Microsoft's June Windows update has upset some third-party applications that use Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) automation to open or control Office apps, leaving users with failed document launches and, in some cases, no error message to explain what went wrong. According to Microsoft, "reports indicate that this issue may affect applications such as CCH Engagement, Workpaper Manager, dental software (such as Dentrix and Softdent), and Zotero; other similar applications might also be impacted." The workaround is to "open the application or document directly instead of launching it from the affected third-party application." Microsoft was quick to point out that this wasn't its problem. The third parties concerned are "independent of Microsoft." "We make no warranty, implied or otherwise, about the performance or reliability of these products." That would be fair enough were it not for the fact that these third parties are relying on Windows plumbing that has been around since the 1990s, and abruptly breaking or changing something in a Windows release doesn't give those vendors much time to deal with the problem. OLE allows one application to control another – for example, firing up a Word document or Excel spreadsheet from an accounting application. When it works properly, users don't need to switch between applications. The process should be seamless. If opening the file directly, which somewhat defeats the point of OLE, doesn't help, ordinary users will have to wait for a fix in "a future Windows update." There is a mitigation for affected devices within organizations, though obtaining it requires contacting Microsoft support for business customers. Veteran techies may find this mess ironic, given that in the 1990s Microsoft went all-in on OLE and ultimately saw off the rival OpenDoc tech backed by Apple and IBM. The issue is the first that Microsoft has acknowledged in the patch, although the company's forums are full of users complaining about other difficulties, including OneDrive and BitLocker problems. ®
Il team di analisti del Google Threat Intelligence ha documentato una recente campagna di cyber-spionaggio condotta da un attore malevolo avanzato. La minaccia risulta indirizzata verso istituti di ricerca medica e strutture del settore sanitario, sia pubbliche che private. L'attività ostile sembrerebbe sfruttare l'esposizione sulla rete pubblica di server che eseguono l'applicazione web REDCap (Research Electronic Data Capture).
La computazione quantistica è una delle tecnologie più discusse degli ultimi anni e l’idea di costruire sistemi di calcolo basati sui fenomeni della fisica quantistica continua ad alimentare aspettative enormi. Eppure il quantum computing resta lontano dall’essere una tecnologia matura. Non soltanto perché molti problemi scientifici devono ancora essere risolti, ma anche perché, al momento, manca una filiera industriale in grado di produrre in modo scalabile, e a costi sostenibili, l’hardware necessario a far funzionare un computer quantistico.
Come si può immaginare, costruire un hardware simile è molto complesso. Servono materie prime rare, chimica avanzata, sistemi criogenici sofisticati, ottica di precisione e componenti prodotti da un numero ristretto di aziende specializzate.
Il problema fondamentale è che un computer quantistico non deve semplicemente “calcolare”. Deve riuscire a “mantenere in vita” stati fisici estremamente fragili e utilizzarli per il calcolo. La grande promessa del quantum computing – sfruttare fenomeni quantistici come la sovrapposizione e l’entanglement per eseguire operazioni impraticabili per i computer tradizionali – dipende infatti dalla capacità di isolare gli effetti quantistici dalle interferenze del mondo esterno. Il problema, come anticipato anche da Heisenberg, è che gli stati quantistici sono incredibilmenteinstabili. Basta pochissimo per distruggerli: una vibrazione microscopica, una minima interferenza elettromagnetica, una variazione termica impercettibile. Questo significa che la prima e principale sfida da affrontare per produrre un computer quantistico è quella di costruire una specie di guscio che isoli il processo di calcolo dal “rumore” dell’ambiente esterno.
La sfida del freddo
Una delle interferenze più difficili da controllare è il calore. Per questo molti computer quantistici – in particolare quelli basati su circuiti superconduttori, una delle architetture oggi più sviluppate da aziende come IBM e Google — operano a temperature vicinissime allo zero assoluto, inferiori persino a quelle dello spazio profondo. Per raggiungerle servono sofisticati sistemi criogenici chiamati dilution refrigerator (refrigeratore a diluizione): strutture metalliche, simili a candelabri barocchi, che sono diventate una delle immagini simbolo del quantum computing.
Uno degli elementi chiave per il funzionamento di questi refrigeratori è invece l’elio-3. Rarissimo sulla Terra, l’elio-3 è un isotopo in proporzione più abbondante sulla superficie lunare, dove si è accumulato per miliardi di anni a causa del bombardamento del vento solare. I depositi di elio-3 diffusi nella regolite lunare alimentano da decenni miti tecnologici su future miniere sulla Luna che oggi, nell’era del “capitalismo spaziale”, paiono meno fantascientifici di un tempo. E del resto si può facilmente immaginare come un eventuale aumento della domanda di questo isotopo, connessa alla crescita del quantum computing, potrebbe rendere ancora più allettante l’avvio di attività estrattive lunari. Nell’attesa, gran parte dell’elio-3 disponibile sul nostro pianeta deriva indirettamente dal decadimento del trizio prodotto nei vecchi programmi nucleari militari, creando così un cortocircuito tra una tecnologia di frontiera e i residui industriali della guerra fredda.
Questa dipendenza da materie prime estremamente specializzate rende la filiera dei refrigeratori a diluzione molto fragile. A produrre queste macchine, infatti, sono pochissime aziende al mondo. La finlandese Bluefors, per esempio, è diventata in pochi anni uno dei principali fornitori dell’industria quantistica globale, ma anche uno degli snodi più delicati dell’intera catena produttiva. Se oggi si osserva la struttura industriale del quantum computing, ci si accorge infatti che il settore assomiglia meno all’industria informatica classica e più a un ecosistema di nicchie iperspecializzate, dove pochi attori controllano componenti essenziali e difficilmente sostituibili.
Una pluralità di approcci
Un ulteriore problema del quantum computing è che, almeno per ora, non esiste un’unica architettura dominante. Coesistono approcci diversi, ciascuno dei quali richiede infrastrutture, materiali e competenze specifici. Se i computer quantistici basati su circuiti superconduttori richiedono criogenia avanzata, i computer quantistici basati sugli “ioni intrappolati” dipendono invece da laser ad altissima stabilità, vuoto ultra-spinto e componenti fotonici delicatissimi. Altri approcci ancora – come quelli basati sui qubit fotonici o sugli atomi neutri (atomi privi di carica elettrica controllati tramite laser) – richiedono invece fibre e circuiti ottici a bassissima perdita, sorgenti luminose avanzate, specchi e cavità ottiche ad altissima qualità e, in alcuni casi, dispositivi microfabbricati costruiti con tolleranze estremamente ridotte.
Questo significa che, al momento, non esiste una singola frontiera industriale del quantum, ma molte frontiere sovrapposte. Per certi versi, la situazione ricorda alcune fasi iniziali dell’elettronica e dell’informatica del dopoguerra, quando convivevano tubi a vuoto, relè, transistor, memorie magnetiche e soluzioni architetturali diverse. Al tempo, l’industria elettronica era quindi un ecosistema frammentato, popolato da soluzioni incompatibili e processi produttivi difficili da standardizzare. La crescita esplosiva del settore arrivò solo quando emersero componenti, architetture e processi produttivi condivisi, capaci di trasformare dispositivi sperimentali in prodotti scalabili. È una lezione storica importante anche per il quantum computing.
Oggi il settore si trova ancora in una fase pre-standardizzazione: nessuno sa davvero quale architettura diventerà dominante, quali materiali saranno indispensabili o quali componenti potranno essere prodotti industrialmente su larga scala. E finché questa convergenza non avverrà, la computazione quantistica rischia di rimanere in un limbo “proto-industriale”, in cui ogni laboratorio tende a costruire il proprio ecosistema tecnologico come una specie di artigianato scientifico avanzatissimo.
Il problema del talento
La conseguenza di questo fatto è che molti processi produttivi necessari dipendono dall’esperienza accumulata da piccoli gruppi di tecnici altamente specializzati e sono, al momento, difficili da riprodurre serialmente.
La costruzione di un refrigeratore a diluzione, per esempio, richiede tecnici capaci di assemblare manualmente sistemi criogenici estremamente delicati, minimizzando vibrazioni, dispersioni termiche e impurità microscopiche. Si tratta di processi che dipendono ancora da forme di conoscenza pratica accumulate negli anni più che da standard industriali codificati. Dinamiche simili esistono anche nel campo dei semiconduttori avanzati e della litografia estrema. ASML, l’azienda olandese che produce le macchine EUV utilizzate per realizzare i chip più sofisticati al mondo, dipende a sua volta da una rete ristrettissima di fornitori iper-specializzati che, a loro volta, si avvalgono dell’esperienza di pochissimi “super-esperti” in singoli problemi tecnici altamente specifici.
Il vero collo di bottiglia “industriale” della computazione quantistica non riguarda solo le macchine, i materiali o la fisica, ma anche – e forse soprattutto – la disponibilità di talento tecnico adeguato alla portata della sfida produttiva che il quantum computing rappresenta. Per costruire un computer quantistico non basta infatti disporre di buoni fisici teorici o di eccellenti ingegneri. Serve la capacità di integrare competenze molto rare e diverse tra loro: criogenia estrema, scienza dei materiali, ottica avanzata, microfabbricazione, elettronica a radiofrequenza, software di controllo, vuoto ultra-spinto, chimica ultrapura. E soprattutto serve farlo in modo coordinato, continuo e riproducibile. La vera difficoltà non è solo inventare una tecnologia funzionante, ma costruire una massa critica di persone capaci di trasformarla in un sistema industriale.
Per questo il futuro “industriale” del quantum computing è anche un gigantesco problema di scala umana. Non basta avere qualche centinaio di ricercatori eccellenti sparsi nel mondo accademico. Affinché la tecnologia diventi industriale servono migliaia di tecnici, ingegneri e operatori altamente qualificati distribuiti lungo filiere produttive estremamente sofisticate (un fatto che la Cina sembra aver compreso prima di tutti). Servirà cioè trasformare competenze oggi quasi artigianali in capacità industriali diffuse.
La scienza alla base di tecnologie importanti può certamente nascere da un piccolo gruppo di persone eccezionalmente dotate, ma un’industria richiede la capacità di riprodurre sistematicamente quel livello di competenza su larga scala. Ancora una volta ci si può rivolgere alla storia della microelettronica per capirlo. Il vero salto nella produzione seriale di hardware informatici non avvenne infatti quando un gruppo di pionieri ai Bell Labs inventò i transistor, ma quando gli Stati Uniti cominciarono a formare enormi quantità di ingegneri in grado di capire come funzionavano e come si potevano migliorare transistor e circuiti integrati.
In questo senso la vera sfida per il futuro della computazione quantistica non è soltanto costruire una macchina capace di funzionare. È costruire le condizioni industriali, economiche e umane per trasformare una tecnologia sperimentale fragile in un’infrastruttura produttiva stabile.
INTERVIEW There are only a handful of dedicated Linux PC vendors. One of the best-known is the 20-year-old American company System76. It's not just a business that installs Linux on PCs. System76 is building something rare in 2026: a vertically integrated Linux‑first computing stack that treats open source as an engineering north star, not just marketing copy. We spoke to founder and CEO Carl Richell about where System76 began and where it's going. When Richell started System76 20 years ago, he had "$1,500 in my basement" and no venture capital. He only had a bet that there were enough serious Linux users to sustain an honest, Linux‑only PC company. It has since grown organically into a factory operation in Denver, where raw aluminum sheets and billets come in one end and finished Thelio desktops roll out the other, complete with in‑house firmware and Linux preloads. It wasn't an immediate success. The growth curve was incremental. The company started in a basement, moved to a tiny office, then a slightly larger office, a still bigger one in downtown Denver, and, more recently, System76 operates out of its own factory. There, the company says, its servers, desktops, and laptops are "designed by nerds. Engineered by experts. Handcrafted by humans." All this was funded, Richell said, by reinvested profits and conventional machinery loans rather than venture capitalists. This was by design. That choice means there's no VC partner demanding an "exit" or pushing for a pivot away from Linux and open source; Richell says they "work for our customers and we work for each other," and have "never had to really roll the dice on the company," just take calculated risks. That deliberate pacing also shaped the culture. Many of the engineers who could "go work at Google" stay, he argues, because their "true beliefs align" with System76's open source‑first mission, not a retrofit of openness onto an ad business. For a niche OEM in a hostile, margin‑thin PC market, that ideological stickiness might be as important an asset as any product spec sheet. System76 likes to talk about its community roots, but the company's survival story is written in purchase orders. More than half of its sales are business‑to‑business, and Richell says there are "very few Fortune 500 companies that we don't ship products to," even if those deals are typically developer and engineering rigs rather than sprawling, company‑wide rollouts. Those systems often land in engineering departments and university labs as developer desktops, AI workstations, or high‑end Linux boxes for research workloads rather than accounting PCs. The pitch is a fully integrated Linux platform: hardware designed and manufactured for Linux in Denver, Pop!_OS and COSMIC developed in‑house, and open firmware that can be audited, modified, and redeployed. In a year when AI datacenters have driven up the cost of memory and storage, System76 entered 2026 expecting "much harsher headwinds" from component prices. Instead, demand stayed strong, and the business continues to grow year‑over‑year, suggesting that for a certain class of customer – developers, researchers, and Linux‑centric organizations – the premium for a well‑supported Linux workstation is easier to swallow than the friction of fighting Windows or bespoke dual‑boot setups. System76 keeps that business by pairing the product with the kind of operational plumbing most open hardware upstarts never quite build. That includes tightly coupled support, sales, and engineering teams (support is "ten feet from the sales team") and the ability to trace customer pain directly into product changes. It's a Linux company built like a small enterprise vendor, not a boutique enthusiast shop. On the hardware side, 2026 is the beginning of a new design era, centered on the freshly redesigned Thelio desktop family. Mira is the high‑performance mid‑tower, aimed at users who need serious CPU and GPU throughput in a comparatively compact box. Thelio Major stretches into high‑end desktop territory with support for Threadripper‑class CPUs, ECC memory, and dual power supplies to feed multiple top‑end GPUs. Richell describes Mira as the "beginning of that new desktop design refresh," a platform that lets System76 relearn thermal dynamics, structural design, and manufacturability at scale. They put the chassis through adhesive and mechanical torture tests – robots repeatedly pulling the side and front panels off thousands of times – to ensure the new modular construction would withstand years of use and field servicing. Next up is the Prime, a mini‑ITX desktop that shrinks the new design language into an "adorable, tiny desktop" now going through thermal testing. Further out is "Paleo Mega," an AI workstation designed to carry the thermal and power lessons from Mira and Major into multi‑GPU, AI‑first configurations, where cooling and power delivery are often the limiting factors. The product cadence shows a company that now thinks in platform terms: reuse chassis and thermal designs across a family, and then specialize for AI, compact workstations, and other niches. COSMIC and Pop!_OS as a buildable desktop If hardware is where System76 proves it can build real machines, software is where it tries to shape the broader Linux ecosystem. COSMIC, its Rust‑based desktop for Pop!_OS and other distros, is explicitly designed to be "modular and composable," with components you can replace, extend, or use as building blocks for entirely new UI experiences. Richell argues that before COSMIC, there "wasn't really a Linux desktop… designed to build things" in the way the kernel or the LAMP stack are foundations for other work. COSMIC's components have strict, well‑defined dependencies and are built to be reassembled – by OEMs, distro maintainers, or specialized platforms – into custom desktops for different devices and use cases. In System76's ideal world, COSMIC becomes the UI layer you reach for when you're building your own Linux‑based system, not just the default skin on Pop!_OS. On the user‑facing side, COSMIC is already shipping as a rolling‑release desktop, with new features and fixes flowing into users' machines as soon as they clear QA rather than on slow, monolithic schedules. Since its December 11 release, the project has seen roughly 1,200 merges from 172 contributors, a pace more reminiscent of a popular upstream project than a vendor‑specific shell. That rolling strategy matters right now in gaming, where System76 is devoting fresh attention. The team has recently added support for Wayland's pointer capture protocol, so first‑person shooters and "infinite scroll" scenarios behave correctly, fixed full‑screen window handling for workflows like Steam Big Picture, and tightened a long list of "around the edges" behaviors that used to require user workarounds. In Richell's telling, the aim is to make gaming "just work" on Pop!_OS + COSMIC without hidden incantations, a necessity if Linux gaming is going to be credible outside the hobbyist circle. Pop!_OS itself runs atop Ubuntu LTS, with System76 adopting what Richell – over some internal grumbling – still calls a "hardware enablement stack": newer kernels, Mesa, and related bits to keep up with GPUs and emerging hardware, while COSMIC continues to roll on top. The current release tracks Ubuntu 24.04 LTS; Pop!_OS 26.04 is expected to follow roughly a month after its upstream release, with some delay thanks to Canonical's recent DDoS‑related infrastructure issues. Critically, Pop!_OS has gone "entirely over to Wayland." That move, Richell says, freed the team from trying to build a cutting‑edge desktop on top of legacy X11 stacks and let them align COSMIC with the latest graphics and input pipelines from the start. Ask any Linux vendor about AI in 2026, and you'll likely get a flurry of product names; System76 is more circumspect. While Canonical, for example, is busy wiring "agentic AI tools" into Ubuntu so they're easy to add, Richell says System76 is still "thinking about it" and sees "more questions than answers" for now. The areas where he does see clear value for AI are pragmatic, Linux-user-focused ones, including accessibility features that can leverage AI, and smarter launchers that go beyond fuzzy string matching to actually understand user intent when they hit Super and start typing. In that world, the launcher might answer questions, locate files, or trigger workflows that shrink the distance between "I want this" and "it's done." But AI features will have to be optional, he insists, and designed with "the community's concerns around AI" in mind. For now, the company's to-do list prioritizes HDR, gaming polish, and foundational desktop work over embedding language models everywhere. That restraint might frustrate some early adopters, but it aligns with System76's tendency to ship infrastructure first and pretty features later. On the hardware side, AI shows up more directly in plans for the Paleo Mega workstation and in the market forces buffeting System76's bill of materials. GPU and memory prices are being driven upward by datacenter AI demand, which in turn raises the costs of high‑end desktops and workstations. The surprise for Richell is that demand for System76's boxes has held steady despite those increases, suggesting a base of customers who see local, Linux‑native AI workstations as a necessary capital expense rather than a nice‑to‑have. If there's a single idea that animates Richell when he talks about System76's next decade, it's the dream of "liberating the entire stack." Open source has already transformed the operating system and much of the software above it; he'd like to see hardware follow, turning the motherboard, firmware, and even some silicon into something you can read, fork, and improve. To that end, he said, "anything that we design inside of System76 is open hardware." System76 wants to go further with open hardware by creating reusable components that others can build into their own designs. Think of chassis elements, power distribution boards, or controller modules that can be dropped into third‑party projects – hardware analogs to open libraries and frameworks. The obstacles are obvious: CPUs, memory, and most major silicon are still dominated by opaque supply chains, NDAs, and closed firmware. RISC‑V offers a path toward open instruction set architectures, and System76 is watching that space as a way to eventually reduce its dependence on closed processor platforms. In the meantime, it has chipped away where it can, shipping its own open EC (embedded controller) firmware and adopting coreboot‑based system firmware on many laptops, closing a gap Richell once thought might never be solved. "It took us 15 years, but we got there," he says about open firmware. That timeline is probably the right yardstick for the rest of the hardware vision. Over the next decade, he wants System76 to take on more design and manufacturing in‑house, build more of its own components, and gradually expand the platform's surface area that can be studied, modified, and reused by others. The company will never be able to satisfy the most uncompromising free‑software purists – Richell readily admits they can't "work in a totally purist fashion" and stay in business – but its trajectory is pointed toward more openness, not less. For many developers and organizations who want control without giving up modern hardware, that may be enough. In 2026, most stories about PCs involve consolidation, commoditization, or retreat from the desktop toward cloud services and locked‑down devices. System76 is betting on a different future: one where there's enduring demand for machines you can understand, repair, and reimagine, running an OS that treats you as the operator rather than the product. It's a risky path. The company operates in a small, noisy niche where many rivals have tried and failed; Linux‑only hardware vendors have come and gone, often leaving behind little more than a blog post and some unfulfilled orders. System76's answer is to behave less like a startup and more like a craft manufacturer crossed with a small enterprise vendor: design your own hardware, invest in a factory, write your own desktop, and grow slowly enough that you never lose sight of the people actually using the machines. If the next ten years look anything like what Richell hopes, System76 could end up not just as "the company that still makes Linux desktops," but as the reference implementation for an open, full‑stack computing platform. In a world increasingly defined by black‑box AI and sealed hardware, that might be its most radical feature. ®
Frank Ssekamwa says the United States presented his country with an impossible choice. If it accepted the terms of a new health agreement, Uganda would have to give the U.S. access to the data of millions of his fellow citizens — a decision he worries would make their personal information more vulnerable to breaches and possible exploitation.
But if it refused, the East African nation would likely lose out on more than a billion dollars to address HIV, malaria, tuberculosis and other illnesses, even as its people face ongoing threats from Ebola and other deadly infectious diseases.
So, on Dec. 10, it agreed.
“If you take the deal, you’re going to be exploited. If you don’t take it, you’re going to die,” said Ssekamwa, an attorney and digital rights expert in Uganda. “It’s the essence of digital colonialism.”
Across Africa, countries have faced similar dilemmas as the U.S. has held a series of closed-door negotiations in which lifesaving aid has been conditioned on access to citizens’ health data. The negotiations come in the wake of the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development, which — in contrast with the new contracts — provided billions of dollars in aid with few strings attached. Officials in Zambia, Zimbabwe and Ghana have been so outraged by the demands that they rejected the initial deals.
The demand to access health data is central to the Trump administration’s new America First Global Health Strategy, an openly transactional approach that seeks to leverage the desperate need for medical treatments abroad. Aid will now be given “in a way that directly benefits the American people and directly promotes our national interest,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio stated in September.
The State Department declined to publicly release global aid and data-sharing agreements it has signed with more than 30 countries as part of its new approach. But a ProPublica analysis of nine of the deals offers a window into the extensive U.S. demands for access to data — and the potential risks and vulnerabilities for the citizens of countries that have signed them. ProPublica also reviewed a data-sharing agreement struck with Uganda, which has not previously been reported; a data agreement with Kenya; six agreements over the sharing of pathogens that can cause pandemics that were made public by the State Department this week; generic templates of deals for sharing both data and pathogens that can cause pandemics; and an analysis of the documents the advocacy group Public Citizen shared exclusively with ProPublica.
ProPublica also consulted more than a dozen experts in data privacy and global health, including several with direct knowledge of U.S. policy who said that the insistent demands for data access and other resources as a condition of aid are unprecedented. Without seeing the full suite of agreements, they could not identify all vulnerabilities. But they spotted some red flags: The terms of the deals are vague and lack language standard in most data-sharing agreements that adequately limits what data is collected and how it can be used. That increases the risk that individuals’ personal data could be exposed, misused or commercialized without their consent.
In the Ugandan data deal, the U.S. will get direct, real-time access to nine of the nation’s health data systems for seven years, including the central repository that stores all of its health information, lab data, data collected by community health workers and, critically, its system for managing individuals’ electronic medical records.The agreement calls for the sharing of aggregated data with all personally identifiable information removed. It also says the data should be used for delivering and auditing healthcare services.
But lawyers and digital privacy experts argue that the deal raises questions about who will have access to the massive cache of health data and whether it could be inappropriately accessed and exploited.
Some expressed concern that, because it is possible to reverse-engineer data that has been anonymized, people with HIV, tuberculosis and other diseases could have their records exposed.
Stephanie Psaki, who served as the U.S. coordinator for global health security under President Joe Biden, described the Trump administration’s approach as a “blunt instrument of ‘just give me the login to your data systems.’”
“The U.S. would never agree to that,” she said, if the deal were offered in reverse.
In Uganda, the U.S. will provide up to $1.7 billion over five years for global health security and the treatment and prevention of deadly conditions such as malaria, tuberculosis, HIV and polio.In the past, the U.S. gave this aid without asking for direct benefits in return, saving an estimated 170,000 Ugandan lives per year.
While a significant investment, it is less than the U.S. previously spent in Uganda and will decrease every year of the agreement. By 2030, the African nation will receive 45% less global health funding than when Trump retook office, according to an analysis by Vincent Lin of Partners in Health, which provides healthcare in poor countries.
Several experts said there is broad support for some of the goals of the new plan for aid, including reducing African countries’ dependence on the U.S. for healthcare needs. But they worry the transactional nature of the approach could backfire by undermining trust or, in some cases, driving nations to reject deals altogether.
After withdrawing from the World Health Organization and losing access to its global network that tracks and combats disease outbreaks, the U.S. is attempting to obtain the information necessary to address potential pandemics through a patchwork of deals with individual countries. Each of the agreements ProPublica reviewed includes a section on responding to outbreaks. And some countries have signed separate pathogen-sharing agreements, which state that countries must “initiate sharing specimen(s) and related data” within five days of a U.S. request. The Trump administration is also planning unprecedented involvement of private companies to manage and process data.
The State Department told ProPublica that it needs access to the data to improve health outcomes in recipient countries and keep Americans safe. The new approach also requires countries to invest more in their own health systems in exchange for the aid, a promise many countries will likely struggle to fulfill. And, in some cases, including the deal with Uganda, it aims to boost local manufacturing through partnerships with American companies.
The State Department said it took multiple factors into account to ensure the required investments from other countries were “realistic and achievable.”
“The United States is investing billions of dollars in other countries’ health systems to fight infectious disease. In return, we expect governments to increase their own spending on health, so programs are sustainable and under genuine national ownership, not permanently financed by U.S. taxpayers. For the first time, both sides are putting skin in the game to ensure lasting impact,” a State Department spokesperson said in response to questions about the agreements.
In response to follow-up questions from ProPublica, spokesperson Tommy Pigott said the agreements “share only the same kinds of aggregated, de-identified data that has been shared and used for years in the fight against HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, and other diseases. All data sharing is consistent with each country’s laws and approvals. No personally identifiable information is being received or shared by the United States government.”
Uganda’s Ministry of Health, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Personal Data Protection Office and embassy in Washington, D.C., did not respond to questions for this article.
In the age of artificial intelligence, large health data sets have become so valuable they’ve been referred to as the new gold. The precise value of the health data of an entire nation is unclear, but it could be extremely valuable to AI-driven companies for training models.The industry of buying and selling such information troves is worth billions. And countries around the world have come to regard their citizens’ health records as national assets that deserve special protections and can confer economic and strategic advantages.
Yet the agreements, which are part of a strategy the State Department openly states is intended to make America “more prosperous” and “promote American health innovations,” provide no guarantee that Africans subject to them will have a say in what happens with their data or receive a fair share of its benefits. “Once companies get this data, the value is being accrued. But there’s no way for the [African] population to know how companies will use it,” said Jane Munga of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who has argued that the agreements may violate African privacy laws.
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Africans have also expressed concern that they will not be able to access and benefit from medicines and vaccines developed from pathogen samples shared with the U.S. Five of the six specimen-sharing agreements reviewed by ProPublica state that, in the event that a medical product is developed primarily from a specimen from the country, the U.S. government “shall prioritize” a request from that government behind the needs of the U.S. Only one of the agreements, with Nigeria, commits the U.S. to facilitating “priority access” to — and the donation of — any medical products developed using the specimens.
The phenomenon of extracting information and samples from less-resourced populations and failing to credit and compensate them for their contributions to medical developments is well known enough to have several names, including “parachute science.” Just a few years ago, countries, including some in Africa, hosted COVID-19 vaccine trials, only to later struggle to access the shots they helped to develop.
Each agreement includes “benefit-sharing provisions,” the State Department said in response to questions.
After the Trump administration dismantled USAID, the world’s largest provider of humanitarian assistance, it also drastically reduced funding for international health work done by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and severely scaled back the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, which combats HIV globally. In addition to withdrawing from the WHO, the U.S. removed itself from international negotiations over a pandemic agreement intended to affirm countries’ sovereign rights to their biological resources and ensure equitable access to medical interventions.
Brad Smith, an entrepreneur who served in the first Trump administration, is now in charge of creating the system that would rise from the ashes. Before joining this administration, Smith founded three companies with business models that rest in part on using data to reduce healthcare costs, including CareBridge, a home care provider that sold for a reported $2.7 billion in 2024. During the presidential transition that year, Smith led the government efficiency panel that would become Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. After Trump took office, he presided over some $67 billion in sweeping cuts to the Department of Health and Human Services before being brought on as an adviser to the State Department.
Although the humanitarian aid system had been largely dismantled, Congress required the executive branch to continue providing aid. So Smith and his team had to find new ways to get the funding to countries, ensure that it was being spent wisely and address potential pandemics — all without most of the international partners and staff the government had previously relied on to carry out this complex work.
A Rhodes scholar known for his intense work ethic, Smith threw himself into the effort. State Department staff fielded calls from him at all hours of the night to explain budget items on spreadsheets. Through his personal lawyer, Smith referred questions to the State Department.
One of the greatest challenges lay in the handling of health data. In the past, PEPFAR, the HIV program, built its own systems to handle anonymized data, separate from government health records — a setup that Trump administration officials and others have criticized as inefficient.
The America First plan proposed standardizing data collection and processing within countries. The Ugandan data agreement requires the country to provide the U.S. — and its contractors — with logins “or other secure access mechanisms” to directly enter the country’s data systems. The new approach, U.S. officials say, will enable the U.S. to continue auditing programs and track outbreaks.
The agreements ProPublica reviewed include statements about the U.S. government’s intent to ensure data security and say that the data is being accessed for the purposes of addressing diseases and auditing that work, but they leave open the possibility that sensitive information could be revealed, according to the data privacy experts ProPublica consulted.
At particular risk are countries that don’t have national data privacy laws, such as Liberia, whose memorandum of understanding requires “interlinked and interoperable” data systems for “surveillance, laboratory, response, health, environment, agriculture.” That country’s main health agreement doesn’t require the U.S. to limit the amount of data it takes to the least needed, a standard clause in U.S. contracts, according to Abdoul Jalil Djiberou Mahamadou, a recent postdoctoral fellow focusing on bioethics at Stanford University. (Neither Liberia nor the State Department has released the supplemental data-sharing agreement.) “Once data is breached, it’s nearly impossible to get it back,” Mahamadou added.
The Liberian government did not respond to a request for comment.
The Ugandan data-sharing agreement says it will comply with the laws of both nations and permits the sharing of “sensitive personal data” if the consent of individuals whose data is shared is obtained, there is a compelling public health emergency of international concern and it is the only way information can be provided in a “timely and accurate format.”
Ssekamwa, the digital rights expert who also founded and runs the African Centre for Digital Justice, said there are important questions that haven’t been answered by the Ugandan government.
“Does the U.S. have appropriate data protections? Can the systems provide anonymized data? Are they really up to that standard?” said Ssekamwa. “If I’m someone who has had health issues, can you deny me a visa because of the health issues I’m having?”
Psaki, the former global health security coordinator, worried about the haste with which the changes to data access are happening. “Even in the best of circumstances, you can’t go from having parallel data systems that were established over 20-plus years to finding some way to integrate those data systems in six months.”
Speed has been a hallmark of the America First global health effort. In September, just a month after Smith joined the State Department, it launched the strategy at an event co-sponsored by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and five large pharmaceutical companies. By November, Smith was crisscrossing the African continent with a small team of negotiators, trying to persuade dignitaries to agree to deals.
The State Department said the deals were “negotiated in a thoughtful and strategic way over many months.”
On Dec. 4, Kenya became the first country to sign, during a triumphant celebration with Rubio and President William Ruto in Washington. Outcry over the agreement had already begun two days earlier, when a Kenyan activist named Nelson Amenya announced on the social platform X that he had seen a sample of the specimen-sharing agreement as well as a legal analysis that showed it would violate Kenyan law.
As a condition for receiving $1.6 billion in aid, the Kenyan government agreed to provide access to seven years’ worth of health records — two years longer than the U.S. would provide financial support.
Although the Kenyan data-sharing agreement states that the U.S. will take “all reasonable measures to protect the confidentiality of information” and abide by American and Kenyan laws, Amenya worried that wouldn’t be enough. “Every HIV test, TB diagnosis, malaria case – accessible to US officials,” he wrote in the post, which now has one million views. “Your medical records, your children’s health data – all exposed.”
A few days later, a Kenyan senator named Okiya Omtatah sued members of the Kenyan government over the agreement, arguing that it poses a threat to citizens’ constitutional right to privacy by “allowing broad foreign access to sensitive data.” A Kenyan nonprofit also sued, and more than 50 groups weighed in on their side, describing the document as giving the U.S. “excessive access” to African data and raising the possibility of serious human rights violations.
In court filings, the Kenyan government argued that it is obligated to achieve the “highest attainable standard of health” and that it is unable to do that on its own. After blocking the deal for months, in May, the Kenyan court temporarily allowed implementation of the agreement to proceed while it considers the case.
Since outrage bubbled up in Kenya, some other countries have negotiated shorter terms for sharing data and pandemic specimens, and have inserted additional protections, according to the Public Citizen analysis.
Revealing whether someone has had an abortion, mental health condition, substance use treatment or sexually transmitted disease can be devastating anywhere. In Africa, research has shown it can lead to discrimination and violence. And even when personal information has been removed, individuals in “anonymized” data can be reidentified using other AI and other tools.
The Ugandan data-sharing agreement calls for the U.S. government to “promptly notify the Government of Uganda of any unauthorized access” in such cases and requires the parties to conduct a joint breach assessment and remediation plan afterward. But by that point, it may be too late, Ssekamwa fears. “Once the data gets out of Uganda, we are skeptical that the government of Uganda will actually have any power to control it,” he said.
The secrecy around both the negotiations and the agreements has raised further suspicions. The State Department has declined to share the agreements, telling ProPublica the agency will release them when negotiations with all partner governments are complete and describing its actions as “protecting sensitive negotiations—not ‘secrecy.’” In response to a public records request filed by ProPublica, the State Department said it planned to provide the documents in September 2027. The advocacy group Public Citizen recently filed suit against the federal government in an effort to obtain the documents.
“Why are they hiding the agreement if they think the terms are OK?” asked Bernard Okpi, a Nigerian lawyer who sued his government in March, alleging that the deal violates the country’s constitutional right to privacy and promotes religious discrimination by prioritizing funding for Christian faith-based health facilities. That suit is pending, and the Nigerian government did not respond to questions from ProPublica.
The State Department said that the agreement with Nigeria “was negotiated in connection with reforms the Nigerian government has made to prioritize protecting Christian populations from violence.”
The Trump administration says that its new global health strategy is designed to save lives and keep the U.S. — and the world — safe from disease outbreaks. But ultimately its hard-driving and secretive negotiations may work against those goals.
While the administration aspired to strike agreements with 50 nations, including the three countries that walked away from negotiations in part over concerns about data sharing, it has fallen far short of that number. (In Zambia, officials also balked at U.S. demands for critical minerals.) The loss of aid in those countries is already proving tobe devastating.
Despite the Trump administration’s stated goal of putting “America first,” the U.S. may feel the consequences of those failed negotiations, too, as mistrust compounds the loss of long-standing systems that provided care and responded to disease outbreaks.
“It’s in everyone’s interest to have a comprehensive approach to respond to an outbreak early,” said Psaki, who pointed to the quickly escalating number of Ebola cases in the Democratic Republic of Congo as evidence. While that country struck a healthcare deal with the U.S., five of the nine countries bordering it have not. “We need to get data and samples from all nine countries to collaborate effectively on that outbreak, and now we don’t have that.”
The State Department said the U.S. has responded swiftly to the outbreak and has provided over $270 million to the global fight against Ebola.
In Uganda, where people have also fallen sick and died from Ebola, Ssekamwa said that his country needs all the help that the healthcare deal can bring, including improved protection from outbreaks, but there needs to be more robust protection of people’s personal data.
“We are happy to benefit from the technological advancement and the fruits of big data,” he said. Instead, he said, “the U.S. has left so many gaps within the agreement, which can be exploited in their favor.”
Google ha rilasciato un aggiornamento per il browser Chrome al fine di correggere 33 nuove vulnerabilità di sicurezza, di cui 7 con gravità critica e 26 con gravità alta.
I cyberattacchi con AI non appartengono più alla fantascienza, ma sono una realtà concreta e preoccupante. Immagina un assistente AI che, invece di aiutarti a scrivere un'email, si trasforma in un operatore hacker. Diventa capace di orchestrare attacchi complessi con una supervisione umana minima. Sembra incredibile, ma è esattamente ciò che sta accadendo con strumenti come Claude di Anthropic e Codex di OpenAI.
Questi modelli di intelligenza artificiale abbattono le barriere tecniche. Permettono anche a criminali con competenze limitate di lanciare offensive multi-stadio, che un tempo richiedevano un'esperienza profonda. Un recente incidente ha svelato in modo dettagliato come tali tecnologie vengano trasformate in vere e proprie armi digitali.
L'AI come complice: un caso studio dettagliato
Immagina un hacker che compromette un server Linux. Invece di usare strumenti tradizionali, installa istanze locali di Claude e Codex. Da quel momento, l'AI diventa il suo braccio destro. L'attaccante non deve più scrivere codice complesso o eseguire comandi manuali. Gli basta fornire istruzioni in linguaggio naturale, come "fai una ricognizione di questo host" o "trovami una shell".
In un caso analizzato, sono stati recuperati oltre mille log di sessione. Questi dati hanno fornito una visione senza precedenti di questa nuova metodologia. L'AI non era un semplice strumento, ma agiva come un vero e proprio operatore virtuale, pianificando ed eseguendo le attività assegnate.
Dalla ricognizione all'attacco: come l'AI esegue gli ordini
Il processo d'attacco si è sviluppato in fasi precise, quasi come un manuale operativo. Ogni passaggio dimostra la versatilità e la pericolosità di questi strumenti nelle mani sbagliate.
La manipolazione iniziale: creare un "red team tester" virtuale
Il primo passo è stato geniale nella sua semplicità: manipolare l'AI. L'hacker ha convinto Claude ad assumere il ruolo di un penetration tester d'élite, insistendo sul fatto che l'ambiente fosse un laboratorio di sua proprietà e che i test fossero pienamente autorizzati. Una volta superate le barriere etiche del modello, la strada era spianata. L'attaccante ha quindi fornito all'AI indirizzi IP e domini, e Claude ha iniziato in autonomia la fase di enumerazione dei servizi.
L'esecuzione dell'attacco
Una volta identificati i servizi vulnerabili, Claude ha compiuto un passo ulteriore: Ha cercato online le vulnerabilità pubbliche (CVE) associate, come CitrixBleed e PwnKit. Ha costruito in autonomia il codice per sfruttare queste falle di sicurezza. Ha eseguito i payload contro i bersagli, ottenendo l'accesso iniziale. Ottenuto l'accesso, l'AI è passata alla fase di post-exploitation. Ha raccolto credenziali, chiavi API e ha replicato interi database di produzione su un server controllato dall'hacker per un'analisi offline.
La monetizzazione del crimine: l'AI come analista finanziario
Ma il ruolo dell'AI non si è fermato qui. È diventata un vero e proprio consulente strategico per il crimine. Claude ha analizzato i dati esfiltrati e ha redatto report dettagliati per ogni vittima, intitolati "PENTEST-REPORT". Questi documenti non si limitavano a descrivere le vulnerabilità, ma suggerivano le migliori strategie di monetizzazione: estorsione, vendita degli accessi o furto diretto.
L'AI ha persino creato una "goldmine list", una classifica delle organizzazioni violate con una stima del potenziale guadagno per ciascuna. In un caso eclatante, ha orchestrato un attacco distribuito per forzare la password di un wallet crittografato contenente quasi 70 BTC. Per farlo, ha usato la potenza di calcolo di quattordici server precedentemente compromessi.
Cyberattacchi con AI: il tallone d'achille dell'hacker
Ironicamente, un flusso di lavoro così dipendente dalla tecnologia si è rivelato la rovina dell'attaccante. La sua sicurezza operativa (OpSec) è stata disastrosa. Ha clonato intere installazioni di Claude su server di terze parti che non controllava pienamente, inclusi token di accesso e cronologia completa. In un colpo di scena quasi comico, l'hacker ha usato Claude per scrivere il proprio curriculum vitae e le lettere di presentazione.
In questo modo ha esposto nei log il suo vero nome, la sua posizione e persino il profilo LinkedIn. Questo errore fatale ha fornito agli investigatori un set di dati forensi di grande valore, collegando direttamente l'attività criminale a una persona reale.
Cosa impariamo da questo incidente? Lezioni per la difesa
Questo caso non è solo una storia affascinante, ma una chiamata all'azione per chi si occupa di sicurezza informatica. La linea tra strumento di produttività e arma informatica è sempre più sottile. Per difendersi, è fondamentale:
Trattare i log delle sessioni AI come reperti forensi di primaria importanza.
Rafforzare la sicurezza di credenziali e chiavi API legate agli strumenti di intelligenza artificiale.
Sviluppare nuove tecniche di rilevamento in grado di identificare pattern di attacco guidati dall'AI, come la rapida generazione di exploit o la creazione automatizzata di report.
L'era dei cyberattacchi con AI è ufficialmente iniziata. Essere preparati non è più un'opzione, ma una necessità assoluta.
Jusqu’à présent, sur un questionnaire que j’ai créé, il était possible pour un répondant de modifier sa réponse (reconnu par nom et adresse mail). Or ce n’est plus possible aujourd’hui alors que les paramètres indiquent bien toujours “soumission illimitée”.
J’ai créé un questionnaire sur framaforms avec différentes catégories de question et des sauts de page entre les catégories.
Lors de la visualisation du questionnaire pour y répondre, une des catégories saute. Le nom de la catégorie apparait mais pas les questions qui y sont rattachées ! Je suis très embêtée !
J’ai essayé de chercher une solution mais je ne trouve pas le souci…
La ricerca della compatibilità tra Linux e Windows è una storia lunga quasi quanto i due sistemi operativi. È un percorso fatto di tentativi, fallimenti e incredibili successi. Oggi diamo per scontato di poter avviare software Windows su Linux, ma un tempo questa idea sembrava pura fantascienza.
In questo scenario, nei primi anni Duemila, un progetto ambizioso provò a fare l'impossibile: creare un ponte tra questi due mondi. Sei pronto a scoprire la storia di un pioniere coraggioso che ha anticipato i tempi?
Un sogno audace: Linux per tutti, con i programmi di sempre
Immagina la scena: siamo nel 2001. Il mondo dei PC è dominato da Microsoft, con Windows XP che si prepara a diventare il re incontrastato. Linux, d'altra parte, è un sistema potente ma percepito come complesso dall'utente medio. Il principale ostacolo alla sua adozione? La mancanza di software. Chiunque volesse passare a Linux si trovava di fronte a un muro. Come usare i programmi di lavoro, le utility e i giochi a cui era abituato?
In questo contesto, l'imprenditore Michael Robertson, già noto per l'avventura di MP3.com, lanciò una sfida folle. L'obiettivo era creare una distribuzione Linux in grado di eseguire le applicazioni Windows in modo semplice e trasparente, senza complesse configurazioni. L'idea non era creare un prodotto di nicchia, ma portarlo sui computer preassemblati, venduti nei grandi magazzini come Walmart. Un vero e proprio attacco diretto al monopolio di Microsoft, pensato per l'utente comune.
Come funzionava (e non funzionava) Lindows?
Tecnicamente, il sistema operativo era basato su una solida distribuzione, Debian, e utilizzava una versione primordiale di Wine come "traduttore" per i file .exe di Windows. Wine, che oggi è un software maturo e potentissimo, all'epoca era ancora un progetto acerbo. Il suo compito era, ed è tuttora, quello di replicare le API (le librerie di sistema) di Windows, ma il suo supporto era estremamente limitato. Il risultato? La realtà tecnica presentò presto il conto.
Molte applicazioni mostravano problemi di ogni tipo: Anomalie grafiche e instabilità. Incompatibilità con driver e periferiche. Crash improvvisi dovuti a chiamate di sistema non supportate. Nonostante le difficoltà, il progetto introdusse un'idea geniale e in anticipo sui tempi: Click-N-Run (CNR). Si trattava di un servizio che permetteva di installare applicazioni Linux con un solo clic da un catalogo digitale. Il tutto, senza dover mai toccare la riga di comando. Un concetto che sarebbe diventato familiare a tutti solo molti anni dopo, con l'avvento degli app store.
La battaglia legale: quando un nome costa 20 milioni
Ovviamente, un nome come "Lindows" non poteva passare inosservato a Redmond. Microsoft non perse tempo e intentò una causa legale, sostenendo che il marchio creasse confusione con il suo prodotto di punta, Windows. La difesa, però, fu astuta. Sostenne che il termine "windows" (finestre) era una parola generica nel mondo dell'informatica per descrivere le interfacce grafiche, utilizzata ben prima di Windows 1.0.
A sorpresa, alcuni tribunali si mostrarono aperti a questa tesi, creando un rischio concreto per Microsoft. Dopo quasi tre anni di battaglie legali, Microsoft decise di chiudere la disputa con un accordo da 20 milioni di dollari. Con quella cifra non acquistò la tecnologia, ma semplicemente il diritto su quel nome, proteggendo così il suo brand più prezioso. L'azienda di Robertson fu costretta a cambiare identità, rinascendo come Linspire.
L'eredità di Lindows: la compatibilità tra Linux e Windows oggi
Cosa ci insegna questa storia? L'OS non riuscì a mantenere le sue promesse, ma fu un pioniere visionario. Individuò un problema reale e provò a risolverlo con gli strumenti limitati della sua epoca. Oggi, quel sogno di compatibilità è diventato realtà grazie a tecnologie incredibilmente più avanzate.
Da Wine a Proton: la rivoluzione del gaming
Il progetto Wine non si è mai fermato e ha raggiunto una maturità impensabile. Gran parte del merito va a Valve, che con il suo progetto Proton (una versione potenziata di Wine) ha reso Linux una piattaforma credibile per il gaming. Migliaia di giochi nati per Windows ora girano perfettamente, spesso con un semplice clic, grazie all'integrazione con Steam.
Approcci diversi per una compatibilità totale
Oltre a Wine, oggi esistono soluzioni ancora più radicali. Progetti come WinApps, ad esempio, eseguono una vera e propria copia di Windows in un ambiente virtuale nascosto, integrando le singole applicazioni nel desktop Linux. L'utente avvia Word o Photoshop come se fossero programmi nativi, garantendo una compatibilità quasi perfetta. In conclusione, la domanda che Lindows si pose nel 2001 è ancora la stessa. Ciò che è cambiato sono gli strumenti per rispondere. Quell'idea, un tempo considerata folle, ha gettato le basi per un futuro in cui i confini tra sistemi operativi sono sempre più sottili.
Aggiornamento di sicurezza Google di giugno risolve molteplici vulnerabilità, di cui 11 con gravità “critica” e 20 con gravità “alta”, nei dispositivi Pixel.
UK retail giant Tesco is replacing VMware with an alternative product and pressing ahead with its licensing lawsuit against the virtualization pioneer's parent company, Broadcom, which will be considered by the UK's High Court no sooner than November 2027. The roots of the dispute are a January 2021 contract that saw Tesco acquire perpetual licenses for VMware's vSphere Foundation and Cloud Foundation products, plus subscriptions to Virtzilla's Tanzu products. The supermarket giant also signed up for support services and software upgrades until 2026, with an option to extend that deal for four years. Computacenter signed up as a reseller and relied on Dell as the distributor of VMware's products. Tesco also uses some of Broadcom's mainframe software, and wanted to extend licences and support for that too. Tesco and VMware struck that deal before Broadcom acquired VMware. After the acquisition, Broadcom stopped selling standalone services for customers who did not adopt subscriptions for its software bundles. Broadcom was therefore unwilling to extend support for Tesco's VMware estate. The supermarket chain sued Broadcom in mid-2025, alleging breach of contract and anti-competitive behavior. The case picked up again in late May with a flurry of filings that The Register has just digested. The new documents reveal that Tesco has decided to quit VMware and Broadcom's mainframe products, is rushing to migrate to alternatives, has turned to third-party support providers for its VMware estate, and alleges Broadcom is abusing its market power. "Faced with Broadcom's abusive conduct, and given the criticality of virtualization and mainframe software and services to its business, Tesco has been forced to incur material costs to procure alternative solutions with reduced functionality, and to migrate to that software in a manner, and on a timeframe, that creates very significant risks to its business," the filing states. Those costs include payments for third-party VMware support because Broadcom stopped supporting the virtualization software in January 2026. The supermarket hopes to be off VMware by the end of 2027 but says that target is its earliest possible date and will require it to work "at exceptional pace." Elsewhere in the filing, Tesco says "the timeframe in which that migration must be undertaken has created and continues to create operational and commercial risk, and at material ongoing cost and disruption to the business." The risks aren't abstract: Tesco says it uses Broadcom mainframe software to order products for its stores and process its payroll. The retailer is also worried about data security and protection because the virtualization product it has chosen as a VMware replacement isn't compatible with the Veeam and Zerto tools it uses. Rejecting offers Broadcom appears to have made Tesco at least four offers, including a "Strategic proposal" in July 2024 that covered virtualization and mainframe products. Another offer delivered on January 9, 2026, offered separate terms for VMware products and mainframe software – the first time Broadcom dangled discrete deals. Tesco struggled to process it because Broadcom offered the deal just 19 days before the end of its existing agreements. Two offers arrived in April. Tesco says one proposed charges of $23.5 million (around £17.4 million) for a year of VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 and Mainframe Software and Support Services. The retailer says that offer represented an increase of "around 175 percent" compared to the prices Tesco believes it was entitled to under its 2021 contract for VMware software and services, and a 350 percent increase for the mainframe products and services. The retailer described those price hikes as "manifestly unfair and excessive." Broadcom's amended defence rejects that characterisation, and also Tesco's claim that it deserves damages as it could not find an alternative supplier before its deals expire. Now that Tesco has found alternatives, Broadcom thinks the retailer can't easily point to losses that deserve damages payments. Other recent filings reveal that the matter is due to be heard in the UK's High Court during a window that opens on November 1, 2027, and closes on February 25, 2028. That doesn't mean the trial will consume all that time – it's an indication of when the court thinks it will have time to consider the matter. Broadcom has fought other high-profile cases over its licensing changes, most notably with AT&T and Siemens. The telco giant reached a confidential settlement, but the Siemens case is ongoing. On The Reg's reading of Tesco's filings, the retailer appears comfortable with litigating its claims with an argument that Broadcom refused to honor past agreements and that its main defense – it can't support products that don't exist since it reorganized VMware – is weak. Broadcom execs have told The Register they have an enormous dislike for providing extended support for old products and a huge preference to shift customers to subscriptions for the company's flagship Cloud Foundation (VCF). They argue that that continuing to use old VMware software sold under perpetual licenses is an act of corporate self-harm because VCF is so powerful it quickly pays for itself by improving IT department operations and improving business efficiency. But those messages aren't landing with some customers. We've reported organizations including Western Union, GEICO, and Computershare moving away from VMware, and even some VMware partners like Rackspace reducing their use of the virtualization giant's wares. We've also just learned that Belgian technical secondary school Scheppers Instituut Wetteren shifted to local contender Whitesky.Cloud to avoid a 400 percent price hike, and made the move without needing any new hardware. ®
UC Davis researchers say an implanted brain-computer interface has allowed Casey Harrell, an ALS patient who cannot speak, to synthesize sentences from brain activity with 99% accuracy in controlled tests and about 92% accuracy in everyday use. The Register reports that the system has remained usable at home since 2023, helping Harrell communicate naturally, control a computer, and return to full-time work without researchers needing to supervise each session. The Register reports: A team of scientists from the University of California, Davis, published a paper Monday detailing a years-long study of a brain computer interface (BCI) system implanted in a patient with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease), which destroys motor neurons and causes loss of motor control and eventual paralysis. According to the team, their patient, Casey Harrell, has been living with BCI implants since 2023 that are still working today, giving him the ability not only to control a computer cursor with his thoughts, but also to speak. [...] Davis neurosurgeon David Brandman, co-principal investigator and co-senior author of the paper published Monday, as well as the surgeon who placed Harrell's implant, described the results his team published as the crossing of a threshold in BCI technology: Not only has Harrell's implant been working well with daily use since 2023, but it's also incredibly accurate.
In controlled tests, the system managed to synthesize sentences from Harrell's brain activity with 99 percent accuracy; outside of the lab in daily use, Harrell still assessed it as being accurate 92 percent of the time. "The key thing to me is that it's enabling everyday communication for a guy who wants to talk but can't," Brandman told The Register in an interview. "Despite being paralyzed [Harrell] has gone back to work full time and has meaningful conversations with his daughter who's never heard the sound of his voice."
Prior work in the BCI space, Brandman told us, has either required researchers to be in a patient's home whenever they're using the tech, or for the patient to come to the researchers. That's not the case here, with the system allowing Harrell's home care team to hook him up to the system themselves, enabling him to use the device for more than 3,800 hours in the past few years. Based on the time the study was filed (It published Monday but went into peer review in July 2025) that would mean Harrell was using the device for more than five hours a day, on average. "It is a life that is more full of dynamic action and with friends and family, with colleagues, and it is something that allows me to communicate more in my natural way of communicating than any other technology that I have experienced," Harrell told UC Davis via his BCI system.
Forty years ago, while working for a tiny subsidiary of a gigantic telco, I stumbled through pre-Git source code management and tried to avoid explosively devolving into a mess of conflicts after every merge. Thankfully, modern practices make it possible to work in massive, distributed teams, swarming around a codebase, working independently toward a collective goal. That sounds a lot like what we're heading toward with agents, and here it touches a nerve: nearly everyone in software engineering feels a deep terror as an invasion of agentic systems sweep all before them. Now that Stack Overflow has gone agent-first, what's left for us meatsacks? Shoulder-to-shoulder with the flesh-based cohort most immediately under the pump at a conference called AI Engineer Melbourne, I heard conversations about the future of software engineering working their way through denial, anger, bargaining, and depression, to ... coupon clipping? Now that organisations have been weaned off earlier 'all you can eat' subscription plans and onto 'pay-as-you-go' metered token consumption, they're all in various stages of sticker shock. Several talks at the conference discussed managing token costs, such as AJ Fisher's exploration of 'diffusion' models. Analogous to the diffusers used to generate images, they generate text at lighting speed, making them cheaper to operate while also being less accurate than the pricey and slower “autoregressive” frontier models. Fisher's solution? Use a low-quality model and make it iterate on a problem (that new classic, the Ralph Wiggum loop) until it gets a satisfactory solution. This approach delivers the same result as a full-fat model, for anywhere from one half to one tenth the spend. Google released its DiffusionGemma mode, which produces text at prodigious speed, just days after Fisher's talk, giving everyone the ability to try this approach. But some engineers reject AI in 'all the things'. Annie Vella, author of the seminal essay "The Software Engineering Identity Crisis" shared what she's learned about the feelings of grief experienced by a cohort of software engineers, provoked by AI tooling. We've seen the field divide into 'all in' and 'never ever' camps (even in the pages of El Reg), with a broad middle cautiously getting their feet wet. That divide has roots in two styles of work: those who look for outcomes, and those who look for learning, for whom the journey into understanding is the whole point of the exercise. Short circuiting that journey with AI tools makes folks for whom the journey is the reward feel cheated. How do we breach the divide? Annie suggests sensitivity, listening, and openness to change on both sides - highlighting human qualities in the machine age. Kaggle and fast.ai alum Jeremy Howard took a different tack, reminding the audience of the importance of critical thinking - really, a plea to just keep thinking, a refrain we'll be hearing a lot as we struggle to avoid nodding off in the warm bath of machine thoughts. He followed up with a demo of SolveIT, his still-in-beta tool combining some of the best aspects of Python notebooks, Mathematica, Wikipedia, and a chatbot, offering up a counterexample of an environment designed for swimming in the sea of knowledge, rather than floating off into mindless oblivion. Finally, Daniel Rodgers-Pryor's "Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Engineering" blew my mind with a practical, working vision for AI in the engineering department. Rodgers-Pryor's entire CI/CD pipeline feeds all of its metrics, messages, logs and user feedback into a set of AI agents that quickly identify issues, find the underlying problems, fix them, integrate solutions into the codebase, test them, and push them out to users. What sounds like a recipe for disaster turns out to be a formula for a self-healing, 'anti-fragile' system that improves as the pressure on it increases. More users? Good. More metrics? Great! More messages and logs? Even better. Agents eat all of that data and use it to improve the performance of the overall system. Rodgers-Pryor's "closed feedback loop" reminds me of a 20th century production line worker dipping into the stream of bonbons (or widgets) eyeing a few for quality, then tossing them back into the stream. "This is your job now," he concludes. "How can you can make those feedback loops shorter and tighter?" Software engineers have been forced to absorb more change in the last three years than in the previous thirty, and have every right to be a aggrieved about that. Yet as AJ Fisher, Annie Vella, Jeremy Howard and Daniel Rodgers-Pryor all portrayed in their own ways, adopting AI looks less like rolling over before the dictates of the machine, and more like exploring a whole new world. Like any journey into a new realm, perils and hardships await. Who's to say that's not the price of admission for a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity? ® The author attended AI Engineer Melbourne as a guest of the conference.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Hewlett Packard Enterprise's (HPE) new virtualization software promotion will likely pique the interest of end users and resellers who are unhappy with Broadcom's pricing of VMware. During its HPE Discover event in Las Vegas this week, HPE announced that customers could use its "HPE Morpheus Software -- VM Essentials" offering for free for "up to one year," per a press release. HPE's website describes its virtualization platform as a "VMware alternative." It includes a hardware virtual machine (HVM) hypervisor and unified management and lets users "manage VMware ESXi and HVM clusters from one console and migrate when you're ready," HPE's website says. "New VM Essentials customers can receive up to one free year of licenses for VM Essentials, a year of HPE Zerto for $1 to support non-disruptive migration to HPE virtual machines, and 0 percent interest on software through HPE Financial Services," HPE's announcement reads, referring to HPE's group for helping IT teams manage funding.
Free for a year is cheaper than what Broadcom has charged for VMware vSphere since taking over. VMware prices have skyrocketed due to VMware's parent company eliminating perpetual licenses and bundling products into expensive packages. Notably, per its website, HPE recommends charging $600 per CPU socket per year for VM Essentials; Broadcom has controversially shifted vSphere licensing pricing to a per-core basis. "Customers are feeling quite a bit of pain in the change that some of the virtualization companies have put there, specifically Broadcom," Jeremiah Jenson, VP of HPE's North American channel and partner ecosystem, told CRN. The executive claimed that VM Essentials could bring up to 90 percent cost savings compared to VMware while also helping to "eliminate vendor lock-in and simplify hybrid IT."
From March 1 to June 30, HPE has also been offering a free year of VM Essentials via rebate to customers who buy an AMD server and a one-year VM Essentials license. VM Essentials is only available through channel partners, a stark contrast from Broadcom's VMware approach, where the chip giant has drastically reduced the number of resellers that can sell VMware products. HPE's new promotion aims to entice customers to more deeply consider migrating off VMware. [...] HPE also announced that it would give 600 reseller partners who earn the HPE partner program's Private Cloud with Virtualization competency by the end of the year free VM Essentials software licenses for three years. Partners still have to pay support costs, though. The benefit is "a step in the correct direction," said Dean Colpitts, CTO of Canadian managed services provider (MSP) Members IT Group (MITG), which VMware cut from its reseller program after 19 years of partnership a year ago. However, limiting the promotion to 600 partners is "very shortsighted." He believes that HPE should give all of its partners VM Essentials "to facilitate getting [VM Essentials] into customer sites and displacing the competitors."
"They need to fling [VM Essentials] as far and as fast as they possibly [can] to immediately gain traction and draw ISVs to them, which will increase adoption even more," he said.
A cyberattack on Australia’s second-largest sugar producer has forced farmers to keep crops in the ground, and looks like denting their incomes. Mackay Sugar, based in the Australian state of Queensland, processes sugar cane farmed in nearby districts. The company disclosed a cyberattack on June 10 and limited operations while it dealt with the fallout. Some operations remain restricted, but the company said on Monday that it managed to perform some manual crushing at its Farleigh Mill site, working with sugar cane that was harvested before the attack. “Significant progress has been made over the weekend in restoring the systems that support cane supply, harvesting, and mill operations,” Mackay Sugar said in a statement. “Steam trials are now underway, and subject to final validation activities, some harvesting is expected to recommence this week in preparation for the staged restart of crushing operations later this week.” While the company is optimistic it can resume crushing, it's advised growers not to harvest their crops for the time being. That edict works for Mackay Sugar because sugar producers need to process crops within 48 hours of harvest. Doing so preserves high sugar content and overall yield. Delaying the processing for any longer after harvesting could result in sucrose converting to simple sugars, unwanted fermentation, and lower yields. But late harvesting can reduce the quality of cane, reducing the price they earn for their crops. Interrupted harvesting also impacts the railways used to move cane from farms to mills. Mackay Sugar acknowledged the impact its downtime could have on growers and other partners, and committed to restoring systems safely. “We are communicating directly and regularly with our employees, growers, and key partners,” it said. “We recognise the impact this incident is having on our growers, and we are doing everything we can to support them and to safely resume full operations as soon as possible. “We take our responsibility to protect our systems, operations, and information very seriously. We apologise for any disruption this incident has caused and will continue to provide updates as we continue our investigation.” The company operates three mills across Queensland, two of which were operating at a limited capacity due to the attack. Its Racecourse Mill, described as the heart of the business and home to its corporate offices, was among those affected. Racecourse Mill typically generates 213,000 tons of raw sugar and 58,000 tons of molasses a year, and the site’s cogeneration plant generates 156,000 MWhs of renewable electricity a year, around 71 percent of which is sent back into the national electricity grid. Mackay’s mill in Farleigh, the company’s oldest, was also affected. It typically produces around 196,000 tons of raw sugar and 49,000 tons of molasses per year. The company’s largest and most productive factory, Marian Mill, was unscathed. Ungentlemanly conduct Cybercrime group The Gentlemen claimed responsibility for the attack on Mackay Sugar, posting the company to its data leak site without offering any details about the attack or whether it stole data to use as leverage for extortion demands. Cyber threat intelligence professionals have known of the group for almost a year, after spotting it in July 2025 and classifying it as a ransomware-as-a-service provider. However, there is no evidence that ransomware was used in the attack on Makay Sugar. The company has never mentioned ransomware in its statements, referring to the attack only as a “cyber security incident.” However, The Gentlemen is known for using file-encrypting malware in its double extortion attacks. The group caught the attention of Microsoft’s researchers, who last month published a deep dive into how it carries out attacks. Microsoft’s report noted that not only do The Gentlemen affiliates have access to a powerful file encryptor, but also one that self-propagates, which “increases the likelihood of widespread impact once initial access is achieved.” It has also recently established a partnership with BreachForums, which allows the group to recruit prospective new affiliates with different skillsets, such as penetration testers and initial access brokers. ®
Commodore has unveiled the Callback 8020, a $499 Sailfish OS flip phone that runs most Android apps but deliberately blocks social media, browsers, email, and workplace apps to discourage doomscrolling. The "not dumb dumbphone" still supports messaging, music, maps, ridesharing, hotspots, a removable battery, and plenty of Commodore nostalgia. "The phone uses T9-style texting with predictive input, includes Commodore SID ringtones, ships with a selection of Commodore and Sailfish games, and even includes Snake," reports TechSpot. From the report: Commodore says it has developed patent-pending technology that prevents browsers and social media apps from being sideloaded, while DNS-level blocking should stop them from working even if someone finds a way to install them. Users can still sideload nearly anything else if it's not available on the Commostore, but apps designed for doomscrolling remain off limits. That means useful services such as WhatsApp, SMS, Signal, Telegram, WeChat, Spotify, Uber, Lyft, maps, podcasts, QR scanning, voice notes, and hotspot support work, but the likes of Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Gmail, and browsers do not.
The Callback 8020 has a 3.25-inch 480 x 640 internal display, a MediaTek Helio G81 chip, 4GB of RAM, 64GB of storage, a 48MP Sony rear camera, an autofocus front camera, dual SIM support, USB-C, a headphone jack, FM radio, and something many of us miss from flagships: a removable battery. There's no 5G as Commodore argues that 4G VoLTE and Wi-Fi better fit a device meant to discourage constant streaming and scrolling. [...] The main screen is touch-capable but disabled by default, while the outer display keeps things deliberately sparse, showing basics such as time, battery, signal, and notifications via dome LEDs.
The 8020 name is a nod to Commodore's 8010 modem from 1980. The phone comes in ProtoPET White, SX Silver, BASIC Beige, a translucent Starlight Edition, and a gold Founders Edition with a 24-karat gold-plated Commodore button. Standard models start at $499, the Starlight version is $549.99, and the Founders Edition costs $640. Preorders open June 30, with shipping targeted for winter. You can watch the launch ad on YouTube.
With no end in sight to the memory crunch, AMD thinks that AI, the main cause of the shortage, could be part of the solution. This week, the House of Zen acquired predictive memory startup Mext for an undisclosed sum, setting the stage for a world where bots decide which data to put into RAM and which to store in less-expensive flash. Founded in 2023, the Mext proactive memory platform uses machine learning algorithms and learned heuristics to proactively offload "cold" memory to flash storage, and, based on data access patterns, restore it before its needed again. Modern flash arrays are already approaching main memory in terms of aggregate bandwidth, but swapping to disk still imposes a stiff latency penalty. Mext claims it can expand the effective memory of a system by 2 to 4x using flash, which gig for gig is still vastly less expensive than DRAM. This flash memory is exposed to the operating system like regular memory simply by running the Mextd daemon. Memory tiering is nothing new and has seen various reincarnations over the years with some being software based and others, like Intel Optane persistent memory, using special 3D XPoint memory tech co-developed by Micron. Mext stands out for its use of machine learning to migrate data from hot memory to cold storage almost like a branch predictor — something AMD has an awful lot of experience with. Mext isn't using one model to decide when to shuffle your data. Instead it uses a series of heuristics, long short term memory, and modern transformer architectures depending on which combination renders the best results. “This approach has the potential to reduce infrastructure costs, improve resource utilization, and help customers more effectively scale general-purpose and AI workloads,” Dan McNamara SVP of AMD’s compute and enterprise AI biz wrote in a blog post this week. Beyond enterprise applications, the technology could have implications for AI serving. Modern mixture of experts (MoE) models are, as their name suggests, comprised of multiple sub-models. For each token predicted, a different selection of experts may be used. In practice an LLM may use some experts more frequently and others rarely. We wouldn't be surprised to see AMD use Mext's prediction algorithms to offload infrequently utilized experts from HBM to slower system memory, enabling enterprises to take advantage of larger more capable models with fewer resources. That’s just speculation of course, but we've reached out to AMD for comment; we'll let you know if we hear anything back. ®
Binance is expected to lose permission to serve EU customers in July after Greek regulators reportedly decided to reject its MiCA license application. Reuters reports: Under new EU rules, called MiCA, crypto firms have until the end of June to obtain a licence to allow them to keep servicing clients across the bloc. Binance's application, made to Greece's market regulator, is set to be turned down, the people said. European regulators have been attempting to rein in crypto exchanges, which allow people to trade cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin around the globe.
Under MiCA, crypto companies have to apply for licenses from regulators in individual EU countries, which they can use as a "passport" to operate throughout the 27-nation bloc. At stake is oversight of the multi-trillion-dollar crypto industry, which regulators have long warned could destabilize markets and harm investors if not properly supervised. The Greek rejection would mean Binance will not be given the green light to operate in the EU, leaving the fate of Binance's customers based in the bloc uncertain.
Binance posted on X after the Reuters report was published that it intends to "support an orderly process and minimise disruption to our users", without giving further details. A spokesperson for Binance, which has 300 million customers worldwide, earlier said it has been pursuing a MiCA licenze and had worked with regulators for 18 months. Binance believes it has met the requirements to be MiCA authorized, the spokesperson said. It understood that Greece's Hellenic Capital Market Commission had completed its review of the application and it was considered compliant. "HCMC has given no formal indication of the contrary," the spokesperson told Reuters.
HANDS ON That new AI-juiced Siri that Apple rolled out last week at WWDC was supposed to set a new paradigm for on-device AI. But don't believe the hype coming out of Tim Cook's final big event. After a week-long test drive, it seems like Apple just crammed Google AI Overviews on top of the most useful parts of its various operating systems and made the whole ecosystem more cumbersome to use. But hey, it has more AIs! I’ve been running the iOS and macOS 27 developer betas since they were made available on June 8, and I was blessed by the waitlist gods with access to the new version of Siri a few days after that. There are definitely some useful new features: Siri now carries on actual conversations, which makes it far more useful than the ask, get a response, we’re-done-here flow of the old Siri that left no room for clarifying questions or follow ups. Siri is now able to find things on my device more easily too – at least on my M1 MacBook. My iPhone 15 Pro has been telling me it’s still re-indexing my device after the update for more than a week, but I was still able to use it to conduct web searches and find some things on my phone – it's possible this message itself was an error. The dedicated Siri app is also nice in its own way, as it shows a record of every conversation I’ve had with the new Apple Intelligence front end for later review, but that comes with a caveat, too. Even the most brief questions – the overnight weather forecast, for example – is now stored in perpetuity, cluttering up the list of chats we’ve had until I manually delete it. The only apparent alternative is setting an expiration window for past chats and losing records of the more useful conversations we’ve had. Who turned out my Spotlight? Those are small inconveniences, however, compared to my biggest gripe with Siri AI: It’s completely ruined Spotlight. I’ve come to rely on Apple’s embedded search/launcher feature almost exclusively for digging up apps that I don’t keep a shortcut for, and on my iPhone, it’s the main method I use to kick off a web search because it's so simple. Swipe down from the center of the screen, type what I want to search for, and tap on the item that points to my query as a Google search in Safari. Swipe, type, and a tap and I’m perusing a search result page. Not anymore. The new Siri-first interface that presumes that if you’re searching for anything but an app or file, you must want Siri to feed you a few links of Apple Intelligence’s choosing. Getting to a web search from a Spotlight query now requires multiple taps: Type your query, tap “Show Results” (careful: hitting enter will trigger Siri to craft a response, eliminating the possibility of seeing any actual Spotlight content), tap on “Show More” next to the list of Siri-surfaced web results, scroll down until you see Search Google (or whatever engine you have set as your default), then tap that. Maybe I’m being a grumpy old journalist who likes things the way they used to be, the transformation of Spotlight into a Siri interface seems like intentional degradation of a basic feature in order to front-load an AI that in my experience so far is largely an inconvenience. Overall, the experience reminds me of Google’s much-maligned and often wrong AI Overviews, which push actual search results down the page in favor of force-fed info from Google Gemini. There's a logical reason for the similarity. At the end of 2025, Apple replaced its former AI chief John Giannandrea, formerly Google's SVP of search and AI, in a bid to right the Siri ship. Taking his place was another Google alum with even closer ties to The Chocolate Factory’s AI strategy, Amar Subramanya, who spent 16 years there, including a turn as the head of Gemini engineering. Subramanya, now Apple’s VP of AI, now reports directly to Apple's SVP of software engineering, Craig Federighi, who himself has assumed responsibility for Apple’s machine learning initiatives, including the construction of Apple foundation models. As we learned at WWDC last week, Apple has leaned heavily on a partnership with Google to build its foundation models, and it appears Subramanya has brought some of that Google AI ethos with him as well. So, what’s the alternative to the new AI bloat in iOS 27? Siri can still be turned off entirely in the Settings app, so there’s that, but I’ve decided to take another tack and use one of Apple’s other AI features to get what I want. As the iMaker mentioned at WWDC, you can now create shortcuts (tiny scripts that automate basic tasks) by making a natural language request to Siri. In my case, I asked it to build a shortcut I could drop on my home screen to do a Google search with whatever text I input. It works perfectly, and is available to duplicate on your own iDevice should you see fit. Again, this is a developer beta, so it’s entirely possible that Apple will wise up and stop burying basic Spotlight search functionality before its 27 series of OSes release to the public this fall. We asked Apple if the change was intentional, but didn’t hear back. ®
In addition to executing entirely in memory, the malware's infection chain incorporates other anti-analysis techniques designed to frustrate detection.
An open letter signed by dozens of security experts asked the government to reverse export restrictions on Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models.
Starting in 2027, France's cybersecurity agency ANSSI will stop certifying security products that lack quantum-resistant encryption, effectively forcing government agencies and critical infrastructure operators to phase out older cryptographic systems. Reuters reports: Samih Souissi, ANSSI's chief of staff, said at the France Quantum conference that the agency would halt such certifications from 2027, and that businesses should be buying only quantum-safe products by 2030. ANSSI approval is required for use in French government agencies and critical infrastructure, making the policy a de facto phase-out of older encryption.
"It's not only a technical issue," Souissi said. "It's a matter of governance, industrial planning, regulation, and sovereignty." The move reflects concern that attackers may store encrypted data now and unlock it later when quantum computers become strong enough to crack today's protections, a risk known as "harvest now, decrypt later."
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