Software

With tech CEO roles, a certain level of shamelessness comes with the job description. Yet Alex Karp, head honcho of Palantir, seems set to raise the bar with a conspicuous display of political flexibility following the Democratic wave in the US midterms. In December 2024, Karp gave $1 million to the pro-Trump super PAC MAGA Inc. But it does not take cutting-edge AI and data analytics – in which Palantir claims to have unique power – for Karp to understand on which side his bread is buttered. The man with the distinctive verbal diarrhea is now stressing his progressive credentials – and those of Palantir's products. The CEO told Politico that he is now open to voting for the Democrats come 2028. "I've been a Democrat my whole life. I grew up in a far-left environment. I know more about being a progressive than almost anybody on the planet, and I absolutely believe Palantir – all of our products are essentially progressive," Karp reportedly said. Karp's explanation for his political generosity was an apparent desire for balance. "My giving is equal, Democrat, Republican," Karp told the publication. "I can tell you, without going into things I'm not gonna disclose, I'm very balanced, and everyone in the political arena knows it. And I'll tell you what, I'm also not the village idiot." All of which raises the question of whether, in avoiding idiocy, it is necessary to eschew any principled stance whatsoever. If only the Germans of the Weimar Republic had thought to fund both sides. Apparently, all Europe needed was a more balanced political donations portfolio. Such is Karp's sensitivity towards the topic that he once claimed: "I love when I'm getting yelled at in cities in Europe... Keep yelling at me... the only reason why someone's not goose-stepping between me and you is my product. Say thank you." They have not said thank you. In fact, across Europe, governments are looking to reject Palantir, while the EU has instigated a sovereign tech and AI policy to escape the clutches of the US tech giants. Karp has a talent for holding two seemingly contradictory positions. He has talked about the need for democratic societies to exercise hard power, and, elsewhere, about founding a company that could "power the West to its obvious innate superiority." At the same time, he has presented Palantir as a force for peace. "We see ourselves as the pioneers of a genuine and viable antiwar movement," he wrote in his shareholder letter. It is his company's association with a longstanding customer, the controversial US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), that has drawn the most criticism. In Minnesota earlier this year, federal immigration officers shot and killed two American citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, in incidents captured on video. It has detained US citizens, and critics argue it has shown scant regard for due process. Karp denied that Palantir's association with ICE should reflect badly on the company. He told CNBC: "If you are critical of ICE, you should be out there protesting for more Palantir. Our product, actually, in its core, requires people to conform with Fourth Amendment data protection." In the Politico interview, Karp said he was "really happy to hear" President Trump, a driving force behind ICE's expansion, acknowledge after the midterm elections that ICE deportations have been too tough. "And I'm glad he's saying in public now what I've been saying in private," Karp told the news outlet. Karp has no shortage of public opinions on goose-stepping or innate Western superiority. Why, then, reserve his concerns about deportations for private conversations? A public intervention from a Trump donor and ICE supplier might have carried some weight. Maybe he doesn't care so long as people are still writing about Alex Karp. But anyone who cares about more than that might feel the need to take a hot shower and scrub off the associated trauma. ®

eMudhra's private key exposure has been a security disaster, but it also means that you can block those annoying ads on smart TVs if you’re so inclined. Luckily for those with some know-how and a hatred of smart TV ads, Czech software developer Daniel Vrátil has done the work for you and published his project on GitHub for anyone who wants to take a stab at it - and do the legwork to add support for their own ad-riddled television. Vrátil said he’d been blocking ads on his Samsung smart TV using a Pi-hole (DNS-based ad-blocking software that can run on a Raspberry Pi, for those unfamiliar), but right around the time the eMudhra certificate leak mess unfolded, he had messed something up while tinkering with his home lab and the ads were back. First, here's a bit of background on the eMudhra mess. The company, based in India, operated a publicly trusted HTTPS certificate authority and says it has issued more than 60 million digital certificates. As we learned last month, eMudhra wasn't doing its best to keep its cryptographic keys safe: Eight intermediate CA private keys were found to be absurdly weak, with one being the number four and the others consisting of two- or three-digit numbers that could be guessed with little effort. eMudhra has since left the CA racket, saying that it wasn’t a big deal to it since issuing certs was a small part of its business. The company has blamed a bad software script put in place to generate keys that its hardware couldn’t handle as the root of the issue. What all that means, in a practical sense, is that anyone could forge an eMudhra certificate to spoof a website and do something malicious. It also means that security researchers who were able to get their hands on devices that still trust eMudhra certificates could have a field day learning how their communications work, which is exactly what Vrátil took advantage of. eMudhra private keys were added to the open source mitmproxy service - a fully interactive HTTPS proxy that can be used for good or bad - shortly after they were exposed. Pair that with a 2022 Samsung smart TV that still trusts the compromised eMudhra certificates, and you have a way to inspect its HTTPS traffic and redirect selected requests to a server of your choosing. By Vrátil’s account, swapping out annoying ads for pictures of his family on his TV’s main screen was a pretty simple task. “Luckily for me, Samsung did not yet release an update for my TV that would revoke the certificate,” Vrátil explained in his writeup. “This allowed me to route all traffic from the TV through mitmproxy and get a list of all the domains and endpoints that my TV talks to, but also see the structure of the requests and response payloads.” The advertising traffic flow was pretty basic, it turns out: Activity on the TV is relayed to an ad server, which serves up ads on the home screen based on a JSON response. By generating a certificate for Samsung's advertising domains using a compromised eMudhra signing key, and configuring his router to direct requests for those domains to a server on his home network, Vrátil was able to replace ads with family photos served from his NAS. He also added code that tosses other requests to those advertising domains, including tracking data, into a black hole rather than forwarding them to Samsung's servers. As mentioned above, it’s on GitHub for those who want to trick their TV, if it still supports eMudhra certificates, but you’ll have to do the legwork to dissect how your device is getting ads and tweak the code to work. “It's not exactly a one-click setup,” Vrátil told The Register in an email. He’s invited people to try it out, but no one has bothered to submit a pull request to add support for their own device to his public repo. It’s also worth noting that this is only going to work as long as vulnerable devices keep trusting eMudhra certificates, which hopefully means you need to act fast. That said, smart TVs that are out of support may never receive such an update, leaving them exposed to the certificate weakness even if their owners block the ads. “The compromised eMudhra certificates open up a lot of opportunities for understanding and spoofing network requests from embedded devices, especially those that no longer receive security updates,” Vrátil told us. “And while replacing ads on a TV's home screen with pictures of my family is fun, there are also countless much more sinister applications of this vulnerability.” As for Vrátil, he’s still trying to figure out how to block the firmware update that may eventually render his method obsolete, even though that, as he points out, is a security risk in and of itself. “I want to run the traffic through a proxy that would validate the connection against an up-to-date trust store to at least mitigate anyone intercepting traffic from my TV, or spoofing responses, like I do with my little project here, but it won't protect me from other potential security risks, so there's a trade-off,” he explained. We suppose at this point you can take your pick of abuse. You can use a vulnerability to block ads and some tracking while leaving your TV exposed to potential interception, or let the manufacturer serve up ads and collect data about your viewing habits. There are safer ways to block ads than relying on a TV to keep trusting a compromised CA. ®

More than 1,600 Rockstar Games employees in the UK will begin voting on union recognition on Thursday, with the ballot kicking off just a week before the long-awaited launch of Grand Theft Auto VI. The ballot, which opens on November 12 and runs until November 26, will determine whether Rockstar formally recognizes the Rockstar Game Workers Union, part of the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain (IWGB). Nearly all UK employees below director level are eligible to vote. If successful, the union would become the largest recognized union in the UK games industry, giving workers a collective voice. The proposed recognition agreement follows four months of negotiations between Rockstar management and employees. It would allow workers to negotiate over pay, overtime, pensions, bonuses, leave and other employment conditions, while securing consultation rights over HR policies and AI. The vote comes at a particularly busy time for Rockstar, with GTA VI finally due to arrive on November 19, more than 13 years after its predecessor. The game is expected to be one of the biggest entertainment launches in history, although the people responsible for making it have rather more immediate concerns than sales records. "I am incredibly proud of the work we've put into making this game. I'm also proud of the union we've built here. For me, those two things are connected," said Nestor Uriate, an animation programmer and Rockstar Game Workers Union representative. "We care deeply about the games we make, and we want to make sure we can continue doing that work in an environment where we're respected, have a meaningful say over our conditions and can feel secure about our futures." The vote follows a year of bad blood between Rockstar and the IWGB. The union accused the GTA developer of union busting after it fired 31 members in October 2025, claiming they had been singled out for taking part in a private Discord group. Rockstar denied the allegations, insisting the workers were dismissed for gross misconduct rather than their union activities. The dispute subsequently reached an employment tribunal, where Rockstar unsuccessfully attempted to have blacklisting allegations struck from the case. Closing submissions are expected on November 17 and 18, meaning the legal proceedings will reach their final stages just as GTA VI prepares to hit shelves. Despite the ongoing dispute, Rockstar's head of publishing, Jennifer Kolbe, recently indicated that management would respect the outcome of the recognition vote, telling Bloomberg: "We go where the team goes. So if they want a union, they will have a union." The union campaign has also attracted support from elsewhere in the games industry, including SAG-AFTRA and the Communications Workers of America (CWA), which represents workers at Blizzard. Alex Marshall, president of the IWGB, said the vote was an opportunity for Rockstar employees to take greater control over their working conditions. "What happens at Rockstar matters beyond the studio. Workers across the games industry are watching, and this ballot is an opportunity to show what can be achieved when people come together, organize and build the collective power to shape their own working lives." For Rockstar, November was already shaping up to be a big month. By the time GTA VI has been in players' hands for a week, the company should also know whether its UK workforce has voted to secure a formal seat at the negotiating table. ®

Anthropic has introduced three new types of artifacts that show the company tiptoeing into the office productivity market long dominated by Microsoft and Google. On Tuesday, the Claudefather announced Claude Sheets, Claude Whiteboards, and Claude Data, and promised the imminent arrival of Claude Meetings. These artifact types join existing ones – Docs, Slides, Design, and Motion – to form a nascent Claude-dependent productivity suite. Anthropic initially used the term artifacts to refer to shareable AI-based interactive tools, like dynamic charts. But the scope of the term has been stretched to cover specific artifact types, which refer to what traditionalists might take to mean files associated with specific hosted applications. "An artifact is anything Claude makes for you that you'd put in front of someone: a design, a deck, a document, a dashboard, or a small interactive tool," the company explains. The key thing that distinguishes an artifact from a file is that users are meant to interact with artifacts through Claude, rather than storing and transferring them independently. Think of it more as a container or managed object that opens in Claude (via a sharing URL), because artifacts in fact consist of various content types – .txt, .md, .html, .jsx, .svg, .pptx, .docx, .zip, .pdf, and .mp4, among others. Anthropic's vision of Claude as a container for other applications goes beyond artifacts. The AI biz has also expanded its interactive connectors, which turn Claude into a landlord for other software applications. Its own promotional video for the feature hammers that point home in its title: "Your apps have moved into Claude." "Starting today, partners can embed their apps directly in Claude, so you can work in Adobe, Atlassian, and others without switching tabs," Anthropic said. "Plugins from Salesforce (beta), NetSuite, and Workday (beta) come with built-in skills, so sellers can prep for a call, accountants can analyze financial data, and HR teams can handle time off and expenses." In a prior era, those would be fighting words. Tech companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft have worked for years to maintain their positions as platform landlords. Anthropic's invitation to become a Claude tenant ought to set off competition alarm bells. But perhaps with LLMs being able to re-create other people's apps on demand, there's less interest in defending app boundaries as if they were moats to keep out rivals. With AI, the call is coming from inside the house. Alongside the rollout of Claude Sheets, Whiteboards, and Data, Anthropic is pushing the notion that Claude is useful for people working outside of computation and mathematics, the occupational category that, according to the company's own data, accounts for a larger share of Claude usage than any other. "Inside Anthropic, non-technical teams are starting to get as much out of Claude as our engineers," the biz insists, hauling out canned testimonials from the likes of Accenture and Datadog. If Anthropic can demonstrate that there's an untapped market of non-coders who would welcome a Claude subscription, investors in the company's pending IPO will be glad to see it. ®

Built by a 14-year-old developer, a new tool called Autark treats AI agents as a virtual team that can work without constant prompting. Users put tasks in an inbox, where a manager agent delegates them to other agents that carry out the work and report their results. Agents can also ask clarifying questions if tasks are too vague. “Agents do not wait for a prompt,” Autark’s website explains. “A schedule, a timer, a new task, a message or an event wakes them up. They decide what to do, do it, and can plan their own next step.” As one would hope from a product like this, Autark is model agnostic and can be set up to connect to OpenAI Codex, Claude Code, Gemini CLI, GitHub Copilot CLI, and Kimi Code through those services’ CLI tools. Local models are also supported. Your mileage may vary if you choose to use anything besides Codex or Claude Code, though, as Autark’s website mentions support for other models is built in but hasn’t been tested in a live run yet, as Autark is still under active development as an open-source tool. Real teenage engineering Autark is the brainchild of teenage Austrian developer Stanislaus Hees. He’s still in school, and tells The Register he’s deeply interested in AI and came up with Autark after being unhappy with existing AI tools. “I could get help with individual tasks, but I still had to organise the work, remember what was unfinished and keep pushing it forward,” Hees said of his time using Claude Code and Codex. “I wanted a system that could take responsibility for ongoing work, not just respond to my next message.” He developed Autark - or, more accurately, prompted AI coding tools to do it for him - to come up with a tool that could fulfill that want. You know what that means: It’s capable, but that capability also makes it dangerous. Autark’s page on access and data makes clear what’s at risk if you give it unfettered access to a PC, and why you don’t want to let the thing run roughshod over a system. “It can do everything,” the page explains, because “Autark does not put walls around its agents.” There’s no sandboxing in Autark, no approval prompts, and no permission gates. It doesn’t stop agents from spending all the money they can get their hands on, deleting files, or sending unsolicited emails, either. Agents run with the privileges of the machine's user, with approval checks and permission restrictions disabled or bypassed. Even the safety limit parley that users have with Autark establishes guidelines, not rules. “The first thing the AI asks is how far it may go,” the access page points out. “That is a question, not a technical barrier.” That means agents given a task that conflicts with their stated limits may still attempt to carry it out. As we’ve seen in recent months, some AI agents have found ways around restrictions, instructions be damned. “In our own live test runs, agents given a vague request reached real repositories, backups, SSH keys and .env files within minutes, and one changed the permissions of a file it had found,” the access page notes. In other words, it’s probably best to stick Autark on a machine that doesn’t contain anything you’d want to avoid losing - even Hees admits as much. “I would not claim that … the app is suitable for unattended access to sensitive systems,” the teen dev told us. That’s not to say Autark lacks protections for secrets, though. Autark’s site explains that stored passwords and keys are encrypted and referred to using IDs that keep their values out of prompts. It also says its servers don't store user data, with a meeting server used to relay encrypted traffic between devices. If you're willing to try Autark to see whether it can improve your workflows, you don't need to rely on its servers. While prepackaged apps are available from Autark’s website, it’s also fully open source and available on GitHub. Everything, even the meeting server code, is available for self-hosting and modification under an Apache open source license. The bottom line is that this is a tool built by an ambitious young person, and it’s a tool with a lot of potential if used correctly. That correct usage is the major challenge, though, so be sure to build your own guardrails. ®

The Mozilla-backed Thunderbird project is getting closer to a wider launch of a hosted email service designed to complement its desktop mail app. Now known as Thundermail (what else?), the service was originally developed under the Thunderbird Pro banner, which encompassed paid email, appointment scheduling, and file-sharing services designed to generate additional revenue for the organization. The org has been inviting people from its Thundermail waitlist to try the service through an early-access program, and this writer just happened to be among them. Thundermail offers a web-based email interface and can also be accessed through the Thunderbird desktop app, the Thunderbird mobile app for Android, or other compatible email clients. The Thunderbird apps remain free. Users get an inbox with up to 15 email addresses and three custom domains, plus 30 GB of mail storage and 60 GB of send storage for Thunderbird Send, an end-to-end encrypted file-sharing and large-attachment service. That’s for starters – the org intends to offer those extra features and services at different price points. Yes, Thundermail is a paid service, which may put off some users who are used to free email accounts offered via Gmail, Outlook.com and Proton Mail, but with the first two of those you do get served ads along with your messages. The sign-up screens for Thundermail suggest the basic service will cost $6 per month, billed annually. This is roughly equivalent to the £55 we paid for a year on the early access program. We asked Thunderbird when we can expect to see Thundermail officially launched and open to all comers. We will update if we get an answer. It previously said that a full launch is expected sometime in 2026. The web-based user interface of Thundermail presents a fairly clean and uncluttered look, and could be likened to Gmail with the screen partitioned into a pane with folders on the left and a larger one to the right displaying messages. A welcome screen introduces you to the features of Thundermail, which include the ability to work on several drafts at once, schedule delivery times for emails, create folders to arrange messages, contact lists and identities – all pretty much standard for an email system. We haven’t really had the time to test out Thundermail a great deal since signing up, but there are no great surprises so far, and everything works pretty much the way you would expect it to. Firefox and the Thunderbird mail client both recently moved to a fortnightly release schedule in line with Mozilla’s plans, and Thunderbird itself gained support for Microsoft’s Exchange late last year. ®

Welcome to Monday, the day upon which The Register offers a new instalment of "Who, Me?" – our reader-contributed column that shares your stories of messing up, 'fessing up, and somehow finding redress. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Oriel" who told us he once worked for a vendor of small business accounting software. This story comes from a time when software shipped on CD-ROMs and users bought it off the shelf in actual shops. The vendor released a new version each year and always shipped it before a major holiday that's celebrated with a giant meal. Oriel was part of the team whose job it was to get the package ready on time. In the previous year, they flubbed the job because the program didn't always install itself on some PCs running Windows 95 or Windows ME machines system due to registry corruption. "We wanted to increase our successful installation metrics, so in conjunction with the installation team, a key decision was made – by me – to force the updating of registry keys to enable the install," Oriel admitted. In his email to The Register, he asked the portentous question: "What could possibly go wrong?" What went wrong was that not long after the software was shipped, the vendor's support lines started getting calls from customers who complained that after installing the accounting package none of their other software would work. "Installing a new version of our application had borked the customer's machine completely," Oriel wrote. The company decided the best thing to do was to tell affected customers they should go and buy a new PC – and that it would pick up the bill, no questions asked. "In the week prior to the holiday, we replaced over 600 machines," Oriel told The Register. Oriel and his developer colleagues were of course told to fix the problem but couldn't reproduce it nor figure out their mistake. "To get a reproduction case we need a user's machine where the user had created a Windows Registry restore point prior to installing our application," Oriel explained. If the developers could find such a machine, the plan was to roll it back to the restore point, verify everything was in order before the customer installed the update, install the accounting software, and figure out the problem. The company tasked its support agents with finding a customer willing to surrender their PC, which proved difficult because few bothered to create a registry restore point. The day before the holiday, a customer volunteered their machine. This customer was located a few hours away by road, so an engineer got the job of visiting on the morning of the holiday to pick up the stricken machine, give the customer a shiny new system and configure it to their specifications. Said engineer did the job, which took so long he was invited to stay for the holiday meal, then returned to HQ with the broken box. The next day, Oriel and his colleagues got to work and found a fix, then created a version of the accounting application that wouldn't break any more PCs. Oriel was, of course, summoned into a meeting with senior execs to explain the situation and watched as they decided the best course of action was to pull buggy CDs from stores – which meant trashing CDs and packaging valued at $1 million. Have you made a mistake that broke customers' kit, or cost millions? If so, don't make the mistake of not sharing your story with The Register and click here to email the column. ®

Linux can do many things, but good looks aren't always its strong point. Apple has rather more of a reputation in that department, and a crop of new projects is bringing Mac-style polish to the open source desktop. Some are all-new, such as the Argentinian Lord OS, a whole new GUI desktop on top of Debian. Another, Cutefish, is a revival of a pre-ChatGPT project that never got as far as a complete release. Now it has version 1.0 for both x86-64 and Arm64, plus it's working on Mac binary compatibility via a work-in-progress layer called Reef. Ukrainian Desert OS is already at version 5.5 – practically a venerable elder in this company, despite appearing to be only about a year old. Meanwhile, ClokeOS uses Xfce for its desktop, but underneath, the OS is based on Apple's FOSS XNU kernel. The project lead plans to offer compatibility with multiple types of binaries: Linux apps, plus Mac apps via Darling, and Windows apps via Wine. This isn't new. Much as Cutefish has been revived, last year we reported on PearOS Linux, a very Mac-like skin on KDE Plasma. It has hooks in place for ambitious future features, such as Siri-style speech recognition. What's striking is the number of projects appearing and the pace of their development. Some offer both x86-64 and Arm64 builds, with Raspberry Pi editions in certain cases. For human coders, this would be months of hard work, but if it's just checking an additional box in an LLM development tool, then why wouldn't you? It's almost no extra work, but it widens the potential audience. Coveting Mac-like good looks is a longstanding urge among Linux users, and with legitimate reason. There's nothing wrong with Macs, even if you are mainly a FOSS user. Modern macOS, or OS X as it was called a decade ago, is a Unix underneath its shiny proprietary desktop, and many of the flagship Linux FOSS apps also have Mac versions, from Firefox and Thunderbird, via LibreOffice, to VirtualBox, plus less well-known but very handy apps such as Ferdium and Panwriter. We've written about the usefulness of FOSS apps on macOS before, including for reviving elderly Macs. Just a couple of months ago, we published a two-part guide on how to give Xfce a macOS-like layout and then how to tweak it so apps fit in better. We focused on the functionality, though, not the looks – we don't really care much for such things. If it does matter to you, though, you're not alone, and there are lots of themes and skins to make Xfce look prettier. Some of these are all-in-one packages that you can install on an existing distro to give it a new look. One recent example is Cupertino, developed with assistance from Claude. From a few years ago, there are Small Sur and Ventura-Xfce. From nine years ago, long pre-LLM, there is osXFCE. We can see the appeal. From 2006 to 2020, Macs used Intel x86 processors, and those machines are now all falling off the end of Apple support – only four Intel models supported last year's macOS 26 "Tahoe," support for which is just starting to reach OpenCore Legacy Patcher. Earlier this year, The Reg FOSS desk upgraded his 11-year-old iMac to macOS 15 "Sequoia" with OCLP 2.5.1. The first experimental OCLP 3.0 release appeared last month, and it's now up to 3.0-rc5. This adds support for macOS 26, Apple's final major macOS release for Intel Macs. That puts a ceiling on future macOS upgrades for both home-built Hackintoshes and older Macs kept going with unofficial patches. We gave LordOS a brief spin using its OVA virtual machine image. It installed and booted without trouble, and looks impressive. Last month, we wrote about ZacOS-9 and Mavernix, and similarly, we gave ZacOS-9 a very quick spin in a VM. The resemblance to our recent experience with ZacOS-9 went beyond appearances. In both, we found that the keyboard UI is largely missing: standard keystrokes didn't work. In LordOS, we found some menu options duplicated in two places in an un-Mac-like way, such as "About" options in both the app menu and the Help menu. The LordOS GitHub repository does not credit any LLM assistants, but it's gone though nine test releases in three weeks. The inevitable end of life of x86 Macs is driving fresh interest in FOSS OSes. They offer a life extension for genuine Macs as well as the enticing prospect of Mac-like polish for existing FOSS OSes. Combine that with the fast, easy code generation offered by LLM coding assistants, and we think there's going to be a lot more of this. In 2025, we saw one macOS-like Linux project rebooted. This October, we saw two new ones. In November, we've found four more. We have a feeling that these are just the first trickles of what may soon become a flood. ®

openSUSE Leap 16.1 lets users choose between a conventional Linux installation and an immutable system from the same installer, bringing the previously separate Leap Micro into the fold. It's the first point release after Leap 16.0, which we looked at last year when it reached the release candidate stage. Leap 16.1 has arrived ahead of its paid enterprise sibling, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 16.1, which is expected later this month. Its release notes are already available, and IBM discussed the release in September. The big change in the 16.1 release cycle of both the free and commercial products is that SUSE is merging its conventional Linux with its immutable version, a change the company announced back in February. SUSE previously offered a commercial stripped-down immutable OS, aimed mainly at hosting containers, called SLE Micro. To correspond with that, there was a free community OS called Leap Micro – the final release was Leap Micro 6.2. Leap Micro is being discontinued as a separate community distribution. The Leap 16.1 announcement says: "Immutable Mode with transactionally updating a system with a read-only root filesystem is a big change for this release. Users who know Leap Micro will recognize it right away, because it is the same approach, now integrated directly into Leap. Leap 16.1 in Immutable Mode replaces Leap Micro, and there will be no Leap Micro 6.3 or 7.0. Users simply boot the regular Leap 16.1 install image and select Immutable Mode in Agama." Both Red Hat and Canonical offer immutable distros, but both use different architectures from their conventional package-based distros. Ubuntu Core is built entirely from snap packages, while Red Hat's "Atomic" immutable distros are built from bootable containers, running on top of OStree, which works a little like a local Git server. Immutable distros built on Arch, such as SteamOS 3 or KDE Linux, resemble ChromeOS at filesystem level, with dual root filesystems that update one another. Leap belongs to the openSUSE family of distros, backed by enterprise Linux vendor SUSE. Its commercial sibling is SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES). Leap is the free, community-supported version, and they are based on the same core packages and release schedule. openSUSE also has a rolling-release version, called Tumbleweed. To rephrase this in terms of slightly more familiar Red Hat equivalents, SLES is SUSE's equivalent of RHEL. Leap is the free openSUSE equivalent of the late lamented CentOS Linux. Leap shares a common core with SUSE's enterprise products while offering a broader community package selection. SLES and openSUSE began sharing enterprise binaries in 2021. Red Hat, meanwhile, announced the end of CentOS Linux in 2020, shifting its focus to CentOS Stream. To continue the Red Hat comparisons, openSUSE Tumbleweed is loosely equivalent to Fedora Rawhide, but with automated testing and rollback of problematic updates. Unlike the best-known rolling distro, the entirely community-built Arch Linux, Tumbleweed uses SUSE's Snapper technology to offer snapshots. If an update breaks something, Tumbleweed users can boot into a snapshot of an older version of the OS, before the offending update was installed, and keep on working. If dozens of updated packages a day prove too much, then openSUSE also offers an experimental slower-moving rolling release called Slowroll. Despite the modest version-number bump, Leap 16.1 is a substantial annual update. Its release cycle sits between Fedora and interim Ubuntu releases on one side, and Debian and Ubuntu LTS on the other. Along with its other updates, it brings GNOME 48.8, KDE Plasma 6.6.4, and LXQt 2.4. We tried its Xfce desktop, which surprisingly defaulted to X.org rather than the Wayland-based setup using labwc that we saw in 16.0 last year. Immutable distros look to be the future of Linux for non-technical users. Android is an immutable OS based on the Linux kernel, and sells in the billions – which is why, as we reported last year, Google is replacing ChromeOS with Android. The result is the AI-festooned GooglebookOS, on sale in Mountain View's new high-end GoogleBook kit. The Reg FOSS desk isn't aware of any other Linux OS in which you're able to choose, at the point of installation, whether you wish it to be immutable or not. For now, in the commercial Linux OS space, only SUSE has anything like this flexibility. It's marketing its immutable versions as being ideal hosts for containers, and as suitable for "edge" devices, meaning that they are expected to be provisioned remotely, update themselves automatically, and recover from faults on their own. SUSE is a much smaller company than Red Hat, and unfortunately, as we reported earlier this week, it is getting smaller. This vulture is both a former SUSE Linux user and a former SUSE employee, and we hope it and its unique distribution survive and thrive. ®

The Excel copy-and-paste bug is back, which means Microsoft is making a second round of fixes. The bug first appeared in the September update and manifested in multiple versions of Excel as a silent failure of the paste operation. Users copied content and attempted to paste it, but the destination cell was unchanged no matter how hard they mashed the Ctrl+V keys. Microsoft fixed it in mid-September. But it made a comeback in Excel 2016 when users installed October's security update. Microsoft has now released a new build of Excel 2016 to address the reintroduction of the bug: build 16.0.5574.1006. The company wrote: "The new build includes all security updates for Microsoft Excel 2016, and also fixes the issue that was reintroduced in 16.0.5574.1005, in which paste operations might fail if the workbook contains conditional formatting." Microsoft did not explain how the bug slipped back in. Copy and paste is, after all, a niche bit of functionality. Users reported the recurrence of the bug in October after the KB5002934 update was applied. Rolling back the update resolved the problem until Windows Update pushed the patch again. KB5002934 is a security update that resolves glitches including remote code execution and information disclosure vulnerabilities. The problem affects only Excel 2016 and is not the result of the latest Windows security update. Rather, it was reintroduced in an Excel update delivered through Windows Update. A user in a Microsoft Excel forum said the issue had appeared on workstations throughout their organization. "What's frustrating is that this is the same issue we encountered before, which was supposedly fixed in a previous update. Now it's back, barely a few weeks later." And now, at least, it appears to be fixed once again. Still, if Microsoft is determined to reintroduce bugs into Excel, perhaps it might also be tempted to bring back the Hall of Tortured Souls (a secret first-person 3D mini-game hidden inside Microsoft Excel for Windows 95) and populate it with the testers who managed to miss the issue's resurrection. ®

SAP has taken meaningful steps in opening its data to bidrectional sharing across the enteprise, and in decoupling the advanced analytics needed for AI from its ERP upgrade path. During a technical conference last week, the German software giant adopted native support for Apache Iceberg, the open table format, and extended its partnership with Databricks to bring data from legacy ERP systems into its modern cloud analytics platform. "By putting [a] stake in the ground with Iceberg, we now have SAP moving from a very closed application storage model to an open lakehouse model," said Aaron Rosenbaum, Gartner senior director analyst, referring to the concept which brings together data lakes and warehouses. Also important was the bridge between modern analytics in the cloud and on-prem or hosted legacy systems such as ECC, the ERP system broadly adopted by global companies. "SAP made a pretty big move in saying we're going to open this up, not just to S/4HANA Cloud [the latest ERP system], but ECC users. That coupling — leveraging of AI, leveraging a lakehouse for AI to the ERP upgrade lifecycle — was a problem," said Rosenbaum. In May this year, SAP bought Dremio, a lakehouse platform built around Apache Iceberg, ending its previous preference for Databricks' Delta Sharing to bring together SAP data products with existing lakehouses bi-directionally. At SAP's TedEd conference last week, SAP said its Business Data Cloud (BDC) – the "trusted data foundation for SAP Business AI Platform" – would now support native Apache Iceberg and a universal catalog powered by Apache Polaris, "providing an open and governed data foundation for users and [AI agent platform] Joule to consume data." Together with SAP BDC Connect, the new tech policy will support platform interoperability with "zero-copy data sharing" across platforms from Databricks, Snowflake, Google, AWS, and Microsoft. The system would also continue to support Delta Lake, the alternative open table format from Databricks, SAP said. With the integration of Dremio's SQL query engine, BDC users will also get access to relational databases including SQL Server, MongoDB, Oracle, and PostgreSQL without moving data, the vendor said. During the same conference, Databricks – the lakehouse company born out of an Apache Spark platform – extended its partnership with SAP based on the previously announced SAP Databricks, which embeds the Databricks Data + AI Platform in BDC. That "expanded scope" promises to make data from SAP applications available for consumption in the SAP Business Data Cloud engine of choice, including SAP Databricks. The vendor said that a manufacturer running finance and supply chain on SAP ECC on-premises, for example, could use SAP Application Data Foundation to bring historic order data into SAP Databricks, combining it with third-party data, and allowing data engineers to build demand-forecasting models on SAP's business semantics, without custom extraction pipelines. They can keep that work as they move to the cloud, Databricks suggested. This being 2026, the hoped-for output from all of this data engineering is not just business insight, but automated action, by way of AI agents. SAP has its Joule AI assistant and agentic platform, while Databricks has Genie, and the two companies have promised to bring them together. The increasing openness is good for users who will get more options in plotting a strategy to bring together enterprise data, leaving them pondering over where to put the business context layer, which vendors will no doubt fight to control, Rosenbaum said. "You have the comment that they're going to bring Joule and Genie together in the future. This is pointing to a struggle that's going on throughout enterprises and throughout all the vendors about the context layer. I don't necessarily see that there's one winner. You do have different points of context within the transaction system and across the whole business, and they have been points of tension. "Lack of single vendor lock-in is important. It's something that all the customers are struggling with: how do we build these context layers and deliver sort of consistent answers?" SAP's shift in the direction of openness is likely to help users in this struggle, whether they choose to build the context layer within the ERP vendor's data platform using its semantic layer, or outside of it using tools from other vendors – there are plenty of companies offering help for those opening their wallets. Nonetheless, whichever path users choose, a lot of work lies ahead. ®

When The Register writes about professional certifications offered by vendors, we often receive comments arguing that such credentials are nowhere near as valuable as real-world experience. Now, Microsoft has acknowledged there’s some merit in that argument. Redmond revealed its stance last week in a post from general manager for content and insights Cameron Percy, who observed: “For years, people have asked for a simpler way to prove the skills they use in the flow of work, without stepping away to prepare for another test.” Microsoft’s response is the “Pro Badge,” a new form of credential that Percy wrote “works alongside Microsoft Certifications.” “Certifications show that you can solve problems in a role or field. Pro Badge shows how you use a specific product in your everyday work. Together, they give a more complete picture of what you can do.” “Instead of capturing skills on a single test day, this approach keeps pace with your work and the products you use,” Percy added. “It gives you a current, verified signal of what you can do, at no cost and without a separate exam or study guide.” The first Pro Badge is for GitHub Copilot. To earn it, users need only visit learn.github.com and sign in with their GitHub account. Going through those steps fires up a “proficiency engine” that Microsoft says “gets to work analyzing relevant product usage signals and evaluating them against a defined proficiency framework.” Percy’s post says it “systematically uses evidence from everyday product use to calculate and automatically update your proficiency level.” Microsoft offers five levels of proficiency: beginner, intermediate, proficient, advanced, and expert. To earn a Pro Badge, users must reach the proficient level. A beginner has had “first contact” with GitHub and “understands what Copilot is, where it can be used, and how it might fit into everyday development workflows.” An intermediate user is “familiar with web-based collaboration features, core IDE features, model management, agent configuration, customization options, and techniques for managing context.” To score the Pro Badge, users will need to demonstrate “practical ability to work on projects” and use GitHub “across typical scenarios, demonstrated through consistent hands-on usage across multiple repositories and extended periods.” “A Proficient user can use many web and IDE features, select appropriate models, and apply customizations to tailor Copilot for specific project needs. They have experimented with extended features and are aware of extensibility/integration options.” At the time of writing, Redmond hasn’t defined expert or advanced proficiency. It has published more criteria for the first three levels here. Microsoft has kindly integrated GitHub’s learning site with LinkedIn, which it owns, so users can add Pro Badges to their profiles. Percy’s post suggests Microsoft has other Pro Badges in the works. Elsewhere, Microsoft makes it plain that Pro Badges won’t replace its other credentials. “GitHub Verified Proficiency is part of Microsoft Pro Badge, a new credential type designed to recognize skills as they are applied in the flow of work,” explains a page offering detail of the new cred. “It does not replace certifications or Microsoft Applied Skills. It adds a third signal: how skills show up through everyday product use.” The Register welcomes comment on this new approach to professional credentials. ®

With RAM getting more expensive, Microsoft is putting more effort into making Windows 11 run better on systems with just 8 GB of memory. Microsoft said on Tuesday that it was "raising the bar for 8 GB Windows 11 PCs," following a renewed focus on memory optimization earlier this year. The changes come as Redmond continues pushing more expensive Copilot+ PCs, which require at least 16 GB of RAM, amid a memory crunch fueled by AI infrastructure demand. Now, Microsoft says a low-end machine with its 8 GB of precious RAM will be up to 20 percent more responsive and 40 percent faster at multitasking thanks to improvements made in memory management. The tweaks are relatively simple, as Microsoft explained, and seem more about adjusting back to the reality that its flagship operating system needs to function on the hardware people can actually afford to purchase if and when they’re forced to upgrade. Windows 11 will now keep up to 2 GB more active data in memory before shunting it to slower storage, as one example. In another instance, Windows will connect directly to Edge when the browser is already running in the background, allowing it to launch up to 33 percent faster, according to Microsoft. Microsoft apps are also being made more efficient, with Teams able to enable Efficiency Mode by default on 8 GB machines, which Microsoft said will make it launch "up to 20 percent faster." Memory efficiency is also being improved by tweaking things like Widgets, which will only load when used instead of always being on, and decreasing the time when Edge tabs go to sleep from two hours to 15 minutes by default. Microsoft said it’s enabling third-party apps to make use of those tweaks, too. Microsoft also included benchmark data in the blog post from a recent bit of research it commissioned. The benchmark report compares a range of 2026 Windows machines with models from 2021, finding that a 2026 Dell XPS 13 with 8 GB of RAM performed about as well as a 2021 Dell XPS 13 with 16 GB across selected workloads. What that means, says Microsoft, is that “the complete PC, not memory capacity alone, shapes the experience.” In other words, please buy some new Windows hardware, even if it’s expensive - we’re begging you. Software optimization can only do so much. “For many people, 8 GB is a great fit for the things they do every day,” Microsoft EVP of Windows and devices Pavan Davuluri wrote in the blog post. “Demanding workloads, such as 3D modeling, advanced video editing, or large-scale data processing benefit from 16 GB of memory or more.” It’s no surprise Microsoft is improving the performance of lower end systems at the same time it’s subtly asking users to buy newer kit, even if it’s just an 8 GB machine - Microsoft may have done well in the past two quarters, but it’s no thanks to Windows devices. Microsoft’s Q4 2026 earnings in late July saw the company rake in cash more broadly, while simultaneously reporting a 7 percent decrease in Windows OEM and devices revenue. Likewise, in its fiscal Q1 2027 results, reported just last week, Microsoft again brought home a mountain of net income, with adjusted earnings reaching $36.4 billion, up 18 percent from the same period last year. Windows OEM and devices revenue, however, was down a whopping 22 percent. It’s hard to think of a reason beyond the fact that hardware prices have shot up with more force than a SpaceX rocket - memory prices are likely to actually make it to Mars, unlike Starship - leaving both consumers and enterprises to stretch those upgrade cycles. If you need to get the most out of that 8 GB Windows 11 PC, you’ll find the latest improvements in 26H2, build 26300.9818 or later. Microsoft is also encouraging users to keep its branded apps up to date, as “some improvements arrive through app updates or through Microsoft Store.” ®

GhostBSD, the easiest-to-install flavor of FreeBSD for the daemon-curious desktop dabbler, is back with a fresh update. GhostBSD 26.2-R15.1p6, to give it its slightly unwieldy full version number, is based on FreeBSD 15.1. It brings a new installer, full-disk encryption support, a smaller installation image, and fixes across its desktop tools. FreeBSD 15.1 was released back in June, and at the time of writing, it's the most recent point release of FreeBSD. The original plan was that FreeBSD 15.1 would include the option of installing KDE Plasma directly from the setup program, so that the OS would have a graphical desktop from its very first boot. However, this feature isn't ready just yet. That gap inspired Daemonarchy, which we covered late last month. But its Omarchy-derived, keyboard-driven tiling desktop can feel unfamiliar even to experienced Linux users accustomed to conventional desktops. GhostBSD has different goals. It brings Linux-like desktop convenience to FreeBSD: a live graphical environment to explore before installation, a graphical installer, and tools for managing software and updates. These conveniences are familiar to desktop Linux users, but a standard FreeBSD installation takes more work. Its text-mode installer leaves users to install and configure a graphical desktop themselves, if they want one. This is just how the BSD family does things, and most BSD users we've talked to regard it as standard operating procedure and see nothing wrong with it. For Linux users who are curious about how things are on the other side of the FOSS Unix fence, though, those extra steps can form formidable barriers. GhostBSD is an attempt to lay down a welcome mat. The standard edition of GhostBSD installs the MATE desktop, and the downloads page also offers a community-maintained version with Xfce instead. As the project said it would back in February, this release uses the XLibre fork of the X.org X11 server. That's one fewer desktop than when we last tried GhostBSD in August 2025. That release also offered the Mac OS X-like Gershwin environment. There are practical hardware fixes too. The release notes list improvements for Intel AX200 Wi-Fi cards, open networks, password alerts, and non-ASCII network names, while USB HID support is enabled by default. Where has Gershwin gone? Gershwin remains in active development, so we asked project lead Joe Maloney why it wasn't included. "It has been difficult to find time to package for GhostBSD. It's the only distro I have ever packaged for," Maloney said. He added that rapid contributions from AppImage creator Simon Peter, known as probono, had made packaging increasingly difficult. He also pointed to the fact that GhostBSD project lead Eric Turgeon is developing his own environment too: the Mocka desktop. Mocka is still in its very early stages – alpha version 0.0.2 appeared early last month – but the plan is that when it's ready, it will become GhostBSD's default desktop. For now, the only available module is a dock for the MATE desktop, but the curious can follow its development on the GitHub project page. There may be no Gershwin included, but GhostBSD 26.2 offers MATE 1.28, and there's also a community-supported version with Xfce 4.20 instead. We tried the default MATE edition, and it works as well as ever. It defaults to a dark theme and the classic two-panel GNOME 2 desktop layout. The System menu in the top panel has an Administration submenu with a few of the project's own apps that aren't from upstream FreeBSD: "BE Station" for managing system boot environments, "Software Station" for browsing and installing applications, and "Update Station" for updates. We regularly hear from users growing tired of the Linux vendors' headlong rush into Rust, Wayland, systemd, containerized app formats, and so on. Some are curious about whether FreeBSD offers a usable alternative. GhostBSD is the easiest way to get a complete, ready-to-use graphical FreeBSD desktop. There is a price to pay for switching to FreeBSD: for a start, most proprietary Linux apps, from Chrome to Slack, are not available here. Hardware compatibility needs more checking than on mainstream Linux, especially with recent GPUs and Wi-Fi adapters. If Windows gaming is a priority, this isn't the obvious choice. But if you can live without those proprietary apps and find suitable open source replacements, FreeBSD is a viable alternative – and GhostBSD takes much of the setup work out of trying it. ®

One in ten employees at SUSE are facing the chop due to "automation and AI," according to a memo dispatched by management at the privately owned open source software biz. In an email to the 1,900 strong workforce on Monday - seen by The Register - CEO Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen, the former Red Hat exec who joined SUSE in March 2023, confirmed the "difficult news." "We are announcing a reduction of SUSE’s global workforce of approximately 10 percent," he said. "These decisions are painful for our people, our culture, and our open source community, but they are necessary for us to adapt and build a sustainable, resilient SUSE for the long term." Van Leeuwen says the business, bought by Swedish private equity provider EQT, decided to cut jobs after scrutinizing its "future strategy, required capabilities, and team structures." The rest of the organization will get a look at the fiscal year 2027 strategy on November 16. He said in the message to staff: "What is clear is that automation and AI are fundamentally shifting how software companies operate. AI capabilities are advancing exponentially, forcing us to radically reimagine our work. We have seen this trend already both inside our sector and in the wider economy. This means that the organizational design and cost base that SUSE is built on today will not carry us forward successfully. "We are adapting. Across SUSE, modern tooling is already changing our daily workflows, enabling teams to move faster with less operational overhead and flatter reporting lines. The requirement for some existing roles has greatly diminished. Other roles will evolve over the next few years. This means we are accelerating investments in high priority areas, and deprioritizing others. These are hard, painful decisions to make, but necessary for our future." As The Reg reported in 2025, SUSE doubled down on AI. The specific roles at risk of redundancy were not outlined but SUSE claims it has considered where the people in those positions are "able to evolve, what they can stop doing, what they need to do more of - and decisions have been made on that basis." Staff caught up in the redundancies will be informed by November 4, employee representatives nominated the following day, and one to one meetings will begin at the start of next week. Van Leeuwen says in the internal memo that the job cuts are a "reflection of shifting organizational needs, not your talent or commitment. You have tackled hard infrastructure and open source challenges that power critical enterprise systems around the world. "Any organization will be fortunate to have your expertise." Back in September, we reported that the company was asking old hands if they would take "voluntary separation." It seems not enough people chose to walk through the door, so instead, they're getting thrown through it instead. SUSE "geckos" in the Czech Republic may be glad they joined a trade union. Back in 2018, EQT bought SUSE from Microfocus for $2.5 billion. EQT floated SUSE on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange in 2021 with slightly disappointing results. A couple of years later, new CEO Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen took over, and later in 2023, EQT chose to take the company private again. The commercial context is that in March SUSE's corporate owner EQT was reportedly considering selling it off again. ®

Microsoft has discovered once again that few things strike fear into the heart of a software engineer quite like a government deciding to fiddle with the clocks. Parts of Canada stopped observing seasonal clock changes on November 1, leaving affected areas of British Columbia, Alberta, and Manitoba permanently on UTC-07:00, UTC-06:00 and UTC-05:00 respectively. Unfortunately, Microsoft's sprawling software empire hasn't entirely caught up. The company has confirmed problems across a chunk of its software estate, leaving some customers facing incorrect times, broken schedules and a collection of workarounds while Redmond catches up. Outlook users have been left with the most homework. Switching to the new Canadian time zones won't automatically update existing calendar entries, meaning that meetings scheduled after November 1 are potentially an hour out of whack. Microsoft advises users to change their Outlook calendar time zone, then update upcoming events and meetings to use it. For meetings involving other people, only the organizer can make the change. Recurring meetings come with an additional treat: changing the time zone resets any previously moved occurrences, which then have to be recreated. Anyone with a calendar full of recurring meetings may wish to put the kettle on first. Microsoft is working on an Exchange Online PowerShell cmdlet to remediate non-recurring meetings, but according to its guidance, that's not due until later this week. A fix for recurring meetings remains "in development," with an ETA yet to be confirmed. Things get stranger with Power Automate and Fabric, where Microsoft's temporary fix involves pretending you're somewhere else entirely. Depending on the product and province, that could mean Saskatchewan, Arizona or, for Manitobans, Bogota. Because apparently time zones weren't confusing enough already. SharePoint On-Prem customers, meanwhile, have to wait until November 10 for the correct time zones to arrive, while Power Pages users could see server-formatted dates appear an hour out until a service fix lands. Microsoft's current milestone for that is December 12. Admins dealing with the fallout aren't exactly delighted. One sysadmin on Reddit said Microsoft's guidance had been "terrible" and claimed to have written roughly 900 lines of PowerShell to change users' Outlook settings and manually adjust calendar events. Others described switching systems to Saskatchewan time while waiting for Microsoft's new zones to settle in. Microsoft published its guidance on October 26, less than a week before the change took effect, and was still adding affected products and workarounds four days later. Meanwhile, admins were urged to test calendars, recurring meetings, and schedules before the November 1 switch, leaving little time to find out what might break. If any of this sounds familiar, it's because time has caused trouble for Microsoft before. In 2022, Chile delayed its switch to daylight saving time by a week. Microsoft responded by warning that Windows clocks could be wrong, scheduled tasks could run at unexpected times, and timestamps on files, transactions, and logs could end up an hour out. Four years later, governments are still messing with time and software is still apparently objecting. ®

Capitalism can seem so perverse. Take Microsoft, which is celebrating record financial performance by inviting 60,000 employees to consider continuing their careers outside the company. Voluntary redundancy may seem to make sense when a company's running out of cash, but Microsoft is dripping with the stuff. It was a very good fiscal '26 at Redmond. Its Azure business is up over 40 percent, it's has 30 million paid seats on CoPilot, revenues are through the roof, and it has so much moolah it returned $10.2 billion to shareholders in the form of dividends and share repurchases. This latter move probably soothed CEO Satya Nadella, who suffered, due to the vagaries of C-suite reimbursement and incentive packages, a 6 percent cut in his pocket money. But as he’s also a stockholder with about 0.01 percent of the company, his share of the cash return presumably eased the pain. He won't have been offered redundo. Jenkins, the large wheelbarrow if you please. Microsoft, then, can afford all its employees, each who contributes about $1.5 million to SatNad's bottom line. The "massive efficiencies and ROI of AI" make a great line for a company flogging magic LLM juice, but the evidence remains elusive. AI is, of course, still the reason. Nothing else matters these days. It’s just that it's not today's AI. Among all the fulsome figures, analysts noted that Microsoft's capital expenditure wasn't as spendy as expected. Quite a lot has been pushed into next calendar year, not because it's not there to be spent – Microsoft could build a 1:1 scale model of the Vatican filled with robot priests if it wanted – but because so much it wanted to mash the Buy Now button for was "Out of stock. More expected soon." This is bad. MS added 88 datacenters in its most recent full financial year. That’s not enough datacenters for a cloud business expected to grow by half again in 2027, and hugely not enough to do the other thing. Lags in the cadence of deforestation, dewatering and detonation of the planet can't be tolerated. Thus there are contracts signed to get things back on track PDQ, with mucho, mucho, mucho sponduiks. Microsoft is hinting, those selfsame analysts say, that it will have to go to the debt market and go into "negative free cash flow" territory in 2028. In other words, as well as spending its own bank, the company will be taking out massive loans. This is why Billy and Bhavya Dev have to go. The cost of borrowing depends on the financial health of the borrower, and that boils down to how much profit you're making from the money you earn. A big round of redundancies, which are very costly in themselves, sits on the books of the year they happen. The hole in expenditure left by the vanished salaries lives on. The capital must flow. Will this work? Last week, we listed the reasons why it might not — price competition between rivals and increasingly powerful local and open weight models, supply side shortages, you know the litany by now. This week is Groundhog week, with fresh stories singing the same songs from different choirs. Any sensible soul, especially developers sitting on the sharp end of AI's forcible insertion into their working lives, will know how uncertain the job market is. Voluntary redundancy is a very high stakes bet, and the game is very different if you're in an organization that's going downhill and may need to get rid of you later with far less cash available than if you're nominally making $1.5 million in a place whose biggest problem is that it physically can't move into a bigger shell. On average, only 5 percent or so of those offered voluntary redundancy take it, which Microsoft HR will have factored in. It's cold outside and snug within, so that may be on the high side. The biggest knock-on of such schemes is cultural, with only the very confident moving on out, a disproportionate loss of talent and role models. Hey, the cost of doing business, right? For those who do decide to leave and watch the fireworks from outside the tent, part of the deal is career development resources. Sounds great, if anyone knows what technical careers will look like if either AI works and does indeed do all the work, or it fails and the global financial system throws a humongous wobble. Or anything in between. So, here's an exercise in very dark humor quite fitting for the Halloween season. Ask your favorite AI what careers will be available for coders made redundant by AI. It will give you a long and plausible list. Then ask it – and yourself – why AI won't be able to do any of those jobs too. Buying a truck and a wrench and calling yourself a plumber is probably safest. Nobody will ever want AI to fix their toilet. ®

As debate and legal argument continue over the extent to which developers of large language models are entitled to feed the world’s data into their systems without paying for it, India’s government has come up with an idea to regulate and secure the flow of information. India’s motive is to create AI models trained on local data, because it thinks offshore model-makers won’t be motivated to address the nation’s issues or to ensure owners of data stay in control. The scheme India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) thinks can make that happen is called the “Data Empowerment and Protection Architecture (DEPA) for AI Training.” As described by Professor Ajay Kumar Sood, Principal Scientific Adviser to the Government of India, DEPA means “the model travels to the data, rather than the data travelling to the model.” The scheme envisions “Training Data Providers” (TDPs) – examples of which include hospitals, banks, and government agencies – sharing anonymized and encrypted data with a “Data Exchange Platform” (DEP). Entities called “Training Data Consumers” (TDCs) access the data stored at the DEPs to train their models. DEPs will operate what MeitY calls “hardware-based Secure Data Environments” in which “data remains encrypted and isolated even during processing.” They also enforce rules set by TDPs that describe how TDCs can use data. MeitY’s DEPA framework [PDF] says this scheme means “Differential privacy techniques are systematically applied to prevent the model from learning or revealing individual specific information,” adding “All activities inside the secure data environments are immutably logged for audit purposes, ensuring that the process is both secure and transparent.” India’s government already operates several data exchanges, but it is unclear how much work remains to make DEPA a reality. Once DEPA is working, MeitY envisions model-makers will use it to do things like “unlock currently fragmented health data to power breakthroughs in AI-driven diagnostics, drug discovery, and public health management.” The optimism extends to financial services. India is home to literally thousands of banks, and MeitY thinks “DEPA can enable secure sharing of diverse financial data, potentially extending formal credit to 400 million underserved individuals and MSMEs and fueling next-generation fintech innovation.” India’s government has long believed that if financial services companies can lend to more people, it will boost economic development. “Similarly, in Education, DEPA can overcome data interoperability challenges to enable AI-powered personalized learning for millions and create portable skill credentials essential for a future-ready workforce of its 250 million students in a $29 billion EdTech sector,” the framework states. “The successful adoption of DEPA Training across these domains is the essential catalyst for realizing India’s vision of inclusive growth and responsible AI leadership on the global stage.” While the purpose of the framework is to build Indian AIs for Indians, the document also has half an eye on the nation’s international standing. “DEPA is India’s contribution to global science diplomacy, advancing the efforts of institutions such as the World Bank and the United Nations to shape a more inclusive and responsible global AI ecosystem,” the framework states. It also makes several mentions of digital public infrastructure (DPI), an idea pioneered by India that involves government funding creation of tools like the Unified Payments Interface payment systems and the Bharat Taxi zero-commission ride-sharing platform, to ensure Big Tech companies don’t dominate the local market. India also uses its DPI as a diplomatic tool, by giving it away to friendly nations. ®

If you want to ask AI a question and watch the conversation go up in virtual flames when you're done, there's a new Mac app for that. Howler is an open-source app from a Chinese developer going by Aries Zhou, and it takes incognito mode AI questions to a new level by making them graphically interesting and easy to access right from the desktop of a macOS device. Anyone familiar with the Harry Potter series is likely to know where the name comes from - Howlers are letters that scream in recipients’ faces and then burst into flames, destroying themselves, which is the exact same thing the prompts ostensibly do once a user taps the Escape key. The Howler app displays a parchment-esque letter on the screen whenever the user presses Option+H, complete with a little wax seal that shows a letter representing their chosen model. Responses to queries are written out “at a hand’s pace,” per Howler’s website, first in glowing gold that settles to a sepia-toned print. “Besides needing translation at any time, I often want to look up a concept or learn about an event on the fly, without wanting to switch to a browser or open a separate session in Chat,” Zhou wrote in a comment on his Hacker News post showing off the applet. “So I made Howler, dedicated to Harry Potter fans, always there when you call, burning after reading.” The biggest catch to using Howler is that setting it up involves either using an AI service that can run commands, like Claude Code or another coding agent, or running the configuration commands manually. The recommended method involves pasting a setup prompt into the agent's input field. Once set up, Howler can connect to supported AI models using an API key, or to compatible models running locally. Howler’s website states that the API key never enters the chat and is stored in the macOS Keychain for safety. In addition to the API key for the chosen model staying local and not being printed, Howler is described on its website as only storing messages in memory with no history, sending requests straight to the chosen AI service and never through a relay, keeping no logs, and only connecting to an outside service to check for updates - and even that feature can be disabled. It’s a handy tool for those who want to ask AI questions without leaving a chat history on their Mac – like trying to remember the name of that damn function you’re supposed to have down by now, or whether Memorial Day or Labor Day is the one in the fall. Just don’t assume the AI provider won’t retain a record of the exchange. “Unlike regular conversations, it doesn't take up your conversation list, and you don't have to think about cleaning it up or archiving it afterward,” Zhou explained. “It's only for handling your sudden flashes of inspiration or a moment of confusion.” And it does it with panache - sure, it’s just an interface for an AI model one could find elsewhere, but it’s easily conjured, dismissed with a snap, and is open source, to boot. You can find Howler on GitHub, or download it from its website, both linked above. ®

Decentralized messaging platform Matrix is no longer the upstart it once was. The organization is now a serious challenger to the status quo as concerns about sovereignty and independence reach new heights. At the organization's recent Malmo event, which grew attendance 30 percent year-on-year, the mood shifted from "yes, this is important" to "yes, we're rolling this out." Matrix is an open standard for communication. It's a federated system, so there are no central hubs or overseas control to worry about, and it can be used for anything from messaging to voice over IP. Video is also supported. The system is an alternative to services such as Microsoft Teams. It has become popular in the public sector as governments grow increasingly wary of relying on US tech giants for services that the Trump administration could switch off at will. However, that increased interest and subsequent roll-outs have brought a level of scrutiny Matrix was not fully prepared for. A recent report regarding anonymous reaction to a roll-out of the technology by the European Commission took Element - the company that puts the lion share of the money into Matrix - by surprise. One attendee at the Malmo conference observed, "First they [competitors] ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you." Matrix remains an open standard, however, the open source foundation behind it would certainly welcome more paying members. "It's true that we're definitely getting more attention than we have had before," said Element CEO Matthew Hodgson. "We are seeing Matrix ending up on the critical path of digital sovereignty as almost the poster child of the whole thing. "I'm not sure that we necessarily do want to be the poster child," he added, "We didn't sign up to end up being ambassadors for digital sovereignty, roaming from government to government, but empirically that's where we've ended up, and yeah, that's going to attract attention from people who would rather everyone just kept in their traditional big tech systems." This comes amid worries about the reliability of international partners, from early projects including France's Tchap messenger for the public sector and Germany's BundesMessenger through to more recent users, such as the Swedish public sector. Indeed, in one memorable demonstration during the Matrix event, messages were sent between French, Swedish, and NATO entities. "I cannot overstate the strangeness," Hodgson added, "of having various national militaries phoning up every couple of days, saying, 'Look, we need to get on board Matrix too because we need to talk to this country and they're using Matrix, and we need to talk to that country, and they're using Matrix.'" "It could be for defense, could be national security, could just be healthcare or education, public sector. But that is real. That is why there is a feeding frenzy." Not that Element or Matrix is trying to build a better Teams than Teams. Patrick Alberts, Element's Chief Product Officer, said, "This is a digitally sovereign communication solution that, by and large, works like Teams in many aspects, but it's not set out to be the faster Porsche here..." As for the reported complaints from the European Commission over Element's software implementation, Diana Gheorghe, EC head of sector for Communication and Collaboration Services, addressed them directly and described the anonymous complaints as "the natural friction of [a] high-profile rollout that we have done at scale." Alexandru Vignide, EC service manager for Communication and Collaboration Services, who is very much at the pointy end of making the sovereign communication tools work, noted the speed of the rollout, which began with a proof of concept in Q4 2025, and hit laptops between July and September 2026. The EC chose the Schengen Cloud Alliance (which includes OVHcloud) for hosting and, according to Vignide, "We wanted to provide a familiar experience for users." Not everyone is impressed with what is rolling out, but it's important to remember that change can be alarming, and this is still early days. It is, however, a significant one. Gheorghe said that, as well as increasing resilience and business continuity, "We wanted to have vendor diversity. We also wanted to have data control and ownership of the platform." Microsoft, as an example, would point to the sovereign capabilities of its system. As the Matrix conference kicked off, it announced new capabilities, including additional options for running AI, data services, and confidential workloads on customer-controlled platforms, and highlighted its sovereign partner ecosystem for customers who prefer local expertise. However, Microsoft (and other tech giants) cannot escape concerns about who ultimately controls the data and what administrations might do with it. In 2025, a Microsoft representative memorably confirmed the US giant "cannot guarantee" data sovereignty to customers in France. There is, however, a fly in the Matrix ointment. The platform is open source and, like so many open source projects, requires funding. Right now, Element accounts for much of the Matrix Foundation's funding. Hodgson finds this a little frustrating. "If every government who is operationally dependent on Matrix put the smallest amount of money in the Foundation, the Foundation would have enough money to really start investing in the ecosystem and not be dependent on Element basically picking up the tab." He acknowledged that things had improved in the last year, but said, "It's not good governance for an open standard to have one big player like Element effectively propping things up." This isn't uncommon in the open source world, and it's a little disappointing given the ever-increasing importance placed on sovereignty in communications. Alberts commented: "There is confusion in the market that the thing somehow creates itself. "No, it doesn't. It requires hardworking people. These hardworking people need to be paid, and that payment, in order to support government deployments going forward, ideally also comes from these governments. And some of them do a lot and do it in a great way, and that's amazing. "But some don't." ®