#IgorNews 1. A university spent years trying to roll out Oracle, then said screw it, went to court — and negotiated $1.3 million off the bill plus $3.1 million in credits. Classic: first "we’ll customize everything for you," then "your processes are wrong," then lawyers.
The main thing here isn’t the sum. The main thing is the university openly said: the cloud can’t deliver what was promised. This kind of thing usually gets signed in silence and endured.
https://www.theregister.com/saas/2026/10/12/ucla-settles-oracle-erp-dispute-with-31m-in-credits-and-131m-wiped-off-the-bill/5302520
2. Microsoft is playing its favorite games again. Copilot can now dig around in Office documents — okay, thanks. But the moment someone asked it to create an Outlook theme via Copilot, it turned out that’s already too much.
It feels like the company itself doesn’t fully understand where it has AI and where it’s just a marketing sticker. Some things are allowed, some aren’t, and you can go figure out the logic yourself.
https://www.theregister.com/applications/2026/10/12/microsoft-giveth-and-microsoft-taketh-away-copilot-edition/5302542
3. London cabbies are asking the mayor to pump the brakes on robotaxis. Well, of course — people who spent years memorizing "The Knowledge" by heart are now politely hinting that a little respect wouldn’t hurt. City Hall, meanwhile, put out a report cautiously asking: who’s actually at the wheel if there’s no wheel?
Classic. First the technology, then the safety questions. The bit about traffic jams is just hilarious — as if central London was an empty, blissful place before robots showed up.
https://www.theregister.com/personal-tech/2026/10/12/london-cabbies-want-sadiq-khan-to-slam-the-brakes-on-robotaxis/5302595
4. Thirty-five years ago, China launched a pigeon-powered internet — birds carried data packets faster than local telecom worked back then. Then everyone forgot about it, and now one surviving packet has surfaced at Christie’s with a $4,000 price tag, which is, frankly, an honest metaphor for our entire IT industry: a bad idea that just needed to wait a few decades to become a collectible artifact.
https://www.theregister.com/offbeat/2026/10/12/pigeon-powered-internet-packet-goes-under-the-hammer-at-christies/5302526
5. Turns out hacking crews can be optimized too. Some Mythos found a second vulnerability purely through math — something a human would never in a lifetime stumble onto. And while some get arrested, others simply become unnecessary.
People are still arguing about whether AI will replace creativity and jobs, while it quietly takes over what we considered a purely human craft. Hacking used to be about intuition, instinct, "hands." Now it’s about a formula.
https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/10/12/imagine-theres-no-shiny-hunters-ai-could-make-human-hacking-crews-obsolete/5302430
6. Now this is interesting. Someone decided desktop apps are too bloated and shoved JavaScript into native system webviews. Sounds nice: small, fast, no gigabytes of Electron.
As always, the devil’s in the details. Micro-runtimes are great right up until it turns out half the usual features are missing. And then either you proudly live without them, or you drag Electron back in.
https://www.theregister.com/devops/2026/10/12/when-you-just-need-to-build-a-tiny-desktop-app-tinyjs/5302502
7. Strange that this still works. TCP/IP was invented when nobody thought the internet would get this big, and it just took it and held up.
Everything modern breaks under load, while this ancient protocol just pretends nothing’s happening.
https://www.theregister.com/columnists/2026/10/12/celebrating-the-brilliant-pragmatism-of-tcp/ip-the-wiring-of-the-world/5302202
8. Apparently, updating the desktop version of Raspberry Pi OS is a whole event now. People waited four years, and it finally arrived. For those with a dusty old laptop and a holy faith that it can be brought back to life without pain.
A lightweight OS for weak hardware — sounds like a plan. Though it usually ends with you spending half a day installing it and then just staring at your phone anyway.
https://www.theregister.com/os-platforms/2026/10/12/raspberry-pi-desktop-catches-up-with-debian-13-after-4-year-wait/5301693
9. Hackers got into refrigerators at European supermarkets and mass-activated the defrost cycle. No ransom, no encryption — they just ruined people’s food, and prices and supply chains went sideways too.
On one hand, it’s funny. On the other — a smart fridge with internet access was, of course, a brilliant idea.
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/cyber-security/unprecedented-cyberattack-cripples-supermarket-fridges-across-europe-as-hackers-activate-automatic-defrosting-delivery-and-store-prices-also-impacted-by-incident
10. Citroen decided the electric age needs a 2CV. That same utilitarian "tin coffin" for farmers and students is coming back — only with a battery and, I suspect, a price tag that would make the original 2CV nervously rust over.
Nostalgia for simplicity is a convenient thing, especially when you’re selling it as "affordable mobility." It’s just that cheap EVs still haven’t been invented, while retro badges at any price — as many as you like.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c620r33plgppo
11. QGIS decided it doesn’t want AI-written code. They just went ahead and banned it — no drama, no half-page explanation. Funny how open source, which always prided itself on "we’re for openness," is now carefully closing the door.
Though you can understand it. If pull requests start getting generated in batches every five minutes, maintainers will simply drown in reviewing other people’s garbage. It’s just that where the line is between "helped with autocomplete" and "generated the whole thing" — nobody can say clearly.
https://github.com/qgis/QGIS-Enhancement-Proposals/pull/387
12. So Deloitte "helped" with taxes. Well, who’d have doubted it — when we’re talking about money on that scale, "optimization" and "document forgery" somehow end up in the same paragraph without anyone noticing. In the reports, of course, it’ll be phrased differently.
What’s more interesting: 323 points and 92 comments on HN. People are discussing not Abramovich, but the fact that the Big Four are once again just "providing services." As if that’s news.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c64g1l5389kvo
13. Someone found something strange in the commits to zod, and now everyone’s collectively remembering that the npm ecosystem is basically a field of surprises. Not that it’s panic, but the habit of checking your lock file has stopped being paranoia.
https://github.com/colinhacks/zod/commit/d821685ea6732436fcdf786a81d076958471e467
14. Someone went and quietly ported PS2 games to the browser via WebAssembly. Not an emulator, but static recompilation — meaning the code is effectively rewritten for the web. Sounds like sorcery, smells like an eternal weekend project that suddenly works.
Of course, it’s not "turn it on and play" yet — there’s its own fiddling, its own limitations, and most of the PS2 library will simply haunt you in your dreams. But the fact remains: another mountain of "impossible" turned out to be perfectly possible.
https://github.com/snuri00/ps2-web-recomp
15. Analysts at New Constructs are calling Anthropic’s IPO the circus of the year. Apparently, the valuation is so detached from reality that it’s no longer investing, it’s a test for naivety.
Funny, of course. People who spent years packaging loss-making startups as "the future" suddenly remembered common sense — but only when someone else was involved.
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/10/07/anthropic-will-be-most-ridiculous-ipo-of-year-analyst-says.html
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Filed under: Business & Policy, AI, Anthropic, Cybersecurity, Linux, Open Source