UK plans a £100M lab using AI to defend against biological threats

The BBC reports that the UK will set up a national AI Biosecurity Lab (AIBL) to strengthen its defences against new biological threats. The plan is worth £100M. OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind support it.

OpenAI explains the cached copy of the web it uses to train models offline

OpenAI says it built an 'offline world' from cached web content. Its strongest models are trained cut off from the internet, and this world lets them practise browsing, searching for information and using web apps. OpenAI says AI models need computing environments where they can write and run code.

OpenAI lets vetted security partners use its hacking-capable AI to find bugs

Forbes looks at OpenAI's Project Daybreak. It lets vetted partners use OpenAI's top hacking models, including the latest GPT model, to find and fix vulnerabilities. Forbes says the program helped uncover this week's php2shell flaws in PHP.

Amazon's CEO says cloud capacity for 2027 is largely sold out

Andy Jassy, Amazon's CEO, says Amazon Web Services capacity for 2027 is "largely sold out" and a "good chunk" of 2028 is sold too, The Information reports. AWS keeps some capacity for on-demand use.

Xbox misses a Microsoft executive pay target for the fifth time in six years

Microsoft's new proxy statement shows the fiscal 2026 goal was 4.3% growth in Xbox content and services revenue. That revenue fell 6% by the pay measure instead, or 5% by the filing's own business highlights. Fiscal 2025 was the only year Xbox hit the target. The division has also announced plans to lay off 3,200 workers. Satya Nadella's total pay came to about $90.6 million, down from about $96.5 million, though the filing does not link the drop to Xbox.

LattePanda launches Sigma 2, a single-board computer for running AI locally

LattePanda launched the Sigma 2, a 146 × 102 mm x86 board built around Intel's Core Ultra X7 358H chip with Arc B390 graphics. The company claims up to 180 TOPS of AI performance and up to 64 GB of memory, and says it runs the Qwen3.6-35B-A3B model at around 30 tokens per second. It costs $2,599 in pre-sale through mid-November, then $2,799.

A new flaw in the PHP web language affects even fully patched servers

On October 23 the PHP project published an advisory for CVE-2026-115560, a flaw in PHP's session upload progress feature. It is related to the php2shell flaws disclosed this week. It affects fully patched releases, including 8.5.12, and will be fixed in PHP's next regular release. Cloudflare says its existing firewall rule blocks known attacks, but only on sites that use PHP's default upload progress field name.

GitHub restores about 12,285 business accounts it deleted by mistake in June

GitHub says that from June 1 to June 13, 2026, some Enterprise Managed User accounts (accounts a company controls through its own identity system) were deleted instead of suspended when they were removed. A new code path did not check the account type. This hit about 12,285 accounts, 76 of which were active. The affected users showed up as 'ghost' users in issues, pull requests and audit logs. GitHub restored the records in October.

Windows 11 beta testers get a right-click menu they can customise

Microsoft is rolling out a redesigned File Explorer right-click menu to Windows Insiders in the Beta channel, in build 26220.9757. The top level now shows only common actions. A new 'Customize menu' settings page lets users switch built-in commands on or off and move app entries into a submenu or hide them. Microsoft is also removing eight OneDrive-based Copilot actions from the menu, reportedly from mid-November.

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