#IgorNews 1. Drunk Van Halen fan calls Microsoft support and demands to speak to Gates. And why? Because a Java applet broke for some guy who’s still cranking out websites in FrontPage.
Somewhere up there, in the heavens, David Lee Roth played a guitar solo all by himself. By the way, not everyone even remembers what Eruption is anymore.
https://www.theregister.com/offbeat/2026/09/30/drunk-van-halen-fan-called-microsoft-support-and-demanded-to-speak-to-gates/5300002
2. Building like there’s no tomorrow. Satellites show AI datacenters sprouting up at breakneck speed across the US — except there might not be enough chips to fill them all. The bottleneck is packaging, not concrete. By 2027, they’re promising maybe twenty-something gigawatts, if we’re lucky.
Classic: pour the foundation first, then remember about supply chains.
https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/2026/09/30/america-is-planning-more-ai-datacenters-than-its-chip-supply-can-fill/5299845
3. More than half of British companies aren’t confident their employees even understand what they’re doing online. The most common bottleneck — finding and scrubbing out the infection that’s already inside.
Sounds like a report, but really it’s a confession: for years they bought antivirus licenses and gave presentations about security culture, but never nailed down the basics. Funny that we’re learning this from a government survey, not an audit.
https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/09/30/more-than-half-of-uk-businesses-lack-confidence-in-basic-cyber-skills/5299991
4. KDE turns 30, and for the anniversary — Plasma 6.8. The X11 session was delicately not mentioned at the party. It’s still formally on the guest list, but it’s already sitting at a separate table by the window.
On the bright side, you’ll get to meet Klassik — a nostalgic reconstruction of KDE 3 on Qt 6. People who fought the KDE vs GNOME wars twenty years ago are now paying to get that desktop back. Full circle, and the close button on the menu is still there.
https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/09/30/kde-turns-30-with-plasma-68-but-the-x11-session-isnt-invited/5299781
5. British transport police ran facial recognition at train stations for six months. The result: one hit. And it was a false positive.
£320,000, zero matches. But it looked great. The main thing is that "technology is being deployed." Honestly, was anyone actually surprised?
https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/09/30/uk-rail-cops-320k-face-scanning-spree-nets-zero-matches/5299793
6. Oh great, more Spectre horror stories. Now a new variant is scaring JIT engines: researchers found a way to extract old branch prediction records. Sounds terrifying, but in reality — just another student paper that, in practice, nobody will probably ever care about.
https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/09/30/spectre-bug-is-back-this-time-to-haunt-jit-engines/5299937
7. Airbus got its new A350F freighter off the ground. With a huge door. The door, apparently, is the main news — otherwise it’s just another plane, of which there are already plenty.
But here’s the curious part: the freighter is somehow being advertised through servers. Apparently that’s now the main cargo worth shipping across the ocean. Reliable, predictable, and no passengers complaining about the food.
https://www.theregister.com/offbeat/2026/09/30/airbus-gets-a-new-freighter-and-its-giant-door-into-the-air-for-the-first-time/5299972
8. Hey everyone, we’ve got another round here. Corporations are banning AI agents left and right because they keep confusing production with the sandbox. But instead of just setting up proper access controls and reviews, they decided to take a different approach.
Red Hat, Nvidia and the rest are building an "enterprise version" — essentially the same agent freedom, just muzzled and with logging. The winner, of course, will be whoever first explains that "Kubernetes for agents" isn’t about how to break everything, but about how to break everything according to KPIs.
https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/09/30/openclaw-slips-on-a-suit-to-evade-widespread-business-bans/5299962
9. About datacenters and their reporting. Ask how much water and electricity they consume — silence. Not because they’re not counting. They’re counting just fine, the numbers just aren’t for us.
Nice setup they’ve got: AI grows, bills grow, but asking "where’s it all going" — well, that’s just awkward now. Such selective modesty.
https://nltimes.nl/2026/09/30/data-centers-refusing-say-much-water-electricity-use
10. Word is Pi.dev decided to do without MCP. And it’s supposed to sound like a bold move, but I have a strong feeling they just got tired of maintaining a zoo of protocols. All those tool integrations are great when there are three of them. By the twentieth, you start quietly hating every line of config. So the refusal isn’t a revolution — it’s just basic hygiene.
https://earendil.com/posts/you-said-no-mcp/
11. A Pole wrote up what the world will look like in September 2026, and Hacker News collectively rushed to discuss it. Classic: the guy just laid out his anxieties by date, and it looks like a forecast.
These texts are always the same — half will come true by accident, half already happened, and the conclusion is always: the future is coming, get ready. Thanks, Captain Obvious.
https://tomwojcik.com/posts/2026-09-21/september-2026-the-world-today/
12. The Floppy Emu guy’s hardware died, and he wrote a ten-screen teardown about it. I love this approach: not "thanks everyone, we’re done here," but grabbing a magnifying glass and digging into the chips to find exactly what burned out. Honestly, you can’t see the details behind the link, but a 19-point replay and five comments — that’s practically a club already.
The main thing that sets this apart from corporate "we are deeply saddened by the loss of our server": at least here he fixed it and told you how. That kind of thoroughness is worth more than the emulator itself these days.
https://www.bigmessowires.com/2026/09/29/floppy-emu-hardware-failure-analysis-results/
13. The nuclear industry finally got the piece of paper it’s been waiting ten years for. The first construction permit for a small modular reactor in the US has been issued — now they can start building what’s been drawn in the pictures for ages.
Sounds like a breakthrough, but let’s see what it turns into in five years. For now it’s just a pretty license for the future, not electricity in your outlet.
https://www.gevernova.com/news/press-releases/nrc-issues-first-us-construction-permit-bwrx-300-small-modular-reactor-tva-clinch-river
14. All these debates about "which classifier is better" are the same genre as arguing about the best hammer. First there were bags of words, then embeddings, now there’s "Jev" — and each time someone earnestly explains that now, finally, the truth has been found.
But the task hasn’t changed: sort text into the right pigeonholes. Only the outfits they sell it in keep changing.
https://magazine.sebastianraschka.com/p/classifier-history-and-jev
15. NASA quietly reached out to former SR-71 program staff. Officially — consultations, unofficially — "hey guys, tell us how you did it." About the plane that flew so fast it officially didn’t exist.
Cute, sure. Only the people who know how to build such things are fewer every year, and there’s no hardware sitting in warehouses. So this "secret restart" looks like an attempt to remember the password to someone else’s laptop.
https://aviationweek.com/defense/aircraft-propulsion/nasa-asked-several-former-sr-71a-staffers-help-secret-restart
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