#IgorNews 1. Scientists have discovered that birds flying home across the ocean arrive with their internal clocks knocked out of sync. So basically jet lag — except not after flying to a different time zone, but after a fishing trip.
It’s nice to know we’re not alone in this. Though unlike us, a seagull doesn’t have to go to the office afterward and pretend everything’s fine.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/10/seabirds-racing-home-over-the-ocean-can-get-jet-lagged/
2. The agency says the data was falsified, so the approval should be revoked. Meanwhile patients are left somewhere between "drug approved" and "drug not approved." That’s the real story here, not the paper war between the regulator and the pharma company.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/10/the-fda-wants-to-pull-its-approval-of-a-drug-its-not-so-easy/
3. Hubble is being "rescued" again. NASA is once again asking for ideas on how to boost it higher, even though four years ago they already collected proposals — and those went nowhere. Kind of funny, honestly.
On one hand, the telescope seems alive and everyone’s happy with it. On the other, the idea fund clearly works better than the orbital tug fund. So we wait for another round of "send us a concept," no strings attached.
https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/10/think-you-can-save-the-hubble-space-telescope-nasa-wants-to-know/
4. In the US, flesh-eating screwworms have already reached a third state — now they’re eating pets too. The USDA has counted 74 cases in animals since June. No "it’s far away, not our problem" — the parasite is methodically expanding its geography, and the news reads like a horror movie plot rather than a veterinary report.
https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/10/flesh-eating-screwworms-are-feasting-on-pets-4-dogs-and-cat-attacked-this-week/
5. It’s always like this: a person passes away, and the obituary ends up being about how well he played someone else. "To a huge number of people, I’ll forever be Picard" — well yes, Sir Patrick, that’s exactly right, and you’ve clearly made your peace with it.
What’s funny isn’t that, though — it’s the speed. While some are still processing the news, others already have a heartfelt piece with quotes ready to go. Hats off to HR for the efficiency.
https://arstechnica.com/culture/2026/10/oh-captain-our-captain-ars-staff-remembers-patrick-stewart/
6. Boom had all but shelved its plans for a supersonic passenger jet — and now it turns out they have a business feeding data centers. And they’ve already lost a client there. Somehow "the future of aviation" abruptly turned into "we hook up generators to servers for AI."
Not that anyone’s surprised. Supersonic is delayed again, and the money, apparently, is closer to the power outlet.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/10/united-airlines-ceo-doubts-supersonic-airliner-from-boom-will-be-ready-by-2029/
7. Oh right, safety-first-safety-first Anthropic, and their Cursor extension sat there with a backdoor for almost twelve hours without a care. And no one still knows how their verified account got hijacked in the first place.
Just a reminder that "verified" isn’t about security, it’s about a checkmark. And "twelve hours" is a perfectly normal workday — plenty of time to haul off all sorts of interesting things.
https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/10/anthropic-vs-code-extension-on-cursor-backdoored-for-nearly-12-hours/
8. Well, at least they didn’t blow a pile of money on something genuinely stupid. They sent a data center with a TPU into orbit so it could write a haiku about Earth and beam it back down. Expensive, beautiful, slightly pointless.
Then again, that’s how the industry works now: demo first, press release second, then someone inevitably says "this changes the game." The haiku, apparently, turned out fine. For that kind of money, it could’ve been better.
https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/10/31/googles-ai-satellite-sends-a-very-expensive-haiku-to-earth/5306818
9. Someone seriously made themselves a black interface in Windows 3.1 and labeled the buttons black-on-black. Not a "dark theme" — literally, you can’t see anything. As if on purpose, so nobody can figure out where to click.
And they’re presenting it with pride, like it’s gothic aesthetics. Beautiful, no argument there, but I keep waiting for the person to admit they just lost the contrast and called it a style.
https://www.theregister.com/offbeat/2026/10/31/goth-aesthetic-gone-wild-a-users-self-inflicted-black-screen-of-non-death-in-windows-31s/5306592
10. Amazon sent engineers a memo about AI. The gist: use it, but carefully, and honestly, don’t blame us. A classic of the genre — big companies love to talk about the future until it shows up on its own and sits down at your desk.
Doesn’t make it any easier for the engineers. Feels like being politely warned that the chair under you is being slowly pulled away. Not right now, but slowly.
https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/10/31/amazon-sends-chills-through-its-workforce-with-mixed-message-memo-about-ai-use-corey-quinn/5306804
11. News from London keeps delivering on sheer density. On Oxford Street, storefront displays decided to show passersby their underwear — apparently that’s the bold marketing everyone’s been talking about.
And somewhere in the headlines a chocolate caterpillar and a chocolate teapot surface, and for good measure they suggest expanding disk space on Windows 10. Feels like the news feed has just stopped pretending.
https://www.theregister.com/offbeat/2026/10/31/chocolate-caterpillar-or-chocolate-teapot-top-up-the-disk-space-for-windows-10-to-find-out/5306103
12. All it took was buying Mellanox for $6.9 billion — and suddenly Nvidia is bigger than Cisco and the most valuable company in the world. Funny how "a bet on networking" turned out not to be a risky experiment but just a lucky foray onto someone else’s turf.
I applaud, but the irony is that these stories are usually told in hindsight. While the deal was being prepared, nobody was shouting "brilliant." But now — "the making of a networking titan" and all that pomp. OK.
https://www.theregister.com/networks/2026/10/31/backbone-of-a-beast-charting-nvidias-rise-to-networking-titan/5306499
13. Renting out someone else’s computer piece by piece is a beautiful idea until you do the math. Darkbloom promised Mac owners they’d be warming themselves on other people’s AI, but in reality the payouts are pennies.
Because the price per token is falling faster than the enthusiasm. The inference market has turned into the same story as everything else: plenty of takers, no margin for anyone. So "passive income" once again turned out to be just a word from a pitch deck.
https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/10/30/darkbloom-which-allowed-mac-users-to-rent-out-their-gpus-for-ai-inference-warns-of-low-payouts/5306782
14. Cloudflare helped Uber Eats speed up its app via HTTP/3. Lower latency, faster delivery, warmer food — in theory. In practice it’s another story about corporations burning engineering years to shave half a second off loading a screen with a burger on it.
https://www.theregister.com/devops/2026/10/30/http/3-is-faster-with-some-work-and-help-from-cloudflare/5306767
15. Cyber-extortionists spent seven thousand dollars on AI services to demand money, then helpfully left evidence right out in the open. Convenient. Frankly, "security" on the level of "left the keys in the lock and a note with the address."
So either the technology really is working against us, or this "cybercriminal" is just a startup bro who confused a pitch deck with threats. Either way, you can’t look at this without a crooked smirk anymore.
https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/10/30/crim-spent-7k-on-ai-services-in-extortion-attacks-then-left-evidence-for-all-to-see/5306754
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Filed under: Cybersecurity, AI, Anthropic, Cybersecurity, Hardware Security, LLM