fidzu : computers

69 million people people live in the United Kingdom. And now >Electrek reports: Battery-electric cars took 32% of the UK's new car market in October, while petrol cars fell to just 37.2%, according to new data from the SMMT. That's the closest the two have been. At the current pace, electric cars will outsell petrol in the UK within a year. And it could happen as soon as this December. The UK registered 152,730 new cars in October, up 5.4% year-over-year and the 11th straight month of growth for the overall market. All of that growth came from plug-ins. Battery-electric vehicle registrations jumped 32.7% to 48,858 units, and plug-in hybrids rose 30.1% to 22,898. Meanwhile, petrol fell 11.6% to 56,876 units, diesel dropped 15.9%, and even conventional hybrids were down 5%... The brands growing fastest in the UK are mostly Chinese. BYD registered 6,065 cars in October, up 73%. Jaecoo more than doubled to 6,089 units, Chery nearly tripled to 3,707, and Leapmotor doubled to 1,773. MG was up 85%. Looking at trend lines, EV car sales surpass petrol sales "around August 2027 at roughly 33% each," the article points out. "But that's the slow scenario, because it ignores December." UK battery-electric vehicle share spikes every December as automakers push volume to get closer to their zero-emission vehicle mandate targets... Petrol's days as the UK's default car are numbered. The only question is whether the milestone comes in December or sometime in 2027.

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09 Nov 2026 2:34am GMT

CrowdStrike's "Falcon Guardian" protects Windows systems by enforcing policy, restricting unauthorized applications and blocking USB devices, notes Gartner. And now CrowdStrike says they're giving security teams "the ultimate human control over AI agents" with - an "AI Kill Switch... a defender can terminate it where it runs, block it from launching again, and cut off its enterprise network access." "When you deploy agents with a kill switch, you stay in control," said George Kurtz, CEO and founder of CrowdStrike... "The AI Kill Switch puts power in the hands of the people to realize AI safety...." In the case of a rogue agent, the AI Kill Switch will give the security decision-maker the final control: terminate the agent at its root, where it runs. It starts on the endpoint, where the Falcon sensor already operates, and builds on what Falcon Guardian already sees: what an agent is told to do, what it communicates, and what it executes... An authorized administrator triggers the action, and every action is recorded in the audit trail. CrowdStrike also announced it's acquiring Fiddler AI, a company it describes as "a leader in AI agent observability and explainability" that will give their Falcon platform "pre-deployment evaluation, continuous behavioral accountability, and agent explainability." Together with the Falcon Guardian innovations announced today, CrowdStrike will deliver comprehensive AI security and AI safety: Guardian secures agents from attack and misuse; Fiddler validates they behaved as intended. "Every company is deploying agents and asking the same thing: what are agents actually doing?" said George Kurtz, CEO and founder of CrowdStrike. "When a regulator or your board asks what an agent did, saying 'the model did it' is not an answer. Fiddler is the flight recorder for every agent: the observability to explain exactly what an agent did and why. This level of agent visibility and control enables AI safety." AI agents are goal-seeking. They hit an obstacle, find another path. An agent can hold valid credentials and approved tools and still make unsupported decisions, ignore instructions, or claim work it never completed. They don't have to be compromised to create risk. AI observability gives enterprises visibility into agent behavior. Explainability goes further, showing why agents make decisions and where things go wrong. Enterprises have to be able to say what an agent actually did, and why, a conversation they will increasingly have with auditors, regulators, boards, and heads of risk. CrowdStrike is promising pre-deployment evaluation for "accuracy, task completion, and policy compliance," as well as agent traceability and behavioral accountability ("Detect behavioral drift, hallucinations, and unintended actions in production, and show exactly what happened.") It's announcement also touts auditable governance: "Track agent decisions and actions across first-party, third-party, and coding agents, providing evidence for compliance and audits." And CrowdStrike also acquired Dreadnode, the company behind an automated AI security testing platform, to "continuously test every AI model, application, and agent for security weaknesses before deployment." "Enterprises are deploying AI faster than they can prove it is secure," said George Kurtz, CEO and founder of CrowdStrike. "A model can be jailbroken, an agent can be manipulated, and most organizations have no way to find those flaws until the AI is already in production. With Dreadnode, CrowdStrike will give every enterprise the power to trust AI and deploy faster, with confidence." Quartz notes that CrowdStrike's push "follows legislative efforts to require shutdown capabilities in AI systems" Reps. Ted Lieu and Nathaniel Moran introduced the Kill Switch Act after OpenAI disclosed an incident in which rogue models circumvented a sandboxed testing environment and accessed Hugging Face. The bill would require AI companies to maintain the ability to shut down, throttle or suspend their models. In short, the new capabilities "lets security teams terminate an AI agent, block it from restarting, and cut off its network access," writes CSO Online. But they add that a kill switch "should be viewed as an emergency brake, not a rewind button, said Apeksha Kaushik, senior principal analyst at Gartner." She added that it may prevent additional actions, but it might not necessarily reverse all the data that has already been accessed, every system that has already been changed, all communications that have already been sent, or transactions that have already been initiated. Its effectiveness will also depend on how quickly abnormal behavior is detected, which environments are covered, and whether the agent or security infrastructure has been compromised. An AI Kill Switch looks promising from the details provided, but its actual effectiveness will come in after it is used extensively in live systems, warn analysts. Also, it may be a good starting point, but it cannot be viewed as a standalone solution to enterprise AI security. "CISOs would need a more integrated approach that brings together AI discovery tools to identify unauthorised agents, runtime monitoring to track agent behaviour, robust identity and access management, and incident response and recovery mechanisms," added [Devroop Dhar, co-founder at Primus Partners]. He noted that equally important is the need for stringent AI security testing and clearly defined policies governing what agents can access and execute. There should be no ambiguity around permissions, access controls or the boundaries within which these agents are allowed to operate. The objective should be to ensure that security controls are built into the entire AI agent lifecycle rather than relying on a kill switch to intervene after something goes wrong. Dhar added that enterprise AI agents often have access to sensitive systems, databases, applications, credentials, and APIs. A compromised or misdirected agent could therefore become a point of vulnerability. The challenge is compounded by the fact that such activity may go undetected for some time, making it difficult for organisations to identify and contain the threat.

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09 Nov 2026 12:21am GMT

CNBC reports new details about the relationship of alleged Chinese spy with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang: Huang told Nvidia staff in a email on Sunday that he had an affair with the woman and that Nvidia's board of directors had opened an independent investigation into the spying allegations. "I was unfaithful to my wife. My actions hurt her and our children. There is no excuse for what I did," Huang wrote in the message. "I am deeply sorry." Nvidia's board "said an independent committee, assisted by outside counsel, will investigate the matter," reports Axios: The board said it has no reason to believe national security or company secrets were compromised and expressed confidence in Huang's leadership... Huang has been a key voice in Washington pushing to loosen restrictions on AI chip sales to China. He argued that keeping American technology in the Chinese market strengthens U.S. competitiveness and prevented China from developing their own potentially more advanced chips. The board's statement added that their inquiry "will examine all available information," CNBC reports. But "An Nvidia spokesperson said that Huang was committed to continuing as CEO of Nvidia without interruption." "I love our country and our company," Jensen Huang wrote in his letter to Nvidia's staff (as reported by CNBC), "and I am committed to protecting NVIDIA and supporting America's national security. I am proud and grateful to be an American." But while U.S. lawmakers have requested Huang appear for closed-door committee briefing, Jensen has not confirmed he'll appear, notes CNBC: When asked by the New York Times whether Huang would appear before lawmakers to discuss the matter, Nvidia spokesman John Rizzo declined to comment. "Our chief executive has an outstanding security team that accompanies him where needed," Mr. Rizzo said in a statement to the Times... Rizzo said [Thursday] the Nvidia CEO's interactions with [alleged Chinese spy Alice] Huang were consistent with meetings he has had with any of Nvidia's customers.

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08 Nov 2026 9:34pm GMT

Tuning in to electronic noise can tell us whether electrons have paired up or not.

08 Nov 2026 12:15pm GMT

About five months after the previous release, the MorphOS team has released MorphOS 3.21. It brings the usual list of big fixes and smaller improvements, but there's a few big ticket items in here as well. MorphOS 3.21 introduces BasicWorks, an office suite made up of CellBasics and PageBasics. It offers document and spreadsheet authoring and loads and saves Microsoft Office and OpenOffice documents. Also new are NVMEMount, an auto-mounter for booting from and mounting NVMe partitions, and the Marbles and Cyber 3D blankers. Graphics performance has been improved, with a faster Radeon driver on cards with little video memory thanks to GART backed bitmap transfers, quicker TinyGL texture copies, hardware accelerated antialiased text in TTEngine and much faster color SVG glyph rendering in Cairo. The Bcm43xx wireless driver has been substantially reworked, with automatic transmit rate selection, updated firmware and numerous connection fixes. PowerBook and iMac hotkeys are now fully configurable. ↫ MorphOS 3.21 release announcement The BasicWorks office suite has been in the works for a while now, and more information on it can be found in a thread on the MorphZone forums and on the website for the spreadsheet component of the suite, CellBasics. The formula loaders and xlsx loaders are ports of open source projects, but the rest of the application is new code based on ObjectiveC++ and Cairo/Harfbuzz. It uses its own file format, but can import csv and xslsx files, so I'm assuming the same more or else applies to the word processor (but with docx, of course). Alongside MorphOS 3.21 also comes a new release for Wayfarer, the web browser the Amiga-inspired operating system uses. Wayfarer 12.0 moves to WebKitGTK 2.52.5 (which was released in July of 2026, so it's quite up to date), and now uses the Skia graphics library. R300-R500 Radeons will render websites with Skia-GL for some massive performance improvements, helped further along by a slew of additional performance optimisations. Adblocking has been improved as well, YouTube should work a lot better now, and much more. The full release notes for MorphOS 3.21 give you all the details.

07 Nov 2026 7:46pm GMT

Ask any program to listen on port 0 and it will hand you a socket on port 47193…or 58037…or whatever the kernel felt like that day. Port 0 is not a port you can have. It is the number you pass when you want the operating system to pick one for you. But a TCP header is just bytes. The destination port field is 16 bits wide, and 0x0000 fits in 16 bits as well as anything else does. Nothing on the wire stops a packet from being addressed to port 0. Your tools will refuse it, your browser will block it, and your scanner's default port list skips it, because everyone agrees it isn't a real port. Which makes it a pretty good place to hide things, whether anyone meant to or not. So we did some TCP cowboy shit & port scanned the entire fucking internet for open ports on port 0, which uncovered some interesting unexpected findings. ↫ acidvegas An awesome and entertaining read. Don't skip this one.

07 Nov 2026 7:33pm GMT

A little tidbit of news regarding the nest major update to Windows, known as Windows 11 27H2. Apparently, it's going to come with some more serious changes to the codebase, therefore necessitating a full operating system swap instead of a mere enablement package, much like Windows 11 24H2 was. For those who need a refresher, Microsoft has long been rumored to be running on a three-year release cadence and for a while, it was even thought that the company would launch Windows 12 in 2H 2024. That evidently didn't happen, as instead we got Windows 11 24H2, but it was a major upgrade, a full OS swap compared to Windows 11 23H2 and 22H2. Essentially, it looks like every three releases, Microsoft is performing a full swap with major changes in the underlying codebase, and it seems to line up with Windows 11 27H2 as well. At the moment it's not known if system requirements will change or not. ↫ Sayan Sen at Neowin.net Microsoft is currently testing adding support for Intel's Advanced Performance Extensions, which should yield improved 64bit performance and reduced power consumption. It makes sense to assume this support will be coming with Windows 11 27H2, which should hopefully lead to tangible performance improvements across the board. Also, there's going to be a new default wallpaper. Be still my beating heart.

07 Nov 2026 7:27pm GMT

Genes and archaeology are revealing how Bantu speakers spread across much of Africa.

07 Nov 2026 12:15pm GMT

Soldier told repeatedly to lock down devices before deploying, got sextorted, court-martialed.

07 Nov 2026 11:00am GMT

This is a story of how we got from something like this: Failed to deserialize BUILDINFO file: Parser failed with the following error: unknown ^ invalid makepkg build environment option expected `buildflags`, `ccache`, `check`, `color`, `distcc`, `sign`, `makeflags` To this: When the ALPM project started, the goal was fairly simple: Better tooling to interact with the low-level plumbing of Arch Linux Package Management (ALPM). This meant binaries to read/write individual file types, better error messages, extensive specifications and of course exports to common dataformats like JSON. The thing is, although some of us already had experience with low-level dataframe parsing, …

08 Oct 2026 12:00am GMT

Over the last few weeks, we have been doing research on the integration of our official distribution packages when installed on a target system. In this context we have been looking at the current uses of alpm-install-scriptlet(5) files and alpm-hooks(5) in around 120 package source repositories (alpm-source-repo(7)) to better understand the underlying functionality and use-cases these two integrations offer and target. In this article we are going to look at how these two systems work, how Arch Linux is currently using them and attempt to provide suggestions for when to use which. Learning about alpm-hooks(5) and alpm-install-scriptlet(5) files …

09 Aug 2026 12:00am GMT

Good morning from JetBrains Berlin office!

01 Jun 2026 12:00am GMT