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UPDATED Web hosting bills getting too expensive? Maybe you ought to consider serving your site from a one-dollar 8-bit microcontroller. Okay, you won’t exactly be serving up a high-performance, graphic-rich website using this project from European developer and blogger Maurycy Zalewski. The setup is limited to one URL, but hey, it actually works, provided an influx of visitors hasn’t killed the site yet. The bargain-basement chip that serves as the central component of this project is the AVR64DD32, which currently retails from DigiKey for $1.30. It has a single 8-bit AVR core with a blistering 24 MHz max clock speed, 8 KB of static RAM, 64 KB of flash memory, and 256 bytes of EEPROM non-volatile memory for storing a very limited amount of data. Zalewski told The Register in an email that the whole build was free for him, as he had everything on hand, but he estimates the total cost of the thing to run closer to $2 or $3 when accounting for resistors and capacitors, the board the chip is attached to, and the like. Serving a web page from such a limited chip is a task, to say the least, and Maurycyz had to do a lot of legwork to get the thing working. The I/O pins on the AVR max out at 12 MHz, which Zalewski explained meant that it wouldn’t be possible to use Ethernet for the project, as the data flow from even the aged baseline Ethernet connection of 10BASE-T is too fast for the chip to handle. “10BASE-T still runs at 10 megabits/second,” Zalewski wrote. “Worse, it uses Manchester encoding: a zero is sent as ‘10’ and a one as ‘01,’ so 10 megabits of data is actually 20 megabits at the wire.” “The proper solution is to buy a dedicated Ethernet chip from DigiKey, but then I'd be waiting weeks to finish this project,” Zalewski noted. Instead of waiting, he decided to take a different approach by turning to Serial Line Internet Protocol (SLIP), just like the guy who turned a discarded vape into a web server last year. For those unfamiliar with SLIP, it’s a 38-year-old protocol designed to encapsulate IP traffic for transmission over serial lines, and it was widely used to make internet connections in the olden days. SLIP is still supported in modern Linux builds due to its compact size and the fact that it’s often used to connect microcontrollers to the internet. Now, giving the AVR an internet connection didn’t solve the harder problem of actually serving a web page to visitors. Zalewski said the chip could generate response packets by swapping the source and destination addresses on incoming traffic and resetting the packet’s TTL value, but implementing TCP still took several days of work. HTTP handling was simplified by returning a hardcoded response for every request, which works as long as the site only serves a single URL. Here’s that limitation we were talking about: “This works fine as long as there's only a single URL on the site,” Zalewski said. Sorry for those wanting to host more pages from that $1 microcontroller. Lastly, Zalewski said he had to figure out how to get requests from the internet to the microcontroller without spending money on a publicly routed IP address. That was resolved by using WireGuard to connect the microcontroller located at his home to a public-facing machine at a Helsinki datacenter, which then proxied requests to the microcontroller using a local address block. “This means that visitors aren't directly connecting to the MCU's TCP/IP stack... but hey, it's the same setup that the Vape Server uses and no one complained,” Zalewski said. And all without having to buy a vape or root through dumpsters to find an old one. Zalewski told us that the hardware he used for the task was so simple that it only took a few minutes to build the thing itself. The software was another thing altogether, though. "Wiring up the board only took a few minutes, but writing the software took multiple days," Zalewski said. Lucky for those wanting to duplicate or add to his work, the source code and a pre-compiled binary that'll run on an 8-bit microcontroller are included in his blog post. ® Updated at 1854 GMT on 3/18/2026 with more information after we spoke to the developer.

Another Linux kernel flaw has handed local unprivileged users a way to peek at files they should never be able to read, including root-only secrets such as SSH keys. The bug affects multiple LTS kernel lines from 5.10 upward, although a fix has already landed – and there is now a proposal for reducing the odds of similar surprises in future. What FOSS analytics vendor Metabase memorably dubbed the strip-mining era of open source security continues. This time, the culprit is CVE-2026-46333, a local kernel vulnerability that lets an unprivileged user read files they should not be able to access, including those normally available only to root. An attacker who already has login access to an affected machine could therefore potentially grab SSH keys, password files, or other confidential credentials, as the KnightLi blog explains. Despite its official designation, a demo exploit on GitHub calls it ssh-keysign-pwn. It is not quite as catchy a name as Copy Fail, or Dirty Frag, or indeed Fragnesia, but we feel it is safe to say it hasn't been a good month. According to a report on Linux Stans, it affected LTS kernel versions 5.10, 5.15, 6.1, 6.6, 6.12, 6.18 and 7.0. The good news is that it's already been fixed: Linus himself, in commit 31e62c2, called the fix "ptrace: slightly saner 'get_dumpable()' logic." The issue was reported on the oss-security list on Friday by security consultancy Qualys, as noted on X by grsecurity's Brad Spengler. In the same thread, Altan Baig pointed out that the underlying issue was reported by Jann Horn on the Linux Kernel Mailing List way back in 2020. The problem with tracking security reports, which Penguin Emperor Torvalds described recently, is not new, alas. ModuleJail This also seems like a good time to look at what we thought was an interesting new defensive measure, Jasper Nuyens' ModuleJail. The top line of the README summarizes it: The mention of "no AI inside the tool" is arguably something of a giveaway, and you can see a CLAUDE.md file in the repo. Even so, how it works is simple enough. Although Linux has a monolithic kernel, it is modular: when the kernel's source code is compiled, the person or tool building it can choose if each individual component is included (built into the binary), not included at all, or compiled as a module, which can be loaded on the fly as and when it's needed. Since the kernel is mostly device drivers, it's normal for distribution vendors to compile most non-essential components as kernel modules – as the Arch wiki explains. Blacklisting a module just means adding its name to a list of modules not to load. Blacklisting unusued models for added security isn't a new idea. It's in the RHEL 6 documentation, for instance, and a DoHost blog post from last year describes it as a security measure. ModuleJail simply automates the process: it blacklists any modules not currently in use. Probably safe for a server, but rather less ideal for a laptop or machine where you need to plug in new hardware on the fly. Connecting a USB headset, say, is quite different from plugging one into a headphone socket. While a device with a jack plug uses your existing sound controller, by connecting a USB one you're effectively adding a new sound controller – just one that happens to be connected over USB. ModuleJail mentions that its approach avoids changing the initramfs. An initramfs, like an initrd, is a file containing a temporary RAM disk, so that a generic kernel can find and load the drivers it needs for the particular box it's running on – even before it can find the machine's SSD and mount the root partition. Back in the 1990s, as grumpy old graybeards such as this vulture recall, recompiling your kernel was a standard part of periodic system maintenance. One benefit of building the kernel customized for your own computer was eliminating the need for an initramfs. If all the drivers are built in, there's no need for this temporary stage, although as the ArchWiki notes, this does limit some advanced features, which, for instance, systemd uses. We would love to see some of the systemd-free distros incorporate such automatic ModuleJail-style identification of essential modules, and use it to build a custom kernel on the fly, then banish the use of initramfs. (Maybe just keep the all-options-enabled installation kernel around as an emergency fallback.) Aside from a few special cases such as OpenZFS, this should work on most hardware – and make life simpler, quicker, and perhaps slightly more secure. ®

Europe's hunt for secure, high-capacity satellite communications infrastructure has produced a laser-equipped mountaintop ground station in northern Greece. 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. Astrolight CEO Laurynas Mačiulis told The Register that the company originally pursued laser communications after concluding it "would need to tap into the optical spectrum," as demand for satellite bandwidth continues to grow. He described optical connectivity as "one of the enabling technologies for further expansion into space." 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. The engineering problem, however, is slightly more complicated than pointing a laser pointer at the sky and hoping for the best. "You have two moving objects that try to establish a laser link, which means trying to point a very, very narrow laser pointer at your object, which is potentially tens of thousands of kilometers away, moving at eight kilometers per second," Mačiulis said. ESA and its partners are pitching optical comms partly as an answer to an increasingly crowded radio spectrum, but the tech is also drawing attention from defense and dual-use operators interested in more resilient communications systems. "There is a need for networking in space, both for connectivity and tactical reasons, and dual-use defense applications," Mačiulis said, adding that future satellite constellations "will inevitably rely on optical links, because that gives information superiority and security and resistance to jamming electronic warfare." He added "there's also sovereignty aspects, which means that there will never be a single player – there cannot be just Starlink." ®

Netherlands police’s scheme to unmask and shame scammers into submission is proving highly successful, with 74 of its 100 most wanted now known to investigators. The country's “Game Over?!” campaign involved releasing the blurred images of fraudsters into the public domain and threatening to unmask them within two weeks if they did not turn themselves in. True to its word, after two weeks, the Dutch police unblurred the alleged offenders’ faces via social media and advertising boards across the country, including at gas stations, shopping centers, and train stations. The result? Thirty-four handed themselves in, and revealing the remaining faces led to the identification of a further 40 individuals. The police said it received more than 500 tips from the public after it unblurred the faces. Its website was viewed more than two million times, and its campaign images were seen nearly 90 million times on social media. Of the 74 now known to the police, more than half (38) have been questioned, and the interrogations for the rest are already scheduled. Police have arrested six individuals so far, although they stated that this doesn’t necessarily mean the arrests were directly for their alleged crimes. Arrests may take place when someone fails to appear for police questioning, for example, or if a suspect is linked to multiple offenses. Anne Jan Oosterheert, portfolio holder for online crime at the Dutch Politie, said: “This form of crime claims many victims. It has a huge impact on both the victims and society. The goal of Game Over?! is therefore to identify and prosecute the suspects. “With the identification of 74 suspects, this goal has been amply achieved, and so far, we can speak of a successful investigative offensive. We are very satisfied and grateful for all the help we have received from citizens.” An unusual take on appealing to the public for support, Game Over?! aimed to give the alleged offenders the chance to retain their anonymity in exchange for helping the police, and potentially assisting their own prosecution. The idea behind naming the campaign “Game Over?!” came from the term “F-Game,” or fraud game, which is what police say offenders often refer to when discussing their actions. The police’s initial announcement explicitly called the campaign a public attack on criminals, saying that it was also relying on public shaming to eventually apprehend the alleged offenders. The same message also came with a warning that young people were increasingly being recruited to these schemes, often paid very little for the privilege. Of the 74 now identified, the police said today that the youngest suspect was aged just 14, with the oldest being 42. The average age across them all was 22. Game Over?! explicitly targeted banking helpdesk impersonators, fake police officers, and card collectors, with officials saying they had become a “nasty” social problem. “These nasty forms of fraud have now become a social problem that can also be solved in collaboration with society," said Oosterheert previously as part of the campaign’s launch announcement. Of the crime types police strategists are looking to stamp out, cases involving bank helpdesk fraud are the most common, and typically target the elderly. The classic script goes: scammer calls the victim pretending to be a representative of their bank; throughout the course of the phone call, the scammer convinces the victim to surrender enough of their details so they can go away and access their account; the scammer then steals their money. Fake police officer scams are another, more recent scourge on the country, that in some cases have become violent and even deadly. They typically also target the elderly and see criminals knocking on doors, offering to safeguard valuables on the residents’ behalf. Police say that tens of thousands of elderly victims have fallen victim to scams like these, resulting in police fielding calls from victims and their “frightening stories.” “The impact on these often vulnerable victims is enormous,” the police said. “Their sense of security is often completely gone, as is their trust in the government and their fellow human beings.” ®

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. ®

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. ®

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. ®

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. ®

Linux kernel boss Linus Torvalds has declared the project’s security mailing list has become “almost entirely unmanageable” due to multiple researchers using AI to find bugs and then filling the list with duplicate reports. Torvalds used his weekly state of the kernel post to deliver release candidate four for Linux 7.1 and report “fairly normal” progress towards a full release. He then pointed kernelistas to the project’s documentation, which he wrote “might be worth highlighting” as “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.” “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,” Torvalds complained. The Penguin Emperor believes that kind of chatter is “all entirely pointless churn” and isn’t productive because “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.” He then offered an opinion on how best to use AI to improve software security. “AI tools are great, but only if they actually help, rather than cause unnecessary pain and pointless make-believe work,” he wrote. “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,” he added, “but that's the core gist of it.” “So just to make it really clear: 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?” Torvalds' remarks contrast with recent comments from fellow kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman, who recently told The Register that AI has become an increasingly useful tool for the FOSS community. ®

KETTLE Hopefully you haven't had reason to notice yet, but there's a rising problem with AI services on Google Cloud, AWS, and other platforms sticking their customers with bills in the tens of thousands of dollars. This week's episode of the Kettle focuses on two such stories that The Register published this week, one concerning Google and another involving AWS. In both cases, cloud customers using AI incurred massive bills without any prior notification from their provider and not a lot of help to resolve the matter with any sense of urgency. Tune in to this week's episode to hear host Brandon Vigliarolo chat with O'Ryan Johnson and Richard Speed about their stories, what's causing these massive bills, and how you can avoid a similar situation at your own organization. You can listen to The Kettle here, as well as on Spotify and Apple Music, or read the transcript of the latest episode below. It's been lightly edited for clarity. Brandon (00:01) Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of The Register's Kettle podcast. I'm Reg reporter Brandon Vigliarolo, and this week I'm joined by my colleagues Richard Speed and Kettle newcomer O'Ryan Johnson to talk about a recent spike in cloud AI API abuse that's sticking customers with some massive charges. We're talking tens of thousands of dollars that Google is seeming to...try hard not to refund. Guys, thanks for coming on. O'Ryan Johnson (00:29) Great to be here. Brandon (00:30) And O' Ryan, welcome again to your first Kettle episode. Glad to have you here. So in this case, this one is primarily based on an exclusive you published this week about compromised Google Cloud API keys. And from what I read, it seems like cyber criminals are using those keys to run all the AI inference they want on most expensive models that Google has without paying a dime. So walk me through what exactly this story's about. O'Ryan Johnson (00:33) So there were a couple parts of this. One is the API abuse. But then there was this policy by Google that kind of threw gasoline on the fire. So if you're a developer and you've created an API key for your projects, if your project uses Maps, you'll create an API key. And for years, the advice from Google was put that API key on the front end of that, make it public so that when users are using your site, it links back to your project. The problem was a couple years ago, they allowed those API keys, if they were configured correctly, to also access Gemini. And a lot of folks who were early adopters of AI went in and said, okay, I want to use Gemini with my project. And not really connecting the dots that their API key on the front end that was publicly available would now also allow anybody to inference Google's Gemini platform. And it wasn't a big deal, I think, for a lot of years because I don't think the platform was really that amazing. Brandon (02:01) Yeah, because you said this is a three year old change, right? O'Ryan Johnson (02:22) But recently...Nano Banana and the Veo 3 models came out. And that's when I think we started to see a lot of this. This great security company named Truffle wrote something about this in February saying, look, be careful because if you've put your API key out according to Google's instructions, and if you've also been working with Gemini models, there's a chance that you may have inadvertently opened up your API key to anybody to be able to inference [Veo] and NanoBanana to their heart's content. Brandon (02:40) And specifically a Maps API key, right? Okay, O'Ryan Johnson (02:51) Correct. Which again was, was Google had told everybody for quite a while was safe. And so, what happened kind of inevitably is folks were bad actors were in fact using that for for those purposes So you'd have these you know sort of like horror stories of waking up in the morning and seeing your Google account Which you maybe you never spent more than fifty dollars a month, all of a sudden you have a $3,000 bill, $5,000 bill. I talked to a guy who got a notification from his credit card company that "Hey, we're basically we're shutting off your account because you spent too much," and he's like "What the hell is going on?" And as he's in there trying to figure it out he sees the bill keeps going up.... Brandon (03:26) ...I think you mentioned basically that where this is, how you figure this out, is kind of buried, right? It's hard to find, right? So as he's looking, trying to frantically figure out what's happening, more charges are being added. I couldn't imagine waking up in the morning to that kind of scenario. O'Ryan Johnson (03:36) It's a rough, rough way to start the day. It's really tough. Brandon (03:50) So that's the first part, right? So what's the second part then? O'Ryan Johnson (03:52) So, right, that's the first part. The second part is that, you know, this happened to people who had spending caps in place. And Google has only recently put spending caps in place, but they're really loose caps. I talked to a developer in Australia who said, "Look, I put a $250 spending cap in place. And when I woke up, I had a $10,000 bill." ...And he said, "When I was going to going through afterwards, I looked and I said my spending tier was at the $100,000 limit. And I said, how does it happen?" Well, if you look like Google was actually very upfront about this. In March, they put out a blog and said, "Hey, we're going to help you out. If you've only got a $250 spending cap, if you spent $1,000 in the lifetime of your account and you've been a Google member for 30 days or more, a Google Cloud developer for 30 days or more, you can spend $100,000." Brandon (04:47) And there's no notification to the user accounts that this is being done? O'Ryan Johnson (04:50) Except for the emails that say this is how much you owe us, which is all after the fact. Brandon (04:57) And if you're less than 30 days, right, it's moving to tier two is, I think, what's the cap on that? O'Ryan Johnson (05:01) Two thousand dollars. Brandon (05:04) But even then, it's spend a hundred bucks in the lifetime of your account? O'Ryan Johnson (05:06) A hundred dollars and be three days old, and Google will give you a $2,000 cap to spend. Those are the most generous terms – you guys have been around IT for years, what distributor would ever give you terms like that like if you went to TD Synnex or if you went to Ingram Micro and said, "Hey, I'm 30 days old and I've spent $1,000. I would like $100,000 in credit with you." They would laugh . Brandon (05:13) They would laugh you out of the office and then maybe close your account. O'Ryan Johnson (05:37) Yeah, even the best distributor in the world is not going to give you those terms, but Google's opened that up. And then of course the problem is trying to get that money ... trying to get your account restored. like in two of the cases, the money had already been spent. So the credit cards, one was $17,000, one was $10,000. The money was already out of their account and they have this project. If they charge it back, they're afraid that Google's going to shut down their project and delete it. If they stick with the bill, then they're stuck with this debt that is obviously outside the bounds of any budget that they had set for their Google Cloud project. Brandon (06:12) Yeah, for a small developer that can be devastating. O'Ryan Johnson (06:15) Right. Right. So Google, though, we do have an update coming today. Google has refunded the two people we talked about and looked in their account. It looks like they're kind of going after this with more accounts too, based on what I've talked to with Google, they're going to look at a lot more of these issues...This didn't come to me in a vacuum. I mean, this this was on these posts have been kind of flooding Reddit. If you go to the Google Cloud subreddit there, you you pretty much don't go, there's two or three a day that are popping up saying, "Hey, my gosh, I've got $10,000. I got $7,000 in bills. Like I only ever spent, you know, $50 with these folks. How am I getting these bills?" Brandon (06:57) Right, so it's kind of a two-part story here. The automatic tier upgrades are obviously a problem, but are all these cases that you're seeing, are they tied back to the Truffle notice? I mean, these are all Maps API keys? O'Ryan Johnson (07:02) Not all of them. Some people say like, "Look, I never put my API key out publicly." And I talked to a guy yesterday who said, "Look, my API key has been hidden from everybody. I think I got brute forced." ....I don't possibility or the probability of being able to brute force an API key, they're huge, long chains of numbers and texts. Probably not impossible...But this guy, his bill was $127,000, which is just a huge, huge amount. Brandon (07:40) God that is so that is so much money that's ridiculous. Ten thousand dollars is bad enough add another zero to that and oh my God. O'Ryan Johnson (07:51) That's rough. Fortunately, he caught it before...That bill only exists with Google. Fortunately, the good side is, it's not in his credit card. So he doesn't have to try to pay that back. The bad news is, his Google project is looking at a possible deletion if he can't convince Google that, "Look, this wasn't me, this was really somebody else who brute-forced my API." Brandon (08:15) I'm guessing proving that is pretty difficult. O'Ryan Johnson (08:17) Well it's difficult, what makes it difficult is he no longer has access to the logs because he hasn't paid the account, so now he has to rely on somebody at Google to go through those logs and make his case for him. Brandon (08:34) When there's $100,000 on the line. O'Ryan Johnson (08:36) When there's 127 on the line. That's a gamble. That's a gamble. Brandon (08:43) So this is bad enough, but as I understand, Richard, Google's not the only company being a bit shifty with their AI billing. You wrote a story this week about an AWS customer who was billed $30,000 despite supposedly having a setting enabled to prevent this. So what's this all about? Richard Speed (08:50) It's kind of almost a cautionary tale in some ways. Again, we've talked about Google, there's also, this is AWS. And this is a user who was using AWS Bedrock. He wanted to take Claude Opus out for a spin, try it out. He had some startup credits fired by Activate. All great. Now he was using a tool called the AWS Cost Anomaly Detection Tool. What that does, that actually sends you alerts if you're doing some odd things and your account is incurring additional costs, and as well as using AI machine learning, you can also set some custom thresholds... "If I spend more than this then stop or shout at me or whatever Brandon (09:39) Yeah, cut me off. Yeah. Richard Speed (09:45) So he thought, "Great, I've got that, what could possibly go wrong?" And so he began to use his AWS Bedrock and no alerts were fired, all was good until about a month after he began using it he got a bill for $30,000 or $38,000 through where he was expecting hundreds. And the reason being was that AWS Bedrock apparently bills through AWS Marketplace, and that is not compatible with the cost anomaly detection. Brandon (10:06) So Marketplace is where you can pick up third party integrations for AWS, right? Richard Speed (10:17) Right, and that's where AWS Bedrock was being billed, was basically invoiced through. And to be completely fair to AWS, that is documented. It is in the documentation, "This will happen." So, hence the cautionary tale aspect. But again, I've had a few people say, actually it's pretty unintuitive, this. You kind of would assume it's being caught and it wasn't caught. And so this is gone through. Now, unfortunately, at the moment, I don't think there is the happy ending about a refund. If and when I get more information, I willupdate. But the cautionary tale aspect is, I've heard from somebody else who said, yeah, similar sorts of things can happen. So I tend to go through directly through the AI provider. In this case, it's Anthropic. And there again, you can put limits in place. And those limits did save this particular person from a $50,000 mistake. And he only ended up paying $50 because he'd accidentally turned on a thing which enabled a lot more invoicing to happen, and of course it was stopped before it got out control. Brandon (11:25) I'm assuming a lot of customers, with the way they have their architectures and their infrastructure set up and their various providers, I mean, is it going to be simple for a lot of businesses to say, I'm going to skip AWS and go straight to the AI company itself? I mean, that seems like it might work in some cases, right? But a lot of people are going to be trying to integrate these. And so they're going to have to go through things. So does Cost Anomaly Detection function only with first-party Amazon products then basically? Anything in the Marketplace that you're pulling from a third-party provider doesn't get included in this? Richard Speed (11:59) Yeah, I believe so. Yeah, it's just through AWS services except for Marketplace stuff. But there are other checks and things in place in AWS. It's just in this instance, the expectation was if I'm using Cost Anomaly Detection, it should stop me running up a massive invoice or running up a massive bill using AWS Bedrock. In this case, it didn't. It was completely silent as the thousands and thousands and thousands began to rack up on the account. Brandon (12:05) And even, I think you wrote, even when his credits ran out. Like, he ran out of credits and switched to cash billing and there was no notice. Richard Speed (12:29) Exactly. It suddenly went from from credits to cash billing again with no notification or warning. It just happened. And so again, his account began to incur these charges. And so he didn't realize until the invoice came through. "Oh, my goodness me. How terrifying is this?" As as Ryan said, it's quite a shock when when you're used to a small amount per month and then suddenly a massive invoice comes through. O'Ryan Johnson (12:53) One thing that is kind of universal across this that one of these users pointed out, is that the most frustrating part is that they have the information. They can see what you're doing in your account and they don't stop it. All this information that we're talking about, whether it's your usage, whether it's your billing, all that stuff is within the four walls of, whether it's Google or AWS and they, whether it's intentionally or unintentionally – we live in this era where everybody talks about immaculate orchestration across all their environments, right? Like, I mean, if you're in SaaS, that's all you hear is about how amazing and perfect their SaaS products are. And we just don't see that in practice. You don't see that orchestration, and you certainly don't see it if it can ever give the user an advantage, or if it can ever give the user the ability to control how much they spend. Like if a user could shut off – if there was a notification that came in and said, "Hey, did you know that you're on Veo right now and you're generating videos? Would you like to shut that off?" Think about your credit card company. If I go one county over and I spend $10 at a Target, I'll get an alert from my card company. "Hey, are you sure?" Are you telling me, Google and AWS, that you can't do that? Like, don't give me that. I mean, this reminds me like when the banks in the US had overdraft fees, they used to – they could see how much money you had in your account. They would gladly let you spend much more than that so that they could fine you for every transaction. And so it was very similar. You'd open up your bank account and see like, I'm $800 in debt. So that was eventually determined to be, hey, that's an aggressive, that's not a good policy. We shouldn't allow people to do that. And I just wonder if, I wonder if there's gonna be some sort of trade regulation that kicks in on this. Brandon (14:26) I mean, it almost feels like there has to be. What we have in these two stories this week is multiple cloud platforms making their AI billing usage or usage billing so convoluted that a non-trivial number of customers are seeing their bill skyrocket, whether both due to cybercrime or simply the fact that Cost Anomaly Detection on AWS isn't very well-defined on the Marketplace, right? You're seeing multiple companies this is happening to, right? Again, O'Ryan, you kind of went right to the, the conspiracy theory, but that's where my mind goes too, this seems really convenient. Google's move in March. All these kinds of things are very well timed to ensure that companies that are adopting AI are being left with this ambiguous billing situation. Richard Speed (15:35) I mean, if only there was a tool that could spot strange patterns in data and frames. I mean, what would that look like? [Laughter.] Brandon (15:43) Yeah, I don't know. ⁓ There's no way, there's no way that ⁓ Google and AWS don't see this usage or can't monitor it. Can't pop a large language model on there to keep an eye out for ⁓ unusual billing and notify people. Like you said, if you never use [Veo] or never use NanoBanana and all of a sudden your account's racking up thousands of dollars of charges on it, Google should probably say, "Hey, is this you?" Right? Like, you know, that would be, I would hope that would happen. Right? You know, it's like you said, right? Your bank, Target will know, or your credit card company will notify if you spend things a county over. Right? If I try to log into a video game online from a different IP address, it locks me out and makes me me approve it. Right? Like this is not a complicated technology here. O'Ryan Johnson (16:32) No, think about the user agreements that we have like with all of our subscriptions like you know like Netflix. If my kid tries to log into my Netflix from where they live, they can't, and I get these notifications from Netflix, "Hey do you want to add somebody on your account?" Like don't tell me that you can't do that, Google. And Google actually says that they hat between the usage and the spend, they're better than AWS when it comes to being able to spot this. But it's like, it's still something like 28 days to be able to reconcile usage with spend. And that just does not make any amount of sense. Brandon (17:16) It takes Google 28 days? O'Ryan Johnson (17:18) They're pushing people into these products. They're pushing, they want you to use these products. They want developers to, they want to be able to say, we have X number of developers who are using this. We have X number of spend. All of those hijacked API keys are inevitably helping marketing for Gemini. Just through sheer usage numbers, through sheer revenue and dollar spend, that drives a narrative that they can then, you on the quarterly earnings call say, "Hey, look at all these people using our product. Look at all the spend on [Veo]. Look at all the spend on Banana." come on, you guys, you got to make it fair for the rest of us, man. Brandon (17:59) I'm just gonna toss it allegedly in there before Google comes after us, right? You know. We don't know for sure that this is what they're planning, but it sure seems, the ducks do line up, right? So guys, are you familiar? Do you know, are any other cloud platforms...are there similar issues on Azure, on other platforms? Have you heard anything? Or does this seem to be mainly confined right now to Google and AWS? Richard Speed (18:11) There have been some issues on Azure. I read a piece, oh crikey, several weeks, maybe even months ago now, regarding a similar thing to what's happened with AWS with a user who had, he hadn't realized that his startup credits didn't count towards AI usage. And then he found himself hit with a massive invoice because again, Microsoft just quietly said, "Yeah, sure. You want that service? No problem. Here you go. Use it." And so he used it and then the huge invoice came through. I think... I think it's important to point out that these companies, they're not doing anything wrong legally. Ethically, I'm with O'Ryan, they should be warning you to say, "Hey, you know, you're spending way more now than you ever used to before. These services that you've never used before, are you sure you want to be doing that? Are you sure about that?" Brandon (18:51) I was talking to my wife about Google before we started the podcast, right? Because when we were talking about the topic for this week, and I think Matt, our editor in chief said, "AI overage charges." I was like, "What? This is going to be a boring episode." And then I got to actually reading these stories and I'm like, "Oh my God, this is really interesting." My wife's like, "Surely this is illegal." I'm like, "I don't know, if it's in the terms of service, right? You know? Yeah." O'Ryan Johnson (19:23) It's like the South Park episode. Richard Speed (xx:xx) I think another aspect of this is there's a perception that AI services are inexpensive and you won't run up these massive costs. One thing I've come across a few times are companies saying, "Hey, we can increase the productivity of our staff enormously because we can roll out these AI tools and our employees can use them and they'll be massively more productive and it'll be great." They're forgetting that of course there is a cost to that. And I think what we're seeing here are people hitting these costs. So I think that the message has got to be, you need to be – I mean, until these companies actually put in warnings to say, know, perhaps make it very clear how much this stuff is really costing, I think you need to be aware that this isn't a free service, you know, it's going to be paid for somehow. Brandon (xx:xx) I guess that's kind of the big warning to businesses, right? Or AI users, anyone who's using AI in the cloud in general, It's like these things are not free. Yeah, sure, you can use ChatGPT for free if you're, you know, some random person logging into the website. But if you want to go enterprise with this or use it in any kind of business capacity, it's going to cost you money and potentially a lot of it. So Richard, you said that it looks like the AWS user might be a little bit hosed on getting a refund. Do you know is Amazon – did you talk to Amazon for the story? Do they have any intention to change the marketplace versus non-marketplace CAD policy? Richard Speed (xx:xx) They did respond, and at the moment there's no plans to change it. O'Ryan Johnson (xx:xx) Google is also, they're sticking by their automatic tier upgrades. They like the flexibility that it gives to developers. Flexibility, of course, meaning that developers can spend a lot more than they initially wanted to, or agreed to. Brandon (xx:xx) It's a very one-sided flexibility, really, when you think about it. O'Ryan Johnson (xx:xx) In fairness, we are kind of helping at least notify people that this could happen. This is something that is really happening to people and their bills really do become five-figure, in some cases six-figure bills at the end of the month through no intention of their own. Brandon (xx:xx) Yeah, so I guess basically the big, yeah, like we said, the big takeaway for business AI customers is to just really watch that billing, be sure that whatever system you have in place to prevent overages is actually doing its job, and hide those API keys. Well, like we said, guess this is just a cautionary tale, you know, to watch that billing. So if this keeps happening, we are definitely going to be talking about it and writing about it again. And we hope that you will tune in on a future episode of The Kettle to find out more. ®