLs for easier sharing, have been improved. There’s an optional new “Send Tab” toolbar button. You can also right-click on a tab button and get options to send it to a nominated device, or copy its URL for sharing. Better still, this also applies to groups of tabs: hold down Ctrl or Cmd, select several, and right-click any of them, and they’ll all be sent, or their URLs copied, in one action. There are also multiple bug fixes, about 40 security fixes, and as always, some new features for developers. Speakers of Basque or Galician will welcome their inclusion in its translation répertoire. Mozilla’s fast release cycle for Firefox is a minor irritation, yes. (Of course, there’s always the Extended Support Release channel, if you want to hop off the treadmill.) However, one interpretation of it – and the stream of bug-fix versions – is that Mozilla is working hard on Firefox, and in our view that’s good news. A new source of information that the company has published with this version) is the new Firefox Roadmap, which has info about future planned changes. ® ]]></content:encoded>
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        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.theregister.com/a/5256175</guid>
        <link>https://www.theregister.com/systems/2026/06/16/microsoft-faces-down-sueball-capacity-problems-in-series-of-challenges/5256175</link>
        <pubDate>Tue, 16 Jun 2026 17:01:00 +0200</pubDate>
        <title>Microsoft faces down sueball, capacity problems in series of challenges</title>
        <description><![CDATA[ Misleading statements about Copilot and AI? Surely not! ]]></description>
        <category>systems</category>
                <lab:kicker><![CDATA[ SOFTWARE ]]></lab:kicker>
                <dc:modified>Tue, 16 Jun 2026 15:31:23 +0000</dc:modified>
                <content:encoded><![CDATA[ Microsoft is facing AI-related issues on multiple fronts. Disgruntled investors have flung a sueball at the company over its Copilot claims, while it is reportedly turning to other cloud vendors to help with AI-induced scalability issues at its coding collaboration tentacle, GitHub. The sueball is a class action, filed by the City of St. Clair Shores Police and Fire Retirement System in the Seattle US District Court, that alleges that Microsoft bosses (including its CEO, Satya Nadella) made "materially false and/or misleading" statements about adoption of the company's Copilot technology. On the contrary, according to the complaint, "Microsoft’s flagship proprietary AI model ranked well below competitors on a number of benchmark tests," and "Microsoft had failed to convert a significant percentage of its commercial Microsoft 365 users to paid Copilot subscriptions and the Company's Copilot offerings had lost market share to rival products, a trend that was increasing." Some organizations are gung-ho for Copilot these days – NHS England, for example, announced plans last week to roll the technology out to more than half a million staff. However the class action alleges Microsoft's SEC filings did not clearly explain problems "regarding the development and customer adoption of Copilot products and Microsoft's proprietary AI models." On January 28, Microsoft announced results for its fiscal second quarter, which included a slowdown in Azure growth and an admission that paid Microsoft 365 seats had reached only 15 million out of 450 million Microsoft 365 users. The company's shares subsequently declined by more than $48 per share, around ten percent of their value at the time, according to the complaint. “We are aware of the complaint and believe the claims are without merit. Microsoft stands by the integrity of its public statements and will vigorously defend itself in court," a Microsoft spokesperson told The Register. Git thee to AWS? Microsoft's AI headaches are not limited to the sueball, which the company reportedly claims "is without merit." Its source-shack tentacle, GitHub, is also reportedly facing the possibility of being forced to leap into bed with a rival to address ongoing reliability and scalability woes. Microsoft acquired GitHub in 2018, but the source site has sometimes struggled with availability amid a surge in AI-assisted workflows. The site has attempted to shift workloads to Azure, but has, for many users, remained unreliable. Azure has, infamously, had its own capacity problems recently. According to reports, the source shack will be propped up with additional resources from AWS, although it is not clear whether this is a temporary measure to address immediate problems or something more permanent. After all, given the choice, few IT managers would entrust all their workloads to a single vendor, and a multicloud approach is sensible. "The context here is important: Our community is growing at a rate we've never seen before, and the incredible spike in agentic development that began late last year has tested our infrastructure's limits," a GitHub spokesperson told The Register. "To meet this demand, we are both accelerating our move to Azure and continuing to explore a multi-cloud strategy to ensure we have the future capacity, compute elasticity, and horizontal scale required to support continued growth." It is, however, a little embarrassing when your owner operates its own cloud service. ® Updated at 1631 with comment from GitHub. ]]></content:encoded>
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        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.theregister.com/a/5256296</guid>
        <link>https://www.theregister.com/cyber-crime/2026/06/16/crooks-found-a-new-way-to-collaborate-using-teams-by-hiding-command-and-control-traffic/5256296</link>
        <pubDate>Tue, 16 Jun 2026 16:41:00 +0200</pubDate>
        <title>Crooks found a new way to collaborate using Teams – by hiding command-and-control traffic</title>
        <description><![CDATA[ Custom malware routed communications through legitimate Microsoft services, making malicious activity look like routine corporate collaboration ]]></description>
        <category>cyber-crime</category>
                <lab:kicker><![CDATA[ Cyber-crime ]]></lab:kicker>
                <dc:modified>Tue, 16 Jun 2026 13:57:35 +0000</dc:modified>
                <content:encoded><![CDATA[ Cybercrims deploying DragonForce ransomware appear to have gained access to a major US services company's network, then spent two months up to no good while disguising their command-and-control activities as legitimate Microsoft Teams traffic. Researchers at security firm Symantec said the intrusion began with attackers gaining access to the victim's environment before deploying a custom Go-based backdoor, tracked as "Backdoor.Turn," to maintain communication with the compromised systems. Rather than reaching out to attacker-controlled infrastructure that might raise alarms, the backdoor hid its activity inside traffic associated with Microsoft's widely used collaboration platform. To anyone monitoring network traffic, the compromised systems appeared to communicate only with legitimate Microsoft servers. "The attackers in this campaign use exceptionally sophisticated cyber tradecraft," Symantec said. "The configuration of Backdoor.Turn means that security products only see C&C traffic going to legitimate Teams servers, leaving defenders unaware that data is being siphoned away by malicious actors." Symantec said the attackers installed Backdoor.Turn on systems after deploying DragonForce ransomware, potentially giving them a way back into compromised networks or access they could later sell to other criminals. To connect to Microsoft's infrastructure, the backdoor first requested an anonymous visitor token from Microsoft Teams and Skype back-end services. It then used a Microsoft-operated TURN relay server – infrastructure typically used to help establish communication between users – before establishing a direct QUIC connection to a malicious command-and-control server. Symantec said this is the first known case of malware using this particular technique. The security firm did not identify the victim beyond describing it as a major US services company, nor did it say whether the Teams-based communications channel had been observed in other DragonForce incidents. The ransomware operation has become increasingly prominent over the past year, operating a ransomware-as-a-service model that allows affiliates to conduct attacks under the DragonForce banner. It has been linked to the prolific Scattered Spider group, which has conducted a string of high-profile attacks, including intrusions targeting major retailers in the UK. While attackers have long abused legitimate cloud services to conceal malicious traffic, Symantec's findings suggest that DragonForce operators continue to look for ways to blend into the software and infrastructure that organizations trust most. ® ]]></content:encoded>
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        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.theregister.com/a/5256260</guid>
        <link>https://www.theregister.com/os-platforms/2026/06/16/linux-kernel-71-sends-intel-486-support-to-silicon-heaven/5256260</link>
        <pubDate>Tue, 16 Jun 2026 16:03:00 +0200</pubDate>
        <title>Linux kernel 7.1 sends Intel 486 support to silicon heaven</title>
        <description><![CDATA[ More than 140,000 lines of code bite the dust as ancient CPUs, bus mice, and other legacy leftovers face the chop ]]></description>
        <category>os platforms</category>
                <lab:kicker><![CDATA[ OS PLATFORMS ]]></lab:kicker>
                <dc:modified>Tue, 16 Jun 2026 15:03:12 +0000</dc:modified>
                <content:encoded><![CDATA[ Linux kernel 7.1 is out, bringing significant changes that have been brewing for years – including the long-promised removal of support for Intel's 486 chip and its contemporaries. More than 140,000 lines of code have been chopped, with more facing deletion. Back in May 2025, we wrote that kernel 6.15 would drop 486 support, but that change was canceled at the last minute. Now it's in: in April, Penguin Emperor Linus Torvalds merged the big change that we described back then. More work is still ahead before this is completely gone, though. The Reg reported on the Russian Baikal family of CPUs way back in 2014, and again in 2021, but now Linux support for Baikal hardware has been removed, as has support for ancient bus mouse ports. We've also previously described 7.1's new NTFS driver, NTFSplus. It's optional for now, but South Korean filesystems boffin Namjae Jeon has revived and rewritten the original read-only NTFS driver from the 1990s. Most importantly, now it's able to write to NTFS volumes as well as read from them, and it's been modernized in line with current kernel filesystem methods. Linux Weekly News (LWN) explained the change in its January Filesystem Medley. Along with the new driver, there's also a new and improved version of the additional ntfsprogs utilities, called ntfsprogs-plus. This gives Linux the ability to repair some forms of NTFS corruption and errors – so we suspect that the various Linux-based live rescue media such as SystemRescue, GParted Live, and Grml may be quick to adopt kernel 7.1. This reminds us of what might have been the first time we reported on some of Namjae's filesystem finesse, when his code to repair exFAT volumes was added back in 2022. NTFSplus stands to completely replace the driver that Paragon Software donated back in 2020, as we described in April. It also seems likely that the old read-only NTFS driver will be removed too, as NTFSplus is based on that code. As it happens, exFAT support has been improved too. Contiguous space for files can be pre-allocated without zeroing the blocks first, making the process faster, and reducing fragmentation so storage media stays faster for longer. There are also improvements in ext4 and Btrfs handling. The swap memory subsystem has been overhauled, and should be faster. With RAM prices still high and thus renewed interest in memory and cache compression tools, we suspect that there's much more to do here. There are, of course, many smaller changes, some of which we've previously covered – including the removal of a whole collection of ancient communications devices. In 2022, our own Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols introduced the new io_uring API. In doing so, he also mentioned the new eBPF functionality, which we had days previously attempted to summarize. In 7.1, those two meet: now eBPF code can handle io_uring scheduling. The extensible kernel scheduler, which we've previously mentioned as an advanced feature of Oracle Linux's UEK-next kernel, has now been merged. Kernel 7.1 has improved power management for both AMD and Intel chips, as well as battery-status reporting on Apple M1 and M2-based laptops. The security of KVM virtualization on Arm has been tightened up, and so has that around accessing PIDs (process IDs) in the /proc virtual filesystem. The CIFS network filesystem – or SMB, as most of us call it – now has explicit support for creating temporary files. Intel FRED support debuted way back in kernel 6.9 but it's now on by default, and it helps performance on AMD processors as well. Kernel Rust support now needs Rust 1.85. For a deep dive into all the changes, as ever, LWN is the place to go. All this and much, much more is described in the articles on the first half of the 7.1 merge window and the rest of the 7.1 merge window. ® ]]></content:encoded>
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        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.theregister.com/a/5256248</guid>
        <link>https://www.theregister.com/systems/2026/06/16/non-x86-servers-now-nearly-half-the-market-idc-says/5256248</link>
        <pubDate>Tue, 16 Jun 2026 15:31:23 +0200</pubDate>
        <title>Non-x86 servers now nearly half the market, IDC says</title>
        <description><![CDATA[ Demand for AI systems plus the shortage of DRAM and NAND are shaping the global market ]]></description>
        <category>systems</category>
                <lab:kicker><![CDATA[ SYSTEMS ]]></lab:kicker>
                <content:encoded><![CDATA[ Servers employing x86 chips from AMD and Intel now account for little more than half of server revenue, according to the latest figures from IDC. In its Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker for Q1 2026, the analyst firm says that non-x86 server revenue hit $58.7 billion, representing a startling increase of 107 percent over the same period last year. The results mean that those non-x86 servers make up 47.9 percent of the market revenue, closing in rapidly on the amount of cash spent on x86 boxes. The growth in non-x86 turnover is likely thanks to systems powered by Nvidia’s AI chips featuring Arm cores. Although there is high demand for these, they also cost a pretty packet compared to an average datacenter box. In fact, IDC noted a stark divide shaping the worldwide server market, which reached $122.6 billion in vendor revenue during this period, a 30.4 percent increase year-on-year. On the one hand, AI infrastructure investment from hyperscalers and large cloud providers is “running at a scale that shows no sign of plateauing,” while everything else - the non-accelerated segment - faces a supply-constrained environment, thanks largely to that AI infrastructure spending. As Reg readers will know, memory chipmakers are prioritizing manufacturing capacity for higher margin products for AI servers and GPUs, starving the rest of the market of supply. Component availability, particularly DRAM and NAND flash, is limiting near-term shipment volumes from vendors, IDC says, though order pipelines are strong. Supply of the right chips is therefore the chief limiting factor on server market growth. Revenue for x86 servers still reached $63.9 billion, but this was a decline of 2.9 percent due to those component supply constraints impacting shipment volumes. GPU accelerated servers pulled in $68.9 billion for the vendors, up nearly 25 percent year-on-year, while other accelerated servers surged a massive 122 percent to $17.7 billion. The latter category represents AI systems configured with FPGAs or ASICs rather than GPUs. IDC’s spin on the data is that AI infrastructure adoption is no longer limited to hyperscalers, thanks to developments such as government-led sovereign AI initiatives, while the non-accelerated segment tells a more nuanced story. Although revenue here declined, underlying demand remains strong, but many enterprise customers are holding out against elevated component prices. “Companies aren’t pulling back from infrastructure investment; they’re just not getting servers as fast as they need them. Longer term, emerging workloads, including agentic applications and physical AI ecosystems, will keep demand elevated well beyond the current cycle,” commented IDC research director Juan Seminara. The firm says it expects to see supply normalization beginning in 2027, with capacity relief coming as chipmakers bring new fabrication plants online. Across the last two decades, non-x86 servers accounted for less than ten percent of revenue, and most of that went to IBM which emerged as the last vendor of proprietary servers as Oracle lost interest in Sun and the likes of HPE decided they couldn't sustain businesses built on exotic architectures. ® ]]></content:encoded>
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        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.theregister.com/a/5256198</guid>
        <link>https://www.theregister.com/public-sector/2026/06/16/nhs-palantir-claims-face-scrutiny-after-data-suggests-uneven-results/5256198</link>
        <pubDate>Tue, 16 Jun 2026 14:32:30 +0200</pubDate>
        <title>NHS Palantir claims face scrutiny after data suggests uneven results</title>
        <description><![CDATA[ Campaign group says FOI figures show some trusts carried out fewer procedures than before ]]></description>
        <category>public sector</category>
                <lab:kicker><![CDATA[ PUBLIC SECTOR ]]></lab:kicker>
                <dc:modified>Tue, 16 Jun 2026 12:58:35 +0000</dc:modified>
                <content:encoded><![CDATA[ Nearly a third of NHS trusts using Palantir's health data platform are performing fewer patient procedures than before it went live, according to figures analyzed by campaign group Foxglove. The research – based on a series of Freedom of Information (FOI) requests – also found that a single body, Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, accounted for 84 percent of the fall in outpatient waiting lists, while 16 trusts use the tool provided by the US firm. Palantir won the £330 million contract to provide the NHS Federated Data Platform (FDP), which the UK government said was vital to improving NHS productivity and recovering from the long waiting lists for elective care caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Palantir's journey with the NHS began with a £1 award in 2020, which later led to a total of £60 million in contracts awarded without competition during the pandemic. NHS England, which awarded the contracts, said that as of June, 139 trusts used the FDP, with 137 reporting benefits. An Inpatients Care Co-ordination Solution (CCS) tool based on the platform had resulted in 111,589 additional patients undergoing procedures in operating theatres, it said. However, data obtained by tech rights campaign group Foxglove found that 41 NHS trusts are using Inpatient CCS, the module for helping hospitals manage operation scheduling, but 13 of them – or about 30 percent – report having carried out fewer operations overall since using the tool. Staffing shortages, more complex cases, or pressure on hospital bed capacity might explain the fall. Foxglove said it was the first time that data from individual trusts using FDP had been made publicly available. The FOI response also shows that, for the Outpatient CCS, a single trust accounted for the vast majority of the benefits. According to NHS figures, Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust accounted for 183,061 of the patients removed from the outpatient waiting list, compared with the total of 217,846. Foxglove head of strategy Tim Squirrell said: "We now know that the big claim the FDP is delivering more operations for hospitals across the NHS is covering up a much less positive reality – a third of the trusts using the FDP's operations scheduling tool, Inpatient CCS, are actually delivering fewer operations than before they started using Palantir's kit. "Palantir can't have it both ways. If it expects us to believe that the FDP is responsible for improvements in some hospitals, it must also accept that things are getting worse as a result of its tools in others. "The data the NHS has seen fit to publish provides no useful comparisons of how things are going at the trusts not using Palantir's tools. So, in effect, we are being asked to back Palantir's FDP is delivering the goods based on faith, rather than hard evidence." An NHS spokesperson said: "Thousands more patients are benefiting from the NHS Federated Data Platform every month, with more than 110,000 extra patients having undergone procedures in operating theatres, while also reducing the number of unnecessary days patients stay in hospital following treatment by a seventh. "As NHS organizations expand the use of this technology, we will continue to work with them to ensure they use it to its full extent and get the most out of it for patients." An official pointed out that trusts have different starting points, at different scales, through locally agreed rollout plans when using the FDP. In a statement to The Financial Times, Stephen Childs, head of UK health partnerships at Palantir, said the company was working to improve by applying lessons from the trusts that get the best results from its software. "But we should be clear that the recent history of technology in the NHS has, by the government's own admission, seen us fall behind, exacerbated by various failed programmes, often at great expense to the taxpayer," he said. "And what these figures show, despite attempts by the campaign group that obtained them to present them otherwise, is that Palantir software is helping to fix this and enable the NHS to deliver better patient care. "This includes more than 110,000 additional operations to date, a 15 percent reduction in discharge delays for long-stay patients, and a 6.8 percent increase in the number of patients finding out whether they have cancer within 28 days of referral." The FDP deal has been the subject of frequent criticism in recent months. Earlier in June, MPs told the government to reduce reliance on the US spy-tech firm, and specifically use a break clause in the FDP contract to end its involvement in the NHS. Instead, the government should "develop an in-house replacement or seek an alternative developed by UK-owned and UK-based providers that are more compatible with UK values, and do not pursue either technical or contractual dependencies," the House of Commons science committee said. ® ]]></content:encoded>
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        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.theregister.com/a/5252739</guid>
        <link>https://www.theregister.com/science/2026/06/16/nasa-said-nyet-to-roscosmos-plan-to-cut-into-leaky-iss-segment/5252739</link>
        <pubDate>Tue, 16 Jun 2026 14:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
        <title>NASA said nyet to Roscosmos plan to cut into leaky ISS segment</title>
        <description><![CDATA[ Crew sheltered in SpaceX Dragon as aging Zvezda segment's cracks continue to test orbital nerve ]]></description>
        <category>science</category>
                <lab:kicker><![CDATA[ SCIENCE ]]></lab:kicker>
                <dc:modified>Tue, 16 Jun 2026 11:33:44 +0000</dc:modified>
                <content:encoded><![CDATA[ Russia's space agency Roscosmos intended to cut into part of the International Space Station (ISS) to determine the extent of leaks in the aging structure, according to a space agency source. The Register was told that discussions involved a handsaw . Other reports have suggested cosmonauts planned to deploy a drill. Whatever tool was involved, the plan made NASA sufficiently alarmed that the agency sent its astronauts scurrying into the relative safety of a SpaceX Dragon capsule docked at the ISS. Neither NASA nor Roscosmos has commented officially. Russia's plan was to use the tool to learn more about the extent of the crack.  NASA said: "This revised approach involved cutting a bracket to access better an area identified as a possible leak source for further inspection, using a method that could have resulted in elevated risk to the structure in the area." However, this could have created unpredictable loads on other cracks. Eventually, the plan was called off in favor of more measurements and data gathering. The SpaceX Crew-12 astronauts and NASA astronaut Chris Williams were forced to shelter in the Crew Dragon spacecraft earlier in June following a sharp increase in the rate of air leakage from the orbiting outpost. The offending area is the Zvezda service module's transfer tunnel, known by the Russian abbreviation PrK. While more epoxy patches might address the problem in the short term, the fact that additional cracks have appeared suggests issues Zvezda has wider problems. That's not unexpected given the age of the craft, some parts of which date to the 1980s when it was a backup for the Mir space station. Russia launched Zvezda in 2000, so it's now endured decades of stress. The module has leaked for years. In 2024, ESA astronaut Andreas Mogensen suggested one option for dealing with the cracks was to seal off the module once and for all. He told The Register: "The lucky point is that the cracks are confined to that chamber at the very end. So, as long as Russia is willing to forego that docking port, that wouldn't impact operations too badly." The crew routinely keeps the hatch to the tunnel closed when not in use, but a more permanent solution might be necessary in light of the ongoing problems. "So, yeah, worst case, you could seal it off," said Mogensen, "and I think the Space Station could continue. But of course, you never know what other problems might arise." Mogensen's "worst case" is, according to reports, likely the way forward: permanently sealing off the affected segment. A sudden depressurization of the PrK segment is a risk NASA is no longer willing to take. ® ]]></content:encoded>
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        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.theregister.com/a/5256038</guid>
        <link>https://www.theregister.com/cyber-crime/2026/06/16/cardiac-monitor-makers-security-skips-a-beat-as-data-thieves-go-for-the-jugular/5256038</link>
        <pubDate>Tue, 16 Jun 2026 13:45:00 +0200</pubDate>
        <title>Cardiac monitor maker's security skips a beat as data thieves go for the jugular</title>
        <description><![CDATA[ Attackers used social engineering to access third-party business apps and steal patient information ]]></description>
        <category>cyber-crime</category>
                <lab:kicker><![CDATA[ CYBER-CRIME ]]></lab:kicker>
                <dc:modified>Tue, 16 Jun 2026 11:30:41 +0000</dc:modified>
                <content:encoded><![CDATA[ Heart monitoring biz iRhythm says thieves made off with patient health information and tried to turn it into a payday. The California-based cardiac monitoring specialist offers customers a wearable device that collects data, then analyzes it to create reports about heart health. The company said it detected unauthorized activity on June 8 and launched an investigation with the help of third-party cybersecurity experts. A day later, the company received messages from a cybercriminal claiming to have obtained sensitive information, including proprietary company data, protected health information, and other personal information. According to iRhythm's filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, the attackers demanded payment in exchange for not publicly disclosing the stolen data. The company confirmed that data had been exfiltrated and, on June 10, determined that the incident was material due to the volume of information potentially affected. While the company disclosed the extortion demand and the existence of stolen data, it made no mention of negotiations. iRhythm spent a good chunk of the filing explaining what the attackers didn't get. According to the company, the intrusion was confined to business applications and never reached its clinical systems, medical devices, or customer connections. Patient care and day-to-day operations were unaffected. The company has not yet disclosed how many individuals may be affected, what data was accessed, or which third-party-hosted applications were involved in the breach. It has also not identified the threat actor behind the attack, and The Reg has found no evidence of major ransomware groups claiming responsibility. The company's filing states the attackers gained access through social engineering. Exactly how that happened remains unclear, although healthcare organizations have increasingly found themselves dealing with phishing campaigns, help desk impersonation scams, and other forms of human-targeted intrusion designed to bypass technical defenses. As of the filing date, iRhythm said it had not identified any ongoing unauthorized access to its systems and believed the incident was unlikely to have a material impact on its financial condition or operating results. The company added that it maintains cyber insurance that may cover some of the losses associated with the breach. iRhythm's disclosure comes less than a week after drug giant Novo Nordisk revealed that attackers had copied patient data from some clinical trials, adding another healthcare name to a growing list of organizations dealing with data theft and extortion attempts. ® ]]></content:encoded>
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        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.theregister.com/a/5256084</guid>
        <link>https://www.theregister.com/systems/2026/06/16/qualcomm-said-to-be-circling-ai-chip-biz-tenstorrent-in-10b-risc-v-power-play/5256084</link>
        <pubDate>Tue, 16 Jun 2026 13:15:00 +0200</pubDate>
        <title>Qualcomm said to be circling AI chip biz Tenstorrent in $10B RISC-V power play</title>
        <description><![CDATA[ Potential takeover would represent significant commitment to the open instruction set architecture ]]></description>
        <category>systems</category>
                <lab:kicker><![CDATA[ Systems ]]></lab:kicker>
                <dc:modified>Tue, 16 Jun 2026 11:06:11 +0000</dc:modified>
                <content:encoded><![CDATA[ Qualcomm is reportedly moving to buy AI chip firm Tenstorrent, an acquisition that could prove a major boost to the RISC-V ecosystem. This comes from The Information, which cites an anonymous source claiming that a deal valued at $8 billion to $10 billion is under discussion. According to the report, the talks are ongoing and there is no certainty a deal will be reached, but the move would fit with Qualcomm's datacenter ambitions and bullish statements about AI opportunities made by its chief, Cristiano Amon. The Register asked Qualcomm and Tenstorrent to comment. Tenstorrent is a Canadian AI chip startup that bases its products on the permissively licensed RISC-V processor architecture. The company is led by CPU guru Jim Keller, known for his design work at AMD, Apple, and on DEC's Alpha chips back in the day. The firm's Galaxy Blackhole AI compute platform went on sale earlier this year, packing 32 of its Blackhole accelerators, each with 768 RISC-V cores, into a 6U enclosure running its own software stack. Qualcomm is also keen on RISC-V, especially since its licensing court battle with chip designer Arm, which wanted to nix Qualy's license to create its own Arm-based processor silicon. The chip design firm's datacenter products use home-brew Hexagon neural processing units, but it continues to rely on Arm processors in its Snapdragon range. In December, Qualcomm picked up Ventana Micro Systems, another company designing RISC-V CPUs targeting datacenter and enterprise applications. Financial details of that were not disclosed, but estimated at between $200 million and $600 million. A Tenstorrent buy could therefore see a greater commitment to RISC-V from Qualcomm, giving the open standard a shot in the arm (pun intended) and allowing the chipmaker to further distance itself from Arm and its owner SoftBank as it pursues datacenter customers. Arm appears unfazed by that prospect, having recently said it expects datacenter chips will soon be its main source of revenue. ® ]]></content:encoded>
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        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.theregister.com/a/5256106</guid>
        <link>https://www.theregister.com/cyber-crime/2026/06/16/scammers-keep-scoring-brits-fleeced-for-13b-as-americans-lose-35b-to-impersonators/5256106</link>
        <pubDate>Tue, 16 Jun 2026 13:02:31 +0200</pubDate>
        <title>Scammers keep scoring: Brits fleeced for £1.3B as Americans lose $3.5B to impersonators</title>
        <description><![CDATA[ More reasons to love social media and AI ]]></description>
        <category>cyber-crime</category>
                <lab:kicker><![CDATA[ cyber-crime ]]></lab:kicker>
                <content:encoded><![CDATA[ Brits lost £1.28 billion ($1.7 billion) to payment fraud last year as scams continued to thrive on online platforms and telecoms networks, according to the latest figures from banking trade association UK Finance. The 2025 losses represent a modest four percent rise on the previous year, the trade association said, but the main sources of fraud remained familiar. UK Finance said two-thirds (66 percent) of incidents start with online platforms, such as scams promoted through social media adverts. Telecoms accounts for a smaller proportion (17 percent) but encompasses crimes such as impersonation fraud, which can result in larger per-crime losses. Calling for tighter regulations on tech and telecoms, UK Finance said online marketplaces must take measures to reduce scammers' use of their platforms. This could include prohibiting off-platform payments, relying solely on secure alternatives. It also called for stronger action against fraudulent social media advertising. "The financial sector invests huge amounts in protecting customers, but we cannot be the only line of defense," said Ruth Ray, managing director of economic crime at UK Finance. "Almost £1.3 billion was stolen again last year and it is clear we are not tackling the underlying problem effectively enough. "Given most authorized push payment (APP) fraud still starts via online tech platforms or via telecoms, we urgently need stronger, enforceable responsibilities to be placed on these sectors. This is the way to reduce the harm and stop criminals and tech companies profiting from these devastating crimes." APP fraud losses jumped 19 percent in 2025 compared with the year before. Total losses exceeded £576 million ($772.8 million), and consumers incurred the vast majority of these losses. Of the total cases, purchase scams comprised more than seven in ten, with annual losses increasing 20 percent to £118.1 million ($158.4 million). APP fraud involves convincing the victim to pay for something themselves, but the criminal giving the orders is the only party to financially benefit. Crimes that fall under the APP umbrella include investment fraud, romance fraud, and impersonation fraud – all of which saw double-digit percentage increases in case numbers. "What makes APP scams particularly worrying is how much can be lost before a victim even realizes, and how little advice still exists for consumers once it happens," said Aditya Hindocha, VP of account partnerships at SquareTrade Europe. "Device warranties largely won't cover data theft. Home insurance excludes digital losses. Banks may refund some fraudulent transactions, but there's no guarantee. Consumers today lack support for what comes next: restoring stolen funds, recovering a compromised identity, or navigating the months of fallout that follow." Unauthorized payment fraud, under which the remaining offenses fall, accounted for a higher value of total losses (£703.4 million/$943.8 million). While the total value of losses represents a decrease of five percent compared to 2024, the number of cases increased by 11 percent to 3.81 million, according to the latest report [PDF]. Unauthorized fraud encompasses offenses such as online payments made using stolen card details, lost or stolen card fraud (such as ATM skimming, petty card theft), remote banking fraud, and contactless fraud. US faring no better The Federal Trade Commission published figures this week for impersonation fraud in the US, which reached $3.5 billion in associated losses last year. It said that impersonation fraud was the most commonly reported fraud type last year, accounting for nearly one in three cases across 2025. Nearly $1 billion of the total was lost after scammers impersonated a business, with the most common type being banks, and around $920 million as a result of government impersonations, up from $866 million and $789 million respectively in 2024. According to the FBI's annual cybercrime report, published in April, government impersonation fraud saw the biggest increase in case numbers of all offenses, up 128 percent from 2023 to 2025. A separate warning from May 2025 urged citizens to be wary of the common tricks scammers use in these cases, which increasingly involve AI-generated voices to convince victims they are speaking with genuine government representatives. ® ]]></content:encoded>
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        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.theregister.com/a/5256022</guid>
        <link>https://www.theregister.com/public-sector/2026/06/16/capita-is-about-to-sail-past-deadline-to-fix-civil-service-pensions-scheme/5256022</link>
        <pubDate>Tue, 16 Jun 2026 12:22:51 +0200</pubDate>
        <title>Capita is about to sail past deadline to fix civil service pensions scheme</title>
        <description><![CDATA[ Union says outsourcer will miss June 30 target after portal meltdown and mounting complaints ]]></description>
        <category>public sector</category>
                <lab:kicker><![CDATA[ PUBLIC SECTOR ]]></lab:kicker>
                <content:encoded><![CDATA[ A union representing UK civil servants claims Capita is set to miss the terms of its £239 million contract to run a government pension scheme following a disastrous launch late last year. The tech outsourcing company's leadership had promised that using Microsoft's AI would improve the service, but the investment has yet to help it reach the terms of its contract with the Cabinet Office. Service levels following the move to Capita have been unacceptable In a statement, the PCS union said the Cabinet Office confirmed that Capita would miss the ministerial deadline of June 30 to restore pension administration services to contractual standards, which it dubbed an unacceptable failure. The Register has contacted Capita for a response. A Cabinet Office spokesperson said: "The service levels following the move to Capita have been unacceptable. An urgent recovery plan is underway, and our immediate priority is to stabilise service levels and give current and former Civil Servants the service they deserve. "To this end, the Minister for the Cabinet Office Nick Thomas-Symonds set a deadline of the end of June for significant progress to have been made in this area, and we will assess the situation at the end of the month. "We will continue to use all available commercial levers to hold Capita to account and ensure they deliver for both members and taxpayers." The government is understood to be investigating the respective liabilities of both Capita and MyCSP – the previous provider – for these failures in the launch and handover of the service. The Reg first disclosed that the portal for the Civil Service Pension Scheme (CSPS) – which supports 1.5 million current and former public servants – appeared to be incomplete and barely functional when it launched in December. Users were forced to create new accounts, which went unrecognized, and they endured broken and circular links while the website appeared unfinished and untested, with headers and other features displaying dummy text. Multiple reports followed of scheme members struggling to get hold of their savings. Retired civil servants lost income after pension payments failed to arrive, according to the BBC. Capita said it had inherited a larger backlog of cases than agreed. Initially, it expected a transfer of around 37,300 cases from MyCSP. Later, that increased to volumes of up to 100,000. Nonetheless, the service continues to fail to meet its contractual terms, the PCS said. To date, 607 MPs have received at least one email from constituents about this crisis, with more than 3,000 emails sent in total, the union added. Fran Heathcote, PCS general secretary, said: "This is beyond disappointing, but I can't say it's surprising. Capita has missed deadline after deadline, yet civil servants and pension scheme members continue to pay the price for those failures. "Minor financial penalties mean little when you look at the size of the contracts they've been awarded. They're certainly no comfort if you're facing financial hardship because you've retired and your pension hasn't been paid. "How much more evidence does the government need? Capita has failed to restore confidence in this service. Ministers must now take immediate steps to bring the administration of the Civil Service Pension Scheme back into the Civil Service." This is beyond disappointing, but I can't say it's surprising In January, the Cabinet Office – which ran the procurement – and Capita both apologized for the botched launch of the service. Angela MacDonald, deputy chief executive at HM Revenue & Customs, was also recruited "to lead oversight of an urgent recovery plan." A surge team of "over 150 additional staff" was also deployed to "support clearing the correspondence backlogs and speed up processing." In March, Catherine Little, civil service chief operating officer and Cabinet Office permanent secretary, admitted that Capita did not deliver the full levels of IT, automation, and portal functionality at go-live, significantly reducing its ability to manage the volumes of work it inherited. ® ]]></content:encoded>
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        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.theregister.com/a/5256016</guid>
        <link>https://www.theregister.com/networks/2026/06/16/zte-day-2026-in-almaty-showcases-innovations-shaping-kazakhstans-intelligent-telecom-future/5256016</link>
        <pubDate>Tue, 16 Jun 2026 12:18:45 +0200</pubDate>
        <title>ZTE Day 2026 in Almaty Showcases Innovations Shaping Kazakhstan's Intelligent Telecom Future</title>
        <description><![CDATA[ PARTNER CONTENT: Empowering Kazakhstan’s "Year of Digitalization and AI" with Next-Gen Connectivity and Supercomputing Solutions ]]></description>
        <category>networks</category>
                <content:encoded><![CDATA[ ZTE successfully hosted ZTE Day 2026 in Almaty as part of its annual series of technical seminars addressing key trends and challenges in the telecommunications industry. Under the theme "Creating an Intelligent Future," the event has become a premier forum for dialogue among Kazakhstan's leading telecom operators, regulators, and ICT specialists. Participants explored a cutting-edge technological agenda designed to accelerate the nation's digital transformation through ZTE's efficient, eco-friendly, and smart solutions. The 2026 edition of ZTE Day coincided with a major milestone in the development of Kazakhstan's ICT market. On the initiative of President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, 2026 has been declared the Year of Digitalization and Artificial Intelligence in the country. A dedicated AI law is already in effect, and the national strategy "Digital Kazakhstan" includes 20 roadmaps spanning 72 industries, with clear objectives set through 2027. Kazakhstan has firmly established itself as a digital leader in Central Asia. Internet penetration in the country has reached 92.9%, and the number of mobile subscribers has grown to 26.3 million – an increase of 3.5 million in just one year. The main infrastructure challenge remains the large‑scale deployment of 5G networks in the nation's largest cities. As part of ZTE Day, experts provided a detailed presentation of the company's cutting‑edge developments, first unveiled earlier this year at MWC Barcelona 2026. Aligned with its global "All in AI, AI for All" strategy, the company showcased comprehensive AI solutions spanning diverse areas – from wireless network optimization and high‑speed transport systems to energy‑efficient telecom solutions, smart home technologies, and intelligent personal devices. Visually demonstrating the deep integration of AI and ICT, ZTE specialists presented solutions tailored specifically to the needs of the Kazakhstani market. ZTE continues to build long‑term, successful partnerships with Kazakhstani telecom operators and educational institutions, implementing projects to modernize telecommunications infrastructure. In the area of household digitalization, the company, together with Kazakhtelecom, has delivered high‑speed gigabit internet to hundreds of thousands of families, enabling the widespread adoption of online education, remote work, and 4K video. In mobile networks, ZTE, in collaboration with Beeline, has modernized the wireless infrastructure, increasing coverage, average speed, and peak network throughput by more than 35%. A major milestone in scientific development has been the creation of a supercomputer data center at Al‑Farabi Kazakh National University – one of the most powerful in Central Asia – supporting research in artificial intelligence, climate modeling, and the development of large‑scale language models for the Kazakh language. "ZTE is building end‑to‑end AI infrastructure based on the 'Connectivity + Computing' principle and annually invests approximately 20% of its revenue in research and development. Kazakhstan has already become a recognized regional leader in digitalization, and we are proud that ZTE's innovative and environmentally friendly solutions are making a concrete contribution to technological progress and the creation of a secure digital world in the country," noted Wei Wei, CEO of ZTE Kazakhstan, in his opening speech at ZTE Day. Contributed by ZTE. ]]></content:encoded>
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        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.theregister.com/a/5255735</guid>
        <link>https://www.theregister.com/databases/2026/06/16/sql-server-may-be-too-lucrative-for-microsoft-to-ditch-but-too-legacy-to-love/5255735</link>
        <pubDate>Tue, 16 Jun 2026 12:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
        <title>SQL Server may be too lucrative for Microsoft to ditch, but too legacy to love</title>
        <description><![CDATA[ Analysts say Redmond still has billions of reasons to keep backing its flagship DBMS, even as Azure, Postgres, and AI hog the spotlight ]]></description>
        <category>databases</category>
                <lab:kicker><![CDATA[ DATABASES ]]></lab:kicker>
                <dc:modified>Tue, 16 Jun 2026 08:23:51 +0000</dc:modified>
                <content:encoded><![CDATA[ While Microsoft sweeps the confetti off the floor of its Build event, it may be a good moment to reflect on what it didn't say as much as what it did. Taking the spotlight was AI agent Scout, ready to "understand how work gets done" and "take action without needing to be prompted." The software behemoth's leading database, SQL Server, barely got a mention. On its own, it may not be a big deal, but Microsoft watchers also noted that long-time SQL Server champion Rohan Kumar left the company in June, while Arun Ulag, president of Azure Data, currently holds the SQL Server remit. He's also responsible for the Fabric analytics and AI platform and a portfolio of open source database services. Taken together with the news that Microsoft's own terms and conditions allow customers to take SQL Server licenses to AWS's RDS database service without paying twice – thanks to a feature that lets them provide their own SQL Server installation media – the vibe around SQL Server has changed. "I don't think it is a priority," said Andrew Snodgrass, research vice president of analyst company Directions on Microsoft. "With Kumar leaving, that's become very evident. I think the world of Ulag, but [SQL Server] is not where his focus is for the future. I'm afraid Microsoft are going to leave it languishing." He said his concerns for Microsoft's flagship DBMS began when the 2022 version was released with a "bunch of Azure integration capabilities that no one was really asking for." It ended up being "more of a marketing release than something that was truly engineered to meet customer needs," Snodgrass said. While the introduction of vector search in the 2025 edition was welcomed by users, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and Oracle users had been benefiting from the feature for years. "At Build, Arun Ulag stood up there and talked about all the new stuff: highlights of the database news there was HorizonDB, a PostgreSQL database service with a new form of scale-out capability," Snodgrass said. "There was no news about SQL Server, which was stunning, because SQL Server 2025 just came out at the end of last year, and in that they put in AI vector search, which I think is one of the greatest additions to SQL Server I've seen in ten years." But it seems Microsoft is as interested in its PostgreSQL and other open source database services as it is in its own SQL Server offering. So long as it drives workloads in Azure, it is all good for Microsoft, Snodgrass said. "It's the kind of thing Dad might say: it's not that I'm angry at Microsoft for what they've done to SQL Server, I'm just disappointed," he said. A Microsoft spokesperson said: "Customers have real choice in how they run SQL Server, and we've designed our licensing to be clear and flexible across environments. We're fully committed to SQL Server and continuing to invest in its innovation, security, and long-term support so customers can confidently run their most critical workloads and build what's next." Microsoft first released SQL Server in 1989 as a 16-bit version for the OS/2 operating system, which was a joint project with IBM. Despite challenges from Oracle, open source systems like PostgreSQL and MySQL, as well as a string of NoSQL databases such as MongoDB, it remains highly popular with users and developers. It is third behind Oracle and MySQL – ahead of PostgreSQL – on the DB-Engines ranking, which measures citations, Google data, and job searches. In the Stack Overflow survey of professional developers, it ranks fourth behind PostgreSQL, MySQL, and SQLite, but well ahead of Oracle, which lies in tenth. Adam Ronthal, vice president analyst at Gartner, said Microsoft's approach to SQL Server can be explained by looking at two different priorities. First, despite the hype around the cloud and AI, Microsoft made around $15 billion in revenue from the on-prem DBMS market, largely from SQL Server. It's second in terms of market share (33 percent) only to Oracle, which holds nearly 40 percent of the on-prem DBMS market. "If you look at Microsoft's growth in the on-prem business in 2025, they were growing around 8 percent, so Microsoft continues to have a business in the on-prem that is growing in high single digits," he said. There is no way that Microsoft will walk away from that kind of revenue, Ronthal told The Register. Meanwhile, SQL Server customers represent a good opportunity for Microsoft to convert users to Azure SQL, and the SQL database in Fabric, its data analytics environment, as they are built on a consistent database engine. Microsoft wants people to see that Azure provides a seamless path to build and scale AI applications with deeply integrated data services, security, and governance. However, Ronthal added that specific compatibility would depend on the implementation of T-SQL in the application users want to move. "As we go full into managed services, I don't have full control over the underlying operating system, and I might not have the same level of control over the configuration of the database itself." For commercial, off-the-shelf software, the ease of migration would depend on the vendor certification, he said. As well as wanting to defend its on-prem SQL Server revenue, Microsoft also sees that AI and cloud are driving the market. In the cloud, the market is dominated by a family of databases based on PostgreSQL or closely related to the open source database. "The de facto API for relational databases has emerged to be Postgres right now, and so we see many vendors implement wire from compatible Postgres APIs, which provides end users a hedge against lock-in," Ronthal said. A string of startups have tried to grab this market, including Cockroach Labs, Yugabyte, and pgEdge, all of which offer distributed capabilities and varying compatibility with PostgreSQL. Microsoft cannot ignore this development, hence its investment in HorizonDB, its own distributed PostgreSQL. Microsoft also has the DBaaS offering, Azure Database for PostgreSQL. As well as defending the growing on-prem database market, Microsoft is trying to capture the higher growth in cloud databases and catch up with AWS. As such, it is incorporating operational databases under the Fabric umbrella, including NoSQL database Cosmos, Azure SQL, and Postgres capabilities. "If we look at the drivers of the market right now, which are cloud and AI – Fabric is a core component of AI – then the growth for Microsoft is largely going to be driven by Fabric adoption, where they're putting a tremendous amount of focus and effort," Ronthal said. Nonetheless, Microsoft has deep enough pockets in terms of engineering budget to afford to battle it out on both fronts. In that sense, SQL Server workloads that end up on AWS still make sense. "Microsoft has some rationalization to do in the portfolio, because there are multiple ways to run SQL Server," Ronthal said. "You've got Azure SQL, managed instances, SQL Server in VMs. These provide slightly different levels of compatibility with what you might be doing in the on-prem world, and right now, the fact that there are multiple options actually makes it difficult for end users to figure out what to do. I would love to see Microsoft make it more unified and easier for people to consume." In the cloud DBMS market, AWS has the upper hand by a considerable margin. In 2025, AWS made about $37 billion in cloud DBMS revenue, according to Gartner, while Microsoft made about $18.3 billion. If a SQL Server customer can leverage an existing investment in Microsoft and bring it to AWS, Microsoft loses that business for Azure, "but on the plus side, they don't lose a SQL Server customer, and that's probably more important," Ronthal said. Of the leading vendors – Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, and SAP – only Microsoft has grown their market share in the last 15 years, Ronthal pointed out. Microsoft has proved capable of riding out changes in the market with both its cloud services and SQL Server strategy. Whether that's also good for SQL Server customers might be up for debate, but since support for the 2025 version ends in 2036, they have plenty of time to plan. ® ]]></content:encoded>
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        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.theregister.com/a/5253619</guid>
        <link>https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/06/16/erp-users-may-soon-get-ahead-by-going-headless-says-rimini-street-boss/5253619</link>
        <pubDate>Tue, 16 Jun 2026 11:15:00 +0200</pubDate>
        <title>ERP users may soon get ahead by going headless, says Rimini Street boss</title>
        <description><![CDATA[ Look to AI agents and open source to escape the vendor-driven upgrade cycle ]]></description>
        <category>ai and ml</category>
                <lab:kicker><![CDATA[ AI AND ML ]]></lab:kicker>
                <dc:modified>Mon, 15 Jun 2026 07:36:06 +0000</dc:modified>
                <content:encoded><![CDATA[ Weeks after Salesforce boasted about the adoption of "headless CRM," the concept of "headless ERP" crops up. This notion, according to Seth Ravin, CEO of third-party support vendor Rimini Street, is coming to help beleaguered ERP customers escape the application upgrade treadmill driven by the dominant database vendors. For Salesforce, its Headless 360 allows customers to access all of their Salesforce data from developer tool Cursor, WhatsApp, ChatGPT, Claude, or a terminal. It has processed 4.5 million MCP calls and nearly a trillion API calls since launching in April, the CRM giant said. For ERP, a monolithic category of enterprise software that conducts financial planning in some of the world's largest companies, the idea is the same, Ravin told The Register. Build a UI layer on top of existing applications, with AI agents or workflow software, and swap them out when the business is ready. Eventually, the business data can be moved to an open source or source-available database such as PostgreSQL or MongoDB. "PostgreSQL is number one," Ravin said. "Anyone who's doing open source is leading with PostgreSQL. MongoDB is number two. You're watching this whole decoupling of [ERP] technology and use of open source. You're going to see more and more of this. It's going to change the whole way we think about these big packages that users have been buying in the past." He is not alone. Research conducted by Censuswide with 4,295 CFOs, CISOs, CIOs, and CEOs found 70 percent do not see traditional ERP as the future. The study, commissioned by Rimini Street, found 36 percent favored a "composable, modular, flexible, API-driven, best-of-breed model" while 33 percent would lean toward "agentic ERP [with] autonomous, AI-driven decision-making". Concepts like headless and agentic ERP may seem nebulous now, but SAP, which counts some of the world's largest manufacturers as its customers, had to U-turn on its decision to restrict AI agents on legacy and on-prem software. It had said such innovations would only be available in its latest suite of applications and data products in the cloud, but demand from users forced a rethink this year. Ravin said the impact of agentic AI was "scaring the hell out of everyone from SAP on down." "I guarantee you that they're in a panic because they just don't understand the customers are getting ahead of them, the technology is coming apart underneath them, and they're trying to keep up, but the reality is they've built a business off controlling a customer by having all of this software, and they tell them when to [upgrade] and what to move to, and threatening them, and that's just not going to work." SAP maintains that the combination of its agent platform, Joule, its cloud-based Business Technology Platform for integrating applications, S/4HANA ERP software, and Business Data Cloud data warehouse and data lake environment brings immense value to customers by providing a single semantic layer over their business data. Nonetheless, it has struggled to get customers off its legacy or on-prem systems. Gartner figures from the end of Q4 2024 showed only 39 percent of worldwide ECC customers – from a total of 35,000 – had bought or subscribed to licenses to start their transition to SAP S/4HANA. This year, The Register revealed the company was about €2 billion short of its target for converting on-prem support into cloud revenue. Ravin said customers will take the opportunity presented by maintaining legacy systems to consider their ERP stack. "They're starting to understand that [ERP] is breaking apart into smaller pieces, those pieces are further breaking into pieces that will be microservices." Business processes will be run by a set of APIs running between existing elements of the application portfolio, he said. "Those processes will then get over the top of them a custom [agentic] UX, which will become a truly headless ERP, and you've already seen Salesforce come out with headless CRM. This trend is happening." Rimini Street is a services company that specializes in maintaining legacy ERP systems without vendor support, until 2040 in the case of ECC. It has a vested interest in giving customers time to select a strategy for the future of ERP. As investors eye software in light of AI agents and AI coding, giants like Salesforce and SAP have seemingly been forced to respond. Whether the headless ERP concept takes off or not, the industry is moving fast. ® ]]></content:encoded>
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        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.theregister.com/a/5255380</guid>
        <link>https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/2026/06/16/frances-digital-sovereignty-push-is-struggling-to-escape-the-microsoft-gravity-well/5255380</link>
        <pubDate>Tue, 16 Jun 2026 10:31:00 +0200</pubDate>
        <title>France's digital sovereignty push is struggling to escape the Microsoft gravity well</title>
        <description><![CDATA[ Nextcloud rollout shows locally controlled storage is one thing; getting users off Office is quite another ]]></description>
        <category>on-prem</category>
                <lab:kicker><![CDATA[ On-PREM ]]></lab:kicker>
                <dc:modified>Mon, 15 Jun 2026 11:13:55 +0000</dc:modified>
                <content:encoded><![CDATA[ Digital sovereignty loomed large at Nextcloud's annual summit in Munich last week, where Benoît Piédallu, National Project Manager of Shared Digital Services at the French Ministry of Education, injected a dose of reality into the debate. Nextcloud is an open source storage and collaboration suite. France's Ministry of Education started initial work to adopt it in 2018, Piédallu said, with the COVID-19 pandemic turning up the urgency in 2020. In 2021, "we had this little incident with OVH, a little fire, which destroyed all our data," Piédallu noted dryly. The Ministry went all-in and signed contracts with Nextcloud in 2024. The Ministry wants to provide its users with federated storage and account management. At the time of Piédallu's presentation, the Ministry has set up slightly more than 400,000 accounts, and hopes to eventually reach 1.2 million users. Each account could be allocated 100 GB of storage (a potential 120 PB), although Piédallu said the average storage consumption currently sits at around 3 GB per account. So far, 80,000 sync clients have been persistently connected. However, it has not all been plain sailing, despite recent pledges from the French government about shifting away from American tools and reducing France's dependence on non-European technology. Nobody should be able to switch off or shut down our services from the outside Digital sovereignty means different things to different people. Right now, this project does not include desktop applications. The users "use whatever they want on their desktop… Microsoft if they want," Piédallu said. "So we have some problems sometimes, and people are saying that it is not working, and we say, 'Yeah, so you just use different software'…" This sums up the challenge facing proponents of digital sovereignty. Users are accustomed to Microsoft Office, and Microsoft Office works best in a Microsoft ecosystem, which is at odds with removing dependencies on non-European technology. Microsoft and the other hyperscalers are hard habits to break, and while services like Nextcloud's are capable of handling storage and file synchronization, users accustomed to Microsoft's more visible applications and services, such as Office, will be trickier to migrate. But migrate they must to realize France's digital sovereignty dream. "Nobody," said Piédallu, "should be able to switch off or shut down our services from the outside. Nobody should be accessing our services from the outside." The Nextcloud Hub 26 spring release, which includes Euro-Office, became generally available last week. The Euro-Office productivity suite may go some way to satisfying desktop refuseniks. The EU wants to increase digital autonomy through the European Technological Sovereignty Package, although analysts have warned this could complicate matters for customers. The French Education Ministry's experience shows that sovereign file storage can work at scale. Persuading users to give up the tools they already know may prove the harder part. ® ]]></content:encoded>
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        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.theregister.com/a/5256003</guid>
        <link>https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/06/16/inside-the-clouds-new-agentic-ai-ready-arm-powered-foundation/5256003</link>
        <pubDate>Tue, 16 Jun 2026 10:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
        <title>Inside the cloud's new agentic AI-ready, Arm-powered foundation</title>
        <description><![CDATA[ PARTNER CONTENT: From hyperscalers to enterprises, performance-per-watt and system-level efficiency are redefining the cloud compute foundation ]]></description>
        <category>ai and ml</category>
                <dc:modified>Tue, 16 Jun 2026 04:37:10 +0000</dc:modified>
                <content:encoded><![CDATA[ When Spotify evaluated its cloud compute options, it needed more than incremental improvements. Its recommendation engine delivers real-time suggestions to millions of users around the clock, placing heavy demands on compute infrastructure while requiring tight control over energy use and costs. During its evaluation of next-generation cloud processors, Spotify found that workloads running on Google Cloud Axion processors built on Arm architecture delivered roughly 250 percent better performance. Axion is just a part of a broader shift toward Arm-based compute built on the Neoverse architecture, which has been adopted across all major hyperscale cloud platforms. AWS reports that its Arm-based Graviton processors have accounted for over half of new CPU capacity deployed over the past three years. Microsoft and Google have followed with their own Arm-based designs, including Azure Cobalt and Axion, while NVIDIA’s Grace and Vera signal that it sees Arm as central to the future of AI infrastructure. Now about half of the compute shipped to top hyperscalers are Arm-based platforms. Purpose-built for customers Hyperscalers are not only deploying Arm processors but also designing silicon and infrastructure together to reflect real usage patterns. Ninety-eight percent of top 1,000 Amazon EC2 customers running production workloads on Graviton and benefit from Graviton’s price–performance advantages compared to x86. The new Cobalt 200 processor, built on Arm Neoverse technology, was engineered using telemetry from real Azure workloads and an internal suite of benchmark variants to reflect production behavior. Google is pursuing its own strategy with Axion processors, with C4A instances delivering up to 65 percent better price-performance and up to 60 percent greater energy efficiency than comparable x86 systems. At the core of this shift is Arm’s Neoverse platform, a datacenter–focused architecture designed to enable high-performance, energy-efficient compute at hyperscale. Neoverse marks Arm’s evolution from a mobile-first architecture to a platform purpose-built for cloud and AI infrastructure. It provides the common foundation hyperscalers use to design custom silicon optimized for their own workloads, allowing providers to tailor performance, power, and system behavior to meet specific application demands. While this momentum is driven by hyperscaler adoption, it is rooted in a broader change in how compute infrastructure must operate to support AI workloads. Traditional enterprise workloads emphasized predictable CPU utilization and storage throughput. AI changes that equation. Modern workloads require simultaneous optimization across training, inference, networking, and storage performance while minimizing energy consumption and latency. Even minor inefficiencies can become costly at scale. Power consumption now represents a significant portion of datacenter operating costs, which means performance per watt has become a primary design metric. According to an IDC report AI-ready datacenters are seeing rapid increases in power density, with rack requirements rising from typical levels of 5–10 kW to 30 kW or more, and in some cases exceeding 100 kW per rack. These constraints are forcing organizations to rethink how compute, networking, storage, and cooling systems are designed and integrated at the rack-level These pressures are also collapsing traditional boundaries between compute, networking, storage, and acceleration, creating tightly integrated systems optimized for end-to-end performance. This is driving cloud providers to adopt purpose-built silicon and architectures designed specifically for modern workloads. Real-world efficiency gains drive adoption These design choices are translating into measurable improvements in production environments. Organizations migrating workloads to Arm-based infrastructure are reporting gains across performance, efficiency, and cost: Databricks is using Azure Cobalt 100 virtual machines, built on Microsoft’s Arm-based CPU architecture, which are designed to optimize data-intensive and AI workloads. and deliver up to 50 percent better price-performance compared to previous generations, along with improvements in query speed and latency for analytics applications. For organizations running large-scale data pipelines to power machine learning and business intelligence workloads, these gains translate directly into faster processing and lower infrastructure costs. Pinterest provides a clear example of how Arm adoption can improve both cost efficiency and sustainability at scale. As a platform serving more than half a billion monthly active users and running AI-driven discovery workloads, Pinterest relies heavily on large-scale cloud infrastructure. By migrating workloads to AWS Graviton–based instances, the company achieved 38 percent savings on compute resources and 47 percent cost savings for key workloads, while also reducing carbon emissions by 62 percent. These improvements support both performance and sustainability goals, showing how infrastructure decisions can directly impact operational efficiency and environmental footprint. Uber’s transition to a multi-architecture environment highlights the operational realities of adopting Arm at scale. The company migrated more than 2,800 services and shifted nearly 20 percent of its infrastructure capacity from x86 to Arm-based processors, requiring updates to codebases, dependencies, and deployment pipelines. Through phased rollout, benchmarking, and continuous monitoring, Uber demonstrated that Arm can coexist with other architectures while improving price-performance and supporting a more flexible, efficient infrastructure model. Atlassian’s migration of Jira and Confluence to AWS Graviton highlights how Arm adoption can improve performance and efficiency at enterprise scale. The company moved more than 3,000 instances to Graviton-based infrastructure, achieving the transition with minimal impact on users. In production, instance counts dropped by around 30 percent, while throughput improved by up to 30 percent and latency decreased across key metrics. These gains demonstrate how optimizing infrastructure for performance per watt can enhance both user experience and cost efficiency at scale. These improvements span media streaming, data platforms, and large-scale consumer services, where gains in latency, throughput, and compute efficiency translate directly into lower infrastructure costs and improved user experience. They are particularly significant for AI inference, real-time personalization, and continuously running workloads. The converged AI datacenter The rise of agentic AI is transforming the datacenter into an integrated system in which CPUs, accelerators, networking, and storage operate as a unified platform. In these environments, CPUs serve as the control plane, coordinating scheduling, data movement, memory access, and system services, while accelerators handle compute-intensive training and inference tasks. In this model, efficiency is measured across the entire rack and datacenter footprint. AI workloads demand higher compute density while operating within fixed power and cooling limits, making the ability to maximize compute output per unit of space increasingly important. Coordinating CPUs, accelerators, memory, and networking as a unified system reduces bottlenecks and minimizes wasted energy from unnecessary data movement. Arm’s architecture spans these layers, enabling providers to optimize the full stack while maintaining software compatibility and ecosystem consistency. This cohesion is driving the emergence of the converged AI datacenter, where CPUs and accelerators are central to the trend. NVIDIA’s Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin platforms combine Arm CPUs with high-performance GPU accelerators in rack-level solutions reflecting a broader industry move toward tightly integrated AI systems. In an other example, AWS with Trainium3 UltraServers, pairs Arm-based Graviton CPUs with Trainium accelerators and Nitro networking components to support large-scale AI workloads. Similarly, Google’s latest TPU 8t and TPU 8i training and inference superpods are powered by Arm-based Axion CPUs, extending this trend toward purpose-built AI infrastructure optimized for scale, performance, and efficiency. In these architectures, Arm-based CPUs serve as the control layer, orchestrating data flow between accelerators, memory, and networking while simplifying development and driving optimization across software stacks and developer tooling. Migration realities: less friction than before Migration complexity has historically slowed adoption of new architectures. Today, improved tooling and ecosystem maturity are lowering that barrier. The Arm MCP Server integrates migration tools, compatibility checks, and performance analysis directly into AI-assisted workflows, helping developers analyze codebases, validate dependencies, and build multi-architecture environments. Programs such as the Arm Cloud Migration Program are also helping organizations accelerate this transition by providing guidance, validation, and tooling for production workloads. Arm adoption is supported by expanding software compatibility and platform support. Arm-based environments now support major Linux distributions, container platforms, and modern development frameworks. The ecosystem has matured significantly, enabling developers to focus less on compatibility and more on performance optimization. Arm’s ecosystem now spans more than 22 million developers worldwide. For developers, this shift means building and optimizing applications for multi-architecture environments, with greater emphasis on efficiency, concurrency, and performance tuning. Where cloud compute is heading Purpose-built compute is becoming the default model for AI era infrastructure. As performance improvements outpace increases in power consumption and cost, the economics of cloud computing are shifting toward efficiency-driven architectures. Looking ahead, this evolution is also extending to enterprise environments. Arm’s recently introduced Arm AGI CPU is designed specifically for the next generation of AI-driven workloads, combining high single-thread performance with scalable throughput, compute density and rack level efficiency. Built on the Neoverse platform, it reflects the shift toward Arm CPUs that are not only optimized for general-purpose compute, but also engineered to orchestrate increasingly complex, agentic AI systems across the datacenter. Enterprises are increasingly evaluating infrastructure based on cost per workload, energy consumption, and the ability to scale within power and cooling constraints. This is driving demand for architectures that deliver predictable performance and efficiency across diverse workloads. Arm Neoverse’s growing momentum across hyperscalers, silicon vendors, and ecosystem partners reflects a broader realignment around efficiency, scalability, and system-level optimization. As AI workloads expand, infrastructure decisions will be shaped less by raw compute capacity and more by how efficiently systems can deliver performance at scale. The organizations redesigning cloud infrastructure today are not simply choosing new processors; they are adopting a compute foundation built for the demands of the AI era. Sponsored by Arm. ]]></content:encoded>
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        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.theregister.com/a/5255938</guid>
        <link>https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/06/16/a-modest-proposal-reformat-everything-to-make-documents-more-palatable-to-ai/5255938</link>
        <pubDate>Tue, 16 Jun 2026 01:23:21 +0200</pubDate>
        <title>A modest proposal: Reformat everything to make documents more palatable to AI</title>
        <description><![CDATA[ What's up, DocLang? ]]></description>
        <category>ai and ml</category>
                <lab:kicker><![CDATA[ AI + ML ]]></lab:kicker>
                <content:encoded><![CDATA[ Websites are being redesigned for consumption by AI models, and now a coalition wants to extend the trend to digital documents. The LF AI & Data Foundation, under the Linux Foundation, has formed a working group to steer the development of DocLang, an AI-friendly document format that aims to help enterprises feed their files to AI systems. The DocLang group, founded by IBM, NVIDIA, Red Hat, ABBYY, HumanSignal, and Forgis, contends that existing formats like PDF, Markdown, HTML, and LaTeX are ill-suited for AI document parsing. In late 2024, IBM developed an open source toolkit called Docling to facilitate AI document parsing, not unlike Microsoft's MarkItDown or the Marker project. Docling provides a way to convert various file formats into structured AI-ready data. DocLang expands upon that foundation with a standard for exchanging structured output across different systems. "DocLang is designed to solve one of the foundational problems in enterprise AI: documents were built for humans, not machines," said Maxime Vermeir, VP of AI Strategy at AI automation biz ABBYY in a statement. "By introducing a minimal, standardized, and AI-native representation of document structure, layout, meaning and governance, DocLang creates a far more deterministic foundation for modern AI systems." The new DocLang format is necessary, the spec authors argue, because existing formats were designed for rendering and lose semantic information, structural relationships, or geometric context when AI models turn them into tokens. The specification explains that Markdown lacks sufficient scope, that HTML is excessively verbose, and that LaTeX allows too much ambiguity. Essentially, DocLang is optimized for LLM tokenizers through markup that maps between DocLang elements and LLM tokens on a 1-to-1 basis. The spec relies on a limited XML vocabulary that aligns with LLM tokenizers to produce optimized prompts. It is lossless, so the AI conversion doesn't do away with valuable info. It's designed to support common graphical elements like tables, formulas, charts, and multimodal content. And it's an open standard. DocLang could also help keep costs under control. According to AI Cost Check, having an AI model conduct an OCR scan on a PDF requires about 1,200 input tokens and 150 output tokens as a baseline. That's inconsequential to corporate AI customers on a one-off basis but demands attention at scale. And because AI models have highly variable token costs, companies may find they are spending more than they anticipated to have their AI system ingest PDFs, particularly if the documents are long and complicated or an expensive frontier model is used. "PDFs were designed for rendering, not understanding," said Jon Knisley, AI Value and Enablement Lead at ABBYY, in an email to The Register. "Every time a PDF enters an AI pipeline, structure, meaning and layout get lost, so the model's accuracy ends up bottlenecked by document quality rather than model quality. Teams compensate by building custom parsers at every integration point, which results in brittle, one-off work, and a new engineering sprint for every new document type." According to Knisley, that has measurable cost. "Ambiguous structure forces the model into guesswork, which drives up hallucination risk and burns tokens deciphering layout instead of extracting meaning," he explained. "With DocLang, customers can expect better accuracy, lower costs, fewer tokens consumed, faster performance and more consistent outputs. The exact savings depend on the use case and document complexity, but our initial benchmarks show 4x to more than 30x lower cost depending on the model evaluated." Knisley also cited governance advantages, noting that document provenance data and metadata can get stripped when documents gets moved. DocLang, he said, keeps that information attached. ABBYY, which offers AI document processing, has created the DocLang Interactive Benchmark to illustrate the potential token savings of feeding DocLang documents to AI models. A PDF of IBM's 2025 annual report, for example, results 8,421 input tokens and 512 output tokens while a DocLang version requires only 5,310 input tokens and 498 output tokens. What's more, the DocLang version results in lower latency (2.7s vs 4.2s) and delivers better quality (the AI missed one subsection and mangled a table merger in the PDF). "It's still early, and we won't overstate adoption," said Knisley. "The standard is open and free to build on, and the group is actively inviting more technology providers and enterprises to join. The early response has been encouraging, and we're optimistic about where it goes from here." ® ]]></content:encoded>
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        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.theregister.com/a/5255916</guid>
        <link>https://www.theregister.com/patches/2026/06/15/cisco-sd-wan-make-me-root-bug-under-attack/5255916</link>
        <pubDate>Mon, 15 Jun 2026 23:48:25 +0200</pubDate>
        <title>Cisco SD-WAN make-me-root bug under attack</title>
        <description><![CDATA[ Second Catalyst SD-WAN Manager flaw exploited as an 0-day this month ]]></description>
        <category>patches</category>
                <lab:kicker><![CDATA[ PATCHES ]]></lab:kicker>
                <content:encoded><![CDATA[ Cisco today issued a fix for a Catalyst SD-WAN Manager bug that attackers have already spotted and exploited to get root privileges, according to both the networking vendor and the feds. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-20262, is in the web UI of Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Manager, and exists because the software is not properly validating user-supplied input during a file upload process. “An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a crafted HTTP request to an affected API endpoint of the affected system,” the vendor warned in a Monday security advisory. “A successful exploit could allow the attacker to create or overwrite any file on the underlying operating system. This file could later be used to elevate to root.” There is one caveat: to exploit this bug, the attacker must have valid credentials with at least a lower-privileged, single-task user account. That probably explains the medium-severity, 6.8 CVSS rating for this bug. Still, valid credentials aren’t hard to come by these days, and considering this CVE is already under attack, we know someone had some success. “In June 2026, the Cisco PSIRT became aware of limited exploitation of this vulnerability,” the security alert said. “Cisco continues to strongly recommend that customers upgrade to a fixed software release to remediate this vulnerability.” The flaw affects all deployment types, regardless of device configuration. There are no workarounds, but upgrading to a fixed software version will patch the flaw. Also on Monday, the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) added CVE-2026-20262 to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog, citing “evidence of active exploitation.” America’s lead cyber-defense agency also set a two-week deadline for all federal agencies to apply the patch. This latest Cisco SD-WAN bug under attack comes less than two weeks after Switchzilla warned that a high-severity vulnerability in Catalyst SD-WAN Manager vulnerability (CVE-2026-20245) was under active exploitation. At the time of disclosure, this SD-WAN vuln did not have a fix. Cisco issued an advisory for that zero-day on June 4, and finally released patches for all affected versions on June 12. This is the eighth Cisco SD-WAN bug to be listed in CISA’s Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog so far this year.® ]]></content:encoded>
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