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Flock shock rocks cop cam vendor as protests mount

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 22:32:13 +0000

A mischief-maker in a Darth Vader suit recently endorsed Flock at a city council meeting, and it has not helped the company's fortunes. Around the US, citizens have been protesting and sometimes vandalizing the company's network of surveillance cameras. And the advocacy has caused some governments to change course. Government officials, commonly hesitant to second-guess law enforcement practices, have become concerned enough to question these mass surveillance practices. US Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) on Wednesday wrote to Flock CEO Garrett Langley to announce an investigation of "Flock Safety's collection, retention, and dissemination of data gathered by its artificial intelligence cameras." Despite "Darth Vader's" comments last week at a San Diego City Council meeting about the need to "continue utilizing Flock technologies so that we can follow and surveil the rebel scum," a growing number of local governments in the US have been cancelling or choosing not to renew their contracts with Flock and other makers of automated license plate readers (ALPRs). The Institute for Justice (IJ), a Virginia-based legal advocacy non-profit, on Wednesday published a new database that tracks the termination of local government ALPR contracts. As of Wednesday, the database documents 93 local governments that canceled ALPR contracts. The IJ, which is challenging ALPR use on Fourth Amendment grounds in Norfolk, Virginia and San Jose, California, previously published a database that documents police abuse of ALPRs, a topic addressed in Hawley's letter. Incidents include romantic stalking, wrongful traffic stops and detentions, and other forms of misconduct. "I think what's happened is that the American public has woken up to the mass surveillance that quietly arose around them," said Robert Frommer, senior attorney at IJ, in an interview with The Register. "And they don't like it. "It does seem to me that the rate of cancellations, the rate of public protest has increased over the past few months. I think that's both due to more news attention being paid to the real life abuses of this technology, as well as the Supreme Court's recent decision in the geofence case," Frommer said. In that case, SCOTUS ruled that cops need a warrant to grab location data. Frommer said that he believes the IJ's efforts to document ALPRs and associated abuses have helped focus the public's concern and have illustrated the problems with warrantless mass surveillance. ALPRs, from vendors like Flock, Motorola Solutions, and PlateSmart, among others, capture license plates whenever cars drive by, along with geodata and potentially images of people. This data can be combined with other information, effectively putting all passersby under constant surveillance without any warrant. "I think what we're seeing now is the reaction to that," said Frommer, who explained that the problem with Flock cameras is that they're accessible to anyone with login credentials, without any authorization from a supervising authority. "You don't need to go to a judge and get a warrant," Frommer explained. "You don't need anything. And when you basically give that search power to the bored officer in his cop car in the middle of a shift, it inevitably happens that they start using it and start misusing it, whether to look people up personally or whether to investigate people at political protests." These sorts of issues, Frommer said, have made people question whether we should live in a panopticon. The IJ's litigation and its Plate Privacy Project, said Frommer, follow from the belief that there are solutions, whether they come from the courts or lawmakers. Pointing to Hawley's letter, he said that this is not just a state or local issue, but has become a federal concern. "I think what the din that you've heard over the past couple of months shows that there absolutely needs to be a change, a reckoning," he said. "And that's what we're pushing for in our litigation. We're pushing for a warrant requirement. You want to go look up somebody's past travels and see where they have been? Go to a judge, explain it, and get a warrant." Flock did not respond to a request for comment. ®

More than 100 water systems were hit in July cyberattacks

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 22:32:13 +0000

The US government disclosed that crims targeted more than 100 internet-exposed water systems during July cyberattacks. That's the first time the feds have put a number on the digital intrusions, but they have yet to attribute the campaign, widely suspected to be linked to Iran, to a particular group. “In July 2026, CISA observed malicious cyber activity targeting over 100 internet-exposed systems in the Water and Wastewater Systems (WWS) Sector, commonly via programmable logic controllers (PLCs) connected directly to a cellular modem,” America’s lead cyber-defense agency said, adding that connecting PLCs directly to the internet “can create significant security risks.” Suspected Iranian attackers targeted water and wastewater facilities across at least a dozen states in July, including internet-exposed PLCs. While neither federal nor state officials have identified all 12, we know that the cyberattacks occurred at mostly small, rural utilities in Minnesota, Michigan, Georgia, South Dakota, and New Jersey. “This is very serious. What stands out isn't any single incident. It's the scale,” Matt Hartman, chief strategy officer at the Merlin Group and CISA’s former acting head of cyber, told The Register. “More than 100 water systems with internet-exposed assets were hit in a single month, which points to a systemic vulnerability across the sector, not a run of isolated, unlucky targets,” Hartman said. “Much of this infrastructure runs on operational technology that was built for closed, physical environments. It was never designed with the assumption that it would be reachable from the open internet.” John Gallagher, VP at Viakoo, an OT and IoT cybersecurity provider, told us that while 100 systems represent a small fraction - only about 0.5 percent - of water utilities in the US, the “real threat is that these are test runs for a larger-scale attack.” While the 100-plus water incidents occurred in July, just last week five US federal agencies warned that attackers are using AI-generated exploitation scripts to break into internet-exposed Siemens S7 Series PLCs at water, manufacturing, energy, and other critical facilities. “This appears to be a continuation of the same suite of activity we suspect is affiliated with Iran targeting PLCs,” Halcyon Ransomware Research Center SVP Cynthia Kaiser told The Register a week ago. “Iran-affiliated actors and adversaries are actively targeting a wide swath of operational technology because these PLCs underpin essential health, safety, and critical infrastructure across society,” Kaiser, a former FBI cyber division deputy assistant director, added. While third-party analysts have largely blamed Iran for the intrusions, the federal government has not attributed the attacks to anyone. “Attribution in cyber incidents is inherently difficult and often takes time. Adversaries deliberately obscure their infrastructure, reuse tools and techniques, and route activity through compromised systems, so the government needs to be diligent before publicly assigning responsibility,” Hartman said. “In this case, CISA has done the most important thing: quickly getting actionable information into the hands of water-sector operators so they can defend their systems,” he added. “From a defender’s perspective, the ‘who’ matters less in the immediate term than understanding how the attacks are occurring and taking steps to stop them.” In its advisory, CISA recommended organizations disconnect PLCs from the internet and ensure any remote access goes through a VPN or gateway device rather than connecting directly to the PLC. The cyber-defense agency also advised owner-operators to enable password protection (we suggest multi-factor authentication) and change any default passwords. Also: ensure that allowlist IPs only allow remote access from known engineering laptops or other critical OT assets.®

GitHub Actions was down yet again

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 22:32:13 +0000

GitHub Actions stumbled again on Wednesday, days after the code host renewed its promises to improve reliability. Wednesday’s problem, as has so often been the case, hit Actions, GitHub’s CI/CD platform for automating software builds, tests, and deployments. According to the incident report GitHub put out for the disruption, things started going south at 1511 UTC. The source code host identified an issue with a database primary and failed over to a replica, but said the move "did not fully mitigate" the degradation. GitHub then throttled inbound traffic while investigating upstream Vitess issues before gradually restoring traffic. By 1800 UTC, it said Actions was operating as expected and inbound queues had recovered. The latest disruption isn’t particularly reassuring given that GitHub claimed last week that it’s now serving double the commits it was dealing with in April, which wasn’t exactly a good month for GitHub either. No month this year has been great at the ‘Hub, really. The history archive on GitHub’s status website indicates there were 26 issues with the platform in April. There were 23 in May and June, 26 in July, and there’ve been 23 so far in August with just under a week left to go. Whether this month can top March, with 32 incidents, or February’s 37, remains to be seen. There were 25 in January, too, meaning GitHub has suffered at least 23 reliability issues every month this year. GitHub Actions is arguably a central part of the platform for many developers using CI/CD workflows and other forms of automation, and it has been among the services hardest hit by GitHub’s ongoing reliability problems. As everyone who uses a software-as-a-service product knows, uptime is a key element in measuring reliability, and Actions isn’t exactly at triple nines right now - as of Wednesday, GitHub’s uptime page for Actions shows it at just 98.13 percent for August - nearly in danger of slipping into 97 percent reliability territory. That’s a bad place to be when you’re supposedly dealing with 2.9 billion commits, 24 million new repos, and 130 million merged pull requests a month, as GitHub claims it is. While GitHub’s issues this year have been many and frequently reported on here at The Register, August has been a particularly bad month for the operation. August 17 saw GitHub suffer from a nearly eight-hour outage that hit multiple services, with Issues, Pull Requests, APIs, Actions, and Copilot all producing elevated errors and hamstringing customers’ ability to do work. GitHub has pointed the finger at AI for many of its issues, blaming bots and agents for skyrocketing usage it hasn’t been able to cope with. The same went for that August 17 outage, with GitHub CTO Vladimir Fedorov issuing a mea culpa for the incident, saying that his operation had let users down and promising, just like he did back in April when GitHub admitted it was having issues, to scale enough to support its growing user base, human or otherwise. “We'll earn your trust through the scaling and reliability of the platform,” Fedorov wrote in last week's postmortem of the August 17 outage. Six days after he promised to fix things, here we are with reliability slipping and the issue count growing. GitHub didn’t respond to questions for this story. ®

MNT follows up its open hardware portables with a desktop case

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 22:32:13 +0000

MNT is launching the Station, a miniature desktop case for motherboards that come from its Reform open-source laptop. If you upgraded the laptop, you can now give your old motherboard a new life. The MNT Station is very pricey for a case at $299. That’s not a complete computer – it is just the case for an existing motherboard from its Reform laptop line, which itself goes for $429. Then again, MNT’s Reform laptops are very much not ordinary laptops. The company describes the original MNT Reform as “the ultimate open hardware laptop”. It’s a modular, repairable, replaceable and upgradable machine, complete with extensive documentation. The first model was launched in 2019 and The Register mentioned it when discussing the optional OLKB ortholinear keyboard in 2021. Today, MNT offers several Arm processor options across the Reform family, including a Quasar module based on Qualcomm’s QCS6490 via a Thundercomm C6490P, with 8 GB of RAM and 128 GB of flash, and an RCORE module based on Rockchip’s RK3588, with 16 GB of RAM and 256 GB of flash. In 2023, the full-size laptop was joined by the much smaller MNT Pocket Reform with a seven-inch screen. The company is currently working on the Reform Next, a slimmer, lighter, faster model that it successfully crowdfunded early last year and which should ship very soon. The Reform starts at $1,299, the Pocket Reform costs from $1,200 depending on spec, and the Reform Next is currently planned to be $1,249. These are not bargain-basement laptops. If you want fully open, documented, and maintainable Arm-based hardware, it’s going to cost you. That may help explain the appeal of MNT’s new desktop case: if you upgrade your Reform laptop with a newer, faster motherboard, you can install the old board in the MNT Station and continue using it. This seems to be very much in the model of the Framework Desktop Case, whose announcement The Reg covered early last year. The new Station case is CNC-milled from solid aluminum. It accepts Reform motherboards version 2.0, 2.5, and 3.0. You can add various optional extras, including a daughterboard to provide two more USB-C ports, a Wi-Fi module with external antennas, battery packs, and more. It’s not just a simple plastic enclosure, but even so, it’s quite a lot for just a case. You could buy a used or surplus mini PC for that kind of money, and sites such as LowCostMiniPCs will help you find them – complete with options to look in the US, UK, or Germany (for the Eurozone). At the time of writing, the site has units from $65, so you could build a redundant cluster of the things. Sadly, fully open development costs. ®

Meta's proposed $18B settlement in teen harm case throws YouTube and TikTok under the bus, too

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 22:32:13 +0000

Meta announced on Wednesday that it has offered to pay about $18 billion to settle the lawsuit against it brought by 52 attorneys general from US states, territories, and the District of Columbia. But part of that payout and some of its concessions are being conditioned on whether YouTube and TikTok will adopt its new teen-targeted usage restrictions, too. The case, led by the California Attorney General, was first filed in 2023, and accused Zuckercorp of not only illegally collecting data on its underage users, but also designing its platforms in such a way that it put young users at risk and drove excessive use. All the while, the suit alleged, Meta lied about those risks to users, their families, and the public in violation of state and federal laws. Meta admitted no wrongdoing in the proposed settlement, naturally, though it’s still going to make considerable changes to ensure the not-risks it didn’t inflict on children won’t continue to cause them any nonexistent mental health harms on its pair of totally innocent social media platforms. And nothing happens unless a judge approves. What Meta is offering If the settlement is approved by the judge in the case, Meta will implement changes to accounts held by kids under 18, including a two-hour daily time limit that’s shared across Facebook and Instagram, default blocking of its apps between midnight and 6AM, muted notifications during school hours (8AM - 3PM), prompts every 15 minutes encouraging them to stop mindlessly scrolling, an option to disable autoplay on videos, hiding likes and reactions by default, and a block on “extreme makeup filters.” Most interestingly, Meta said it’ll also give teens the option to choose a non-algorithmic feed that “isn’t personalized by our recommendation systems … as their default” in order to weed out the garbage that Meta algorithms tend to surface to users. No word on whether that option will be made available to adult users too – we asked, but didn’t hear back. Direct messages on Facebook and Instagram, we note, are exempt from night mode, time limits, and school notification pauses, as Meta wants “to allow teens to stay connected with friends and family.” Meta also said it’ll dole out the roughly $18 billion settlement across the states and territories party to the deal, with funds ultimately used at those governments’ discretion, though with the intention it go toward addressing mental health harms to kids due to social media. The payment will be distributed in annual installments over 10 years, making this a drop in the bucket for Zuck and friends. For reference, Meta’s Q2 2026 revenue, reported at the end of July, was $60.8 billion. “Meta has agreed to make massive transformations that will reduce the risk of harm from its platforms — and will do it within months,” California AG Rob Bonta said of the deal. “I am proud to deliver this settlement that addresses the concerns at the core of our lawsuit and institutes real change, real transparency, and real enforceable protections for children on Facebook and Instagram — right now, no more waiting.” Meta wants its peers to share the blame Meta did its damndest in its settlement announcement to deflect blame and shift responsibility, tossing YouTube and TikTok under the bus and conditioning a good deal of its concessions on whether the pair willingly adopt the moves it was forced into in court. “Teens move fluidly between dozens of apps a day,” Meta said. “For meaningful progress to happen, we urge TikTok and YouTube to join us and state attorneys general in adopting this new standard, to ensure teens use social media in a healthy and responsible way.” To put the pressure on the pair, Meta said that it’s going to withhold 30 percent of its settlement payment (around $5.3 billion, per the company) until both YouTube and TikTok agree to implement similar daily limits, night mode, and age assurance measures to the ones Meta has agreed to. Meta also expects the pair to pay an amount matching that 30 percent withholding. If those two conditions aren’t met, Meta’s bill for the settlement will decrease to around $12.7 billion. Along with that demand, Meta also said that the time commitment for its daily time limit and night mode measures would be strengthened if YouTube and TikTok sign on, too. While most of the terms in the settlement are required to be kept in place for 10 years, Meta’s only on the hook to retain its night mode and time limits for teens for five years. If YouTube and TikTok agree to its terms, Meta will not only agree to keep those measures in place for 10 years, but also strengthen them, reducing the daily limit for minors to just one hour per app and expanding night mode to 10PM - 7AM. “This framework will only work if all our peers join us,” Meta legal chief C.J. Mahoney said. “We therefore call on our industry peers, TikTok and YouTube, to implement this new framework, right away.” We reached out to YouTube and TikTok for comment, but didn’t hear back from either. Speaking to Meta’s agreement, Forrester principal analyst Kate Winick described the settlement as the largest penalty ever seen for a social media platform, while qualifying Meta’s concessions as largely in line with what it’s agreed to in other markets that’ve ruled against it. Winick agreed that the social media problem facing teens is bigger than Meta and said its fate is irrevocably linked to those of TikTok and YouTube, but called the company out for deflecting responsibility for much of its concessions to others. “The most pernicious problems are still being displaced onto others: preventing young users from signing up for standard accounts is a problem Meta says it needs the app stores to solve, and ensuring they use the opt-in features is a burden placed on parents,” Winick said in an email. “While limits like these are helpful in [reducing] the mental burden on teenagers, the challenge of fundamentally changing what content they are exposed to remains as big as ever.” ®

Memory crunch: Cloud operators may be pushed to splurge 68% of capex on DRAM and NAND

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 22:32:13 +0000

The rising cost of contract prices for memory chips could see DRAM and NAND flash account for more than two-thirds of the capital expenditure of cloud service providers (CSPs) by next year. Taiwan-based market watcher TrendForce forecasts that total capex by cloud operators will almost double this year - up 98 percent - and grow a further 50 percent in 2027. That rapid rise is driven partly by growing investment in new infrastructure, but also by soaring memory bills. The upshot is that TrendForce estimates DRAM and NAND flash will account for 47 percent of the total spend on hardware this year, jumping to 68 percent of it in 2027. The analyst doesn’t put revenue figures to its predictions, but reckons server DRAM components will have grown by 270 percent year-on-year by the end of 2026, with enterprise SSD prices up 235 percent over the same period. As Reg readers know, growing demand for high-performance memory from big customers is prompting DRAM and NAND chip suppliers to prioritize production capacity for server applications. TrendForce estimates that HBM - used in GPUs - and RDIMMs used in servers will together account for more than half of DRAM bit supply this year. The effects are already visible in PC prices climbing by double-digit percentages due to a shortage of standard memory parts, and overall PC shipments falling by 5 percent in response. The smartphone market has been hit in a similar fashion, with shipments expected to fall by 15 percent this year. For enterprise customers, the knock-on effects are becoming hard to ignore. As memory eats an ever-larger share of CSP capex, that cost is unlikely to stay with the cloud providers and will be passed down. Earlier this month, Euro operator OVHcloud warned it was planning to inflate its charges by up to 87 percent to cover rising memory costs in a preview of what other providers may follow with. As if that isn’t bad enough, TrendForce says that elevated memory costs provide server and AI chip suppliers such as Nvidia with greater justification for raising their own prices. Sure enough, recent news reports claim Nvidia plans to charge 15 percent more for products containing its Vera Rubin and Grace Blackwell chips. To counter this cloud operators may need to increase capital expenditure even further to maintain their targeted level of infrastructure expansion - which means more price increases for users. ®

Boston Scientific discloses 'global disruption' in ongoing cyberattack

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 16:23:08 +0000

Medical device maker Boston Scientific’s global operations have been disrupted by an ongoing cyberattack, the company disclosed on Wednesday. According to an SEC filing, the “cybersecurity incident” affecting its IT systems started on Tuesday, and resulted in a “global disruption to the company’s operations.” Upon detecting the digital intruders, the company began an investigation with third-party infosec experts who are working to contain the threat, the filing says. The medtech firm did not immediately respond to The Register’s inquiries, including if this was a ransomware infection and what data, if any, the criminals stole after breaking into the IT systems. “The incident has caused, and is expected to continue to cause, disruptions and limitations of access to certain of the company’s information systems and business applications that support aspects of the Company’s operations, including the ability to process and ship customer orders,” Boston Scientific reported to federal regulators. The company doesn’t have a timeline for full restoration, and noted the “full scope, nature and impacts, including operational and financial impacts” of the cyberattack remain unknown. The news did, however, send Boston Scientific shares spiraling down more than 4% on Wednesday morning. At press time, none of the usual suspects had claimed responsibility for the attack. In recent months, both ransomware/extortion gangs and government-backed hackers have disrupted other medtech firms’ operations and stolen sensitive data. In March, Stryker was hit by a cyber crew with ties to Iran's intelligence agency, causing a global network outage at the company. A month later, medical-device maker Medtronic disclosed a cyberattack in a filing with federal regulators. Notorious data-theft-and-extortion group ShinyHunters claimed to be behind this intrusion, and the company in July warned patients that their names, contact details, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, and health information was stolen in the breach. ®

Carhartt data breach affects 12.9M, half of what ShinyHunters claimed

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 16:23:08 +0000

Workwear and fashion retailer Carhartt’s data breach was about half as bad as ShinyHunters claimed, according to Troy Hunt, who reviewed the data dump before uploading it to his Have I Been Pwned website. Hunt’s HIBP service reported 12.9 million individuals affected by the alleged breach, around half of what ShinyHunters purported when it claimed to leak the company’s data earlier this month. ShinyHunters dumped what it said was 50GB worth of Carhartt’s data on August 13 after the retailer hired what the criminals called “a very unskilled and incompetent negotiator” to haggle the crooks down from their $3.3 million extortion demand. According to Hunt, ShinyHunters data was injected with millions of lines of synthetic data, substantially padding out the number of affected individuals. “You're not going to believe this, but turns out you can't always take criminals at their word,” said Hunt, before detailing the investigative process that goes into calculating the scale of breaches that make it to the HIBP site. Hunt usually starts with HIBP's open-source email address extractor, which spat out nearly 25 million addresses, before running it through OpenClaw to analyze the contents further and sift through the mass of information, looking for anomalies. For a retailer, the AI thought that the millions of .edu and .org email domains looked off - like signs of TPC-DS synthetic data injection. Examples included michael.ware@c.edu and michelle.larue@lkvb06fkzsjv.org. The first and last names look real, but a common finding among TPC-DS-generated data is that it will use completely random strings for domains. A manual look at the data points with which these email addresses were associated further revealed these "individuals" were located in countries, such as Benin, which don’t represent dominant Carhartt markets. Further, the AI found more customers registered in Montenegro than in the US, where Carhartt is headquartered. It also found a suspiciously large proportion of customers with birth dates set in the early 1900s – unlikely given the company’s clientele is more hipster-oriented than than blue-collar nowadays. Hacking away at all the clearly bogus data, OpenClaw dropped the estimated number of genuine individuals among the data trove from 24.8 million to 13.6 million. Hunt carried on eliminating suspicious findings he noticed, such as Microsoft 365 duplicate email addresses and addresses marked for deactivation, as well as prompting OpenClaw to continue doing the same. He finally arrived at 12,933,413 accounts believed to be genuine among the ShinyHunters-leaked dataset. That’s the number that made it to the HIBP platform, which states that 83 percent of these were already gathered up in previous breaches. The moral of the story is, as Hunt says, to “take headline numbers with a grain of salt unless you're confident in the processes of those making the claims." And until trustworthy sources do the arduous work, stop treating the word of cybercriminals as gospel. The real data contains names, email addresses, phone numbers, and physical addresses. Carhartt did not respond to our request for comment on Hunt’s findings. The company is yet to comment on the breach anywhere publicly. ®

CIOs are on notice – vSphere 8 times out in October 2027

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 16:23:08 +0000

For users of vSphere 8, October 11, 2027 looms large on the calendar. That is the day general support for vSphere 8 ends, along with bug fixes and security patches, and the day traditional perpetual licensing for the technology also expires. From then on, customers must upgrade to VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9 or VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) 9, and shift to a bundled subscription model widely seen as much more expensive and geared toward larger installations. VMware launched vSphere 8 in October 2022, ahead of its takeover by Broadcom in 2023. Broadcom made no secret of its intention to reorganize the VMware product lineup and licensing regime, and train its sights on the biggest, most lucrative users. vSphere 8 offered customers breathing space in which to watch Broadcom's plans play out and plan their own next move. Aside from the higher licensing costs, VCF 9 offers a radically different proposition that includes much more onerous audit requirements. Technically, VCF 9 is a take-it-or-leave-it bundle of products that gives customers less flexibility than its predecessor, which came in Standard and Enterprise Plus editions. According to Harsha Kotikela, senior director for product and solutions marketing at Nutanix, calling this an upgrade doesn't do justice to what shifting to VCF 9 entails. VCF is bundled much more tightly with both vSAN and NSX, the latter of which was an add-on option in vSphere 8. Broadcom's whole vision, he says, is heavily geared toward private clouds. That might work for some businesses but it will go against the grain for many enterprise organizations pursuing hybrid cloud or more distributed infrastructure strategies. Add all this together, argues Kotikela, and what sounds like a routine upgrade starts to look much more like a major architectural migration to a more expensive, less flexible platform by an immovable end date. Customers who want to stay within the VMware ecosystem have an alternative in the shape of VMware vSphere Foundation, which Broadcom pitches as delivering "enterprise-class hyperconverged infrastructure." The platform is widely perceived as a cut-down alternative to VCF, with a narrower range of features and reduced storage per core, along with many of the same drawbacks around unwanted bundled features and costs. It does not offer the broader Kubernetes and AI support found in VCF. That means most customers will still face a decision at some point about how to support these two trends. As Kotikela says: "If an organization decides, 'We can't afford VCF 9 right now, so we're gonna go with this lower cost bundle,' then two years down the road, they're going to be saying, 'Oh, I do want to use AI', then they're going to have to migrate again. That's a hidden danger." The vSphere 8 cut-off may be over a year away, but many businesses are already considering their options, and plenty have identified alternatives and voted with their feet. Gartner research shows that 35 percent of respondents have already migrated or are in the process of migrating their entire portfolios away from VMware. Alternatives to the VMware stack are developing at an accelerated pace, the analyst house added, "with a diverse ecosystem of enterprise-ready solutions projected to reach full feature-parity and operational maturity within the next 24 months." Gartner pointed out that "Nutanix is expanding its ecosystem support, including integration with external third-party storage vendors." Defining your future platform The October 2027 cut-off should be about more than simply finding a replacement for VMware infrastructure assembled over years, even decades. Organizations need to think well beyond a straight lift-and-shift of their existing architectures, Gartner added, and consider broader modernization strategies such as hybrid architectures, open source, and container management. The future of virtualization, Gartner said, is one where "VMs and containers are managed through a single control plane. Hypervisors integrate natively with Kubernetes." That single control plane would allow infrastructure to be provisioned and governed through "declarative automation." That is the Nutanix Cloud Platform architecture, Kotikela says, with workflows, lifecycles, and operations managed in one place. "It's one platform, so, you'll be able to manage both VMs and containers. You have one platform to manage your different clouds, plus on prem." More recently, Nutanix Agent Gateway has added AI agent observability and token management to the platform. The alternative, Kotikela said, is a migration strategy that potentially leaves tech teams juggling separate silos and separate lifecycles for private cloud and public cloud. That is challenging enough during the migration itself, but from a day-two perspective, he says, "It becomes increasingly difficult." Who switched early? Nutanix is keen to highlight businesses that have already shed aging VMware infrastructure to modernize their technology stacks and harvest tangible benefits. Western Union migrated at least 900 applications across a 3,900-core server fleet, while South Korea’s Everland theme park also moved from Broadcom to Nutanix, citing the ease of the migration path. Looming over all of this is the rush toward implementing AI, particularly the promise of agentic AI. As strategic leaders in organizations, Kotikela says, "CIOs are also thinking about where I should drive my organization three years from now, right?" It's increasingly clear that hybrid cloud is going to be the key underlying model for AI, Kotikela argues, and "You have to have a seamless way of managing this distributed environment." Kotikela adds, "The foundation for AI, obviously, is Kubernetes and containers. So, you have to modernize from an application perspective. But it also doesn't make sense that you modernize every legacy application." For that reason, Kotikela said, it's vital that IT should be able to "manage simultaneously both your VM-based applications as well as container-based applications or new applications like AI." That includes the ability to accommodate and manage both CPU- and GPU-based architectures, whether on-premises, in colos, or in the cloud. "That's something that Nutanix provides at the top level," Kotikela says. In the coming years, as businesses move beyond experiments and pilots, which are often on-premises, they will begin deploying inference in production. "It should be able to run anywhere in this distributed environment." Given the scale of the challenge around transitioning to AI, imposing a major migration effort that locks organizations into a single stack, both in AI and other domains, is hard to justify. That is especially true with technology on such a rapid innovation trajectory. CIOs cannot predict or control the innovations in software or silicon they might want to adopt in two or three years' time, Kotikela says. "So, you want to pick a platform that allows you that flexibility to mix and match stuff. So that's what's in your hands, that's what you can control." Sponsored by Nutanix.

Microsoft sketches out a Whiteboard extension

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 16:23:08 +0000

Microsoft is giving customers who are still clinging to its doomed legacy Whiteboard technology a lifeline, and has pushed the deletion date to October 16, 2026. The migration tooling for "legacy enterprise whiteboards" will be retired on September 25, 2026, and the standalone Microsoft Whiteboard app will be deprecated on November 30, 2026. To be clear, Microsoft Whiteboard as a concept is not going away - this is more about migration for Azure-based files. The original dates were August 22 for the migration tooling, September 5 for the permanent deletion, and September 14 for the app deprecation. Therefore, customers have been granted a little more time to make the transition to OneDrive-backed whiteboards. Microsoft did not respond to a query about why it had moved the milestones. The lateness of the announcement suggests it either ran into technical problems or that enough customers were still on the legacy platform that Redmond uttered the computing equivalent of FINE! Have another month! New whiteboard files for commercial customers have been in OneDrive rather than Azure since 2022. However, legacy whiteboards could still be stored in Azure and, if not migrated to OneDrive, will be deleted on October 16. Migration happens automatically when a whiteboard is opened in Whiteboard on the web, Teams desktop, Teams web, or using the Whiteboard Windows app (through to September 22, 2026). If migration doesn't happen, then users have until October 16 before somebody at Microsoft hits the delete key. However, only owners of Azure Whiteboards can trigger migration. Users on vacation, or who have left the organization, could also present a headache for administrators, who might need to transfer ownership to active users. In Microsoft's original announcement, it promised a set of PowerShell cmdlets to ease the process. The Microsoft Whiteboard app became generally available in 2018. It was a useful collaborative tool for Microsoft 365 subscribers (or could be used standalone with a Microsoft account, although these days organizations are the target). It is very much a relic of a past era at Redmond, when touch-based experiences were all the rage. Today, the company would likely prefer users to bark instructions at an AI assistant. According to Microsoft, "Moving these files to OneDrive improves security, accessibility, revision history, eDiscovery, and access to current and future Whiteboard features." ®

AWS buys DuckLabs, the people behind the popular in-process OLAP database

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 16:23:08 +0000

Amazon Web Services has bought DuckLabs, the support and development company behind open-source DuckDB. The deal — the financial details of which were not disclosed — will see DuckLabs, founded by authors of the in-process OLAP database, become part of AWS. AWS said DuckDB and its related projects would remain free and open source under their MIT licenses, with the nonprofit DuckDB Foundation continuing to guide them. Written in C++, the database is embedded within a host process and, as such, there is no DBMS server software to install, update, or maintain. For example, the DuckDB Python package can run queries directly on data in Python software library Pandas without importing or copying data. The brainchild of academics at Amsterdam's Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica mathematical and theoretical computing research center, DuckDB first went public in 2022 and has gathered a strong following among developers and analytics users. It achieved its 1.0 release in 2024 and has since launched into data lakes with DuckLake, which uses DuckDB as metadata storage to get around the “small changes” problem experienced by data lakes. AWS has been a fan for a while. Speaking to The Register last year, AWS veep and distinguished engineer Andy Warfield said the cloud giant's engineering team was "super excited" about the DuckLake announcement. "It was passed around broadly across the teams, and people have been playing with it. It's captured people's imaginations for sure," he said. The AWS and DuckLabs teams have already collaborated around S3 Tables, announced by AWS in December 2024, to ensure “we built first-class support for S3 Tables in DuckDB,” Hannes Mühleisen, co-founder and CEO at DuckLabs told The Register on Wednesday. Although the database itself is fully open source under the MIT License, most of the contributions and strategic direction have come from DuckLabs. However, following the merger, Mühleisen sees a greater role for the independent DuckDB Foundation in avoiding any potential conflicts of interest with other technology giants. The database can read and write to Google Sheets and query and manage Google BigQuery datasets via an extension, for example. “We can expand the role of the Foundation as a place where the stakeholders or the people that are building things with DuckDB are coming together. We are thinking about adding a Technical Advisory Board to the Foundation, so that whoever is betting on DuckDB can come together in the Board and have a communication channel through the Foundation, which stays independent,” Mühleisen said. The Foundation, which is led by Mühleisen and Mark Raasveldt, DuckLabs CTO and co-author of the database, has yet to decide the exact governance and voting rights which will determine the direction of the project’s development. Nonetheless, Mühleisen said it would create a mechanism by which the community could play a greater role. In a prepared statement marking the merger, AWS’s Warfield said: “DuckDB is an incredible open source project with an amazing community; it is broadly used and very much loved by S3 customers today. After about two years of working closely with Mark, Hannes and the team at DuckLabs, I’m excited at the opportunity to help the project have an even broader impact. A lot of what has made DuckDB so successful is the fact that it is completely open source and easily embeddable in so many types of applications. We are committed to the project's continued development in open source and under the stewardship of the DuckDB Foundation.” The DuckLabs team will continue to be based in Amsterdam.®

Gates warns society faces an AI-pocalypse unless we get more socialist

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 16:23:08 +0000

Bill Gates thinks that experts underestimate the potential havoc AI will wreak on society and says preparations to ease the transition are inadequate. The Microsoft founder and former CEO is usually a cheerful proponent of AI tech, talking up its potential to transform healthcare, education, and business productivity. Yet in a missive posted to his personal website, the billionaire philanthropist says the AI era is likely to be one of the most turbulent times in human history, and how we allow it to play out will determine whether the world becomes a fairer place or if the divide between rich and poor becomes greater than ever. This kind of talk will sound dangerously close to socialism for many Americans. There are always winners and losers in a market-led economy, so why should things be any different with AI? Those wealthy enough to invest in it and control it will prosper, as others will find themselves on skid row. But, Gates says, this time it will be different. Previous technology transitions happened over several generations and created new jobs where human cognition was required, whereas AI is starting to replace human cognition. The winners are likely to be a small group of people, and the losers will be everyone else. It will not affect just one or two sectors, according to the AI fab club: AI will replace human roles in fields as diverse as law, customer services, medicine, software, and manufacturing. And it will hit these industries rapidly, over the course of a decade or less, rather than taking a few generations. Gates wrote: There will be some new jobs created, Gates says, but without the right policies in place there will be far fewer than today, and entry-level jobs are among those most likely to vanish (as we're already seeing in the tech industry). Blue-collar jobs will also be affected, as AI-powered robots are advancing faster than people realize - much of the progress is happening in China. These may begin to compete with people on some physical tasks, such as in the construction and hospitality industries, within a few years. Gates says there are several big risks from AI adoption, foremost of which is that many work roles are set to disappear forever. He notes that during the Great Depression of the 1930s, unemployment in the US hit 25 percent and remained in double digits for much of that decade, but ultimately recovered as demand, investment, and growth returned. He fails to mention, however, that it took a global war for that to happen. The biggest shift comes when AI operates error-free operation, without humans prepping its work or checking its output. Gates says we need to think now about reducing job losses, or risk much of society ending up unemployed. Another danger, Gates says, is that AI empowers people to do harm: AI-driven malware already lets low-skilled attackers launch cyberattacks, while generative AI makes fraud, disinformation, and deepfakes easier to produce. The third big threat is that AI systems could stunt the mental development of children, and crowd out human relationships. So how is society meant to avoid this apocalyptic vision and ensure AI becomes the force for good that Microsoft’s progenitor believes it to be? Gates says AI needs both a domestic and international framework. Nationally, that means bodies that can set priorities across government agencies to ensure every risk is accounted for. Yet even a nation with its own house in order remains exposed to cross-border risks, so an international body must be built in parallel. If that sounds like wishful thinking, get in the queue. Gates notes it would require US-China cooperation, and under the current Washington administration, that's about as likely as pigs flying.. Beyond that, some jobs - social care for instance - should stay human. Gates also thinks the tax system will need rebalancing, as more people out of work means less income tax to fund government itself. A starting point, he suggests, is taxing AI tokens and robots to reduce corporations' incentives to swap meatbags for machines. This could fund retraining and a stronger safety net, but would need careful targeting so it doesn't hinder beneficial uses of AI, like drug discovery and better education Again, critics will likely dismiss this as socialism and point out that Microsoft was ruthless in pursuing profits under Gates' leadership. In a final message to world leaders, Gates urges them to act now, “before unemployment rises sharply, communities are hurting, and public trust has eroded.” This marks a shift for the Microsoft founder, who two years ago told people not to worry about AI, in particular energy use and increased greenhouse gas emissions, arguing AI would eventually solve the problems it creates. ®

Nitter no more? X sends in the lawyers to shut down open source project

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 16:23:08 +0000

X, the social media mouthpiece of free speech absolutist Elon Musk, has reportedly sent legal takedown notices to Nitter and related service XCancel over alleged data scraping and rules violations. XCancel's home page now contains some minimal text stating: "On Monday 24th August at 8 PM EST, we received at [sic] letter from X Corp. asking to cease and desist the service XCancel." It says the service has been halted "until further notice." Nitter's maintainer, zedeus, adds in a separate statement : "nitter.net is offline and development has stopped for the time being. I'm seeking legal advice and won't be commenting further on the specifics for now." Although the repository is still on GitHub, it is marked as archived and read-only, with some explanatory text added to the README.MD. Nitter provided a way for users to read posts on X without requiring an account. There was no JavaScript or ads, a user's IP could not be tracked, and it was generally a good deal snappier than the official X client, just read-only. It was the service behind platforms such as XCancel. It has also been a thorn in X's side for years, giving privacy-minded users a way to view posts without logging into Elon Musk's social media mouthpiece. This isn't the first time Nitter has reeled at the hands of X. In January 2024, zedeus announced the end of the project after Twitter (the original name of X) removed the guest account feature. A year later, the project was back after it found a way to work around the restrictions. However, this appears to have triggered the lawyers, judging by reports that the letter alleges data scraping and violations of X's rules. The Register asked X for comment, but has yet to receive a response. X isn't alone in taking exception to data scraping. Meta, for example, fired a sueball at Israel-based web scraping firm Bright Data in 2023, but X's cease and desist notice sits awkwardly alongside Musk's own proclamations about free speech, and his corporation's use of public X data to train Grok. Plenty of organizations continue to post on X, but accessing those posts without an X account has become an order of magnitude more difficult without services such as Nitter and XCancel. ®

SpaceX plans to plant $100B Starbase on Louisiana coast

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 16:23:08 +0000

SpaceX has announced plans to spend $100 billion on a Louisiana spaceport designed to support thousands of launches annually. According to SpaceX, construction is planned to start in 2027, and the first Starship launch from the facility is earmarked for 2029. The spaceport will have its own propellant production, power generation, deep-water shipping capabilities, vehicle processing facilities, and an airport. Louisiana Economic Development (LED) was cock-a-hoop about the plans and estimated that the project would generate 3,000 direct new jobs over the next decade, and 8,100 indirect new jobs. When complete, the project will comprise five launch complexes, each with two launch pads and a propellant farm. Vermilion Parish is the intended location and, according to LED, "SpaceX has also already engaged the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority and other appropriate state agencies to proactively address potential impacts to wildlife, fisheries and their supporting habitats." SpaceX performs its Starship flight tests from its Boca Chica facility in Texas. The company has come under criticism and scrutiny over its environmental record over the years, and we can only hope it has learned some lessons in the meantime. According to SpaceX, the Vermilion Parish shoreline "is eroding between 3.3 and 23 feet [between 1 and 7 meters] per year." It says it'll work with state and federal agencies on projects including Gulf shoreline protection breakwaters, marshland restoration, and coastal wildlife preservation. Louisiana authorities would be wise to remember the experience of the Boca Chica facility, which has hosted a good many exploding Starships over the vehicle's test program, and seen concrete sprayed from a damaged launchpad. Starship has also yet to reach orbit, let alone demonstrate the reusability required by the "thousands of launches" for which the Louisiana facility is designed. "With Starbase, Louisiana," SpaceX wrote, "we will enable frequent missions to Earth orbit to support the expansion of internet connectivity, launch Starmind (AI data centers), build a city on the Moon, make life multiplanetary, and extend the light of consciousness to the stars!" A lofty goal, and one that omits the commitment made by SpaceX to NASA's Artemis missions or the fact that Starship has yet to reach orbit, let alone venture beyond. ®

Nigel Farage wants to scrap 'suffocating' UK GDPR

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 16:23:08 +0000

Reform UK says it wants to scrap the UK GDPR after eight years of the regulations “strangling” small businesses. The party’s leader Nigel Farage and economy chief Robert Jenrick announced additional pledges on Tuesday evening, which include scrapping the UK’s data protection regulation for a “light-touch” alternative more akin to New Zealand’s approach. The UK’s Information Commissioner has powers to issue multi-million-pound fines to businesses that violate UK GDPR, which in 2021 replaced the pre-Brexit Data Protection Act 2018. New Zealand’s equivalent, however, only has the power to issue fines up to NZ$50,000 under its Privacy Act 2020. The legislation is weaker in some areas compared to the UK GDPR, but imposes similar restrictions on handling and transferring data. Building a more prosperous business environment features heavily among Reform UK’s policies, we're told. “Small businesses are the beating heart of our economy, yet they have been suffocated by years of punishing taxes, suffocating EU red tape and a big-state obsession that rewards dependency over hard work,” said Farage via news wire PA. “While the establishment parties drive small firms to the brink of closure, Reform UK is offering a bold, common-sense rescue plan.” Jenrick added: “GDPR has strangled small businesses and tech firms alike in a web of unnecessary regulation. “Ten years after the Brexit referendum, we should not still be following ridiculous EU privacy laws that hurt British businesses.” “For decades governments have focused on big corporations while leaving small businesses to fall by the wayside. No more,” Jenrick added. “Reform UK believes the 6 million small businesses in the UK are the backbone of our high streets and our economy, and we will back them to the hilt.” The UK must keep an active adequacy decision from the European Union so that personal data can flow freely across borders without extra legal hurdles. Any plans to diverge from EU data protection law in a major way could jeopardize the adequacy decision. The Reform UK party itself is currently embroiled in a data protection-related legal battle brought against it by the Good Law Project, which claims Farage's party failed to comply with current UK GDPR. The campaign group sued Reform UK in March 2025 after it claimed the party was refusing to disclose to people the data it stored about them and failing to respond to requests to delete that data. The party tried to have the case thrown out, but a High Court judge ruled in June that the case should proceed to trial. Reform UK did not respond to our request for information about its pledges. Big on business, or a big load of pipe dreams? Farage’s GDPR-related pledge was made as part of a broader list of promises to create a more pro-enterprise business environment for smaller organizations that it said were confined by “damaging” regulations. The party vowed to reverse the National Insurance increase announced in 2024 by then-chancellor Rachel Reeves, as well as a range of tax-related easements. Farage said Reform would scrap income tax on full-time workers’ overtime pay, referred to as a “hard work bonus,” loosen inheritance tax related to farms, and increase the VAT registration floor from £90,000 to £150,000 ($122,662-$204,437). He also said he would alter the Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme to make it more tax-efficient for parents and grandparents to invest in their children’s business, and scrap the 2035 Zero Emission Vehicle mandate. A Labour spokesperson described the pledges as “unworkable and unserious.” They accused Farage and Reform of trying to undo the Online Safety Act and distract from the recent story of the party leader accepting a £5 million ($6.8 million) gift from an overseas crypto-billionaire. Shadow chancellor Sir Mel Stride said Reform’s pledges “collapse on contact with reality,” and would cost billions of pounds to implement. Of the party’s data protection plans, Sir Mel said “there is little detail on how their proposals to scrap GDPR would work.” GDPR was first tabled after lawmakers grew conscious of the need to update data protection regulations in the post-social media and cloud computing world, and in the wake of scandals, such as Cambridge Analytica, to protect individuals’ rights to their own information. Aside from its intention to reform the UK GDPR, Farage’s party has not introduced many tech-specific policies, other than to make the UK a leader in emerging technologies, such as AI. Reform UK isn’t the only party looking to tweak the UK GDPR, however. Labour’s plans date back to 2024 and came into effect last year with the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025. The legislation tweaked the UK GDPR, loosening restrictions related to data-sharing between critical sectors and automated decision-making, while also paving the way for a digital ID rollout, which is another matter entirely. ®

UK supermarket scales go 404 on shoppers

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 16:23:08 +0000

BORK!BORK!BORK! The scales are empty, and so what else can there be but a 404? Today's entry in the pantheon of bork takes us to the UK city of Coventry, where a set of scales at a Tesco store shows the number 404. Spotted by eagle-eyed Register reader Rowan Archer, the scales have logged off and done the computing equivalent of popping down to the pub. It's an odd number to choose. Hopefully it's a device identifier rather than a message code. After all, netizens have long associated the number with a browser being unable to find a resource on a server. 404 means not found. 400 is a bad request and, in fact, pretty much anything starting with a 4 generally means the client has likely done something naughty and the server is patiently replying with the computing equivalent of "don't do that." Archer sent us another image, with a 403 number and a plea for a human to deal with its label feed. 403 means Forbidden, so… could these be the forbidden scales? Only for weighing Eldritch Horrors? We're not sure how much Cthulhu weighs, but this might be the place to find out. The device in question looks like one of the Avery Berkel XT scale series, perhaps an XTi100, i101, or perhaps an x100 or x101. There's a large color touchscreen that lets the customer select the produce to be weighed. The screen can also show video ads to "increase customer basket value," which is exactly what we'd want to see after plopping a bag of onions on top of the thing. As far as we can tell, the scales run a version of Linux. The i incarnation has only 2GB of memory, while the x version pushes the boat out with 8GB, and so has a bit more headroom. Whatever the amount, it feels a little like overkill compared to the mechanical versions of yesteryear. There, no power or open-source operating system was required. Just an assistant capable of doing some basic mathematics, spotting what was in the bag, and knowing the difference between exotic berries and a cabbage. Still, progress, eh? And the only thing an old-fashioned scale could advertise was an audible notification when it was time for a squirt of WD-40. ®

Debian polls its developers on whether to burn the bots, tame the bots, or let 'em loose

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 16:23:08 +0000

The Debian project is polling its developers over AI usage: use it, impose limits, or ban it outright. The second Debian vote of the year, General Resolution: LLM usage in Debian is underway. More saliently, it is still underway – Debian Project Lead Sruthi Chandran extended the voting deadline by an extra week. (She was elected in March, in the first project poll of 2026.) Debian is a large and complicated project: the release announcement for version 13 says it has 69,830 packages, which take a total of 403 GB of disk, and contain 1,463,291,186 lines of code. So, suitably, it is a large and complex poll. The poll is more than 5,000 words long, and contains eight different proposals, which are both numbered and lettered. Each of them is seconded by between six and 17 developers. They are as follows: No LLM contributions to Debian via Social Contract. Allow AI-Assisted Contributions with conditions. Reject LLMs as far as practical, update Code of Conduct. Accept AI contributions for Debian specific work. Responsible Use of Generative AI. A cautious approach to generative AI. Debian is created by humans. Avoid the use of LLM: climate destruction is a deal breaker. The poll also notes: “Proposal A needs a 3:1 majority, the other proposals need a simple majority.” This aside, there’s a lot of variation under each proposal. Some are structured, some contain explanations and lists of what they would or would not apply to, some contain summaries, and so on. Only recognized Debian developers are eligible to vote, but we hope that they’re not put off by the wall of text and take the time to work out which of the fairly subtle variations best represents their views. Proposal A is one of the longest. The closest thing it has to a summary is its “preamble,” which says: “This proposal aims to expressly forbid any contributions to Debian written with the use or assistance of large language models (LLMs) or other generative AI tools.” Proposal B would permit LLM-based contributions, so long as they meet six requirements. These cover “legal compatibility,” “licensing and attribution,” “accountability,” “disclosure,” “prior discussion of bulk or automated changes,” and “confidentiality and privacy.” Proposal C calls for a total ban, and its summary is simple: “Reject LLMs (generative”AI”) as far as practical.” It’s backed by “Debian grandee Ian Jackson”, who wrote dpkg and runs Chiark. Proposal D attempts a pragmatic compromise, saying it “acknowledges that these practices are already in use and here to stay. Rather than banning their use, which seems counter-productive and unenforceable, the project chooses to place responsibility on contributors and therefore defines the following guidelines.” It continues with a reasonable enough set of restrictions – the work must be clearly described, comply with the Debian Free Software Guidelines, and so on. Proposal E is similar, and ends by saying that “responsibility for every contribution rests with the contributor who submits it, who remains accountable for its technical quality, legal acceptability, and suitability for inclusion in Debian.” Proposal F urges caution and “encourages contributors to avoid the use of generative AI where practical”. Proposal G “aims to ensure that contributions directly to Debian are created by humans” – in other words, code should be written by hand, but it’s permissible to use LLM tools in other ways while creating it. It ends by saying “we disallow the output of generative AI as direct contributions to Debian.” Finally, Proposal H focuses on just one of the many ethical concerns – but overall, the single most important one, as it affects everyone. “LLM usage accelerates the destruction of our ecosystem (planet Earth) and that is a deal-breaker.” If Proposal H has a weakness, it's that it does not distinguish between local and cloud-based LLMs, although there’s an argument that the environmental impact of the training process is the predominant aspect here and whether the end result is local (and relatively resource efficient), or remote (and extremely inefficient) is nowhere near as significant. In the humble opinion of this vulture, there are too many propositions, with too much overlap between them. We suspect this makes a three-to-one majority for the first very unlikely. To make it easier to arrive at a decision, we would have wanted to see the positions consolidated to fewer, clearer, mutually exclusive positions. But then, we’re not Debian contributors and have no skin in this game. The vote still has a few days to go, although the votes so far are climbing, at the time of writing under 350 ballots have been received. Some other projects and distributions have already chosen a position in this dispute. Back in April 2024, Gentoo chose to forbid it – as NetBSD did too soon afterwards. As we covered looking at the latest OpenBSD release, the project says that since AI code can’t be copyrighted, it can’t be committed to OpenBSD – but the project grandfathers in code from the Tmux project, which allows LLM-assisted contributions, so the barrier is somewhat permeable. Other such projects may yet follow. As we reported in September 2025, FreeBSD didn’t want AI code, but it has yet to update its official guidance with an explicit position. From some social media posts, we believe that an active debate is happening right now, possibly including a ballot similar to Debian’s – but the information is not public. The Register approached the project leadership at FreeBSD for comment, but at the time of writing, had received no response. Some distributions may forbid LLM code, but how much that changes things is a difficult question. The Linux kernel itself is now officially not an anti-AI project, and of course, Red Hat is all-in – and the IBM subsidiary does create a lot of the code used in most distros. These things being so, arguably what individual distros choose to do becomes something of a moot point. ®

Sopra Steria's £370M Capita spat heads for 2028 courtroom showdown

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 16:23:08 +0000

System integrator Sopra Steria is set to have its day in court to contest a £370 million contract awarded by the UK government to Capita to run shared services for finance and HR across a number of Whitehall departments. A judge has set a trial date for early 2028, pending attempts to settle the case out of court. Sopra Steria's allegations center on the award of a business process outsourcing deal led by the Department for Work and Pensions valued at £370 million over ten years, less than 40 percent of the £958.7 million estimated value outlined during the tender stage, according to court filings from late last year. The French headquartered SI is the incumbent provider for some of the departments through SSCL, formerly a joint venture with the British administration that Sopra Steria now entirely owns. In its claim, Sopra Steria alleged Capita's bid to run the services for four major government departments was "abnormally low" and based on staffing "significantly below the current levels." In statements following the claim, both Capita and the DWP told The Register the government conducted a robust procurement process and were committed to providing a high level of service and value for money for the public. The French tech and services biz later claimed the Capita bid was 42 percent below the DWP’s "Should Cost Model", designed to protect against a bias towards low bids, which provided a total price of £642 million, according to court papers. According to papers released by the court last month, the trial is set to be listed for seven weeks from 17 January 2028 at the Technology and Construction Court, part of the High Court of Justice. Alternative dispute resolution is set to continue in efforts to settle the case out of court, the participants response to which may affect how costs are awarded should the case come to trial. The case comes at a difficult time for Capita and government procurement of technology and business services. Capita is in the spotlight over its disastrous handling of the Civil Service Pensions Scheme (CSPS), which angered MPs after leaving some of the 1.7-million members struggling to make ends meet as they wait for payments. Capita apologized for its shortcomings in running the scheme, and pointed to a higher-than-expected backlog of cases from the previous provider. Capita won the contract for £239 million ($318 million) to build and run the scheme in November 2023. Problems with the project first came to light in December last year, following reporting by The Register. The DWP award to Capita was announced in March 2026. During a meeting of the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee in July, Labour MP Clive Betts said the government had given the shared services contract to Capita “even though things were beginning to go wrong with” the CSPS. Andrew Forzani, Government Chief Commercial Officer, responded: “We went through a ‘lessons learned’ on what had gone wrong with the [CSPS] transition and how that could be applied to the [DWP shared services] contract. That resulted in the Department asking for additional assurances through that process, which it worked through.” ®

India’s crewed space program will fly this year, after missing 2022 and 2025 targets

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 07:26:09 +0000

India plans the first launch of its crewed space program this year and has expanded its orbital ambitions to include operating a space station by 2035. India’s crewed space program is called Gaganyaan and has already missed deadlines to fly in 2022 and 2025. The nation’s space research organization (ISRO) agency and government did not say anything about the future Gaganyaan schedule after last year’s deadline passed without a launch. That silence ended earlier this week, when ISRO Chairman Dr V. Narayanan used the occasion of India’s third annual National Space Day to reveal that testing of the rocket and crew module to be used by Gaganyaan missions is almost complete, and the first of three test missions will launch this year. The test flights will use India’s LVM3 launcher, which ISRO has flown nine times without failure. The version ISRO will use for Gaganyaan missions is rated for human use thanks to the inclusion of a crew escape system equipped with solid-fuel motors designed to speed Vyomanauts – the Sanskrit-derived word India has unofficially adopted for its astronauts –to safety. The Gaganyaan crew module is built to carry three Vyomanauts and spend three days in a 400km orbit before splashing down into Indian waters. ISRO has previously said it will launch a robot on at least one Gaganyaan test mission. It’s unclear if that’s still the plan. The aerospace agency has also not said when it plans to launch its second and third test flights, or a first crewed mission. If India can put Vyomanauts in orbit it will become just the fourth country to do so on its own vehicle – after Russia, the USA, and China. Dr Narayanan and other officials and government figures used this year’s Space Day to tease other future initiatives, one of which is putting an Indian space station into orbit around 2035. More involvement from private space companies was also on the agenda, perhaps as manufacturers of the launchers ISRO uses. If India chooses that path, it will mimic the USA’s current approach, which sees NASA make just one vehicle – the ultra-expensive Space Launch System – and contract its other launches to commercial launch companies. Japan’s space agency uses a slightly different approach, defining specs for its vehicles and contracting industrial giants like Mitsubishi to make them, but then runs its own missions under its own name. ®

Self-hosted email is in steep decline, Microsoft and Google are taking over

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 07:26:09 +0000

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The number of large users hosting their own email servers has halved in the last decade, according to Artem Berezin, a researcher who works at business e-mail company Live Direct Marketing.

On the Internet Society blog, Berezin explained that DNS records reveal a lot about email.

“The MX record says where the mailbox lives. The SPF record says who may send on the domain's behalf. The DMARC record says what should happen when a message fails authentication,” he wrote.

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Berezin says he analyzes those records using daily forward-DNS snapshots captured by the OpenINTEL project run by the University of Twente, SURFnet and SIDN Labs. He also consults the Tranco project’s assessment of the most popular domains to determine the million most popular domains, then “classifies each domain's MX hostname and SPF includes against open dictionaries of mailbox providers, sending platforms and SaaS applications.” The data he uses goes back to 2016, but he admits the dictionaries he accesses don’t offer a complete view of the world’s email servers.

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His lead finding is that in 2016, 44.6 percent of the top million domains ran their own mail server. In 2026, that’s down to 22.4 percent. The number of self-hosted mail servers is falling fast – down by half a percent in 30 days.

Self-hosting an email server remains the most common way to process mail, however Google Workspace is hot on its heels with 21.8 percent of detectable MX records, ahead of Microsoft 365’s 16.8 percent.

Berezin thinks the fact that two tech giants handle 38.6 percent of email is concerning.

“The RIPE [NCC] community has spent years discussing DNS and CDN centralization; email is following the same path, just more quietly,” he wrote. “When more than a third of popular domains depend on two providers to receive mail, an outage, a filtering change, or a policy decision at either one propagates through the whole ecosystem at once. And unlike a CDN, email has no graceful fallback – a rejected message is simply gone.

“There is a second-order effect, too. The fewer independent operators there are, the more the remaining ones inherit the deliverability problems of a world tuned for the big two. Anyone who has tried to stand up a fresh Postfix box in 2026 and get its mail accepted at scale knows exactly what I mean.”

Postfix is a FOSS mail server. Berezin’s reference to the struggle to get mail accepted at scale reflects the fact that Google and Microsoft operate filters to detect messages they believe come from untrustworthy sources. If those two tech giants don’t accept messages from Postfix or other sources, they make their own services more attractive - marketers who want their email blasts to land will move to the service providers most likely to let their messages through.

Another thing that worries Berezin is the use of DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance) records – the instruction in DNS settings that tells email servers how to handle emails that fail an authenticity check. His research found that over half of DMARC records have no valid policy or monitor email without enforcing policies.

That low rate is happening despite Google and Yahoo changing their bulk sender requirements in 2024 to require use of DMARC.

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“At what concentration does inbound mail become a systemic dependency worth the community's explicit attention?” Berezin asks. “What would actually move DMARC from published to enforced, given that the 2024 mandates demonstrably did not do so? And how much of the Internet's mail infrastructure are we all failing to see because our dictionaries don't know its name?”

Berezin wrote that he can’t answer those questions but hopes his daily download of email server data and ongoing analysis means he can one day. ®

Now Perplexity is trying to get into the local AI action

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 01:21:07 +0000

AI company Perplexity has already tried its hand at search services, advertising, personal assistants, browsers, and a hosted agent platform – and now it's getting into local AI services. The biz, having already built a hybrid agent inference orchestrator that connects cloud and local inference, has crossed that bridge to build a local agent called Portable Computer. That's in contrast to its cloud-based agent platform, Computer. Portable Computer consists of an agent harness, an orchestrator, and local AI models running on an Nvidia DGX Spark workstation, with the ability to tap into cloud inference if the situation demands. What's Nvidia DGX Spark doing there? Well, apart from the fact that DGX Spark is a capable bit of AI kit, Nvidia is said to be contemplating a $30 billion investment in Perplexity. Maybe, just maybe, that has something to do with six brand name mentions in one announcement. Perplexity casts its Portable Computer as a way to control AI costs, an issue of interest over the last few months as users find locally run open weight models may offer relief from bulging cloud bills. "Progress is most visible in very small and efficient models such as Nvidia Nemotron 3.5 Lightning (30B total parameters), Qwen 3.6 (35B), and Qwen 3.8 (27B)," the biz said in its post, paying somewhat more attention to Nvidia's model than other local AI enthusiasts. "These small models punch above their weight and are now capable of complex agentic workflows." What hardware might one run such models on? It may just be coincidence but Perplexity suggests Nvidia DGX Spark. "This local-first approach enables significant cost savings, since local inference avoids per-token API fees," Perplexity said. "It also naturally resolves the privacy and intellectual-property concerns: private tokens never need to be transmitted to remote clusters and remain safely within the boundary of the local device." Perplexity's current privacy policy doesn't specifically mention Portable Computer, but does reveal that Perplexity collects quite a bit of data through its other services. Most of Perplexity's pitch to potential customers involves sharing benchmark results that compare Portable Computer to two other agent harnesses, Pi and Hermes. The AI biz reports, "Across the various benchmarks, Computer matched or exceeded Hermes and Pi in accuracy while running Qwen 3.8 27B on an NVIDIA DGX Spark." And Portable Computer, Perplexity claims, proved fastest on BrowseComp and ParseBench-100 and used the fewest tokens on all three. The AI biz concludes that a decent open-weight model and capable local hardware, together with a suitable harness, "can handle real knowledge work at near-zero inference cost without requiring sensitive data to leave the device." And in the event Nvidia does invest $30 billion, Perplexity will have plenty of time to explore how much it can charge in a market where harnesses like Pi and Hermes are free. ®

Intel's 256-core Xeon 7 CPUs are a Diamond in the rough

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 01:21:07 +0000

DEEP DIVE Intel's Xeon 7 platform, better known by its codename Diamond Rapids, was supposed to launch this year with up to 192 cores backed by a whopping 16 memory channels. But that's not going to happen. This being Intel, the launch was, to no one's great surprise, delayed until 2027 to give what remains of the company's engineering team time to cut and polish the chip — and polish they certainly have. At the Hot Chips show this week, Intel revealed the chip won't ship with 192 cores after all — but hold your disappointment because Chipzilla's flagship SKU will actually cram 256 performance cores into a single socket. In fact, spec-for-spec, the platform is surprisingly well positioned to compete with AMD's sixth-gen Venice Epycs, which will also top out at 256 cores. Well, at least on the high end it will. An eye on HPC As we reported earlier this year, Diamond Rapids won't be a mainstream part. It lacks hyperthreading — what the rest of the industry calls simultaneous multithreading — entirely and it can only be offered in high-core-count SKUs aimed at HPC applications. There will be no eight channel Diamond Rapids-SP parts. Those got canned earlier this year, which leaves us with just the high-end AP variants. These always are the cooler of the two anyway, but they're not what enterprises have historically bought. What this means is Diamond Rapids — which for the sake of brevity we're going to refer to as DMR from here on out — won't compete with AMD in every regime, just the very top end. Intel's next chip, known as Coral Rapids, will see the return of hyperthreading and presumably the next round of SP processors, but we wouldn't write off DMR just yet. The chip is without a doubt Intel's most sophisticated Xeon ever built. In many ways it feels a bit like Intel's Rome moment. As you may recall, AMD's Epyc Rome saw the House of Zen embrace a truly modular chiplet architecture that disaggregated compute from I/O and memory, and could be added, removed, and reused depending on the kind of CPU it was trying to make. After faffing about for three generations trying to make chiplets work for them, Intel appears to have found the right glue to stitch everything together and is now having its own Rome moment. Intel ups its advanced packaging game DMR's resemblance to Rome is hard to miss, but the resemblance is only skin deep. Intel really is using a different kind of glue to build its chips. The chip comprises up to 22 chiplets, which can be added or subtracted depending on the ratio of compute, cache, and memory Intel needs — just like AMD has been doing for the past seven years. Those chiplets can be broken into three core groups. There are up to 16 core compute dies built on Intel's bleeding-edge 18A-P process tech, four compute building block (CBB) base dies fabbed on Intel 3-T, and two fabric hub dies built on Intel 3 that tie everything together. We've discussed 18A-P in the past so we won't rehash too much here, but it's a refined version of the 2 nm-class process tech Intel started churning out earlier this year with its Panther Lake mobile processors. Intel claims the tech delivers the same performance at 18 percent less power, or up to 9 percent higher performance at the same power, and that's before taking into account microarchitectural improvements from DMR's all new performance cores. Working our way down the stack, each core chiplet contains up to 16 cores and their respective L2 caches. Up to four of these core chiplets are stacked atop the CBB base die using its Foveros 3D direct hybrid bonding packaging tech. This base die is where all of the chip's L3 cache lives, with 320 MB per CBB, or 1.28 GB for the top-specced DMR SKUs. While Intel is using 3D packaging to assemble its CBBs, it's not using its 2.5D Embedded Multi-Die Interconnect Bridge (EMIB) packaging tech to connect the compute assemblies to the two I/O and memory dies or Scalable Fabric Hub (SFH) dies, as the x86 giant is calling them now. Much like the I/O dies found on AMD's last few generations of Epyc datacenter CPUs, Intel's SFH dies combine the chip's memory controllers and I/O interfaces into a single piece of silicon. This die can then be duplicated for added connectivity or channels, which is exactly what we see with DMR. Combined, the two SFH dies offer up to 16 channels of DDR5 at 8,000 MT/s, or 12,800 MT/s when using MRDIMMs, and 128 lanes of PCIe 6.0 / CXL 3 / UPI 3, along with an additional eight PCIe 4.0 lanes, presumably for ancillary I/O like onboard networking, USB, or baseboard controllers. This is a pretty big departure for Intel, which has either crammed everything into one homogeneous die or disaggregated I/O into standalone chiplets while keeping memory on its compute assemblies. For Xeon 7, Intel wanted to deliver a chip with uniform memory access (UMA) rather than the three non-UMA (NUMA) nodes that Granite Rapids-AP showed up as by default. This is part of the reason why Intel skipped EMIB in favor of a more traditional UCIe-S type interconnect, where data is carried over the organic package rather than silicon bridges. EMIB would have required edge-to-edge connectivity between the compute and I/O and would have prevented the CBBs from talking directly to both SFH dies without additional hops. In any case, Intel is calling this new chiplet architecture "fan-out-fabric" and it's what allows it to have UMA while also keeping packaging cost under control, something we strongly suspect may have become an issue with Intel's Xeon-6+ products, known as Clearwater Forest. Questions remain Beyond the physical makeup of the chip, there's a lot we still don't know about the platform. For instance, we have no idea how high the chip's cores will clock nor how much of an IPC gain we can expect from DMR's all-new performance cores relative to Granite. We also don't know anything about the cache hierarchy beyond the fact this thing is going to have a lot of L3. We do know that the cores will feature Intel's updated AMX instructions, which add FP8 support for on-CPU machine learning workloads, and that it'll be one of the first parts with full support for AVX 10.2. We explored the latter in detail a few years back, but in a nutshell, the revised advanced vector extensions aim to address some of the shortfalls faced by Intel's original AVX-512 implementation. HPC and supercomputing enthusiasts, eat your heart out. But on the topic of HPC, we still don't know how Intel plans to handle NUMA beyond the fact that UMA will probably be the default config. That's fine, but there are a lot of HPC workloads that benefit from carving up high-core count CPUs into smaller pieces. While UMA was obviously a major design consideration, we don't see any reason why one wouldn't be able to carve the chip up into two, four, or potentially more sub-NUMA clusters if you wanted to. As far as we can tell, Intel would just need to enable it in the BIOS. Product segmentation is another open question. We already know to expect 256- and 192-core variants of the part, but we don't yet know how far down the stack Intel will go. Presumably Intel could cut the chip down to a single CBB base die with one 16-core chiplet if it thought someone would buy it. More realistically, we expect DMR to bottom out at somewhere between 64 and 128 cores. Taking DMR to Venice Without a full picture of what DMR will offer, it's tough to say how the part will stack up against the competition. Having said that, the specs Intel has already disclosed suggest this is going to be Chipzilla's most competitive fight in years. Both AMD and Intel parts will offer up to 256 cores, 16 memory channels operating at the same speeds, and a gigabyte or more of L3 cache on board. Both parts will offer similar connectivity, while TDPs are expected to land around 600 watts for both parts. As we mentioned before, the one thing Intel doesn't have is hyperthreading, a fact that could give AMD a double-digit percent advantage in certain thread-happy workloads regardless of which chip slinger ends up having the more potent cores. Intel's saving grace is that this is an HPC-centric part and a lot of HPC apps — including the HPL benchmark used to rank the world's most powerful supercomputers – don't always benefit from hyperthreading. In fact, Arm claims that simultaneous multithreading actually hurts more than it helps. If true, we could see Intel position DMR as yet another CPU for low-latency agentic sandboxes (containers where AI-generated Python code is executed or C and Rust are compiled and run). But unless that happens, the reality is DMR probably won't be a high volume product for Intel. Certainly not with Nvidia pushing its in-house Vera CPUs as its preferred AI head node. DMR's success ultimately is going to come down to price and value. When AMD launched Rome, it couldn't touch Intel on core-for-core performance. What it could do is deliver more cores, more I/O, and more memory for the dollar than anything in Intel's lineup, and that largely remained true up until AMD's 5th-gen Epycs forced Intel to concede it was no longer top dog and slash prices. If Intel can deliver more cores for less than AMD with its Xeon 7 processors, for the right buyer, it may not matter who has the better performance. ®

Apple defies memory shortage with new Mac minis

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 01:21:07 +0000

Apple on Tuesday heralded the imminent refresh of its headless Mac kit with new versions of the Mac Studio and the Mac mini that you can pre-order now for shipping on September 22, 2026. The diminutive desktops promise a high level of local AI performance with memory prices to match. "[T]he new Mac Studio is our most powerful Mac ever," said Johny Srouji, Apple’s chief hardware officer, in a statement, citing the integration of Apple's Neural Accelerators into processor GPUs and the utility of high-bandwidth unified memory to justify the assessment. The Mac Studio became Apple's high-performance standard bearer following the retirement of the Mac Pro in March. With the "most powerful" slot taken, the Mac mini has been dubbed "our most versatile Mac," as Srouji put it, highlighting the machine's recently discovered role as "an always-on agentic device." Earlier this year, the excitement around OpenClaw and open weight AI models led to a run on Mac mini hardware as AI aficionados found Apple's compact desktop made a comfortable home for AI agents and local inference. The Mac mini has unified memory – the CPU and GPU share the same RAM – making a Mac with ample unified memory (eg, 64 GB) well suited to GPU inference compared to a PC with 64 GB system RAM but only 16 GB GPU VRAM. What's more, Apple silicon hardware supports the company's MLX machine learning framework, which provides respectable private inference performance on hardware that draws far less power than a desktop GPU workstation. You have less power, but more money for memory. As outgoing CEO Tim Cook admitted in June, memory prices have been rising due to AI demand, and those costs are being passed on to customers. The Mac Studio comes with two flavors of chip, M5 Max ($2,499) and M5 Ultra ($5,499). The M5 Ultra, with up to 36 CPU cores and up to 80 GPU cores, is an inference beast, supporting up to 512 GB of high-bandwidth unified memory with 1.2 TB/s of unified memory bandwidth. That memory configuration isn't available until October, but the existing 256 GB memory option for an extra $4,000 should give you a sense of how pricey a maxed-out Mac Studio will be ($18,299 for 256 GB RAM, 16 TB SSD). The Mac mini can be had with an M6 chip ($899) or an M5 Pro chip ($1,699), but the base model has just 16 GB of shared memory and it costs a whopping $400 to step up to 32 GB. The M6 is the first Apple silicon to use a 2 nm process. It's a 12-core processor, which Apple notes is "two more cores than before." "Built using the cutting-edge 2 nm process, M6 combines a new CPU complex, two additional CPU and GPU cores, a Dual 16-core Neural Engine, and more unified memory bandwidth to power through workloads with amazing energy efficiency," Sri Santhanam, VP of Apple's silicon engineering group, said in a statement. The M5 Pro offers more in the way of memory and memory bandwidth, making it a better choice for data-intensive development applications. The M6 supports up to 32 GB of memory and up to 170 GB/s of memory bandwidth, while the M5 Pro supports up to 64 GB of unified memory and 307 GB/s of memory bandwidth. The Mac mini comes with Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, two USB-C ports that support USB 3, and a headphone jack. Its rear gunport comes with three Thunderbolt 4 ports for M6 and three Thunderbolt 5 ports for M5 Pro, not to mention HDMI and Ethernet (2.5 Gb or 10 Gb). Thunderbolt 5 allows for clustering, so multiple Mac minis can be connected together to run large AI models on-device. The Mac Studio also does Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, and Thunderbolt 5, with support for PCIe expansion chassis. All of Apple's incoming hardware comes with macOS 27, which is expected to debut in mid-September. ®

Claude and Cowork now share what they know about you

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 01:21:07 +0000

Anthropic’s Claude chatbot knows a lot about its users, and now it's sharing its memories with the company’s everything-but-coding assistant, Cowork. The frontier lab on Tuesday announced that Claude and Cowork now share a memory, meaning that what Claude remembers about users is also available to Cowork. That’s a two-way street: Memories generated through users’ interactions with Cowork will also be available to the regular Claude chatbot. Services like Claude are able to store information about users, like what they’re interested in, the names of their friends, family members, and coworkers, or almost anything else that’s mentioned in the course of a conversation. Those memories are used to contextualize later responses so that Claude isn’t answering from a blank slate every time a user chats. As Anthropic explains in the announcement, memories are particularly helpful for work tasks of the type that Cowork is designed to perform. Cowork is a lot like Claude Code in that it’s designed to automate manual work tasks, but in this case it’s not about software development and is instead about everything else professionals deal with on a daily basis, like writing a report from a spreadsheet, creating a presentation from said report, or what have you. Y’know - work. “Ask Cowork to draft an update for your manager, and it already knows who that is and how she likes updates written,” Anthropic offers as one use of the new shared memory. As other examples, Anthropic posits brainstorming a conference agenda with Claude Chat and having Cowork know all about the event as it builds budget and logistics documents, or having to define once how a team likes metrics presented in a Claude chat and relying on Cowork to remember that format every quarter as you force it to do the work an intern used to have to be trusted to whip up. It’s worth noting that Claude Code’s memory is staying separate, Anthropic told us. The company also mentioned it had nothing to share about the future of Claude Code’s memory and whether it’d join the hive in the future. As for how Claude and Cowork create their shared memories, that’s changing, too, Anthropic explained in the announcement. Whereas the pair previously created memories by reviewing a conversation at its conclusion, memories are now created on the fly during chats. Memory generation is on by default for users on free, Pro, and Max tiers (Cowork isn’t available on Free accounts, though), but Anthropic said it doesn’t remember “sensitive” things without users opting to allow those to be stored in memory. Sensitive topics include things related to health, ethnicity, religious beliefs, politics, gender identity, and the like, though adding those to memory can be enabled if users so choose. Cowork will know those things too, mind you, and Anthropic told us there’s no option to separate Claude Chat and Cowork’s memories since they now use a shared system. An Anthropic spokesperson explained that the only way to keep Claude Chat and Cowork memories separate is to use different accounts. Other options, we’re told, are to entirely pause Claude’s ability to remember stuff, use incognito chats for conversations users don't want remembered, or manually prune Claude’s memory to get rid of individual topics. The new shared memory is available from Tuesday; for Team and Enterprise customers, admins control whether memory is available, so if any of those great business features mentioned above sound useful, you may have to call IT and have them enable it. ®

McKinsey says enterprise AI is finally 'on the road to ROI'

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 01:21:07 +0000

Four years into the generative AI revolution, consulting giant McKinsey reckons we've finally started the engine and are officially "on the road to ROI." Whether that road leads to actual profit-making and how long it takes to travel is anyone's guess, because the firm's data suggests most respondents still aren't reporting an enterprise-level earnings contribution from AI. McKinsey surveyed 1,719 professionals and business leaders from around the world and across industries for its report on the State of AI in 2026, and what it found sounds a lot like what similar studies have determined in the past couple of years. According to the report, more businesses are deploying more AI in the belief that their investments will start paying off, but the number of people reporting an actual earnings boost from their AI initiatives has remained flat. According to the survey data, 37 percent of respondents “attribute at least some EBIT [earnings before interest and taxes] impact to AI use,” which is “about the same” share as respondents to its 2025 survey. The word "some" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there, because only a small minority of respondents qualify as McKinsey’s AI high performers. McKinsey considers AI high performers to be respondents who attribute at least 5 percent of their organizations’ EBIT to AI use and describe the technology’s impact as “significant.” The number of high performers has remained flat since last year - just 6 percent of survey respondents met both criteria. Despite the face-slapping reality of hard-to-find benefits, companies are plowing ahead with their AI investments - at least for now. “Organizations’ conviction in AI is growing faster than the immediate financial returns they can attribute to it,” McKinsey said. “More expect AI to reshape their business over the next three years than did a year ago, and they continue to plan to invest more.” Once you sink your tech budget into all that Kool-Aid, it’s hard to put the powder back in the pack, it seems. Agentic AI use is up, says McKinsey, with 40 percent of respondents at organizations with more than $1 billion in annual revenue saying they’re scaling AI agents, compared to 27 percent last year. Coding agents are also on the rise, with nearly a third of respondents saying their organizations decided against buying one or more software products or features in favor of building the functionality in-house with agentic coding tools. Hopefully those firms have set aside a budget to bring in developers to fix the issues AI-generated code can introduce, too. McKinsey also found that, while a majority of organizations plan to increase their AI investments, many are butting up against the fact that it’s really expensive, with 20 percent of respondents saying AI-related operating costs have constrained their use of the technology. All of that set aside, 80 percent of respondents who use AI in their roles said the technology has improved their individual productivity, even as those gains have yet to translate into broad financial impact for organizations. What do respondents expect AI to mean for headcount? Well, more cuts, apparently. While 43 percent of respondents still expect little or no AI-related change in total employment, an increasing number (39 percent this year compared to 32 percent in 2025) expect their employer to cut jobs thanks to AI in the coming year. Like the belief that AI is eventually going to pay for itself, that might not be reflected in reality either, if McKinsey’s prior year data is anything to go on. According to the consulting outfit, workforce reductions in 2025 “fell well short of what respondents in last year’s survey had anticipated,” suggesting that turning to AI to replace humans isn’t a sure bet, which we could have told you without you having to pay McKinsey big bucks to suss that out. So, where does that leave the future of AI in the enterprise? Pretty much in the same place as it was before: A huge money sink that has yet to prove it’s worth the cash businesses are dumping into it. Individual productivity boosts thanks to the automation of soul-crushing busywork may help employees feel better, but that’s not measurably beneficial to a business’ bottom line. As to when McKinsey thinks organization-wide AI benefits reported by respondents, like increased employee and customer satisfaction, “improvements in innovation,” and competitive differentiation, might actually lead to returns on those ever-increasing investments in tools provided by big AI, that wasn’t mentioned in the report. We asked the firm what its experts think, but didn’t hear back. For now, AI ROI remains in the same place as fusion power, fully autonomous driving, and practical quantum computers: Forever a few years away from reality and in dire need of more capital. McKinsey has been in touch since publication to qualify what it meant by the business world being on the road to AI ROI. "Some ROI is already being achieved, and we expect more over time," report coauthor and McKinsey Quantum Black senior fellow Michael Chui told us in an email. "It’s a journey, not a destination." Chui explained that the "high performers" mentioned in the report are seeing "real ROI," but he believes it takes organizational change to make that happen, not just plugging in AI tools and hoping for the best. Chui also said we shouldn't be surprised it's taken several years for AI to begin showing even the smallest bit of ROI for the biggest businesses. "It should not be surprising that it has taken time, because it is a reflection of trends we’ve seen with other technologies," Chui explained. "History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes." ® Updated at 1903 with a statement from McKinsey.

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