The Register

Windows 11 26H2 is out, and Microsoft has enabled Windows settings backup by default, a move that could send administrators scrambling to opt out where they once had to opt in. The latest release hasn't made a lot of shockwaves in the community featurewise. Users with up-to-date versions of 25H2 will unlikely notice much difference – 26H2 has the same code base, delivered via an enablement package. It even has the same set of known issues, although all are now "mitigated" in one way or another. However, administrators will spot several important changes. The end-of-support clock is reset, and Microsoft has flipped some switches behind the scenes; notably, enabling Windows backup and restore (formerly Windows Backup for Organizations) by default. On by default The service, which was previously off by default, backs up a device's settings and a list of installed Microsoft Store apps. The idea is that when a user moves to a new device, a restore can happen during setup. Microsoft also listed an objective of the service as allowing "organizations to transition to a cloud-first approach for managing devices and user settings." The problem is that many organizations are prohibited from sending this data to the cloud. As a result, the default-on setting won't apply in privacy-sensitive regions such as those covered by the EU Digital Markets Act, or in sovereign and restricted environments. For many others running Windows 11 26H2, it'll now be enabled by default on eligible devices – Entra joined or Entra Hybrid joined. Unless an administrator has explicitly said no to the functionality, the act of installing the update will flip the switch, and the backups will begin. Administrators will rightly be wary of anything that switches from opt-in to opt-out, even something so apparently useful and innocuous as a backup. Why wouldn't you want your users to be able to leap to a new device with ease? That assumes their data is also in the cloud, of course, since this only backs up settings and a list of Windows apps. Backing up data is something else entirely. That is the real issue with the change. The release of Windows 11 26H2 isn't particularly exciting in itself, but flipping a long-standing opt-in to opt-out as part of it is likely to set more than a few nerves jangling. ®

AI ambition is easy to describe - using data and models to improve decisions, automate work, accelerate discovery, or create new services. Delivering those outcomes is harder and takes a significant amount of experience to be successful. Training a frontier model, fine-tuning an industry model, running high-volume inference and supporting agentic AI place different demands on infrastructure, processes and people. Implementing AI may include a single-purpose turnkey configuration that will accommodate one line of business, or the business may demand a more strategic approach to capitalize on the economies of scale and create AI as a multi-tenant service, designed to accommodate the multitude of mainstream business requirements. That is the value of an AI factory, bringing the complete AI lifecycle together so a cost-effective infrastructure can be designed around the mission, scaled with demand, secured as needed and operated as a dependable source of intelligence. The AI factory is designed to deliver the capacity, performance, utilization and business value customers expect. From AI workload to business outcome An AI factory is an integrated solution for data ingestion, model development, training, fine-tuning, inference, monitoring and continuous improvement. Its purpose is to turn data into intelligence repeatedly and efficiently—whether that intelligence supports a clinician, an engineer, a researcher, a public service or an enterprise application. Achieving that goal requires more than choosing an accelerated processor. Compute must match the business model and expected workloads. Networking and data pipelines must keep accelerators supplied. Storage must support the volume and velocity of data. Software must provision resources and orchestrate jobs. Security, governance and multi-tenancy must reflect who will use the environment and what data they can access. Power and cooling must support the system’s density today and as it grows. “Without proper architecture, governance and operational expertise, organizations can't safely leverage their data, take AI into core processes, or turn innovation into durable competitive advantage,” says Thierry Pienaar, HPE Fellow, Vice President and CTO for HPC and AI Sales. “Customers are realizing the fact that to derive value to its utmost extent they need an end-to-end infrastructure that's purpose-designed and purpose-built for AI.” Choice starts with the workload The HPE AI Factory with NVIDIA portfolio brings together NVIDIA accelerated computing, networking and AI software with HPE infrastructure, software, services and expertise at deploying complex systems. Rather than forcing every customer into a single configuration, the portfolio provides three paths for different ambitions, operating models and requirements. ● HPE Private Cloud AI, the turnkey AI factory solution, is an enterprise-ready, on-premises AI platform for running fine tuning, RAG & inferencing workload environments that need up to 256 GPUs. ● HPE AI Factory at-scale supports model builders, service providers and large enterprises that operate across many users, workloads and GPU resources (using 100s to 10s of thousands of GPUs) with centralized control, operational visibility, and multi-tenancy over the entire AI lifecycle ● HPE Sovereign AI Factory is an HPE AI factory at-scale that adds a deep level of operational control, data security and residency, sovereign management (including optional air-gapped configurations), and built-in compliance frameworks. It is designed for large enterprises, and any other organizations with sensitive information that require strict control and compliance across data, infrastructure, models and operations within defined legal, regulatory or geographic boundaries. Each option starts with the same principle: define the workloads and desired outcomes first, then select the right technologies to support them and finally identify the required resources needed to implement such an infrastructure. A hospital deploying clinical assistants will make different choices from a service provider offering GPU capacity, a manufacturer training vision models or a government operating sensitive national workloads. The HPE AI Factory model gives each a way to build for its mission without losing sight of performance, control or future growth – and HPE partners with these organizations to dramatically increase the likelihood of success. Operate the environment as one system As the use of AI expands across an organization, the operational challenges mature. Multiple teams may need different resource profiles, application stacks, service levels and data boundaries. Platform teams need to see utilization, allocate capacity, apply policy and understand consumption without creating a separate infrastructure island for every workload. The management of these differences make time-to-production an increasingly useful way to think about AI infrastructure: How quickly can an organization cost effectively move from investment vision to an operational environment generating useful intelligence? Many enterprises initially try to answer that question by extending their existing IT expertise. But building a DIY production AI environment from individual components requires skill sets that many enterprise IT organizations have never needed or required at this scale. A poorly implemented AI system may technically operate while still failing economically or operationally. GPUs can sit underutilized. Data pipelines can create bottlenecks. Cooling or power constraints can limit operation and/or expansion. Security policies can prevent sensitive data and workloads from being included. Separate less understood management systems can make AI factory infrastructure difficult to operate. That is why the AI factory challenge is fundamentally a strategic, systems integration and operations problem, not simply a stream of hardware purchasing transactions. "The HPE AI Factory with NVIDIA portfolio gives enterprises a range of AI solutions co-developed with NVIDIA, backed by HPE’s engineering expertise and technical capabilities to design an AI factory around their specific needs and optimize it for performance at scale." Pienaar explains. That distinction matters; customers can choose an architecture suited to their current mission and expand it as models, users and operational requirements change. The HPE AI Factory is designed to help operators provision and govern resources, observe infrastructure, track usage and support secure multi-tenant operations. That control helps customers align capacity with workload priorities while keeping the environment easier to manage as it grows. Make sovereignty a design requirement Cloud services, private environments and hybrid approaches can all play important roles in an AI strategy. For organizations with sovereignty requirements, the decision is defined by costs and the level of sovereignty and control they need: where data and models reside, who can administer the environment, which jurisdiction applies, data residency, how policies are enforced and what level of isolation various workloads require. “Sovereign AI tools from HPE and NVIDIA give an enterprise, or even a nation state, complete control over how its AI systems are built, deployed, operated and governed,” says Kaushik Shirhatti, Vice President, AI Factory at NVIDIA. “For some, that means keeping sensitive data in-country. For others, it means controlling who can access systems, where workloads run, how models are governed, and which local laws apply.” HPE and NVIDIA engineer for the complete outcome HPE and NVIDIA co-engineer AI factory solutions to reduce the integration work required to deploy and operate a high efficiency enterprise AI environment. By combining NVIDIA accelerated computing, networking, and AI software with HPE infrastructure, cloud operations, services, and support, the joint solution helps data scientists and developers spend more time building and improving AI applications while platform teams maintain operational production and control. NVIDIA provides accelerated computing platforms, networking, and the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software suite to power modern training, fine-tuning, inference, and agentic workloads. HPE contributes its expertise in enterprise systems engineering, high-performance computing, management and observability software, services, global support, financing, and years of experience in the power and cooling requirements of dense computing environments. Together, the companies can optimize AI computing solutions beyond any single component. The objective is to select the right GPU architecture and system design for the workload, keep accelerators productive with high-speed data movement, provide the software and operational controls teams need, and create a path to scale without unnecessarily redesigning the environment. HPE AI Services support that path from business planning, AI strategy, workload characterization and facility planning through deployment, integration, support and ongoing operations. HPE Financial Services can help with purchasing, accelerated depreciation schedules and lifecycle flexibility. These capabilities help customers make economically sound technology choices in the context of the business outcome, the operating model and the pace at which the environment needs to evolve. Deployment speed matters, but it is not the final measure of success. Customers need to consider workload readiness, model performance, accelerator utilization, developer productivity, governance, availability, economics and the ability to expand. Those measures connect the infrastructure decision to the outcomes the organization set out to achieve. The case for HPE AI Factory with NVIDIA is not that every customer needs the same stack. It is that every customer needs an AI environment intentionally matched to its workloads, data, operating requirements and goals. By combining NVIDIA’s accelerated computing leadership with HPE’s infrastructure, software, services and operating expertise, organizations can choose the right path—and move from AI investment to meaningful business outcomes faster. Recent deployments of the HPE AI Factory with NVIDIA - TELUS Sovereign AI Factory in Canada and the sovereign AI factory at the University of Utah in the US - are helping with overcoming engineering challenges and driving scientific advances. In conclusion, start by identifying the workloads that would benefit from AI, define the relevant data boundaries and residency requirements, estimate the expected scale over a reasonable timeframe, and determine the operating model, resources, and skills needed to support the AI infrastructure. Then work with HPE and NVIDIA to evaluate which path—turnkey, at-scale, or sovereign—best meets those requirements. To learn more visit HPE AI Factory | AI Infrastructure for Enterprises | HPE Sponsored by HPE and NVIDIA

Attackers were poking at a critical Zimbra mail server bug weeks before it was publicly disclosed, and then moved on to steal credentials, raid mailboxes, and take deeper control of compromised systems. Microsoft Threat Intelligence said it tracked exploitation of CVE-2026-73570, an unauthenticated command injection vulnerability in Zimbra Collaboration Suite that gives attackers a potentially easy route into exposed mail servers. No stolen password or unfortunate employee clicking a dodgy link is required. An attacker can send a specially crafted email to a vulnerable internet-facing server and potentially run commands, though Redmond notes the flaw affects only servers running Zimbra's optional SNMP monitoring package with notifications enabled. Zimbra fixed the flaw in version 10.1.20 on July 20, but CVE-2026-73570 wasn't publicly disclosed until August 13. Between July 28 and August 7, Redmond spotted two different scanning tools probing the same part of Zimbra later used in attacks. At first, the activity appears to have focused on finding vulnerable servers and testing the flaw. The attackers used a collection of common network utilities to make vulnerable systems call back to infrastructure they controlled, confirming they could execute commands. Once they found servers that played ball, things got messier. Microsoft's investigation found attackers deploying web shells and reverse shells, escalating their privileges, installing tools for persistent remote access, and running malicious code directly in memory. Some even tidied up after themselves. Microsoft said attackers temporarily changed permissions on public directories to plant web shells, then restored the original settings afterward in an apparent attempt to make their meddling harder to spot. The intruders also explored the wider Zimbra environments they landed in, identifying other mail servers and looking for trusted connections they could use to move between them. In some cases, existing SSH relationships between Zimbra systems gave them a route to neighboring servers. On at least one compromised machine, attackers turned their initial foothold into root access. They then set things up to keep running commands with the highest privileges without needing a password. Mailboxes were, unsurprisingly, also on the shopping list. Microsoft said attackers hunted for Zimbra credentials and authentication secrets that could potentially be used to access user accounts. One malicious tool it uncovered was built specifically to extract service account credentials and pull mailbox information from Zimbra's databases. In another incident, attackers bundled recent mailbox backups into an archive and tried to ship the haul to Azure Blob Storage using Microsoft's own AzCopy utility. Microsoft said it couldn't confirm from the evidence available whether the transfer actually succeeded. The company saw affected organizations across multiple regions and industries, with the attacks ranging from automated exploitation to more deliberate hands-on-keyboard activity. It hasn't attributed the activity to a particular crew. Admins running versions earlier than Zimbra 10.1.20 should update to 10.1.20 or later, while those unable to patch can reduce their exposure by removing the optional SNMP package or disabling SNMP notifications. Attackers, meanwhile, appear to have gotten there early, with Microsoft spotting probes for the flaw more than two weeks before it was publicly disclosed. ®

MI5 has warned that more than 100 UK-linked academics contributed to research projects allegedly funded to improve China's spying capabilities. The Security Service issued an unusually public espionage alert this week naming the China General Technology Research Institute (CGTRI), also translated as the China Academy of General Technology (CAGT). MI5 says the organization has "very strong ties" to China's Ministry of State Security (MSS), the country's civilian intelligence agency. According to MI5, CGTRI's "primary purpose" is to fund academic research that directly improves the MSS's technical espionage capabilities. More than 100 UK-linked academics have contributed to CGTRI-funded projects involving AI, cybersecurity, covert communications, and steganography, the agency said. Some may not have known who was ultimately financing the work. "This activity supports MSS espionage, which poses a threat to UK national security," MI5 said. MI5 isn't accusing all of the academics involved of knowingly helping Chinese intelligence. Its alert acknowledges that many institutions and individuals likely dealt with CGTRI "in good faith" because of what it describes as the organization's "obfuscated links" to the MSS. MI5 "strongly advised" UK universities to review immediately any current or planned collaboration with CGTRI and ensure that the MSS derives no further benefit from British research. Academics working with Chinese institutions are also being told to establish who is ultimately funding the research and make sure CGTRI isn't involved. Researchers may also want to brush up on the National Security Act 2023. MI5 specifically highlighted two offenses: assisting a foreign intelligence service under section 3 and obtaining a material benefit from one under section 17. Under section 3, a person can commit an offense if their conduct is likely to materially assist a foreign intelligence service with UK-related activities and they know, or "ought reasonably to know," that it is likely to do so. Section 17 separately covers accepting or retaining a material benefit when the recipient knows, or ought reasonably to know, that it came from a foreign intelligence service. Legitimate payment for lawful goods or services is excluded. Having publicly identified CGTRI's alleged links to Chinese intelligence, MI5 warned that any institution or researcher continuing to conduct work funded by the organization should seek independent legal advice. In other words, MI5 has put universities on notice: not knowing who was really behind the research money may have been understandable yesterday, but it is a considerably trickier argument today. ®

Welcome back to PWNED, the weekly column where we warn you about weak security practices. This week’s terrifying tale involves a lack of important patching and a humorously bad password belonging to the person in charge of tech security at a law firm. 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 Joe Brinkley, who also is known as “The Blind Hacker” and has more than two decades of experience in information security. Joe was called in several years ago by a large, national law firm that wanted him to penetration test a smaller business they were about to acquire. What he discovered was a huge security hole and an even bigger embarrassment. Brinkley had audited the same law firm the previous year. At that time, he noted a number of holes and the attorneys had dutifully spent time and money on security software from the likes of Reliaquest and Dell to remediate what he found. “I shredded them. They were not in a very good security posture,” Brinkley told us. “They spent probably a half a million dollars to get patching and get through these things because they were trying to go through a merger and acquisition.” Unfortunately, even with their investment, the company failed to patch its Windows machines against BlueKeep, a major remote code execution vuln that was discovered, patched, and exploited in 2019. BlueKeep affects many versions of Windows, including Windows 2000, Windows Server 2008 R2, and Windows 7. Related vulns called DejaBlue also affected Windows 10. BlueKeep and its related security risks involve a flaw in Windows’ Remote Desktop Protocol that allows attackers to gain entry and execute remote code via port 3389. The vuln is wormable so an attacker could make it spread from one system to another. However, none of this filtered through to become a priority for the law firm. During his pentest, Brinkley used the BlueKeep vuln to get access to the org’s systems, where he found that the passwords were stored in plain text and easy to dump into a file, no decryption necessary. The usernames on the system were cleverly designed for security by obscurity. Instead of using the user’s real name or something like “admin,” they had names like “Yellow Banana” and “Red Apple” so attackers could not guess which one had the most privileges. Brinkley had no idea who Yellow Banana was, but he found that person’s password and it was perhaps the tackiest idea of a login we’ve ever heard. The password was “r3@lg00dp@$$w0rd,” which is “realgoodpassword” with some symbols and numbers substituted for letters. Not knowing who made the security faux pas, he took the password and included a screen shot of it in a presentation he delivered on system vulnerabilities that he gave to the law firm’s execs. While he was explaining that he had managed to penetrate 2,500 of the org’s computers, the CISO suddenly dropped an f-bomb. “Why the f*** is my password on the screen?” he complained, giving away the fact that he was Yellow Banana and thought that r3@lg00dp@$$w0rd was a good idea. So what can we learn from this tale of legal embarrassment? Always patch your Windows systems as soon as new patches become available and never use a cutesy password. Enabling 2FA and encrypting the passwords would probably have helped too. ®

Microsoft begins disabling Exchange Web Services (EWS) in Exchange Online today, ahead of the API's permanent retirement on April 1, 2027. Introduced with Exchange Server 2007, EWS allows applications to access mailbox data including email, calendars, and contacts. Microsoft says the service "no longer aligns with today's security, scale, or reliability requirements" and recommends moving integrations to Microsoft Graph, although some capability gaps remain. Beginning October 1, Microsoft will start changing tenant-level EwsEnabled settings left at $null to $false, blocking EWS. Administrators needing temporary continuity can explicitly set the value to $true and add approved applications to the EwsAllowedAppIDs list. Applications not on that list will be blocked. That buys time only until April 1, 2027, when Microsoft will disable EWS permanently. The company was unequivocal: "There will be no exceptions." The retirement applies only to EWS in Exchange Online. EWS in on-premises Exchange Server is unaffected. Microsoft stopped adding features to EWS in Exchange Online in 2018 and announced its retirement in 2023. Administrators have therefore had years to prepare, but moving away from a deeply embedded API is not necessarily straightforward. Markus Müller, global field CTO for API management at Boomi, said one of the biggest migration challenges was identifying every use of EWS. "With rapid integration rollouts and limited documentation, many lack a complete inventory of their EWS dependencies," he said. Translation layers that convert EWS calls into Microsoft Graph requests may offer a temporary bridge, Müller added, but create another component to maintain and do not remove the need to migrate. He argued that organizations should monitor APIs as dependencies throughout their lifecycle rather than waiting for deprecation notices to expose them. Microsoft has not said how many organizations or processes still depend on EWS in Exchange Online. Any overlooked integrations will begin revealing themselves as the phased blocking reaches their tenants – most likely through support tickets reporting that previously reliable workflows have suddenly stopped. ®

Palantir's newly appointed UK senior vice president Tom Watson has accused Labour MP Clive Lewis of making "incorrect claims" about the company – while repeating NHS performance figures that the statistics regulator has said require careful caveats. Watson, the former deputy leader of the Labour Party, advised Palantir from 2024 before joining it full-time last month. He now works alongside Louis Mosley, the company's executive vice president for the UK and Europe. His letter to Lewis was reported by The Nerve after the MP discussed it at the Labour Party conference this week. Watson challenged Lewis's statements about Palantir's UK contracts in healthcare, policing, and defense. Lewis said the level of detail in the letter felt like a message that "we're watching you." Palantir's Gotham or Foundry software would not have been needed to compile the dossier: Watson cited statements made in Parliament, written questions, interviews, opinion pieces, and social media. Watson also described Palantir as a major UK investor and said its software had helped convict a gang stealing money from ATMs, support victims of domestic abuse, and improve the availability of Royal Navy vessels. In rebutting what he described as misinformation, Watson said the NHS Federated Data Platform (FDP) was live at 142 trusts and that "137 are already reporting benefits." The broad claim echoes figures promoted by NHS England, which the Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR) subsequently told to communicate the platform's purported benefits more carefully. Following complaints about NHS England's use of data to promote the FDP, the OSR noted that the health service had added a caveat to its published figures on June 6: "We cannot therefore draw conclusions about cause and effect as other variables have not been controlled for." NHS England also updated its methodology and agreed to identify before-and-after comparisons more clearly in public communications. The OSR asked to be kept informed of its progress. Watson's letter did not include that caveat. Data obtained by campaign group Foxglove illustrated why the qualification matters. NHS England said an Inpatient Care Co-ordination Solution based on the FDP was associated with 111,589 additional patients undergoing procedures in operating theatres. Of the 41 trusts using the tool, however, 13 reported carrying out fewer operations after its introduction. Other factors – including staffing, case complexity, and bed capacity – could have affected those results in either direction. Foxglove also found that Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust accounted for 84 percent of the reported fall in outpatient waiting lists across the 16 trusts using the relevant tool. Watson may therefore want to apply the same scrutiny to the figures he deploys when accusing others of misinformation. The Register asked Palantir to comment. ®

England's secondary schools are reporting slightly fewer cybersecurity incidents and faster recovery when disaster strikes, according to a survey by exams regulator Ofqual. Twenty-seven percent of schools reported an incident during the 2025/26 academic year, down from 29 percent a year earlier and 34 percent in 2023/24. Ofqual surveyed 3,775 secondary teachers in England in July. For questions concerning whole schools, it counted one response from the most senior participating teacher at each institution, producing a sample of up to 2,162 schools. Phishing was the most commonly reported type of incident, followed by data protection breaches, hacking, and ransomware. Ransomware affected 2 percent of respondents. Staff data was the information most commonly compromised. Student data was affected in 13 percent of incidents, while student work was affected in one percent. Recovery times improved more clearly. Among schools reporting an incident, 66 percent said they recovered "immediately," up from 55 percent the previous academic year. A further 12 percent recovered within half a school term – roughly six or seven weeks – while one percent took longer than half a term and another one percent required at least a full term. The proportion of reported incidents causing what respondents considered "critical damage" also fell from ten to seven percent, Ofqual said. "Critical damage" was not defined. The regulator told The Register that respondents were free to interpret the question in whatever way they felt best. Ofqual could not explain what had driven the apparent improvement. When asked what cybersecurity improvements their school had made during the past year, 54 percent of teachers selected "I don't know." Among the 46 percent who identified at least one change, half said their school had introduced a cybersecurity policy, 22 percent cited new or tested backup procedures, and 20 percent said they had completed or updated an incident response plan. Teachers were divided over who bears primary responsibility for cybersecurity. Forty-six percent pointed to the IT team, while 40 percent said responsibility was shared among all staff. Just nine percent identified senior leadership. Ofqual argued that cybersecurity is a leadership responsibility rather than solely an IT problem. Mat Pullen, director of education at Jamf, said the attack frequency and recovery figures were promising, but the understanding of security responsibility was a concern. "Reducing incidents matters, but so does recovering faster," Pullen said. "Cyberattacks have closed schools for a week or longer in the past, further disrupting an education already hit by Covid and affecting the wider economy as parents take time off work. "Ultimately, cybersecurity is a shared responsibility of IT, teachers and senior leadership, and breaking down these silos keeps technology secure and lessons running." Around a third of teachers said they had received no cybersecurity training during the past year or were unsure whether they had, up from 28 percent a year earlier. A similar proportion said the training they received was not useful. Of those who received training, 65 percent said they made no changes as a result. Ofqual's findings look considerably rosier than the government's Cyber Security Breaches Survey, published in April. That research found that 49 percent of primary schools, 73 percent of secondary schools, 88 percent of further education colleges, and 98 percent of higher education institutions had identified a breach or attempted attack during the previous 12 months. The figures are not directly comparable. Ofqual asked secondary teachers about cybersecurity "incidents," while the government survey counted identified attacks and breaches regardless of whether they succeeded. The latter also covered education institutions across the UK rather than secondary schools in England alone. Even so, the broader survey illustrated how frequently schools are targeted. Twenty-seven percent of further and higher education institutions identified attacks at least weekly, and almost half of those reporting a breach suffered an adverse impact on their systems. Successful attacks can force schools to close while systems are restored. In June, several schools across England and Wales shut temporarily while technicians investigated a malware scare. The ICO said last year that students were responsible for more than half of cyberattacks attributed to a known actor in the UK education sector. ®

Britain's data protection watchdog has acquired a new legal identity and governance structure, although the familiar ICO initials are staying put. On September 30, the Information Commission replaced the Information Commissioner as the statutory regulator. The organization itself will be known as the Information Commission's Office and will continue using the ICO name. The change is more than a bureaucratic rebrand. The former regulator was a "corporation sole," meaning its statutory powers and responsibilities were vested in one person: the Information Commissioner. Those functions have now transferred to a corporate body overseen by executive and non-executive board members. The new structure was created by the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025, which received Royal Assent in June 2025. The government says it will modernize the watchdog's governance without changing its existing regulatory functions. The transition follows an awkward final few months under the old structure. Information Commissioner John Edwards resigned in June after an independent workplace investigation into his conduct, admitting that his position had become "untenable" and that attempts at humor had been "inappropriate and caused offense." Edwards had stepped back from his duties in April, and the ICO removed his remaining responsibilities after the investigation concluded there was "a case to answer." Paul Arnold, who assumed Edwards' statutory responsibilities before his resignation, is serving as interim chief executive of the Information Commission. Seven non-executive members have joined the new board. They appointed Maggie Carver deputy chair, and she will perform the chair's duties while the government searches for somebody to fill the job permanently. That recruitment process isn't expected to wrap up until spring 2027. The regulator has also packed its boxes and moved its headquarters from Wilmslow to Oxford Road in Manchester, which it says will give it access to a "diverse talent pool" and strengthen links with businesses and communities across the UK. For anyone dealing with the watchdog, little should change day to day. The Information Commission retains responsibility for data protection and freedom of information regulation, along with the ICO's existing powers, guidance, and public services. A new corporate strategy is also on the way, with AI, cyber resilience, children's privacy, and public services among the areas singled out for attention. Anyone attached to the old initials can relax: despite the legal and governance overhaul, even the Information Commission's Office intends to keep calling itself the ICO. ®

Sopra Steria has expanded its legal challenge to a major UK government contract award after obtaining an unredacted copy of the agreement between Capita and the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP). The company alleges that previously undisclosed terms gave Capita preferential treatment, reduced the outsourcer's exposure to risk, and left the DWP carrying more of it. One clause could allow the department to fund technology needed to compensate for deficiencies in Capita's tender, Sopra Steria claims. Capita values the deal at £370 million, although government documents put its potential value as high as £873.4 million. Sopra Steria has been challenging the award since March, alleging that the DWP accepted an "abnormally low" bid based on staffing numbers "significantly below the current levels." The dispute concerns a contract to provide finance, payroll, HR, procurement, and other shared services across four government departments. Capita, which is also responsible for the troubled transfer of the Civil Service Pension Scheme, beat incumbent provider Shared Services Connected Ltd (SSCL), a former joint venture with the UK government that is now wholly owned by French-headquartered systems integrator Sopra Steria. At the time of the award, Capita said it had participated in a robust procurement process and was ready to deliver value for money. The DWP maintained that it had conducted a fair competition and that the deal represented value for the public. The DWP leads the Synergy shared services program, which is intended to put the DWP, Ministry of Justice, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, and Home Office onto a common SaaS ERP and HR platform with shared business processes. All four departments are defendants in the case. Oracle and IBM previously secured a £711 million deal covering the ERP software and systems integration. Synergy forms part of a wider program to move central government departments and arm's-length bodies onto cloud-based shared services, creating contracts worth about £1.7 billion for technology suppliers. Sopra Steria said the DWP agreed to a Project Change Clause allowing the department to amend the contract to "expand Capita's technology base and/or otherwise compensate for the deficiencies in Capita's tender." Sopra Steria alleged that the provision reduced Capita's exposure, cutting "the contingency that Capita may otherwise have needed to price into its tender" and providing "a means for Capita to boost its margin despite its abnormally low tendered price." It further alleged that responsibilities assumed by the DWP allowed Capita to bid on the basis of a contract that "has a materially reduced level of risk borne by Capita but a materially greater level of risk borne by the [DWP]." Sopra Steria argued that, across a number of the responsibilities accepted by the DWP in the contract, the same or equivalent terms were not offered to Sopra Steria. The DWP denied treating the bidders differently. It said each received equal time and opportunity to negotiate, and that when they raised the same question or request, both were given the same response. General clarifications were shared with both bidders, the department said, while concessions secured through negotiation were disclosed only to the bidder that requested them. Any differences therefore related to the particular points raised by Capita rather than unequal treatment, it argued. A DWP spokesperson said: "We don't comment on live legal proceedings." A spokesperson at Capita told The Register: "We took part in a robust procurement process and stand ready to work with the DUP to ensure a smooth transition of service. Our priority remains to ensure value for money for the public." The filings also highlight competing descriptions of the contract's value. In March, Capita said the deal was worth £370 million over ten years, including all extension periods. That figure was its IFRS 15 transaction price, or order-book value, and excluded change and expansion services expected during the contract. The DWP said it had no record of approving Capita's announcement and denied Sopra Steria's allegation that the agreed price remained unclear. According to the department's filing, the estimated undiscounted value is £606.6 million over the initial seven-year term and £873.4 million over the maximum ten years, including estimated projects and optional services. It stressed that Capita has no automatic entitlement to that additional work. ®

The proportion of workers in the UK cybersecurity industry identifying as women has dropped to 16 percent, the lowest level since 2021. Gender diversity has long been an issue pervading the STEM fields, although in cybersecurity this is especially pronounced, both at senior leadership and education levels. This is despite evidence that girls regularly outperform boys in STEM subjects at UK schools when they do participate. Not only are there still fewer women students in cybersecurity courses than those opting for computer science, but the percentage of women in the senior workforce (6+ years of experience) drops further to 12 percent – a figure that has remained broadly consistent since records began. For context, the UK average across all industries for female-identifying workers is 48 percent. Across the digital workforce, as of last year’s data, the average is 30 percent. The UK government interviewed various stakeholders in the cyber industry, finding that the barriers to senior leadership positions were structural – employers are purposely excluding women at higher levels. History plays a part too – older heads remaining in their positions from back when gender diversity was a matter less discussed – but recruiters say employers are still holding women back based on their perceived family ambitions. One recruitment agent was quoted in the report as saying: “When I’ve spoken to a business and said to them ‘why don’t you hire a more diverse workforce?’ You’ll get the normal common ones of ‘well if we hire a female, she’ll get pregnant, she’ll be off for 12 months,’ which isn’t right.” Refusing to hire women based on assumptions or fears about future pregnancy is a form of illegal gender discrimination that directly violates the UK's Equality Act 2010. Other common barriers to senior positions include assumptions they did not have the requisite technical skills for the role, and that cybersecurity is still seen as “an old boys’ club.” “This tied into a broader finding that stereotypes about women not being interested in cybersecurity continued to persist,” the report noted. “A cybersecurity firm noted that during a career talk on cybersecurity, a group of girls walked out of the talk, and the careers teacher reinforced the perception that the sector did not appeal to women.” The business told the government: “I went to the careers lady ‘What was the story with the five girls that left?’ And she went ‘Oh, cyber security is not really a girl’s job’.” Jill Broom, head of cyber resilience at techUK, said the onus is on employers to work harder on breaking down the lingering stereotypes about women in cybersecurity. “Cybersecurity underpins our growth, our economy and the safety of our society, with the sector offering growing employment opportunities and career prospects,” she told The Register. “However, the underrepresentation of women in this industry remains a significant concern. “A lack of gender diversity not only limits opportunities for women to benefit from this growing sector but also risks narrowing the range of perspectives and ideas that are essential to tackling increasingly complex cyber threats. Educators and employers must work together to challenge stereotypes, break down barriers and promote cybersecurity as an accessible and inclusive career path.” Representation for other groups fared comparatively better. This past year set a new record for neurodivergent workers in the cybersecurity industry, with 22 percent of UK staff identifying as neurodivergent. The figure represents a sharp increase from 16 percent the year before, one that has grown each year consistently since the 9 percent reported in 2020, and exceeds the digital sector average of 19 percent. “Cybersecurity is the most neurodiverse sector I have ever seen, and I think personally it’s celebrated, especially internally within the sector,” one respondent from a small cybersecurity business told the report's authors. While this year’s results may prove especially welcome to the neurodiverse crowd, the report noted this may reflect the rising awareness of neurodiversity among employers, rather than a true increase in numbers. The representation of ethnic minorities also remained at 19 percent, the same proportion as in 2025’s data, although this was a modest rise from 2024, in which 13 percent were from ethnic minorities. The figure is aligned with the digital sector average of 20 percent, and exceeds the UK’s pan-industry average of 16 percent. However, the representation of these groups suffers at the senior levels. The proportion of ethnic minorities in senior positions stands at 9 percent, a low figure that has persisted for the third year running, and one that is considerably down from the 15 percent high of 2021. As for explanations, the report offered few. “Ethnicity was hardly mentioned and was not generally felt to be an issue, despite the quantitative findings suggesting ethnic diversity at senior levels has remained lower than in the 2021 to 2023 studies,” it stated. “Most commonly, participants did not offer any concrete suggestions for enabling the progression of staff from diverse backgrounds into senior cybersecurity positions. Some employers stated that career development was open to everyone and was based on merit.” For neurodivergent security pros, it was not their technical abilities holding them back, but some said a lack of soft skills may hinder them in senior-role scenarios. “They’re more than capable of doing a leadership role,” said one small cybersecurity business. “It’s just they might not be soft-skilled enough to deal with difficult teams, difficult conversations. But to be honest, I’ve seen some fantastic people who are neurodiverse in leadership roles.” Disabled people are continuously absent from the workforce too, occupying just 9 percent of UK roles and 5 percent of senior positions. This is both less than the digital sector average of 15 percent, and significantly less than the UK’s pan-industry average of 18 percent. ®

Just 7 percent of Brits think social media is a force for good and around one in three suspect that life would get better if all these sites were erased from the internet tomorrow. Or so claims Opinium Research, which describes itself as a “strategic insight agency.” It polled 2,000 adults and 1,100 parents in May and The Register’s major surprise is that more people of Britland didn’t want to see social media rubbed out. Some 42 percent surveyed said these networks are addictive, and half think they are worse for society now than they were in 2010 as they contain false or misleading information and the algorithms dictate what they see, making public debate more divisive. More than half reckon the rot set in due to commercialization, yet one in ten admitted buying products every day via the platforms in the last year with around a fifth doing so every week and 12 percent claiming they discover new brands via their feeds daily. Irrespective of the negative sentiments, 49 percent use social media more now than they did 16 years ago, and a third use it a lot more. 31 percent are more using it to view content than post themselves. When there’s so much bot slop and political propaganda to chew through, who has time to upload pictures of, er, cats or the meals they made for themselves? More emphatically, seven in ten people surveyed support fines for social media businesses whose platforms expose under-16s to harmful content. Britain has tried to tackle this and a social media ban for that age group is in the offing. The research was not commissioned by any commercial or government entity, Opinium told The Register it was designed as a “thought leadership piece.” It lands a week before The Social Reckoning hits the cinemas, Aaron Sorkin’s sequel to his critically acclaimed The Social Network, a film that cast Mark Zuckerberg in a less than favorable light. The digital ditch has widened in the past five years since Elon Musk bought Twitter - a tool used by a tool to sow seeds of discontent. Some of the glorious leaders of social media empires have also kowtowed to US President Donald Trump, emboldening those with opinions some may consider racist or sexist. Trump threatened to send Zuck to prison if he was re-elected, branding him a so-called “election fraudster.” Trump lost the 2020 election and there is no evidence he lost it due to fraud. The depressing fact is that more Brits are shovelling social media up their nose than ever before. According to Statista, 55.5 million are signed up, compared to 29.4 million in 2010. This is despite people knowing it is addictive, has ruined the quality of public discourse, and wrecked privacy - we all know none of these platforms are truly free; users pay with their data. This vulture’s account on X is mostly unused, though he is testing out Bluesky, which seems to be a gentler and kinder version of the artist formerly known as Twitter. He deleted Facebook years ago and never looked back (yes, including the data it held in its datacenter). And you can’t find him on Instagram or Snapchat or anything else used to “socialize” or argue with other humans. The UK’s latest Prime Minister – the seventh in ten years – last week announced a center to fight misinformation. If that had been in place around the time leading up to the Brexit vote in 2016, maybe the country could have countered alleged Russian interference. Perhaps other divisive forces in British politics would have crawled back under a rock. Then again, Trump did enjoy a second coming. So what to do? Apart from Reg readers and the quality of the comments they add to our articles, should the internet should become a read-only medium? Terminating social media might be a first step in the right direction. ®

The thought of automated software making purchases on behalf of consumers from online merchants thrills much of the tech and financial industry. The chatter started in early 2025 and has surged since then, giving rise to the term "agentic commerce." A few reality checks have called the idea into question. For example, Amazon recently blocked Meta's Muse bot, citing terms of use restrictions. This was after the e-commerce giant had previously blocked Perplexity's AI bot, and even won a preliminary injunction that was later overturned as the litigation dragged on. But even if major platforms like Amazon haven't accepted that their e-commerce services dissolve into an API call for automated shopping assistants that seek out low prices, payment companies welcome automated shopping. Mastercard on Wednesday published a report exploring what needs to happen to make agentic commerce workable. "AI agents are learning to shop, pay, and act on behalf of consumers, businesses, and machines," the report says. "ICSC and McKinsey project that agentic commerce in US consumer retail could reach $1 trillion in revenue by 2030, and Gartner expects AI agents to intermediate more than $15 trillion in B2B spending by 2028." The word "could" is doing a lot of work here. As the payment biz observes, every player in the commerce chain needs to get onboard with the idea of agentic commerce or it won't happen. At The AI Conference in San Francisco on Wednesday, Lindsay Walker, product manager at Hedera AI Studio, said that will take some time. "Agentic commerce is not a reality yet," said Walker during her presentation. "There are a lot of products out there claiming that they're creating agent wallets or agent cards. But when it comes down to it, it's not functional yet and hasn't truly emerged." Within five years, she expects agentic commerce to be a real thing. But this vulture is skeptical that there will be much demand for surrendering the power of the purse, based on several factors. First, e-commerce sites already offer automated repeat purchasing, without AI agents. Second, low-cost items are already trivially easy to buy from online retailers with only a few clicks. An AI agent is unlikely to improve that process. When people purchase high-cost items, they take pains over their choices with the sort of close consideration many would be reluctant and/or remiss to delegate. Third, trust matters in commercial transactions. AI companies have shown that their models cannot be trusted and there's no transparency into how agents would make purchases, or whether the vendors involved influence prices or purchasing decisions. Personalized pricing via AI algorithms is already under scrutiny by US lawmakers, so further efforts to automate transactions may face regulatory friction (though perhaps not under the current regulate-yourself administration). Points of friction Walker defines agentic commerce broadly, as "more than just that moment of purchase. It includes discovery, it includes negotiation, it includes settlement, and it includes that post-purchase process and logistics. Discovering and comparing options is just as important as the payment moment, which is actually the only thing that people have been focusing on so far." Within that continuum, Walker said, agentic commerce can be as simple as AI helping with product selection and the purchase process. That's viable. It gets more complicated when users delegate authority to an AI agent that makes decisions on its own. That, she said, is where things break down currently. Money is too important. Funds are too important. Value is too important. You need to have deterministic gates that can't be bypassed by a probabilistic model." "The way that we build e-commerce right now works for humans, but it does not work for AI," she said. To make AI transactions viable, she said, transactions cannot be run by probabilistic models. "Money is too important," she said. "Funds are too important. Value is too important. You need to have deterministic gates that can't be bypassed by a probabilistic model. It can't be left open to interpretation." Rather, people need a way to provide input in a deterministic way that signals intent to purchase. "Traditionally in commerce there's something called 'card present' where if a merchant doesn't want to be held liable for a purchase that a human claims they didn't make, they have to prove that the [payment] card is present," Walker explained. "Well, with an AI agent, cards are not present, ever." To solve this quandary, she contends, the industry needs a mechanism for tethering a person's identity to an agent. There are also simple functional problems with how e-commerce is set up today. Walker said there are products out there that companies describe as agentic wallets or agentic cards. But they don't work. "This is an example checkout that I tried to do on the website," she recounted. "I was given a specific virtual card or account to make this purchase. However, there was no point in creating this because the AI agent couldn't make the purchase." The AI agent couldn't log in to access Walker's account, which contained the relevant shipping address. It also couldn't access the DOM element on the web page where it was supposed to enter the credit card number. So Walker had to intervene and enter the information manually. Another problem, she said, is that the site calculated taxes and shipping based on the customer's location. When agents operate from a remote server, she said, that may change the location data. Some of these issues are being addressed by the x402 protocol for internet payments, but Walker said the specification is still evolving and only addresses the payment moment. "The reality right now is we're simply working with agent-assisted shopping," said Walker. "There's no true agentic autonomy going on. And it's very different than autonomous agentic commerce. The human is still there at the moment of purchase. They're still making all the decisions." For shopping bots to work, people have to be able to trust that agents will do what they're supposed to do, said Walker. And we still need suitable infrastructure. "We need to change the whole e-commerce flow," she said. "We need to change all the surfaces so agents can interact, so they're imbued with the ability to do so. And we need to be able to do it at machine speed. "Machine speed means that payments, agreements, and proofs have to move as fast as the agent itself between systems. Not siloed data. It needs to happen in fractions of a second, with fractions of a cent, to execute all of these transactions and exchanges." But today's e-commerce companies are accustomed to commanding more than a fraction of a cent for their goods and services. Getting them to buy into this frictionless agentic future will not be an easy ask. ®

Singapore’s digital transformation agency, GovTech, is piloting a dating app. GovTech says the app came about after discussions among its staff, who apparently “shared an interest in exploring some of the challenges people can face when meeting someone new.” “They wondered whether a different approach that places greater emphasis on compatibility through values and preferences, and offers fewer matches at a time, could give users more space to consider each introduction and decide whether they would like to take the next step.” The staffers took those ideas to GovTech’s annual hackathon, and the result was “FirstDate,” billed as “An initiative to support singles aged 21-35 in their dating journey.” The app asks users to complete a questionnaire that GovTech says “covers users' interests, habits, values and preferences to curate matches based on compatibility.” “Once completed, leave the matching to us,” the agency urges. That’s not strictly true because the app applies the Gale-Shapley Stable Matching algorithm, a method that imagines a group of people hoping to pair off in some way. In the 1962 paper [PDF] that proposes the algorithm, the authors offer the following scenario: “A certain community consists of n men and n women. Each person ranks those of the opposite sex in accordance with his or her preferences for a marriage partner. We seek a satisfactory way of marrying off all members of the community … if under it there are a man and a woman who are not married to each other but prefer each other to their actual mates.” The algorithm aims to produce stable relationships by sifting all participants’ preferences to find viable couples. It’s not perfect, by any means, but is widely used in economics. Readers who imagine that algorithmic matching can’t replace the mysteries of romance may wish to note that the OECD ranks Singaporean high school students as the world’s second-most proficient at mathematics. GovTech, however, allows that the algorithm can’t “guarantee chemistry or a match leading to a relationship.” The app operates on a 72-hour cycle, during which users will see info about one person the algorithm suggests they might find interesting. If both participants agree, the app reveals contact details. “Take it from there, reach out and get chatting!” GovTech urges. “If you do meet up, try our Date Quests to break the ice.” Date Quests are suggested activities for a first date. For now, the app is only available to single members of Singapore’s civil service. There’s no word on when or if Singapore might decide on wider release and take on Tinder, or grapple with Grindr. GovTech’s most famous app before FirstDate was probably TraceTogether, which used smartphones’ Bluetooth radios to track people during the COVID-19 pandemic in the hope of identifying people who had been exposed to the virus. Singaporean authorities used the app to contact those at risk of infection, and requred them to enter isolation to slow the spread of the virus. TraceTogether, and similar apps deployed around the world, mostly flopped. It’s unclear why Singapore has decided to test this app however one of the island nation’s five shared values is “Family as the basic unit of society.” That’s more than a platitude: a program called Made for Families offers grants to purchase housing, funding for pre-natal care, and tax rebates for parents. Those incentives haven’t prevented Singapore’s birth rate from falling to record lows. Singapore is not the first jurisdiction to try this sort of thing: the City of Tokyo did likewise in 2024. ®

Memory-maker Micron has warned that RAM shortages will persist into 2028, and perhaps beyond. Speaking on the company’s FY 2026 earnings call, CEO and company chair Sanjay Mehrotra reminded investors that Micron has already sold most of the memory it will make next year and said customers will pay “much higher prices” than they shelled out this year. “In calendar 2027 as well as 2028, we see demand exceeding supply,” he added. “In fact, we see greater tightness in the industry in 2027 and in 2028 versus 2026. Overall, supply-demand environment is only getting tighter.” “We do not have line of sight to when supply and demand will return to balance.” Micron plans to bring new factories online in 2028 – helped by planned capex of $25 billion in the first half of its new financial year – but execs warned those facilities won’t immediately help to improve availability or ease prices. The CEO said demand for the high-bandwidth memory (HBM) needed in AI hardware is growing faster than it is for the DRAM used in servers. Micron is also finding ways to expand its margins for HBM, which is currently not as profitable as DRAM. Both types of memory are, however, enormously profitable. Micron’s earnings announcement reveals that the gross margin for its cloud memory business unit, which focuses on HBM, reported a Q4 gross margin of 83 percent – a big jump from the 59 percent in last year’s Q4. The core datacenter business unit, which sells more DRAM, recorded Q4 gross margin of 90 percent, up from 41 percent last year. Sales of solid-state disks for use in datacenters reached almost $10 billion for the quarter, up more than 1,000 percent year over year. Q4 revenue came in at $54.25 billion, up from $11.3 billion last year. Annual revenue landed at $133.2 billion, vastly higher than last year’s $37.4 billion. Net income rose 895 percent to $85 billion. Mehrotra told investors Micron has “a strong roadmap for future HBM products and are proud to be working with NVIDIA on the industry’s first custom HBM4E implementation, NV-HBM, to be adopted on next generation of GPUs and NVLink fusion platforms. In NAND, AI context memory storage used for KV cache offload and HDD displacement opportunities are expanding the addressable market for SSDs.” Micron forecast Q1 FY27 revenue of $61.5 billion plus or minus $1.5 billion, and gross margin of 86.25 percent. The company’s share price spiked, then returned to its close-of-day price in after-hours trading, suggesting investors expected its colossal growth and profit. ®

Microsoft has advised users of its ExpressRoute Gateway, VPN Gateway, and Azure VMware service that they may experience degraded or interrupted network connectivity, and struggle to perform some network management operations. This looks like a self-inflicted wound because Microsoft’s status page says it has “paused the infrastructure servicing activity associated with the onset of this event.” The event started at 20:30 UTC on 30 September 2026. ExpressRoute Gateway is a service that connects on-prem networks to virtual networks in Azure, making it an important element of a hybrid cloud. Azure VPN Gateway creates a secure tunnel between on-prem infrastructure and Azure. Microsoft pitches its Azure VMware Service as an ideal way to build a hybrid cloud on VMware. This incident is therefore likely to make life hard for Microsoft’s hybrid cloud customers. At the time of writing, the incident impacts 18 Azure regions: West US, West US 3, North Europe, West Europe, France Central, UK West, UK South, Switzerland North, Southeast Asia, East Asia, Japan West, Korea Central, South Africa North, UAE North, Mexico Central, Germany North, South India, and Jio India Central. The Azure VMware service isn’t impacted in the last four of those regions. As of 23:13 UTC, Microsoft says it is “seeing continued recovery across impacted ExpressRoute gateways and are monitoring this recovery to confirm that it remains durable.” The company also advised that some affected VPN Gateways have experienced reduced redundancy rather than a complete loss of connectivity. “Some supporting network management components have not recovered automatically and are contributing to management operation failures in a subset of affected regions,” the update adds. “Engineering teams are actively restoring these components using alternate healthy instances where available.” Microsoft doesn’t know what happened, or why, but says its investigation “continues to show a correlation between this event and infrastructure operating system servicing activity.” The Register will update this story as Microsoft releases more information. ®

OpenAI, which hoovered up vast amounts of internet content amid copyright fights, has accused individuals associated with China’s Moonshot AI of being involved in a "distillation attack" that began July 1. The house of Altman warns that extracting its models’ reasoning at scale could help rivals train capable models without preserving the same guardrails. Model distillation is a machine learning technique that can involve using one model’s outputs to train another – in adversarial cases, by sending bulk queries designed to reproduce the larger model’s reasoning and capabilities. Both the feds and major US AI companies, including Google and Anthropic, have accused Chinese rivals - and specifically Moonshot AI - of using distillation to reproduce capabilities from American models. In a Wednesday blog, OpenAI chimed in, saying it spotted and ultimately disrupted an adversarial distillation campaign that ran nearly all of July. “The operators did not break our encryption, compromise a database, or gain direct access to stored user conversations,” according to the blog. “Instead, they manipulated model interactions so that protected reasoning could be reproduced in forms visible to the requester in a coordinated, scaled manner that violated our terms of service.” The queries began on July 1, and while they started slowly, “we observed high-volume spikes on July 24 and 25 consisting of 16,000 requests using a relevant extraction pattern from over 4,000 users,” OpenAI said. Upon investigating the incident, the AI giant identified related “prompt-pattern activity” across more than 15,000 users. OpenAI fully disrupted the campaign on July 28, we’re told. While OpenAI said that it's unclear whether all of the operators during the July time period were linked to just one rival AI company, the “core cluster” of the theft came from Moonshot AI, which developed Kimi. The Register reached out to Moonshot AI for comment and did not receive an immediate response. We also asked OpenAI which of its models were targeted during the July campaign, but did not hear back. It’s worth noting that, in late July, US President Donald Trump’s Assistant for Science and Technology Michael Kratsios also accused Moonshot AI of creating its Kimi K3 model by distilling Anthropic’s Fable. Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5 model, released a week ago, comes with a defense against distillation called "preserved thinking" that it introduced with Fable 5.1. “Adversarial distillation poses safety and national security risks,” OpenAI said on Wednesday, echoing earlier gripes from American companies and government officials. “Extracted reasoning could be used to train another model without preserving the safeguards applied to the original model’s user-facing outputs,” OpenAI added. “At scale, distillation can also accelerate the transfer of advanced capabilities without requiring the same investment in safety. These concerns become heightened as models gain capabilities in dual use domains.” In response, OpenAI said it banned the model-copying accounts tightened signup and infrastructure controls and expanded monitoring efforts. It also “closed a pathway that allowed someone who already possessed another user's encrypted reasoning to replay it and recover its contents,” and worked with service providers to ensure that this type of distillation activity didn’t just move to third-party services. Additionally, OpenAI shared the details of its investigation with other AI firms, through the Frontier Model Forum, and government information-sharing programs.®

The White House's new AI chatbot, America.gov, turns out to be a bit of a sausage fest. Not long after the AI-powered portal went live this week, El Reg readers were met face-to-face with a life size Frankfurter. The prompt? "hotdog." How the apparent Easter egg, a raw dog criminally devoid of condiments, made it onto the site, we can't say. We reached out to the White House for comment on the mystery meat, but sadly haven't heard back. But given the AI chatbot's general lack of polish, it wouldn't surprise us to discover the errant glizzy was the product of a bored and presumably hungry dev, whose work was forgotten and eventually made it to production. It certainly wouldn't be the first time easter eggs made it into a production release. If you don't believe us, go ask Google to "do a barrel roll." Intended as a common gateway for Americans to discover, access, and complete common tasks, America.gov is a potentially hallucination-prone front end to Google's Gemini and SpaceXAI's Groq. The site was supposedly built by the National Design Studio, but looks and feels more like something that was frantically vibe coded by a couple of summer interns who've never heard of QA. As we reported yesterday, the site is packed with rendering errors and features that aren't ready and won't be until at least 2027. These rendering errors it turns out include the hot dog. On at least one occasion, the Easter egg glitched and was generating extra wieners with every press of the enter key. How generous of the Trump administration to hand out seconds and even thirds. By the time the site is actually finished, we can only hope our hot dog hero will have snuck in a few more easter eggs. May we suggest baseball or apple pie? ®

Mechanical calculators are precise, fascinating gadgets that you wouldn’t think would take well to being 3D printed, but a YouTuber has proved that a pocket-sized unit can be made purely from plastic filament. YouTuber 3D all Workshop detailed his working, but limited, build in a recent video. If you’re familiar with the holy grail of palm-sized mechanical calculators, the Curta, also known as the “pepper mill,” you already have a working understanding of how this 3D-printed calculator works. As detailed in the video, Workshop’s 3D-printed mechanical calculator, like the Curta, relies on a more than 200-year-old component known as the Leibniz stepped drum, named for its inventor, German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. The core concept of the calculator’s central mechanism, like that of many other mechanical calculators, is the Leibniz drum’s teeth of different lengths. There are nine teeth per drum, representing values one through nine, while a zero setting engages none of them. Workshop’s 3D printed calculator can take inputs from 1 to 999, with one drum per digit. You use a lever to move a gear up the drum so that it only activates as many teeth as are needed for a particular number. The same concept is used to input values into the Curta, just in a much more precise manner - one of the big benefits of using machined aluminum over 3D printing filament. As a result of wanting to keep the 3D printed calc’s build palm-sized, the YouTuber was forced to restrict what it’s able to do. It can do addition, and the addition of a multi-wheel enables it to also do multiplication by simply performing multiple sequences of adding the same number. The Curta does multiplication in a similar manner, requiring a user to input their base number and the number of times they want to multiply by addition. Unlike the Curta, Workshop’s calculator can’t subtract, nor can it divide - as its creator explains, there simply wasn’t the room to get all those fiddly bits into a palm-sized device. It’s not clear how large it would have to be to add those functions, but if the 3x-sized 3D printed Curta is any indication - its creator said the increased size was necessary - it’d probably be quite large. Scaling down to Workshop’s tiny 3D printed calculator means plenty of issues were bound to arise, and they definitely did. “There were a lot of problems,” he noted, explaining that “even the tiniest inconsistencies when printing can cause problems.” If you’ve ever used a 3D filament printer, you know how often such inconsistencies pop up. Gears kept binding because of tight 3D-printing tolerances, while backlash (the play between mating mechanical parts) could throw the drums out of sync. Pieces kept breaking during redesigns, and even the vibrations from picking up and using the calculator were enough to disrupt its components. The YouTuber went through roughly 100 design iterations over the two-month project, finally addressing the problems with custom-designed 3D-printed springs and a ratchet mechanism that kept backlash from throwing the drums out of sync. All said, the final build ended up with 109 separate pieces, took 17 print-hours to complete, and used 90g of filament. Despite multiple calls on YouTube for 3D all Workshop to publish, or even sell, his design, he has yet to make it available, so no struggling through a day-long print job for a potentially brief moment playing with this one. In the meantime, you could 3D print the giant Curta, or if you have a couple grand lying around begging to be spent, try to get your hands on an original. ®

The Trump administration's export control policies governing the sale of AI accelerators to China haven't stopped homegrown Huawei from filling the void. In a Q&A-style release this week, the company's rotating chairman Eric Xu claimed that its Ascend line of neural processing units (NPUs) had exceeded Nvidia in Chinese market share. "It's pretty hard to collect data about the market share of Nvidia in China, but based on the data we have collected, Ascend has surpassed Nvidia," he said. "Chinese people have a keen sense of urgency, and will not accept a future in which others decide whether or not we can have access to certain products." Since taking office, the Trump administration has done an about-face on export controls. After imposing new licensing requirements on Nvidia's and AMD's China-spec accelerators in April 2025, the US Commerce Department reversed course that summer, later reaching an arrangement to cut the US government in on a percentage of certain China-bound chip sales. By late last year, the Trump administration loosened restrictions further, announcing that Nvidia would be allowed to sell its more potent H200-series parts to approved Chinese customers for the first time ever. However, the damage was already done. While Uncle Sam had given Jensen Huang its blessing to resume sales, the initial blockade of H20s earlier in the year had set off alarm bells in Beijing. Government officials there began pressuring bit barn operators to transition away from foreign accelerators in favor of homegrown alternatives. During Nvidia's Q2 earnings call, executives revealed that while the company had begun shipments of a small volume of H200 accelerators to the region, they amounted to less than 1 percent of its datacenter revenues. "Even though our chips may be less advanced, at least their supply is assured, so that you don't have to worry about chip supply day in and day out," Xu said. "For the Chinese government, for the domestic industry, and for Huawei, the path forward is undoubtedly to push for full self-sufficiency in terms of chips and the entire semiconductor value chain." As we recently discussed, while Huawei's latest accelerators still fall short of Nvidia's or AMD's on paper, they make up for that deficit with scale. Huawei is currently deploying a 256,000-card Atlas 950 SuperCluster, while its newer architecture is designed to support training and inference for multi-trillion-parameter models and scale to as many as one million NPUs. However, as Xu notes, Huawei likely won't be a threat to Nvidia outside of China for a while. "We don't have enough capacity to satisfy the demand in China. We don't have plans to expand the international market in a fully-fledged way," he said, downplaying reports that Huawei had begun supplying friendly nations with its chips. "The balance between satisfying the needs of domestic customers and those of international customers is actually quite easy," he said when asked about the use of Ascend accelerators to power Malaysia's sovereign AI initiative. "We prioritize Chinese customers who are in urgent demand for compute; outside of China we only supply a very limited number of customers who either have no access to alternative solutions or want an alternative solution." Along with pressure from government officials to transition away from foreign chips, changing software paradigms are making the transition easier for model devs, like DeepSeek, which has been working with Huawei's chips for well over a year now. "The first barrier encountered by Ascend is actually not hardware itself," said Liao Heng, chief scientist of Huawei's HiSilicon. "It's primarily the ecosystem barrier, because two years ago there was still a tremendous software barrier for Ascend." Liao is referring to what's often called the CUDA moat, a software hurdle not unique to China but faced by essentially every competing chipmaker. "There have been drastic changes over the past 18 months," Liao said. He explained that, two years ago, AI training was dominated by PyTorch running atop CUDA, but changes in model architectures have pushed model devs to "mega-kernel-style programming." "CUDA was no longer deemed important by the frontier labs, nowhere near as much as two years ago," he said. To this end, DeepSeek reportedly released several software tools this week aimed at making Huawei’s Ascend accelerators more accessible to other AI labs. ®