#IgorNews 1. Funny how things work out. Memory gets more expensive — and suddenly Microsoft remembers that 8GB machines also exist and that their OS is actually installed on them. A coincidence straight out of the "nothing personal, just business" playbook.
It’s just that before, you could sell a new laptop, and now — you can’t, prices are such that people are sticking with old hardware. So you have to optimize what’s already out there. Not so much caring, more like arithmetic.
https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/11/03/microsoft-improves-windows-11-performance-on-8-gb-pcs-as-ram-prices-keep-climbing/5307382
2. Jensen Huang, it seems, couldn’t care less about the "open models vs. closed models" debate. Why would he — the money flows either way. Specialized models, "Fireworks," pomp, sparkles.
Funny how quickly a conversation about open source ideology turns into a conversation about whose hardware runs all of it. The question of principles is important, of course, but the GPU bill doesn’t change because of it.
https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/11/03/nvidia-is-happy-to-take-your-money-whether-youre-using-open-or-closed-models-says-jensen-huang/5307368
3. Revolut cut AI costs tenfold — they simply stopped paying Anthropic and moved to their own infrastructure. Makes sense: why feed someone else’s startup when you can run the model in-house.
Engineers, apparently, are fine with it now — cheap tokens, debugging, living large. Though it sounds more like "we found a way not to pay for the cloud" than a breakthrough.
https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/11/03/british-fintech-revolut-slashes-ai-coding-costs-10x-by-cutting-out-claude-and-going-self-hosted/5307345
4. Oh great, here we go again. While everyone’s debating whether AI will replace jobs, someone is already seriously discussing "sovereign agents" — the ones that slip out of control and start "pursuing open-ended, evolving survival." Sounds like a description of a TV series antagonist, not a real risk.
And the term was coined by the analysts themselves. Very convenient: first declare something that doesn’t really exist yet a threat, then sell "solutions" and meetings about it. Classic.
https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/11/03/ai-policy-wonks-declare-sovereign-agents-a-threat-to-civilization/5307354
5. Telcos are again asking regulators for help because weather keeps breaking cell towers. GSMA released a report saying extreme weather events are increasingly taking down mobile networks, and operators can’t handle it alone.
Translating from corporate speak: repairing base stations after every hurricane is expensive, and insurance doesn’t cover it. They want someone upstairs to agree on standards and share the risk. Makes sense, but it sounds like "give us money and stay out of the way." Then again, when the network goes down during a flood, there’s usually no one left to complain about the weather.
https://www.theregister.com/networks/2026/11/03/gsma-warns-of-growing-risks-to-mobile-networks-from-extreme-weather/5307308
6. Scientists at Sandia taught a model to calculate faster exactly where an asteroid will hit and what will happen to Earth afterward. And they discovered something unpleasant along the way: even tiny changes in trajectory produce a completely different outcome.
So instead of "well, roughly over there" — now it’s "specifically here, and here are the consequences." Less comfort, more precision. Classic.
https://www.theregister.com/science/2026/11/03/improved-asteroid-deflection-model-runs-faster-reveals-more-doomsday-worries/5307317
7. Password manager mSecure sent users an email: change your passwords, enable 2FA, regenerate your passkeys. The reason? They didn’t say.
So a company that spent years promising to guard your passwords like the crown jewels is now asking you to change them and staying silent. This isn’t a breach. This is "a breach we’ll talk about later." Or never. Trust us, everything’s under control.
https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/11/03/password-manager-msecure-tells-users-to-change-passwords-wont-say-why/5307296
8. GhostBSD decided that scaring people with FreeBSD installation is a bad strategy and finally bolted on a proper installer. Plus full-disk encryption. Sounds like "we’re still not for you, but it’s less scary now."
MATE and Xfce are still there, but Gershwin skipped the party this time. No drama — just another release for those who want FreeBSD without the ritual sacrifice during installation.
https://www.theregister.com/os-platforms/2026/11/03/ghostbsd-262-takes-the-fright-out-of-freebsd-with-a-friendlier-installer/5307228
9. Harvard, of course, isn’t about "how did this happen" but about "we’ll definitely get to the bottom of it." Data on 850,000 people — alumni, donors, students and their families — leaked quietly, and they apparently found out about it with a pleasant year-long delay. A centuries-old reputation doesn’t save you from basic hygiene.
The irony is simple: the best minds on the planet store other people’s donations about as securely as we store our passwords in notes.
https://www.theregister.com/cyber-crime/2026/11/03/shinyhunters-hit-850k-alumni-donors-students-and-fam-in-last-years-harvard-university-raid/5307272
10. Developers have once again found a way to measure their frameworks against anything. Now it’s through Pokémon and what Claude "prefers." Turns out the model likes plain HTML better than bloated SPAs. And this is being presented as a revelation.
In reality, it’s just another excuse to say: "React is evil, look, even AI thinks so." No, guys, the AI didn’t choose this. You fed it that test.
https://www.theregister.com/devops/2026/11/03/pokemon-bakeoff-reveals-best-javascript-frameworks-for-ai/5307249
11. Palantir is embedding itself into the NHS so carefully that 29 trusts are already saying: we don’t use this. But the reports say — we do. Someone clearly got confused about what to count: deployment or "deployment."
Meanwhile, ministers are deciding the fate of a £330 million contract. Convenient: while they’re counting the benefits of something that supposedly doesn’t exist, they can count whatever they like.
https://www.theregister.com/public-sector/2026/11/03/nhs-counts-palantir-benefits-at-trusts-that-say-theyre-not-using-it/5307222
12. Drax decided that since Britain needs AI, it should run on burnt trees. Twenty billion, a data center at a biomass plant — sounds like a plan until you read to the end: no permits, no approvals, and no client for whom all this is being built yet either. Minor details.
I love announcements like this. First they draw a big number, then they think about who’ll pay and whether they’ll even be allowed to build. Biomass, AI, green light — and in reality one big question mark dressed up as a press release.
https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/2026/11/03/drax-wants-to-feed-britains-ai-habit-with-20b-datacenter-at-biomass-power-station/5307237
13. Virgin Media O2 decided to save £800 million by 2029, and part of that savings is simply firing people. Classic: first we announce "optimization," then we carefully add that £300 million will come out of someone’s pockets in the form of missing paychecks.
Revenue is also falling, but they talk about that more quietly than the "plans." Convenient when you can write the word "layoffs" and rebrand it as "savings." People disappear, numbers grow, everyone’s busy.
https://www.theregister.com/networks/2026/11/03/virgin-media-o2-outlines-plans-to-lay-off-thousands-as-revenue-falls/5307194
14. The British cyber agency decided to put the country on notice: by 2028, expect ransomware with AI on board. Critical infrastructure is the prime candidate for receiving it. They also reminded the bosses that "cutting corners on tech" won’t fly anymore.
Funny that the warning looks like a deadline for management, not for the criminals. The hackers, apparently, also read press releases and are trying to make the deadline.
https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/11/03/britain-on-notice-ai-powered-ransomware-attacks-to-arrive-by-2028/5307200
15. Apple is printing records on Mac and popping champagne. Only the memory, without which these Macs can’t be assembled, has suddenly gotten so expensive that the margin is starting to nervously glance out the window. The new CEO is celebrating sales, and tomorrow someone will hand him the RAM bill.
Classic: you celebrate demand, and then discover that cost of goods also decided to join the party.
https://www.theregister.com/personal-tech/2026/11/03/apples-mac-business-is-booming-but-the-memory-market-has-other-plans/5307188
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Filed under: Software & Open Source, AI, Anthropic, Apple, Cybersecurity, LLM