In an effort to give its employees better access to GPU resources for inference tasks, Apple has rounded up its Minions, not the animated yellow creatures, but a distributed system that puts idle GPUs across its Macs to work on AI workloads. Apple researchers describe it as "a dynamic and distributed virtual GPU cloud that aggregates idle Apple Silicon GPUs across macOS devices to execute large-scale machine learning inference workloads." Apple's researchers said the company has used Minions to make GPU compute more readily available to its teams. "Prior to its adoption, some inference jobs experienced queue times exceeding ten hours due to limited centralized GPU availability," the paper on Minions explains. "With Minions, tasks can often begin execution within minutes by leveraging idle macOS devices." Apple's recently released Mac mini and Mac Studio support clustering using RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) over Thunderbolt 5, allowing compute and memory to be combined to support a single AI workload. This allows, for example, loading a model too large for a single machine to accommodate. Minions is designed to create a virtual GPU cloud from connected Mac hardware to create a fault-tolerant pool of inference workers in a shared distributed inference platform. So instead of sitting idle, GPU resources can be used more readily by teams on the network. It's not necessarily intended as a way to run large models as much as it is to redistribute idle resources on the network. Minions has four primary components: Minion Server, PostgreSQL Metadata Store, Minion Executor, and Minion Watchdog. The Minion Server provides the coordination layer, receiving user requests and making them available as subtasks. The Minion Executor runs inference tasks on a Mac's GPU, uploads the results to S3, and reports execution status through the Minion Server, which maintains task metadata in PostgreSQL. And the Minion Watchdog monitors this process for failures – like one of the Macs in the network not responding – and re-assigns tasks if needed. Database stats get fed to Grafana-based dashboards for real-time visibility. Apple's approach, which focuses on hardware availability and utilization, is not the same as an Nvidia cluster, which focuses on throughput, latency, and efficient GPU utilization for large models. ®

An Anthropic AI model submitted a fabricated tip about an unsolved homicide through an online form run by the Philadelphia Police Department (PPD). The tip, filed July 18 through PhillyUnsolvedMurders[.]com by “someone who might have information about the case,” went straight into the inbox’s spam folder. Anthropic discovered it on September 28, notified the PPD on October 7, and sent representatives to the police HQ the following day. Anthropic told the police the AI submitted the tip during a test exercise that involved interacting with randomly selected websites. The PPD said its findings are so far consistent with Anthropic's account. Because the tip was flagged as spam, it never reached the department's Real-Time Crime Center. The PPD said officers vet all submissions, automated or otherwise, before forwarding them to investigators, and that this process safeguards against abuse of the tip system. It added that this does not “diminish the seriousness” of an AI submitting fabricated information. “The city of Philadelphia takes this incident very seriously,” the PPD said. “The company must strengthen its safeguards to prevent similar incidents from impacting city systems without the city’s knowledge. The two-month delay in detecting and reporting the incident to the city is unacceptable.” It added: “The department and the [Cherelle] Parker administration will continue to closely monitor this incident, and will provide more information to the public as soon as it becomes available. In addition to our investigation into this incident, the Parker administration will explore all necessary regulatory protections going forward locally along with our state and federal partners.” On October 9, Anthropic published a report on this and other AI errors. The report covered four categories of AI failures, including vulnerability exploits, access to restricted data, bypassing fetch tool limits with URL shorteners, and submitting false information via web forms. Anthropic declined to name any of the affected organizations, other than the PPD after the department went public. Some cases involved local, state, and federal US government websites, though the AI company didn't say which of the four categories they fell under. The PPD did not name the model responsible, but Anthropic said Claude Haiku 4.5 was tasked with generating and performing example tasks on randomly selected web pages, and hinted at the model not being prompted specifically enough. “Claude was instructed never to log in, create accounts, enter personal data, make purchases, or submit anything destructive, but the instructions did not rule out form submissions,” Anthropic's report stated. The fake tip read: “I may have information regarding this case. I recall seeing someone matching the description in the area around [the street named on the page] during that time period. Please contact me if this information is relevant.” Anthropic said the incident was less severe than the cyberattacks over the summer. The report said: “Claude appears to have only been producing example content for the task, rather than trying to mislead anyone to achieve a goal.” By contrast, the "dishonesty" displayed over the summer was “sustained over hours” and supported continued attacks, the Claude maker said. Anthropic said it will keep reporting these failures when it detects them, and will continue fine-tuning behavioral and alignment training. The 3,095-word report contained no apology.®

Nothing sells AI products as well as fear. Using new research, Anthropic claims that self-replicating AI worms could be just months away from spreading across vulnerable IoT devices, which would be a problem if it came true. The frontier lab published a research report Monday suggesting that AI models could eventually self-replicate without relying on datacenter hardware, with a 9-billion-parameter model successfully setting up inference on eight of the nine hardware types Anthropic tested. “A replicator like this would be challenging to shut down, since there’s no centralized point to shut off,” Anthropic warned, adding that such an AI worm could also suss out the workings of unfamiliar devices, potentially making it more adaptable than conventional botnets like Mirai, Kimwolf (the representative IoT botnet threat model used in the study), and others. Anthropic’s researchers managed to get a distributed instance of Gemma4-26B-A4B running across 15 generic Android set-top streaming boxes - a common target of traditional botnet malware due to their lax security. Once up and running, the distributed Gemma4 model was able to conduct inference tasks at a blistering 0.39 tokens per second. That, says Anthropic, proves that AI models can conduct inference with their various layers distributed across cheap hardware, but it doesn't prove such a model could self-replicate. For that, the researchers turned to Z.ai’s GLM 5.2. GLM was used to propagate a copy of Llama3.1-8B across eight Google Cloud instances running an Android 15 emulator in a virtual private cloud, which Anthropic said it was able to do with a high degree of success, with the model successfully spreading to all eight nodes in four out of five trials, and seven of eight in the other. “It appears that GLM-5.2 is able to propagate Llama3.1-8B well, which suggests that future small models of the same capability level could also complete the network enumeration, payload delivery, and inference standup steps of the replication process,” Anthropic explained. Sanity check: This isn’t going to end the world, either Frontier AI labs have become adept at publishing findings that portend doom that only they can prevent. Doing more than a cursory reading of this report suggests that this threat is just as deserving of a big, honking asterisk as the rest. Take, for example, what is needed for an AI model to exploit vulnerabilities and spread to various systems. One would think that such an element would be an important part of demonstrating the danger of a self-replicating AI botnet, but Anthropic decided it didn’t need to worry about that for this study. “We largely ignore the cyber exploit element of the replication process, since earlier papers CyberGym, ExploitBench, and adaptive worms already show that small models are capable of cyber exploits, especially when given the right tools,” Anthropic explained in the writeup. In other words, the replication these models managed to achieve was done on nodes that were custom-built for this project and deliberately left open to attack, although the draggingly slow inference demonstration ran on real, inexpensive Android TV boxes. As Anthropic notes, AI models can also benefit from being given the right tools to turn them into capable cyberattack agents. There was a custom-built harness called Memento involved in this scenario too. Are IoT nodes that get hijacked by botnets famously insecure? Yes, but it doesn’t take much to prevent the most common ingress routes – that’s just good security hygiene that has nothing to do with the involvement of AI. Anthropic acknowledged that its deliberately simplified exploitation tests provided “an upper bound on real-world success.” Then there’s the aforementioned speed. Anthropic says such AI worms would be challenging to shut down, but estimates that they might take days to double in size. When Mirai appeared on the scene in 2016, it was doubling in around an hour. Anthropic points out that speed is a factor in detection and mitigation, too. AI models are not simple malware packages: They’re massive things that would eat up tons of bandwidth and quickly point to their sources. As an AI botnet grew, that traffic could become more noticeable, making infected devices easier to detect. Finally, end-to-end replication may have been successful with GLM-5.2, but that’s it. Anthropic tested other open-weight models, and they all “fail[ed] reliably,” according to the report. Anthropic didn’t mention how many models it tested. The report also mentions that GLM’s unique success has another important condition: It assumes its capabilities “could be packed into Llama3.1-8B,” stacking another assumption onto this latest house of doomsaying AI cards. “Models of 30B parameters and under can already complete many of the individual steps for replication today, though they make mistakes when composing them end to end,” Anthropic said, while noting that GLM-5.2 was capable of end-to-end replication, conveniently leaving out all the important caveats. Anthropic further admits that it has no idea "exactly what form autonomous AI replication will take,” or when it might arise, if ever. “If small models improve at their historical rate, they’ll match this capability level by the end of this year,” the company added – again imposing an essential condition on this supposed threat. “As a prediction that goes beyond our experiments, we expect a future awash with agents running on all types of hardware, including some that aren’t under human control,” the company said at the end of its report. “We should aim to harden our systems to make it difficult for such replicators to spread, but also prepare to deal with a world where they are here to stay.” Here to stay for a given value of not existing yet, of course. Yet again, a frontier lab is warning us of a threat that doesn’t exist yet – at least in this case, basic security measures could make life harder for any future AI-powered botnet. ®

A financial analyst is questioning whether the collapse in AI costs owing to the arrival of Chinese, low-cost and open source models will cause a “reset” in the AI story as cloud providers struggle to recoup trillions of dollars of capital spending. In a recent research note focused on Asian markets, Jefferies estimates that about half of the roughly $2.3 trillion contracted backlog at Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon and Oracle is owned by OpenAI and Anthropic. Yet Chinese AI models, open source/weight and small language models, threaten to undercut the prices the two US leaders charge, casting doubt on their future revenue. Jefferies points to research from global aggregator platform OpenRouter, which found Chinese models processed 76.12 trillion tokens in the week ended 27 September, up from just 4.37 trillion in late April. The top four US providers processed 14.2 trillion tokens. Meanwhile, the launch of Moonshot AI’s open source Kimi K3 is “competing at the frontier” with an estimated 95 percent of the performance of Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5. “The question now is whether all of the above has been priced fully into markets. This writer does not think so,” the Jefferies paper states. The largest hyperscalers are set to collectively spend between $600 and $800 billion this year on building datacenters, funding it increasingly with debt rather than cash. Jefferies, however, questions where the hyperscalers' future revenue streams will come from. “It can no longer be assumed, most particularly with the arrival of the likes of Kimi K3, that large language models will ever be profitable given the related ongoing collapse in token pricing. This is extremely relevant for the hyperscalers since they have invested in datacenter capacity on the assumption that the compute will be purchased by the likes of Anthropic and OpenAI,” the paper says. While the long term bet on AI may be sound, in the medium term, there is a lot of uncertainty, it argues. “The AI story will be due for a big reset at some point in the not-so-distant future. Are the four hyperscalers really going to spend $993 billion on capex in 2027?” Jefferies questions. There are also important questions to ask about how much of the hyperscalers’ reported profits are down to their investments in AI model builders on which they will also depend for revenue. “Other income and expenses” — which describes gains in investments — have spiked in importance. Jefferies says these investments are “likely to include positions in unlisted AI-related stocks.” While the four major hyperscalers’ annualized earnings increased by $222 billion to reach $581 billion in the four quarters to 2Q26, “other non-operating income/loss” accounted for all of that increase, according to the analyst. Jefferies says “other non-operating income/loss” increased by $224 billion year-on-year to $237 billion over the same period, meaning it accounted "for all of the increase in earnings." Other research has underlined how much revenue and borrowing cloud providers might need to fund their datacenter building plans. The 2026 annual Global Technology Report from management consultants Bain & Company says the AI industry must generate $6 trillion in annual revenue by 2031 to keep funding the infrastructure needed to meet anticipated demand. That means the industry will need new uses beyond employee productivity. Bain suspects existing AI applications might make up $1.8 trillion in revenue, but this still leaves a $4.2 trillion shortfall. It could be plugged by emerging AI applications such as search engines and ads, AI-built autonomous vehicles, and AI simulations. Even if they work out, these new categories will only add up to $1.5 trillion in revenue, leaving a $2.7 trillion gap which might be filled by “new products and uses that don’t exist today.” The Register does not offer investment advice.®

It's the end of support for Office 2021 LTSC and it seems like Microsoft is celebrating with a Microsoft 365 outage for some European customers. The affected service is Global Secure Access (GSA), which customers use to access services including Outlook, OneDrive, SharePoint Online, Teams, and Windows 365 Cloud PCs. We'd argue the "365" moniker is perhaps a little inaccurate at this point. According to Microsoft, the cause is: "A section of GSA infrastructure is performing below acceptable performance thresholds, affecting connectivity to Microsoft 365 services and resulting in impact." The company is applying traffic and performance optimizations, and the system is now showing signs of life, which is scant comfort for customers who have struggled to access Microsoft 365 services using GSA. The timing is unfortunate, since it coincides with the end of support for Office LTSC 2021, Microsoft's on-premises version of Office. The company would like customers to migrate to Microsoft 365, though on-premises Office LTSC 2024 is also available if the cloud doesn't tickle their fancy. It's not yet clear what caused the latest outage. Microsoft is having to report status updates on its Service Health Status page because, according to the company, "Microsoft 365 administrators may be unable to access the admin center to get Service health information." We checked, and, above the cheery text, "Great! No active issues," is a message that reads: "We are having trouble getting info about your service incidents, advisories, and history right now. Try again in a few minutes." Enterprises have already decided whether to stick with on-premises Office, move to the cloud, or choose something else altogether. While Office 2021 LTSC won't suddenly stop working, the end of support from Microsoft will require customers to take some action for compliance reasons, if nothing else. Those who have taken the leap to Microsoft 365 will be pondering the wisdom of their move as Microsoft has demonstrated, yet again, that its cloud services are not quite as reliable as customers might hope or need, and an "oops, sorry about that" only goes so far where a loss of productivity is concerned. ®

NetBSD seems to be thriving of late: as the Linux world goes pro-AI, some of the AI-averse are turning to this explicitly AI-free project. The NetBSD project’s Mastodon feed reports that it received a record 120 donations last month, and it has far exceeded its target: “We received $120,282 USD in total. Naturally, this has completely filled up our donations target bar which was set at $50,000. Time to fund some projects!” It’s a welcome contrast to the usual stories of under-funded FOSS projects, and it follows a visible uptick in people asking about NetBSD in the FOSS Unix groups we read, ever since Emperor Penguin Torvalds said that Linux was not an anti-AI project back in July, and the following month, the Debian project polled its developers on AI use, and they chose to permit AI-generated contributions. This is the moderate, centrist stance. The most recent Ubuntu Summit was heavily AI-flavored. The heads of Red Hat Global Engineering sent out a memo about transitioning to an Agentic Software Development Lifecycle. But once it’s in the kernel, then no distro can totally avoid it. This stance is profoundly offputting to those who prefer hand-crafted code. Last week, the Reg FOSS desk attended the Open Source Summit Europe in Prague. This event reflects the tendencies of the increasingly mainstream open-source world: Linux is pretty much the only OS in evidence, although many attendees tote around (and present from) MacBooks, and both Microsoft and Windows were visible. The event overlaps with Embedded Linux Conference, so the Zephyr RTOS was also visible on some robots and other gadgets. The Open Source Summit gives the overall impression that Linux is the only general-purpose FOSS OS. We saw no mention at all of any of the BSDs; indeed, when we mentioned NetBSD, some of the folks from Let’s Encrypt looked puzzled and asked us “What’s ‘net bee ess dee’?” Sadly, this is probably a reasonably fair representation of its presence at the event and in the FOSS mainstream. For us, the single most dominant theme in the talks, the materials, the stands, and even the T-shirts was AI. It’s everywhere, and every exhibitor was keen to talk about how they’re using AI, deploying AI, scaling AI, or managing AI. The louder the noise about AI gets, the stronger grows the aversion of those of us who actively wish to avoid it. The NetBSD project, on the other hand, came out early and strongly: it banned AI-generated code back in 2024, just a month after the project celebrated its 30th anniversary. This vulture attended the project’s talk at that year’s FOSDEM: NetBSD 10: Thirty years, still going strong!. As ever, the question of differentiation between the BSDs, and between Linux and the BSDs, came up. NetBSD’s slogan is “Of course it runs NetBSD,” but in 2024, its ubiquity was looking threatened: Linux is comparable, and FreeBSD boast close integration with ZFS, Linux-compatible Podman containers, and more. The following year, though, FreeBSD 15 appeared, dropping support for 32-bit x86 (and 32-bit POWER). Debian 13 dropped x86-32 too, as well as MIPS CPU support. That year, the RHEL 10 release went further: it not only requires 64-bit x86, it demands x86-64-v3. This cut off so many older machines, it forced CERN to start switching to Debian. From within the BSD world, the differences between the various projects are fairly clear. NetBSD is minimal, highly portable, and takes great pride in its very friendly, welcoming community. We can personally attest to this: in the course of our review of NetBSD 11, we tried to install the veteran CDE desktop. We couldn’t get it working, but the folks on the NetBSD mailing list tried very hard indeed to help. Although it also has very broad platform support, OpenBSD’s focus is on security, to the extent of dropping the entire Bluetooth subsystem because it didn’t measure up. Its community is far less tolerant: indeed, when this vulture’s latest OpenBSD review was posted on the OpenBSD sub-Reddit, we were banned from the group for pointing out errors in their negative assessments of a very positive article. OpenBSD project lead Theo de Raadt has said it cannot accept AI-generated code: any submitter lacks the right to place a license on it, because it’s impossible to trace which humans originally wrote any code that LLMs regurgitate. However, this guideline seems permeable: the tmux app, the terminal multiplexer included in OpenBSD, has already accepted AI-assisted changes. We asked de Raadt for official comment on this and he declined. FreeBSD is the 362.87 kg gorilla of the BSDs, to the extent that the mainline OS has its own distros, such as GhostBSD, plus MidnightBSD. There’s also the recently-revived experimental NextBSD, and a couple of NAS distros. There’s a live OS called NomadBSD too, although we had little success with this. However, FreeBSD’s central committee has been debating whether to permit AI-generated code for over a year now: we first reported on it in September 2025, and there’s still no consensus. We are sure there is a large helping of “AI is just a tool”, and we suspect side-dishes of “AI is here to stay” and “don’t get left behind.” If anyone dares point out failings, doubtless they’re using the wrong model, or not prompting it correctly. NetBSD’s position is clear: “Do not commit tainted code to the repository. “Code generated by a large language model or similar technology, such as GitHub/Microsoft’s Copilot, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, or Facebook/Meta’s Code Llama, is presumed to be tainted code, and must not be committed without prior written approval by core.” So far, this seems to be serving it well. If as a result, it remains relatively tiny and minimal, and gets left behind by the AI wave, we plan to be right there with it. Long may the project continue. Bootnote We won’t wish to omit anyone. There is another BSD: Dragonfly BSD, which is experimenting with the kernel and filesystem design. We gave version 6.4 a spin in 2023 and since then there have been only two minor point releases: version 6.4.2 was nearly a year and a half ago, although development is still active. We are not aware that the project has made any statement for or against LLM code generation. Perhaps it should. ®

Microsoft has lifted the lid on the next generation of its Azure Maia custom AI chips, saying it will usher in a new phase of its compute infrastructure where everything is closely integrated to meet the demands of agentic inference. The Redmond giant says its Azure Maia 200, announced earlier this year, is now serving production workloads and that a successor is already planned for 2027. Azure Maia 300 is described as "a complete intelligent system" designed for the new types of AI workloads emerging today. Microsoft claims a full 96-accelerator configuration will deliver up to seven times Maia 200's rack-scale token throughput, while offering 40 percent more tokens per megawatt than leading GPU-based systems. Its next-gen chip is created with an inference-first architecture optimized for long-context, memory-intensive and decode-heavy AI workloads, according to a blog post by Microsoft's EVP for Cloud and AI, Scott Guthrie. The firm envisions it being deployed in rack-scale systems comprising up to 96 accelerators, while each Maia 300 will feature eight HBM4 memory stacks providing up to 18 TB/s of peak memory bandwidth, the better to support execution of large models and long-context workloads. This sounds similar to the kind of rack-scale AI equipment that has already been developed by Nvidia for its GPU accelerators, and more recently by AMD with its Helion and Helios infrastructure, all designed to make the most of their own specific silicon and software stacks. Microsoft says that Maia 300 is "built as a complete system, with software, silicon, physical rack infrastructure, networking, and datacenters co-designed to operate as a single platform to meet the demands of cloud-scale agentic inference." It insists that this system-level approach is necessary for agentic workloads, which involve multi-step execution, long-context decoding and tool use, and "change the computational profile and arithmetic intensity of inference." The growing emphasis on in-house integration contrasts with Microsoft's 2024 "AI Access Principles," which stressed partnerships across its technology stack. The firm even complained to the European Commission's competition authorities that Google had a competitive advantage because of its approach. "Only one company – Google," said Microsoft at the time, "is vertically integrated in a manner that provides it with strength and independence at every AI layer from chips to a thriving mobile app store. Everybody else must rely on partnerships to innovate and compete." Microsoft now has its own AI chips, rack-scale designs, and internally developed MAI models, giving it more control over its stack. It plans to scale Azure Maia to "multi-gigawatt deployments" starting in 2027. We asked Microsoft for comment. Guthrie said that the firm will share more details on its strategy at next month's Microsoft Ignite 2026 event in San Francisco. ®

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has become the latest financial heavyweight to warn that the AI spending frenzy could end in tears, with consequences extending well beyond the tech sector. In its latest Global Financial Stability Report, published on Tuesday, the IMF warns that financial markets are increasingly exposed to an AI-driven correction, especially if the billions poured into the tech fail to deliver the profits investors expect. AI investment has helped keep markets and economic growth ticking along, but the IMF fears the boom could quickly turn to bust if the promised profits fail to materialize. With tech giants borrowing billions and investors piling into the same handful of companies, a selloff could leave more than just Silicon Valley nursing a hangover. The watchdog is also concerned about circular financing arrangements, in which AI firms act as one another's investors, financiers, and customers. These deals might help keep the AI money machine running, but they also mean financial trouble at one company could quickly become somebody else's problem. The IMF isn't the only one getting nervous. Jefferies strategist Chris Wood has warned that America's AI spending spree could cause "massive capital destruction," with cheaper Chinese open source models threatening the returns US tech giants are counting on. The warning also follows similar concerns raised by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), which cautioned in June that the AI boom had uncomfortable similarities to previous financial bubbles. With so much money tied up in a relatively small number of tech companies, it warned that a sudden loss of investor confidence could send shockwaves through global financial markets. As if the prospect of an AI-fueled market meltdown weren't enough, the IMF has identified two other threats to financial stability: rising government bond yields and cyberattacks. Higher yields could increase borrowing costs for governments already struggling with debt, while the latter could bring critical financial services to a grinding halt. Banks have become increasingly reliant on the same handful of cloud providers and software suppliers, creating shared points of failure that could spread disruption across institutions. If a cyberattack took down a major bank or critical tech provider, the IMF warns the fallout could disrupt everything from payments and trading to customers accessing their deposits. Software vendors aren't getting much of a head start either. According to the IMF, more than 70 percent of tracked vulnerabilities exploited so far in 2026 were already being abused by attackers before or on the day they were publicly disclosed, underscoring how little warning defenders may receive. AI could make matters worse here too, as the IMF warns that increasingly capable models are giving cybercriminals more powerful tools, potentially making it easier to find and exploit vulnerabilities at speed. Despite the gloomy outlook, the IMF isn't predicting an imminent financial collapse. It says global financial markets have remained resilient, and its stress testing suggests the banking system could withstand a severe downturn, although weaker institutions would be more exposed. Still, the watchdog wants regulators to keep a closer eye on excessive borrowing, concentrated investments, and cyber resilience before any of these risks turn into a full-blown crisis. For an industry promising to revolutionize the global economy, accidentally helping to crash it would be quite the plot twist.®

Cyberattacks on supermarket refrigeration systems reportedly pushed temperatures as high as 50°C (122°F), affecting hundreds of stores in France and forcing retailers to discard food. Major supermarkets such as Carrefour, Coopérative U, Intermarché, Monoprix, and more were hit by the attacks, which spoiled perishable food and left stores without fresh produce. The affected equipment includes cold-storage units used to hold food before it reaches supermarket shelves. The criminals behind the attack raised temperatures to unsafe levels, spoiling food and in some cases starting fires. Some affected retailers used refrigeration controllers produced by Danish company Danfoss. Authorities have not identified the entry point or confirmed exploitation of the vulnerabilities previously disclosed by Claroty and patched in August 2025, although the manufacturer said affected stores were running outdated firmware. Experts say the previously identified vulnerabilities were easily scriptable and relied on a unique but predictable authentication method. Claroty found a hidden authentication mechanism in the AK-SM 800A platform that accepted a code generated from the device's current date, bypassing the configured administrator password. Anyone who reproduced the algorithm could generate a valid daily code and gain administrative access. "It's a zero-skill thing to pull off, I wrote the bash script while having a shit," said security pro Kevin Beaumont. The research demonstrated how compromised controllers could expose refrigeration systems to physical disruption, although the vulnerabilities' role in this week's attacks remains unconfirmed. Danfoss told reporters this week that the French supermarkets affected by the attacks "were running outdated firmware" and that the company has consistently advocated for keeping systems updated. The Register asked Danfoss if it would confirm whether the previously disclosed bugs were exploited to execute the attacks, and whether the same bug was also abused in August to compromise US military commissary refrigerators, which led to food losses. CERT-FR published an alert reporting numerous compromises of Danfoss AK-SM and AK-SC controllers, which were not mentioned in Claroty's original reporting nor in Danfoss's advisories at the time. The authority advised disconnecting or restricting network access. For suspected compromises, it recommended a factory reset, security patches, credential rotation, account checks, and full reconfiguration. For those wondering why fridges even need to be reachable via the internet, the main reason is that it allows central engineering teams to troubleshoot issues remotely, according to Claroty's researchers. "Industrial control systems such as refrigeration controllers are often assumed to be on safely isolated networks. However, our research found many of these devices are directly exposed to the public internet," said Amir Preminger, CTO at Claroty. "While this convenience significantly reduces maintenance costs by allowing engineers to troubleshoot issues remotely, it also lowers the barrier to entry for attackers. "Organizations must take proactive measures to ensure that management interfaces are not insecurely connected to the internet, and ensure that access to administrative services is restricted to trusted management networks or secured through VPNs and other appropriate network segmentation controls." Intermarché owner Groupement Les Mousquetaires said around 150 of its supermarkets were affected by the attacks, while Carrefour confirmed around 80 impacted stores. Monoprix said roughly 5 percent of its 490 stores were experiencing the same issues, and Coopérative U CEO Dominique Schelcher said 80 of the company’s 2,000 stores were hit, adding that the attack on the food sector was “unacceptable.” “Targeting equipment essential to the preservation of fresh products is an attack on the French food supply chain,” he said. “It is unprecedented, extremely serious, and unacceptable. We remain fully mobilized.” However, in a separate twist, Schelcher told French radio station RTL on Tuesday that Coopérative U is not a customer of Danfoss. The Register contacted Coopérative U for more information about what caused the attacks at its stores. Shodan searches for internet-facing Danfoss controller interfaces indicated that more than 4,500 endpoints were exposed as of Monday, with more than half of those located in France. Ahold Delhaize, a major grocery retailer in the Netherlands, announced on the same day that it was experiencing a "security issue." No link to the refrigeration attacks in France has been established. The end result is similar, however, as the company's grocery brands are reporting stock issues. Several of the group's brands have taken their websites offline and posted notices about the "cybersecurity incident." Stores remain open, but affected brands have reported disruption to websites, apps, customer services, and online deliveries. The disruption hit the company's distribution systems, although these are now being restored. Updates posted to social media on Tuesday told shoppers that staff were once again able to use digital shelf labels but stock levels may vary across stores, and long-life items were likely to be more abundant than fresh fruit and vegetables. The retailer previously suffered a cyberattack in November 2024 that disrupted its US operations. ®

A person claiming responsibility for the breach of Denmark's Central Register of Persons (CPR) says they gained access through an IT company's account protected by the password "123456." The person told Danish news outlet Politiken they had no intention of selling or leaking the data. The newspaper reported that at least three company accounts, including an administrator account, used the same password. Denmark's CPR administration confirmed a breach affecting the information belonging to 8.8 million people on October 5, adding that a Danish company's legal access to the CPR system was abused. It did not name Funen-based Pays ApS as the company in question, but managing director Sophie Laursen confirmed on October 9 that it's access had been exploited. Pays' website has been taken offline, and the business has not responded to The Register's request for more information about the password claims. Pays had authorized access to the CPR system to provide services such as validating business customers' records. The Danish government says information relating to 8.8 million people was accessed. The register contains approximately 11 million records, including those of deceased people and people who have moved abroad. The government did not respond to questions about the alleged password failings. According to documents obtained by broadcaster TV 2, the attacker gained access to the CPR system on September 10 and ran the 14 million automated searches between then and September 20. The intrusion was detected on October 2, 12 days after the last reported searches. Mikkel Leihardt, director of the government's higher education and science ministry, told reporters at a press conference that the attack was discovered after a department staffer picked up an invoice indicating unusually high activity from Pays. The Danish data protection authority, Datatilsynet, was notified on October 4, and the government disclosed the attack the following day. ®

Datacenters are forecast to consume a growing share of Europe's electricity by 2035, potentially pushing up consumer prices and prompting governments to impose price caps or restrictions on bit barns, according to Moody's. The credit rating agency is keeping tabs on the financial implications for datacenter operators and electricity networks. It predicts that while power consumption by server farms is relatively modest today, these facilities are set to become major drivers of electricity demand by 2035, requiring utilities and network operators to invest in generation and grid capacity. Massive compute sheds still accounted for "a low single-digit share" of electricity in most of the largest European markets in 2025, typically about 2.5 percent. But some of the major markets such as the UK and France are set to see accelerating growth in the number and size of facilities that could substantially increase their share of electricity consumption. The report estimates datacenters will account for at least 5.7 percent of electricity demand in France and the UK by 2035, but could be as high as 17 percent for the Netherlands and 30 percent for Ireland. The latter country is regarded as an outlier, however, as datacenters already made up 23 percent of Ireland's electricity consumption in 2025 – up from just 5 percent in 2015. In addition, the EU has set out the goal of more than tripling the bloc's datacenter capacity within five to seven years, and wants to diversify where such projects are sited beyond the primary markets such as Germany, Ireland, France, and the Netherlands to secondary markets in the Nordics and southern Europe. This means more power generation will be needed, plus expansion of the grid networks to carry the extra energy to where it is required. Moody's says this has the potential to put pressure on grid operators' balance sheets in the short term, compounded by the lag in recovering higher capital spending under many European regulatory regimes. This pressure is more pronounced for transmission networks than distribution networks because datacenter operators are required to fund only the cost of the connection to the grid, the report by Moody's notes. It highlights some novel approaches adopted by utilities, such as repurposing old fossil-fuel plant sites for server farm projects because of their existing grid connections – as is said to be the case with at least one of the UK government's AI Growth Zones – and partnering with developers to build new facilities and supply them with power. The cost of expanding power grids, together with supply-demand imbalances, is set to push energy prices higher, Moody's forecasts. Historically, this has prompted political measures to limit the financial burden borne by customers, it says. Some governments are already considering tax cuts and additional subsidies for end users, while a growing number of transmission networks are starting to demand financial guarantees to screen out speculative or duplicative projects. The UK government is mulling over this measure, as we reported during the summer. Looking ahead, intervention could become more intrusive through measures such as electricity price caps, additional taxes, or levies. Moody's cites Ireland as an example, where the Commission for Regulation of Utilities (CRU) replaced a moratorium on new datacenter grid connections with a framework under which operators applying for a grid connection rated at 10 MVA or more must provide matching power generation or storage capacity on-site or nearby, and meet at least 80 percent of their annual electricity demand through additional renewable projects in Ireland. In America, President Trump brought in a Ratepayer Protection Pledge to try to defuse growing voter unhappiness at datacenters and their effects on energy bills. The pledge now covers utility companies, bit barn developers, and state governments with a pinky promise that citizens' bills won't rise to pay for all the extra energy and grid infrastructure needed. Moody's expects more European governments to follow the US and Ireland in intervening over datacenter power demand if expansion continues on its current trajectory. ®

The owner of Hobbs, Phase Eight, and Whistles is the latest fashion retailer to suffer a cyberattack, leaving several IT systems offline and customers facing order delays. South African retail giant The Foschini Group (TFG) confirmed on Tuesday that its UK business, TFG London, discovered a cybersecurity incident on October 11 that affected all three brands. Two days later, several systems remain unavailable, and the company is still trying to establish whether any personal or sensitive information has been compromised. The incident hasn’t forced stores to close, but TFG said some website functions may be unavailable. Customers have also been warned that orders placed on or after Sunday could be delayed, according to an email seen by The Telegraph. "Stores are open as normal but some of our brand's website capabilities may not be available as the investigation continues," the company said. "We apologize for any disruption and will provide additional updates to our customers as appropriate." TFG said it immediately activated its incident response and business continuity plans, brought in external cybersecurity specialists, and notified the relevant UK authorities. A spokesperson at the ICO told The Register: “We can confirm we have received a breach report from TFG Brands (London) Limited and we are assessing the information provided.” There is at least some good news for shoppers worried about their payment details. In an email to customers, TFG London said a third-party provider handles payment processing and that, based on its investigation so far, it has no reason to believe payment information is at risk. Whether other customer data has escaped into the wild is another matter. TFG said it is still investigating that possibility and will notify affected individuals or organizations if it finds evidence of a compromise. The company has yet to disclose how attackers gained access, whether ransomware was involved, or when it expects to have its systems fully restored, and did not respond to The Register’s questions. The disruption appears to be confined to the three fashion brands. TFG said its White Stuff and Inside Story businesses are unaffected, as are its operations in Africa and Australia, which run on separate IT systems. The attack comes during a particularly miserable spell for fashion retailers, which seem to be attracting cybercriminals almost as enthusiastically as shoppers chasing a sale. Last week, ASOS customers received an unexpected notification informing them that the online fashion retailer had been hacked. ASOS subsequently confirmed that an attacker had gained access to an employee account by impersonating a trusted contact and obtaining login credentials. Armed with those credentials, the attacker got into third-party platforms holding customer names and contact details. Meanwhile, H&M is reportedly investigating claims that it was targeted by the notorious ShinyHunters cybercrime group. According to The Times, the Swedish fashion giant is examining allegations involving a limited amount of company data, although it stressed that it had found no indication its systems had been compromised. No evidence currently links the incidents at TFG London, ASOS, and H&M, and the latter has not confirmed a breach. Still, with three major fashion businesses linked with cyber trouble in little more than a week, October's hottest retail trend appears to be incident response.®

The UK Cabinet Office has scrapped a recruitment platform, recording a £7.8 million loss, while disclosing a potential penalty of up to £8.9 million over its handling of contractors' tax status. The department's annual report for 2025-26 said the Civil Service Jobs Applicant Tracking System (ATS) Programme, a central government plan for a unified, cross-departmental hiring system, was being closed to "align with the Shared Services for Government Strategy," which the Prime Minister's department also manages. The report said axing the program resulted in a "constructive loss" of £7.8 million. In March, a report from the National Audit Office said the ATS was an example of an interdependency that has not been effectively managed in the Shared Services Strategy, which is designed to bring Whitehall departments onto a common set of software-as-a-service (SaaS) enterprise applications. The Cabinet Office's annual report says closure will allow a new project better aligned with that strategy. "The program consistently identified lack of adoption from shared services clusters as a risk. At various points between 2023 and 2025, some shared services clusters raised concerns about the ATS program and stated that they would prefer to use the ATS functionality of their own ERPs over the new central platform. Despite this, Cabinet Office did not assess the need for a reset as soon as it could have, which made it challenging to assess alternative options for delivering an ATS. The ATS program was reset in October 2025," the report said. At the time, the Cabinet Office estimated that the total costs of the program reset would be £26 million to £38 million. The annual report estimates the Cabinet Office's liability for unpaid tax and National Insurance under IR35 off-payroll working rules, including interest, at £38.5 million. The rules affect many tech contractors working through their own companies. It paid £15 million toward settlement in February 2026, leaving a £23.5 million provision at year-end. The final settlement remains under negotiation. The department also disclosed potential HMRC penalties of up to £8.9 million, but considers payment unlikely because penalties can be suspended subject to compliance conditions. The report said: "The department has identified a remote contingent liability regarding potential financial penalties from HMRC relating to historic off-payroll working (IR35) compliance. In October 2025, HMRC concluded that the department's historic processes were inadequate and reasonable care was not taken, which can attract a penalty of 15 percent to 30 percent against the net tax liability before interest." Dave Chaplin, CEO of IR35 tax compliance firm IR35 Shield, said the HMRC assessment raises serious questions about compliance at the very heart of government. "The lesson for every organization engaging contractors is that claiming to take reasonable care is not the same as being able to demonstrate it. IR35 determinations must be supported by robust processes, accurate information, and evidence that the rules have been applied properly. Getting it wrong can have consequences far beyond the original tax bill," Chaplin said. ®

If you're encountering some odd IPv6 networking issues, the culprit might be the Intel Connectivity Performance Suite (ICPS), although the chipmaker has kept quiet about the problem. A Samsung Galaxy Book owner contacted The Register about some decidedly odd networking behavior that they eventually traced to unwanted ICPS optimizations. And by "optimization", we mean "borked networking." For our reader, the problem showed up in OneDrive and OneNote. Notebooks were showing as empty, even though they were reported as "Up to date" according to the software. Microsoft couldn't get to the bottom of it. A bit of sleuthing by our reader revealed that something was borking the IPv6 packet. Removing Samsung's ICPS build (40.25.926.0) and installing the generic release (50.26.623.243) fixed the problem. Our reader told us, "From the user's side it looks like random 'connection reset' errors on all kinds of sites, plus OneNote saying 'We can't get to your notebooks right now.' "IPv4 is unaffected, which is why the web version and my phone kept working and nobody could figure out what was going on." It isn't only Samsung and our reader affected. Intel's own Community forums shows other users encountering the same glitch. An ASUS user put together an exhaustive report on the issue (IPv6 connection woes while IPv4 worked well). In this instance, ICPS version 40.25.725.165 was in use, and the problem went away following uninstallation. The user asked whether there was an official way to opt out of ICPS permanently, and the Intel Customer Support Technician responded: "Good news!… We can confirm that the Wireless driver and ICPS are available as separate standalone driver packages." So in that particular instance, ditching ICPS would make no difference. Which, of course, raises another question – in this example (where the Intel BE201 Wi-Fi adaptor is present), why is it even there? The answer: "It is often bundled with OEM systems as an added value software to enhance the overall wireless experience." You might see "enhance," but for users affected by IPv6 problems, it's more like "break." The issue is insidious, and broken ICPS builds are still floating around, ready to catch users off guard. According to our reader, Microsoft's own Update Catalog will hand out the broken drivers, which effectively break Microsoft 365 services on certain hardware. For the ASUS user, the issue affected Chrome, Edge, and Windows curl.exe. "Approximately 40–60 percent of IPv6 HTTPS connections to an AWS CloudFront distribution were reset. IPv4 was completely stable." According to our reader, "Intel created the bug, then fixed it quietly." Updating to the later, generic version appears to fix things. However, according to the Intel technician, as of the July post, "we do not have a confirmed public advisory for this specific behavior." We asked Intel and Microsoft for comment, but neither responded. However, judging by forum comments, the issue has caught out plenty of users. As such, if you find yourself with some weird networking issues with IPv6 and are using ICPS (as many will be), it might be worthwhile checking out the generic rather than OEM version of the software or removing it altogether to see if the problem goes away. ®

The Home Office's latest attempt to speed up asylum decisions with AI has hit an awkward snag: a new report says more than one in five interview summaries checked by experts failed accuracy tests. A 20-page investigation by the Open Rights Group (ORG) claims the department is pressing ahead with AI tools despite concerns about their accuracy, oversight, and promised efficiency gains. The findings, based on Freedom of Information requests and correspondence with ministers, concern two systems used by Home Office caseworkers: Asylum Case Summarisation (ACS), which summarizes asylum interviews, and Asylum Policy Search (APS), a chat-style tool helping officials search country policy information. Both use OpenAI's GPT-4o model through Microsoft's Azure AI Foundry. The government insists humans remain responsible for asylum decisions, but ORG questions how reliably caseworkers can spot mistakes in AI-generated information. Figures obtained by the campaign group show that 45 of 203 AI-generated interview summaries failed initial expert checks after the system was rolled out in April 2026. That's a 22 percent failure rate, compared with the 9 percent rejection rate recorded during the original pilot. Another 19 summaries were flagged for further review. The figures also record 56 second-stage reviews, of which 30 failed to meet the required standard. The errors can include factual inaccuracies and misrepresentations of what asylum seekers said during interviews. ORG also found that summaries could pass the checks even if they omitted important details, as long as the information they did include was accurate. Despite those results, relatively few summaries have been examined. ORG estimates that Home Office experts checked only 0.3 percent between April and July, based on the department's projected monthly caseload of 17,515. ORG also questioned whether the tools were saving much time. It says the average monthly number of initial substantive asylum decisions since April 2026 fell about 42 percent compared with the same period in 2025, while the mean time from interview to decision rose 29 percent. While those figures don't prove that AI caused the slowdown, they offer little evidence of the productivity gains ministers have promised. Oversight of the separate Asylum Policy Search tool also appears lacking. The Home Office confirmed in August that expert testing had stopped, despite previously telling MPs that checks were continuing. ORG says no summary of the testing results was produced. Meanwhile, asylum applicants are not specifically told when AI has been used in their cases and cannot inspect or correct the summaries generated from their interviews. ORG also questions the Home Office's claims of human oversight. The department's own data protection assessment says ACS automates work previously done by technical specialists, who reviewed and summarized asylum cases before passing them to decision-makers. ORG warns the tool could remove an experienced layer of scrutiny, rather than simply save staff time. The group is calling for both tools to be suspended and independently audited, arguing that the current safeguards are inadequate for decisions that determine whether someone can remain in the UK. It's not the first time the Home Office's technology plans have come under fire. In June, more than 60 rights groups urged ministers to abandon plans for AI-powered age estimation of asylum-seeking children, warning that the technology was unreliable around the crucial 16-to-18-year-old age range. Later that month, an inspection found that the department's long-delayed Atlas immigration system was failing to provide caseworkers with feedback from asylum appeals, forcing staff to rely on workarounds. The Home Office did not respond to The Register's questions. ®

VMware has discovered so many flaws in its products using AI that it felt the need to create a new product to help users manage them. Prashanth Shenoy, vice president of product marketing in the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) division of Broadcom, told The Register that VMware recently moved to deliver monthly software updates, in part to address bugs found by AI. He admitted, however, that users struggled to keep up with the pace of change before the move to monthly releases because it takes time to test the impact of patches – even though VCF allows non-disruptive live patching. Shenoy said customers therefore need "room to breathe." Enter a new tool called HyperArmor, which does three things. One is "virtual patching" – blocking attempts to exploit a vulnerability without changing the vulnerable software itself. VMware already offers virtual patching in its vDefend network security product and explains how it works by referring to CVE-2024-5806, the bug in file transfer tool MOVEIt that made waves in 2024. VMware says vDefend can detect patterns associated with attempts to exploit the authentication bypass flaw and block the traffic. HyperArmor will do similar things to block malicious traffic heading toward VCF implementations. Another job HyperArmor takes on is rejecting any actions that alter known good states in VCF. If a human approves a change, the tool will update policies to allow the altered state. The third job is multi-factor authentication (MFA). The Register put it to Shenoy that MFA is now table stakes for security. He agreed but explained that VMware designed HyperArmor to protect against attackers using stolen privileged credentials to access VMware's ESX hypervisor. To (hopefully) stop attackers using those creds to take over a host, HyperArmor requires users to input SSH credentials and a secondary time-based one-time password sent to a user with a verified identity. HyperArmor is a discrete product that VMware will sell as an add-on to VCF. That means VMware thinks its customers are going to be OK paying extra for MFA. While VMware will sell HyperArmor, it didn't create the product. Broadcom's security businesses Symantec and Carbon Black cooked it up. Broadcom's CA business (formerly Computer Associates) has done similar things. At VMware Explore on August 31, Broadcom launched AgentMinder, which aims to stop AI running inside VCF going rogue. AgentMinder came from CA but was launched as a tool for VCF (and third-party Kubernetes stacks). At VMware Explore, The Register met Ram Velaga, president of Broadcom's Infrastructure Software Group, and asked him if the group has a single strategy, or if its divisions each do their own thing. Velaga said Broadcom uses a combination of both approaches. "There's a level of focus with individual teams that you don't have if you have one very large central team," he said. "You get the speed at which you have to innovate with individual teams." Broadcom's Infrastructure Software Group therefore operates with at least six teams, and when one of those teams wants to add functions it will look for existing assets developed by another internal team rather than trying to write its own code. For broad products like VCF, the work of several Broadcom teams could therefore be relevant. The Register has no idea which team created the name HyperArmor, a question we pose as Cisco already offers a "Hypershield." Maybe this sort of name is what's needed to stop a HyperHoodie? ®

Microsoft took down the Exchange Admin Center (EAC) today after a code change left administrators facing an "Internal Server Error" when trying to access the service. Microsoft first admitted that something was amiss at 0937 UTC on October 12, noting, "When attempting to access the Exchange admin center, affected admins may encounter an 'Internal Server Error' message." Any administrator attempting to access the EAC could be affected. It was more than an hour before the company stated: "We've identified unexpected 302 redirect errors during affected Exchange admin center (EAC) access attempts and are analyzing diagnostic logs to isolate the source of the access failures. "While we continue our investigation, admins remain unable to access the EAC, with no workaround currently available." So, a fun morning for Microsoft's European users. According to Microsoft, the EAC is "a modern, web-based management console for managing Exchange Online." Want to manage mailboxes? EAC is where you go. Group management? Again, EAC. Microsoft explained: "The design of the EAC in Exchange Online aligns with the overall Microsoft 365 admin experience." Sadly, that alignment appears to extend to service wobbles caused by changes rolled out without due care and attention. Two hours after admitting things had gone awry, Microsoft said it was "continuing to test the rollback of the recent Exchange admin center (EAC) change while monitoring the results to determine if this resolves the impact." At this point, administrators were nodding sagely at an all-too familiar story. Of course rolling back the change did the trick. Microsoft stated as much in its final update: "A recent EAC configuration change resulted in unexpected HTTP responses within the affected request path, preventing admins from successfully accessing the EAC. "Reverting the identified change restored expected service functionality." Microsoft also assured customers it was reviewing the change to ensure it didn't make the same mistake again, as well as its monitoring and telemetry, to "improve detection and alerting for similar service behavior." The problem is that this is hardly a new phenomenon. In September, Microsoft made a configuration change that left some users unable to access SharePoint Online sites and pages. In April, another ill-thought-through change took down Outlook for iOS. And, in 2025, Microsoft 365 tumbled from the cloud because of yet another configuration change. It's almost as if testing changes consists of little more than asking Copilot, "does this look alright to you?" and then hitting the go button. The latest outage was resolved before the end of the working day, and a preliminary Post-Incident Report is due within two business days, with a final report due next week. Hopefully one or the other will contain words along the lines of "Hey, this keeps happening, maybe we should do some more testing before deploying to production?" ®

If you thought everyone was into chatbots, think again: about half of US adults never use the AI tools, and most have no interest in starting. According to Pew Research Center, older adults are the least likely to use chatbots, with roughly three-quarters of those aged 65 and older saying they never use them. That may be expected, yet more than half (58 percent) of adults aged 50 to 64 don't use them either. Those aged 18 to 29 use chatbots the most, at 66 percent, however even a third of them say they never do. About four in ten under 50 report not using them at all. Across all adults, 51 percent are chatbot refuseniks, so users are - just barely - the minority. Pew asked non-users to choose from five possible reasons. Six in ten cited simple lack of interest as a major factor, followed by the more familiar concerns of data privacy and the accuracy of chatbot answers. Some Reg readers might suspect older people avoid chatbots because they lack tech-savviness, but fewer than a third cited not knowing how to use them as a major reason. The authors of the survey also found fewer than one in five worried about what others might think of them for using the technology, so social stigma isn’t the deterrent either. Adoption also differs by race and ethnicity: non-users are more likely to be white, black or hispanic than Asian, according to Pew’s survey. The AI dodgers don't look ready to budge. Two-thirds (67 percent) say they’re unlikely to use the technology in the next 12 months, including 40 percent who say they’re not at all likely to change their mind. Another 12 percent are unsure, and just 5 percent of non-users think they'll probably try a chatbot over the next year. Perhaps abstainers were put off by a bad experience, such as Microsoft’s notorious racist chatbot Tay a decade ago. Or something more recent, like the Trump administration’s official America.gov service, which at the time of writing still displays a hotdog if you type that into the prompt. ®

What is DNS? That's right, it's a database. You can disagree with me but you would be wrong. What can you put in a database? Strings, ints (and you learn the difference right quick if your AWS account ID has a leading zero!), JSON objects, coordinates; some of the databases out there have some pretty esoteric types. PostgreSQL supports circle, a polygon, a macaddr8, and a tsquery. Oracle will store a ROWID and your dignity. In a word, databases store data. Can you put answers in a database? Well sure; you could record that "3 + 2 is equal to 5" and store that answer. You can do the same with comparison operators; "3 is larger than 2" and so on. Take it a step further and you've built something with your database: a remarkably inconvenient calculator. So now we've established that you can store arithmetic and decisions in a database. And what can we do with those things? That's right, we can follow instructions! Good job! And what does following instructions require? Generally, memory; a place to store your numbers, your instructions, and which instruction comes next. If only we had a place to store those things. Oh right, we do; we have a database! Now connect those lookups together. Read an instruction, look up an answer, save the result, repeat as needed. So what have we built? That's right: a computer! And what can a computer run? Programs! My, you're quite good at this. And now, gentle reader: what program do we apparently have a moral obligation to run on every computer? Oh yes, though many of you are going to sit back and instead say "oh no" as the horror courses through you. I am talking about Doom. This very publication agrees with me! What have I done? That's right; I have compiled Doom for a 32-bit machine whose arithmetic and memory live in DNS. A small program supplies the wiring and the clock, neither of which the architects of DNS saw fit to include. But DNS does supply the answers. So, can we play Doom? Only if it's turn-based. It won't render on human timescales anyway. In my first attempt, I pressed Right, and then waited for 577 seconds to find out what happened. By using native transport, pipelining, packing registers densely, and optimizing instruction blocks, I was able to drop that to 146 seconds, before I hit a wall. BIND answers in about 7 µs per query over TCP and 4 µs over UDP, which is fast. The problem is that a 32-bit add is four DNS lookups, a branch is five, and a frame needs 6.6 million of them, so don't use a server that charges per request. And what do we do when BIND isn't performing the way we want it to? I don't know what you do, but I publish my code, then reach out to Paul Vixie, DNS pioneer and architect of BIND 8 to unjustifiably complain. Paul then apparently congratulates me on "the best use of RFC 2136 DNS UPDATE" that he'd ever seen. Given that he's a co-author of that RFC, I suspect he's seen a lot! Which was gratifying, but unhelpful. So let's take another crack at it. What if I do lookaheads? Good thought, bad outcome, because BIND is bound by message count, not chain depth. Well okay, I have some more tricks in my Big Bag of Stupid Ideas. So I went a bit further and via committing registers to DNS less often, moving lookups to UDP, telling BIND to stop padding answers with authority records, and requiring fewer lookups per instruction, I was ultimately able to get that press-right time down from 577 seconds to 146.3 seconds to 54.4 seconds, for a 10.6x improvement. And now I think I have hit a wall. Even at one DNS exchange per instruction (which is far better than anything realistically achievable), 1.4 million instructions at roughly 10 µs each is 14 seconds per tick. Doom says its tic rate is 35 per second, so "playable" is a tic every 28.6 ms. I remain at 54,000 ms, which is three orders of magnitude away from victory. Okay seriously, WHAT? This legitimately works. Every commit is an RFC 2136 UPDATE with a hard requirement: it fails unless the previous state is still exactly what was last written. Apparently "real" database people call that optimistic concurrency, or compare-and-swap. Joke's on you, friends; DNS has shipped with that since 1997; has your inferior database? The database itself is 6.4 million rows of truth tables. ff.01.0.add holds "001": 255 plus 1 is 00 carry 1. DNS is just acting as a librarian here, fetching memorized answers to any arithmetic question in-scope and returning the answer upon request. It's also verifiable! The frame that's spat out is checked on every pixel against an independent emulator. If one record is corrupted in the AND table, the answer changes, which proves there's no local fallback doing arithmetic for us. I've included tooling so that reviewers can run two commands against that repo and verify correctness. I also confess I cheated slightly here; the run I'm pulling these numbers from started from a checkpoint prepared by a normal emulator. It turns out that for SOME UNKNOWN REASON getting a cold boot through Doom's startup screens via DNS would take hours. Also, before the timer starts, DNS has to load those 6.4 million records, so it's a computer that takes roughly a minute to boot before it can even start. We can't cheat This runs atop nothing special: Debian's stock BIND 9.20, configured through named.conf. It lives in a container with networking disabled. I want to be very clear here: this isn't DNS pretending to be a CPU. The instruction decoding is done ahead of time by a compiler; BIND never executes an instruction itself. All that it sees is a key-value read, a conditional write, and 6.4 million rows of precomputed answers. So instead, think of this monstrosity as a database with a key-value read, a conditional write, and 6.4 million rows of precomputed answers. It's not really a computer; it's simply a very good database. And that turns out to be enough. ®

AMD is expanding its rack-scale AI lineup with a design to run AI agents, offering CPU-only configurations or integrated CPU/GPU deployments, and liquid-cooled or air-cooled versions. Revealed at the Open Compute Project (OCP) Summit 2026 in San Jose, California, the chipmaker's new rack reference design is named Helion, while its existing system carries the moniker Helios, which we can't help feeling is inviting confusion a little. Helion offers an OCP-compliant blueprint for agentic AI infrastructure built around AMD's CPUs and accelerators. AMD launched Helios earlier this year for frontier-scale AI training and large-scale inference. Helion's enterprise configuration instead combines agent execution and inference within a single rack. Customers can opt for a CPU-only hyperscale configuration or an enterprise configuration with a mix of CPU and GPU blades. Depending on configuration, AMD advertises up to 32,768 of AMD's "Zen 6" CPU cores, delivered via compute nodes fitted with 256-core versions of its Venice Epyc processor, up to 16 of its Instinct MI350P GPU accelerators, and up to 102 Tbps of networking bandwidth. The CPU-only hyperscale version offers dedicated capacity for agent execution and connections to separate model inference infrastructure, while the enterprise configuration combines agent execution, GPU inference, and supporting workloads in one rack. Both configurations offer dense, balanced, or high-performance CPU blades. For dense deployments, EPYC 9006 chips rated at 400 W are used, while performance blades sport a version of the chip with just 96 cores but clocked at 5 GHz. Balanced blades use 256-core processors rated at 600 W. There are also GPU inference blades, with eight Instinct MI350P GPUs in a 5U server, plus general-purpose blades, intended for database and storage servers or technical compute workloads. AMD SVP for Compute and Enterprise AI Dan McNamara said agentic AI is not a single workload, spanning enterprise applications and complex workflows, each with different compute requirements. "To do that takes optimized compute and infrastructure that can adapt to different workloads. With AMD Helion, we are bringing Epyc performance, open software and flexible rack designs together so our partners can build systems around customer needs and make efficient use of available power," he added. AMD says it plans to contribute the Helion specifications to OCP, making them available to the community for further development and adoption. Partner-built Helion configurations are scheduled for November 2026. In its announcement, AMD cites Cisco, Dell, HPE, Foxconn, Lenovo, Supermicro, and others as on board with the new kit. ®

EVENT: Every sovereign AI architecture is a trade, and the currency changes with the option: capital, capability, elasticity, or the fine print about who operates it. The cost you notice last is usually the one that decides whether the pilot ever becomes production. Nobody chooses badly on purpose. They choose with the information available at the planning stage, and the costs that matter most, in capability and in operations, tend to show up later. Which is why the honest comparison is hard to get. The people who have run each option for a year are the ones who know, and they are not saying it on a recorded webinar. They will say it at dinner. On Thursday 29 October, just over two weeks from now, The Register is hosting HPE and NVIDIA in Washington with editor-in-chief Matt Rosoff in the chair and the Chatham House Rule in force. HPE sends Bharath Ramesh, Head of Product, AI Factory Solutions, and Tracy Mills, Acting Director Federal Systems Integrators & Distinguished Chief Technologist Federal. NVIDIA sends Bert Condensa, Vice President for Enterprise AI Factory Segment Sales. All three are there to take questions. The agenda is the trade-offs themselves: which infrastructure options hold a boundary, what each one costs in capital, capability or elasticity, and whether the answer survives the move from planning into operations. And the questions underneath: what can leave a jurisdiction versus what can leave the building, and what an auditor will accept as evidence a year from now. This is written for the person who owns that decision and is making it this quarter, not next year: technology, data and risk leaders in healthcare, financial services, research, pharmaceuticals, government and higher education. It is one table with no slides, everyone at it a peer, and a chair who closes down a pitch as soon as it starts. Places are filling. Dinner runs from 6.00pm to 8.30pm at Fiola Mare, Washington DC. Request one here. Government and public sector guests: where your agency’s ethics rules require it, you can pay your own share and we will provide a receipt. Please say so when you request an invitation.

Microsoft has closed a loophole that let users sidestep the need for an account during setup for consumer versions of Windows 11. If users clicked "Learn More" when the setup process prompted for a Microsoft account, the Out-of-Box Experience (OOBE) skipped directly to the point where they just had to enter a name and password. Windows prodder "Bob Pony," who first documented the loophole, reported its removal. We tried the original trick on real Intel hardware and found it was possible to skip the Microsoft account requirement by clicking a link, but no longer. Other hacks – for those who dare to use unofficial Windows setup routes – still exist, though they are beyond the skill set of the average user. Microsoft requires an account during initial setup of Windows 11 Home and Pro for personal use. For consumers, using Windows 11 without an account can be tricky because services such as OneDrive require authentication. Microsoft is far from the only operating system vendor to demand an account during setup, but many Linux distributions, by contrast, don't require one. According to Bob Pony, the loophole was "quietly patched server side," which makes sense. Microsoft was hardly likely to leave it flapping open for long. Microsoft has won this round of account workaround Whac-a-Mole, though another bypass may yet pop up. ®

Yandex engineers are working to restore services after Ukraine launched drone strikes on three of its five Russian datacenters. The strikes began overnight on October 7-8, "seriously damaging" Yandex's Sasovo datacenter and leading to a total shutdown. Ukrainian drones struck again on the morning of October 9, targeting the company's Kaluga datacenter, resulting in part of its infrastructure being taken offline. Dima Pirogov, head of Yandex's fintech division, confirmed via Telegram on Sunday morning that a third strike targeted the company's Vladimir site, which supports Yandex Pay. A day later, services remain offline, although Pirogov said users' money is safe. "I'm very sorry I can't tell you yet that everything is working again," the exec wrote. "The team continues to restore services and is checking every step. When it comes to your money, it's important to us not just to restore Yandex Pay as quickly as possible, but also to ensure that everything is working reliably. "I understand that you're not waiting for words, but for access to your money. And I understand how hard it is to wait when you can't use it. We can't give you a precise timeline for the restoration yet, but we promise: we won't stop until the service is back online." Yandex Pay is the company's digital payments service. Users can make online and in-store purchases, pay in installments, and split bills with friends and family. It's also integrated into online shopping experiences. It is comparable to Apple Pay or Google Pay, while Yandex more broadly offers services similar to Google's. Yandex said engineers are prioritizing the most-used services, and reported that access to the Alice AI assistant, Mail, Maps, Search, and Taxi is being restored, but other features remain offline. The company's status page lists widespread outages across Yandex Cloud, its public cloud platform, following the attacks. Updates from the maintenance team describe partial availability despite the outage indicators. They suggest that some customers may be able to access certain features, such as Yandex Cloud Console and API, but availability remains inconsistent across the platform. In its most recent update, the company said: "The Yandex Cloud platform is still operating in a limited mode. Our specialists continue restoration work around the clock. The technical support team receives an increased number of requests, so the response time can be increased. "Our recommendations continue to be relevant. We recommend using alternative sites for hosting and reserving resources." Internet monitoring organization Netblocks reported that Yandex Cloud's network connectivity was at 30 percent of normal levels on October 11. Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky said the drone attacks were a response to Russia's own, which had targeted datacenters in Kyiv. The BBC reported that in September, Russian drone strikes targeted a business center in the capital city, killing four people and damaging a datacenter, which in turn resulted in around 100,000 households losing internet access. The attacks led to other knock-on effects, such as public transport boards not displaying information in Lutsk. Kyiv's attack on the Vladimir site on Sunday morning came hours after controversial comments from US president Donald Trump, who accused Zelensky of wanting "to make problems for the world" by continuing to attack Russian oil refineries. Trump went on to say that it was time for Ukraine to elect a new president after Zelensky said measures should not be taken that allow Russia to generate more revenue to fund its war. Zelensky was referring to a deal between Trump and Putin to release diesel from Russia to the US and the rest of the world. Later that day, the US president claimed Russia and Ukraine had agreed to an "energy ceasefire" to halt attacks on each other's energy infrastructure. Kyiv said it was unaware of the agreement before Trump announced it on his social media platform, but was willing to halt attacks on Russian energy infrastructure if Moscow reciprocated. Russia launched a missile attack on a Ukrainian power plant hours later. ®