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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: The World Health Organization declared on Saturday that the spread of the Ebola virus in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda was a global health emergency. The announcement was made a day after Africa's leading public health authority reported that an outbreak in a province in the northeast of the country was linked to dozens of suspected deaths. By Saturday, cases had also been confirmed in Kampala, the capital of Uganda, the W.H.O. said. In Congo's Ituri province, where the outbreak was first identified, 246 suspected cases and 80 deaths attributed to the virus had been reported, although only eight cases had been definitively linked to the virus through laboratory testing. There is no approved vaccine and no therapeutics for the Bundibugyo species of Ebola behind the outbreak, according to the W.H.O. The scale of the outbreak could be far larger than has been detected and reported, the W.H.O. said in declaring a "public health emergency of international concern." It added that there were "significant uncertainties" about the precise number of people infected and the "geographic spread." The W.H.O.'s declaration signals a public health risk requiring a coordinated international response, and is intended to prompt member countries to prepare for the virus to spread and to share vaccines, treatments and other resources needed to contain the outbreak. [...] The risk of the outbreak spreading is exacerbated by a humanitarian crisis, high population mobility and a large network of informal health care facilities in the area, the agency said. Containing an Ebola outbreak depends on the speed and scale of the public health response. The virus is transmitted through direct contact with the bodily fluids of an infected person, putting family members and caregivers at particular risk. Tracing people who may have come into contact with sufferers, isolating and treating victims promptly and safely, and burying the dead properly are all viewed as critical steps.

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The AI industry is copying techniques used by tobacco firms, big pharma and oil companies to influence governmental policy and regulation of itself, according to an academic study. Researchers at the University of Edinburgh, Trinity College Dublin, Delft University of Technology, and Carnegie Mellon University claim they identified patterns of "corporate capture" by which regulations and public bodies come to act in the interest of industry rather than the citizens they are meant to protect. Their paper, “Big AI’s Regulatory Capture: Mapping Industry Interference and Government Complicity,” details various mechanisms of capture and how these work. The most frequent include what the researchers identify as Discourse & Epistemic influence (D&EI), Elusion of law, or Direct influence on policy. For evidence, the researchers analyzed 100 news stories covering four global AI events between 2023 and 2025; the EU AI Act negotiations, and the global AI summits held in the UK, South Korea, and France. They report finding numerous cases fitting capture patterns. One of the most prevalent here was “narrative capture,” which is when an industry or company attempts to steer discussion in a direction that benefits them, and influences the position or decisions of public officials and official regulations. As an example, it cites how the European Commission has uncritically followed the industry’s call to "simplify” the AI Act (alongside other digital regulation) even before it has been fully implemented. Earlier this month, The Register reported how enforcement of the rules was delayed, while the rules themselves were cut back after months of angry complaints from AI companies. Narratives deployed emphasized how "regulation stifles innovation" and centered on "red tape," where regulation is portrayed as unnecessary or excessive, setting the stage for later calls explicitly advocating for "deregulation." The researchers found that "elusion of law" (using legal loopholes) is the most recurring after narrative-framing activity. This may comprise violations, such as disregarding existing laws, or contentious interpretations of laws governing areas including antitrust, privacy, copyright and labor laws. Reg readers will be familiar with AI developers' efforts to exempt themselves from copyright laws, for example, by arguing that requiring permission or payment for training data would stifle progress or even destroy the industry entirely. This position has been championed by the Tony Blair Institute and by the UK’s former deputy PM and erstwhile Meta apologist Sir Nick Clegg, who now works for neocloud biz Nscale. The study also identified lobbying and "Revolving Door" as common tools for shaping policy, the latter referring to public officials moving into private sector roles or industry figures securing influential government posts. The UK government’s flagship AI Opportunities Action Plan - for example - was authored by entrepreneur Matt Clifford, who it turns out happens to have financial interests in nearly 500 tech firms, including a number involved with AI. The paper concludes that while it is only right that government regulators attend to the concerns of industry, regulation should always prioritize protecting and promoting the core public values for which governments bear responsibility. It warns that the AI industry’s power, wealth and influence have "far-reaching implications" in terms of impact on the rule of law, the labor market, the environment, knowledge production, and, ultimately, on the functioning of democracy itself. The level of power held by the AI industry is "so corrosive" that policymakers ought to treat it as an emergency, the paper says. Government complicity is detrimental to ensuring the rule of law and to restoring trust in public interest technologies, it points out. ®

The TanStack team has documented security measures and proposals following a damaging breach last week, including the possibility of making pull requests (PRs) by invitation only - a break from the open-contribution model that defines most open source projects. The attack used code from the Shai-Hulud worm, published by malware outfit TeamPCP, which can extract secrets from memory used by GitHub Actions. It began with a PR that triggered an automatic workflow via TanStack's use of the pull_request_target feature, causing the malicious code to be built and run by a GitHub Action, poisoning a cache used across the entire repository. The TanStack team said that its workflow used a pattern GitHub warns against: pull_request_target id intended for PRs that "do not require dangerous processing, say building or running the content of the PR." Since the attack, TanStack has removed all use of pull_request_target from its continuous integration (CI) pipeline, disabled caches used by pnpm (a Node.js package manager) and GitHub Actions, pinned actions to commit SHA (Secure Hash Algorithm) hashes rather than retargetable tags, and disabled use of text messages for 2-factor authentication. The TanStack repository also now uses a feature of pnpm 11 called minimumReleaseAge, which requires dependencies to have been published for a set period before they can be installed. The idea is that compromised packages are usually detected and removed before that period completes. A more drastic proposal is closing the ability for external contributors to open pull requests at all. "We are absolutely not going closed source," the team said, but it could put in place a mechanism where contributions begin with an issue or discussion, and a PR can be submitted only by invitation. TanStack acknowledged that it would be a radical step to take as "open PRs are part of how a lot of us became maintainers in the first place." It might not be necessary if the repository can be hardened enough that malicious PRs cannot cause damage. It is a debate that maintainers of other open source projects will watch with interest. Supply chain security is a huge issue, but making pull requests invitation-only could hurt projects by deterring contributions. Another aspect of this is the extent to which GitHub itself is to blame. "Cache scoping in GitHub Actions shouldn't silently bridge fork PRs and base-repo branches," said the TanStack team.®

Microsoft has begun rolling out tweaks to the Windows 11 experience to make good on its promise to "fix" the operating system, starting with the ability to move the taskbar around. The changes are only for Windows Insiders brave enough to be in the Experimental channel, but will be welcomed by customers left baffled by Microsoft's decision to strip features from its OS with Windows 11. The update allows the taskbar to be positioned at the top, bottom, left, or right of the screen, with icon alignment selectable for each position. Flyouts, including those for Start and Search, appear relative to the taskbar location, and it is also possible to "never combine" taskbar buttons, meaning each app window appears as a separate labeled button. Shifting the taskbar to the side opens up additional screen space at the bottom – which is handy for editing code or writing lengthy pieces complaining about Microsoft's approach to product quality. It's a good start, but it isn't all there yet. This is the Experimental channel after all. However, some omissions, such as auto-hide (which isn't yet supported in alternate positions) and Search boxes being just a search icon, are irritating. Microsoft is also pondering different taskbar positions per monitor and drag-and-drop, but wrote: "Our focus is to deliver the core functionality you need while keeping the experience simple, predictable." A cynic might suggest the company takes the same approach to testing its security updates. Other improvements include the ability to shrink the taskbar with smaller buttons, something that will be welcomed by users running on smaller screens where every pixel matters, and more control over the Start menu. Currently, the size of the Start menu is decided by Windows. The update means users can choose Small or Large themselves, and those choices will remain across displays. Microsoft is also simplifying control over the Start menu sections and recommendations, and adding the option to hide a user's profile picture – useful for those presentation moments when having something personal pop up unbidden might not suit the audience. The update will receive more polishing before reaching production – there are still some howlers, such as notifications, that seem to completely ignore the taskbar's position. But this is more of a preview than anything else at this stage, and an opportunity for enthusiasts to file feedback on the direction of travel. However, there is also the nagging feeling that Microsoft had all this in earlier versions of Windows, and it's taken half a decade for the company to reinvent what was working before. Windows Design Director Diego Baca explained: "The taskbar was modernized during Windows 11 to support better animations, more states, and several other features. So we could not reuse that old code." That "old code" should, coupled with user feedback, have given Microsoft a starting point for the Windows 11 user interface, which it chose to ignore. Now, as Windows 12 lurks in the shadows, Microsoft is reimplementing functionality that users have missed from previous versions. Better late than never. ®

Exploit attempts are already hammering a newly disclosed NGINX bug dubbed "NGINX Rift," proving once again that attackers read patch notes faster than most admins. Researchers at VulnCheck said they are seeing active exploitation tied to CVE-2026-42945, a heap buffer overflow flaw affecting both NGINX Open Source and NGINX Plus that was disclosed last week after apparently sitting unnoticed for 18 years. VulnCheck's Patrick Garrity said the company observed exploitation activity on its canary systems "just days after the CVE was published." "An unauthenticated attacker can crash the NGINX worker process by sending crafted HTTP requests," he said. "On servers with ASLR disabled – which, of course, is extremely unlikely – code execution is possible." Researchers at Depthfirst disclosed the bug last week, saying the flaw had been sitting in NGINX's rewrite module since 2008. The vulnerability, nicknamed "NGINX Rift," was assigned a CVSS score of 9.2. According to F5, which acquired NGINX in 2019, the flaw can be triggered by specially crafted HTTP requests under certain server configurations. In most cases, the result is a crashed worker process and a forced restart, though systems running without standard Linux memory protections could potentially face code execution. A public proof-of-concept exploit appeared the same day patches dropped, which helps explain why researchers started seeing exploitation attempts almost immediately. In practice, turning this into reliable remote code execution takes a pretty specific setup. The target server must be running a specific rewrite configuration, attackers need enough knowledge of that setup to exploit it correctly, and ASLR must also be disabled on the host system. Security researcher Kevin Beaumont noted that while the bug is real, modern Linux defaults significantly reduce the likelihood of successful real-world RCE. "Regarding CVE-2026-42945 in nginx – no modern (or even old) Linux distribution runs nginx without ASLR," Beaumont said. "So, cool, sweet technical vuln – it's valid – but the RCE apocalypse ain't coming." Even so, VulnCheck said Censys scans surfaced roughly 5.7 million internet-exposed NGINX servers running potentially vulnerable versions, which means patching teams everywhere just inherited another very long week. ®

The Polish government is urging public officials and "entities within the National Cybersecurity System" to stop using Signal, directing them to instead use an encrypted messenger developed by a leading Polish research organization. In an announcement on Friday, the government stated that Signal comes with security risks, including social engineering attacks orchestrated by advanced persistent threat (APT) groups. "National-level Computer Security Incident Response Teams (CSIRTs) have identified phishing campaigns conducted by APT groups linked to hostile state agencies," the announcement says. "These attacks target, among others, public figures and government employees." Offering examples of these social engineering campaigns, the government said attackers impersonate Signal support staff and abuse this perceived trust to take over victims' accounts. Attackers trick users into opening malicious links by sending messages designed to create a sense of urgency, such as those supposedly informing them of their account being blocked. Successful attempts can expose victims' phone numbers and, crucially, messages sent between government officials, potentially threatening national security. A more detailed advisory cited "recent security incidents" related to Signal as reasons for the change. It didn't specify what these recent attacks were, or even who was behind them, but it can be reasonably assumed that the Polish government was indirectly referencing Russia's phishing attempts against both Signal and WhatsApp, which were revealed in March. Dutch intelligence agencies AIVD and MIVD reported a "large-scale" campaign targeting their own government officials, noting that some attacks were successful. "The Russian hackers have likely gained access to sensitive information," the AIVD and MIVD said, adding that successful attacks were carried out on government bods as well as journalists. Beyond Signal support staff impersonation, the agencies said the attacks can also involve outsiders persuading victims to surrender their verification codes or PINs, or abusing the platform's Linked Devices feature via QR codes to take control of accounts. The FBI, CISA, and the German information security department issued near-identical warnings. The alternative Poland announced the launch of mSzyfr Messenger in March, saying it was designed for use by public administration entities, those involved in the National Cybersecurity System, and others to be decided by the government. Developed by the Ministry of Digital Affairs and the Scientific and Academic Computer Network – National Research Institute (NASK), mSzyfr was touted by the government as "the first secure instant messenger fully under Polish jurisdiction." It does, however, rely on multi-factor authentication (MFA) provided by US megacorps. Microsoft is the recommended option, but users can also opt for Google or FreeOTP. Further, if users want to retain access to messages even after logging out of the platform, they must set up a recovery key, which the installation manual suggests storing in a password manager. That undercuts the government's emphasis on Polish jurisdiction somewhat, since many popular password managers are either foreign-owned or open source. An FAQ document for mSzyfr states that the messenger is built with a privacy-by-design philosophy, and explicitly notes that neither WhatsApp nor Signal fits this description. It also claimed the US-based platforms are not GDPR-compliant. The mSzyfr app is not publicly available. Only individuals working for approved organizations are able to receive invites to join the platform. It replaces Swiss-founded Threema, which the Polish government began endorsing for state officials and law enforcement in 2022, but data such as messages cannot be transferred because of the apps' encrypted nature. All Threema users should expect to receive an invite to mSzyfr in the near future, if they have not already. The Register asked Signal to comment on Poland's announcement, but it did not immediately respond. It did, however, recently address security concerns raised by various intelligence agencies last week, introducing new warnings and alerts inside the platform to help users weed out potential impostors and bad actors. ®

John Lennon's last interview — just hours before he was shot on December 8, 1980 — has become a documentary directed by Steven Soderbergh, debuting Saturday at the Cannes Film Festival. In a new interview with the Associated Press, Soderbergh defends the film's limited use of AI to visualize concepts from that two-hour interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono: Soderbergh was resolved to let the audio play. He could finds ways to visualize much of the film, but that still left a large gap where the conversation grows more philosophical. "I worked on everything that could be solved except that for as long as I could," Soderbergh says. "Then there was the inevitable moment of: OK, but really what are we going to do? We just started playing and ran out of time and money. That's where the Meta piece came in." Soderbergh accepted an offer to use Meta's artificial intelligence software to conjure surreal imagery for those sections, which make up about 10% of the film. When Soderbergh let the news out earlier this year, it prompted an uproar. One of America's leading filmmakers was using AI? In a film about a Beatle, no less? The AI parts (overwhelmingly slammed by critics in Cannes) are fairly banal and don't differ greatly from special effects — there are no deepfakes of Lennon. But they put Soderberg at the forefront of an industrywide debate about the uses of AI in moviemaking. It's a conversation the director, who has made movies on iPhones, is eager to have. While the film follows John and Yoko's conversation, "I needed a way to follow them in flight visually," Soderbergh says, "or I'm not doing my job." Though when asked about the strong negative reaction, Soderbergh acknowleges that "I knew what was coming. I take it very seriously, and I understand why people have an emotional response to this subject. As I've said before, I feel like I owe people the best version of whatever art I'm trying to make and total transparency about how I'm doing it." AP: Some fear generative AI will tear apart the film industry. You don't see it as a bogeyman, though. SODERBERGH: I think most jobs that matter when you're making a movie cannot be performed by this tech and never will be performed by this tech. As it becomes possible for anybody to create something that meets a certain standard of technical perfection, then imperfection becomes more valuable and more interesting. We haven't seen yet someone with a certain amount of creative credibility go full-metal AI on something, and see how people react. I think it's necessary. How do you know where the line is until somebody crosses it? "I don't think what I'm doing crosses it. Some people may disagree. I don't know where my line is yet. I'm waiting to see...

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Microsoft has admitted that the May 2026 security update might fail to install with a "Something didn't go as planned. Undoing changes" message. The problem is related to the EFI System Partition (ESP), which is usually where the device boots from. Its minimum size is 200 MB, and the operating system manages it. However, if there is 10 MB or less free space, then the update might fail with a 0x800f0922 error code and the helpful message. "On affected devices, the installation might proceed through the initial phases but fail during the reboot phase at approximately 35-36% completion," Microsoft said. As with all security updates, there is important stuff in here that needs to be installed. In our earlier coverage, we called this a "doozy of a Patch Tuesday." While nothing was reported as being under active attack, there were dozens of fixes for critical Microsoft CVEs. On devices experiencing the issue, Microsoft has suggested either a registry edit, which will have administrators rolling their eyes, or a Known Issue Rollback (KIR) to deal with the problem. The company wrote: "The resolution has already propagated automatically to consumer devices and non-managed business devices." The issue affects Windows 11 25H2 and 24H2, and emerged while Microsoft was enjoying a period of no known issues with its operating system products. The admission was made doubly unfortunate by coinciding with a company blog post titled "Improving Windows Quality". Microsoft clearly has more work to do on the quality front, which, frankly, is understandable. Windows is more akin to a supertanker than an agile skiff, and changing direction will take time. However, as administrators reach for the KIR group policy to deal with this latest issue, many would be forgiven for looking at Microsoft's protestations around quality and muttering the infamous aphorism: "The more things change, the more they stay the same." ®

Britain's F-35 fighter fleet is set to carry US-made glide bombs as an interim measure until delayed F-35 software updates from Lockheed Martin add support for the SPEAR 3 mini-cruise missile intended for the aircraft. The news comes in an official response from the Ministry of Defence (MoD) to Parliament's Public Accounts Committee (PAC), which published a scathing report last year on the MoD's management of the F-35 program. That report noted that the stealth fighter force lacks essential capabilities, one of which is a stand-off weapon to attack ground targets from a safe distance. The SPEAR missile is intended to fulfil this requirement, but although it is ready and passed test firings in 2024, the F-35 is not currently able to operate it. This capability should have been delivered by now through the Block 4 software update from F-35 prime contractor Lockheed Martin, but this has met with a series of delays. It is now expected in 2031, five years behind schedule. One of the PAC's recommendations was that the MoD should set out in the Defence Investment Plan (DIP) how it will ensure a stand-off capability until SPEAR 3 is fully integrated onto the aircraft. Permanent Secretary at the MoD Jeremy Pocklington wrote back in a letter that approval has been given to proceed with a Foreign Military Sales (FMS) procurement of the precision-guided munition, Small Diameter Bomb (SDB II). "This acquisition will provide the F-35 with an interim stand-off capability until the introduction of SPEAR 3 into service," he stated. SDB II, designated GBU-53/B StormBreaker in US service, is a roughly 200-pound (93 kg) bomb with fold-out wings to allow it to glide to a target up to 69 miles (111 km) away. It has a tri-mode seeker in the nose that lets it use radar, infrared, or laser tracking to home in. Other criticisms leveled at the MoD were that it lacked suitably qualified engineers, and the department's pattern of delaying purchases to meet annual budget targets, which the PAC claimed has the effect of inflating total program costs while reducing operational capacity. Pocklington conceded that not enough spares were available to support the F-35 squadrons aboard aircraft carrier HMS Prince of Wales during the eight-month Operation Highmast deployment last year. "The surge to 24 F-35B aircraft during Operation HIGHMAST exceeded the Afloat Spares Pack capacity of 12. This was mitigated by supplementing with the Deployable Spares Pack [designed for land-based deployments] and taking additional spares from the RAF Marham Base Spares Pack," he wrote. "The Lightning Force is collaborating closely with the Royal Navy to optimise joint scheduling between home and embarked operations, given the current limitation of two front-line squadrons. The Department also plans to double the capacity of the Afloat Spares Pack and procure an additional Deployable Spares Pack for land operations, subject to the DIP." In response, PAC chair Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown MP commented on the "entirely unacceptable incompetence that flies in the face of any kind of sensible planning from the Ministry of Defence." "At the heart of any military planning is sound logistics. The UK sent an aircraft carrier with 24 F-35 fighter jets on it to the Middle East – with not enough spare parts to support them." "In an increasingly dangerous world, our military and the country need more than this half-baked approach from the MoD. Our brave fighting men and women, before being sent into potential harm's way, must have absolute certainty that they are well-supported in their equipment, with clear and reliable supply lines," he added. Pocklington's letter also said a short-term reduction in the availability of F-35 aircraft was likely due to the MoD stepping up corrosion awareness and prevention practices. While corrosion can be an issue for all aircraft, this is especially true for those operated from carriers, and it can also impact the F-35's radar-defeating stealth capabilities. The PAC report had noted that the MoD is behind in delivering a UK Aircraft Signature Assessment Facility, needed to check that the F-35's stealth technology is still doing its job and has not been compromised. On the lack of qualified engineers, Pocklington claimed that steps were being taken to address this by increasing available posts to 168. "The RAF has plans in place to fill its remaining engineering posts by 2032. This date is driven by the amount of time (up to three years) it takes to make engineers fully competent on an aircraft type," he said, adding that "the number of personnel recruited into the Engineering Profession, who are now in the training system, has already increased." However, the government's Defence Investment Plan (DIP) was due in autumn 2025, but there is currently no official publication date for it, despite the fact that many key projects are in limbo until it is delivered. ®

Mozilla has warned Britain not to turn VPNs into collateral damage in the government's increasingly desperate hunt for ways to stop kids dodging Online Safety Act age checks. In a submission to the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology's "Growing up in the online world" consultation, Mozilla argued that VPNs are "essential privacy and security tools" used by millions of ordinary people, from those securing public Wi-Fi and remote work traffic to journalists, activists, and other vulnerable users. "VPNs serve as critical privacy and security tools for users across all ages," said Svea Windwehr, policy manager at Mozilla. "By hiding users' IP addresses, VPNs help protect users' location, reduce tracking and avoid IP-based profiling." Windwehr added that people rely on VPNs for everything from connecting remotely to school or work networks to avoiding censorship and "simply protecting their privacy and security online." The filing lands in the middle of an increasingly strange UK debate where privacy tools are being recast as a threat to online safety enforcement. VPN usage in the UK surged almost immediately after Online Safety Act age checks started rolling out last year, as users scrambled to avoid handing sensitive identity data to adult websites and platforms demanding facial scans or ID verification. Child safety advocates and officials then turned their attention to VPNs themselves, with the Children's Commissioner for England even suggesting the government should explore ways to stop children from using them altogether. Mozilla's response argues the government is chasing the wrong target. The company pointed to research from Internet Matters suggesting that relatively few children use VPNs in the first place, and that only a small minority use them specifically to bypass age restrictions. Mozilla instead argued that most successful workarounds involve fake birth dates, borrowed accounts, weak age assurance systems, or laughably fragile facial estimation tools that children have reportedly fooled with drawn-on facial hair. Mozilla also pointed out a central problem with age-gating VPNs: users would first need to hand over personal information before accessing software intended to reduce tracking and data collection. Britain is not the only country suddenly developing strong opinions about VPNs. Denmark recently floated anti-piracy legislation broad enough to trigger fears that VPN usage itself could become legally risky, before ministers hurriedly insisted nobody was trying to ban VPNs. Across Europe, VPNs are being treated less like routine security software and more like an obstacle to enforcement as users turn to them to bypass restrictions. Unfortunately for regulators, the technology industry appears to be moving in the opposite direction. Mozilla has already been testing built-in VPN functionality directly inside Firefox, joining a wider browser trend toward integrating privacy features that previously required separate software. Blocking standalone VPN apps is one thing, but trying to untangle VPN functionality from modern browsers is a much bigger problem. Mozilla's submission repeatedly argues Britain is drifting toward "safety through surveillance" instead of addressing the recommendation systems, engagement algorithms, and platform incentives that actually drive online harms. ®

Google is encouraging its database developers to lean "heavily" on AI coding tools as it ramps up contributions to open source projects such as PostgreSQL. Earlier this year, Google announced a raft of new contributions to PostgreSQL, the open source database that has become a popular RDBMS for developers building new applications in the cloud. Sailesh Krishnamurthy, VP of Databases, Google Cloud, told The Register that the company was using AI coding tools to accelerate its contributions to open source database systems, although each developer remains responsible for their individual contributions. "We do encourage folks to use AI heavily ," he said. "We are seeing huge amounts of productivity improvements internally. In the end, we have individual engineers take accountability for our contributions. Whether you have a piece of code that is completely drafted by AI, or not even part of what you're pasting into your development environment, you have a whole spectrum where AI is used in different places. Either way, the accountability remains on behalf of the person who's done it." AI coding tools can be especially suited to developing contributions to open source projects because the codebase is publicly available and has been used to train the generative models, he said. "That's how models have a better sense of the code, as opposed to many proprietary pieces of code, which are inside the firewall." PostgreSQL was designed to be extensible. As such, it can be a system well suited to vibe coding to get new ideas off the ground quickly, Krishnamurthy said. "The sweet spot is where you have maybe an interesting academic idea that is well understood, and you have a codebase that's well understood, and you're trying to say, well, I want to take this idea and I want to take this piece of code and build an extension for it. That's a great example where you have something isolated – the blast radius is small – and you can go and use AI to interpret the code. Our own engineers are using AI quite heavily, but also judiciously." PostgreSQL became the most popular database among developers in 2023, according to the Stack Overflow survey. The trend owes a great deal to the plethora of PostgreSQL database services out there, not least from the big three cloud providers, which have ramped up investment in the open source system. Last year, Microsoft contributed pg_documentdb_core, a custom PostgreSQL extension that enables support for Binary JavaScript Object Notation (BSON, a binary-encoded serialization of JSON documents), and pg_documentdb_api, a data layer providing MongoDB-compatible commands for create, read, update and delete (CRUD) operations, queries, and index management. The extensions are set to run on the Azure Cosmos DB PostgreSQL database service and offer a document-store-style database to rival MongoDB. Microsoft has also announced a distributed PostgreSQL database service called HorizonDB. Krishnamurthy said: "The industry at large is investing heavily in PostgreSQL. We see this across the board, whether it's customers, whether it's digital native services, and certainly we see the migrations coming from commercial databases. It is also a broad industry trend of PostgreSQL as a layer, no matter where data is being stored." As such, Google has contributed new code to the project, with the engineering effort focused on advancing logical replication. Contributions included Automatic Conflict Detection, designed to allow the replication worker to automatically detect when an incoming change (Insert, Update, or Delete) conflicts with the local state; and logical replication of sequences. Demand for PostgreSQL services is coming from migrations as well as new applications, Krishnamurthy said. Customers are ditching Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, and IBM Db2, as well as other legacy systems, including Sybase and Informix. Research from Gartner earlier this year shows that of the leading database vendors 15 years ago – Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, and SAP – only Microsoft has grown its market share since. As well as its own database systems, Microsoft offers PostgreSQL and MySQL services, as does AWS, the leading database vendor. Oracle remains third, ahead of Google, and that position seems unlikely to change soon. Nonetheless, with all the major cloud vendors contributing to open source database projects such as PostgreSQL, momentum is slowly shifting. ®

OPINION The terms "blindingly obvious," "logical consequence," and "that is not how it works" appear nowhere in the government handbook of internet legislation. In particular, the discovery that imposing age access controls on websites has pushed users to VPNs has come as a huge surprise to legislators in the UK, the EU, Canada, and Australia. Nobody here knows how old VPN users are, be they kids unwilling to lose access or adults unwilling to disgorge personally identifying data to who knows what. As they recover from this shocking discovery, these fine people are looking at ways to control VPNs, whether by adding age verification here too or by some magical "digital age of consent" technology that somehow evades the paradox that demanding more personal information in the name of safety itself reduces safety. Yet here, as in so many ways, the rest of the world is lagging behind America – more specifically, the great state of Utah, which has just enacted an anti-VPN law. This law makes it compulsory for any site that the state says needs age verification – porn, basically – to impose those checks on anyone physically in Utah whether or not they are using any VPN. Those would be the same VPNs whose sole purpose is to prevent the geolocation of their users. Which would seem, and is, another paradox. The only way to comply is to impose global age checks, effectively giving Utah worldwide regulatory powers. As there is no global standard for this, it's not a practical option. But then, there are no practical options to control VPNs, short of cutting off all internet access à la North Korea. Even China, the world's most effective cyber-authoritarian state and one which very much enjoys telling its citizens what to think, has to be very wary of putting the VPN screws on too harshly. The ground truth about VPNs is that if you allow people access to anywhere on the internet outside your direct control, they can access a VPN. Obvious vectors of denial, such as blacklisting VPN ingress or egress IP ranges, don't work for long. VPN operators are adept at moving these, and you can build your VPN infrastructure in the cloud, and there are plenty of stealth techniques. A VPN pipe looks to any router it traverses like an encrypted bitstream, which is to say like most internet traffic, and if you disguise the session establishment ports and protocols, it’s HTTPS going about its lawful business. All this adds up to a landscape where hundreds of VPN providers are able to react to any official monitoring or clampdown in ways that leave them more resilient and more expensive to tamper with. China knows this, discouraging rather than preventing access altogether, and putting the squeeze on only briefly as occasion demands. The reason age verification works as far as it does for social and salacious media is that these are advertising-driven, which means having a commercial presence everywhere they have advertisers. That puts their cash flow at the mercy of local regulators, which is how the British pirate radio ships of the 1960s were closed down. They operated in international waters and couldn't be jammed, so the UK government made it illegal to advertise on them. VPNs take your money directly, so don't react to local edicts. Plus, even if none of the above were true, VPNs are so essential to enterprise security, and are so available as open source, that they could no more be banned or backdoored than, say, HTTPS. VPNs are bombproof, as far as sense extends. Which means attempts to bomb them into compliance or out of existence in a fit of epic fury will work as well on the internet as it does in the desert. Lots of collateral damage, not so much victory. This isn't an unalloyed good, as the consumer VPN market is far less competitive than it appears and there are plenty of questions about connections between those who control VPNs and various national security interests. A VPN service is literally a man in the middle you pay to use, and assigning trust is up to you. Freedom rarely comes for free, and it would be unwise to rely on any VPN you can't check out if you're doing anything that might summon the intelligence services. Most of us aren't, at least in the free world, at least for now. VPNs, for all their faults, remain a genuine and essential brick in our antisurveillance Lego set. It is very much in our interests that we aren't forced to disclose additional identifying data to them, and that they're not used as an excuse to effectively close down services and sites a particular state dislikes. The Utah law may yet fail on various grounds, as it has already been challenged in court – although given the way the American legal system is being stress-tested right now, this is harder to call than it should be. If it stands, then it will spread to like-minded states like butter across a hot pan. The obvious consequence will be that people move their attention to smaller, less savory sites more resistant to state interdiction. This will come as a surprise to nobody except the legislators. Outside the US, the progress of the Utah experiment will be watched closely by those who see VPNs as loopholes to be blocked. It's our job to demonstrate that VPN regulation would be counterproductive and dangerous, and that concentrating on reducing harm at source is better than forcing consumers to reveal ID and tampering with the infrastructure. ®

Iran's government "wants to charge the world's largest tech companies for using the subsea internet cables laid under the Strait of Hormuz," reports CNN. Their article also notes that Iran's state-linked media outlets "have vaguely threatened that traffic could be disrupted if firms don't pay." Lawmakers in Tehran discussed a plan last week which could target submarine cables linking Arab countries to Europe and Asia. "We will impose fees on internet cables," Iranian military spokesperson Ebrahim Zolfaghari declared on X last week. Iran's Revolutionary Guards-linked media said Tehran's plan to extract revenue from the strait would require companies like Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon to comply with Iranian law while submarine cable companies would be required to pay licensing fees for cable passage, with repair and maintenance rights given exclusively to Iranian firms. Some of these companies have invested in the cables running through the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf, but it's unclear if those cables traverse Iranian waters. It's also unclear how the regime could force tech giants to comply, as they are barred from making payments to Iran due to strict US sanctions; as a result, the companies themselves may view Iran's statements as posturing rather than serious policy. Still, state-affiliated media outlets have issued veiled threats warning of damage to cables that could impact some of the trillions of dollars in global data transmission and affect worldwide internet connectivity... Iran's threats are part of a strategy to demonstrate its leverage over the Strait of Hormuz and ensure the survival of the regime, a core objective for the Islamic Republic in this war, said Dina Esfandiary, Middle East lead at Bloomberg Economics. "It aims to impose such a hefty cost on the global economy that no-one will dare attack Iran again," she said. The article notes that subsea cables "carry vast internet and financial traffic between Europe, Asia and the Persian Gulf," and that targetting them "would affect far more than internet speeds, threatening everything from banking systems, military communications and AI cloud infrastructure to remote work, online gaming and streaming services." CNN spoke to Mostafa Ahmed, "a senior researcher at the United Arab Emirates-based Habtoor Research Center, who published a paper on the effects of a large-scale attack on submarine communications infrastructure in the Gulf." Armed with combat divers, small submarines, and underwater drones, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) poses a risk to underwater cables, Ahmed said, adding that any attack could trigger a cascading "digital catastrophe" across several continents. Iran's neighbors across the Persian Gulf could face severe disruptions to internet connection, potentially impacting critical oil and gas exports as well as banking. Beyond the region, India could see a large proportion of its internet traffic affected, threatening its huge outsourcing industry with losses amounting to billions, according to Ahmed... Any disruption could also slow financial trading and cross-border transactions between Europe and Asia, while parts of East Africa could face internet blackouts. And if Iran's proxies decide to employ similar tactics in the Red Sea, the damage could be far worse.

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The perennial question "Can it run Doom?" has a new answer, of sorts, after the USA's Library of Congress (LOC) added the iconic game's soundtrack to its National Recording Registry. An announcement of this year's new additions to the Registry hails Bobby Prince's 1993 soundtrack as "the perfect riff-shredding accompaniment for the game's demon-slaying journey to hell and back." "Key to Doom's popularity was the adrenaline-fueled soundtrack created by freelance video game music composer Bobby Prince," the LOC asserts, before revealing that the composer took inspiration from "a pile" of CDs loaned by Doom designer John Romero, including "seminal works by Alice in Chains, Pantera and Metallica." Prince was apparently "fascinated" by MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) and used his knowledge of the standard "to ensure that the sound effects he created could cut through the music by assigning them to different MIDI frequencies." That approach, the LOC says, saw the Doom soundtrack "go on to inspire countless remixes and lay the foundation for future generations of game composers." The Doom soundtrack is the third recording to make its way into the National Recording Registry, which added the Super Mario theme by Koji Kondo in 2023 and last year selected Daniel Rosenfeld's Minecraft: Volume Alpha soundtrack. Joining the Doom soundtrack in the archive are Taylor Swift's 2014 album 1989, Beyoncé's 2008 tune Single Ladies, and Weezer's 1994 debut The Blue Album. The National Recording Registry adds 25 titles each year, as recommended by the Librarian of Congress, who gets advice from the National Recording Preservation Board. All works added to the Registry are at least a decade old and are held to be "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant." Other nations collect games, and therefore soundtracks, in their national archives – but don't conduct an annual inculcation process in the same way as the USA's National Recording Registry. ®

WHO, ME? Welcome to Monday morning, the time of week when The Register always asks “Who, Me?” because that’s the title of our reader-contributed column in which you confess to having made a mess, and found a way to egress without career distress. This week, meet a reader we’ll Regomize as “Miller” who told us that as a whippersnapper of just 21 summers he found himself tending a mainframe that created a virtual machine, and accompanying virtual disk, for each user. Miller’s employer shut down those VMs at the end of the working day to free up resources for overnight jobs. He therefore wrote a cleanup routine that removed the drives and backed up their contents. This story took place in 1981, a time when it was possible for code written by a 21-year-old to go into production without much scrutiny. Oversight arrived at 3 AM, when the overnight operators ran Miller’s cleanup code and it produced a “file not found” message. Miller spent his entire Saturday finding the problem, the roots of which lay in the fact that the mainframe assigned a letter to each user drive, with A-Z as the available labels. “The routine attached to all users’ drives and backed them up to a temporary drive,” Miller explained. “But you never knew in advance what drive letter the system would assign to the temporary drive. So I wrote a routine to attach it and capture the letter.” That approach worked, until it didn’t – because on this day Miller’s employer gave another user an account on the mainframe. And that user’s virtual drive meant the mainframe used the entire alphabet of disks. “The call for temp disk failed and my routine passed back an asterisk instead of an error code,” Miller confessed. The routine then ran its delete command, but instead of specifying a drive letter to destroy, applied the asterisk and deleted everything. “Every file, all the data, and all the code,” Miller admitted. “I had written all the code myself, long before the days of peer reviews or DevOps or any other controls, so it was all on me,” he added. The Register thinks that’s a bit harsh – who lets a kid write mission-critical code? It took Miller a day to restore data, while 20 other people twiddled their thumbs and waited for him to finish the job. “Hard lesson but it's stayed with me 40+ years!” Miller concluded. Have you written code that went awry? Or failed to supervise a junior? In either case, click here to send us an email so we can tell your tale on a future Monday. ®

Observability outfit Grafana Labs has revealed that an attacker accessed its GitHub repository and stole its codebase. In social media posts the company blamed the situation on an “unauthorized party” who was somehow able to obtain a token that offered access to its GitHub environment. The company thinks it has identified the source of the credential leak, and therefore “invalidated the compromised credentials and implemented additional security measures to further secure our environment against unauthorized access.” But that didn’t stop the attacker from threatening to release the company’s code unless Grafana paid a ransom. Grafana says it won’t pay. “Based on our operational experience and the published stance of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which notes that ‘paying a ransom doesn't guarantee you or your organization will get any data back’ and only ‘offers an incentive for others to get involved in this type of illegal activity,’ we have determined the appropriate path forward is to not pay the ransom,” the company wrote. It’s not clear if that stance is entirely principled, because plenty of Grafana’s products are already open source. The company’s posts suggest that the attacker accessed code that is not freely available. The Register has sought clarification about just what the attacker accessed, because if they lifted code that’s mostly already open source there’s little reason for Grafana to pay a ransom! Grafana’s decision not to pay may also be easier than it is for other victims of cybercrime because the company says it “determined that no customer data or personal information was accessed during this incident, and we have found no evidence of impact to customer systems or operations.” The company therefore appears confident that whatever code the attackers downloaded won’t make a material different to its business, or harm customers. The same couldn’t be said for educationware giant Canvas, which last week paid extortionists after they claimed to have stolen data describing over 275 million students and faculty. The Register will update this story if we receive additional information from Grafana Labs. ®

Today Linus Torvalds announced another Linux release candidate on the kernel mailing list. But he also highlighted "documentation updates" to address a new problem. "The continued flood of AI reports has basically made the security list almost entirely unmanageable, with enormous duplication due to different people finding the same things with the same tools." (The new documentation says the security team has found "bugs discovered this way systematically surface simultaneously across multiple researchers, often on the same day.") TORVALDS: People spend all their time just forwarding things to the right people or saying "that was already fixed a week/month ago" and pointing to the public discussion. Which is all entirely pointless churn, and we're making it clear that AI-detected bugs are pretty much by definition not secret, and treating them on some private list is a waste of time for everybody involved — and only makes that duplication worse because the reporters can't even see each other's reports. AI tools are great, but only if they actually help, rather than cause unnecessary pain and pointless make-believe work. Feel free to use them, but use them in a way that is productive and makes for a better experience. The documentation may be a bit less blunt than I am, but that's the core gist of it. The new documentation offers this overview. "It turns out that the majority of the bugs reported via the security team are just regular bugs that have been improperly qualified as security bugs due to a lack of awareness of the Linux kernel's threat model." "So just to make it really clear," Torvalds said at the end of his post. "If you found a bug using AI tools, the chances are somebody else found it too. "If you actually want to add value, read the documentation, create a patch too, and add some real value on *top* of what the AI did. Don't be the drive-by 'send a random report with no real understanding' kind of person. Ok?"

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Samsung found itself facing down controversy in South Korea last week, when the weather app pre-installed on many of its devices incorrectly labelled an island territory named Dokdo as part of North Korea. Dokdo is a group of volcanic islets that is the subject of a territorial dispute between South Korea, North Korea, and Japan. Netizens were therefore outraged by a champion of South Korean industry handing the islands to foes in North Korea. Mislabelling the map was therefore sufficiently controversial that Samsung quickly pushed an update to fix the error – and blamed data from The Weather Channel as the source of the mistake. While we’re talking about islands … The Federated States of Micronesia, the Republic of Kiribati, and the Republic of Nauru last week connected to the world over a submarine cable for the first time. The three Pacific island nations hooked up to the East Micronesia Cable System, which NEC Corporation built and last week handed over to telecoms companies in the three nations. The cable can carry 100Gbps to each country where it lands, and has capacity to reach 10 Tbps. The three nations are collectively home to around 100,000 people. The governments of Australia, Japan, and the USA funded construction of the cable as part of ongoing diplomatic efforts to woo Pacific nations at a time China is also active in the region. Bitdefender spots alleged Chinese attack on Azerbaijan Antivirus vendor Bitdefender last week published what it says is evidence of a China-backed “multi-wave intrusion targeting an Azerbaijani oil and gas company from late December 2025 through late February 2026.” Bitdefender linked the attacks to the resurgent FamousSparrow crew, which apparently deployed “an evolved DLL sideloading technique” to drop the Deed RAT and Terndoor backdoors. The company’s researchers think attackers targeted a vulnerable Microsoft Exchange server. Senior security researcher Victor Vrabie suggested the attack is a sign that Russia and China are both trying to gain a foothold in Azerbaijan’s energy infrastructure, to gain leverage over energy supplies to Europe. The central Asian nation is a major oil and gas producer, and exports much of its output through pipelines that reach Turkey and Georgia. The importance of those routes has grown thanks to slowing gas exports from the Middle East. China seemingly shuns Nvidia to focus on its own alternatives The United States has allowed several Chinese companies to acquire Nvidia’s H200 accelerators, but Beijing won’t let local buyers do the deed. That’s the washup of President Trump’s visit to China last week, during which US authorities reportedly issued licenses allowing Nvidia to sell its wares to Chinese tech companies including Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance and JD.com. But President Trump later remarked that China has not allowed its tech companies to buy H200s “because they chose not to, they want to develop their own.” That’s perhaps the strongest signal yet that China has decided to decouple from foreign tech stacks. Bottom drops out of India’s smartphone market Analyst firm IDC last week reported that smartphone shipments in India slumped by 4.1 percent in the first quarter of 2026. IDC said that subdued result would have been worse had brands not decided to front-load channel inventory before the cost of smartphone rise due to the soaring cost of memory. The firm said the result “signals a structural turning point for one of the world’s largest smartphone markets” because device-makers who sell entry-level devices “face shrinking margins and reduced market viability as memory costs continue to rise.” When consumers who buy sub-US$100 phones do upgrade, they “are being pushed upmarket by necessity rather than aspiration” – meaning demand is muted and will likely remain so for quite some time. ®

America's Library of Congress "is preserving a little piece of Hell," jokes Engadget, "by inducting the soundtrack to the original Doom into the National Recording Registry." The album of demon-slaying tracks is joined by several other notable 2026 additions to the registry, like Weezer's self-titled debut album (colloquially known as "The Blue Album"), Taylor Swift's "1989," Beyonce's "Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It) and the original "Mambo No. 5." "Doom" was created by Bobby Prince, a freelance composer who worked on lots of id Software games, and also scored Doom's '90s rival Duke Nukem 3D. The soundtrack draws clear inspiration from metal bands, but also touches on techno and ambient music throughout its track list, making for an eclectic soundscape for tearing through enemies. That it all fits together is also impressive in its own right: All of the music for Doom was written before the game had completed levels to play through, according to Prince. The official announcement from the Library of Congress says Doom "brought a heavy metal energy to MS-DOS systems across the globe," while also pioneering first-person shooter videogames. "Key to Doom's popularity was the adrenaline-fueled soundtrack created by freelance video game music composer Bobby Prince. Prince, a lifelong musician and practicing lawyer, was fascinated by the MIDI technology that rose in prominence in the mid-1980s as a means for instrument control and composition... For "Doom," Prince took inspiration from a pile of CDs loaned by the game's chief designer, John Romero, including seminal works by Alice in Chains, Pantera and Metallica. Despite the limitations of the 1993-era sound card drivers, Prince composed the perfect riff-shredding accompaniment for the game's demon-slaying journey to hell and back. Taking advantage of his knowledge of MIDI, Prince even worked to ensure that the sound effects he created could cut through the music by assigning them to different MIDI frequencies.

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Today former Google CEO Eric Schmidt "was booed multiple times," reports NBC News, "while discussing AI during a commencement speech at the University of Arizona." Schmidt had started by remembering how computer platforms "gave everyone a voice" but also "degraded the public square... They rewarded outrage. They amplified our worst instincts. They coarsen the way we speak to each other, and that way, and in the way that we treat each other, is in the essence of a society." But then Schmidt "drew a parallel between artificial intelligence and the transformative impact of the computer — and was immediately met with boos." "I know what many of you are feeling about that. I can hear you," Schmidt said, addressing the crowd as many continued to boo him. "There is a fear ... there is a fear in your generation that the future has already been written, that the machines are coming, that the jobs are evaporating, that the climate is breaking, that politics is fractured, and that you are inheriting a mess that you did not create, and I understand that fear." He went on to argue that the future remains unwritten and that the graduating class of 2026 has real power to shape how AI develops — a claim that drew further disapproval from parts of the audience... He closed by congratulating the class and offering them closing words. "The future is not yet finished. It is now your turn to shape it." 404 Media shared a video on YouTube of the crowd's booing — and what Schmidt said that provoked them: SCHMIDT: "If you don't care about science that's okay because AI is going to touch everything else as well. [Very loud booing] Whatever path you choose, AI will become part of how work is done..." "You can now assemble a team of AI agents to help you with the parts that you could never accomplish on your own. [Loud booing] When someone offers you a seat on the rocket ship, you do not ask which seat. You just get on... The rocket ship is here."

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