Recent TalkFuse coverage from The Register. Open a story to read its summary, compare its sources and join the discussion.
Microsoft has reported degraded or interrupted connectivity affecting Azure ExpressRoute Gateway, VPN Gateway and Azure VMware services, following an incident that began at 20:30 UTC on 30 September. The disruption may hinder customers linking on-premises systems to Azure, including those running hybrid cloud environments, and has also caused…
America.gov, a new White House AI chatbot, displays a life-sized plain hot dog when users enter “hotdog”. The Register reports that the image appears to be an unintended Easter egg, highlighting the rough state of the portal shortly after launch. The site is intended to help Americans find…
YouTuber 3D all Workshop designed and 3D printed a working, palm-sized mechanical calculator inspired by the Curta. The build shows that a complex calculator can be made from plastic filament, though its limited functions and sensitivity to printing imperfections highlight the precision advantages of machined metal. It uses…
Huawei's rotating chairman Eric Xu has claimed that the company's Ascend neural processing units have surpassed Nvidia in market share within China, capitalising on US export controls that have restricted American chip sales to the region. The Trump administration's initial blockade of Nvidia and AMD accelerators, though later…
Peter Norvig, a Stanford HAI education fellow and former Google research director, said software engineering practices must adapt as AI coding agents become more capable. In a keynote in San Francisco, he described successive shifts in computing, from wiring mainframes to higher-level programming, and argued that AI requires…
A 16-year-old security researcher named Faav discovered a critical authentication vulnerability in Microsoft's Titan analytics service that allowed him to gain administrator access to internal databases containing an estimated 17.3 trillion rows of data. Working with an AI hackbot he built called Antares, Faav exploited a flaw in…
Canonical has begun offering Ubuntu 24.04 LTS users an upgrade to Ubuntu 26.04.1 LTS, known as Resolute Raccoon. The rollout follows the new release’s first point update, the usual point at which Ubuntu starts prompting users to move to a newer LTS version; the offer was delayed while…
MeetTwins, an AI assistant being developed by Indian developer Aditya Shinde, is designed to join Google Meet calls on a user’s behalf and share information the user has approved. The tool is recruiting beta users; its proposed uses include routine status updates and check-ins, but the article questions…
The AI industry must generate $6 trillion in annual revenue by 2031 to sustain the enormous infrastructure investment required to meet anticipated demand, according to management consultants Bain & Company's 2026 Global Technology Report. This represents a significant increase from Bain's previous forecast of $2 trillion by 2030,…
A former National Crime Agency officer has been ordered to repay £1.8 million after stealing Bitcoin seized during an investigation into the dark web marketplace Silk Road 2.0. Paul Chowles, 44, absconded with 50 of 97 Bitcoin recovered from convicted administrator Thomas White whilst analysing seized devices in…
The article promotes an invitation-only dinner in Washington where The Register, HPE and NVIDIA will discuss where AI data is stored and who can access it in regulated industries. It argues that AI projects often stall over jurisdiction, organisational control and the evidence regulators may later require, rather…
OpenAI’s new marketplace lets eligible customers use part of their existing OpenAI spending commitments to buy products from 32 partner companies. The article argues this could give OpenAI influence over customers’ future purchasing decisions, as competition between AI companies may depend as much on distribution as on model…
Gartner predicts that by 2028, 70 per cent of enterprises will abandon agentic AI systems built with vendor assistance. It says forward-deployed engineering, where a vendor’s engineers work with a customer to build and deploy tailored software, can produce quick initial progress but leave the customer reliant on…
Apple's AirPods 5 have achieved a repairability score of two out of ten from iFixit, marking the first time the company's earbuds have scored above zero. This modest improvement reflects Apple's incorporation of removable batteries with pronged connections rather than soldered leads, which can be extracted without destroying…
Microsoft veteran Raymond Chen has recounted a memorable support call involving a customer attempting to build a Van Halen fan website using FrontPage. The caller, experiencing problems with a Java applet meant to play music, became increasingly intoxicated during the call and ultimately demanded to speak to Bill…
US datacentre construction is accelerating, but satellite tracking suggests the country will struggle to meet the most ambitious forecasts for AI capacity by 2028. A Jefferies report says permitting, power access and shortages of packaged AI accelerators are limiting how quickly announced projects can become operational. SynMax estimates…
The government’s latest annual cybersecurity skills survey found that 57 per cent of UK businesses lacked confidence in at least one basic cyber task, up from 49 per cent the previous year. Researchers said the rise may reflect increased scrutiny after high-profile breaches, rather than a decline in…
KDE has released the second and final beta of Plasma 6.8, with the full release scheduled for 14 October, the project’s 30th anniversary. The new version will run the desktop on Wayland and end KDE’s optional X11 session; X11 applications will still run through XWayland. The change marks…
British Transport Police invested more than £320,000 in a six-month facial recognition trial that scanned over 500,000 commuters at London railway stations, yet produced no useful results. The system generated just one alert, which proved to be a false positive, meaning no matches were found and no arrests…
Researchers in the Netherlands and Italy have identified Branch Target Reuse (BTR), a new Spectre variant that can target just-in-time (JIT) compilers. It exploits old indirect branch prediction entries left behind when JIT code is replaced, potentially allowing an attacker to infer sensitive data through speculative execution. The…