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Partner Content ZTE recently released its Sustainability Report 2025, highlighting the company's latest achievements in deepening Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) practices. This marks the 18th consecutive year that ZTE has voluntarily disclosed its annual sustainability performance to the public. The report demonstrates that in the past year, ZTE fully embraced artificial intelligence, achieving milestone progress in advancing scientific carbon reduction, accelerating global digital inclusion and industry transformation through intelligent technologies, and strengthening governance resilience. These efforts profoundly embody ZTE's responsibility and mission as a "Driver of Digital Economy". Xu Ziyang, Executive Director and CEO of ZTE, states in the report: "In the face of profound changes in the global digital economy, ZTE has unveiled its new vision, 'To lead in connectivity and intelligent computing', with greater strategic foresight and a stronger sense of responsibility. Driven by our 'Connectivity + Computing' strategy, we remain committed to our original aspiration of empowering high-quality and sustainable economic development through technology, and work with our partners to build an intelligent future that is more efficient, green, and inclusive." Strengthening Innovation and Reshaping Digital Momentum with AI ZTE continues to advance its "Connectivity + Computing" strategy, fully embracing AI under the guiding principle of "All in AI, AI for All". In 2025, the company sustained disciplined R&D investment, recording annual expenses of RMB 22.76 billion, approximately 17% of total revenue. Efforts focused on key areas such as connectivity (6G, optical communications, and IP networks), computing power, energy technology, smart terminals (such as AI-powered devices), operating systems, databases, and chips, underpinned by a core commitment to frontier technology exploration and collaborative innovation. According to the report, as of December 31, 2025, ZTE has filed approximately 95,000 global patent applications, with over 50,000 patents granted globally. In the chip sector, the company holds around 5,900 patent applications and over 3,700 granted patents. In the field of AI, it has nearly 5,500 patent applications, with nearly half of them granted. Throughout the year, the company declared and secured over 100 technology projects. Within R&D, AI tools have been widely applied, with a usage penetration rate of 79.78% among developers. The AI code generation rate reached 31.45%, and the improvement in R&D efficiency has begun to manifest. ZTE's innovation was further recognized with 11 gold awards, 3 silver awards, and 39 excellence awards from the China Patent Awards, and 31 honors from the Guangdong Patent Awards. Leading Science-Based Carbon Reduction, Paving the "Digital Green Path" ZTE has deeply integrated climate action with its development strategy, advancing the "Digital Green Path" across four key dimensions: green corporate operations, green supply chain, green digital infrastructure, and green industry empowerment, ensuring the achievement of science-based targets. For Scope 1 & 2 (operational emissions), in 2025, the company exceeded the Phase I target outlined in its 2024 Zero-Carbon Strategy White Paper. Through management measures for energy saving and technologies such as AI-based dynamic scaling and remote control, the company achieved a 46% reduction in carbon emissions compared with the base year of 2021. For Scope 3 (upstream and downstream emissions), ZTE achieved an 8.55% reduction in physical emissions intensity during the use and maintenance phase of telecom products, with a year-on-year reduction of 3.05% in absolute emissions across the full lifecycle of terminal products. For three consecutive years, ZTE has been recognized on the CDP Climate A list for its excellence in environmental governance. In terms of green operations, ZTE has established a systematic decarbonization pathway spanning energy mix optimization, refined technical energy-saving solutions, management-driven electricity saving, dual-carbon digitalization, as well as capability building and awareness enhancement. In 2025, the company completed new photovoltaic projects in Xi'an and Changsha, increasing the proportion of photovoltaic power generation with an annual generation of 39.22 million kWh. Furthermore, ZTE actively participated in green electricity trading and obtained 33,700 green electricity certificates (a total of 33.69 million kWh of electricity) throughout the year.Regarding the green supply chain, ZTE has comprehensively integrated low-carbon requirements into its SPIRE 2.0 supply chain strategy, collaborating with partners to build a technology-driven, end-to-end eco-friendly value chain that drives sustainable development across the entire industry ecosystem.In 2025, with its Xi'an Base and Changsha Base newly awarded the "National Green Factory" certification, the company now operates three national-level green factories and one provincial-level green factory. Over the past year, ZTE accelerated supply chain decarbonization by conducting dual-carbon training for 97 suppliers and performing dual-carbon audits on 158 suppliers. Furthermore, it provided guidance for 152 key suppliers (covering 50.82% of procurement spend) on completing carbon accounting and drove 83 key suppliers to participate in CDP assessments and make public disclosures.For green digital infrastructure, ZTE adopts self-developed low-power chips, advanced cooling technologies such as liquid cooling, PV applications at sites, and full lifecycle carbon footprint management to provide green digital infrastructure for the industry. By the end of 2025, the company had completed carbon footprint assessments for 240 products, achieving full coverage of all product categories.For green industry empowerment, ZTE leverages ICT technologies (such as 5G, cloud, AI, and the Digital Nebula platform) to provide digital transformation solutions for various industries, helping them achieve energy saving, carbon reduction, and quality and efficiency enhancement. A prime example is ZTE's collaboration with Benxi Tool Co., Ltd. on its smart factory initiative. Leveraging the 5G-enabled industrial Internet solution, the project successfully reduced the cumulative number of frontline operators across process steps by 20% while boosting the annual output by 1.5 times. Furthermore, the project shortened the lead time for raw material procurement by 40%, slashed the downtime due to material shortages by 50%, and cut the delivery time by 20%. These improvements significantly enhanced the overall competitiveness of this metal tool manufacturer. Advancing Tech for Good, Building an Inclusive and Equitable Society ZTE remains committed to a people-centric philosophy, striving to ensure equal communication rights and digital opportunities for communities worldwide. Providing network services to one-third of the global population, ZTE extends sustainable infrastructure and technological empowerment to every corner of the globe. From the remote heights of Baqen, Xizang, where ZTE deployed an FTTR-B all-optical network solution at the People's Hospital of the county (situated at an altitude of over 4,500 meters) to bridge the telemedicine divide, to Africa, where the company's "Signal Reach" program built 152 rural network sites in Ethiopia to bring reliable connectivity to over one million people, ZTE continues to bridge the digital divide and foster an inclusive, equitable, and intelligent digital world. ZTE regards talent as its most valuable asset, committed to building a learning organization and continuously fostering an employee empowerment ecosystem in the AI era. In 2025, the company maintained 100% employee training coverage and regularly carried out Employee Assistance Program (EAP) initiatives. In addition, ZTE successfully passed the re-assessment for the ISO 45001 system for all domestic operations and production sites, as well as for operations in 30 overseas countries. In public welfare, ZTE further strengthened its volunteer service system in 2025, with the number of employee volunteers surpassing 20,000 and more than 600 global community programs carried out during the year. Guided by its vision of "Goodwill, Everywhere", ZTE implemented tailored projects in over 40 countries, including China, India, Indonesia, Spain, South Africa, and Ethiopia, focusing on educational support, medical assistance, low-carbon environmental protection, and rural revitalization. These efforts benefited more than one million people globally, underscoring ZTE's commitment to building a more inclusive and sustainable society. Strengthening Compliance Foundations, Enhancing Governance Resilience ZTE continuously builds and improves its three-tier sustainability governance system of "Strategy—Decision-Making—Execution", proactively addressing emerging risks to ensure steady implementation of its strategic goals. In 2025, the company sustained its ISO 22301:2019 Business Continuity Management System certification, covering five manufacturing bases and major R&D centers, while also guiding major suppliers to establish BCM management systems. ZTE also sustained ISO 37001 certification for anti-bribery management systems, covering its subsidiaries and branches in 38 key countries. In addition, the company officially launched its "Cross-Border Data Compliance Service Platform for Enterprises Going Global", a one-stop solution designed to help companies tackle complex global compliance challenges. ZTE regards data compliance governance as an important part of the company's overall compliance governance framework. In 2025, the company sustained ISO/IEC 27001 (Information Security Management System) and ISO/IEC 27701 (Privacy Information Management System) certification. Alongside releasing its updated ZTE Privacy Protection White Paper, ZTE secured EU's ePrivacyseal Global certification for five of its key fixed network and multimedia products, reinforcing its world-class data protection standards. As a member of the United Nations Global Compact and the Global Enabling Sustainability Initiative (GeSI), and a key participant and one of the first Champions of the Partner2Connect (P2C) Digital Coalition initiated by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), ZTE's ESG efforts continue to receive worldwide recognition. In 2025, the company was rated by Sustainalytics as "Low ESG Risk" for the fourth consecutive year, included in the 2025 Fortune China ESG Impact List for the fourth year, honored with "Excellence in Practice Award" from the Association for Talent Development (ATD) for the sixth consecutive year, and once again included in the S&P Global Sustainability Yearbook (China Edition) 2025. ZTE was also selected for the 2025 China's Top 100 Overseas Brands Index released by People's Daily Overseas Online and Global Yearly Brand Research Institute, and was selected as a model case in the 2025 China Corporate ESG Blue Book, and was recognized by Phoenix TV as an "ESG Communication Influence Pioneer". Looking forward, ZTE will continue to leverage its strengths in the R&D innovation and commercialization of fundamental technology, actively supporting the realization of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The company remains committed to creating long-term value for stakeholders and driving society toward a future that is more efficient, greener, smarter, and more inclusive. Download ZTE Sustainability Report 2025 here. Visit ZTE's sustainability website for more updates on their commitment to sustainability. Contributed by ZTE.

Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have identified an ultra-faint galaxy seen just 800 million years after the Big Bang. The galaxy contains almost no heavy elements, shows signs of intense early stellar radiation, and could offer a rare glimpse into the first stages of galaxy formation. Phys.org reports: In a paper published in the journal Nature, a team of scientists led by Kimihiko Nakajima, an astronomer at Kanazawa University, Japan, describes how they used the telescope to study a part of the deep universe and discovered a faint galaxy called LAP1-B. "LAP1-B establishes a 'fossil in the making,' a direct high-redshift progenitor of the ancient ultra-faint dwarf galaxies observed in the local universe," they wrote. Because the galaxy is so small and distant, it would normally be impossible to see. However, it was spotted due to a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing, in which a massive cluster of closer galaxies acts like a giant magnifying glass, boosting the light from LAP1-B by 100 times. The scientists realized that most of the light from the galaxy wasn't coming from the stars, but from glowing clouds of gas. They analyzed this light by splitting it into a spectrum and studying the emission lines, which revealed the chemical composition of the gas. They found that the galaxy contains almost no heavy elements, and its oxygen abundance is about 240 times lower than the sun's, making it one of the most primitive star-forming galaxies ever observed. The emission lines also revealed intense ionizing radiation, which is what scientists expect to see from the first generation of stars. The team also measured an elevated carbon-to-oxygen ratio. This matches the predicted chemical signature for the first star explosions in history from Population III stars, the first stars to exist in the universe. The stars we see today are Population I stars, which formed later and contain more heavy elements. Another fascinating finding is that, after measuring the gas's motion and speed, the researchers concluded that the galaxy is held together by a massive cloud of invisible dark matter.

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American outfit Varda Space Industries thinks it’s a little closer to operating factories in space after successfully landing its latest test craft. Varda won the USA’s first-ever license to first license fly uncrewed spacecraft that reenter the Earth's atmosphere. The company wants to do this so it can build small craft that include manufacturing facilities that create products it’s only possible to make in microgravity - mostly pharmaceuticals - and figures that the relatively cheap launch services offered by private launch companies will make orbital factories economically viable. Spacecraft are not cheap to build, and the cost rises if they include equipment to slow from orbital speeds before reaching Earth’s atmosphere. Crewed craft can be more expensive still. And humanity just doesn’t have a lot of capacity to schlep stuff home from space. In March, Varda therefore launched a capsule called the W-6 that it hoped would survive re-entry at hypersonic speeds, and do so using an autonomous navigation system “that uses onboard imagery to identify resident space objects, including stars and low Earth orbit satellites, to determine precise vehicle position.” The company reckons that represents “a critical step toward fully autonomous navigation for hypersonic and reentry vehicles.” The craft also carried one nose tile that included samples of advanced thermal protection materials, another two tiles equipped with sensors to record data NASA will use to learn about hypersonic re-entry and the materials that make it possible. Thermal performance matters because if you go to all the trouble of launching an orbiting factory if the product made in space gets cooked during re-entry. It all seems to have worked because the capsule touched down as planned on Monday. Varda hasn’t said much about the state of the W-6’s capsule and its interior when it landed but has celebrated the flight as “another demonstration that frequent, low-cost, reliable return is easily accessible.” The W-6 landed at the Koonibba Test Range in South Australia, whose operator Southern Launch celebrated the fact this is the fourth capsule to land in the patch of remote bushland it tends in the last twelve months. ®

PaaS platform Railway says Google temporarily suspended its account on Wednesday without cause, inducing a major outage. Railway automates code deployment by taking a GitHub repo and doing all the work needed to get it running from the cloud. It’s struggled to do that for the last few hours and the company’s status page tells the sad tale, starting with an update time-stamped May 19, 22:29 UTC that said the company is “investigating a widespread service disruption” that meant “Users may be experiencing errors including ‘no healthy upstream’, ‘unconditional drop overload’, login failures, and inability to access the dashboard.” Angelo Saraceno, a solutions engineer for Railway, told The Register the company noticed a problem at around 22:00 UTC. He said the company’s resources appeared to have been deleted and appeared not to exist. Google has since explained it suspended the account, making Railway’s resources invisible. “Our contacts at Google were confused, customers are irate,” he added. We are livid and still trying to get all the details Ironically, in 2024 Railway decided to shift much of its infrastructure into colocation services after Google “caused a multitude of problems that have posed an existential risk to our business.” Those problems resurfaced in 2025 after more trouble at Google Cloud that again impacted Railway’s services. But Railway kept its control plane in Google Cloud and still has a dependency on databases that run there. Those resources see it spend an eight-figure sum each year. Yet Saraceno said when this incident commenced, it took an hour for Google’s support team to engage. “We are livid and still trying to get all the details,” he said before advancing a theory that Railway somehow triggered an enforcement rule. Railway’s status page says that as of 22:43 UTC the company “escalated this directly with Google.” Oh, to have been a fly on the wall during that escalation! Railway’s most recent status update, at the time of writing, is an 03:05 May 20 missive that states “More workloads are coming back online. Some users may still experience intermittent issues during the recovery. Non-enterprise deploys remain paused; enterprise deploys are unaffected.” The Register has contacted Google to ask if and why it blocked Railway’s account. You know the drill: We will update this story if we receive more than corporate platitudes. Cloud providers might rightly block a customer’s account over unpaid bills or inappropriate use – but usually do so after giving fair warning. Railway told us this incident came out of the blue. Google has form taking down customers without cause: In 2024 it infamously wiped out all rented infrastructure used by Australian pension fund UniSuper. Railway’s status page includes apologies to its customers, despite the problem being at Google’s end. “Our customers don’t care if it is Google,” Saraceno said. “We have to own our uptime.” ®

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz has signed the nation's first law banning prediction market sites from operating in the state, and in response, the Trump administration has sued, teeing up a legal battle over the most far-reaching crackdown on popular services like Kalshi and Polymarket. It comes as states confront a growing standoff with the Trump administration over how to regulate the industry, which allows people to bet on virtually anything. The new state law makes it a crime to host or advertise a prediction market, which it defines as a system that lets consumers place a wager on a future outcome, like sports, elections, live entertainment, someone's word choice and world affairs. The prohibition extends to services supporting prediction markets, like virtual private networks, that could allow consumers to disguise their location and get around the ban. It would force prediction market sites like Kalshi and Polymarket to leave the state, or face possible felony charges. The law takes effect in August. The law has a carve-out for event contracts that serve as an insurance policy in the event of "harm, or loss sustained" and for the purchase of securities and other commodities. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission's lawsuit seeks to block the law before it starts, arguing the prediction market industry should be exclusively regulated by federal officials. "This Minnesota law turns lawful operators and participants in prediction markets into felons overnight," said CFTC Chairman Michael Selig. "Minnesota farmers have relied on critical hedging products on weather and crop-related events for decades to mitigate their risks. Governor Walz chose to put special interests first and American farmers and innovators last." An updated version of the prediction market bill allows trading on weather, an exception that followed pushback from the agricultural industry, which has historically used futures trading on weather as a hedge against storms and other inclement weather that can affect a harvest. Walz is expected to sign it soon. "We as a state should decide how best and what regulations we think should attach to gambling, to protect public safety, to protect our kids," said Minnesota Rep. Emma Greenman, the Democrat who introduced the measure. Kalshi spokeswoman Elisabeth Diana called the ban a "blatant violation" of the law. "Minnesota banning prediction markets is like trying to ban the New York Stock Exchange," said Diana, adding that "this actively harms users because it reduces competition and drives activity offshore."

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The wave of layoffs attributable to the adoption of AI has washed up on the shores of New Zealand, which has announced an overhaul of its public service that will see the technology become a “basic expectation” for government agencies and help to make it possible to sack 9,000 staff - about 14 percent of current headcount. Finance Minister Nicola Willis announced the job cuts yesterday, in a speech that saw her bemoan the fact that New Zealand’s government comprises 39 departments and ministries, and compared that to the 16 in Australia and 24 in the UK. She characterized the nation’s public service as “scared of AI, slow to move to the cloud” and said it operates a “complex and fragmented set of overlapping IT solutions.” “Our government is as frustrated as you are by the fragmentation and silos, the complexity, the status-quo thinking and the dangerously slow take up of digital and AI technologies,” she added. Aotearoa’s answer is to task its Chief Digital Officer “to embed AI deployment as a basic expectation for all public entities.” Minister Willis mentioned a “recent trial of an AI scribe tool in hospital emergency rooms which has reduced the amount of time clinicians have to spend on file notes and increased the time they spend with patients” as an example of the sort of thing she hopes to replicate. She said the planned overhaul will therefore “reduce the number of government departments, increase the use of AI and other digital tools, and deliver significant savings.” The government plans to cap departmental budgets and says that combined with redundancies it will save NZ$2.4 billion ($1.4 billion) over four years – less than one percent of all core government spending. Plenty of tech companies have made substantial redundancies that they justify as necessary to create an appropriate workforce for the age of AI, an explanation we’ve seen deployed to explain deep cuts at Cisco, Cloudflare, Atlassian, Meta, and Arctic Wolf. Few governments have done likewise, but one early high-profile effort – the Elon-Musk-led “Department of Government Efficiency” – hoped to use AI to improve government operations but left behind little evidence it had succeeded. New Zealand is blessed with many resources and extraordinary natural beauty, but has a modest tax base – yet residents expect a high level of government services. Minister Willis’s plan is therefore a very big bet on AI. ®

Anthropic is acquiring Stainless, a maker of software development tools that counts rivals OpenAI and Google as clients. The deal, reportedly for more than $300 million, demonstrates Anthropic's continued interest in exercising greater control over the AI technical stack and suggests that speculation about the commodification of models is on the mark. Frontier models will not be so strong that they serve as a moat or barrier to competition, but the tooling and workflow around those models should provide some cover. Anthropic has made several recent acquisitions that give it more say in the software that orchestrates model input, output, and tool calls. In December, it snarfed Bun, a JavaScript runtime, package manager, and test runner. Two months later, it bought Vercept, a company focused on AI-mediated computer usage. In April, it admitted healthcare AI startup Coefficient Bio into the fold. Enter Stainless. "Hundreds of companies rely on Stainless to generate SDKs, CLIs, and MCP servers – the libraries, command-line tools, and connectors that let developers and agents use an API," Anthropic said in its announcement. "Stainless turns an API spec into SDKs across TypeScript, Python, Go, Java, Kotlin, and more." SDKs are sticky. Whoever ships the cleanest one wins the long tail of developer mindshare One of those hundreds of companies is OpenAI – its Python, Node, Java, Go, and Ruby clients are based on SDKs generated by Stainless. With Stainless now planning to shutter its platform on September 1, 2026, OpenAI and other industry customers will have to shoulder the burden of maintaining existing SDKs and find equivalent tools elsewhere. It should be noted that OpenAI in March agreed to acquire Python tool maker Astral, one of six such deals this year. So far, the Astral acquisition hasn't affected the ability of Anthropic or developers to use Astral's tooling. Jan Schmitz, who runs AI analytics biz BrightBean, described the Stainless acquisition as both offensive and defensive. "By acquiring the SDK infrastructure used across the industry, Anthropic gets visibility into how competitors evolve their APIs, even if only through generator usage patterns, and it gains the ability to set the pace on integration tooling," he said in a blog post. "The defensive read: If OpenAI or Google had bought Stainless first, the damage to Anthropic’s developer ecosystem would have been worse. SDKs are sticky. Whoever ships the cleanest one wins the long tail of developer mindshare." Schmitz also argues that Anthropic sees value in controlling the MCP standard that it proposed and promoted. "The pattern looks like this: Control the standard by giving it away, then control the implementation by owning the toolchain," he said, noting that Google followed that playbook with Kubernetes and then making GKE the leading managed version. ®

BrianFagioli shares a report from NERDS.xyz: Plex is raising the price of a new Lifetime Plex Pass from $249.99 to $749.99 on July 1. That's a $500 increase for media server software. Plex says it needs the money for "long-term development" and future features, but a lot of self-hosting folks are already wondering if this is basically a soft way of killing the Lifetime option without officially removing it. At nearly $750, are people just going to move to Jellyfin instead? As for those future improvements, Plex said the roadmap includes better downloads support, restored music and photo library support in mobile apps, NFO metadata support, IPv6 support, playlist editing on mobile, audio enhancements, and transcoding improvements.

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Google is warning some long-time G Suite Legacy users that they must start paying for Workspace subscriptions or lose access to Gmail, Drive, Calendar, and other core services, after the company flagged their accounts as "commercial use." A reader alerted The Register to what appears to be a new crackdown on long-standing G Suite Legacy accounts, with similar complaints now piling up on Reddit from users accused of violating Google’s non-commercial use policy, despite insisting they use the accounts only for family email and personal domains. Reports have been stacking up on Reddit’s r/gsuitelegacymigration subreddit from users who say their long-running personal G Suite Legacy accounts are suddenly being classified as “commercial use” accounts and pushed toward paid Google Workspace plans by May 2026. A lot of users have been through this before. Google spent part of 2022 trying to wind down free G Suite Legacy accounts, then changed course after users running family domains made enough noise. Now some of those same users are being told they have fallen outside Google’s rules after all. Emails seen by The Register warn users their accounts have been "identified as being used for commercial purposes" and say Google may start suspending Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Meet, and other Workspace services if they do not either win an appeal or begin paying for Workspace subscriptions. "Please upgrade to a paid Google Workspace subscription to continue using your services. Look out for a notification regarding the appeal process in Google Admin console or email," the email reads. "If you don’t take action during your 45-day appeal period, Google will begin suspending your Google Workspace core services, including Gmail, Calendar, Drive, and Meet. As a result, you will lose access to these core services and data." In a statement to The Register, a Google Workspace spokesperson said: "G Suite legacy free edition is intended for personal non-commercial use. If users are identified as commercial users, we are enforcing our existing policy and helping them transition to a Google Workspace subscription. Anyone who believes their account has been identified as being used for commercial purposes in error can file an appeal." The trouble, according to users, is that the appeals system appears about as transparent as a brick. One Reddit user said their appeal was initially denied despite "none" of the account activity being commercial. After filing a GDPR subject access request asking Google to provide evidence of business use, the user said the company abruptly reversed course the following day and restored the account. Others say they were not so lucky. One UK-based user whose appeal failed accused Google of relying on vague "signals" data and effectively trapping users into accidentally linking personal accounts to business activity. Another said their family-only custom domain, used solely for relatives’ email accounts and with no commercial activity, was permanently classified as business use despite an appeal. Some users suspect the enforcement may be tied to custom domains that have at some point been associated with public business listings, websites, or Google Business profiles. Google has not explained what specifically triggers the bans. The move also lands days after Google quietly began testing a 5 GB storage cap for some users who decline to add phone numbers to their accounts, suggesting the company’s definition of "free" continues to come with increasingly creative terms and conditions. ®

Google is giving its iconic search box its first major redesign since 2001. The new design incorporates, you guessed it, artificial intelligence, "getting bigger and more interactive so that people can ask even longer questions and upload photographs and videos into queries," reports the New York Times. "In addition, people can ask follow-up questions with a chatbot on Google's main search page." From the report: The company will also offer digital assistants, known as agents, to automate searches so that someone who may be apartment hunting can be notified of a new listing without opening a real estate site like Zillow. The search features will be powered by a new artificial intelligence model, Gemini 3.5 Flash. Google said the model had improved on creating software code and performing autonomous tasks, worked faster and was less expensive to run than comparable models. [...] Google is also bringing one of A.I.'s biggest breakthroughs -- software coding -- to search. When people research complex topics like astrophysics, Gemini can build interactive graphics and simulations behind the scenes to provide a deeper answer than its previous listing of websites. Google said it was introducing an alternative to the agents powered by Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex. Called Gemini Spark, the service is embedded in Gmail, Docs and other Google products, where it can turn meeting notes spread across emails and chats into a single document. It can also read and draft emails. "The open web is on its way out," says Richard Kramer, a financial analyst with Arete Research. "With A.I., Google is reducing everyone to raw data providers."

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Microsoft seized websites and took down hundreds of virtual machines running a cybercrime service that allegedly sold code-signing certificates to ransomware gangs, thus making their malware look like legitimate software – and allowing criminals to infect thousands of machines in the US, including at least 12 owned and operated by the Windows giant. The malware signing-as-a-service operation called Fox Tempest has been around since May 2025, and abuses Microsoft’s Artifact Signing code-signing service. This service allows developers to digitally sign their software applications, signaling to the Windows operating system and end-user that the software is authentic, and hasn’t been tampered with. Since May 2025, the Fox Tempest crew – referred to as John Doe 1 and 2 in court documents unsealed on Tuesday – used fake identities and impersonated real organizations, allowing them to create more than 580 fraudulent Microsoft accounts. They then used these accounts to abuse Microsoft’s Artifact Signing service and obtain real code-signing credentials, then sold the code-signing certificates to other criminals for thousands of dollars. According to Microsoft, Fox Tempest’s customers included a ransomware group Redmond tracks as Vanilla Tempest (aka Vice Spider, Vice Society, Rhysida), which allegedly used the certificates to digitally sign malware and make it appear legitimate to Windows and users. This also allowed the ransomware slingers “to more easily deploy the malware onto the computers of unsuspecting victims without their consent,” according to the court documents [PDF]. Malware included Windows backdoor Oyster, infostealers Lumma and Vidar, and Rhysida ransomware. Vanilla Tempest “unlawfully accessed victims’ computers and devices, exfiltrated and stole the personal and confidential information of victims, deployed ransomware designed to encrypt victims’ files and systems, and extorted victims by demanding payment in exchange for restoring access to, or suppressing, their data,” the civil complaint continues, adding that the criminal activity remains ongoing. In a subsequent blog post, Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit attorney Steven Masada said the tech company's investigation “further linked Fox Tempest to various additional ransomware affiliates and families, including INC, Qilin, Akira, and others.” Between February and March, the Digital Crimes Unit (DCU), working with “a cooperating source,” anonymously bought and tested the code signing service from John Doe 2, aka SamCodeSign. “These test purchases allowed DCU investigators to observe first-hand how Fox Tempest Defendants operate the service, the information a purchaser is provided, and the instructions given by SamCodeSign to connect to the service and sign the test software created by Microsoft,” the court documents say. “Additionally, the test purchases allowed DCU to identify cryptocurrency wallets used by Fox Tempest Defendants.” During the first test purchase, the source filled out a Google Form asking them to select how quickly they needed the certificates. Standard costs $5,000, while priority runs $7,500 and expedited carries a hefty $9,500 price tag. SamCodeSign then sent a direct message to the source and requested the $7,500 payment to be sent to a bitcoin wallet, according to screenshots (translated from Russian) in the court documents. After the source paid up, SamCodeSign sent instructions on how to access the virtual machine and complete the code signing process. “Microsoft has identified thousands of customer machines, including more than a dozen machines owned and operated by Microsoft, in the United States that have been impacted by malware signed with certificates originating from the tenants created by Fox Tempest Defendants,” the complaint says. ®

The back-of-house AI system that Pizza Hut has mandated its restaurants to adopt has been so poorly received by some franchisees, that one is using the company for $100 million in losses tied to the technology. Put that in your crust and stuff it! Chaac Pizza Northeast, a franchisee with around 111 Pizza Hut locations in New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Washington DC, and Pennsylvania, filed a complaint in the Business Court of Texas earlier this month accusing the Hut of breaching its franchise agreement by mandating Chaac adopt restaurant management AI from Dragontail, a provider of AI-powered food delivery software. What was supposed to be a platform that would unify multiple kitchen systems under one AI-managed umbrella allegedly turned out to be a disaster for Chaac, which claims it was a leader among Pizza Hut franchises on metrics like delivery speed and rack time (i.e., the time between a pizza leaving the oven and leaving the store for delivery) prior to forced Dragontail adoption. Pizza Hut parent company Yum Brands purchased Dragontail in 2021. “With the intention to improve efficiency and service to the customer, Dragontail did the exact opposite; it caused significant delays and pummeled consumer satisfaction,” the lawsuit filing states. Chaac further alleged that Pizza Hut didn’t provide promised Dragontail support, and refused to allow Chaac to step back its use of the product, “causing cascading operational breakdowns and customer dissatisfaction.” Chaac admits it might be a bit of a special case, however, because of its particular business model: The company’s Pizza Hut locations don’t have a dining room, instead exclusively offering carry out and delivery services. Chaac also doesn’t employ its own drivers, instead relying on DoorDash to handle its deliveries. Before Dragontail’s implementation, staff at Chaac Pizza Huts had to input pickup requests into a DoorDash tablet, according to the lawsuit, which would handle getting the delivery order to a driver. Centralizing all of the order-to-delivery pipeline under one product meant that DoorDash gained visibility into the entire pizza making process. On one side that makes things more efficient, as the complaint explains. “This access allowed DoorDash to know when the pizzas went into the oven and were ready for pick-up, and when other pizza orders would be ready for pick-up,” the suit states - not bad if that means drivers aren’t sitting around waiting. In practice, however, that’s not what happened. Drivers were able to see whether additional orders would be up soon, meaning many of them would grab one order and simply wait 15 minutes for another, meaning the first order was invariably late and cold by the time it got to a customer. DoorDash drivers were also able to see any pre-paid tips on the order and whether an order was paid in cash. In many cases, drivers would decline tipless and cash orders. “These issues, arising out of DoorDash’s visibility, caused a disruption in orderly delivery and significantly slower delivery times,” the suit claimed, adding that the changes ultimately benefited DoorDash at Chaac’s expense. “The damage was not abstract,” the suit continued. “Chaac suffered lost revenue, lost profits, loss in enterprise value, business interruption, and erosion of goodwill and customer relationships” as a result of Dragontail adoption. According to the lawsuit, loss of business and enterprise value due to the forced adoption of kitchen management AI caused is in excess of $100 million, which Chaac is demanding as recompense. It’s not difficult to find examples online of Pizza Hut employees complaining about Dragontail. Multiple Reddit threads from inside the 2020-2024 implementation period contain examples of employees describing dissatisfaction with the software. Several commenters note, as Chaac did in its lawsuit, that Dragontail took control out of the hands of its kitchens and put it in the hands of AI. “Dragontail’s integration with kitchen workflow and aggregator dispatch predictably stripped Chaac’s managers of operational control, introduced delays, and invited stacking and other algorithmic behaviors that slowed production and delivery,” the lawsuit argues. Pizza Hut has been struggling in recent years, with Yum closing hundreds of locations so far this year in the midst of a turnaround effort that included initiatives like adding Dragontail to the struggling brand’s locations; the company didn’t respond to questions for this story. Whether this’ll be another nail in Pizza Hut’s coffin or just a bump in the road will be up to a judge to decide. ®

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Inside Climate News: A proposed merger of the largest utility in the country by market value, NextEra Energy, with the sixth-largest, Dominion, would create a megacompany at a time when data centers and rapid increases in electricity demand are reshaping the industry. The proposal, announced Monday morning and contingent on state and federal regulatory approval, would result in a company that leads in nearly every aspect of the US power and utility industry, including overall electricity generation, natural gas generation, and renewables. The $67 billion deal combines NextEra's size and reach with Dominion's positioning as the local utility for the world's largest concentration of data centers in northern Virginia. But the results are likely bad for consumers and the environment, creating a company with enormous financial and political strength that will be difficult to effectively regulate, according to consumer advocates and analysts. For perspective, only Exxon Mobil and Chevron would be larger based on market value among US-based energy companies. "Mergers are not about consumers; they're about shareholders," said Ari Peskoe, director of the Electricity Law Initiative at Harvard Law School. "For the Dominion shareholders, they are selling their shares at a premium. The executives are getting massive payouts for facilitating this, assuming it all goes through, and obviously NextEra believes the transaction is going to add value to the company. Ratepayers are all an afterthought." The deal makes financial sense for both companies, said Andrew Bischof, an equity analyst for Morningstar. "We view the transaction as allowing NextEra to accelerate its data center ambitions, which had trailed those of its regulated peers, by using Dominion's expertise and relationships to expedite NextEra's data center hub plans," he said in a note to clients. NextEra, based in Juno Beach, Florida, includes Florida Power & Light, the largest regulated electricity utility in the state, and NextEra Energy Resources, a wholesale electricity supplier that owns power plants across the nation. Dominion, based in Richmond, Virginia, includes regulated utilities serving much of Virginia, parts of North Carolina and South Carolina, and other assets across the country. The company would be called NextEra Energy, and NextEra CEO John W. Ketchum would serve in the same role after the deal closes. Robert M. Blue, Dominion's CEO, would be the CEO for regulated utilities for the merged company. The parties said they expect regulatory approvals to take 12 to 18 months. NextEra shareholders would own 74.5 percent and Dominion shareholders would own 25.5 percent, respectively, of the combined company in the all-stock transaction. "We are bringing NextEra Energy and Dominion Energy together because scale matters more than ever -- not for the sake of size, but because scale translates into capital and operating efficiencies," Ketchum said in a statement. Although the companies claim the deal would produce savings, including $2.25 billion in Dominion customer bill credits, former regulator Marissa Paslick Gillett said she was "flabbergasted by the tone deafness," arguing that major utility mergers rarely deliver the promised "synergies" and often create "a behemoth" that is harder to regulate. Others warned that a larger NextEra could use its political power "to the disadvantage of ratepayers," while climate advocates said expanding methane gas plants to serve data centers would worsen pollution and leave vulnerable communities "at the short end of the stick."

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Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and doting parent company Alphabet, opened its Google I/O developer conference with a celebration of token and capital expenditures. Tokens are the basic data exchange unit of AI models and Google has vastly increased its token processing to accommodate internal and external demand for AI inference. Two years ago, Pichai said, Google handled 9.7 trillion tokens per month. Last year, it was 480 trillion per month. Currently, the Chocolate Factory handles 3.2 quadrillion tokens per month. "Now some out there might call this tokenmaxxing and there's probably some truth to it," said Pichai. "I still think it tells an important story about our products and how others are building as well, especially our developers." Pichai said over 8.5 million developers are building applications using Google's Gemini model family monthly, using about 19 billion tokens per minute in API calls. And over the past 12 months, more than 375 customers have consumed more than 1 trillion tokens each – an indication there's some demand for AI among businesses. That token processing is possible because of the vast capital expenditures Google has made in datacenters and compute capacity, and TPU hardware. "Supporting all of this at scale for our users while also serving enterprises and developers around the world requires massive investments in infrastructure," said Pichai. "And we've been investing for today and for the future. In 2022, we were spending $31 billion annually in capex. This year, we expect that number to be about six times that, approximately 180 to 190 billion dollars." Demis Hassabis, co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind, took a turn on stage to provide an update on Google's progress toward AGI – artificial general intelligence – that ill-defined point when AI models perform some set of tasks as well as a human. Gemini Omni, Hassabis suggested, is a step in that direction. It can, he said, "create anything from any input," meaning digital stuff as opposed to atomic replication. "It combines Gemini's intelligence with the best of our generative media models for a new level of world understanding, multimodality and editing," he explained. Gemini Omni combines video, image, and interactive simulation capabilities of models like Veo, Nano Banana, and Genie with physics modeling, so projects accurately depict object interactions involving kinetic energy and gravity. The first model in that family, Gemini Omni Flash, is now available. Pichai returned to announce an expansion of SynthID, Google's AI watermarking technology. Google, he said, will support C2PA content credentials verification across its products, to help people distinguish between content created by AI and by a camera, and to tell whether it has been edited with Google Photos. "We are expanding both SynthID and content credentials verification to Search and Chrome," said Pichai. "You can simply circle to search or right-click in Chrome and ask, 'was this generated with AI?' and you'll get a clear response along with other helpful context." To help make this technology more broadly useful, Google said OpenAI, Kakao and ElevenLabs have decided to adopt SynthID. Pichai went on to announce the next generation of its Gemini model family, Gemini 3.5 Flash. "When compared to 3.1 Pro, Flash is better across the board, in almost all benchmarks," he said, adding that the model has made "huge progress in coding," one of the more remunerative use cases for AI models presently. One of the major selling points of Gemini 3.5 Flash is that it offers comparable performance to other frontier models, but much faster. The model manages about 289 tokens per second, about 4x more than other frontier models, Google claims. Those using Google's coding harness Antigravity can look forward to even greater speed gains. "We've optimized Flash to be not just four times, but 12 times faster in Antigravity," said DeepMind engineer Varun Mohan, adding that the 2.0 release of Antigravity is out now. The other major selling point is price. "Top companies in Google Cloud are processing about 1 trillion tokens a day," said Pichai. "If they shifted 80% of their workloads from other frontier models to 3.5 Flash, they'd save over $1 billion annually." Gemini 3.5 Flash is also making its presence known in the Google Gemini app and in Search through its integration with Gemini Spark, an agent service. "It's your personal AI agent that helps you navigate your digital life, taking action on your behalf and under your direction," Pichai explained. "It runs on dedicated virtual machines on Google Cloud. And it's 24/7." Based on Gemini 3.5 Flash, with an assist from the Antigravity harness, Spark can perform long-running tasks in the background, presumably without incurring a huge token bill. Spark will be able to connect to other tools – Google apps initially like Gmail and Chat, then third-party tools via MCP. Chrome integration, which will enable agentic browsing, is planned for later this summer. Josh Woodward, VP of Google Labs, Gemini and AI Studio, described how he used Spark to arrange a block party, emailing neighbors, recording their responses in a spreadsheet, and creating a slide deck. This is rolling out now to trusted testers and to Google AI Ultra subscribers in the US next week. Spark's arrival coincides with a new $100/month Ultra plan tier and the deflation of the top Ultra tier from $250/month to $200/month. Pichai offered up one of his timeworn phrases – "It's still the early days when it comes to making agents easy to use, super secure, and truly helpful" – to gloss over the security and privacy implications of AI agents acting on user data and applications without supervision. Then he handed off to Liz Reid, VP of Search, who proceeded to detail further AI incursions into Google's Search service. Gemini 3.5 Flash, she said, has become the default model for AI Mode. And the Search box itself has been redesigned to surface AI-based suggestions and to facilitate inputs from modalities other than text, such as images, files, videos, and Chrome tabs. The biggest change is Search Agents, which like Gemini Spark will be accessible from Search and will run while you're away from the keyboard. "You can set information agents to work for you 24/7 in the background," said Reid. "They can find you exactly what you need, exactly when you need it, and help you take action. You can spin up multiple agents in search simultaneously to get updated and make progress on all those things that matter to you." Google is also taking a page from Anthropic by offering code-based interactive widgets or mini-apps on demand. Search users will be able to create dynamic layouts, charts, graphs, and the like through the integration of Gemini 3.5 Flash and Antigravity in a containerized environment. This generative UI capability is rolling out this summer. Expect Google's token expenditures to continue to grow, along with pressure to purchase subscriptions to pay for the agentic labor. ®

OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy has joined rival AI lab Anthropic. "The hire is a major coup for Anthropic in the high-stakes competition for elite AI talent -- and another sign the company is emerging as a magnet for some of the industry's most respected technical minds," reports Axios. From the report: Karpathy will start this week on Anthropic's pre-training team, which is responsible for the massive training runs that give Claude its core knowledge and capabilities, according to Anthropic. Karpathy will help launch a new team focused on using Claude itself to accelerate pretraining research -- an increasingly important frontier as AI companies race to automate parts of AI development. "I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative. I am very excited to join the team here and get back to R&D," Karpathy said in a post on X. Karpathy is a rare AI figure with credibility across research, industry and education. He was a founding member of OpenAI before serving as Tesla's director of AI, where he led the computer vision team behind Autopilot. Karpathy coined the term "vibe coding" and recently described himself as being in a "state of AI psychosis" since December -- embracing "tokenmaxxing" and aggressively stress-testing frontier models.

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The London-headquartered lender Standard Chartered announced plans to cut more than 7,000 jobs by 2030, with CEO Bill Winters saying the bank will replace some "lower-value human capital" through automation and AI while offering retraining to affected workers. "It's not cost-cutting. It's replacing in some cases lower-value human capital with the financial capital and the investment capital we're putting in," CEO Bill Winters told reporters. "So, the people that want to reskill, that want to carry on, we're giving every opportunity to reposition," Winters said. Reuters reports: The cuts, alongside higher shareholder return targets announced in a strategy update, come as StanChart is at the tail-end of a decade-long effort to transform itself from a potential takeover target to a steadily profitable lender. Its London-listed shares, which have risen 65% in the last 12 months, fell 0.5% in early trading, as analysts said the new targets were at the conservative end of their expectations. "In a world full of uncertainty, performance may prove more challenging further out," said Ed Firth, analyst at Keefe, Bruyette & Woods, citing how the bank has benefited in recent years from high interest rates and huge wealth flows. StanChart's move to streamline operations and rein in costs comes as more global firms slash jobs by deploying AI to improve efficiency. Japanese lender Mizuho in March unveiled up to 5,000 job cuts over a decade. And banks globally are scrambling to integrate frontier AI models and fend off rising cyber threats. The most affected roles will be in the bank's back-office centres, including those in Chennai, Bengaluru, Kuala Lumpur and Warsaw, according to Winters. "Of course we're using AI along the way and AI will be a huge facilitator and enabler of that," he added, referring to its ongoing revamp to automate more of its core banking system. StanChart said it would deliver over 15% return on tangible equity in 2028, more than three percentage points higher than in 2025, and building to about 18% in 2030. Meta also announced plans to reassign 7,000 employees into AI-related initiatives, just ahead of layoffs expected to affect roughly 8,000 workers.

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Firefox version 151 is out of beta and trickling out to users, with handy additions, just in case you were thinking of jumping ship from Windows 11 to Linux. Mozilla has officially released Firefox 151, although automatic updates are not yet happening at the time we write this. Its profit-making subsidiary MZLA has also released Thunderbird 151, although its new-feature list has less cool new shiny. The Firefox product announcement trumpets a “fresh new look and feel” for the New Tab page. As we’ve already lightly customized ours, we didn’t see that, but you know how it is – this is the sort of thing marketing folks can understand and sound excited about. Apparently you can customize its wallpaper and add a “Recent Activity” feed, if that’s what you want. (We’ve just added a few more rows of shortcuts to recent pages.) A more useful function, especially if you don’t trust Firefox Sync and you’re thinking of changing to a new OS, is improved handling of Firefox Backup, the built-in tools for backing up and restoring your profile (or profiles, plural, for the truly hardcore). The page in the last link hasn’t changed in the last three weeks, and it still says, “Note: Firefox Backup is currently only available to users on Windows 10 and 11. This feature may be extended to other platforms in future versions of Firefox.” Well, now it has: the release notes say it works on Linux now. We’ve also seen reports that it is now on macOS too, but not on our iMac (This could be because we’ve been using Firefox Sync since the late lamented Xmarks shut down). A key addition is that a profile backed up on one OS can now be restored on a different OS, which sounds like a significant improvement to us. This includes extensions and themes. Last time around, we shared the news that the PDF editor could split multipage PDFs into chunks, including saving out individual pages. In this version, it can now merge multiple PDFs into one, which also sounds handy. It’s the sort of feature we rarely need, but when we do, we really need it. Suffice to say that with recent Firefox versions, we no longer need a standalone PDF viewer. As well as over 30 security fixes and the usual developer changes, this release fixes some more visible bugs: multi-monitor handling has been improved, as has macOS integration. For instance, it can now handle links pasted from iOS using Apple’s Universal Clipboard feature, and dropdown menus on web pages use the native Apple menu style. Firefox’s Enhanced Tracking Protection has been further – er – enhanced, and now conceals more info about you – and much more on macOS. Thunderbird 151 is nigh upon us The closest thing to a universal cross-platform messaging client that the 21st century has to offer us so far has been updated, too. Thunderbird 151 is rolling out, although we haven’t been offered the update yet. The release notes' What’s New section only has three bullet points, and one of those is for the not-yet-public Thundermail service, part of Thunderbird Pro. However, it’s easier to adjust authorization settings for automatically-created accounts, Microsoft Exchange handling has been slightly tweaked, and you can sort tasks by different criteria. Since our task list is about three pages long and never seems to get any shorter, that sounds quite handy. ®

An anonymous reader quotes a report from KrebsOnSecurity: Until this past weekend, a contractor for the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) maintained a public GitHub repository that exposed credentials to several highly privileged AWS GovCloud accounts and a large number of internal CISA systems. Security experts said the public archive included files detailing how CISA builds, tests and deploys software internally, and that it represents one of the most egregious government data leaks in recent history. On May 15, KrebsOnSecurity heard from Guillaume Valadon, a researcher with the security firm GitGuardian. Valadon's company constantly scans public code repositories at GitHub and elsewhere for exposed secrets, automatically alerting the offending accounts of any apparent sensitive data exposures. Valadon said he reached out because the owner in this case wasn't responding and the information exposed was highly sensitive. The GitHub repository that Valadon flagged was named "Private-CISA," and it harbored a vast number of internal CISA/DHS credentials and files, including cloud keys, tokens, plaintext passwords, logs and other sensitive CISA assets. Valadon said the exposed CISA credentials represent a textbook example of poor security hygiene, noting that the commit logs in the offending GitHub account show that the CISA administrator disabled the default setting in GitHub that blocks users from publishing SSH keys or other secrets in public code repositories. "Passwords stored in plain text in a csv, backups in git, explicit commands to disable GitHub secrets detection feature," Valadon wrote in an email. "I honestly believed that it was all fake before analyzing the content deeper. This is indeed the worst leak that I've witnessed in my career. It is obviously an individual's mistake, but I believe that it might reveal internal practices." "Currently, there is no indication that any sensitive data was compromised as a result of this incident," a CISA spokesperson wrote. "While we hold our team members to the highest standards of integrity and operational awareness, we are working to ensure additional safeguards are implemented to prevent future occurrences." The GitHub account in question was taken offline shortly after CISA was notified about the exposure. However, according to Caturegli, the exposed AWS keys remained valid for another 48 hours. "What I suspect happened is [the CISA contractor] was using this GitHub to synchronize files between a work laptop and a home computer, because he has regularly committed to this repo since November 2025," Caturegli said. "This would be an embarrassing leak for any company, but it's even more so in this case because it's CISA."

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The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) left open a GitHub repository named “Private-CISA” containing plain-text passwords, private keys, tokens, and secrets – with obvious file names like “external-secret-repo-creds.yaml” and “AWS-Workspace-Firefox-Passwords.csv” – for six months. GitGuardian researcher Guillaume Valadon, fresh off a recent talk on Kubernetes secret leaks, found the public repository on May 14, and told The Register that he “quickly understood that the leak was bad and that time was running out. A national agency having 844 MB of production infrastructure material in a public GitHub repository for six months is as serious as a secrets leak gets.” Valadon, who previously spent nine years at France’s CISA equivalent, ANSSI, told us the leak included tokens for CISA's internal JFrog Artifactory, Azure registry keys, AWS credentials, Kubernetes manifests, ArgoCD application files, Terraform infrastructure code, GitHub personal access tokens, and Entra ID SAML certificates. GitGuardian reported the leaky repository to CISA on May 14, and the agency took it down a day later. A CISA spokesperson told The Register that it was aware of the report and is investigating. "Currently, there is no indication that any sensitive data was compromised as a result of this incident.” It’s not a good look for the nation’s infosec agency, which hasn’t had a permanent boss since Trump took office, is facing hundreds of millions of dollars in budgets cuts on top of deep cuts to staff and funding last year, and has suffered its share of embarrassing security snafus in the interim. In a Tuesday blog, Valadon said he initially thought the repo “was a hoax, given how suspicious the directory names (Backup-April-2026/, All Backups/, LZ-Artifactory/, Kubernetes-Important-Yaml-Files/, ENTRA ID - SAML Certificates/ ...), file names (external-secret-repo-creds.yaml, CAWS GitHub Token.txt, Important AWS Tokens.txt, AWS-Workspace-Firefox-Passwords.csv, Kube-Config.txt ...), and their contents (private keys, personal and professional GitHub tokens, AWS secrets, ...) seemed too good to be true,” Valadon wrote. It wasn’t a hoax – “The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency is aware of the reported exposure and is continuing to investigate the situation,” but it was a “catalogue of unsafe practices,” he added, containing passwords stored in plain text, backups committed to Git, and an “explicit” how-to guide for disabling GitHub's secret scanning. After initially reporting the leak through the CERT/CC portal, and only receiving an auto-acknowledgement as of the morning of May 15 – a Friday – Valadon alerted security journalist Brian Krebs about the publicly exposed secrets, which seemed to speed up CISA’s processes. By 6 pm EST that night, the feds took down the repository. Valadon told The Reg he gives CISA credit for quickly deleting the repository. “Most of our responsible disclosures take much longer, and many are never fixed,” he said. “Managing to take the repository offline in a day is impressive work.” He doesn’t know if any other parties with less altruistic intentions found the secrets first, although the fact that the repository was never forked (based on public GitHub events) would seem to indicate that it wasn’t widely circulated on the dark web. “The only ones that can answer definitively is GitHub,” Valadon said. GitHub did not immediately respond to The Register’s inquiry. GitGuardian isn’t aware of any of the exposed credentials being abused by unauthorized individuals “Each category of secret in the repository unlocks a specific attack path,” Valadon said. “Stacked together, they cover the full range: from destructive attacks and ransomware extortion to quiet, long-term persistence inside CISA's build and deployment pipeline. That last scenario worried me the most, and it's why I escalated through every channel we had until the repository was taken offline.” Plus, the committer used both a CISA-issued contractor email and a personal Yahoo email across the same commits, and created the repository using a personal GitHub account. “That mixed-identity pattern is one of the hardest surfaces for security teams to cover, and it's where the worst leaks happen,” Valadon said.®

You know about shadow IT. Get ready for the shadow AI surge. Employees using unauthorized personal accounts to access GenAI tools are emerging as a growing insider-risk concern for organizations, new research shows. That means workers who have access to sensitive material could be plugging it into their AI platform of choice more frequently, leaving their organization none the wiser. Of the 45 percent of all professionals using AI in the workplace regularly, 67 percent of those were accessing the platforms using personal accounts that were not authorized by their IT teams, data from Verizon’s annual data breach investigations report (DBIR) [PDF] showed. Verizon said that the proportion of users accessing AI through personal accounts now represents a fourfold increase in non-malicious insider actions detected across this year’s dataset of more than 22,000 breaches globally. We’re not just talking about the Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT, and Grok, but also various vibe coding platforms, AI agents, and other external chatbots that could have access to an organization’s data in some form. Verizon reported that 28 percent of data loss prevention policy violations involved employees entering source code into an AI tool, potentially exposing an organization’s intellectual property. In descending order of prevalence, staff were tossing images, structured data, documents, and PDFs into GenAI platforms as well. In 3.2 percent of cases, workers were uploading proprietary research and technical documentation. This should concern even the most bullish AI adopters, given the volume of potentially sensitive corporate data employees are feeding into unauthorized third-party AI services each day. Verizon said admins should be doing everything they can to prevent users from blindly trusting technology that is putting an increasing number of systems between this potentially sensitive data and the model itself, including by securing all enterprise asset configurations, and ensuring accounts and their permissions are tightly managed. The prevalence of shadow AI has given rise to new thinking around the matter, including by evolving the idea of software bill of materials (SBOMs) to AI-BOMs. You may have come across these already. Cisco open-sourced its AI-BOM earlier this year, for example, and more recently introduced a tool to track AI model provenance. Ian Swanson, VP of AI security products at Palo Alto Networks, told us the other week that AI-BOMs can also play an impactful role in helping incident responders deduce how cyberattacks play out in cases where the attackers use an organization’s own AI against it. AI-BOMs give defenders an idea of what any given AI system’s configurations were at a given time, allowing them to more easily see what changed and when. "If you had understanding of state and understanding of state changes, then you would be able to go back to an AI bill of materials and say: 'What system prompt was used within the ingredients to create the AI application?' And then see it's changed from a prior state to a new state. So we should probably check this and see if there's anything bad that's happening here," Swanson said. "And in that case, you'd be able to catch it." Bugs, bugs, bugs Away from the growing issue of shadow AI, Verizon said the exploitation of software vulnerabilities is once again the leading cause of security breaches, overtaking credential abuse, which is down 13 percent on last year’s results. Organizations’ patching habits aren’t doing much to help the cause here. The percentage of critical vulnerabilities from CISA’s Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog that were fully remediated was down from 38 to 26 percent in 2025, for example. Verizon also said that the median time to full vulnerability resolution rose by nearly two weeks, from 32 days in 2024 to 43 days last year. That said, defenders have had their work cut out for them, with the number of critical vulnerabilities needing remediation increasing by 50 percent on average. Elsewhere, ransomware featured in nearly half of all breaches covered in the report. Forty-eight percent of them, to be exact, up slightly from 44 percent in the previous year’s dataset. Some bright news to end on, however: Verizon continues to see a downward trend in ransom payments being made – 69 percent of victims refused to pay, while the median ransom payment fell from $150,000 to $139,875. ®