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"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:

New desktop app simplifies stripping out bundled software, with heavier cuts carrying security and support risks:

Tiny11 Builder, a tool for creating less-bloated Windows 11 installation images, now has a desktop app preview that makes the process less reliant on PowerShell know-how.

As the author explains: "Tiny11 Builder aims to be the de facto standard for creating lightweight, safe and efficient Windows images."

The tool creates an ISO image for Windows installation, stripping out bundled apps and selected system components. It accepts Windows 11 installation media from 22H2 onward, including 26H2, and the result is something a good deal more compact than Microsoft's original.

The major visible change is a WinUI 3 desktop application that uses a new C# image builder rather than merely running the existing PowerShell scripts behind a graphical interface. Those scripts remain available, but the new interface is considerably more polished.

There are three basic build modes: Tiny11, which removes bundled apps while retaining Windows Update, Defender, and recovery tools; Tiny11 Core, which disables updates and Defender and irreversibly removes components, including the recovery environment; and finally a custom option where users can decide which Windows elements to keep or drop from the ISO image.

Tiny11 remains an impressive technical achievement, but it carries an important health warning: the ISOs it creates are definitely not supported by Microsoft, and if you opt for Tiny11 Core, the author recommends sticking to test VMs only.

This is for enthusiasts who understand that a smaller installation can come with missing functionality, security trade-offs, and support complications. There is also no guarantee that attempts to bypass some of the more onerous aspects of Windows 11 installation will work.

As the author notes in the project's repository: "Local-account and hardware-check settings are best effort, not guaranteed bypasses on new builds."

In other words, don't count on it to bypass Windows 11's hardware requirements or account demands on newer builds. Tiny11 is all about stripping fluff and fripperies from the Windows 11 installation image.

As with earlier versions, a license is still required. While the ISO might have been debloated, this is still Microsoft Windows 11 after all. "No modification bypasses Windows licensing or activation," the author notes.

The appeal of removing Microsoft's excesses is clear. Whether the reduced footprint is worth the loss of components and potential support headaches depends on what users choose to strip out.

[Ed's Comment: Note that a licence or activation is still requireed.]

Original Submission

"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:

"Small weight-based replicators" could usher in a new generation of computer worms:

AI company Anthropic is warning that advances in small AI models could soon usher in a new era of self-replicating malware that's capable of infecting smart fridges, vacuum cleaners, and a wide range of other Internet-of-things devices and is more resistant to takedown.

By next year, smaller AI models may be able to autonomously self-replicate on all kinds of IoT devices, the company said. Eventually, the capability could enable computer worms, which propagate without requiring human interaction and are capable of infecting unfamiliar IoT devices. An experiment the company performed recently revealed significant challenges in bringing such an AI malware replicator to fruition, so the finding is necessarily tempered. Still, the results do raise concerns about the possibility of new forms of computer worms.

Anthropic further warned not only about the new potential malware, but also that it could be difficult to stop. In its blog post, it wrote that "a replicator like this would be challenging to shut down, since there's no centralized point to shut off—though it may be slow (with a doubling time of days). Unlike non-AI malware, it could also figure out unfamiliar devices on its own."

Smaller AI models require much less powerful hardware to run than do frontier models. Anthropic ran small open-weight models on real or simulated low-cost, off-brand Android TV boxes and other types of IoT hardware. Company researchers found that by using quantization to represent the models using fewer bits and splitting the workloads into "shards" running on each device, the models were able to establish inference, meaning that the model weights loaded and could generate output.

The lightweight Gemma4-26B-A4B model required just 15 boxes, each equipped with only 4GB of memory, to achieve inference. The Qwen3.5-9B was able to configure other LLMs to run on eight of nine hardware types. Unlike traditional malware, which must be written to run on specific hardware or software, the model was able to use its weights to make configurations on the fly that were specific to the devices it was tested against.

This finding was the starting point for further research that asked: Would it be possible for small models to create self-replicating infections that run themselves on IoT devices the way traditional IoT worms, like Mirai, install DDoS code and other payloads? Unlike Mirai, these AI worms could pose a much higher threat, since the models could tailor exploits and payloads dynamically, depending on the target. Once such an infection chain began, it might also be harder for defenders to stop it.

"Such an 'AI worm' could carry its model weights with it as it reproduces (or re-download them from a public hub), and then run inference directly on compromised hardware," Anthropic said. "Effectively, the weights would become part of the malware payload."

"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:

https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/openai-employee-fbi-arrest-recording-device-news/

The FBI arrested an OpenAI employee and charged him with planting a surveillance device in an executive conference room to record the company's plans for its artificial intelligence, the company and FBI confirmed on Tuesday.

The US Department of Justice identified the employee as 35-year-old Abdulrahman Alfozan, a Saudi Arabian citizen and legal permanent resident of the US, who joined OpenAI's product team in July 2025. He was fired and arrested on Oct. 9 on suspicion of violating US law by using "an electronic, mechanical, or other device to intercept oral communications." The charge comes with a possible five-year prison sentence and a $250,000 fine.

In a statement, Jay Clayton, director of national intelligence, said that the incident underscores the importance of US success in AI development as “a national security prerogative.”

The complaint, filed in the Northern District of California, says Alfozan allegedly placed a "thumb-sized development board with a detachable camera sensor, digital microphone and microSD storage." It was wrapped in toilet paper and stuck into a TV port. A second recording device was found in a bag Alfozan allegedly left in a printer room along with his wallet and ID.

The conference room where he allegedly planted the bug could be reserved only by executives and their assistants — Alfozan did not have access — and was frequently used to discuss proprietary research and hold meetings with government and industry officials. OpenAI said it has evidence Alfozan planned to place additional surveillance bugs to secretly record company meetings.

The ChatGPT maker says it discovered the first bug on Sept. 30 and alerted the FBI. During the 10 days between the discovery and arrest, the company says it took steps to contain the security risk. The company says it has not seen evidence that the safety of its products or customer data has been compromised.

"We take protecting our technology, data, and people seriously, and as a matter of national importance," OpenAI said in a statement.

"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:

https://www.quantamagazine.org/triplet-of-ghostly-galaxies-hints-at-what-dark-matter-is-and-isnt-20261014/

The lack of dark matter in galaxies DF2, DF9, and DF4 (clockwise from left) was a shock to scientists, who speculate that they formed after an ancient collision.

About 65 million light-years from Earth, three galaxies don't look quite right. They aren't whirlpools bursting with light, but pallid objects dimly illuminated by a smattering of stars. "They have this ghostly appearance," said Michael Keim, an astrophysicist at Yale University. And this isn't even the weirdest thing about them.

Dark matter is the invisible glue that keeps the largest structures in the cosmos together. It draws ordinary, visible matter toward it, allowing stars to form and keeping the stelliferous limbs of galaxies from flying off. "Almost all galaxies are dominated by dark matter," said Shyam Balaji, a theoretical physicist at King's College London.

But these three diffuse galaxies, known as DF2, DF4, and DF9, have left astronomers stunned. After using a suite of telescopes to estimate their masses — using the motions of their stars as a proxy — the researchers found that all three have little dark matter. Instead, a pittance of ordinary matter alone must have forged their small selection of stars. How could these rule-breaking galaxies have formed?

A paper published in June 2026 in The Astrophysical Journal offers a potential solution. Once upon a time, two regular galaxies collided. Their ordinary matter — their gas and dust — swirled about and got clumped up. But the dark matter passed right through and continued on, like a specter passing through a wall. The cosmic pileup left behind three new galaxies, each bereft of dark matter, each left to struggle to form a new batch of stars.

It's a convincing explanation for many experts — one that, crucially, may tell us something about the mystery of dark matter.

Is there a way of evolving the galaxies without dark matter in the first place? Our understanding says no.

Some scientists have suggested that dark matter, which has yet to be directly detected, may not exist. Instead, they propose that a tweak to our understanding of the gravitational force might explain various features of the universe.

These bizarre galaxies pour cold water on that idea. "What this is showing is that dark matter is ... not just a modification of gravity," said Keim, who is an author of the new study. If you segregate ordinary matter from dark matter, you'd expect that the dark matter–lacking galaxies would struggle to form stars — and that's what DF2, DF4, and DF9 show.

That suggests, as many have suspected for some time, that dark matter is a physical thing. "The absence of dark matter is, in a way, some evidence of dark matter, which is ironic," Balaji said.

What, exactly, is dark matter? Ever since it was formally proposed by the astronomer Fritz Zwicky in the 1930s — and built upon in the 1970s by the astronomer Vera Rubin — cosmologists and astrophysicists have been putting forward their best candidates. Could it be a stealthy type of neutrino? Might it be so-called weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs? Some have even opined that it could be primordial black holes as small as individual atoms and as old as the universe itself.

"We don't know which dark matter candidate is the right one," said Daniel Whiteson, a particle physicist at the University of California, Irvine. Whatever it is, it has yet to be detected. But "there's a lot of independent lines of evidence that dark matter is matter."

In 2018, scientists used observations from the Keck Observatory in Hawai'i to estimate the mass of galaxy DF2. They discovered that it contained 400 times less dark matter than expected.

Dark matter, which makes up 27% of the universe — and 85% of all matter —interacts with gravity. If it were down to the gravitational pull of ordinary matter alone, stars on the edges of rapidly spinning galaxies would escape into space. Ordinary matter alone would struggle to clump together tightly enough to form stars. Dark matter also seems to warp space itself, bending light around objects in a process known as gravitational lensing.

"You wouldn't get galaxies without dark matter," said Chamkaur Ghag, a physicist at University College London. "Is there a way of evolving the galaxies without dark matter in the first place? Our understanding says no."

So when DF2 was discovered in 2018, astronomers didn't quite know what to make of it. The galaxy is roughly the same size as the Milky Way, but with 200 times fewer stars, it's considerably dimmer. Suspicious, scientists used the Keck Observatory in Hawai'i to track the motions of those stars to estimate its total mass. They discovered that, even for such a star-deficient galaxy, it was lightweight: It seemed to contain, at most, 400 times less dark matter than they would expect, making DF2 the first dark matter–deficient galaxy ever spotted.

In 2019, they observed DF4, another phantom galaxy with a dearth of dark matter. And in 2026, scientists announced that a third, DF9, had joined the club. It contains the mass of roughly 100 million suns, which is consistent with having only ordinary matter. If it were also packed with dark matter, it would be 100 times more massive.

That all three gossamer galaxies existed along a line, as neighbors, didn't escape the attention of astrophysicists, who began to coalesce around an origin story.

"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:

https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/10/13/123456-password-linked-to-denmark-data-breach-affecting-88m-people/5302726

A person claiming responsibility for the breach of Denmark's Central Register of Persons (CPR) says they gained access through an IT company's account protected by the password "123456."

The person told Danish news outlet Politiken  [Website in Danish. --Ed] they had no intention of selling or leaking the data. The newspaper reported that at least three company accounts, including an administrator account, used the same password.

Denmark's CPR administration confirmed a breach affecting the information belonging to 8.8 million people on October 5, adding that a Danish company's legal access to the CPR system was abused.

It did not name Funen-based Pays ApS as the company in question, but managing director Sophie Laursen confirmed on October 9 that it's access had been exploited.

Pays' website has been taken offline, and the business has not responded to The Register's request for more information about the password claims.

Pays had authorized access to the CPR system to provide services such as validating business customers' records.

The Danish government says information relating to 8.8 million people was accessed. The register contains approximately 11 million records, including those of deceased people and people who have moved abroad. The government did not respond to questions about the alleged password failings.

According to documents obtained by broadcaster TV 2 [Website in Danish. --Ed], the attacker gained access to the CPR system on September 10 and ran the 14 million automated searches between then and September 20.

The intrusion was detected on October 2, 12 days after the last reported searches.

Mikkel Leihardt, director of the government's higher education and science ministry, told reporters at a press conference that the attack was discovered after a department staffer picked up an invoice indicating unusually high activity from Pays.

The Danish data protection authority, Datatilsynet, was notified on October 4, and the government disclosed the attack the following day.

Original Submission

"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:

https://www.engadget.com/2285013/nasa-perseverance-rover-breaks-record-for-off-world-driving-distance/

NASA's Perseverance Mars rover just broke the record for the farthest distance traveled by any vehicle on another world, the space agency announced. The six-wheeled, nuclear-powered buggy has now traveled 28.10 miles (45.22 km) as of October 11th, besting NASA's Opportunity rover that rolled 28.06 miles (45.16 km) across the red planet's surface. Perseverance managed the feet in just five and a half years, compared to nearly 15 for the plucky Opportunity.

Last we checked with Perseverance, it was officially a marathon finisher with 26.2 miles under its pock-marked metal wheels. While the 28.1 miles it's covered to date may not seem like much, it's pretty good considering the vehicle's maximum speed is a glacial 0.1 mph. It's also impressive considering the challenging terrain it's been tasked to transit, as NASA showed in the video below.

The 2,260 pound rover attained the milestone traveling to a region called Idubi, where it will investigate a feature called "Lac de Charmes" with some of the oldest terrain ever explored in our solar system. "The rocks and terrain of Lac de Charmes are so ancient that their Earthly equivalents have long since been erased by erosion and plate tectonics (Mars doesn't have tectonic plates), and Idubi is where the science team hopes to find traces of ancient hydrothermal systems," NASA explained.

Perseverance's longevity can be chalked up in part to smart navigation decisions powered by its autonomous AutoNav system. Using that, the rover can image terrain and find hazards in real time while driving automatically between waypoints chosen by its planners. By processing 600,000 measurement points with each glance, it has been able to travel more than 90 percent of its total distance autonomously.

Thanks to a recent software update, Perseverance can now roll more and steer less to save wear on parts, while checking its own position against orbital maps in mid-drive. Next, the team wants to overcome camera glare issues from sunlight that impede its vision, so the rover can work longer days.

Perseverance may have out-driven Opportunity, but the Curiosity rover is still exploring Mars as well and has traveled 38.15 km (23.7 miles) to date. The next most traveled US vehicles are the manned rovers from the Apollo 16, 17 and 18 missions — of those, Apollo 17 rover went the farthest at 35.74 km (22.21 miles).

Original Submission

"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:

https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/2026/10/13/european-datacenter-boom-threatens-higher-energy-bills-unless-governments-intervene/5302583

Datacenters are forecast to consume a growing share of Europe's electricity by 2035, potentially pushing up consumer prices and prompting governments to impose price caps or restrictions on bit barns, according to Moody's.

The credit rating agency is keeping tabs on the financial implications for datacenter operators and electricity networks.

It predicts that while power consumption by server farms is relatively modest today, these facilities are set to become major drivers of electricity demand by 2035, requiring utilities and network operators to invest in generation and grid capacity.

Massive compute sheds still accounted for "a low single-digit share" of electricity in most of the largest European markets in 2025, typically about 2.5 percent. But some of the major markets such as the UK and France are set to see accelerating growth in the number and size of facilities that could substantially increase their share of electricity consumption.

The report estimates datacenters will account for at least 5.7 percent of electricity demand in France and the UK by 2035, but could be as high as 17 percent for the Netherlands and 30 percent for Ireland. The latter country is regarded as an outlier, however, as datacenters already made up 23 percent of Ireland's electricity consumption in 2025 – up from just 5 percent in 2015.

In addition, the EU has set out the goal of more than tripling the bloc's datacenter capacity within five to seven years, and wants to diversify where such projects are sited beyond the primary markets such as Germany, Ireland, France, and the Netherlands to secondary markets in the Nordics and southern Europe.

This means more power generation will be needed, plus expansion of the grid networks to carry the extra energy to where it is required. Moody's says this has the potential to put pressure on grid operators' balance sheets in the short term, compounded by the lag in recovering higher capital spending under many European regulatory regimes.

This pressure is more pronounced for transmission networks than distribution networks because datacenter operators are required to fund only the cost of the connection to the grid, the report by Moody's notes.

It highlights some novel approaches adopted by utilities, such as repurposing old fossil-fuel plant sites for server farm projects because of their existing grid connections – as is said to be the case with at least one of the UK government's AI Growth Zones – and partnering with developers to build new facilities and supply them with power.

The cost of expanding power grids, together with supply-demand imbalances, is set to push energy prices higher, Moody's forecasts. Historically, this has prompted political measures to limit the financial burden borne by customers, it says.

Some governments are already considering tax cuts and additional subsidies for end users, while a growing number of transmission networks are starting to demand financial guarantees to screen out speculative or duplicative projects. The UK government is mulling over this measure, as we reported during the summer.

Looking ahead, intervention could become more intrusive through measures such as electricity price caps, additional taxes, or levies.

Moody's cites Ireland as an example, where the Commission for Regulation of Utilities (CRU) replaced a moratorium on new datacenter grid connections with a framework under which operators applying for a grid connection rated at 10 MVA or more must provide matching power generation or storage capacity on-site or nearby, and meet at least 80 percent of their annual electricity demand through additional renewable projects in Ireland.

In America, President Trump brought in a Ratepayer Protection Pledge to try to defuse growing voter unhappiness at datacenters and their effects on energy bills. The pledge now covers utility companies, bit barn developers, and state governments with a pinky promise that citizens' bills won't rise to pay for all the extra energy and grid infrastructure needed.

Moody's expects more European governments to follow the US and Ireland in intervening over datacenter power demand if expansion continues on its current trajectory.

Original Submission

"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:

https://www.engadget.com/2285001/scientists-find-evidence-second-generation-planet-dying-star/

Way back in 1999, NASA's Hubble telescope gathered data from a white dwarf star codenamed HS 0209+0832 with 100 chemical features that couldn't be identified. Now, a team of scientists led by astronomers from the University of Warwick has published a paper in Nature, revealing that those chemical features indicate that the white dwarf hosts a second-generation planet.

A white dwarf is what remains of a star like our sun following its red giant phase, wherein it runs out of hydrogen and expands into a massive fireball that's expected to eat up nearby planets, if there are any. It's the dense core left behind after it's done burning up its nuclear fuel and shedding its outer layers.

The planets in our solar system, including the Earth, are all first-generation planets. That means they formed using materials from the birth of the sun. Second-generation planets form from the materials a dying star casts off. They are very, very rare and are mostly suspected to exist around pulsars, which are the highly magnetic and rapidly spinning remnants of dead neutron stars. White dwarfs are more common than pulsars, and Jamie Williams, the lead author of the study, said finding a second-generation planet around one "was completely unexpected."

Williams found evidence of the planet by looking at Hubble's decades-old observations and comparing them to an updated chemical database. They found that the unidentified chemical features matched an element called niobium, which "can only be synthesized in the exotic conditions that briefly emerge inside dying stars." The niobium levels in the system were 1,000 times higher than our sun's, and that amount points to the formation of a planet from the dying star's materials.

The scientists said that the white dwarf is still extremely hot and is still blasting the planet with enough heat to strip out its outer layers. But they believe the planet will stay and that it will remain in the white dwarf's habitable zone for millions of years. According to the European Research Council, which funded the study, HS 0209+0832 would be the first white dwarf found to host a second-generation planet if the team's findings are confirmed.

Original Submission

"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:

https://www.engadget.com/2283487/microsoft-president-ai-less-regulated-than-a-carton-of-milk/

Milk can't hack companies and governments like AI definitely can, but it's still subject to more regulation, Microsoft president Brad Smith told ITV on Friday [Video not reviewed. --Ed] . "Right now, your washing machine is subject to more safety rules than AI," Smith said in the interview. "Every carton of milk that you see in the grocery store is subject to safety rules and inspection."

Major US AI giants like Anthropic, OpenAI and Google's DeepMind have spoken in favor of an AI development slowdown. However, US President Donald Trump has said that, if anything, the US AI industry needs to accelerate to stay ahead of China.

Rather than government, Trump would prefer that AI companies regulate themselves. At his so-called Super Intelligence summit, AI bosses including Google Sundar Pichai, Anthropic's Dario Amodei, Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI President Greg Brockman, Elon Musk and NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang signed a pact with several key tenets. Those include implementing self-regulation, safeguards to keep pioneer models from going rogue and using "independent auditors" to assess models.

Critics were unimpressed, though, with one telling the BBC that it allows firms to "define what counts as safety" and another saying that "the accord should be ignored for the distraction it is."

Microsoft's Smith thinks the lack of US action gives the UK a unique opening to lead in terms of regulating AI. "In Washington DC, people don't look at the UK and they don't look at London the way they look at Brussels — that's a strength," he said. "I hope that's the role we can play as a company. I hope that's the role the UK can play as a country. [W]hen you look at models that are so powerful that they're putting the world's cybersecurity at risk, I would say: the moment has arrived."

Original Submission

hubie writes:

New technology absorbs moisture from the air and turns it into electricity:

More than 6 million U.S. homes have solar panels on their roofs — but what if you could generate power inside your house, too?

Researchers from Binghamton University have developed a new type of wallpaper that turns moisture in the room into small amounts of electric current, and they hope to improve the technology for greater power yields.

[...] The wallpaper uses tiny moist-electric generators (MEGs) that absorb water molecules from the air. The absorbed moisture promotes the dissociation and movement of ions within the material, creating an ion-concentration gradient. This charge separation establishes a voltage between the two sides of the device, allowing electrical energy to be generated.

The MEGs don't need to compete with high-energy power sources. Instead, they can serve as dedicated power supplies for low-energy electronics like environmental sensors, wireless communications modules, smart-building interfaces, and other devices for the growing "Internet of Things" collecting data.

"All previous moist electric-generator devices are for outdoor humidity, because there is a lot of moisture out there that is an excellent energy resource," Choi said. "The problem is that it generates such small amounts of power, and the outdoor environment is not stable because of extreme sunlight or weather. The good thing about an indoor environment is that it maintains a very constant humidity between 30 and 60 percent, and the occupants' activities like respiration, cooking, and bathing generate additional moisture."

[...] To address these limitations, the researchers drew on Choi's pioneering work in papertronics to develop a new MEG architecture resembling a microchip on a circuit board. Glycerol at the edges captures moisture from the air, while a raised polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP) structure in the center, patterned with a wax layer, controls moisture release and evaporation. This spatial design directs moisture transport from the absorption region toward the evaporation region, maintaining a more controlled gradient for continuous power generation.

"It was not easy to integrate three different areas into one paper, but I want it all printable so that we can make it for mass production and at a larger scale," Choi said.

Because homeowners wouldn't want to see a bunch of wires, a second key design feature meant putting all the wiring for MEGs on the back of the wallpaper. The researchers connected the generators in series and in parallel to see which setup produced the most power, but both methods produced similar results.

For now, Choi sees the MEG arrays as a way to power small devices such as environmental sensors or wireless keyboards while also regulating a room's humidity.

Journal Reference: Guangya Yuan, Yang Gao, Seokheun Choi, Moist-Electric Wallpaper With Engineered Unidirectional Moisture Transport for Indoor Energy Harvesting and Humidity Management, First published: 16 September 2026 https://doi.org/10.1002/aenm.71603

Original Submission

"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:

https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/10/12/ukrainian-drone-strikes-on-yandex-datacenters-knock-cloud-and-payments-offline/5302577

Yandex engineers are working to restore services after Ukraine launched drone strikes on three of its five Russian datacenters.

The strikes began overnight on October 7-8, "seriously damaging" Yandex's Sasovo datacenter and leading to a total shutdown. Ukrainian drones struck again on the morning of October 9, targeting the company's Kaluga datacenter, resulting in part of its infrastructure being taken offline.

Dima Pirogov, head of Yandex's fintech division, confirmed via Telegram on Sunday morning that a third strike targeted the company's Vladimir site, which supports Yandex Pay. A day later, services remain offline, although Pirogov said users' money is safe.

"I'm very sorry I can't tell you yet that everything is working again," the exec wrote. "The team continues to restore services and is checking every step. When it comes to your money, it's important to us not just to restore Yandex Pay as quickly as possible, but also to ensure that everything is working reliably.

"I understand that you're not waiting for words, but for access to your money. And I understand how hard it is to wait when you can't use it. We can't give you a precise timeline for the restoration yet, but we promise: we won't stop until the service is back online."

Yandex Pay is the company's digital payments service. Users can make online and in-store purchases, pay in installments, and split bills with friends and family.

It's also integrated into online shopping experiences. It is comparable to Apple Pay or Google Pay, while Yandex more broadly offers services similar to Google's.

Yandex said engineers are prioritizing the most-used services, and reported that access to the Alice AI assistant, Mail, Maps, Search, and Taxi is being restored, but other features remain offline.

The company's status page lists widespread outages across Yandex Cloud, its public cloud platform, following the attacks.

Updates from the maintenance team describe partial availability despite the outage indicators. They suggest that some customers may be able to access certain features, such as Yandex Cloud Console and API, but availability remains inconsistent across the platform.

In its most recent update, the company said: "The Yandex Cloud platform is still operating in a limited mode. Our specialists continue restoration work around the clock. The technical support team receives an increased number of requests, so the response time can be increased.

"Our recommendations continue to be relevant. We recommend using alternative sites for hosting and reserving resources."

hubie writes:

If you're 18, getting a bit more sleep could matter more than you think:

"Go to bed!" — it's a phrase most teenagers have heard countless times. For many young people, bedtime is easily pushed aside in favour of Netflix, gaming or just another scroll on their phone. Most already know that sleep is important for concentration, mood and learning. Now, there's new evidence that it matters for metabolic health too.

A new study from the University of Copenhagen and the COPSAC research unit at Herlev and Gentofte Hospital shows that longer sleep is associated with fewer fluctuations in blood sugar – even among healthy 18-year-olds.

Large swings in blood sugar can increase inflammation and place strain on the metabolism, potentially contributing over time to conditions such as obesity and diabetes.

The link between sleep and metabolic diseases is not new. However, most previous studies have focused on middle-aged adults or individuals at increased risk of diabetes.

"For most 18-year-olds, diabetes feels like something far off in the future. We've known very little about what blood sugar variability means for this age group," says senior author Professor Morten Arendt Rasmussen of the Department of Food Science at the University of Copenhagen and COPSAC. "But here we're seeing similar patterns even in completely healthy young adults."

[...] The results were clear: on days following longer sleep, participants had more stable blood sugar and fewer extreme spikes.

While the researchers had expected to find this link, they were surprised to discover that the relationship also worked in the opposite direction:

"The more stable participants' blood sugar was during the day, the longer they slept the following night," says first author and postdoctoral researcher David Horner from COPSAC at Herlev and Gentofte Hospital and the University of Copenhagen. "So this appears to be a two-way relationship — and that's new."

The study also found that more sleep was linked to slightly higher blood sugar levels during the morning and early part of the day — the opposite of what researchers had anticipated.

"However, that may actually be beneficial. Slightly higher blood sugar early in the day may help curb sugar cravings and thereby contribute to more stable blood sugar overall," says Morten Arendt Rasmussen.

One possible explanation lies in how the body prepares to wake up. The researchers observed that blood sugar levels typically rose in the hours before waking — with a steeper increase after longer sleep.

"This may reflect the body getting ready for the day," says Horner. "For example, the natural morning rise in the stress hormone cortisol can affect blood sugar around waking. Our findings suggest that the transition from sleep to wakefulness may be an important window for metabolism."

[...] "If future studies confirm our findings, sleep could become an even more important factor in preventing disease and promoting health among young people. And taking action doesn't require a new diet or an expensive gym membership – it really just comes down to going to bed," says Morten Arendt Rasmussen.

Journal Reference: David Horner, Kristin Evensen, Zhi Ye, et al., Night-to-night sleep duration and wake-anchored glycemia: associations with continuous glucose monitoring in free-living adolescents, Sleep, 2026;, zsag158, https://doi.org/10.1093/sleep/zsag158

Original Submission

"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:

https://www.theregister.com/networks/2026/10/13/intel-optimizes-ipv6-networking-into-nothingness-say-users/5302622

If you're encountering some odd IPv6 networking issues, the culprit might be the Intel Connectivity Performance Suite (ICPS), although the chipmaker has kept quiet about the problem.

A Samsung Galaxy Book owner contacted The Register about some decidedly odd networking behavior that they eventually traced to unwanted ICPS optimizations. And by "optimization", we mean "borked networking."

For our reader, the problem showed up in OneDrive and OneNote. Notebooks were showing as empty, even though they were reported as "Up to date" according to the software. Microsoft couldn't get to the bottom of it.

A bit of sleuthing by our reader revealed that something was borking the IPv6 packet. Removing Samsung's ICPS build (40.25.926.0) and installing the generic release (50.26.623.243) fixed the problem.

Our reader told us, "From the user's side it looks like random 'connection reset' errors on all kinds of sites, plus OneNote saying 'We can't get to your notebooks right now.'

"IPv4 is unaffected, which is why the web version and my phone kept working and nobody could figure out what was going on."

It isn't only Samsung and our reader affected. Intel's own Community forums shows other users encountering the same glitch. An ASUS user put together an exhaustive report on the issue (IPv6 connection woes while IPv4 worked well). In this instance, ICPS version 40.25.725.165 was in use, and the problem went away following uninstallation. The user asked whether there was an official way to opt out of ICPS permanently, and the Intel Customer Support Technician responded:

"Good news!... We can confirm that the Wireless driver and ICPS are available as separate standalone driver packages."

So in that particular instance, ditching ICPS would make no difference. Which, of course, raises another question – in this example (where the Intel BE201 Wi-Fi adaptor is present), why is it even there?

The answer: "It is often bundled with OEM systems as an added value software to enhance the overall wireless experience."

You might see "enhance," but for users affected by IPv6 problems, it's more like "break."

The issue is insidious, and broken ICPS builds are still floating around, ready to catch users off guard. According to our reader, Microsoft's own Update Catalog will hand out the broken drivers, which effectively break Microsoft 365 services on certain hardware.

For the ASUS user, the issue affected Chrome, Edge, and Windows curl.exe. "Approximately 40–60 percent of IPv6 HTTPS connections to an AWS CloudFront distribution were reset. IPv4 was completely stable."

According to our reader, "Intel created the bug, then fixed it quietly." Updating to the later, generic version appears to fix things. However, according to the Intel technician, as of the July post, "we do not have a confirmed public advisory for this specific behavior."

We asked Intel and Microsoft for comment, but neither responded. However, judging by forum comments, the issue has caught out plenty of users.

As such, if you find yourself with some weird networking issues with IPv6 and are using ICPS (as many will be), it might be worthwhile checking out the generic rather than OEM version of the software or removing it altogether to see if the problem goes away.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

New Bayesian model can combine conflicting rankings, measure uncertainty and reveal what drives them:

Who, really, is the best player in baseball?

Ask five sports media outlets and you may get five different answers. Rankings can vary dramatically from one source to another, change from year to year and leave out different players altogether, making it difficult to determine where there is genuine consensus and where opinions diverge.

Now, Rice University statisticians, in collaboration with Cornell University, have developed a new method designed to find clearer answers in messy rankings data. The research was recently published in the Journal of Quantitative Analysis of Sports.

The approach, called Bayesian Multivariate Rank Regression, or BMRR, combines rankings from multiple sources and across multiple time points while accounting for disagreements among the rankers, incomplete lists and factors that might influence the rankings. And just as importantly, the method measures just how certain or uncertain the resulting consensus is.

"Rankings look simple on the surface, but statistically they're actually very complicated," said Rose Graves, a doctoral student studying statistics at Rice and the study's corresponding author. "Two experts may rank different numbers of items, disagree about the order or even change their opinions over time. We wanted to create a way to bring all of that information together while accounting for uncertainty."

For their real-world test case, the researchers turned to one of the most closely scrutinized ranking systems in sports: annual lists of Major League Baseball's best players. They analyzed preseason rankings published by ESPN, CBS, Bleacher Report, Yahoo Sports and MLB from 2021 through 2024. Each outlet ranked its top 100 players, but the lists varied in both who was included and where players were ranked. To create a consistent pool for comparison, the researchers focused on 55 players who appeared in at least one outlet's rankings in each of the four years.

Those differences illustrate exactly what makes ranking data difficult to analyze. Simply averaging a player's position across several lists can mask meaningful information, especially when a player is omitted from one list altogether or when assessments shift substantially from year to year.

BMRR instead treats the rankings as evidence about an underlying value and uses a hierarchical Bayesian framework to combine that evidence. The model can incorporate incomplete rankings and ties, borrow information across years and estimate how closely each source aligns with the overall consensus. Unlike a single definitive list, the result also includes a measure of uncertainty, showing when the data strongly favor one player and when two players are effectively too close to separate.

[...] "Rather than asking only who ranks first, this framework lets us ask how confident we are in that conclusion, why someone may be ranked highly and how much agreement actually exists among the people doing the ranking," said Marina Vannucci, the Noah Harding Professor of Statistics at Rice and one of the authors of the paper. "That kind of uncertainty quantification can be extremely important when rankings are being used to inform decisions."

[...] While MLB provided a compelling proving ground, the researchers designed BMRR for a much broader problem.

Rankings appear almost everywhere: Search engines order websites, voters rank candidates, experts prioritize intelligence information and clinicians may rank treatment preferences. Existing statistical approaches often struggle when different raters evaluate different items, when rankings are repeated across multiple criteria or points in time or when analysts want to incorporate additional information about what is being ranked.

"The biggest challenges when working with ranking data are remarkably similar across different fields and industries," said Dan Kowal, a previous Rice statistics faculty member now at Cornell University and second author on the paper. "We believe that BMRR can be impactful in many of these areas beyond Major League Baseball."

The authors encourage broader application of their method and have made the code for BMRR available on GitHub, so other statisticians can apply this method to their own data.

"Wherever multiple sources disagree about what belongs at the top, our framework offers a way to identify a consensus while measuring how confident that consensus should be," Graves added.

Journal Reference: https://doi.org/10.1515/jqas-2026-0012

Original Submission

"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:

https://www.siliconrepublic.com/enterprise/japan-cybersecurity-cybersecurity-ai-millions-emergency

Government sites across Europe have also been affected in attempted data breaches in recent months.

Japan’s financial regulator has asked banks to protect themselves against fraud after a series of cyberattacks rattled the country in recent years.

In a press conference last Friday (9 October), the country’s Ministry for Finance said that banks should implement appropriate verification mechanisms when new bank accounts are opened, including by mandating ID cards with chips.

“In recent years, there have been a series of unauthorised access incidents in various industries, resulting in numerous cyber incidents in which customer information, including images of identity verification documents, has been leaked,” the country’s finance minister Satsuki Katayama said in the press conference. The financial services agency said it would issue a warning to banks.

Cyberattacks have affected a range of public and private institutions in the country, including from rail operators, car manufacturers, karaoke chains and even the police.

Late last month, Times Car Rental, a popular Japanese car-sharing service announced that a data breach affected some 6.6m accounts. Lawson, a convenience store chain, reported last week that 2.15m customer records were illegally accessed in the hack, with names, emails and credit card details potential leaked in the incident.

Between January and June this year, Japan saw a total of 123 recorded cases of ransomware attacks.

Other official bodies, including the National Cyber ​​Security Office has also issued a warning to businesses asking them to promptly consider further security measures, including those of their contractors, to quickly address vulnerabilities and strengthen authentication functions. The Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications also issued a similar warning to businesses and other organisations under its jurisdiction.

In an emergency meeting convened last Friday, the head of the National Cybersecurity Strategy Headquarters and former Digital Minister Masaaki Taira called the situation a “state of emergency in [the] cyberspace”.

Japan isn’t alone in facing a barrage of cyberattacks in recent years. Across Europe, a number of Government websites have been targeted in attacks, including Spain, Norway, Germany and the European Commission.

Last week, the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that it bad been the target of a recent cyberattack, while Danish authorities alerted the public to an “extremely serious” cyber incident after hackers secured access to the personal information of around 8.8m people.

Original Submission