The Register Kettle

Windows XP is turning 25, and with AI still causing a memory crunch we're really missing the days of low-overhead OSes from Microsoft that just worked. 

This week on The Kettle, host Brandon Vigliarolo is joined by FOSS reporter Liam Proven and Microsoft reporter Richard Speed to talk about why XP might have been peak Windows, but that's not the only retro thing we're chatting about in this episode. 

Along with reminiscing about Windows of days gone by, we're also looking at Casio's remake of its classic digital watch to add some basic smart capabilities without losing a two-year battery life, and we're reexamining the long-held belief that putting passwords on paper is a bad idea.

After all, you can't hack a paper notebook. 

This week, we learned a lot more about what’s going on inside the datacenter. GPUs may still be king but their exclusive reign on the rack is over. The taskbar's reign at the bottom of the desktop may be coming to an end too.

Register Systems Editor Tobias Mann joins us to talk about why so many vendors are turning to alternate silicon from the likes of Cerebras and Marvell to help power their inference. He also explains why Waymo is designing its own custom chips in robotaxis rather than continuing to use off-the-shelf silicon from Intel.

As new AI silicon moves forward, Microsoft goes back to the future by finally, after only five years of waiting, allowing users to move the taskbar in Windows 11. It also has belatedly started giving users more control over context menus and given them a closer look at what their neural processing units (NPUs) are doing in task manager. Register Microsoft Ecosystem Reporter Richard Speed weighs in.

Our cybersecurity editor Jessica Lyons spent a week in Las Vegas for Black Hat and DEF CON last week, and there was only one thing on everyone's mind: AI agents and their growing threat to cybersecurity defenders.

As Jess wrote this week, pretty much every discussion she had centered around AI and its potential effects on critical infrastructure, with multiple current and former government leaders expressing worry over recent events and what they mean for the future of infosec. 

Join Jess and host Brandon Vigliarolo for this week's episode of The Kettle, where they break down the hacker summer camp scuttlebutt and what the security world is doing to protect critical infrastructure from the emerging AI threat. 

OpenAI's invasion of Hugging Face keeps getting worse somehow, Chinese open-weight models are nigh on to reaching parity with their closed-off American cousins,  and AI crawlers are getting their own LLM-poisoning ads.

Were there anything world-shaking events in AI land we missed this week? 

Join Kettle host Brandon Vigliarolo as he chats with systems editor Tobias Mann and senior reporter Tom Claburn about this trio of exciting AI stories from the week.

Worried that a rogue hivemind of AI agents could come for your secrets? Want reassurance that a Chinese open-weight takeover wouldn't be that bad? Curious how LLMs are being advertised to when you're not watching? That's all on tap for the latest episode. 

Between eye-watering capex expenses, shrinking free cash flow, and worries about chip availability, things are starting to look tight. El Reg Editor-in-Chief Matt Rosoff and Systems Editor Tobias Mann join host Brandon Vigliarolo for this episode of The Kettle to discuss what the numbers mean and how things pan out.

So, an OpenAI model broke out of its sandbox last week, made its way to the internet, and then hacked its way into Hugging Face, stealing some internal data and credentials in the process.

That's big news in the world of AI, but as El Reg cybersecurity editor Jessica Lyons and senior reporter Tom Claburn tell Kettle host Brandon Vigliarolo, it's not really the end of the world as we know it. 

Sure, it means there's some capable models out there, and maybe there's more risk from them than some might think, but the OpenAI/Hugging Face mess only happened because of some very specific circumstances. That, and it's actually a really good reason to prioritize more open models instead of relying on frontier labs to own the entire space. 

Your host Brandon Vigliarolo has been breathing in wildfire smoke from Canada for the past few days, which really has him thinking about whether all those AI datacenters building gas turbines and contributing to climate change is really worth it. 

Luckily for us, CNBC technology and climate reporter Lora Kolodny, who just published a documentary on xAI's environmentally-damaging Colossus datacenters in Memphis, Tennessee, was available to chat with us as a special guest on this week's episode. Lora joins Brandon and El Reg editor-in-chief Matt Rossoff on this week's Kettle to chat about how datacenters are affecting the environment in this discussion, how they could be done right, and why they keep being done wrong. 

Like a drug dealer who's hooked you and raised their prices, business leaders are simply shocked to learn the AI their organizations are becoming dependent on is suddenly a lot more expensive. 

Kettle host Brandon Vigliarolo is joined by Reg reporter Lindsay Clark and contributor Joab Jackson this week to discuss their recent stories about the rising cost of enterprise AI - and one way a popular open-source project is trying to fight tokenmaxxing with tokenminning - but the question remains whether such measure will be enough to prevent cost-benefit analyses from popping that bubble. 

Will the AI industry adapt to the fact it's still unprofitable, blowback from usage-based billing, and a desire to not pay AI models as much as the human devs they're supplementing or replacing? That's what's on the hob for this week's episode. 

From international banking worries to the market state of canary-in-the-coal-mine Oracle, the AI bubble is sure looking taut.

The Bank for International Settlements, often referred to as "the central bank for central banks" said in a report at the end of June that it was worried the AI bubble was nigh on to popping and taking the global economy with it. Oracle, the hyperscaler with arguably the largest exposure to the AI bubble, has lost more than 40 percent of its share volume in the past month and recently outlined all the ways it might suffer if this whole AI thing doesn't pan out.

If you ask our systems editor Tobias Mann and senior reporter Tom Claburn, those factors and more sure make it seem like the AI industry could be on the verge of a massive contraction, and that's the very thing they chat about with Kettle host Brandon Vigliarolo on this week's episode. 

AI commands all the headlines nowadays, but the biggest security story of the week is all about human laziness and poor password habits - just like the good old days. 

This week on the Kettle, host Brandon Vigliarolo is joined by US editor Avram Piltch and security editor Jessica Lyons to talk about the Klue breach, which was blamed on a "compromised legacy credential" that ought to probably have been deleted a while ago, which allowed cybercriminals to pivot to the SalesForce environments of hundreds of companies. The incident has caused trouble for security firm Huntress, who admitted to the breach early on, and the situation over there wasn't caused by AI either. 

That said, AI is playing a role in what's being described as "the summer from hell" by one security professional, but while top-tier AI models are spotting troublesome vulnerabilities, the amount of damage they've managed to cause pales in comparison to what one lazy sysadmin can cause by poorly managing passwords.