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ON CALL By the end of the working week it can be tempting to phone it in, but The Register instead works to bring you extra amusement in the form of a new edition of On Call – the reader-contributed column that shares your tech support stories. This week, meet a reader we’ll Regomize as “Orson” who told us they very much enjoyed the recent On Call about the lawyer who didn’t understand italics. “It reminded me of an incident many years ago when I was a Facilities Manager for a major UK food company,” Orson told On Call. “I came in one morning and was summoned by the Company Secretary, who was clearly annoyed because the night before, she tried to send an extremely urgent fax and the fax machine did not work.” For those who don’t remember fax machines, or successfully tried to forget them, they packed a low-res scanner, a nasty printer, and a slow modem into a small appliance. The user interface included a numeric keypad used to enter the phone number of whichever remote fax machine you wanted to send a document to. Faxes were horrible, but faster than the postal service. Email killed faxes in the late 1990s (except in Japan) though manufacturers kept including fax functions in multifunction printers (MFPs) for years. But we digress: Orson decided the way to solve this problem was to start with the wetware. “I asked her to show me what she had done and watched as she placed the document on the in-tray, used the keypad to dial the number, and then hit Enter,” he told On Call. Having gone through those steps, the Company Secretary stared at Orson, her pose clearly communicating a desire for him to swiftly explain why technology had let her down – and why the facilities team had left the fax machine in such a state. “I told her she was trying to use the photocopier,” Orson told On Call. To be fair, the presence of MFPs in many workplaces meant that wasn’t a completely horrible mistake. But as an example of a rather silly tech support moment, it makes for a fine On Call! Does a similar tale lurk in your memory? If so, click here to send your story to On Call. We’d offer to let you fax it in, but The Register doesn’t have a fax machine anymore. ®

Nothing smarts like a paper cut, but being attacked after leaving an application’s web interface exposed to the internet might be just as painful. Such attacks are the risk to which users of PaperCut print management software find themselves exposed today, after the company revealed a university’s security teams alerted it to an attack. The company analyzed info provided by the university and found a vulnerability in its PaperCut NG and PaperCut MF products, which manage access to printers, track use, and enable printing from myriad client devices. “We are aware of confirmed customer incidents and are treating this matter with the highest priority,” states an urgent security advisory issued on Thursday. Unusually, the advisory is silent on the nature of the flaw and the risk it poses. It looks like the web interface to the company’s products enables access deeper into a user’s networks, because among the indicators of compromise are altered log files, plus alerts from intrusion detection software, endpoint security tools, and network monitoring packages. The company has cooked up an emergency patch but warns it is not an official release. “We have not gone through our usual release process,” states an FAQ. “This is an emergency patch for customers with public-facing PaperCut servers who are unable to take other mitigating action.” Thankfully, those other actions aren’t hard to take: users need to get their PaperCut servers’ web interfaces off the public internet, by allowing access only from trusted internal IP addresses. Fashioning a potent and rapid response to a zero-day attack is never easy. Communicating the nature of the problem can be even harder, as discussing the nature of a flaw invites more attackers to take a shot at a stricken product. PaperCut says it’s working on a better fix and will advise users once it lands. For now, the company is asking customers to apply its wonky patch or take their servers offline ASAP. The Register fancies most users will go for the latter fix, as aside from the issue of finding a change window in which to apply a patch, running unvalidated emergency software is not an appetizing approach. ®

The Australian city of Perth is by some measures the world’s most isolated major metropolis, but is still sufficiently connected to US law enforcement authorities that the FBI was able to help Australia’s Federal Police (AFP) to find two men they believe were the masterminds of TeamPCP, a cybercrime crew that conducted prominent supply chain attacks. According to the AFP, two men aged 21 and 23 arrested on Wednesday “were principal participants in the activities of the cybercrime syndicate and received payments in cryptocurrency for their roles in the illegal activity.” An FBI Facebook post names one of the arrested men as Ruben Thomson and describes him as “the alleged leader of the cybercriminal group TeamPCP.” Australian media named the second man as 23-year-old Louis Michael Gaebler. Investigations into the pair started in April 2026, after Australian authorities and the FBI “received information from multiple cyber threat assessment companies regarding a syndicate that allegedly inserted malicious code into software available on an open-source repository, which was then unwittingly used by other developers.” Researchers detected some of those activities before April: In March, we reported that researchers spotted a supply chain attack on the open source scanner Trivy. Another of TeamPCP’s attacks was the Shai-Hulud worm, which attacks npm packages, tries to infect them and goes looking for credentials to major public clouds or services like GitHub. If the worm burrowed into its targets, it would either try to replicate to continue its attacks, or wipe the environment out of spite. The AFP’s “We cuffed ‘em!” announcement estimates that TeamPCP’s supply chain attacks “potentially compromised more than 1000 organisations globally, enabling the theft of more than 500,000 credentials, and the exfiltration of at least 300 gigabytes of data.” Australia’s Feds estimate “the financial impact includes global remediation costs estimated to be hundreds of millions of dollars.” As is often the case in such matters, the arrested men were found with electronic devices and other items which authorities seized. “A large volume of data seized is being forensically examined and the investigation remains ongoing,” the AFP wrote, adding “Further arrests and charges have not been ruled out.” Indeed, the Feds note that they arrested the two at different locations in the suburbs of Perth and searched a third property nearby. ® Bootnote: Perth is considered the site of the original “Black Swan” event, as swans there – and across much of Australia – are black. Early European explorers who explored Australia's west coast were astounded when they saw the black birds, as the “fact” that all swans are white was at the time a metaphor for the existence of absolute truths.

Anthropic on Thursday teased a protocol for allowing AI agents "to safely operate physical devices," a somewhat optimistic ambition given it cannot reliably anticipate how its models behave. The as-yet-unpublished protocol, dubbed the Model Hardware Standard (MHS), is similar in concept to the Model Context Protocol (MCP), a way for AI models to connect to data sources. Anthropic intends for MHS to allow Claude or other models to drive the hardware used in laboratories, factories, and robots. Supopse you are an Iranian research scientist setting up a network of centrifuges to enrich uranium. You might look at how your machinery spun out of control in 2010 and think: "Maybe if we use an AI model and MHS, we could avoid that sort of mishap next time." MHS, however, is being battle-tested in quieter regions of the world, specifically at Howard Hughes Medical Institute's (HHMI) Janelia Research Campus in Maryland. And now other entities with suitable laboratory and industrial equipment can apply to join the research preview. "It typically takes a lab or manufacturing facility weeks, if not months, to set up and integrate their hardware," Anthropic explained in its post. "Most devices don’t communicate with each other, instead requiring specialists to build bespoke integrations. MHS reduces this integration work to hours or minutes." Linking hardware to an AI model requires a programmable interface. Many industrial machines offer one to expose relevant controls and data — but the ecosystem of such devices is very diverse and it is not easy for developers to make a hookup. MHS aspires to be a universal translation layer. The MHS driver software uses a limited set of primitives, such as "read" and "write," an approach similar to the way a few simple tools like Bash can be used to power AI agents. The driver makes connected devices discoverable in a standard format. It also supports tags that convey information about device functions, and lets users provide that data by conversing with the model during setup. The tags let the driver produce a reference file detailing device characteristics. AI agents can use MHS to interact with devices using three control paths: MCP, the command line interface, and API code. They can carry out commands on connected instruments, monitor test results, or tweak knobs and dials. According to Anthropic, biotechnology company Genentech has used MHS to run a drug-discovery experiment with real-time error handling. Quantum computing outfit QuEra is another user, and applied MHS to improve laser stabilization for its machines from 58 percent to 99.3 percent. The possibilities already have partners salivating. AWS is planning to support MHS through its Strands Robots library. Automata expects to add MHS to its LINQ lab automation platform. And similar support is planned by the likes of Danaher, Doosan Robotics, MBF Bioscience, Qiagen, Tecan, and Universal Robotics. "There’s more to learn before we open source MHS," Anthropic said. "LLMs still lack physical intuition, having learned about the physical world from text and images. The research preview will let us build more safety evaluations and strengthen protections for using AI in the physical world." Let the experiments begin. ®

Shots were fired at the Hot Chips conference in California this week as Nvidia announced its new Groq-3-based LPX racks had entered production, with early tests showing the systems churning an eye-watering 3,400 tokens a second in Gemma 4 31B. That's four times faster than rival Cerebras. A day later, Cerebras fired back, touting nearly equivalent performance from its next-gen CS-4 accelerators revealed last week. These top-line performance figures make inference feel instantaneous relative to the chatbots we've grown accustomed to over the past four years. But the two companies are essentially arguing over numbers their customers will probably never see in production. To be clear, neither is lying. If you wanted to recreate these results, you certainly could — Artificial Analysis, the team responsible for both sets of benchmarks, knows what they're doing — but beyond a marketing gimmick, no inference-as-a-service model operator in their right mind would run either system this way. Not unless you've somehow figured out how to make a profit serving one request at a time. In reality, these numbers are more like the top speed on a race car. It makes for great marketing but you probably aren't driving that fast on a regular basis, and if you did, you wouldn't get very far before your tank runs dry. These aren't the numbers that matter Unsurprisingly, the economics of "premium" or "ultra-low latency" inference are a bit more nuanced, but ultimately come down to how efficiently you can scale that performance at the rightmost end of the Pareto frontier. We've shown the graphic below before. It charts the performance characteristics of how different Nvidia B300 configurations perform across a Pareto front. As you can see, GPUs are great for high-throughput, low-interactivity applications, but run out of steam quite quickly as per-user generation rates climb. Chips like Nvidia's Groq-3 LPUs or Cerebras' dinner plate-sized accelerators offer massive bandwidth thanks to their SRAM-heavy architectures, so they can extend and push the Pareto curve out to the right. Unfortunately, the same thing that makes them so fast also limits their ability to scale that performance to large numbers of users. To understand why we need to walk through a little math. We're going to pick on Gemma 4 31B, in part because we have rough numbers for both Nvidia and Cerebras, but also because it's a small model and therefore presents a best-case scenario. Each Groq-3 accelerator is equipped with 500 MB of on-chip memory capacity. Nvidia achieved its 3,400 tok/s per user run at 8-bit precision. So to run a 31 billion-parameter model, we need about 31 GB of memory or about 64 LPUs. But that's just to hold the model's weights. Since it's running as a standalone system, we also have to account for the KV caches generated during the prefill stage in which the prompt is processed. According to LMcache's KV calculator, at 8-bit precision, a 100,000-token input sequence is going to chew up another 8 GB of memory, and that's per sequence. So for every additional 100,000 token input, that's another 16 LPUs worth of memory. By our estimate, that means the most a single LPX rack with its 256 LPUs can manage on its own before running out of memory is a batch size of 12 at a 100,000 token input length each. The numbers look a little different for Cerebras' CS4, but the conclusion is largely unchanged. Each CS4 rack contains three massive WSE-3T accelerators with 44 GB of SRAM apiece, totaling 132 GB of capacity. That leaves the system a bit more headroom, but we're still looking at a maximum batch size of 12. To be clear, that's not a compute limitation. The systems simply don't have enough memory to support larger batches without adding additional racks or cutting the prompt size. Sure, we're oversimplifying a bit. We're assuming batch inference with fixed input sequences, not concurrent users hitting the systems asynchronously, and with different input and output sequences each time. For a chatbot, especially one with a limited context window — think the model's short term memory — a single CS4 or LPX rack could conceivably serve far more users than the 12 noted here. Lifting the curve Even if both systems can hit 3,400 tok/s, the better platform is going to be the one that delivers better scale at a lower cost and power consumption. The benchmark figures touted by Nvidia and Cerebras this week are really measuring the top speed the systems could run on, not the speed customers will actually run them. In fact, customers probably won’t run these systems on their own. These SRAM-heavy architectures work a lot better as decode accelerators, which is exactly why Nvidia spent $20B to license Groq's tech and poach its engineering team. It's also why Cerebras recently teamed up with AWS and AMD. We've discussed these kinds of heterogeneous compute architectures in the past, but in a nutshell they involve GPUs or other compute heavy XPUs, like Amazon's Trainium chips, with something like Groq's LPUs, Cerebras' waferscale accelerators, or SambaNova's SN-series parts. This combination largely eliminates, or at least minimizes, the KV cache and compute overheads that made scaling Cerebras' and Groq's chips so difficult. As decode accelerators, they only really need to hold the model weights, as almost everything else can get on just fine on a GPU. Again, top line AI performance makes for great headlines, but the far right of the Pareto is rarely where you'll want to be. As is usually the case with Pareto curves, the sweet spot usually presents itself as a notable hump or knee pushing toward the upper right corner of the chart. Here you'll be trading some per-user interactivity for better concurrency, throughput, and economics. Combining GPUs with Cerebras or Groq accelerators is what Nvidia, AMD, and AWS are all counting on to make "premium inference" cost-effective. There's a better benchmark for this We've yet to see benchmarks combining Cerebras' or Groq's chips with Nvidia, AMD, or AWS' respective GPUs and XPU platforms, but these are the metrics that are actually going to matter. SemiAnalysis' InferenceX offers a better representation of whether or not adding a CS4 or LPX rack would even help, as we can see exactly how each system performs across the full Pareto, ranging from high-volume low-interactivity "bulk" tokens on the left, to ultra-low-latency but also lower-volume tokens on the right. In fact, while Nvidia and Cerebras opted for Artificial Analysis' simpler test methodology, OpenAI actually opted for InferenceX to show how its spicy new Jalapeño accelerators perform across bulk and premium inference regimes. So why didn't Nvidia and Cerebras do the same? If we had to guess, it's because their LPX and CS4 racks are still best suited toward low-latency inference and wouldn't look as impressive on the left and middle sections of the Pareto curve. We fully expect that both companies will share InferenceX results for their combined GPU and LPX/CS4 systems when they're ready, but no marketer ever got a bonus for making their product look worse than it really is, so we'll just have to wait. In any case, the next time you see someone boasting of some impossibly fast inference accelerator, it's worth asking where on the Pareto that number came from. ®

CRPx0, a cybercrime crew that has rapidly evolved from a scam service to a ClickFix-delivered ransomware and crypto-theft business over the summer, claims its victim count jumped from fewer than 10 in June to 48 organizations on its clear-web leak site at the time of publication. Keep in mind: criminals aren’t always the most trustworthy bunch, so take their claims with a healthy dose of salt. Still, the ransomware biz’s expanding operations, unique payload, and white-label hacking service make it one to watch, and a few recent analyses provide tips for defenders to keep the crooks out of their IT environments. Rakesh Krishnan, a threat-intel analyst who writes about cybercrime investigations on TheRavenFile blog, was one of the first researchers to publish details about CRPx0 at the beginning of the month, including previously unreleased malware samples. The operators offer a hacking service, providing “complete database extraction” from victim organizations and “optional public leak coordination upon request.” This platform also advertises full network compromise, “from initial access, through lateral movement, to full domain compromise,” plus persistent access across the victim’s infrastructure. A second, white-label, ransomware-as-a-service platform makes it really easy for wannabe crooks to get into the data-theft and extortion biz. CRPx0 builds, deploys, and configures everything from command-and-control infrastructure to the negotiation panel and malware, allowing its criminal customers to bring their own brand identity to their operations - and originally offered these services for a $10,000 one-time fee. At first, the operators promised to allow affiliates to keep 100 percent of their profits - this is unheard of in ransomware-as-a-service operations. This has since shifted to a 70-30 model, with affiliates receiving 70 percent of the extortion payments (after a one-time $333 enrollment fee) and the remaining 30 percent going to the operators. CRPx0 rules prohibit affiliates from infecting Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) member countries and organizations based in these countries. This is a pretty common rule among Russia-based ransomware operations, and in an earlier interview with The Register, Recorded Future threat intelligence analyst Allan Liska called it the “first rule of ransomware club: you don't attack organizations in the Commonwealth of Independent States.” The gang also prefers Monero (XMR) payments, rather than Bitcoin (BTC). ClickFix ransomware delivery Affiliates can also customize their own ClickFix payload delivery. The operators offer two lures, a fake Windows Update and a fake Google reCAPTCHA, to socially engineer victims into executing the initial command, according to a Ransom-ISAC research team analysis published on Thursday. The Windows lure tricks a victim into pasting a PowerShell command into the Run dialog. This drops a DLL stager chain and ultimately deploys Python-based ransomware. The macOS lure, however, uses a curl|bash command that downloads portable Python and the ransomware directly. The lures and the rest of CRPx0’s malware run on Windows and macOS, and according to the researchers, there are four payload formats: “the two HTML lures plus a standalone DLL and a standalone EXE, both of which discard the social engineering step entirely.” All four deliver the same ransomware: a 1,769-line Python script that steals high-value files before encrypting them with AES-128-CBC (Fernet). The malware moves laterally via WMI/schtasks, and delivers a ransom note that gives victims a 48-hour deadline to pay up - or see their files leaked. 'Complete, professional offensive control center' On August 23, the CRPx0 operators published a v3.0 update note on the group’s clearnet leak site, promising “a complete, professional offensive control center for managing compromised remote machines from a single web dashboard.” It provides crims with tools to steal valuable files, credentials, and wallet recovery phrases and keys, while “watching stolen cryptocurrency wallet addresses flow in.” This service also provides scripts to run remote commands, and the control panel sets up “automated attack reactions that fire on their own when something valuable happens on a target.” As the operators note: “Everything is built to be operated by a human with no technical background: point-and-click panels, plain-language rules, and clear status indicators. The underlying attack engine is hidden behind a clean, dark-themed interface.” CRPx0’s hacking and ransomware services, enabling everything from crypto theft to encryptors and full network compromise, “could be a strategic move to attract new recruits, or a scam targeting a range of affiliate hopefuls seeking cybercrime services,” according to an August 12 analysis from Jade Brown, a threat researcher at Bitdefender. What defenders should do Still, “other threat actors may attempt to adopt similar techniques,” she warns. “This is a reminder that organizations should balance detection capabilities in preparation for different types of compromises, configuring technologies to detect and block malicious behavior that aligns with both crypto theft and encryption processes.” The Ransomware-ISAC team says defenders should prioritize five actions, in this order. “The first three cost nothing and blunt the entire ClickFix class of attack, not just CRPx0,” they note. First: remove the Run dialog for standard users - this will entirely block the Windows path. For macOS users: restrict Terminal via MDM for non-technical staff. Next, the threat-intel analysts advise defenders to alert on RunMRU writes containing powershell, curl or long base64 strings. “Every ClickFix victim leaves a trace at HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\RunMRU,” they wrote. “This is the highest-fidelity ClickFix detection available and it is trivial to deploy.” The team also lists adversary network indicators and suggests blocking those. Make sure to hunt for indicators and malicious behavior in the pre-encryption exfiltration window. “Data leaves before a single file is encrypted, so .crpx0 extensions and ransom notes are a post-mortem indicator, not a warning,” according to the Ransomware-ISAC. Finally, confirm backups are unreachable from the account that would be compromised, and treat anything reachable with the victim's credentials as destroyed. ®

Picture this: You’ve just undergone one of the most harrowing experiences of your life, and you’re trapped in the rubble of a collapsed building. You’re injured, air is running out, and human rescuers can’t reach you. But crawling through the rubble to administer life-saving drugs and reassure you comes the last thing you’d expect: a swarm of cyborg cockroaches bearing tiny syringes. Unfortunately for those who’d rather find solace in the arms of a fluffy, drooly St. Bernard, this tale is anything but science fiction. It’s not even a new idea: Cockroaches fitted with electronics that allow rescue workers to control their movements from a distance have been on the research docket for biotech researchers for some time. What’s new in this latest experiment from researchers at Australia’s University of Queensland is outfitting the, erm, little buggers with devices remote rescuers can use to shoot a drug dart into trapped patients. “A lot of people might not like the sight of a giant cockroach scurrying towards them, but if you’re trapped in rubble or stuck in a cave and need help, it could make a real difference between life and death,” PhD candidate and lead research paper author Hai Nhan Le told the University of his phobia-triggering project. Giant is right – the species chosen for the project, the giant burrowing cockroach, is the world’s heaviest roach species, and can grow up to 8 centimeters in length, or around 3.1 inches. Known to be docile, they’re popular pets in their native Australia, and – lucky for anyone coming face to face with one while trapped in a pile of rubble – they’re known to be relatively clean and disease-free, too. The giant burrowing cockroach was chosen for its size, per the paper, as they needed to be large enough to “integrate centimetre-scale apparatuses for … real world scenarios.” The “paraborgs,” as the team calls their subjects, were outfitted with electrodes that gave researchers the ability to make the roaches turn left and right, control their speed, and immobilize them in order to deliver drugs without the roach moving while scientists tried to take aim. Then they were fitted with various add-ons specific to their roles in the paramedic swarm –one built to search, another equipped with a single launchable drug syringe, for example. Outfitting the roaches with their cyborg backpacks isn’t fatal, and the team said that their subjects were able to live just as long as other roaches once their harnesses were removed. *shudder* Well, at least they're good at their jobs The Queensland team had overwhelming success in getting their paraborgs to end up where they wanted them - 100 percent successful, in fact, the paper said. As for drug injection, the auto-injection mechanism succeeded 90 percent of the time, and paraborgs able to get within 15 cm of a target (5.9 inches) were able to successfully inject drugs 95 percent of the time. The only trouble spot for the experiment was getting the robo roaches to sit still, with only a 72 percent success rate in stabilizing the cockroaches for injection targeting. That’s still a pretty good rate of success, leaving the team to predict that swarms of specially-outfitted paraborgs could be swarming over disaster sites in a matter of a few short years. “Some could carry cameras and environmental sensors, while others could carry specialised emergency or medical equipment,” UQ robotics engineering lab director and lecturer Dr. Thang Vo-Doan said of the project. “Hopefully, within the next 5 to 10 years, we could see cyborg insect rescue teams deployed to help people in real emergencies.” Hopefully large bugs bearing medical aid isn’t something that’ll send you into a panic. ®

Police in Mauritius are conducting a criminal investigation into possible forgery related to the annulled June 2025 board election staged by the African Network Information Centre (AFRINIC). AFRINIC is the regional internet registry (RIR) for 54 countries in Africa and the Indian Ocean region. In recent years it has experienced governance and operational problems and been embroiled in a complex set of interlocking legal disputes with one of its members, Cloud Innovation, regarding AFRINIC’s powers to terminate users who do not follow its rules for using IP addresses. The disputes with Cloud Innovation saw AFRINIC unable to convene a board for several years. Courts in Mauritius placed the registry in receivership. The receiver eventually brought the registry into a state that made it possible to stage a board election in June 2025. AFRINIC offered members the chance to vote online, by attending a day of in-person voting in Mauritius, or by appointing a proxy to vote for them at the in-person voting session. During that in-person voting session, the Nomination Committee that oversaw the election became concerned about the voting process and called off the election. AFRINIC’s receiver later annulled the vote, which was re-run under different rules later in the year. AFRINIC has never commented on the reasons for the annulment. The Register sought comment from the four UK-based barristers who comprised the Nomination Committee. None were willing to answer our questions. AFRINIC’s receiver has also not responded to our request for comment. After the annulment, South Africa’s Internet Service Providers' Association (ISPA) made two claims about irregularities at the election: “A duly authorised representative of a resource holder attempting to vote, only to be informed that another person had already submitted a vote on their behalf thanks to a Power of Attorney, which that resource holder had not provided to any third party." "A representative of a resource holder, learning that a Power of Attorney had been submitted on their behalf, only to find that that particular Power of Attorney (the existence of which had already been recorded by AFRINIC staff) had been mysteriously removed from the record by the time a copy was requested.” Mauritius Police this week confirmed to The Register that it is investigating the matter as a possible forgery case. “Two cases related to AFRINIC elections in 2025 are still under investigation at the level of the Central CID of the Mauritius Police Force. Both are alleged Forgery cases,” a spokesperson told The Register. Mauritius Police describes its Central Investigation Division, or Central CID, as “a specialized unit … which deals with sensitive cases and cases involving larger public interest. It deals with all the cases of bribery, fraud and homicides.” And also internet governance election scandals, it seems. AFRINIC revived, revisiting past controversies The court cases that indirectly led to AFRINIC’s annulled election were related to the registry’s powers to terminate users who do not follow its rules. Termination means losing the right to continue using IP addresses allocated by AFRINIC. AFRINIC on Tuesday published an update on the community consultation process it has run to determine members’ interest in, and attitude to, proposed bylaw changes. One proposed change would see AFRINIC add a specific dispute resolution clause to its constitution. Such a clause could perhaps have avoided the lengthy legal battles that the registry continues to fight, but the organization’s Bylaws Review Committee will not recommend adoption of the clause. The Committee also commented on the AFRINIC board’s power to terminate a member, and said it is “considering various options aimed at further strengthening the existing legal safeguards applicable to the exercise of such power.” AFRINIC therefore looks to be trying to strengthen its ability to terminate members, a power that rightly or wrongly has been the source of its many recent travails. The registry also had happier news this week after naming its next CEO: South African lawyer Mike Silber, whose CV includes serving on the board of ICANN and many senior roles at African telcos and tech companies. Silber will take up the position on January 1, 2027, and will clearly have some contentious issues on his desk from day one. ®

PWNED Welcome back to PWNED, the weekly column where we explore the frightening and amusing world of foolish infosec errors. This week, it's all about a test site that exposed real information. Have a story about someone leaving a gaping hole in their network? Share it with us at pwned@sitpub.com. Anonymity is available upon request. Our story comes courtesy of Mia Morin, Editor & AI Quality Analyst at Intimeros, a site that rates, reviews, and evaluates AI companions – yes, that means boyfriends and girlfriends, as well as other kinds of pals. The trouble started during a redesign when one of Morin’s colleagues was working on a test version of the site. The test site was supposed to be password-protected, but the colleague turned off the protection so they could show a client what they were working on. Password protection remained disabled for three weeks without anyone noticing. Then, one day, Morin noticed that the test site had been indexed by Google. Apparently, nobody thought to use a robots.txt file to exclude this beta-level domain from search. While the site was publicly accessible without password protection, anyone could see unpublished reviews, prices, and private product notes about the different AI companion services. That’s because the test site was connected to a real live version of the production database. This was all editorial content, so no user data was exposed. However, it could have allowed competitors to see everything that Intimeros was working on and to deduce their entire editorial strategy. After she noticed what was wrong, Morin took swift action to protect the test site from prying eyes. “We restored password protection, blocked search engines from indexing the draft pages and changed all the system access keys,” Morin said. “Now, we secure every test site just like our official website and run weekly automated scans to catch exposed pages.” What we can learn from this is kind of obvious. Never forget to lock down the test or staging versions of your websites. Make sure that they not only require logins, but also have tools in place to block search and AI crawling. Better still, place your staging site on a private server and require someone to use a VPN to get to it in the first place. ®

Google has declared that Android apps distributed through Google Play will have to meet new memory performance thresholds, starting in early 2027. Google is cracking down on poorly optimized code that might otherwise squander what's now a precious commodity, as RAM prices skyrocket and consumers choose phones with leaner specs. "An ecosystem-wide memory crisis is imminent due to rising RAM costs," the Chocolate Factory explains in its technical documentation. "Inefficient memory use, such as a single app with a runaway memory leak that consumes most of the device memory, causes the device to stutter and kill other well-behaving apps in the background. Android has announced strict memory limits, and Play wants to ensure your app’s fall within this and minimize the chances that the device needs to terminate your app." On-device AI probably isn't helping. The new app quality requirements represent an expansion of the Android memory efficiency push announced in June, aimed at "[preventing] 'one bad actor' from destroying the multitasking experience and stability of the user’s entire device." Technical scrutiny is scheduled to take effect in two stages: In February 2027, bad behavior thresholds and code optimization thresholds will come into effect. And in April 2027, the device migration experience – onboarding – will need to support zero-tap credential restoration. The former covers memory usage (Anonymous Resident Set Size + Swap), bitmap memory usage, and DEX code optimization – DEX (Dalvik Executable) files represent a compressed version of an application's Java bytecode. The specific memory requirements depend on the amount of physical RAM available on the device. For a device with 8 GB, an app can use no more than 2.25 GB in the foreground, 1.5 GB for user-perceived services, and 1.5 GB in the background. Devices with more than 16 GB are mostly exempt. Bitmap memory usage is capped at 200 MB in user-perceived services and in background, and 400 MB cached, for all devices. The limits differ somewhat for games. And DEX code optimization is being required to ensure modest memory usage, rapid app launches, and better runtime performance. The second stage requirement, Zero-tap Sign-In, aims to make device migration easier and more secure. As Google's documentation states, "Manual sign-ins during device setup doesn't just create onboarding friction and decrease user retention, it actively exposes apps to critical security vulnerabilities like phishing and credential theft during setup." So as of April, Android devs are advised to use the Android Restore Credentials API to help move user credentials from one device to another. ®

The controversial Omarchy distro is attracting both criticism and fans – and financial support, too. Omarchy is an opinionated respin of Arch Linux and a pet project of Ruby on Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson, better known as DHH. Although the first release was as recent as June last year, this week sees the release of Omarchy 4.0.1 – a security fix for the mid-August Omarchy 4 “Quattro”. Although it started out just over a year ago, Omarchy now has a sibling project Omakub, which is based on Ubuntu, and an organization behind it called Omacom. A week ago, DHH announced the launch of the Omacom Foundation with $8 million. Its founding patrons include figures behind Shopify, Stripe, Dell, Block, Cloudflare, Sesame, and 37signals - closely followed by people behind Dropbox and OpenClaw, taking the total to $10 million. The project, like the man behind it, is controversial. But that means attention, and an “opinionated distro” gets opinionated reviews. Some of the criticism is strong stuff: for instance, Merchants of Insecurity, whose top line is: “First, a PSA: Do NOT use Omarchy if you care about security of your machine even a little bit.” Author “One Happy Fellow” is not the first: last year, a member of Framework's community forums posted Omarchy is not a secure distribution and should be taken off the Linux installation options. Others like it or give it a guarded thumbs up while saying it’s not for them. There really is no such thing as bad publicity. As P. T. Barnum put it: "Say anything you like about me, but spell my name right." DHH is no stranger to controversy. We suspect he doesn’t mind at all. The Register reported in late 2025 that Framework, known for its repairable laptops, was sponsoring Omarchy and Hyprland, and in turn, multiple people criticized Framework for sponsoring such controversial projects. That piece linked to some of the criticism of DHH, but he has been attracting criticism since at least 2014. We tried it, and it does work. It has a unique UI based on the Hyprland tiling compositor and a panel and menus provided in the new release by Quickshell. This is heavily keyboard-driven, but ignores almost all existing keyboard shortcuts and UI conventions from other OSes. There are no title bars, let alone close buttons or anything like that. No middle-click or right-click app menus. The jaded take of the Reg FOSS desk, who is a big fan and advocate of keyboard-driven UIs, is that such things usually reflect ignorance of existing user interface standards. We found it a bit clunky. We had to install an additional tool, hypermon, in order to be able to make our testbed machine’s second display useful. You can’t use established pacman commands to update it – you must use the custom omarchy update script, and when trying that in a VM, we hit a known bug. On hardware, it worked fine. It’s Arch, extensively preconfigured. Lots of apps are preinstalled, and the selection is surprising and not typical of a FOSS product. The selection includes Discord and WhatsApp for communications, Docker, Obsidian for note-taking, Neovim as an editor, and OBS Studio for streaming. There are optional extras for using speech, automatic dictation via Voxtype, and other unusual features. There’s a terminal-based music player, cliamp. (We like the name of that one, and may keep it around.) There are, of course, options to add AI tools – one of the startup messages invites you to configure your preferred plastic pal who’s fun to be with LLM bot. It’s pretty big. A default install (not that there is any other kind) took 14 GB of disk space after the first update. It did install in a VM with a 16 GB virtual disk, but there wasn’t enough disk space to update the OS. It uses about 1.5 GB of memory at idle. It’s not lightweight, but then, Omarchy definitely comes with batteries included, as well as (to quote a friend’s old email signature) “bells and whistles, plus a couple of gongs. Don’t forget the horns, the custard pies and the water-powered whirling knives.” If you don’t know your way around existing environments or distros, want something fashionable and snazzy looking, and are willing and happy to jump in and learn, then this is an interesting new option. You may not agree with the politics and views behind it, but you must be able to either tolerate them – or ignore them. It works, it’s quite fast, it looks striking, and it does the job. If you just want something clean, fast, pretty, and with tiling by default, personally, we’d suggest Pop!_OS instead. ®

If it walks like a robot duck and quacks like a robot duck, it’s probably a Microduck robot from Hugging Face subsidiary Pollen Robotics. And it's ready to work with AI. Bordeaux, France-based Pollen announced the Microduck on Thursday, describing it as a robot designed for immediate action, as well as being ready for training via reinforcement learning in an open-source physics simulator to teach it new tasks. Microduck is tiny, mind you: It’s a mere 25 cm tall (a little under 10 inches), and weighs in at about 800 grams (1.76 pounds), so don’t expect this to serve as your own in-home AI butler or cleaner. It’s more of a cheap (just $399) testbed designed to teach users about hardware AI, machine learning, and the potential of modern robotics. Microduck “sets out to make building AI on real hardware as approachable as running a model: complex behaviours out of the box, then an open-source stack covering robot control, simulation, RL training and sim-to-real deployment, so new skills can be trained in simulation and transferred to the robot,” Pollen writes on Microduck’s website. That’s not to say that Microduck can’t be trained to do real work, of course. A video on the bipedal bot’s website shows it picking up socks and a marker with its articulated beak and placing them in a box, which it’s able to see with its front-facing camera and determine distance thanks to a built-in LiDAR unit. That hardware isn’t open source, mind you, but the entire software stack Microduck is built on is, and Pollen is encouraging users to share skills once the entire Microduck system goes live later this year. A Pollen rep told us that the company has no plans to open source the hardware. Microduck should be able to handle a pretty robust library of tasks, too: It’ll ship with 1 GB of RAM, 32 GB of onboard storage, and a 50 Hz onboard policy loop for connecting its onboard AI to sensors to determine its next action. Like any good bipedal robot, Microduck is able to get back on its feet when knocked over, as demonstrated in videos on the minuscule machine’s website. It’s also able to roller skate, with a pair of wheeled feet available in an optional accessory pack that includes a ball it can play with, an NFC chip and NFC tags, and a laser pointer it’s able to follow with its eyeball camera. “Anyone can train new behaviors … in simulation using reinforcement learning,” Pollen representative Santiago Pavon explained to us in an email. “Adding purpose and autonomy to the robot is something we are still working on, and we expect the community to pick up and contribute.” Pavon explained that Pollen hopes it and the community it wants to build with Microduck will “achieve autonomous behaviors such as voice recognition, simultaneous localization and mapping, navigation and grasping,” though he admits its grasping capabilities will likely be limited given the small size of the robot. Pavon estimates Microduck probably can’t lift much more than 100 grams. Regardless of its ability to lift, Pollen wants Microduck to serve as an open platform for training tiny autonomous robots to do both practical and fun things. “We find the ‘autonomous behaviors as a community objective’ to be very exciting,” Pavon noted. Microduck is available for preorder now, with units planned to ship sometime before Christmas 2026. Now about that acquisition … El Reg readers are likely aware of the hubbub brewing around Pollen Robotics’ parent company, AI model hosting platform Hugging Face, and Nvidia. The GPU giant has reportedly agreed to buy the AI biz for somewhere in the neighborhood of $13 billion. The deal remains unconfirmed, with Business Insider saying its exclusive was based on “a person familiar with the matter” and that an agreement had not been finalized. If true, it would mean that Nvidia is putting its money where CEO Jensen Huang’s mouth is in regard to open-weight AI models. Nvidia’s own Nemotron AI models are fully open source and available on Hugging Face, and Huang has come out in support of open source and open weight AI models during the recent back-and-forth in the industry between frontier labs and open model makers located largely in China. Pollen Robotics itself was only acquired by Hugging Face in April 2025, and it’s unknown how the acquisition by Nvidia would affect the Microduck maker. While Pavon was willing to answer plenty of questions about Microduck, he didn’t respond to our inquiry about the rumored Nvidia deal. Neither Nvidia nor Hugging Face responded to our inquiries, and both have been silent on the matter since BI’s story broke. ®

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) said it’s responding to a “major” cybersecurity incident shortly after the Qilin ransomware gang posted the US federal law enforcement agency on its leak site. According to ATF's statement, the intrusion affected a standalone system that operated separately from its enterprise network. “There is no indication that the incident has affected the ATF enterprise network, the ATF eForms system, or any other ATF system,” the statement said. ATF, which is housed under the US Department of Justice, said it’s “coordinating closely” with the DOJ to investigate the breach, and “immediately” blocked connections to the affected IT environment upon discovering the incident. The statement said the security breach had not affected ATF’s operations and noted that senior Justice Department officials designated the compromise as a “major incident” under federal guidelines. Shortly before ATF posted its security-incident notice on its website, Russia-linked Qilin ransomware criminals listed the firearms agency on its leak site. The post, seen by The Register and shared on social media, did not say what data Qilin claimed to have stolen, how much, or provide samples to substantiate the claim. ATF did not immediately respond to our questions, and we will update this story when we receive a response. Qilin, the notorious crew behind the 2024 attack on pathology provider Synnovis that disrupted NHS services in the UK, was one of the most prolific ransomware gangs in July, according to Comparitech. The firm, which reviews cybersecurity products and provides data analysis, counted 799 ransomware incidents last month, up from 668 in June. Qilin claimed 125 of those.®

Schrödinger's Cat, the famous 1935 thought experiment, imagines a cat that, for reasons rooted in quantum physics we need not dwell on here, is simultaneously alive and dead. In a landscape of relentless cyberattacks and mounting infrastructural complexity, a routine backup task can appear finished, with every box ticked and every check made. The job is not actually done, however, until it has been verified as fully ready for recovery in the event of cyber disaster. A task that looks sorted can turn out, under scrutiny, to be anything but. A backup can be logged as 'complete' once data has been copied to storage, but a recoverable workload is another matter entirely. It means that when a business goes down, its workloads can be restored to their state at the point of attack with nothing lost. By the time you realize you are on the wrong side of that ambiguity, it may be too late: your data is in the hands of the bad guys, or destroyed, and this time the cat really is dead. This is not a problem to which IT bosses and managed service provider (MSP) management are entirely oblivious. Most organizations recognize to some degree that their backup may not be 100 percent watertight. Cybersecurity management specialist Kaseya recently partnered with 1105 Media to survey 200 IT professionals about the realities shaping cyber resilience planning. Some 53 percent were no more than 'somewhat confident' in their organization's ability to fully recover from a ransomware attack, and admitted their backups were supported by no better than 'limited testing'. A significant proportion had even less faith in their recovery capabilities, while only 15 percent were 'very confident' they could get back on track with no loss. Verify and survive Understanding what a verified backup means, and what role verification plays in the recovery challenge weighing on so many IT leaders, is where any sensible resilience plan begins. Backups are vital but they do not guarantee recovery on their own. What matters is confirming that a backup job will hold up in a disaster. Verification is the process of proving that backed-up data is complete, uncorrupted, and fully restorable in an emergency, offering evidence that recovery is possible during a critical outage, hardware failure or ransomware attack. It is essential whether you run an IT department or an MSP responsible for client protection: unless you can prove clients are protected, there is every chance they are not. "Backup isn't done and entrustable until you've gone in and made sure that the application actually works and can be brought back to the recovery environment," explains Brent Torre, GM of cyber resilience at Kaseya. "Historically, it's just taken too much time and resource for a lot of people to even attempt that. And where they have been verifying, they haven't been doing it regularly enough to ensure real protection." Not all approaches to verification are of equal value. IT departments still relying on intermittent manual verification are operating on blind trust: warnings thrown up by the process can be misread, failures overlooked, and the result is a dangerous mix of false negatives that waste time and false positives that expose the organization to real risk. Manual screenshot verification is a proven way to squander a security budget , tying up highly qualified staff on needless work and pulling their expertise away from where it is genuinely needed. Nobody wants seasoned engineers spending hours reviewing screenshots, second-guessing outputs and trying to determine whether a backup worked. Where static verification methods once had a place, today's complex IT ecosystems have made them redundant. Across an estate spanning in-house systems, SaaS and cloud endpoints, basic verification cannot cope, picking up only surface-level signals and lacking the design to operate at scale. At scale, the inefficiencies of manual verification multiply and response times slow to a crawl. A minor inefficiency can quietly become a serious bottleneck without anyone noticing, and legacy methods can create the illusion that everything is working perfectly while catastrophe waits around the corner. As Torre points out, light-touch checking is unlikely to satisfy the ever-increasing regulatory burden around recovery and resilience. "Some compliance frameworks explicitly state that you must test recovery on a frequent basis," he says. "It's becoming more important than ever that organisations are able to do that." Let AI handle the heat The emerging gold standard is AI-powered screenshot verification, which replaces the best-efforts manual checking of overstretched human teams. It works by automatically booting up virtualized backups, capturing a screenshot and analyzing the image to confirm the backup ran correctly. Where rigid, rule-based checks fall short, context-aware visual AI combined with OCR accurately identifies login screens, dashboards and maintenance states, and evaluates every element with precision. The result is 99.9 percent verification accuracy and sharply reduced false positives, alongside far greater confidence in every backup. This is welcome news for IT managers facing budget shortfalls and a drought of experienced talent, and it is what MSPs need as they try to make the economics of recovery stack up. Remove the manual effort and the constant checking of false alarms, and the gains mount quickly. Human teams are free for higher-value work, SLA confidence rises, customer trust improves, and environments can scale without ballooning overheads. AI-powered verification is no longer a maybe for today's MSPs; it is the only route forward that makes sense on the P&L. The good news is that AI-powered screenshot verification does not require major up-front investment or deep internal expertise. Datto, the cybersecurity and data protection outfit owned by Kaseya, has built the latest verification technology directly into its business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) platform, so that deployment stays simple and disruption to existing workflows is minimal. This kind of AI-powered screenshot verification is designed to strip uncertainty out of the process and give IT teams confidence that backed-up data is complete and recoverable. The ideal solution does so at scale, and without adding complexity, by working within the workflows already in place. With Datto there is the further option of integrating remote monitoring and management (RMM) with the BCDR product, which enables proactive remediation through automated deployments, the merging of backup health with endpoint alerts, and virtual restores launched directly from a single management console. "It's key to have context and visibility into the backup estate through your RMM so you know that you are up to date on patching, on antivirus definitions and backups," says Torre. "With all of that integrated within the RMM solution, you have the ability to understand your risk profile across the fleet in terms of protection. You know in the event that something needs to be recovered. And you can start a backup-initiated recovery directly from the RMM platform." The gold standard to aim for, he concludes, is continuous validation and automated remediation, not the ability to look in now and again to see what is going on. The perfect verification solution , he adds, should be 'impossibly easy to use', requiring humans to exert zero cognitive effort on backup beyond deploying a new client and initiating a recovery. By giving yourself the means to distinguish between a completed backup job and a recoverable workload, you have set yourself apart from the kind of IT manager or MSP who only spots a problem after something has gone wrong. By deploying AI-powered verification, you stop treating backup as a probability and start treating it as a proof. You know what you have. Then when something goes wrong, and it will, that certainty is the only thing standing between a fast recovery and a very long night. MSPs looking to unify backup and security into a single resilience practice can start with the When Backup Meets Security in the MSP Stack whitepaper. Sponsored by Datto.

There'll be no rest for X Corps' lawyers this weekend after startup Operation Bluebird rolled out the twitter.now social media network this week. The launch came the same week as Nitter was served a cease-and-desist letter, and it's the latest in the saga of Twitter branding that X boss Elon Musk dispensed with when renaming his $44 billion purchase as 'X'. Unlike Nitter, which lets users view X content without an account, twitter.info is a new social media platform and "not affiliated with X Corp." Users must sign up for a paid account and can then post and view posts. "You'll see trust signals on posts," a FAQ on the service's website explains, "and you control your own feed with a simple dial — freedom of speech, not freedom of reach." At present, the service is asking $20 for early access as a founder, and $40 for the "Fighter" tier, which adds a slingshot badge to the user's profile. As for why the service isn't free, like other X alternatives such as Bluesky or Mastodon, the answer is, "To keep bots out and stay independent. "A paid door proves there's a real person behind an account, and member funding keeps us answerable to you instead of advertisers." Operation Bluebird filed to claim the Twitter trademark last year, reasoning that since Musk ditched it in favor of X, it was fair game. X disagreed, and snapped back: "Twitter never left and continues to be exclusively owned by X Corp." The case is ongoing, and no judgment has been made. However, the team behind Operation Bluebird is clearly confident enough in the outcome to launch twitter.now and posted, "Twitter is a reclaimed brand. "Twitter.now is not an attempt to recreate the old platform." The Register asked X what it makes of it all, but Musk's mouthpiece has yet to respond. In a week in which X lawyers have seen off the likes of XCancel and Nitter, at least for the time being, it will be interesting to see what happens to twitter.now. X's content is not what the service is offering, but the old Twitter branding is certainly in its crosshairs. Your move, X. ®

Announcing upbeat financials and a new offering with AI posterchild Anthropic, Salesforce has begun to drip-feed plans for how it might get customers to spend more as they deploy AI. The CRM giant has been among the victims of the so-called SaaSpocalypse, which sees widespread business application software replaced or diminished by AI models which interact directly with business data. Flawed or not, the notion has tanked Salesforce’s share price by more than 20 percent this year, but its Q2 results, for the period ending July 31, caused some cheer, at least among shareholders. As well as trumpeting revenue of $11.3 billion, up 11 percent on a year ago and beating analysts' expectations, the CRM giant announced a new tie-in with AI model builder Anthropic. The two companies have teamed up to announce Claudeforce, which claims to bring Claude’s services together with Salesforce’s enterprise data, workflows, governance and business logic. It offers a Plugin with 37 prebuilt “sales skills” the companies say help sellers and agents automate sales pipelines for example. As well as using Claude for the UI, it can be embedded in Salesforce products AIforce, Headless 360, Data 360, Tableau, and Slack. Together with the financial results, the news caused a 12 percent jump in the company’s value. That’s all very well for investors, but customers will be asking whether it works and how much they pay for it. Both will depend on the implementation strategy, but Salesforce did offer some clues about its expectations while speaking to investment analysts. For a start, there are so many products which seem to overlap, customers may be forgiven for being a little confused. Co-CEO and founder Marc Benioff said products would use “not only Claudeforce, but a new version of Slack, as well as Coworker,” an AI powered assistant built in its Agentforce platform. That adds to the Headless 360, which allows customers to access all of their Salesforce data from Cursor, WhatsApp, ChatGPT, Claude, or a terminal. Slack is also being reworked as the UI for CRM and other applications through SlackBots, which can fetch and query data from a range of applications. Consumption-based How are users expected to pay for this menagerie of product types? Bundles is the answer. Robin Washington, Salesforce President and Chief Operating and Financial Officer, told investors, “bundles give our customers access to our innovation in real time.” Benioff said customers would have the option to pay by consumption, basic usage, or by outcome, such as a transaction outcome or a business outcome. “Customers want that kind of diversity in pricing, we have created a high level of flexibility, and that has really expanded our ability to sign very large transactions with our customers,” he said. Also underscoring this approach was the importance of consumption-based payment model Flex Credits in Salesforce's plans to get customers to adopt its various AI agent-led approaches to business processes. Miguel Milano, also President and Chief Operating Officer at Salesforce, told analysts: “When you look just at bookings — not just the cumulative annual recurring revenue — [they] grew triple-digit. We doubled year on year. Fifty percent of the bookings came from customers refilling the tank: they consume Flex Credits, they want more.” In October last year, Gartner warned users about the unplanned consumption of Flex Credits, alongside similar concepts in Microsoft and ServiceNow’s commercial portfolio. “These often require upfront usage commitments and can be credit-based, with rates that may change unilaterally by the vendor, exposing buyers to unexpected cost increases. While buyers may expect costs to decrease as usage scales, Gartner has seen no evidence of vendors lowering prices. Volume discounts must be negotiated upfront,” it said. The Register asked Salesforce to comment on Thursday Washington added that the company was “really comfortable with” the way it was working “through headless monetization.” “We ultimately think predictability and flexibility are what's important to customers. With our new platform, Agentforce, we are going to unlock the potential for knowledge workers in great ways. That's going to be pretty impressive. “That is an early stage for us relative to our installed base, or our opportunity to continue to upgrade our customers to those premium editions that give them instantaneous access to this innovation... We feel really comfortable with the monetization strategy that we have, and most importantly, the flexibility that we are giving our customers that allows us to capture that,” she said. Separately, Gartner has previously predicted that Salesforce’s all-you-can-eat model, the Agentic Enterprise License Agreement (AELA) announced last October, will not be available to all customers forever. Hannah Decker, Gartner director analyst for IT sourcing and procurement, told The Register in January it was critical that users understood the exit terms of AELAs before signing up for them. "Gartner believes that these are going to be converted into defined quantity contracts at the end of the agreement," she said. At the time, Salesforce denied that was the case. In a statement, Bill Patterson, Salesforce EVP, Corporate Strategy, said: "The claim that we are moving away from capped agreements is inaccurate. Renewals remain flexible, and because AI compute costs may actually shift over time, we focus on tailoring terms so each customer can get the maximum value from their usage.” ®

The company behind three of the UK’s busiest airports says “a quantity” of data was stolen during a recent “cybersecurity incident". Manchester Airports Group (MAG) operates Manchester Airport in the North West of England, Cambridgeshire’s Stansted Airport, and East Midlands Airport in Derbyshire. The affected data includes information collected as part of its car parking, lounge, and fast track bookings, as well as information collected as part of MAG's public Wi-Fi services. Email addresses, phone numbers, vehicle registrations, and postcodes are the data types currently known to be compromised. A spokesperson at MAG told The Register that the majority of the 8.7 million customers caught up in the breach only had their email addresses compromised. As is always the case, individuals will be affected in different ways. Not all of the data types will be compromised for all customers. The company, which recently celebrated a record 66 million passengers travelling through its airports in a year, said it “immediately contained the risk” and brought in external expertise to advise on next steps. “We have informed and are working with the relevant authorities,” said MAG in a statement. “At no point has passenger safety or aviation security been compromised.” It confirmed that none of its airports experienced operational disruption as part of the attack, and that the affected system does not store bank or payment details. However, “as a precautionary measure,” it temporarily revoked access to its Manage My Booking service. Customers who want to amend or cancel a booking due within 72 hours of the statement going live are being advised to contact customer services. “We would like to reassure customers that Manchester Airport Group takes the security of customer information extremely seriously and we apologise for any inconvenience or concern caused.” Affected customers have already been contacted, including a few Reg readers who kindly alerted us to the news. While MAG continues to investigate the incident, customers were advised to be extra vigilant to potential phishing attempts, and remain assured that there is no danger of visiting MAG’s airports as a result of the cyberattack. One Reg reader griped that in addition to being charged £80 for five days of parking at Stansted, receiving the email informing him that it had also allowed his personal data to be stolen via a cybersecurity breach added insult to injury. The Register asked MAG for additional information, but a spokesperson only responded with the same statement issued online. ®

HP reckons enterprises fretting about the spiraling cost of AI tokens have an obvious alternative: run the models locally and spend the money on a more expensive PC instead. The pitch emerged during HP's third-quarter earnings call on Wednesday, where executives repeatedly pointed to cloud AI costs as one reason customers are buying higher-spec machines that can do more AI work locally. AI PCs are becoming harder to avoid as HP pushes more of its lineup upmarket, but the company insists customers are getting something for the extra cash. "Clearly, the AI PCs are now providing more value than what it was last year," said Ketan Patel, president of HP's Personal Systems business. "Clearly, as the workloads are coming from cloud to the device, it is adding significant value for our customers, especially on token economics, which is a big topic right now, as you start deploying workloads in a customer environment." Patel also pointed to keeping sensitive data closer to where it is generated, reduced dependence on network connectivity, and faster response times as reasons to run AI locally. HP says it is already seeing customers use the machines for employee productivity, engineering and design, customer service, and predictive maintenance. The token issue came up again later in the earnings call, when HP was asked whether enterprises were looking at AI PCs specifically to get models off the internet and avoid cloud charges. "Yes, there are two meaningful conversations which are going on right now," Patel replied. The first, he said, was "this increasing cost of token and how bringing models locally on the edge can help them optimize cost." The second was how enterprises securely govern the growing number of AI agents wandering around their environments. All of this is rather convenient for HP, since AI PCs cost more and, by the company's own admission, are good for its margins. AI PCs made up 46 percent of HP's PC mix during the quarter, and the company expects that to rise to between 60 and 70 percent in fiscal 2027 and more than 70 percent in 2028. Patel said the shift would be "margin accretive," while interim CEO Bruce Broussard noted that AI PCs come at "premium pricing" and give HP opportunities to pile additional services and security products on top, making them "more valuable to the customer and frankly, more valuable to us." The effect is already showing up in HP's numbers. Personal Systems revenue jumped 18 percent year over year to $11.8 billion even though PC volumes fell 16 percent. HP attributed that seemingly improbable combination to higher prices, a richer mix of premium machines and AI PCs, and sales of attached services and peripherals. Those non-hardware businesses now contribute about a third of Personal Systems gross profit. Anyone hoping PC prices have finished climbing may also want to look away. CFO Karen Parkhill said HP has been increasing prices as component costs rise and "expect[s] to continue to increase pricing." Patel added that, depending on how a machine is sold, it can take anywhere from immediately to "a few months" for those increases to reach customers. Still, HP's AI ambitions aren't confined to convincing enterprises they need beefier laptops. The company has also deployed AI to tackle one of computing's more enduring problems: people printing all the rubbish surrounding the thing they actually wanted. It talked up its Precise Print software, which uses AI to remove unnecessary web content before printing, which HP claims can cut paper use by up to 38 percent and ink consumption by as much as 47 percent. After decades spent finding increasingly imaginative ways to sell us printer ink, HP has apparently decided artificial intelligence can help us use less of it. ®

Microsoft is dusting off the rebrandogun again, and this time it's aimed at the Microsoft 365 Roadmap. The list of hopes and dreams will henceforth be called the AI at Work roadmap. The notification popped up in the Microsoft 365 admin center earlier this week with the words "The AI at Work Roadmap provides a single destination to discover upcoming innovations across Microsoft 365, Copilot, agents, and related AI-powered experiences." Information for Dynamics 365, Power Platform, and Dataverse will be added from September. In its announcement, Microsoft stated, "We’re making this change because of how our customers actually work." Other changes include when roadmap information appears. Instead of the twice-yearly release wave 1 and 2 model, Microsoft intends to publish new capabilities as soon as plans are committed. This means, in theory, administrators will have more notice of incoming features and functionality. The full transition will take time. Although the renaming has already happened, and other capabilities will be published to the AI at Work roadmap from September, existing roadmap content in public preview or with a General Availability date of June 1, 2026, or later, will also transition to the "AI at Work roadmap experience." This will take until November 15, 2026. Earlier this month, an enterprising Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) created the Microsoft Rebrand Registry. We look forward to the addition of the Microsoft 365 roadmap. All in all, it's an odd decision, and perhaps a slightly cynical way of shoving AI in administrators' faces. Microsoft 365 Copilot, the company's flagship AI technology, is available as a paid add-on, and adoption has hardly set the world alight, despite the investment poured into it. In June, a sueball was thrown at the company, with the lawsuit alleging "Microsoft had failed to convert a significant percentage of its commercial Microsoft 365 users to paid Copilot subscriptions." For its part, Microsoft told The Register that the claims in the complaint were "without merit." Regardless, renaming a roadmap with which administrators were familiar to something prefixed with AI smacks of marketing desperation on the part of Microsoft. Heaven forbid the company might have better things to do with its time than rename something that users were already happy with, and understood. ®

The UK’s data protection watchdog has fined a nuisance call blocking biz £190,000 ($258,000) for bombarding elderly people with hundreds of thousands of - you guessed it - nuisance calls. Elderly Aids Ltd made 758,053 unsolicited direct marketing calls between May 27, 2024, and February 10, 2025, according to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). On average, that works out as 2,916 calls per day. Busy fingers. The ICO and Telephone Preference Service (TPS), a UK service to register one’s phone number to exclude it from unwanted marketing calls, received 20 complaints during this timeframe related to Elderly Aids. It is illegal for direct marketers to call a number registered with the TPS, unless the individual has given explicit consent to that specific company to call them. All 758,053 unsolicited direct marketing calls, in this case, were made to phone numbers registered with the TPS and belonged to people who had not given their consent for Elderly Aids to contact them. Complainants commonly cited aggressive and misleading sales tactics, with callers also failing to identify themselves. One said their father was pressured into signing up to Elderly Aids’ services, which required a £139 ($188) sign-up fee, and a recurring monthly £6.99 ($9.50) payment on top of this. Andy Curry, head of investigations at the ICO, said: “Not only did this company target vulnerable people who had explicitly asked not to be called – they harassed them to sell call-blocking devices. “EAL showed a complete disregard for the law and the people they were hounding. This penalty should serve as a clear warning to any business that thinks the law does not apply to them - we will hold them to account for both exploiting people in this way and trying to avoid accountability.” Russell Roach, director of preference services at the Data & Marketing Association (DMA), concurred and encouraged responsible businesses to screen their calling lists against the TPS and Corporate TPS (CTPS) registers. “People register with the Telephone Preference Service because they want greater control over who can contact them,” he said. “Cases like this demonstrate why those protections are so important. “Anyone making live marketing calls must respect the choices people have made about their privacy. When organizations ignore those preferences and contact individuals who have explicitly opted out of receiving unsolicited sales calls, particularly those who are most vulnerable, they undermine consumer trust and risk causing significant nuisance and distress.” The ICO said Elderly Aids failed to engage with the regulator, ignoring requests for information, while continuing to make illegal marketing calls. According to public Companies House filings, the company attempted to strike itself off the register three months after it started pestering the elderly with its phone calls, although this was swiftly suspended following an objection. The ICO said that in cases where a debtor cannot pay a fine, such as those in “genuine financial hardship,” they provide payment plans. Organizations that can pay don’t face formal recovery action, and when directors attempt to skirt fines through insolvency, insolvency practitioners are called in, potentially kickstarting a multi-year recovery process. ®