If you’re planning to pick up a new laptop during Amazon Prime Day or Flipkart’s GOAT Sale, ASUS has just added another option to the list. The company has launched the new ASUS Vivobook 15, which it claims is India’s first laptop powered by Intel’s new Core 5 Series 3 processor. Alongside it, ASUS has also introduced a new TUF Gaming A15 variant and announced discounts across its gaming and consumer laptop lineup.

The new Vivobook 15 is aimed at students, professionals, and anyone looking for an everyday AI-ready laptop without stepping into premium creator or gaming territory.

ASUS Vivobook 15 Brings Intel’s New Core 5 Series 3 Processor

The biggest highlight of the new Vivobook 15 is its Intel Core 5 Series 3 processor, which includes an integrated Intel AI Boost NPU capable of delivering up to 16 TOPS of AI performance. While it isn’t a full-fledged Copilot+ PC, it is designed to support Windows’ growing list of AI-powered features. The laptop features a 15.6-inch Full HD anti-glare display, 16GB of DDR5 RAM, and a 512GB PCIe 4.0 SSD. ASUS says the combination is built to handle everyday multitasking, office work, web browsing, media consumption, and light creative workloads.

Connectivity includes Wi-Fi 6, while the rest of the package is fairly premium for this segment. You get a backlit keyboard, a dedicated Copilot key for quickly launching Microsoft’s AI assistant, a fingerprint reader for Windows Hello authentication, and a physical privacy shutter for the HD webcam.

Despite the large display, the Vivobook 15 weighs 1.7kg and also carries MIL-STD-810H military-grade durability certification, which should help it withstand the occasional bump during daily commuting. The laptop will be available exclusively through Amazon and Flipkart in Cool Silver, Quiet Blue, and Terra Cotta.

ASUS Also Launches a New TUF Gaming A15

Gamers aren’t being left out either. ASUS has also announced a new TUF Gaming A15 (FA506NCG-HN192WS) as part of Amazon Prime Day.

The laptop pairs an AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS processor with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 GPU with 4GB of memory, alongside 16GB of DDR5 RAM and a 512GB PCIe 4.0 SSD. It also gets a 15.6-inch Full HD 144Hz display, making it a suitable option for esports titles and AAA games at medium to high settings. The TUF Gaming A15 carries a starting price of ₹1,24,990.

BearingPoint’s Sohini De discusses the state of digital transformation in healthcare, and the structural and organisational requirements for long-term success.

Digitisation in healthcare has become a prominent topic over the years across the world, and Ireland is no exception.

In 2024, the Irish Government unveiled the Digital for Care framework, a roadmap with the ultimate goal of digitally transforming Ireland’s health services by the year 2030 to ensure access and improve efficiency.

As part of that framework, Ireland’s national healthcare system – the Health Service Executive – has been working on several digital initiatives, including an app for health information and electronic health records.

Digitisation in healthcare appears to be progressing, which BearingPoint’s Sohini De believes has been most noticeable after the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.

“There has been a clear shift from episodic, hospital‑centric care towards more preventative, integrated and data‑enabled models, particularly following Covid‑19,” she explains.

“Progress is most visible in diagnostics, clinical decision support and telehealth, which saw rapid adoption during the pandemic. Remote monitoring and virtual care models are also beginning to extend care beyond hospital settings.”

However, De – who is head of healthcare and innovation at BearingPoint Ireland – believes significant gaps remain.

“Interoperability across systems is still limited, and many digital tools are not integrated into day‑to‑day clinical workflows,” she says. “Scaling also continues to be a challenge. Across Ireland, multiple local pilots address similar issues, but there is no consistent mechanism to share or scale successful models.

“Healthcare is, therefore, digitising but not yet transforming. To move forward, organisations must rethink care models, organisational structures and governance – not simply digitise existing processes.”

Digital therapeutics

De tells SiliconRepublic.com that digitisation is already visible in practical, real‑world applications across healthcare systems.

“Telehealth is now a standard part of service delivery following rapid adoption during Covid‑19,” she says. “Electronic health records have been adopted in a number of hospitals, or across different clinical pathways.”

Other examples of digitisation include remote patient monitoring using wearables and home equipment; virtual wards and ‘hospital-at-home models’; and something De refers to as digital therapeutics.

But what, exactly, are these?

Digital therapeutics, De explains, are software‑based, clinically validated interventions designed to prevent, manage or treat medical conditions.

“They form a distinct category within digital health and are typically classified as software as a medical device (SaMD) because they deliver therapeutic interventions directly,” she says.

“They differ from wellness apps, which are not clinically validated, and from telehealth, which acts as a delivery channel rather than a treatment. Instead, digital therapeutics provide structured, evidence‑based care through software as part of a clinical pathway.”

Some common applications highlighted by De include behavioural interventions, chronic disease management (for conditions such as diabetes and obesity), and medication adherence or lifestyle support programmes.

Digital therapeutics are also being increasingly used to “augment” clinical decision-making, according to De.

She points to a recent collaboration that BearingPoint had with Lund University in Sweden, where the two partners focused on developing a digital tool to support mental health professionals in areas such as assessment, documentation and treatment planning.

“This acts as an early-stage triage tool, helping to identify cases requiring more urgent clinical intervention, while ensuring that clinicians remain central to decision-making.”

De adds that when integrated with connected care platforms – clinician dashboards, alerting systems and so on – digital therapeutics can also “enable more effective collaboration across multi‑disciplinary teams”.

“Their significance lies in their ability to deliver scalable, consistent and ‘always‑on’ care, particularly for chronic conditions that require long‑term engagement.”

Constraints

Despite the progress, De says that digitisation in healthcare is constrained by a combination of structural, operational and adoption challenges.

“At a system level, fragmentation and limited interoperability between platforms continue to restrict data sharing, while legacy IT infrastructure limits integration,” she explains.

Adoption, according to De, is a significant barrier.

“Clinicians often face time pressures and may lack the training needed to incorporate new tools into practice,” she says. “Patients are not always involved early in solution design, and broader education is needed to build confidence in digital care, including remote monitoring and at‑home interventions.

“Variations in digital literacy and limited human‑centred design further affect uptake.”

Meanwhile, digitisation can also face operational challenges – De says organisations often struggle to scale digitisation efforts beyond pilot initiatives.

To ensure digitisation is successful in the long term, De highlights the importance of embedding digital solutions into routine care “rather than treating them as standalone initiatives” – requiring a shift from short‑term pilots to sustained, scalable services.

“Clear governance and operating models are essential, with defined ownership, accountability and clinical oversight,” she adds. “Organisations must also adopt a continuous improvement approach, using data to launch, test, refine and scale solutions over time.

“Workforce enablement is equally important. This includes designing organisational structures that support new ways of working, alongside ongoing training, change management and clinical engagement.”

At a technical level, De emphasises that digital platforms require active life cycle management, including integration, interoperability, upgrades and vendor coordination. “Funding models must also evolve to prioritise outcomes rather than activity,” she adds.

“Sustaining digital care relies on patient trust,” says De. “Transparency, usability, data protection and continuous feedback all play a critical role.

“Ultimately, sustainability depends on embedding digital into how care is planned, delivered and measured.”

Don’t miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic’s digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.

Volkswagen has announced plans to gut its sprawling product range as it fights the worst crisis in its history. The carmaker will cut its model lineup by up to half over the coming years, CNBC reports.

The group will also shrink production capacity to nine million vehicles a year. That is well below the 12 million it once targeted before the pandemic.

Volkswagen currently offers around 150 model lines across brands including Porsche, Audi, and Skoda. So-called offering complexity, meaning the number of equipment and configuration options, will be cut by up to 75%.

Chief executive Oliver Blume framed the overhaul as a survival move. It is about “making the Volkswagen Group faster, more resilient and more competitive”, he said.

The number nobody would say out loud

What the official announcement pointedly left out was jobs. The company gave no word on headcount at its supervisory board meeting, even though that is the flashpoint dominating the story.

Sources say Blume wants to cut up to 100,000 jobs and close four German plants. That would roughly double the reductions Volkswagen had already been reported to be planning.

The sites said to be at risk are Hanover, Emden, Zwickau, and Audi’s Neckarsulm factory. None of this was confirmed on the record at the board meeting.

Why Volkswagen is in trouble

The pressure comes from several directions at once. Volkswagen faces high costs and excess capacity at home, rising Chinese competition, and US import tariffs.

Those forces have been brutal for the bottom line. The company’s profit margins roughly halved between 2021 and 2025.

China is the sharpest wound, as the market that once printed money for German brands turns hostile. Domestic Chinese rivals now dominate, leaving foreign automakers scrambling for a comeback.

Volkswagen is not alone in feeling it, with BMW cutting its profit forecast as China squeezes Europe. The electric transition has added to the strain, and Volkswagen has already cut EV output as demand faltered.

A fight with the workforce

The plan collided head-on with Volkswagen’s powerful unions on 9 July. Labour representatives on the supervisory board pushed back hard against the deeper cuts.

Around 400 people demonstrated in Wolfsburg, part of a wider mobilisation by IG Metall across roughly 20 group sites. The union warned of a “major conflict” if management forced the plans through.

IG Metall president Christiane Benner, who is also deputy chair of the supervisory board, was blunt. “This is a clear message to the board: not on our watch,” she said.

The workers have leverage and precedent on their side. Under Blume’s late-2024 restructuring deal, unions won a commitment to avoid German plant closures, and reopening that promise is explosive.

What happens next

The meeting was never likely to settle anything. It reads instead as the opening round of a long and bitter negotiation over Volkswagen’s future.

Analysts were unimpressed by the detail on offer, with Jefferies calling it “limited new information”. The lineup cuts are now on the record, but the human cost has been left deliberately blank.

Even as it retrenches, Volkswagen is still spending on the technology it hopes will save it, having become Rivian’s largest shareholder through its software partnership. The strategy is to shrink the old business while buying into a leaner, software-defined future.

That gap is the whole story. Volkswagen has told the world how many cars it will stop making, while refusing to say how many people it will stop employing.

Six vulnerabilities in the widely used U-Boot bootloader have been discovered that could allow attackers to execute malicious code during device boot, potentially enabling stealthy firmware attacks that compromise security protections and install persistent malware.

U-Boot is one of the world’s most widely used open-source bootloaders and is found in many embedded Linux devices, including enterprise servers’ Baseboard Management Controllers (BMCs), networking equipment, industrial systems, IoT devices, and other appliances.

Because U-Boot is responsible for loading the operating system, vulnerabilities in the bootloader can allow attackers to compromise a device before the operating system and its security software have a chance to start.

One of its security features, known as Verified Boot, uses cryptographic signatures to ensure that only firmware and operating system images signed by a trusted key are loaded during startup.

In a report published this week, firmware security company Binarly disclosed six vulnerabilities in U-Boot’s FIT (Flattened Image Tree) signature verification code.

“Recognising the critical nature of this component, the Binarly Research team decided to examine the core functionality of the U-Boot project more closely,” explains Binarly.

“This research revealed six distinct vulnerabilities, ranging in impact from denial of service (DoS) to arbitrary code execution during the verification of an untrusted image.”

According to the researchers, two of the flaws can potentially lead to arbitrary code execution during firmware verification, while the remaining four can be exploited to crash vulnerable devices. 

As these flaw impact the code for validating firmware images before the operating system starts, if an attacker can exploit that process, they may be able to execute malicious code before the operating system loads.

The six disclosed vulnerabilities are:

• BRLY-2026-037: A flaw that can cause U-Boot to crash when processing a malicious firmware image and, under certain conditions, can be used for arbitrary code execution.
• BRLY-2026-038: A memory corruption vulnerability that could allow attackers to execute arbitrary code during firmware signature verification.
• BRLY-2026-039: An out-of-bounds read vulnerability that can crash devices by forcing U-Boot to read beyond the firmware image.
• BRLY-2026-040: A null pointer dereference that allows specially crafted firmware images to crash the bootloader.
• BRLY-2026-041: Improper validation of externally stored firmware data that can cause U-Boot to crash when processing malicious firmware images.
• BRLY-2026-042: An unbounded recursion flaw that can exhaust available stack memory and crash the bootloader.

According to Binarly, most of the vulnerable code has existed since U-Boot version 2013.07, causing the flaws to potentially affect more than 50 releases of the project as well as vendors who utilized the vulnerable code in their own firmware.

“This means that they potentially affect over 50 stable releases of the U-Boot project. Counting many downstream vendor forks, these vulnerabilities have a significant impact on the industry,” explains Binarly.

If successfully exploited, the arbitrary code execution vulnerabilities could allow attackers to execute code during the earliest stages of the boot process.

Because this occurs before the operating system loads, attackers could potentially disable firmware security features, modify the boot process, install persistent firmware malware, or carry out other malicious actions with high levels of access.

Binarly says that malicious would be difficult to detect because they execute before the operating system starts.

Binarly says exploiting these vulnerabilities does not always require physical access. On systems such as BMCs that support remote firmware updates, an attacker who has already compromised the management interface could upload a specially crafted firmware image to exploit the flaws.

Binarly reported the vulnerabilities to the U-Boot maintainers and submitted patches for all six issues, which have since been accepted into the project’s upstream codebase.

However, because U-Boot is integrated into firmware by individual hardware manufacturers, the fixes must first be incorporated into vendors’ firmware updates before they can be distributed to customers.

Older or unsupported devices that no longer receive firmware updates may never be patched.

Security teams log 54% of successful attacks and alert on just 14%. The rest move through your environment unseen.

The Picus whitepaper shows how breach and attack simulation tests your SIEM and EDR rules so threats stop slipping by detection.

Get the whitepaper

On-Prem

Green groups want licenses frozen before a million satellites litter the exosphere

Environmental groups want the FCC to slam the brakes on orbital datacenters, arguing the agency shouldn’t approve constellations they say would total more than a million satellites before taking a hard look at their environmental impact.

Earthjustice, acting on behalf of DarkSky International, Environment America, and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), filed a petition this week urging the regulator to prepare a Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS) under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) before approving any of the pending applications.

The filing doesn’t target any single company. Instead, it asks the regulator to put the entire emerging orbital datacenter sector on hold while it assesses the cumulative effects of proposals from SpaceX, Starcloud, Blue Origin, Cowboy Space, and any similar applications that follow. According to the petition, those proposals collectively seek “well over a million datacenter satellites” in low Earth orbit.

“The FCC is currently considering multiple requests for licensing extraordinary numbers of satellite-based datacenters to be placed into low-earth orbit over the next decade,” the petition states. “Collectively, the proposals seek to place well over a million datacenter satellites into orbit, increasing the existing volume of satellites in low-earth orbit by multiple orders of magnitude.”

The groups argue that the FCC is trying to apply licensing rules written for much smaller satellite constellations to an entirely new class of infrastructure.

“If ever a situation warranted a PEIS, it is this one,” the petition says. It argues that a single review would allow the agency to examine “the risks, alternatives, needs, costs, and impacts of this sudden transformation of Earth’s exosphere” before deciding whether any of the projects are in the public interest.

The petition raises concerns about rocket launch emissions, pollutants released as satellites burn up during atmospheric reentry, depletion of the ozone layer, orbital debris, light pollution, impacts on wildlife, and interference with astronomy.

It also argues that the combined effects of these constellations cannot be understood by evaluating applications one at a time.

“It is difficult to imagine a better example of multiple projects presenting essentially identical impacts and risks that compound synergistically and cumulatively than the present proposals for orbital datacenter constellations,” the petition argues. “The FCC’s default position that such projects ‘individually and cumulatively’ have no environmental impact is plainly inapplicable here.”

The groups also criticize the applicants, saying they make expansive claims about the benefits of orbital computing while offering little detail about its environmental consequences.

“The proponents of these proposals describe their plans in grandiose, civilization-changing terms,” the petition states. “But these same proponents have refused to embrace any inquiry into the impacts of their self-claimed epochal technology on the environment, science, economy, or other values.”

The petition arrives as the FCC reconsiders its environmental review rules for satellites, acknowledging that rapid growth in the space industry has raised new questions about how to apply its existing framework. The petition argues that the FCC’s current approach, which generally treats satellite licenses as categorically excluded from detailed environmental review, is no longer fit for proposals measured not in dozens or thousands of spacecraft but in hundreds of thousands and, potentially, millions.

If the FCC agrees, orbital datacenter operators will have a mountain of paperwork to clear before sending their hardware skyward. ®

PERSONAL TECH

Open source recreation costs a fraction of the original and may even work with Twiggy drives

Apple Lisas are rare now. Here’s a rather cheaper way to build your own – and in theory, it can even use original floppy drives.

LisaFPGA does what it says on the GitHub repo: “The Apple Lisa computer implemented inside an FPGA!”

It’s an open source project that recreates a complete Apple Lisa on an FPGA board. It’s not entirely complete yet, but hardware went on sale in May and you might still be able to buy one – or download the bitstream of the model and build your own.

The Apple Lisa was a very strange computer, in part because it was pioneering new design territory. Apple started the project before the famous visits to Xerox PARC to see what became the Alto – also a radical machine, as The Reg FOSS desk tried to describe in 2023 for the machine’s 50th anniversary. After those visits (for which Apple paid Xerox in shares, which the photocopier giant promptly sold), Apple changed course. Now the Lisa would be the first mass-market computer with a GUI. (The “mass market” bit didn’t work out, and 2,700 unsold Lisas ended up as landfill in 1989.)

Even so, it was a very important and influential machine: The Register celebrated its 30th birthday and indeed took another look back in 2019.

So it’s quite hard to find an Apple Lisa today, and if you manage to do so, it will probably (a) cost you quite a lot of money and (b) not be in working condition. That’s a shame because Apple released the source to Lisa OS for the machine’s 40th birthday in 2023.

The enterprising developer behind LisaFPGA is Alex Anderson-McLeod, and he built his knowledge of the Lisa and its implementation from an earlier project. Last year, he managed to work out how to compile and build Lisa OS from Apple’s source code. This was a particularly difficult effort, and he documents the process of Lisa OS Source Code Compilation at length. We’ve read the account closely and we think it’s fair to say the build process is deeply arcane.

(Sadly, the repo does not contain the source code itself, as the very strange “Apple Academic License Agreement” allows recompilation and study, but it forbids redistribution. To get the code, you’ll have to agree to the license on the Computer History Museum.)

Anderson-McLeod learned a great deal about how the Lisa works while rebuilding the OS, and he’s applied that knowledge to designing and building LisaFPGA. It is not completely finished – under “Features,” the Introduction section of the README states: “Onboard ESP32-based floppy drive emulation (NOTE: THIS DOESN’T WORK YET).”

And a few lines down: “Supports Twiggy drives with an optional breakout board. Note that this is CURRENTLY UNTESTED as I don’t have a set of Twiggy drives.”

Even so, we are impressed by the effort, and it sounds like a very entertaining bit of kit. The first batch has already sold out, but finished boards were on sale from two official outlets: MacEffects for £264.89, and from Joe’s Computer Museum for $350. Both will take your info and contact you when the next batch is ready.

If you can’t wait, there is Ray Arachelian’s Lisa Emulator Project. The history section is particularly interesting, starting with So, Ray, how come you care about ancient, obsolete machines?

The LisaEm source code is on GitHub, but sadly, Arachelian died of cancer in 2023, which is why version 1.2.7 never got past Release Candidate 4. We feel it would be a good tribute for someone to pick it up and produce a finished release.

In the meantime, we wrote about the remarkable LisaGUI website last year, which recreates the machine’s user interface inside your browser. ®

Amazon‘s Prime Day sale has delivered another very tempting robot vacuum deal, with the Dreame X50 Ultra dropping to just AU$1,479. That’s a huge discount from its AU$2,999 launch price last year, and well below the usual AU$2,000 price we’ve seen it discounted to in recent months.

It isn’t a budget buy, even at AU$1,479, but this is the lowest price we’ve seen for this robovac so far and, given it scored an impressive 4.5 stars in our Dreame X50 Ultra Complete review, we think it’s worth considering at this price.

This isn’t just another robot vacuum with a mop attached to the rear. The Dreame X50 Ultra is built to be a proper hands-off floor cleaner, with a self-emptying, self-refilling and self-cleaning dock, 20,000Pa suction, extendable mop pads and a side brush designed to reach into edges and corners.

More Amazon Prime Day deals in Australia

security

Microsoft says GigaWiper combines at least 3 malware families into one modular tool

A newly identified destructive Windows backdoor combines ransomware-like encryption with multiple data-wiping features, according to Microsoft.

Last October, the Redmond threat-hunting team first spotted attacks using the Golang-based implant they’ve named GigaWiper. 

Its developers stuffed multiple malware families into the software as on-demand commands, giving criminals a Swiss Army knife of command-and-control (C2) and destructive capabilities, including multiple wiping commands and file encryption without any possibility of decryption.

“The consolidation of multiple destructive capabilities into a modular backdoor reflects a notable shift in wiper malware, which are typically designed purely to destroy rather than to extort and carry real-world consequences,” Microsoft Threat Intelligence wrote in a Thursday blog.

Microsoft declined to answer The Register‘s questions about the scale and scope of GigaWiper attacks.

In the blog, Redmond’s malware analysts said they uncovered two types of GigaWiper samples in victims’ environments, and both are unstripped portable executable files written in Golang. 

One is a standalone wiper that operates at the physical disk level, as opposed to deleting individual files. It overwrites raw disk content, removes partition metadata, and then reboots the system using Windows shutdown functionality with restart and zero-delay.

The second sample is the more interesting one. It includes the same disk-wiping functionality, but that’s just one component of the backdoor. This malware also establishes persistence and sets up C2 communication using RabbitMQ over AMQP for receiving commands from the C2 server, and Redis for updating command status and output.

GigaWiper also organizes its commands into different categories, including “always run” for tasks such as continuous screen recording, “manage command” for system management functions, and separate “special command” and “shell command” modes for executing additional functionality.

These include the standalone wiper command, along with another command that disables Windows recovery, triggers a blue screen of death (BSOD), and leaves the device unable to boot.

It also has a destructive command based largely on Crucio ransomware. It encrypts files with randomly generated keys that are never saved, which means victim organizations will never be able to decrypt these files.

Another command bulk encrypts or decrypts files with AES-256 in Cipher Block Chaining (CBC) mode, while a different command uses MinIO Client (mc) to upload stolen files to remote storage.

The malware also runs PowerShell commands, takes screen shots and recordings of the compromised device, collects system info, clears Windows event logs, and allows remote control over the system along with keyboard and mouse control – among other capabilities that attackers can use at will.

According to Redmond, GigaWiper combines components from at least three previously separate malware families, including Crucio ransomware, a Go reimplementation of FlockWiper, and a standalone disk wiper.

“Overall, these findings show the evolution of the actor’s tooling over time,” the security sleuths wrote. “Functionality was merged into a single robust backdoor, granting the actor more ways to control and destroy infected systems.” ®

If you still doubted it, a new Samsung Galaxy Z foldable looks like a sure thing for the company’s upcoming Galaxy Unpacked event this month — a Spider-Man tie-in teaser posted on X on Wednesday pretty much confirms it. And it’s likely the Z Fold 8 or one of the expected variants, as rumors indicate.

Samsung’s been playing up its tie-in with new movie Spider-Man: Brand New Day for a while, including its launch of a functional Spider-Man tracking site that mimics the one appearing in the upcoming movie.

While the tracker promotion showed the site running on the screen of a foldable model, in the latest teaser, we can see a bit of the outside, including the profile of the phone’s folded halves when closed. Because it’s Spider-Man, the phone is shown being snatched out of the air by one of his web shooters.

The Galaxy Z Fold 8, or whatever it will be called, is rumored to feature a new, wider passport-style chassis. The teaser image suggests that might be true, but it also masks the width of the phone with a cleverly placed flare.

The post also links to Samsung’s site, where you can reserve a mystery phone (“your next galaxy device”) before Unpacked in exchange for a chance to win a $500 Samsung gift card and a $30 “gift” that can only be applied to a second device you purchase at the same time.

That may not be enough to make a dent in the potentially high price of upcoming models. Phone prices are rising along with those of many electronics, including consumer laptops, external storage devices, gaming consoles and more, thanks to the current memory- and component-supply shortage caused by RAM resources being reallocated toward more lucrative AI-related sales.

Whatever their cost, the new foldables are expected to be unveiled at Samsung Galaxy Unpacked on July 22 in London.

The Echo Dot (5th generation) is small enough to fit anywhere in your home, and loud enough that you’ll actually want to listen to music through it.

Right now, you can get that balance in the Echo Dot (5th generation) at £44.99, down from an RRP of £54.99, which represents a saving of 18%, which makes the choice to finally try smart home obvious.