OFFBEAT

Time to switch back to paper and harvest that suddenly valuable RAM

BORK!BORK!BORK! It’s not all sunshine and Pastel de nata in Portugal. Behind the hundreds of ways of cooking fish and bottles of sweet, fortified wine lurks our old friend – a BIOS screen misbehaving in a window.

Spotted by eagle-eyed Register reader Mário in Lisbon, the digital sign looking out on the street from a branch of Banco CTT looks like it is in imminent danger of a storage failure. The “S.M.A.R.T. Status Bad” indicates that something has made the storage media (hard drive or SSD) unhappy, and Banco CTT should take a break from flogging financial services to replace the unit before it fails completely.

A jab of a key should allow the digital sign to continue doing its thing, and there is some computer hardware in the background that we’re sure an enterprising Reg reader could plug into the screen to put it out of its misery – at least temporarily.

While we applaud Mário for his attentiveness, it is also worth noting that Lisbon is a lovely city with much to recommend – there is history to explore, cuisine to sample, and local culture to enjoy. This hack is a particular fan of the labyrinthine streets of Alfama, and the iconic trams are sufficient to satisfy anyone’s inner public transport nerd.

Back to the bork.

Visible on the screen is the amount of memory installed. Four gigabytes, by the looks of things, which seems excessive for something that is probably only going to show a jumped-up slideshow to passersby.

Then again, considering the cost of RAM nowadays, that screen might be considerably more valuable today than it was only a few months ago. While we’re not familiar with the financial products on offer from Banco CTT, we’d wager that few – if any – can keep up with the relentless rise in RAM prices.

It cannot be much longer before it makes more financial sense to replace digital signage with printed paper and harvest the suddenly valuable chips within, although where would that leave The Register’s bork desk? ®

India’s Unified Payment Interface has grown to over 750 million daily transactions, and the head of the body that oversees it says AI will be central to reaching a billion. Dilip Asbe, MD and CEO of the National Payments Corporation of India, told TechCrunch at Mumbai Tech Week that AI could drive the next half billion users through fraud prevention, credit distribution, and multilingual voice onboarding.

“AI will be used very effectively when we look at the next wave of UPI, and that includes all aspects, including reaching new users,” Asbe said. “We must use AI effectively to protect our current citizens, to find fraud, and to find mules. AI must also be used to provide credit to all the users and merchants who have digital footprints.”

NPCI launched a voice assistant-based payment system in 2023, but Asbe acknowledged adoption has not taken off yet. He said voice models need to be more accurate before they become a critical component of the payment ecosystem. India has been debating its AI sovereignty more intensely in recent weeks, with proposals for a $5 billion annual sovereign AI fund and calls to build small language models tailored to local languages and use cases.

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Asbe sees an opportunity there. “We have a very rich data set in our ecosystem,” he said. “I think there is a big opportunity for Indian companies, the banks, FinTechs, and the ecosystem, to create small language models which are sharp, specific, and as deterministic as possible.” NPCI already launched a model called FIMI to resolve user disputes, which Asbe said now serves over a million users for cancelling mandates and resolving issues.

On regulation, Asbe said India can adopt AI-powered finance with the right protections. He wants systems that can trace the instructions and consent a user gave to an AI agent if something goes wrong. NPCI demonstrated agentic commerce and payments with Razorpay last year, but a wider rollout has not followed.

The UPI market remains heavily concentrated. PhonePe and Google Pay control over 80% of transaction share. A regulatory cap that would limit any single app to 30% is set to take effect on December 31, 2026, unless NPCI defers the deadline again. Asbe said switching costs between apps are low and that the concentration reflects the absence of a viable commercial model for newer entrants. “The moment we see the commercial model being available to the ecosystem, I believe newer players will start investing very heavily,” he said.

NPCI’s own app, BHIM, holds roughly 1% market share despite growing transaction volumes. Asbe said there is no specific share target for BHIM, but as India’s digital economy scales toward its largest-ever tech IPOs and $110 billion AI infrastructure plans, NPCI wants BHIM to serve as a sovereign and secure alternative.

Tesla has settled a lawsuit connected to a fatal 2023 crash involving a vehicle using the company’s advanced driver assistance system known as Full Self-Driving.

Bloomberg was first to report on the settlement. Terms were not disclosed.

The lawsuit was filed against Tesla and the driver by the daughter of Johna Story, a 71-year-old woman who was struck by a Tesla Model Y. Story was hit after she stepped out of her own vehicle to direct traffic around a crash that had occurred earlier due to sun glare.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) opened an investigation into Tesla’s FSD (Supervised) automated driving software in 2024 after four reported crashes in low visibility conditions — including the one involving Story. The NHTSA said, at the time, it was investigating the driver assistance system to find out whether it could “detect and respond appropriately to reduced roadway visibility conditions,” such as “sun glare, fog, or airborne dust.” 

That investigation was upgraded in March 2026 to an engineering analysis. In that report, the agency wrote “Available incident data raise concerns that Tesla’s degradation detection system, both as originally deployed and later updated, fails to detect and/or warn the driver appropriately under degraded visibility conditions such as glare and airborne obscurants.”

While the settlement ends the family’s lawsuit, this upgraded NHTSA investigation has not yet been closed. At stake for Tesla for the federal investigation is a host of possible outcomes, including a recall.

The federal agency also opened an investigation into FSD in October 2025 after receiving reports the software caused the vehicles to run red lights or cross into the wrong lane.

Dana, 46, and Calista, 43, are two women in Florida who turned to the subreddit as they reckoned with the possibility of being evicted due to prolonged unemployment.

Calista tells WIRED that she has applied to more than a thousand full-time positions since losing her remote job in February 2024 but can’t seem to land an interview. She says she’s three months behind on rent. “I’ve never been close to homelessness like this before. It’s a new experience,” she says. “It’s very helpful to see the stories from other people, see the things they’ve tried, just that solidarity.”

Dana, who has extensive work experience in software development, says she has been laid off four times since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, most recently in November, in part due to the AI boom. A single mother, she has discussed the possibility of living in a tent with her son, who recently graduated from high school. “So many people are in similar situations,” Dana says of the stories she’s read online. “It’s honestly been the most helpful from a mental perspective. I don’t feel so alone.” This is contrary, she says, to the stigmatization of poverty that she feels in her own city.

Politicians and commentators who demonize the homeless population as mentally ill drug addicts—such as former reality TV star Spencer Pratt, who ran a failed mayoral campaign in Los Angeles that characterized them as “zombies” on “super meth”—are distorting the issues at play, says Margot Kushel, director of the Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative at UC San Francisco.

“What we’re seeing in the numbers of people experiencing homelessness isn’t that we suddenly have this increase in people with mental health or substance use problems,” she says. “What we have is that the rent is too damn high.”

The cruel ways unhoused people are depicted in the media add “to the already very heavy burden of homelessness,” Kushel continues, with groups like r/almosthomeless countering those narratives and making people feel seen.

Keith, 35, in South Carolina, says he attempted suicide in 2023 after a long battle with alcoholism. He recounts how he survived jumping off a bridge but broke his back. After he received a spinal fusion, he found it difficult to work or do much of anything physical because of his injury, and finally he wound up homeless. He took to sleeping in the woods outside a hospital where he says he regularly sought assistance. “I was just staying there, like trying to get into the mental health department or something like that,” Keith says. “They would just turn you away.”

Later, Keith says, he secured a spot at a local Salvation Army shelter, found a job at a gas station, and in January made the transition into a studio apartment, staying sober and “building something that resembled a normal life,” he says. Yet lately he has started to worry that he’s “watching years of progress disappear in slow motion.” A succession of restaurant jobs, including dishwashing and prep work, have proven impossible with his back problem, and he has avoided further medical treatment for fear of the cost. Now he expects to be evicted, and he’s dreading a return to an unhoused existence.

Jacob Andreou, the 33-year-old executive Satya Nadella promoted to run Copilot in March after just one year at Microsoft, now oversees more than 11,000 people. He has merged the consumer and enterprise Copilot teams, eliminated redundant product versions, and is building a super app that combines chat, coding, and a new agentic workflow called Autopilot, according to a Fortune profile published Friday.

“This is one of the most intensely competitive environments tech has seen in the last 20 years,” Andreou told Fortune. “Because the technology is moving so quickly, the reality is a six to twelve month roadmap doesn’t really exist in the way it used to.”

The profile paints Andreou as a technically hands-on leader who personally codes alongside developers. He built Copilot Tasks, an AI agent that can autonomously perform multi-step actions like ordering food, in roughly two months. That speed impressed Nadella, who dismantled Microsoft’s entire senior leadership structure this year in favour of startup-style engineering groups.

Andreou’s appointment freed Mustafa Suleyman, the DeepMind co-founder, to focus on proprietary AI models rather than day-to-day product management. The two work closely but run separate organisations. Suleyman told a group of roughly 80 developers in March that the future of software development means fewer people working harder by leveraging AI agents, according to Fortune.

The challenge is substantial. Only about 4.5% of 450 million Microsoft 365 customers pay for Copilot, and its free consumer version trails far behind ChatGPT. Microsoft’s stock is down double digits over the past year as investors question AI spending and the company’s reliance on OpenAI. Jefferies analyst Brent Thill said the general perception of Copilot is that “it stinks.”

Before Microsoft, Andreou spent eight years at Snap scaling the platform from 80 million to 360 million daily active users. He then joined Greylock as a venture partner backing consumer AI startups. At Microsoft, he has introduced consumption-based pricing alongside seat licences, scaled back the Copilot icons that irritated Windows users, and launched Copilot Cowork to compete with Anthropic’s Claude.

Not everyone is on board with the new culture. Current and former employees told Fortune that some teams now work 12-hour days, feel daily panic to keep up with Anthropic and other labs, and worry that shipping speed risks compliance problems. Critics say Andreou can be overconfident and still has to prove himself in enterprise software, where the burden is building durable revenue at scale.

Andreou’s three stated priorities are delivering a superior AI chat product, achieving leading model quality without being late to market, and providing a trusted way to integrate various models. The super app, expected by end of summer, will let users toggle between personal and enterprise accounts in one interface. Microsoft is also exploring hosting DeepSeek and other open-source models inside Copilot Cowork, while Nadella has warned against industry reliance on only a few AI providers.

New EU proposals would give Europol a sovereign cloud and a shared data space to fight cross-border crime.

The European Commission has proposed extensive new measures to strengthen Europol and Eurojust, aiming to give the EU’s law enforcement and judicial agencies sharper tools against crime that it said is increasingly sophisticated, international and digital.

The package includes two regulations reinforcing the mandates of Europol and Eurojust, a revision of the European Investigation Order, and changes to the Data Protection Regulation for EU institutions and bodies. The reforms are designed to target criminal networks and hostile actors operating across borders, online and, increasingly, through AI.

Technology is at the heart of the proposed Europol overhaul. The agency will build a secure, scalable and sovereign cloud infrastructure alongside a new Police Shared Data Space, allowing investigators in different member states to work jointly on the same cases in real time. Automated information sharing is intended to replace slower manual exchange between national authorities.

Europol will also set up a technology and innovation hub, giving the EU its first bloc-wide view of law enforcement capability gaps, and helping member states pool investment in joint research and development. Any tools that come out of the hub will be distributed to national authorities through the same shared data space.

On the ground, Europol Support Offices staffed by former Europol officers will be rolled out in member states, widening access to the agency’s forensics and data-analysis capabilities.

Eurojust gets its own tech upgrade: a new information system will let Eurojust and Europol flag cases and information relevant to both agencies, tightening the link between judicial and law enforcement cooperation. Eurojust’s mandate is also being widened into emerging crime areas, including cybercrime, breaches of EU restrictive measures, and gender-based violence, alongside greater power to open coordination on its own initiative.

Separately, the Commission wants to update the European Investigation Order, the standard mechanism for gathering evidence across borders in criminal cases, by clarifying procedures and removing operational snags. A new European Remote Participation Order would let suspects, accused persons and victims take part in criminal hearings remotely from another member state.

“Criminals are highly adept at exploiting the opportunities of the digital realm, operating effectively across borders without limitations,” said Henna Virkkunen, Executive Vice-President for Tech Sovereignty, Security and Democracy yesterday at the announcement.

“With today’s proposals, we are strengthening both Europol and Eurojust so that Europe can respond faster, including in the fight against online criminal activities, share information more effectively, and bring criminals to justice more efficiently.”

“Serious organised crime is becoming increasingly sophisticated, digital and transnational,” said Michael McGrath, Commissioner for Democracy, Justice, the Rule of Law and Consumer Protection. “Eurojust must be equipped to keep pace with these evolving threats. This reform strengthens the agency’s capacity to support national judicial authorities, coordinate complex cross-border investigations and enhance cooperation with partners across Europe and beyond.

“By modernising Eurojust’s mandate, we are reinforcing the rule of law and ensuring that justice can respond with the same speed and agility as the criminal networks it seeks to disrupt,”

The proposals now move to the European Parliament and member states for negotiation.

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Smart bulbs have really caught on in recent years, and it’s easy to see why. They are a breeze to use, work exactly as advertised and offer a simplified introduction into the world of smart home automation. Also, there’s just something fun about barking “turn the lights off” like a spoiled monarch and getting the bulb to do your bidding.

Smart bulbs tend to be filled with some nifty, albeit relatively simple, tech, leaving many to wonder if they use more energy than traditional LED bulbs. After all, they do contain more components to enable communication with your smartphone or Wi-Fi. So are these gadgets truly energy efficient or does the convenience come with a price? 

Do smart bulbs use more energy than standard LED bulbs?

The answer is yes. Smart bulbs do use a tad bit more energy than regular LED bulbs. This is due to the nature of the technology. The two types of bulbs use the same amount of energy when illuminating a space, but standard LEDs draw no power when turned off. Smart bulbs do draw a bit of power when not in use, so they can remain connected to Wi-Fi or a hub. 

According to a 2019 study published in ScienceDirect, “when a user turns off a smart LED bulb from a mobile device, the bulb stops emitting light; however it is constantly consuming power.” The study found that of the 30 smart LED bulbs tested, 21 had standby power consumption levels of less than 0.5 watts, which met the requirement set out by the Energy Star program.

How much more energy does a smart bulb use?

Smart bulbs use very little electricity in standby mode. This varies depending on the manufacturer and model, but we’ve found devices like the TP-Link Tapo that are advertised as consuming about 0.2 watts in standby, while Philips Hue stated in a whitepaper that most of its “more modern products” consume less than 0.5 watts while in standby mode. 

A single bulb’s standby power consumption will increase your energy bill by $0.35 to $1.30 per year, though this will vary depending on local utility costs. For many, this difference in consumption will be negligible and won’t impede smart bulb adoption.

The US Department of Energy notes that devices left in standby mode make up around 5 to 10 percent of a home’s total electricity use. The biggest standby power thieves are things like microwaves, televisions, routers and computers, though.

Can you still save money in the long run?

Absolutely. The additional power draw of a smart bulb is so small that the various benefits offered could offset the cost and even reverse it. One of the primary functions of a smart bulb is the ability to turn it on or off at will via an app or smart assistant. Another primary function is the ability to create schedules. Taken together, this can drastically reduce the amount of time the bulb is being used. Many models even allow for dimming, which further lowers the energy load.

Are there any other hidden costs with smart bulbs?

There is one other fairly significant cost factor, but it’s not hidden at all. That’s the price of the actual bulbs. Smart bulbs tend to be more expensive to purchase when compared to regular bulbs. Traditional LEDs cost anywhere from $1.50 to $4 per bulb, and combo packs can lower the price even further. Smart bulbs start at around $6, in the case of IKEA’s latest offering, and shoot all the way up to around $90. However, the average price sits at around $8 to $15 per bulb. Combo packs can help keep costs down.

Do smart bulbs last longer than traditional LEDs?

No, but it’s a bit more complicated than that. Smart bulbs are typically rated slightly under traditional LED bulbs when it comes to lifespan. This is primarily because of the additional components involved with a smart bulb, which can wear down as the years go on. On paper, regular LEDs last for 20 to 40 years and smart bulb LEDs last anywhere from 15 to 25 years.

Once again, this can be offset by the nature of the technology. Smart bulbs won’t stay powered on as long as old-school light bulbs, but the added control options will likely translate to a more economical usage schedule.