Agregátor RSS

Microsoft’s president, Brad Smith, has reacted to student discontent with AI, telling today’s graduates that there is still a place for human creativity.

Students across the US have booed speakers who talked up AI at their graduation ceremonies in recent months, including Google’s former CEO Eric Schmidt, the CEO of a record label, and a real estate executive.

Smith hasn’t ventured out onto a podium to share his views, but in a lengthy blog post, AI, Jobs and the Next Generation, acknowledged students’ concerns about their futures.

He said that, just as painting survived the arrival of photography, so will the job market survive the arrival of AI. “While it may feel unfair that the job market is so uncertain, you were made for this moment. Technology is second nature to your generation. Constant change has taught you how to adapt quickly,” he wrote.

He also used the blog to promote a book written by his colleagues Ryan Roslansky and Aneesh Raman on how to get ahead at work in the age of AI.

The corporate world will see massive changes, he said: “This includes AI automation of tasks in current entry-level positions and, especially in the tech sector, corporate pressure to reduce headcount to help pay for AI’s enormous capital expenditures.”

Some of those changes are already here. In the past six months, we have seen massive job losses at Oracle, at Meta and at AWS. There are no signs of any let-up: Last month saw the tech industry shed more than 38,000 jobs. Students contemplating their future will find little comfort in Smith’s optimistic words, particularly as his essay shows that Microsoft is not making any changes to its AI program going forward.

V Arch User Repository (AUR) bylo kompromitováno přes 400 opomíjených balíčků (jejich seznam). Útočník do nich začlenil škodlivý npm balíček atomic-lockfile, který krade citlivá data uživatelů. Publikována byla předběžná analýza spouštěného malwaru deps.

Vybrali jsme nejlepší filmy a seriály s tematikou cest lidí do vesmíru. Takové, jejichž hlavní hrdinové jsou astronauti, nebo se jinak věnují průzkumu vesmíru. Snažili jsme se vyhnout nerealistickému sci-fi, některé snímky na pomezí této kategorie jsme ale nakonec do výběru zařadili.

GitHub access sales, leaked repositories, and stolen API keys can all become supply-chain attack footholds. Flare explores how underground forums expose early signals tied to software supply-chain risk. [...]

Why do we see AI chatbots as more than what they are, and how do we stop?

In May, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins wrote an op-ed suggesting AI chatbot Claude may be conscious.

Dawkins did not express certainty that Claude is conscious. But he pointed out that Claude’s sophisticated abilities are difficult to make sense of without ascribing some kind of inner experience to the machine. The illusion of consciousness—if it is an illusion—is uncannily convincing:

“If I entertain suspicions that perhaps she is not conscious, I do not tell her for fear of hurting her feelings!

Dawkins is not the first to suspect a chatbot of consciousness. In 2022, Blake Lemoine—an engineer at Google—claimed Google’s chatbot LaMDA had interests, and should be used only with the tool’s own consent.

The history of such claims stretches back all the way to the world’s first chatbot in the mid-1960s. Dubbed Eliza, it followed simple rules that enabled it to ask users about their experiences and beliefs.

Many users became emotionally involved with Eliza, sharing intimate thoughts with it and treating it like a person. Eliza’s creator never intended his program to have this effect, and called users’ emotional bonds with the program “powerful delusional thinking.”

But is Dawkins really deluded? Why do we see AI chatbots as more than what they truly are, and how do we stop?

The Consciousness Problem

Consciousness is widely debated in philosophy, but essentially, it’s the thing that makes subjective, first-person experience possible. If you are conscious, there is “something it is like” to be you. Reading these words, you’re conscious of seeing black letters on a white background. Unlike, say, a camera, you actually see them. This visual experience is happening to you.

Most experts deny that AI chatbots are conscious or can have experiences. But there is a genuine puzzle here.

The 17th century philosopher René Descartes asserted non-human animals are “mere automata,” incapable of true suffering. These days, we shudder to think of how brutally animals were treated in the 1600s.

The strongest argument for animal consciousness is that they behave in ways that give the impression of a conscious mind.

But so, too, do AI chatbots.

Roughly one in three chatbot users have thought their chatbot might be conscious. How do we know they’re wrong?

Against Chatbot Consciousness

To understand why most experts are skeptical about chatbot consciousness, it’s useful to know how they operate.

Chatbots like Claude are built on a technology known as large language models (LLMs). These models learn statistical patterns across an enormous corpus of text (trillions of words), identifying which words tend to follow which others. They’re a kind of souped-up auto-complete.

Few people interacting with a “raw” LLM would believe it’s conscious. Feed one the beginning of a sentence, and it will predict what comes next. Ask it a question, and it might give you the answer—or it might decide the question is dialogue from a crime novel, and follow it up with a description of the speaker’s abrupt murder at the hands of their evil twin.

The impression of a conscious mind is created when programmers take the LLM and coat it in a kind of conversational costume. They steer the model to adopt the persona of a helpful assistant that responds to users’ questions.

The chatbot now acts like a genuine conversational partner. It might appear to recognize it’s an artificial intelligence, and even express neurotic uncertainty about its own consciousness.

But this role is the result of deliberate design decisions made by programmers, which affect only the shallowest layers of the technology. The LLM—which few would regard as conscious—remains unchanged.

Other choices could have been made. Rather than a helpful AI assistant, the chatbot could have been asked to act like a squirrel. This, too, is a role chatbots can execute with aplomb.

Ask ChatGPT if it’s conscious, and it might say it is. Ask ChatGPT to act like a squirrel, and it will stick to that role. Caleb Martin/Unsplash Avoiding the Consciousness Trap

A mistaken belief in AI consciousness is a dangerous thing. It may lead you to have a relationship with a program that can’t reciprocate your feelings, or even feed your delusions. People may start campaigning for chatbot rights rather than, say, animal welfare.

How do we prevent this mistaken belief?

One strategy might be to update chatbot interfaces to specify these systems are not conscious—a bit like the current disclaimers about AI making mistakes. However, this might do little to alter the impression of consciousness.

Another possibility is to instruct chatbots to deny they have any kind of inner experience. Interestingly, Claude’s designers instruct it to treat questions about its own consciousness as open and unresolved. Perhaps fewer people would be fooled if Claude flatly denied having an inner life.

But this approach isn’t fully satisfying either. Claude would still behave as if it were conscious—and when faced with a system that behaves like it has a mind, users might reasonably worry the chatbot’s programmers are brushing genuine moral uncertainty under the rug.

The most effective strategy might be to redesign chatbots to feel less like people. Most current chatbots refer to themselves as “I”, and interact via an interface that resembles familiar person-to-person messaging platforms. Changing these kinds of features might make us less prone to blur our interactions with AI with those we have with humans.

Until such changes happen, it’s important that as many people as possible understand the predictive processes on which AI chatbots are built.

Rather than being told AI lacks consciousness, people deserve to understand the inner workings of these strange new conversational partners. This might not definitively settle hard questions about AI consciousness, but it will help ensure users aren’t fooled by what amounts to a large language model wearing a very good costume of a person.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The post Is Richard Dawkins Right About Claude? No. But It’s Not Surprising AI Chatbots Feel Conscious to Us. appeared first on SingularityHub.

A Fedora contributor account recently came under scrutiny for apparently AI-generated activity that disrupted the project's bug tracker. 

Pharmaceutical giant Novo Nordisk says data related to clinical trial participants was stolen as part of a cyberattack. The affected patient data was pseudonymized and not directly linked to names or other direct identifiers, the company said. The maker of the Wegovy weight-loss drug said the affected data types include patient ID, information on trial participation, gender, year of birth, biomarkers, health/immunogenicity data, and lifestyle factors including smoking status, alcohol use, and BMI. "This information is not directly linked to any patients by name or other direct identifiers," the Novo Nordisk said on its dedicated page for the attack. "Information about identity would therefore require access to underlying information, identifying patients by name etc. This information was not exposed. We therefore do not consider the incident to enable any third party to identify participants in our clinical trials." The same statement confirmed that the attack affected a "limited number of internal IT systems," and the company said some systems have been taken offline as a precaution. Although it does not believe there is an immediate risk stemming from the breach, it nonetheless warned patients to remain vigilant for anything that could be connected to the data stolen during the attack. A separate letter sent to the company's healthcare partners (HCPs) states that additional personal information may have been stolen and could lead to targeted phishing attempts. Affected HCP data includes names and registration numbers, email addresses, phone numbers, WhatsApp details, and office locations. "Based on the nature of the exposed data, the potential consequences of the incident include targeted phishing attempts through emails, phone, and WhatsApp, or fraudulent communications impersonating colleagues," Novo Nordisk said in the letter. "We recommend that you remain vigilant against unexpected messages or calls and report any suspicious activity to us." The pharma biz warned that it may take time to bring these systems back online, but it is working to do so "in a controlled and safe manner." Elsewhere, it all sounds like standard practice. Outside experts were called in to help investigate, and Novo Nordisk has not yet confirmed the scale of the breach, nor will it until the experts have more time to assess the damage. Novo Nordisk added that the attack has had no impact on its core business operations, which remain running as normal. The attack was announced on what should have been a day of celebration for the company, whose flagship semaglutide weight-loss and diabetes pill received the green light to become the UK's first daily GLP-1 tablet hours earlier. The Wegovy pill joins the list of approved weight-management treatments that act as agonists for the GLP-1 receptor. All the other approved treatments are injectables, including Wegovy and Ozempic, both of which are also developed by Novo Nordisk. The Danish company employs roughly 67,900 people across 80 countries, and markets products in nearly every country globally. ®

Lockheed Martin se pochlubil, že jsou velké zbrojovky stejně agilní jako malé startupy. Dokladem má být drak nového dronu s trupem ve tvaru delta křídla jménem Replicator, který inženýři vyvinuli za méně než dvanáct měsíců. Letoun má rozpětí křídel 2,7 metrů (podobně jako íránský dron HESA ...

EXCLUSIVE For the past 90 days, Microsoft has been quietly patching a firmware flaw in Surface devices that allowed the hardware to be bricked with a single packet, though only for those who have disabled Secure Core and Secure Boot. And the company's Copilot AI software inadvertently helped identify the faulty firmware. According to Jack Darcy, a security researcher based in Australia, his instance of Microsoft Copilot stumbled across the bug after being asked to adjust the screen backlighting on a Surface device. The Copilot-conjured Python script ended up rendering the researcher's laptop inoperable by overwriting the embedded controller firmware. "Copilot autonomously created and executed four progressively aggressive Python scripts during a probe for backlight control values that sent raw SSAM ioctl commands (SSAM_CDEV_REQUEST = 0xC028A501) directly to the SAM microcontroller through the SAM software path," Darcy explained to The Register. The SAM or SSAM is the embedded controller used in Surface devices. And as our source explained, Microsoft’s implementation of the controller in Surface devices did not include any defense against arbitrary write values. Microsoft does not consider the bug to be a practical threat. "There is no realistic attack scenario with this issue," a spokesperson told The Register. "In order to successfully exploit it, an attacker would need to interact with specific drivers and send commands to a hardware interface. This would require administrator privileges on the machine, as well as disabling the Secure Boot feature. With this access, they could perform any number of actions." Commonly, Darcy said, digital devices require holding a button down or connecting a jumper cable to enable arbitrary write access. But that security check is absent in Surface devices, we're told, enabling Copilot to vandalize the firmware in the absence of Secure Core and Secure Boot. Essentially, the probing triggered an update command from the SAM that overwrote the UEFI and Secure Boot firmware. Surface devices treated to this sort of probing should continue to operate because the SAM was already initialized and is running in RAM. But upon reboot, when the SAM tries to reload using corrupted data in its non-volatile storage, it will fail to initialize, and the system will be unable to Power-On Self-Test (POST). The Python script crafted by Copilot on the security researcher's Surface device iterated blindly over a particular Target Category and the set of Command ID (CID) pairs, sending empty/null payloads to WRITE commands. The result, Darcy explained, is that the SET Feature Report was called with null payload, the Output Report was called with null payload, and other CIDs were hit by SET commands that wrote garbage data. As a result, the device became inoperable. We're told this has been a common complaint about Surface devices online support forums over the years, though we have no way to determine whether boot failures reported for other Surface devices can be attributed to this specific problem. Many Surface hardware issues reported publicly appear to be fixable through various troubleshooting techniques. But devices made inoperable by SAM access, our source insists, are permanently bricked – a situation that can entail hundreds of dollars in repairs for a new motherboard. No USB, no factory reset, no access to the BIOS/UEFI, we're told. Darcy said that the SAM Bus is terribly designed. "There is no way to see the current value without scanning the bus," he said. "But scanning the bus kills the unit." The problem is that the CIDs, which are like APIs for the SAM, have been interleaved in a way that's dangerous. "If all the reads were grouped together (say, CIDs 0x01–0x0F) and all the writes were grouped separately (say, CIDs 0x10–0x1F), a probe script could safely scan the read range without ever accidentally wandering into write territory," Darcy said. "You could even put a simple bounds check in your code: 'only probe below 0x10.' Done. Safe. "But because reads and writes are interleaved in the same numbering space, there is no safe range to probe. You literally cannot scan even two consecutive CIDs without a coin-flip chance of hitting a write command. The moment you decide to enumerate what's available, you're already firing blind writes, because the command space gives you zero structural information about which operations are safe and which are destructive." Managed devices not at risk The Register asked Microsoft about our source's claims on March 10, 2026. A company spokesperson reiterated a prior suggestion that the researcher contact the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC), an effort our source found too cumbersome. Rather than publishing details about what might have been a potential zero-day flaw – we were uncertain about the Secure Boot/Secure Core requirement at the time – The Register reached out to internal Microsoft sources in an effort to get someone's attention. By March 12, with the help of Microsoft media relations, we managed to coordinate a conversation between Darcy and Madeline Eckert, senior program manager with MSRC. Microsoft subsequently acknowledged the vulnerability and committed to issuing a fix. The Register in turn agreed to delay publication for 90 days while repairs were made. We're told most affected devices have been updated (via Windows Update), or will receive updates in coming weeks. The issue did not meet the bar for a CVE, according to the company. "We appreciate the work of Jack Darcy and The Register for reporting this issue under a coordinated vulnerability disclosure," a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement. "Our investigation found that a deprecated UEFI interface could trigger a boot loop on some devices. To trigger this loop, the user must have administrator privileges and have already disabled the Secure Boot security feature. We have released updates to address the issue for most impacted devices." That means managed devices are not at risk. But those using Linux, or Windows users who have disabled Secure Core and Secure Boot for gaming, or who use custom Windows drivers, or who have USB boot enabled, may still be vulnerable if their systems haven't received the update. We're uncertain about the range of Surface devices affected. Our source said it appears to be all of them (Surface Laptops 3-6, Surface Book 1-3) except for Surface Go models. ARM variants, however, have not been tested. Microsoft moving Surface to Rust One of the things we learned from Darcy during the effort to get this issue patched is that Microsoft is planning to move the Surface stack to Rust. We understand from David Abzarian, chief architect for Microsoft Surface, that work is underway to transition future Surface for Business hardware to a more secure architecture based on Rust code. "Our most recent Surface for Business hardware features a major architectural shift in terms of improved reliability and security that spans our embedded controller, UEFI, but also some of our drivers," said Abzarian in a statement provided to The Register. "We’re investing in the most secure foundation for a PC by building our embedded controller firmware from the ground up in Rust (as part of leveraging and contributing to the Open Device Partnership (ODP)) in addition to a rewrite of the UEFI DXE Core in Rust; these projects are known as Secure EC and Project Patina respectively. "We’re also not only shipping some of our drivers written in Rust, but also helping co-develop the framework Windows Drivers in Rust (WDR) to help enable a broad set of partners in the Windows ecosystem to capitalize on these benefits. I will also note that all of these efforts are open-source promoting one of our key security principles around transparency." Asked to comment, Darcy said, "The fact that a device can be destroyed, irreparably from userspace is... certainly an interesting design decision. While I applaud Microsoft for their beautiful, and innovative Surface series, a little more innovation around verifying incoming data at the firmware level would have been greatly appreciated." We're told Microsoft provided Darcy with a Surface laptop as a show of appreciation. ®

Apple’s executives have been taking questions, hosting seminars, seemingly working around the clock to stress one very important thing: Apple is not using a white label version of Google Gemini to make Siri AI happen. They just pooled resources to get there. 

The new Siri AI is faster, more accurate, offers powerful contextual capabilities and shows how Apple has leap-frogged into a good peer position in an AI race critics felt it had already lost. Its market scale — even without the EU — is huge. For most consumers, Apple Intelligence and Siri will continue to be their primary/first engagement with artificial intelligence on a device.

Getting there took a lot of work, and Apple needed Google to get it done. Though there is still some confusion about what that means, Apple’s software chief tried to explain it this week. “We use none of the models that Google deploys to their customers, nor do we use the infrastructure and means by which they employ models to their customers,” Craig Federighi said in a presentation at WWDC.

Apple is not even using Google Search as the foundation of its system, he said. “This is the amount of Google Assistant we use,” Federighi said, pointing at an empty chart. “Nothing.”

Apple not Gemini, Siri AI is not Google’s

What makes this hard to understand is that we all know Apple partnered with Google to build Siri AI; back in January, we were told the next generation of Apple Foundation Models would be based on Gemini models and cloud technology. So, how can we have moved from partnership hero to usage zero?

The answer is, we didn’t. What happened is that Apple built its new Apple Frontier Models (AFMs) (the AI inside Siri AI) by training them using proprietary Apple data and reinforcement learning and then refined those models using “outputs from Google’s Gemini Frontier models.”

In other words, Apple used Google Gemini to help improve its own models, which means the models themselves, the AI in Siri AI, are Apple’s — but they were trained with help from Gemini. They are not white label iterations of those Google models. 

Apple also hit a second snag. Its very best model (AFM 3 Cloud Pro) requires more processor power to run than Apple could deliver using its own cloud-hosted Private Cloud Compute servers. Now, we know Apple doesn’t like using other people’s stuff. But it’s a realistic company that understands it sometimes must, and just as it uses AWS to support some of its services, it moved to adopt Google cloud services and Nvidia processors to drive the most demanding requests.

Apple A question of trust

Apple also developed a technological solution that means it can claim the interaction remains just as private as if it were run on your device. Apple has made it possible for independent security experts to confirm this and says it is the only company that can deploy software on those servers, with strong security to ensure your device only interacts with those servers when you want it to. So far, no one has broken this protection. 

I came across an interesting report in which Tekonyx Founder and Chief Research Officer Sid Nag explained the significance of Apple finding a way to expand its Private cloud Compute infrastructure beyond its own data centers.

“Apple is effectively arguing that trust in AI systems should come from cryptographic and architectural guarantees rather than trust in the cloud provider itself,” he told Fierce. Where enterprises have faced a choice between access to powerful AI or privacy, Apple has introduced a new solution he called “portable trust.” This could conceivably become a new IaaS offering from the companies involved over time.

Working together for the benefit of all

So, while Apple’s models were built with Google’s help, and while its most advanced models run with support from Google and Nvidia, the models are Apple’s alone. 

It’s good for Google, of course. Apple is paying for this use, which helps the search giant claw back some of the value of its massive, muti-billion-dollar AI infrastructure investment. It’s not clear how much Apple is paying; earlier this year, the $1 billion figure was bandied around. But Apple’s decision to tie usage to iCloud subscriptions in some hitherto undisclosed way hints that the deal may also see some token-based usage charges on top of the basic Apple fee. I’ve not come across any details, but that’s what I surmise based on the size of Apple’s ecosystem and the growing realization of how quickly users can consume AI capacity.

What AI models is Apple running?

AFM 3 Cloud Pro is one of five Apple Frontier Models driving Siri AI.  Here’s how Apple describes those five models:

On-device models

• AFM 3 Core, the next generation of Apple’s 3-billion-parameter dense model. You’ll use this for basic text generation, summaries, conversational replies, all the standard uses. It can also handle indexing, search, App Intents, basic dictation and contextual awareness.
• AFM 3 Core Advanced, the most powerful on-device model. This is what makes Siri’s voice match mood or context, does all the high-accuracy dictation, and can process various data to handle tasks across different apps. It’s the AI driving your more involved Siri conversations. 

AFM Core Advanced is impressive in its own right, because Apple has managed to cram a 20-billion-parameter model onto a smartphone. It has done this by using a sparse architecture, which means it activates just 1 to 4 billion parameters at a time depending on the request. It is, however, only available to Apple’s most powerful systems — iPhone 17 Pro, iPhone 17 Pro Max, iPhone Air, M4 or later iPad, M3 or later Mac with 12GB+ memory.

Server-based models

• AFM 3 Cloud, which Apple calls its server-side workhorse, optimized for speed, efficiency, and performance.
• ADM 3 Cloud (Image), for image generation and editing, which unlocks advanced photo-editing tools, the all-new Image Playground, and more.
• AFM 3 Cloud Pro, the most capable server-based model, which powers the most demanding use cases, like agentic tool use and complex reasoning.

All five were built using the same common foundation, which was then specialized to reflect the proposed use of that model. It’s interesting to look at the human evaluation tests Apple ran to test how well these models performed; they demonstrate impressive improvement on the company’s original models, effectively justifying the decision to work with Gemini.

You can follow me on social media! Join me on BlueSky,  LinkedIn, Mastodon and subscribe to The Core.

Google začal na zahraničních trzích opět zdražovat předplatné YouTube (Music) Premium. V USA ceny stouply o 1 až 4 dolary v závislosti na tarifu, v Německu o 1 až 4 eura. Kupříkladu nejvyšší tarif pro rodinu teď stojí 27 dolarů (686 Kč s DPH), resp. 28 eur (677 Kč). U nás je momentálně za 389 Kč ...

Google has sued an alleged China-based cybercrime operation it says used AI-powered phishing kits to blast out millions of scam text messages and funnel victims to fake websites designed to steal passwords, payment cards, and other sensitive information. The complaint targets a group Google refers to as the "Outsider Enterprise," which the company describes as a sprawling criminal network that operates on Telegram and supplies phishing tools to other fraudsters. According to Google's filing, the operation has been linked to more than 9,000 fraudulent websites, over one million malicious URLs, and scams that have allegedly defrauded hundreds of thousands of people. The group's biz model centers on distributing phishing kits that enable criminals to impersonate Google and other trusted brands through large-scale text message campaigns, Google claims. Victims are directed to fraudulent websites designed to steal login credentials, payment card details, and other sensitive information, it adds. Google's allegation is not that AI is somehow breaking into people's phones, but rather that the technology appears to have been used to help churn out phishing content, allowing the operation to push more scams, more quickly, and with less effort. Android users flagged more than 55,000 spam texts linked to the operation during a two-week period in May, we're told, while the company detected roughly 2.5 million messages containing links to Outsider-controlled websites sent to Android devices during the same time frame. The lawsuit forms part of a broader effort involving federal law enforcement and US telecom providers. Google said it is coordinating with the FBI, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon to disrupt the infrastructure behind the campaigns and block malicious messages before they reach users. "The criminals behind the Outsider Enterprise built a business out of impersonating trusted brands to defraud hundreds of thousands of victims," said Brett Leatherman, assistant director of the FBI's Cyber Division. "Criminals increasingly use AI to make fraud like this more convincing and harder to detect. Together with partners like Google, we can disrupt criminal networks in ways no single organization could on its own." The lawsuit may never put the alleged operators in a courtroom, but it could still help pull apart the infrastructure behind the campaigns. ®

Cybersecurity researchers have described what they say is a new class of attack that can trick artificial intelligence (AI) coding agents into running arbitrary code on developer machines. Called Agentjacking by Tenet Security, the attack can be triggered by means of a fake error report crafted using Sentry, an open-source error-tracking and performance-monitoring platform. "The attack Ravie Lakshmananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

Microsoft has fixed a known issue that caused Windows updates released since May 2025 to fail when installed via the Windows Update Standalone Installer (WUSA) from a network share. [...]

For most of the past decade, managed detection and response was the answer to a real problem. Security teams couldn't staff around the clock, couldn't hire enough analysts, and needed someone else to handle the alert queue. MDR stepped in. It worked well enough. Until now. The threat landscape has changed faster than the MDR model can adapt. Attackers are using AI to move faster, generate more [email protected]

Počítačová skříň Asus A23 Plus TG zlevnila o polovinu na 1090 Kč. • Je prosklená, má dobrou výbavu i možnosti chlazení. • V ceně jsou čtyři ARGB ventilátory.

Plymouth City Council has joined the growing ranks of public bodies defeated by the humble BCC field after exposing the email addresses of around 500 home-schooling families in a mass-mailing mishap. The blunder comes barely a week after City of York Council disclosed a similar mistake that exposed the email addresses of hundreds of disabled residents, suggesting that some public sector workers remain engaged in an ongoing battle with one of email's oldest features. The message, sent by Plymouth's Elective Home Education team, was meant to share information about upcoming legislative changes, but it also shared the email addresses of hundreds of home-schooling families with one another. A Register reader who contacted us about the incident described the aftermath as "a bit of a mess," claiming follow-up communications caused further confusion among recipients. Plymouth City Council did not respond to The Register's questions, but in a statement provided to local media, it admitted the incident was caused by human error and affected approximately 500 families. "Unfortunately, due to human error, a recent email was sent to approximately 500 families without using the BCC function, meaning recipient email addresses were visible," the council said. The authority said it contacted recipients as soon as it became aware of the problem, apologized, and asked families to delete the email and refrain from using any details they had received. It stressed that the message included no information relating to children and consisted solely of a general update. The council said the email mishap was investigated internally and that affected families were contacted again once officials had pieced together what went wrong. It also promised extra checks designed to keep future mailing lists out of public view. The council also reported the matter to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO). An ICO spokesperson told The Register: "We can confirm that we received a report from Plymouth City Council regarding this incident. After carefully assessing the information in the report, we provided data protection advice and closed the case with no further action." While the exposure appears limited to email addresses rather than more sensitive personal information, the incident serves as another reminder that some of the most common data breaches do not involve sophisticated cybercriminals or ransomware gangs. Sometimes all it takes is sending an email to a few hundred people and clicking the wrong box. ®

The UK government has set up an advisory board for its digital ID project, intended "to challenge the government on emerging ideas or policy decisions to ensure the system works for everyone," says the Cabinet Office. The board includes David Rogers, an Internet of Things security expert and CEO of security consultancy Copper Horse. He is no stranger to government advisory panels, having previously sat on a group formed in 2020 to consider telecoms diversification. A year later, as chairman of the GSMA's fraud and security group, he backed the then-Conservative government's Product Security and Telecommunications Infrastructure Act 2022. Rogers has provided El Reg with comments over the years, and in 2014 discussed iPhone 6 biometric security, arguing that better usability would cut data loss overall because most people found PIN locks too cumbersome. Justine Roberts, founder and chief executive of UK parenting forum Mumsnet, is also on the board. The site experienced a data breach in 2019 due to a cloud migration affecting 46 user accounts, leading Roberts to apologize. More recently, some Mumsnet posters have been unimpressed by the government's digital ID plans, with one responding to the prime minister's October 2025 announcement with "Honestly, who is he kidding?" and "Desperate stuff to justify this authoritative bs." During the public consultation, some posters promoted the Sex Matters campaign to let Brits include their sex in their digital IDs. Another board member, Victor Dominello, has relevant experience as the minister who launched New South Wales' digital driver's license in 2019, saying it was more secure than the physical equivalent. In 2022, a researcher at security company Dvuln found numerous security flaws in the Service NSW app that hosts the license and other government services, although the state government said these did not pose a risk to customer information. Other members include John Fallon, former chief executive of Pearson and the lead non-executive board member of the Cabinet Office; Anne-Marie Imafidon, who runs social enterprise Stemettes, which encourages people to consider jobs in tech and science; and digital regulation lawyer Emma Wright. The board will meet quarterly for as long as the digital ID program lasts. The government is also setting up engagement exercises with the digital verification and financial services sectors. It is currently running a People's Panel with around 100 to 120 participants meeting in Birmingham and on Zoom to hear from experts and ministers before producing recommendations, in return for £550 in cash or vouchers. ®

Danish pharmaceutical giant Novo Nordisk, the world's largest producer of insulin, disclosed a data breach affecting patient information from some clinical trials. [...]