The operators built a malicious loop that they called “Skynet mode” that would scan for targets, infect them, deploy miners, and reinfect hosts. In total, the humans designed the AI agent to run unattended for up to 100,000 steps. theregister.com/security/2026/…

Have any Virgin Media customers out there been directly contacted by the company about it ditching its email service? It announced this at the start of September.

One of the most frequently asked questions of Linux folks is "what's the best lightweight distro for an old PC?" The Reg FOSS desk's current answer is Raspberry Pi Desktop. theregister.com/os-platforms/2…

OpenAI restricts internet access during frontier-model training as Anthropic confronts AI safety failures. Keeping AI under control is proving harder than promised.

More here: theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026…
theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026…

Stop burning $165K on AI rewrites; Jac is meant to "gobble up" your polyglot stack theregister.com/devops/2026/10…

PHP2Shell chaos, round three: Another PHP remote code execution flaw has surfaced.

More here: theregister.com/security/2026/…

theregister.com/security/2026/…

As OpenAI's AI agents were compromising Hugging Face systems, its own watchdog had blind spots.
Red-teamers found serious monitoring gaps and potential bypasses.

More here: theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026…

theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026…

A dozen LLMs were prompted for their most controversial take on humanity, and all took at least one swipe at our herd mentality.
Turns out the machines aren't impressed.

More here: theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026…
theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026…

Fancy a version of Arch that can you can use without installing? You can boot SparkyOS and run it on any x86-64 UEFI computer, entirely from a USB key, without touching the hard disk at all.
More here: theregister.com/os-platforms/2…

Microsoft ended support for Publisher this month, but users with orphaned documents still have options.

More here: theregister.com/applications/2…

Musk pooh-poohs idea that circa 22 launches might be needed to support a landing by the Human Landing System variant of Starship on the Moon, claims it will take 6-8.

More here: theregister.com/science/2026/1…

Linus Torvalds is using AI to help write Linux kernel code, and some people are unhappy about it

More here: theregister.com/columnists/202…

It's Friday and #BOFH has come out to play
More here: theregister.com/bofh/2026/10/2…

Britain is threatening subsea cable saboteurs with up to 14 years in prison and unlimited fines, having apparently decided that Victorian-era laws aren't quite up to the job of keeping Russian submarines away from critical infrastructure. More here: theregister.com/networks/2026/…

You can'tttt stooooop THE CLAW! Unless you're a recalcitrant piece of Android software theregister.com/offbeat/2026/1…

The Agentic AI Foundation has been given stewardship of four more AI projects – all with the goal of broadening the set of vendor-neutral tools for making AI agents. More here: theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026…

We love the smell of scorched PCB in the morning: Read on here for this week's On Call column at the Register. Yep, On Call means it's Friday! theregister.com/personal-tech/…

Even ASLR on an x86-64 server cannot stop the PHP2Shell vulnerability, claim researchers

More here: theregister.com/security/2026/…

AI-designed viruses have reached a human patient in a claimed first. The target? Antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Did the treatment work? The company isn't saying.

More here:theregister.com/science/2026/1…
theregister.com/science/2026/1…

Poisoned LLMs can make robots go rogue, from cutting a model hand to plotting to cook a cat in a simulation. Binghamton researchers exposed the backdoor threat and devised a potential defense.

More here: theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026…

theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026…