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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Meta told employees on Monday that it was reassigning 7,000 workers to focus on new initiatives around artificial intelligence, the latest change in a company transformation spurred by the powerful technology. Employees will be moved to four new organizations focused on building new A.I. tools and apps, Janelle Gale, Meta's head of human resources, said in an internal memo. The organizations will use "A.I. native design structures" and have fewer managers per employee than other parts of the company, she said, adding that company leaders will send details about the new roles on Wednesday. The restructuring "will make us more productive and make the work more rewarding," Ms. Gale wrote. Meta declined to comment further on the changes. The move comes shortly before Meta begins laying off roughly 8,000 employees, or 10 percent of its work force. Ms. Gale also mentioned Wednesday's layoffs in her memo. "We know days like this are extremely hard, and we appreciate you showing up for each other," Ms. Gale said. According to the NYT, employees have been asked to work remotely that day and emails about the layoffs would be sent at 4 a.m. local time. Employees in the United States will receive 16 weeks of severance pay, along with two extra weeks for every year they worked at Meta.

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The Amalgamated Union of Influencers, Trendsetters, Microbloggers, and other professional brand ambassadors is up in arms, and threatening an industry-wide strike (please note: this is not in any strict or meaningful sense true). Elon Musk is tightening the ties that bind, in bad news for enthusiastic social media personalities on X who aren't monetizing successfully enough to pay for it yet. On the site's help page, punitive restrictions on non-paid users are laid out. The current technical limits for accounts now are: Direct Messages (daily): The limit is 500 messages sent per day. Posts: 50 original posts and 200 replies per day for unverified accounts. The daily update limit is further broken down into smaller limits for semi-hourly intervals. Changes to account email: 4 per hour. Following (daily): The technical follow limit is 400 per day. Please note that this is a technical account limit only, and there are additional rules prohibiting aggressive following behavior. Following (account-based): Once an account is following 5,000 other accounts, additional follow attempts are limited by account-specific ratios. We know, and we sympathize. How could anyone cope with being limited to just 50 tweets and 200 replies a day? All the same, some of the Twitterati are not happy. If you are interested in moving up to a premium account, hilariously, at the time of writing the Premium sign-up page compares the benefits of Basic, Premium, and Premium+ accounts with this vivid and enticing description: In case of problems, the help page suggests checking the Status page, which, as the icing on the cake, currently appears to be down: And yes, we checked. Perhaps the site is simply deluged by legions of Digital Storytellers and Tastemakers who are desperately trying to pay to extend their reach. Meanwhile, other social networks remain available. Bluesky has been open to all comers for a couple of years now. Former CEO Jay Graber, who now serves as Chief Innovation Officer, has some enticing rhetoric, such as this post from October: Be warned, though, she does have a strong position against strikes: If Bluesky sounds just a tad corporate, then we suggest the Fediverse, best known through its most famous implementation and site, Mastodon. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a guide on how to join. ®

An npm account compromise infected 314 npm packages with malware, including size-sensor, echarts-for-react, timeago.js, and packages scoped to @antv, in a 22-minute burst of activity in the early hours of Tuesday morning. The most popular impacted package is size-sensor, downloaded 4.2 million times per month, followed by echarts-for-react (3.8 million), @antv/scale (2.2 million) and timeago.js (1.15 million). The compromised account, i@hust.cc, belongs to a developer based in Hangzhou, China. Security researcher Nicholas Carlini reported the malware on GitHub, and the the hust.cc account closed the issues and marked them as "fixed" within an hour. This means the malware report on this and other repositories is hidden unless a developer looks for closed issues. Some malicious package versions have been deprecated on npm with the message "this version was published in error, please use the latest version instead," while others have been removed. Security biz SafeDep reported on the malware and analyzed the payload, which uses the same structure as that used to compromise SAP packages three weeks ago. The malware reads environment variables and scans files to find credentials for GitHub, npm, cloud platforms including AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, Docker, Stripe, and more. The code also attempts to escape container boundaries. Stolen secrets are exfiltrated to a new GitHub repository. The malware injects settings files into other local projects on a developer machine, for execution by Claude Code or Codex, and further abuses GitHub as a C2 (command-and-control) backdoor via malicious repositories and Python code that downloads and executes content from them. According to SafeDep, "the attacker automated the entire wave using a stolen token." Developers who have installed compromised package versions are advised to rotate all credentials accessible from the build environment, check for unauthorized GitHub repositories, and remove malicious systemd services on Linux. Maintainers and package publishers are at greatest risk as they may find further malicious packages published via their own credentials. This attack comes shortly after another Shai-Hulud incident reported yesterday, and more can be expected. Although other package repositories such as PyPI and RubyGems have also seen malware published to them, npm remains the biggest target and, for now, appears to be the worst affected. npm, owned by Microsoft subsidiary GitHub, has said little about the current wave. In September last year, a post outlining a plan for a more secure npm supply chain was intended to "address a surge in package registry attacks," during what now looks like the early phase of Shai-Hulud, but the actions taken so far have not prevented further incidents. The Register asked GitHub to comment.®

VMware is still able to keep some corporate customers onside - it has signed a five-year agreement with the London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) for its Cloud Foundation (VCF) private cloud platform. According to Broadcom, LSEG has used VMware across parts of its infrastructure for more than a decade, and the latest purchase centers on deploying VCF to support the stock exchange operator's private cloud. Broadcom will also provide professional services to roll out VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 across the organization's IT estate as part of the contract. The Register asked how much this new agreement is worth, but LSEG declined to disclose figures. This is a pertinent question, as many customers of VMware's cloud and virtualization software complain that licensing costs have risen significantly since Broadcom paid $61 billion to buy VMware at the end of 2023 and scrapped perpetual licenses in favor of long-term subscription bundles. In fact, analyst biz Gartner has suggested that for some VMware customers, moving workloads to an IBM mainframe could prove a cheaper option than adopting Broadcom's new licenses. As The Register reported recently, half of VMware users are looking to reduce their use of the virtualization pioneer's products by 2028, as many are not happy with Broadcom's recent strategy of only selling a complete private cloud suite in the form of VCF 9. Previously, companies were able to pick and choose parts of the software stack that suited them. LSEG also declined to reveal its rationale for sticking with VMware, beyond the details disclosed in the announcement. "Extending our use of VMware Cloud Foundation supports an engineered private cloud for our operations, while giving us the flexibility to support new services and workloads as our technology needs evolve," said Andrew Knight, LSEG CIO for Infrastructure and Cloud. The stock exchange operator said the initiative complements its existing cloud partnerships. These include a multi-year deal with Amazon Web Services (AWS) as the preferred cloud provider for its Markets, Risk Intelligence, and FTSE Russell divisions, and an earlier long-term agreement with Microsoft to jointly develop new products and services for its data and analytics business. ®

Transport for London (TfL) has published full details of its Revenue Collection Services contract, awarded to Spanish defense and tech group Indra Sistemas in January, revealing the deal could be worth nearly twice what was initially announced. The contract hands Indra responsibility for operating, maintaining, and developing almost all public transport ticketing across western Europe's largest city. This spans paper tickets, Oyster smartcards, and contactless smartphone payments. It covers 8,500 buses, 1,000 stations, 4,000 third-party retailers, and seven visitor centers, running for seven years with options to extend by up to five more. A contract award notice published on May 14 puts the maximum possible value at £1.964 billion excluding VAT, significantly more than the £587.6 million TfL cited when it first announced the award, which it said could rise above £987 million. A TfL spokesperson clarified that the January figures cover agreed work over the initial seven-year term, while the notice reflects the ceiling value if all extensions and variations are exercised, each of which would need to be negotiated separately. The contract's most significant technical change is a shift to an account-based ticketing model for Oyster. Rather than storing balances and tickets on the card itself, data would instead be held in a back-office system, paving the way for virtual Oyster cards on smartphones, though TfL says proof-of-concept and development work must come first. TfL also plans to introduce unique identifiers for payment accounts, which it says will allow passengers to link mobile devices with payment cards and use them interchangeably. This would be a notable improvement on the current system, where price caps – the maximum a passenger pays over a given period – only apply when the same Oyster card, payment card, or device is used consistently. The contract additionally covers new equipment for stations, buses, and revenue inspection staff, and may extend to Oyster and contactless payments on national rail services, as well as commercial use of ticketing data. Indra takes over from US firm Cubic Transportation Systems, which has run TfL's Oyster system since its launch in 2003 and contactless card payments since their introduction on London buses in 2012. Some Cubic staff are expected to transfer with the contract. In 2016, TfL licensed the contactless system to Cubic for £15 million, allowing the technology to be adapted for other cities worldwide. TfL's director of technology strategy and revenue, Shashi Verma, paid tribute to the outgoing operator, saying: "I want to thank everyone at Cubic Transportation Systems for their work and innovation in delivering, maintaining, and improving the Oyster and contactless system over the past decades. The hard work and innovation by Cubic helped make the system as instantly recognizable and successful as it is." The contract gives Indra access to one of the largest urban transport datasets in the world. TfL holds extensive personal data on millions of London residents and visitors, a fact thrown into sharp relief in September 2024, when a cyberattack exposed the records of up to seven million customers after hackers breached its internal systems. ®

Data allegedly belonging to CTT, the operator of Portugal’s national postal service, has leaked online, affecting hundreds of thousands of individuals. According to HaveIBeenPwned, which ingested the data, a little more than 468,000 unique email addresses were included in the vast data dump, along with full names, phone numbers, and parcel tracking codes that could be used to identify different locations along a package’s journey. In 2026, many people now assume that their basic personal data has been included in a data breach or two, and that it can be bought online. However, when data breaches include details such as parcel tracking codes alongside basic personal information – the type that isn’t typically part of every breach – it can provide cybercriminals with crucial information to conduct convincing phishing campaigns. Fake parcel emails and SMS messages become all the more convincing if the attacker behind them can persuade the target that they possess information only the spoofed organization could hold. The stolen data was leaked on April 27, according to cybercrime forum watchers, by a hacker calling themselves “Boogeyman.” HaveIBeenPwned confirmed the breach on Tuesday, putting the scale significantly below what Boogeyman had claimed weeks earlier. While the data types matched, the crook alleged over one million customer records were exposed, more than double the 468k+ verified by HaveIBeenPwned. In addition, the criminal claimed to have stolen technical data regarding the company’s 24/7 postal lockers provided by its Locky brand. Supposedly included among these were locker configurations, private IPs, machine types, locker IDs, and backend versions. HaveIBeenPwned only summarised the consumer-related data, not the technical side of it, and The Register neither downloaded nor examined the raw data. To date, CTT has not publicly acknowledged the alleged cyberattack that led to the data breach. The Register approached the company for a statement but it did not immediately respond. ®

Amazon is adding AI-generated "podcasts" to Alexa+, letting users request custom audio explainers on any topic featuring two synthetic co-hosts. Variety reports: Seemingly to dispel the notion that these "podcasts" will be AI audio slop, Amazon emphasized that it has deals with major news organizations to ensure "accurate, real-time news and information." Those include the Associated Press, Reuters, the Washington Post, Time magazine, Forbes, Business Insider, Politico and USA Today; publications from Conde Nast, Hearst and Vox Media; and more than 200 local newspapers across the U.S. In an example clip shared by Amazon of the new Alexa Podcasts feature, the two AI-generated hosts discuss "the latest music releases." A male Alexa+ narrator says more than 50% of music listening now comes from unsigned artists. "The monoculture is just gone," a female-voiced Alexa+ narrator chimes in. The male Alexa+ host says there has been "stoner metal," indie pop and experimental hip-hop music "all dropping on the same Friday," and adds, "That's not chaos -- that's the healthiest the music ecosystem has ever been." [...] To use Alexa Podcasts, users can simply tell Alexa what topic they're curious about and "it does the rest in minutes." Alexa+ will provide an overview of what it plans to cover, and let you adjust the length and direction before it generates the podcast. When your episode is ready, you'll get a notification on your Echo Show device and the Alexa app.

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Brits increasingly suspect the AI jobs revolution may end with fewer graduate roles, richer shareholders, and possibly riots. New research from King's College London found that more than one in five people in the UK believe AI could eliminate jobs quickly enough to trigger civil unrest, as anxiety over automation, hiring freezes, and white-collar displacement continues to bleed out of Silicon Valley boardrooms and into public opinion. The survey found 69 percent of workers are worried about the economic impact of AI-driven job losses, while 57 percent think the technology will destroy more jobs than it creates. More than half also agreed with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's prediction that AI could wipe out half of entry-level white-collar jobs within five years. University students appeared especially gloomy. Around a third said rapid AI-driven job losses could lead to civil unrest, while 60 percent believe the technology will make the graduate job market significantly tougher by the time they finish university. The study also found that almost nine in ten students who use AI in their studies have already encountered problems with it, including factual errors and completely fabricated sources. Unlike much of the AI industry's favorite future-of-work PowerPoint optimism, many employers admitted AI-fueled disruption is already happening. The study found 22 percent of employers have already made roles redundant or reduced hiring because of AI, rising to 29 percent among large organizations. These findings sit in sharp contrast to years of increasingly grand promises from AI vendors about productivity gains and workplace transformation. Earlier this year, analysts predicted AI and automation could erase 10.4 million US jobs by 2030, while another survey found executives increasingly valued human workers less after rolling out AI tools. The public also appears deeply unconvinced that the financial upside from AI will be shared particularly widely. Most respondents across every group surveyed said they expect the economic gains from AI to flow mainly to wealthy investors and large companies rather than workers or wider society. Professor Bobby Duffy, director of the Policy Institute at King's College London, said workers and students were watching AI development "with more fear than excitement." "The public, workers, young people and university students are watching the rapid development of AI with more fear than excitement, with real concern for what it will do to jobs, particularly at entry levels," he said. Duffy added that the public remains unconvinced by repeated claims that AI will ultimately create more jobs than it destroys. "Only a quarter agree with the World Economic Forum that AI will create twice as many jobs globally as it will eliminate by 2030," he said. The study also found a growing public appetite for governments to slow things down a bit before the labor market turns into a live-action stress test. Around two-thirds backed tighter AI regulation, even if it slows development, while the majority also supported government-funded retraining schemes and taxes on companies replacing workers with AI. Not everyone is fully aboard the doom train just yet. Employers remained substantially more optimistic than the public, with most saying AI is currently assisting workers rather than replacing them, and almost 70 percent saying they are excited about new job opportunities opening up as a result of AI. Whether the AI industry eventually delivers its promised wave of new jobs and prosperity is still an open question. The British public, however, already sounds unconvinced. ®

Britain has deployed low-cost anti-drone rockets to the Middle East, just weeks after successful tests of the equipment were announced. The Ministry of Defence (MoD) says the Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System (APKWS) will be fitted to British Typhoon jets, and has already seen operational use in the Middle East with No. 9 Squadron RAF. As reported by The Register last month, APKWS is actually a kit that adds laser homing capability to US-made Hydra 70 2.75-inch (70 mm) unguided rockets. The kit splices a mid-section between the motor of the rocket and its warhead that is equipped with deployable steering canards which flip out after launch. Laser seekers mounted on the leading edge of those fins lock onto a laser-designated target and steer the rocket toward it. Already in use on some US combat aircraft, the system is said to cost $30,000 to $40,000. This makes it much less expensive than a typical air-to-air missile, and possibly comparable to the cost of an Iranian Shahed drone, one of the targets it is likely to be used against. The threat posed by drones to bases such as RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus - due to the US-Iran conflict - has brought new urgency to the APKWS program, despite the weapon's 24-year development history. March saw a test strike on a ground-based target, the MoD says, while the RAF's Test and Evaluation Squadron conducted the successful air-to-air firing in April. "This has been a superb effort working with industry to test and deploy this system in a matter of months, which will help the RAF shoot down many more drones at a much lower cost," said Luke Pollard, Minister for Defence Readiness and Industry. So it seems the powers-that-be can pull their finger out, if the need is perceived as urgent enough. Contrast that with the program to deliver the Royal Navy's Type 26 frigates. Planning for what became the Type 26 began in 1998, and it is likely that 30 years will have elapsed before the first one enters service. APKWS isn't the only counter-drone technology entering UK service. The first tranche of Skyhammer interceptors and launchers is due for delivery this month, following a multimillion-pound contract signed with manufacturer Cambridge Aerospace in April. Late last year, the Royal Navy's Wildcat helicopters were cleared to carry the Lightweight Multirole Missile, or Martlet, which is also laser-guided. Some were deployed to RAF Akrotiri to help counter Iranian drones, while the RAF also has the Rapid Sentry short-range air defense system that fires Martlet missiles. ®

Like many enterprise software vendors, SAP's share price plunged during the "SaaSpocalypse" – the belief that GenAI and vibe-coding could disrupt traditional enterprise app vendors. At its annual conference in Orlando last week, the ERP giant pushed back with a new vision for how GenAI will work across its enterprise apps and analytics portfolio. On the one hand, it is helping users build agents based on data from outside the SAP ecosystem. On the other, it is arguably creating friction for those wanting to build agents on third-party platforms and use data from SAP systems to power them. At its Sapphire conference, SAP announced Joule Studio 2.0, with new features allowing developers to create and manage AI agents. Agents created in Joule Studio will natively support Model Context Protocol and A2A protocols – two standards designed to help GenAI integration between data sources – crucially allowing the SAP tool to connect and collaborate with third-party tools and agents. Other features, such as the agentic orchestration, are also designed to run across hybrid landscapes, while real-time data ingestion promises to support "context-aware processes" across SAP and third-party systems. Speaking to the conference, Muhammad Alam, SAP executive board member for product and engineering, said: "Underpinning the autonomous suite are out-of-the-box agents, hundreds of agents cutting across all core business processes. These agents come together into what we call assistance, or Joule assistants. "We've made extensibility a core design principle. You can extend any of these agents by adding tools, workflow steps, and even code through the same simple experience in Joule Studio. This allows you to connect them to your non-SAP applications, because we know you're going to have to do that." But this approach to agents roaming freely across the application estate might not support agents built and managed on other platforms. Control and access: The API policy critics Gartner senior director analyst Christian Hestermann said SAP's API policy, published last month, can be read as an effort to control access to capabilities inside the SAP platform and control how third-party AI platforms might build agents based on SAP's applications. "It's about more than just data; agents are expected to do not only read or manipulate data but do entire and maybe complex business activities or even chains of activities. SAP is trying to channel how and who can access the SAP systems through third-party AI platforms and solutions. If they do endorse these environments, SAP will charge customers extra for that," he said. As well as the agent integration in Joule Studio 2.0, SAP has announced a partnership with Anthropic to bring the Claud model into its SAP Business AI Platform. Hestermann said: "We think that the two things – the API policy and the Anthropic partnership – must be seen jointly. SAP is closing the door to third-party AI environments, especially agentic environments, but at the same time, sort of offering Anthropic Claude as something within a 'walled garden' of SAP." The game plan of positioning SAP at center of agentic AI development can also be seen in the data strategy, which the vendor reheated with the launch of Business Data Cloud (BDC), a partnership with Databricks from last year, which promised bi-directional data sharing between SAP Business Data Cloud and third-party data platforms. SAP has sought to strengthen its technology for data sharing across common enterprise sources outside its portfolio with the acquisition of lakehouse vendor Dremio and metadata company Reltio. "They started opening the landscape in Business Data Cloud last year, first with the Databrick partnership, and acquisitions of Reltio and Dremio, those two things go hand in hand. You can, through certain technologies, reach out to other landscapes, but it's more difficult to put a neutral AI layer on top of your entire [SAP] landscape," Hestermann said. Not the only game in town SAP faces competition, though. A bunch of other enterprise application vendors want their users to see them as the locus of control for agentic AI working across their mix of applications from various providers. Salesforce and its office collaboration platform Slack and Oracle both pitch their technology in this way, and so does enterprise workflow vendor ServiceNow. Whether these approaches work or not on a technical basis is the wrong question, said Faram Medhora, principal analyst for Technology Architecture and Delivery at Forrester. "The technical question is solved. The economic question is not. SAP's Joule Studio can reach into Salesforce through open protocols. Salesforce's Agentforce can call SAP. The protocols work. What remains unsolved is who pays for the runtime, who governs the agent, who owns the audit trail, and whose roadmap dictates what the cross-vendor agent can do next quarter." Large enterprise IT departments may be under pressure to execute an agentic AI strategy, but Medhora warns against viewing these choices only from a technical perspective. "The cross-vendor agent question is not a technology choice. It is a 2028 contract negotiation being decided in 2026, under the cover of a 2027 implementation timeline. The platform an enterprise picks to build its first cross-vendor agent becomes the platform that prices its entire AI estate for the next decade," he said. SAP wants to be that choice among its customers. It may make sense if the vast majority of their enterprise applications come from the German vendor, but the reality is, most large enterprises rely on a mix of application vendors, some of whom also want to be the main center for AI agents. While the technology may allow AI agents to work across these barriers, the commercial reality presents another challenge altogether. ®

Partner Content ZTE recently showcased its AI Interactive Flat Panel at the Broadband User Congress in Brazil, and unveiled three core intelligent solutions covering office, elderly care, and education scenarios for the global market. Efficient Office: Redefining Global Collaboration The AI Interactive Flat Panel is deeply integrated with mainstream third-party cloud conferencing platforms such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet, meeting the diverse videoconferencing needs of multinational enterprises. Its built-in AI meeting assistant can generate real-time meeting minutes, extract to-do items, and intelligently push them to participants. Smart Elderly Care: Bringing Technological Warmth to Seniors Targeting the elderly care market, the AI-powered care and health assistant functions are integrated to provide non-contact monitoring and issue alerts for abnormal vital signs. The high-definition video calling enables the elderly to easily connect face-to-face with their family members, delivering a human touch with technology. Smart Education: Empowering Digital Learning in Classrooms In the education scenario, the product enables AI-powered digital teaching, assisting educators in delivering efficient instruction and immersive presentations. The AI teaching archive automatically records full-cycle learning data, helping educational institutions achieve precision teaching management and quality assessment. With its core strengths of "hardware integration, AI empowerment, and an open ecosystem", ZTE's AI Interactive Flat Panel precisely addresses the diverse needs of the global market. Using the AI Interactive Flat Panel as a bridge, ZTE will deepen its cooperation with operators and ecosystem partners in Brazil and beyond, to build a new future of "smart connectivity worldwide, digital benefits for all". Contributed by ZTE.

BORK!BORK!BORK! Forget flame-grilled, it's the heat from the Windows Firewall you need to worry about in today's borked burger file. Spotted by Register reader Chloe Cresswell in Sheffield's Centertainment, a fast food establishment known for its Whoppers is having a whopper of a problem with its firewall. Sorry, we'll get our coats. The problem has appeared on the progress screen, which charts an order's progress from inception to greasy nirvana. Something is trying to escape the kitchen, but luckily, Windows Defender Firewall is there to save the day. Sadly, there's no way for the waiting customers to clear the message, but it's unlikely to interfere too much with the fryers or griddles. Instead, it's just something new on the screen (and arguably better than the maddening sight of a telephone order leapfrogging your place in the line). The Windows Defender Firewall is decades old, and first put in an appearance with Windows XP. It was later elevated in prominence and activated by default with service pack 2 and Microsoft's realization that there were naughty people on the Internet who were all too happy to take advantage of vulnerabilities in the company's software. Indeed, Patch Tuesday became a thing shortly before Windows XP Service Pack 2, meaning there is an entire generation of IT professionals who are unlikely to remember a time when an operating system patch was a novelty rather than an increasingly relentless necessity. All of these thoughts might have gone through our reader's mind as the Windows pop-up confirmed that somehow, somewhere, a bit of software at the restaurant was trying to go places it wasn't supposed to and had been barred by Windows Defender Firewall. Alternatively, there could have been a fleeting concern that the pop-up might interfere with the delivery of greasy packages into eager customers' hands. The appearance of the Firewall warning indicates that something is not configured correctly, but it also represents a missed opportunity. Considering the establishment's logo and font have recently drawn the attention of many internet users, perhaps a dialog update might be in order? Yes, it's definitely hungry for an update. ®

It's exam and graduation time in the academic year, and some students are making their anti-AI feelings heard. It's not the only place. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt gave the commencement speech to the graduating class at the University of Arizona on Sunday, and his line "The question is whether you will have shaped artificial intelligence" was met with a loud chorus of boos and jeering, as The Guardian reports. Not for the first time: last week, students at the University of Central Florida also booed real estate executive Gloria Caulfield for calling AI "the next industrial revolution." NBC's report on Schmidt's speech has a video clip that includes both reactions, as well as a similarly negative reception to pro-AI remarks by record producer Scott Borchetta, giving another commencement speech at Middle Tennessee State University. Borchetta is the boss of Big Machine, the former label of Taylor Swift, whose six-year battle with the company has its own compendious Wikipedia article. As no stranger to controversy, Schmidt is probably not too worried. The Register reported on him blaming working from home for Google's stumbles in the AI race in 2024. However, it's notable that these captains of industry appear surprised by anti-AI sentiment. Granted, this vulture is an arch-skeptic in this matter, but we are noticing increasing levels of resistance and pushback against the rise of LLM bots. Earlier this month, we reported that both Fedora and Ubuntu were planning to include more AI. Since then, there has been sufficient negative sentiment from the Fedora community that the Fedora AI Developer Desktop Initiative community initiative proposal, approved at the start of May, is now blocked by two "-1" votes. One of these is from Justin Wheeler, who, as we noted, wrote a blog post about Fedora's AI-Assisted Contributions Policy. He and Red Hatter Miro Hrončok both changed their votes. Other examples of recent writing about the changing positions on AI that we've seen in the software development world include "I don't think AI will make your processes go faster," and a long and thoughtful piece from Baldur Bjarnason called "The old world of tech is dying and the new cannot be born." Related news comes from the scientific preprint site arXiv. The chair of its Computer Science section, Professor Thomas Dietterich, announced both on X and on Bluesky that arXiv will ban authors who include LLM hallucinations for a full year. Springer journal Social Indicators Research is going further, with a lifetime ban for LLM-generated submissions. ®

Europe is testing laser-based satellite communications through a new mountaintop ground station in Greece, aiming to deliver faster, more secure links than traditional radio systems as bandwidth demand grows. The Register reports: Lithuanian space and defense biz Astrolight says that it has commissioned a new optical ground station in Greece that will support ESA-backed CubeSat missions testing laser-based communications between satellites and Earth. The Holomondas Optical Ground Station was built through the PeakSat project, led by the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki with backing from the European Space Agency and Greece's Ministry of Digital Governance. Its job is to receive data from satellites via infrared laser links rather than the radio systems that space operators have relied on for decades. PeakSat and ERMIS-3, two Greek CubeSats launched in March under ESA's wider Greek IOD/IOV mission program, both carry Astrolight's ATLAS-1 optical communication terminal. Astrolight also built the ground segment, giving the project a fully integrated end-to-end optical communications setup. [...] The company says the station uses an 808-nanometer laser beacon and an optical C-band receiver capable of receiving data at up to 2.5 Gbps. Unlike traditional RF systems, optical links use tightly focused infrared beams that are harder to intercept or jam while also supporting significantly higher throughput.

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Chinese web giant Baidu has told investors its rare ability to build and operate AI infrastructure at scale represents a new high-margin business that its customers can’t avoid. Speaking on the company’s Q1 2026 earnings call, CEO, chairman and co-founder Yanhong Li said GPU cloud revenue increased by 184 percent year-over-year which represented “growth well above the broader market.” CFO Haijian He said that Baidu’s GPU cloud “is structurally higher margin than traditional CPU cloud, driven by stronger demand, tighter supply chain, higher technical barriers and pricing power.” He added his view that AI applications are “naturally high-margin business, driven by sticky and subscription-based models and operating leverage over time.” Dou Shen, the president of Baidu’s AI Cloud Group, remarked “While high-quality supply is relatively tight, customers prioritize proven stability and availability, not just cost.” “For enterprises, it's not only about the peak chip performance,” he said. “What matters more is the stability at scale, compatibility with mainstream models and frameworks, migration costs and friction, support for a large-scale cluster deployment and ultimately, cost efficiency.” He thinks the AI market will "increasingly consolidate around players who can deliver on all of these dimensions” and thinks Baidu is nailing them. “We have seen remarkably strong enterprise demand for AI infrastructure, both training as well as inference,” he said. “Inference is showing particularly strong momentum, which is a pretty healthy signal. It tells us that customers have moved beyond training models and are now running AI across more parts of their business at an accelerating pace.” That Baidu creates its own Kunlunxin AI chips means he thinks the company will emerge in a strong position. “Our Kunlunxin AI chips and full stack AI capabilities give us more room to optimize costs and continued improvement in our customer mix further supports margin expansion,” he said. Baidu is one of many hyperscalers building its own AI chips and ecosystems, so if the Chinese company’s experience is universal the enormous sums of cash US-based clouds are spending on AI infrastructure may well pay off over time. Shen also shared his views on Chinese AI chips, which he admitted “are still catching up with the most advanced global products in certain frontier training scenarios.” He added his opinion that Chinese chips can handle inferencing workloads, but said local buyers and chipmakers “still face near-term challenges around the capacity and supply chain maturity, partly because demand is growing faster than supply.” CEO Yanhong Li proudly revealed increased use of Baidu’s Apollo Go robotaxis but said as the company deploys them more widely “we have encountered a broader and increasingly complex range of real-world scenarios, including system and operational complexities that only emerge at larger scale.” “We are addressing a new frontier centered on how robotaxi services fit more naturally into public transportation, city operations and everyday life,” he said. Once Baidu figures that out, he expects robotaxis will “coexist more seamlessly with the broader transportation ecosystem over time and ultimately to become a more convenient and trusted service for the people we serve.” The CEO also discussed Baidu’s “Digital Human” business, which offers interactive avatars-as-a-service that customers often use to interact with their clients online or host online infomercials. Yanhong said Baidu has reduced the cost of operating digital humans by 80 percent in the last two quarters, taught them 24 languages and even added “presentation styles culturally adapted to resonate with local audiences.” “This helps merchants run around-the-clock digital human live streams that feel authentically native, unlocking new levels of efficiency and conversion potential across global markets,” he said. Baidu’s AI revenue numbers remain modest – even the massive growth mentioned above saw its AI cloud revenue reach RMB 8.8 billion ($1.3 billion). But the company was pleased that AI-related products accounted for over half of all revenue for the first time, accounting for RMB 13.6 billion $2 billion) of the quarter’s RMB 26 billion take ($3.8 billion). Without the spike in AI-related sales, Baidu’s quarterly revenue would have gone backwards. ®

Iran appears to have again threatened to disrupt submarine cables in the Strait of Hormuz. An X account that uses the handle Ibrahim_alFiqar and claims to represent senior Iranian military command last week posted a missive that translates as “We will impose fees on internet cables.” That’s presumably a threat to charge operators of submarine cables a fee to avoid some kind of disruption. Builders of submarine cables typically try to route their cables through deep water, to make them harder to reach. Iran, however, operates a fleet of torpedo-capable submarines and the Strait is famously shallow. Another X account that claims to represent a media outlet called Iran Times, and which uses the image of the same military spokesperson, yesterday warned “There are fears that Iran could use the global internet’s submarine communication cables as a new pressure tactic following the Strait of Hormuz blockade” and pointed out that if anything happened to cables in the Strait it “could affect banking networks, military communications, AI cloud systems, online services, and global commerce.” Disruption can follow any submarine cable outage. The cables that pass through the Strait terminate in gulf nations, and some of them have two paths through the strategic waterway. Some of those cables also have a landing point in Oman – well to the east of the Strait. Gulf nations also connect operate terrestrial fiber links, some of which link to those cable landing points in Oman. If Iran chose kinetic action against all cables in the Strait, packets would still likely flow out of the gulf over optical links, but it’s also conceivable that available bandwidth between the region and the rest of the world would decline. It would be tempting to declare that Iran’s scant remarks on this topic are bluster were it not for Tehran’s claim that it deliberately targeted AWS datacenters due to tenants hosting defense-related workloads within their walls. Iran is clearly aware that attacking information infrastructure can assist its war effort, and that its ability to project force into the Strait of Hormuz means it can try to control the flow of ships, and bits. Indeed, accounts connected to Tehran have today announced a new maritime insurance scheme that requires payment in cryptocurrency. Ships seldom move unless they're insured, but insurance companies are currently not issuing policies as they fear attempts to traverse the Strait will end badly. ®

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Sony reportedly won't release its major single-player PlayStation games on PC anymore. According to Bloomberg's Jason Schreier, Hermen Hulst, who heads up PlayStation's studios business, informed employees in a town hall on Monday about the change in strategy. Schreier had previously reported on the shift in March, saying that Sony scrapped plans to launch PC versions of last year's Ghost of Ytei and "other internally developed games." Online games will still come to multiple platforms following this change in strategy, Schreier reported at the time. In recent years, Sony has released many of its biggest games on PC, including Spider-Man 2, Ghost of Tsushima, both The Last of Us games, Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered, and multiplayer titles like Helldivers 2 and Marathon. Two years ago, Hulst committed to releasing PlayStation's live-service games "day and date" on PC and PS5, but its single-player PC releases have been less consistent, with Hulst saying that the company takes a "more strategic approach." In April, Microsoft's new Xbox chief Asha Sharma said the company is "reevaluating" exclusive games for the platform. "Players are frustrated," she wrote in a memo. "New feature drops on console have been less frequent. Our presence on PC isn't strong enough. Pricing is getting harder for people to keep up with. And core experiences like search, discovery, social, and personalization still feel too fragmented." "The model that got us here won't be the one that takes us forward," the memo adds.

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VMware has quietly debuted a technology preview of its flagship ESX hypervisor that is capable of running on Arm processors and servers. The virtualization giant teased its new tech in a Xeet which piqued our interest and led to the discovery of this document [PDF] on the public internet that explains the hypervisor supports guests running RHEL, Ubuntu, and SUSE, on servers from HPE and Gigabyte powered by Ampere processors, or Supermicro’s ARS-221GL model with an Nvidia Grace processor. The document offers slightly contradictory advice to the effect that “Arm host clusters must be managed by a separate, standalone vCenter running on x86. We do not recommend managing x86 installations and Arm installations from the same vCenter.” The tech preview appears to be a very basic affair, as it lacks support for vSAN hyperconverged storage, NSX virtual networking, and plenty of other features VMware offers in its x86 hypervisor and Cloud Foundation (VCF) private cloud suite. VMware has also made it possible to access Arm guests from its desktop hypervisors. As disclosed last week in release notes for new versions of the Workstation and Fusion products that add “the ability to connect to remote ARM-based ESXi, allowing users to manage VMs on remote ARM servers directly from VMware Workstation or Fusion on any supported platform.” Virtzilla is therefore making good on its promise to bring its hypervisor and VCF to the Arm architecture. The Broadcom business unit is porting its products because it thinks customers will increasingly turn to Arm servers on the network edge, perhaps for AI workloads. VMware is also aware that Arm processors can be more energy-efficient than x86 CPUs, and must also know that its hyperscale partners AWS, Microsoft, and Google aggressively promote their home-brew Arm processors as delivering superior performance-per-watt. In its announcement of its new desktop hypervisors, VMware offers another reason: “As development environments diversify, cross-architecture connectivity is essential.” VMware hasn’t offered a timeline to get ESX on Arm ready for a full release, but the company has previously told us it’s in no rush because customers are currently Arm-curious rather than in a rush to shift workloads onto the architecture. While VMware explores a new architecture, its rivals continue to prepare products they hope will prize away some users who feel Broadcom’s licensing regime isn’t to their liking. Platform9 last week debuted “Platform9 OS”, a cut of Linux that encapsulates its Private Cloud Director in an appliance-like format so that users don’t need Linux administration skills to adopt its stack. Platform9 is going after VMware’s top 10,000 customers with a promise it won’t try to lock them in with licensing or restrictive hardware compatibility lists. Australian outfit Netframe takes a similar approach with its wares and has chosen to walk down a well-worn path by creating a free version of its eponymous product that allows users to run up to three hosts. The company thinks that offering will attract home lab operators and small shops who will be sufficiently impressed by the product to upgrade and sign up for support. ®

A new infostealer variant targets macOS users by spoofing Apple, Microsoft, and Google and then then gets to work searching for victims’ password managers so it can steal all of their credentials and access cryptocurrency wallets such as MetaMask and Phantom. The updated SHub stealer variant is called Reaper, and it uses macOS Script Editor, pre-populated with the malicious payload to execute the malware, according to SentinelOne research engineer Phil Stokes, who documented the attack in a Monday blog. But unlike earlier SHub versions and similar macOS stealer campaigns that rely on ClickFix social engineering tactics to trick the user into pasting a ScriptEditor command into Apple’s Terminal command-line interface, Reaper bypasses Terminal altogether and therefore defeats defenses Apple added to Tahoe 26.4. The attack starts with fake WeChat and Miro installer websites, hosted on a domain designed to instill trust in users by typo-squatting a Microsoft URL: mlcrosoft[.]co[.]com. When a user visits these pages, hidden JavaScript collects a ton of information about their system and browser, including IP address, location, WebGL fingerprinting data, and indicators of virtual machines or VPNs. The attack stops if the victim is located in Russia. Assuming that the machine is located elsewhere and the user clicks on the fake tool installer, they open Apple’s Script Editor app via a sneaky link that’s heavily padded with ASCII art and fake terms to push the malicious command far below the visible portion of the window when it loads. When the victim clicks “Run” in Script Editor, the hidden command executes the malicious AppleScript and displays a popup message purporting to be a security update for Apple’s XProtectRemediator tool. Instead of updating the security tool, however, it calls a curl command to silently download the shell script and it asks the victim to enter their login details – which are scraped and used to decrypt various credentials – and then displays a fake error message. Earlier SHub versions harvested users’ browser data, cryptocurrency wallets, developer-related configuration files, macOS Keychain and iCloud account data, and Telegram session data. Reaper does all of this and more. It includes a filegrabber that searches for files that contain business or financial info in the user’s Desktop and Document folders. That approach is similar to the document-theft functionality seen in Atomic macOS Stealer (AMOS). The script also searches for several desktop cryptocurrency tools including Exodus, Atomic Wallet, Ledger Wallet, Ledger Live, and Trezor Suite. If it finds any, it injects the wallet with malware to ensure continued funds theft. And then, to ensure persistence, it backdoors the infected device by creating a directory structure designed to mimic Google Software Update: ~/Library/Application Support/Google/GoogleUpdate.app/Contents/MacOS/. “The LaunchAgent executes the target script GoogleUpdate every 60 seconds,” Stokes explains. “The script functions as a beacon, sending system details to the C2’s /api/bot/heartbeat endpoint.” This ensures the attacker can remotely execute code on the backdoored machine. If the attacker-controlled server sends a “code” payload, the script decodes it, writes it to a hidden file and executes the code with the users’ privileges before deleting the file. The backdoor gives the malware operators “more ways to steal data or pivot to other malicious installs after the initial compromise,” the threat hunter warns. About the only thing it doesn't do is implore the band to add more cowbell. ®

The FBI is seeking up to $36 million for nationwide access to automated license plate reader (ALPRs) data, which could let it query vehicle movements across the U.S. and its territories through a commercial database. 404 Media reports: "The FBI has a crucial need for accessible LPRs to provide a diverse and reliable range of collections across the United States. This data should be available across major highways and in an array of locations for maximum usefulness to law enforcement," a statement of work, which describes what data the FBI is seeking access to, reads. ALPR cameras generally work by constantly scanning the color, brand, model, and license plate of vehicles that drive by. This creates a timestamped record of where a particular vehicle was at a specific time that law enforcement can then query, effectively letting them see exactly where someone drove across time. The technology has existed for decades, but has become more pervasive in recent years. The FBI says it is looking for a vendor that will let it log into a Software-as-a-Service system and then query the collected ALPR data with license plate information, a description of the vehicle, a time or date, and geolocation information. The FBI says it is looking for ALPR coverage in the following areas: Eastern 48 (East of the Mississippi River); Western 48 (West of the Mississippi River); Hawaii; Puerto Rico; Alaska; and outlying areas such as Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, or Tribal Territories. In effect, the FBI is looking for ALPR data nationwide and even beyond. An attached price template indicates the FBI is willing to pay $6 million for each of those broad areas, bringing the total to $36 million. The FBI says it intends to award the contract to a single vendor, but if any such vendor is unable to fulfill all of the requirements, the agency may award the contract to up to two vendors. The contract is specifically for the FBI's Directorate of Intelligence, which oversees the agency's intelligence mission. The FBI is not only a law enforcement agency, but also part of the Intelligence Community. The report notes that the contract appears aimed at vendors like Flock or Motorola Solutions, since they're some of the only companies able to provide the sort of data the FBI is seeking. Further reading: Small Town Fights Over Flock's AI-Enhanced Network of License Plate-Reading Cameras

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