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An anonymous reader shares a report: Is installing Windows 11 with a local account or on unsupported hardware harmful or dangerous? YouTube's AI moderation system seems to think so, as it has started pulling videos that show users how to sidestep Microsoft's setup restrictions. Tech YouTuber Rich White, aka CyberCPU Tech, was the first to go public about the issue on October 26, when he posted a video reporting the removal of a how-to he published on installing Windows 11 25H2 with a local account instead of a Microsoft account. In the video, White expressed concern that YouTube's automated flagging process may be the root of the problem, as he found it hard to believe that "creating a local account in Windows 11 could lead to serious harm or even death," as YouTube reportedly alleged when it removed the video. When he appealed, White said that YouTube denied the request within 10 to 20 minutes, early on a Sunday morning, which led him to speculate that there wasn't a human in the loop when the request was shut down. That wasn't his only video removed, either. The next day, White uploaded his video for this week on installing Windows 11 25H2 on unsupported hardware, which was removed hours after being posted. YouTube justified the removal on similar grounds. [...] At least two other YouTubers - Britec09 and Hrutkay Mods - have released videos alleging much of the same.

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Microsoft is bringing shared audio to Windows 11, allowing you to stream audio across two pairs of wireless headphones, speakers, earbuds, or hearing aids. From a report: The feature is built using the Bluetooth Low Energy (LE) audio codec, and it's rolling out in preview to Windows 11 Insiders in the Dev and Beta channels. Shared audio comes in handy if you're watching a movie on a laptop with your friend or family member, or just want to show them new music that you can both stream inside your own wireless headsets. You can use shared audio by connecting Bluetooth LE-supported devices to your Windows 11 PC and then selecting the Shared audio (preview) button in your quick settings menu. Microsoft introduced an LE Audio feature on Windows 11 in August, enabling higher audio quality while using a wireless headset in a game or call.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: When Coinbase's quarterly earnings call wrapped up Thursday, its chief executive, Brian Armstrong, didn't finish with profit guidance or statements of confidence. He closed it out with a list: "Bitcoin, Ethereum, blockchain, staking and Web3." Those weren't random buzzwords. They were part of an $84,000 betting market [non-paywalled source]. Across prediction market platforms Kalshi and Polymarket, users had wagered on which words would be spoken during the call -- part of a niche category known as mention markets, where the outcome isn't tied to earnings, price moves or sports games, but to what people say in some public forum. With the final analyst question complete, several terms listed in contracts were still unsaid. Armstrong ticked them off one by one. "I was a little distracted because I was tracking the prediction market about what Coinbase will say on their next earnings call," he said in his parting remarks. "I just want to add here the words Bitcoin, Ethereum, blockchain, staking, and Web3 -- to make sure we get those in before the end of the call." The exchange's CEO had just moved a market -- even if only a small one. Mention markets are one of the more curious byproducts of the broader prediction market boom, but also one of the more controversial. Platforms like Kalshi, which is regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and Polymarket, which is in the process of returning to the US market, let users wager on the outcomes of real-world events. That can mean elections, policy decisions, or sports -- but also, increasingly, corporate rituals and even common jargon.

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AI promises to find bugs and gaps in your apps

After helping expand the modern software attack surface with the rise of AI services prone to data poisoning and prompt injection, OpenAI has thrown a bone to cyber defenders.…

Snowflake filed an 8-K with the Securities and Exchange Commission earlier this week after its chief revenue officer gave financial projections in a TikTok video. Mike Gannon told an influencer outside the New York Stock Exchange that the data-storage company would exit the year with just over $4.5 billion in revenue and reach $10 billion in a couple of years. The filing stated that Gannon is not authorized to disclose financial information on behalf of the company and that investors should not rely on his statements. Snowflake reaffirmed its August guidance of $.395 billion for fiscal year 2026. The video appeared on an account called theschoolofhardknockz and drew more than 555,000 views on TikTok. Gannon told the interviewer he watches the videos all the time.

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The bit barn will run on gas power first.

Texas is set to get another nuclear-powered datacenter project thanks to Blue Energy and Crusoe, but any atomic action isn't likely until the next decade.…

You click and think you're getting a download page, but get malware instead

Imagine searching for Microsoft Teams, seeing a text link at the top of the results, visiting it, and then getting hit with malware. The Rhysida ransomware gang, an especially insidious criminal organization that has stolen millions of people's info, has been placing fake ads for Microsoft Teams in search engines and then infecting victims who make the mistake of clicking them.…

Trevor McNally posts videos of himself opening locks. The former Marine has 7 million followers and nearly 10 million people watched him open a Proven Industries trailer hitch lock in April using a shim cut from an aluminum can. The Florida company responded by filing a federal lawsuit in May charging McNally with eight offenses. Judge Mary Scriven denied the preliminary injunction request in June and found the video was fair use. McNally's followers then flooded the company with harassment. Proven dismissed the case in July and asked the court to seal the records. The company had initiated litigation over a video that all parties acknowledged was accurate. ArsTechnica adds: Judging from the number of times the lawsuit talks about 1) ridicule and 2) harassment, it seems like the case quickly became a personal one for Proven's owner and employees, who felt either mocked or threatened. That's understandable, but being mocked is not illegal and should never have led to a lawsuit or a copyright claim. As for online harassment, it remains a serious and unresolved issue, but launching a personal vendetta -- and on pretty flimsy legal grounds -- against McNally himself was patently unwise. (Doubly so given that McNally had a huge following and had already responded to DMCA takedowns by creating further videos on the subject; this wasn't someone who would simply be intimidated by a lawsuit.) In the end, Proven's lawsuit likely cost the company serious time and cash -- and generated little but bad publicity.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: The rush to secure electricity has intensified as tech companies look to spend trillions of dollars building data centers. There's an industry that consumes even more power than many tech giants, and it has largely escaped the same scrutiny: suppliers of industrial gases. Everyday items like toothpaste and life-saving treatments like MRIs are among the countless parts of modern life that hinge on access to gases such as nitrogen, oxygen and helium. Producing and transporting these gases to industrial facilities and hospitals is a highly energy-intensive process. Three companies -- Linde, Air Liquide and Air Products and Chemicals -- control 70% of the $120 billion global market for industrial gases. Their initiatives to rein in electricity use or switch to renewables aren't enough to rapidly cut carbon emissions, according to a new report from the campaign group Action Speaks Louder. "The scale of the sector's greenhouse gas emissions and electricity use is staggering," said George Harding-Rolls, the group's head of campaigns and one of the authors of the report. Linde's electricity use in 2024 exceeded that of Alphabet's Google and Samsung Electronics as well as oil giant TotalEnergies, while the power use of Air Liquide and Air Products was comparable to that of Shell and Microsoft. Yet unlike fossil fuel and tech companies, these industrial gas companies are far from household names because their customers are the world's largest chemicals, steel and oil companies rather than average consumers. The industry relies on air-separation units, which use giant compressors to turn air into liquid and then distill it into its many components. These machines are responsible for much of the industry's electricity demand, and their use alone is responsible for 2% of carbon dioxide emissions in China and the US, the world's two largest polluters.

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A top United States regulator plans to unveil a faster approach to approving custom gene-editing treatments, a move designed to unleash a wave of industry investment that will yield cures for patients with rare diseases. From a report: Vinay Prasad, who oversees gene therapies at the Food and Drug Administration, said scientific advances, like Crispr, have forced the agency to relax some of its strict rules. As an example, he cited the case of 10-month-old KJ Muldoon, who this year became the first person in history to have his genes custom edited to cure an inherited disease. "Regulation has to evolve as fast as science evolves," Prasad said in an interview with Bloomberg News. The agency is "going to be extremely flexible and work very fast with the scientists who want to bring these therapies to kids who need it." Prasad plans to publish a paper in early November outlining the FDA's new approach. He predicted it will spark interest in developing treatments for conditions that may affect only a handful of people.

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Creators baffled as videos on local accounts, unsupported PCs vanish under ‘harmful acts’ rule

Is installing Windows 11 with a local account or on unsupported hardware harmful or dangerous? YouTube's AI moderation system seems to think so, as it has started pulling videos that show users how to sidestep Microsoft's setup restrictions.…

Our house, our rules

One of the biggest surprises of my tenure at El Reg so far is the activity in our forums and article comments. Reg readers are engaged, opinionated, and unafraid to express themselves. I love this. Thank you for reading, and for commenting.…

Google Maps is testing a power saving mode in its latest Android beta release that strips the navigation interface to its bare essentials. The feature transforms the screen into a monochrome display and removes nearly all UI elements during navigation, according to AndroidAuthority. Users discovered code strings in version 25.44.03.824313610 indicating the mode activates through the phone's physical power button rather than through any in-app menu. The stripped-down interface eliminates standard map labels and appears to omit even the name of the upcoming street where drivers need to turn. The mode supports walking, driving, and two-wheeler directions but currently cannot be used in landscape orientation.

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The once fearsome process killer is now a leaker of resources

Microsoft's ability to add bugs in the most unexpected of places has continued into its latest update to Windows 11, which spawns multiple copies of Task Manager, sucking down resources you'd normally use Task Manager to kill.…

Rare case of the state turning on its own, but researchers say it may be doing so more often

Russia's Interior Ministry says police have arrested three suspects it believes helped build and spread the Meduza infostealer.…

Trim down for obsolete operating system leaves it booting, but not much else

Stripping Windows to the bare essentials is a favorite hobby among enthusiasts, especially as Microsoft continues loading its OS with unwanted bloat. The latest achievement is Windows 7 being reduced to 69 MB.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) does not let people decline to be scanned by its new facial recognition app, which the agency uses to verify a person's identity and their immigration status, according to an internal Department of Homeland Security (DHS) document obtained by 404 Media. The document also says any face photos taken by the app, called Mobile Fortify, will be stored for 15 years, including those of U.S. citizens. The document provides new details about the technology behind Mobile Fortify, how the data it collects is processed and stored, and DHS's rationale for using it. On Wednesday 404 Media reported that both ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) are scanning peoples' faces in the streets to verify citizenship. "ICE does not provide the opportunity for individuals to decline or consent to the collection and use of biometric data/photograph collection," the document, called a Privacy Threshold Analysis (PTA), says. A PTA is a document that DHS creates in the process of deploying new technology or updating existing capabilities. It is supposed to be used by DHS's internal privacy offices to determine and describe the privacy risks of a certain piece of tech. "CBP and ICE Privacy are jointly submitting this new mobile app PTA for the ICE Mobile Fortify Mobile App (Mobile Fortify app), a mobile application developed by CBP and made accessible to ICE agents and officers operating in the field," the document, dated February, reads. 404 Media obtained the document (which you can see here) via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with CBP.

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ArsTechnica: When graphic design platform-provider Canva bought the Affinity image-editing and publishing apps early last year, we had some major questions about how the companies' priorities and products would mesh. How would Canva serve the users who preferred Affinity's perpetually licensed apps to Adobe's subscription-only software suite? And how would Affinity's strong stance against generative AI be reconciled with Canva's embrace of those technologies. This week, Canva gave us definitive answers to all of those questions: a brand-new unified Affinity app that melds the Photo, Designer, and Publisher apps into a single piece of software called "Affinity by Canva" that is free to use with a Canva user account, but which gates generative AI features behind Canva's existing paid subscription plans ($120 a year for individuals). This does seem like mostly good news, in the near to mid term, for existing Affinity app users who admired Affinity's anti-AI stance: All three apps' core features are free to use, and the stuff you're being asked to pay for is stuff you mostly don't want anyway. But it may come as unwelcome news for those who like the predictability of pay-once-own-forever software or are nervous about where Canva might draw the line between "free" and "premium" features down the line. [...] There's now a dedicated page for the older versions of the Affinity apps, and an FAQ at the bottom of that page answers several questions about the fate of those apps. Affinity and Canva say they will continue to keep the activation servers and downloads for all Affinity v1 and v2 apps online for the foreseeable future, giving people who already own the existing apps a way to keep using the versions they're comfortable with. Users can opt to link their Serif Affinity store accounts to their new Canva accounts to access the old downloads without juggling multiple accounts. But those older versions of the apps "won't receive future updates" and won't be able to open files created in the new Canva-branded Affinity app.

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Rough justice? Redmond out as Germany's openDesk judged a better fit

The International Criminal Court (ICC) is ditching Microsoft Office for a European software alternative amid mounting fears about being reliant on US technology.…

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy says the company's latest big round of layoffs -- about 14,000 corporate jobs -- wasn't triggered by financial strain or AI replacing workers, but rather a push to stay nimble. From a report: Speaking with analysts on Amazon's quarterly earnings call Thursday, Jassy said the decision stemmed from a belief that the company had grown too big and too layered. "The announcement that we made a few days ago was not really financially driven, and it's not even really AI-driven -- not right now, at least," he said. "Really, it's culture." Jassy's comments are his first public explanation of the layoffs, which reportedly could ultimately total as many as 30,000 people -- and would be the largest workforce reduction in Amazon's history. The news this week prompted speculation that the cuts were tied to automation or AI-related restructuring. Earlier this year, Jassy wrote in a memo to employees that he expected Amazon's total corporate workforce to shrink over time due to efficiency gains from AI. But his comments Thursday framed the layoffs as a cultural reset aimed at keeping the company fast-moving amid what he called "the technology transformation happening right now."

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