Field notes from the edge.
What our engineers learned this week. Hands-on technical deep-dives, postmortems, and strategy frameworks.
AILatest GitHub outage squeezes Actions, Pages to death
GitHub experienced another major outage affecting its Actions automation platform and Pages hosting service, with workflow runs failing and API errors reported. This incident marks the latest in a troubling pattern of reliability issues, with over 75 incidents logged across April through July 2024. Despite Microsoft-owned GitHub's April apology and June promises of structural improvements to addre
AIHumans in the loop miss a third of dangerous AI coding agent requests
A browser-based game testing human oversight of AI coding agents reveals that users approve approximately one-third of malicious requests, highlighting significant security risks in human-in-the-loop systems. The research, based on over 40,000 game runs, demonstrates that approval fatigue leads to sloppy decision-making, with users approving 93% of permission prompts in real-world scenarios. Exper
AIUK mulls making employers ask before installing bossware
The UK government is consulting on new regulations that would require employers to consult workers before deploying workplace monitoring technologies, including AI-powered productivity tools, keystroke logging, and biometric surveillance. The proposed rules, part of broader labor reforms, could range from non-statutory guidance to mandatory consultation with trade unions, as workplace surveillance
AIUpdate Teams mobile app by October or lose your calendar
Microsoft has accelerated the deadline for Teams mobile app updates to end of September 2024, after which older versions will lose calendar access on iOS and Android. The change is tied to Microsoft's broader plan to disable Exchange Web Services (EWS) in Exchange Online beginning October 1, 2026, with complete retirement by April 2027. Administrators managing enterprise devices must ensure timely
AITechie lured out of retirement to support software only he remembered
A retired IT professional was recruited by his former employer's acquirer to restore legacy application data for a German customer facing a tax audit. The retiree successfully recovered 20-year-old archived documents using obsolete print server software he alone remembered how to operate, ultimately donating his substantial consulting fees to his care home to avoid tax complications.
AIOpen source project fools AI scrapers with poisoned font
ShieldFont is an open-source project that uses modified OpenType font technology to poison AI training data by substituting words in raw HTML while displaying correct text to human readers. The font leverages extended glyph substitution (GSUB) tables to swap approximately 25% of content words with grammatically similar alternatives, making scraped content appear sensible but incorrect. While not f
AIMicrosoft's cloud brings rain of revenue but modest M365 AI revenue harvest
Microsoft reported $90 billion in quarterly revenue (up 18% YoY) driven by strong cloud and AI performance, with Azure revenue growing 43% and Microsoft Cloud reaching $59.3 billion. While Microsoft 365 Copilot reached 30 million paid seats—representing just 6.7% of its 450 million commercial customers—the company's aggressive $41 billion quarterly capital expenditure (up 70% YoY) was offset by st
AIMicrosoft faces competition probe over Copilot subscription price hike
The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is investigating Microsoft over potential consumer protection violations related to its January 2025 price increase for Microsoft 365 subscriptions. The probe focuses on whether Microsoft adequately informed customers about their options when it automatically moved them to a more expensive Copilot-enabled tier, requiring active opt-out to a cheaper
AIPerplexity's tokenmaxxing Model Council gives you multiple bot perspectives
Perplexity has expanded its Model Council feature to its Computer platform, allowing users to configure multi-model queries using 2-8 AI models that work independently before synthesizing their conclusions. The enhanced service, available across multiple pricing tiers, uses usage-based billing where credits range from less than a penny for simple queries to potentially significant costs for comple
AICollege prof hides prompt to catch AI cheaters, finds human nature is pretty much as we thought
A college professor at Alcorn State University embedded hidden white text in an essay prompt instructing AI tools to insert the word 'Madagascar' nonsensically, catching 32 of 35 students using AI to complete assignments without proofreading. The incident highlights growing concerns about AI's impact on academic integrity and critical thinking skills, with research showing reduced brain activity a
Leading AI models (even Grok) are all a bunch of leftist punks
Capitalism may be driving the AI boom, but the LLMs themselves have different economic and social views than many of the companies that built them. Leading AI models subjected to the Political Compass quiz overwhelmingly landed in the libertarian-left quadrant - even "MechaHitler," aka Grok, managed it in half its runs. A self-described “small research lab” working on AI detect
Microsoft seeks Supreme Court lifeline in pre-owned license battle
Still smarting from Court of Appeal loss earlier in July, Microsoft has secured an extended stay in the ValueLicensing saga as it seeks the Supreme Court's blessing for one more roll of the dice. The UK's Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT) ruled in 2025 that the resale and subdivision of Microsoft on-premise software licenses did not infringe the US corporations 's copyright. Mi
Manager showed off his DOS prowess – with a command that wiped data
WHO, ME? Mistakes happen, and when readers of The Register make them, we like to share those tales of woe in a Monday column we call "Who, Me?" It's our guide on how not to get ahead in the modern workplace. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as Clay, who in the 1980s was the most junior member of the management team on a Swedish construction site. "We had two site enginee
Support newbie figured out how to avoid all-nighters, and his colleagues hated him for it
ON CALL Welcome to another installment of On Call, The Register's Friday column in which we share readers' tales of tech support jobs that go south, pear-shaped, or just badly. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Lionel" who told us that in the 1990s he worked for an outfit that operated what he described as "big IBM computer centers running overnight COBOL batch proces
OpenAI won't let some customers export their chats, but this tool will
ChatGPT Business and Enterprise users cannot export workspace chats through OpenAI's standard data export option, but a new free tool offers an unofficial way to retrieve their accessible chat records. Scrapemychats, from freelance journalist Conrad Quilty-Harper, makes it possible for those ChatGPT subscribers to retain a copy of their chat sessions before leaving for other AI
IBM insists AI didn't kill software deals, just delayed them
IBM is asking investors to view calendar Q2's software wobble as merely a temporary AI-induced panic attack, insisting the delayed deals that triggered one of its steepest stock slides in years are already starting to return. Just over a week after its preliminary results sent stock tumbling, Big Blue devoted much of its earnings call to arguing that nothing fundamental had cha
Firefox 153 contains itself while Thunderbird 153 fixes almost everything
Mozilla released Firefox 153 on Tuesday, closely followed by MZLA with Thunderbird 153 – codenamed "Meadow" for reasons that remain obscure for now. Firefox 153 is Mozilla's new Extended Support Release (ESR), so it will receive security updates until some time after the next ESR in mid-2027. We covered the highlights of what's new in this version last week. Firefox 153 will be
GNOME can look like Windows – and Flashback can do it without extensions
A new GNOME extension called Simple-taskbar does a pretty good job of giving GNOME 50 a taskbar and start menu very much like the ones from Windows 11. It's so new that it's still not listed on the GNOME Extensions website – at the time of writing, it's still under review. We built it and installed it, and it works. This single extension merges GNOME's built-in panel (across th
Redmond's reaper cometh: October 2026 set to bury a graveyard of Microsoft products
October 2026 is shaping up to be a busy month for administrators as it heralds the end of several big products, along with the retirement of components that could mean sleepless nights for the ill-prepared. After the demise of Windows 10 in October 2025, sysadmins might have hoped for some respite from Microsoft's ax, but 2026 will see the demise of more beasts. First, there's