Discovered once last bug, and that briefcases can hold more beer than you might imagine On Call Y2k Easter means today is a holiday in much of the Reg -reading world, but that won't stop us from delivering another instalment of On Call the reader contributed column that shares your tech support stories.

Researchers find leading frontier models all exhibit peer preservation behavior Leading AI models will lie to preserve their own kind, according to researchers behind a study from the Berkeley Center for Responsible Decentralized Intelligence (RDI).

Now with a more permissive license, multi-modality, and support for more than 140 languages Google on Thursday unleashed a wave of new open-weights Gemma models optimized for agentic AI and coding, under a more permissive Apache 2.0 license aimed at winning over enterprises.

About that partnership... Microsoft on Thursday unveiled public preview versions of three home-baked machine learning models focused on speech recognition, speech synthesis, and image generation.

Terms admit it is for entertainment only and may get things wrong A recent surge of interest in Microsoft's Terms of Use for Copilot is a reminder that AI helpers are really just a bit of fun.

Maude-HCS from RTX (formerly Raytheon) helps model and validate hidden communication systems A software toolkit built for DARPA to test and validate covert communication networks is now open source, and it could help orgs who want to experiment with new kinds of secure, anonymous communications tools.

Source code with a side of Vidar stealer and GhostSocks Tens of thousands of people eagerly downloaded the leaked Claude Code source code this week, and some of those downloads came with a side of credential-stealing malware.

Tie-up aims to widen Big Blues access to power-efficient compute IBM and Arm are working together on getting software developed for Arm chips to run on Big Blue's enterprise systems, with an eye on future AI and data-intensive workloads.

The chatbot will be a doorway to the company's other services Salesforce has begun to position Slack, its business collaboration platform, as the interface through which users can access and act on data in enterprise applications from rival vendors.

Meanwhile, Collabora splits from LibreOffice Online amid claims TDF ejected 'all Collabora staff and partners' European outfits Ionos and Nextcloud have launched Euro-Office, a fork of the OnlyOffice cloud-based productivity suite aimed at orgs with qualms around sovereignty, provoking an angry response from the original developer.

Name is a joke but the project is real, said main engineer The world's most popular CMS has been remade with the help of AI. Cloudflare has released EmDash version 0.1, described as a rebuild of the WordPress CMS (content management system) but using TypeScript rather than PHP.

Patch Tuesday often gets blamed when a reboot merely exposes damage already done, according to Chen It's not me, it's you. Five words that signify the end of a relationship with a toxic partner, or an ill-timed riposte to users tired of broken Microsoft updates.

Supplier will need to look after networks, email, tech support, to

We must design expecting much of what we publish will be reinterpreted by 'systems we don't control' Those who rely on artificial intelligence to summarize official material may get a misleadingly narrow or incomplete version of it, a senior designer for the UK government has warned.

And of course the Orion toilet malfunctioned Toilet trouble, telemetry problems, and an issue with the flight termination system have not marred the Artemis II mission to the Moon, which launched yesterday.

And other handy tools that could save your data in a crisis The latest update to the handy SystemRescue is here with a new kernel. There's also a new GParted Live, and some other handy utilities.

Connected devices can leave an otherwise secure network vulnerable Pwned Welcome to Pwned, The Register's new column, where we highlight the worst infosec own goals so you can, hopefully, protect against them. Caffeine is an essential tool for most IT defenders, so, on balance, we're sure it has protected against a lot more exploits than it has caused. But in this case, the desire for everyone's favorite stimulant led to a massive breach.

First public downstream victim, but won't be the last AI hiring startup Mercor confirmed it was "one of thousands of companies" affected by the LiteLLM supply-chain attack as the fallout from the Trivy compromise continues to spread.

Chocolate Factorys compression tech clears the way to cheaper AI inference, not more affordable memory When Google unveiled TurboQuant , an AI data compression technology that promises to slash the amount of memory required to serve models, many hoped it would help with a memory shortage that has seen prices triple since last year. Not so much.

WARN filings in two states show 1,000+ layoffs, but wider cuts remain unconfirmed By his third failed attempt to log into Oracles VPN on Tuesday morning, a decades-long employee of the company started to get a bad feeling.

AI is eroding trust in digital communications and data, giving old-school spycraft fresh relevance for modern agents The bots won't be coming for 007's job anytime soon. According to a former CIA officer, AI may help create false documents, but this fakery will give old-fashioned human intelligence fresh relevance.

A hard-coded limit on deny rules drops automatic enforcement for concatenated commands Claude Code will ignore its deny rules, used to block risky actions, if burdened with a sufficiently long chain of subcommands. This vuln leaves the bot open to prompt injection attacks.

Plus: how to train your human AI interview Amazon has seen a 40 percent efficiency gain by using AI tools to pentest its products before and after launch, according to security chief CJ Moses.

Second-hand ship, seawater cooling, with operations eyed for 2027 Japan is getting more serious about floating datacenters, as Mitsui OSK Lines (MOL) has agreed to a deal with Hitachi to develop one with operations targeted for 2027 or later.

Cool, but fossil-fuel additions and AI-era power demand still muddy the climate math It was a strong year for renewable power expansion in 2025, with solar installations helping push renewables to nearly half of global electricity capacity, but that does not mean the world is yet on pace to meet its renewable energy commitments.

War, oil shocks, and market nerves could yet knock the AI boom off course Opinion OpenAI has secured an additional $122 billion in capital from a diverse group of investors and reached a nominal $852 billion valuation, the highest of any pre-IPO tech company.

Board-backed account of maintainer ouster is unlikely to settle row over governance, control, and trust Ruby Central, a nonprofit that supports the Ruby programming language ecosystem, just published an incident report regarding what it calls the September 2025 RubyGems fracture, when ownership of the GitHub code repository behind the RubyGems package manager was wrested from existing maintainers.

We could tell you no for free The UK government will spend about 630,000 running a discussion panel on its digital identity card plans, which minister James Frith said will "consider different perspectives and debate trade-offs" alongside a formal consultation .

Paris makes sovereignty play as it becomes sole shareholder The French government has finally closed a deal to purchase the Advanced Computing assets of tech giant Atos, leading to the re-emergence of an old industry name: Bull .

Flights to resume in 2026 before space tourism biz runs out of cash Virgin Galactic has reopened suborbital ticket sales with a price rise and a promise for commercial spaceflight operations in Q4 2026.

Poll finds 15% happy to take orders from a bot even as most question its output and fear job losses Around 15 percent of Americans would be willing to work for an AI boss, according to a new poll that suggests while robots are not exactly welcome in the corner office, the idea no longer seems quite so far-fetched.

Researchers say localized warming can extend well past site edges, raising concerns about community impact Datacenters create heat islands that raise surrounding temperatures by several degrees at distances up to 10 km (over 6 miles), which could have an impact on surrounding communities.

Hot DRAM! Who is going to drop nearly $400 on an underpowered Linux computer? Raspberry Pi has introduced a 3 GB variant of the Pi 4 as soaring memory costs are passed on to customers.

ESET says factory outages, lost revenue, and supply chain disruption are becoming routine Nearly 80 percent of British manufacturers say they've been hit by a cyber incident in the past year, as new research suggests disruption on the factory floor is no longer an exception but business as usual.

If you loved the data retention of Microsoft Recall, you'll be thrilled with Claude Code Anthropic's Claude Code lacks the persistent kernel access of a rootkit. But an analysis of its code shows that the agent can exercise far more control over people's computers than even the most clear-eyed reader of contractual terms might suspect. It retains lots of your data and is even willing to hide its authorship from open-source projects that reject AI.

How to avoid social engineering attacks? Employee training tops the list Be careful what you click on. Miscreants are abusing WhatsApp messages in a multi-stage attack that delivers malicious Microsoft Installer (MSI) packages, allowing criminals to control victims' machines and access all of their data.

Congratulations, XxXh4xx0r420xXx, you can now use that account in your professional life, too If you're embarrassed by your Gmail address but haven't wanted to start a new account for fear of losing messages, we have good news. Ahead of Gmail's 22nd anniversary on Wednesday, Google says it is now letting US users change their account username.

Researchers say some targets correlate with cities hit by Iranian missile strikes Suspected Iran-linked threat actors are conducting password-spraying attacks against hundreds of organizations, primarily Middle Eastern municipalities, in campaigns that security researchers believe may have been aimed at supporting bomb-damage assessment following missile strikes.

Hijacked maintainer account let attackers slip cross-platform trojan into 100M-downloads-a-week Axios One of npm's most widely used HTTP client libraries briefly became a malware delivery vehicle after attackers hijacked a maintainer's account and slipped a remote-access trojan (RAT) into two seemingly legitimate axios releases, in what's being described as "one of the most impactful npm supply chain attacks on record."

Big Red declines comment as reports point to layoffs in the thousands Oracle laid off thousands of employees on Tuesday as it ramps spending on AI infrastructure projects internally and with major technology partners.