Europe’s merger and acquisition activity also experienced a boost in the first quarter, with that momentum continuing into Q2.

New data from Crunchbase has shown that in Q2 of 2026, European start-ups reported the strongest quarter in four years for venture funding. The region’s start-ups raised roughly $24bn in Q2, with figures having risen by a third, quarter on quarter and two-thirds higher than the $14.4bn during the same period in 2025.

Europe’s merger and acquisition activity was also shown to be improving steadily. Despite public market exits remaining subdued, in Q1 mergers and acquisitions picked up, with the momentum moving on into the second quarter. 

The UK in particular was found to have had a successful second quarter for VC funding, as start-ups based in the region raised $10.4bn. This figure is not too far off the UK’s peak of $10.8bn in 2021 and also marks the third-largest funding quarter for the UK on record. 

Other countries with a strong start-up performance for the quarter include Germany, which trailed behind the UK with $3.2bn, France with $2.4bn and Sweden with $2bn. 

Early-stage funding reached $8.6bn across more than 250 start-ups in Europe last quarter according to Crunchbase, whose data indicated that large Series A and Series B rounds were raised by London-based Isomorphic Labs, London’s AI self-learning lab Recursive, Germany’s fusion energy company Focused Energy, London’s semiconductor developer Fractile and London-based quantum processor provider QuantWare.

Late-stage funding, for Europe-based organisations, totaled $12.1bn in Q2, up 90pc year over year. Among the large Series C and D rounds were German robotics developer Neura Robotics, the Netherlands’ Nearfield Instruments, which makes inspection tools for semiconductor manufacturing, UK quantum computing start-up Oxford Quantum Circuits and Germany’s satellite launcher Isar Aerospace.

Notably, European seed funding totaled $3.2bn for the last quarter, with 1bn of that raised by a single organisation, Ineffable Intelligence, which is a UK-based AI start-up building a ‘superintelligence’ platform. It was founded by former Google DeepMind researcher David Silver.

Other notable seed funding rounds for the period include efforts made by Inherent, a London-based AI lab for science, Italy’s autonomous driving technology producer Niulinx and Stockholm-based defense tech company Swebal.

Crunchbase’s report said, “European startup investment has now steadily increased since the fourth quarter of 2024, with increased momentum in the just-ended quarter, driven by larger rounds of $100m and over. 

“The region’s startup ecosystem shows particular strength in deep tech and financial services as well as the formation of new AI labs and M&A activity has fueled liquidity for the next batch of startups. Now the question remains, will it be enough to keep Europe competitive with the frontrunners, the US and China?”

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from the horrible dept

One of the key tools in the tool belt of the anti-vaxxer has long been VAERS, the voluntarily reporting system for adverse events following vaccinations. People who don’t really understand how any of this works often get very, very confused about what VAERS is and is not. It does not contain confirmed outcomes caused by vaccines, it does not provide any medical advice as a result of the reports within it, and it is not a controlled reporting mechanism. Instead, it is a system that is wide open to reports of adverse events by any member of the public or healthcare community. In other words, it’s just a raw reporting tool.

And the problem is that people who report to VAERS can lie, be confused, misreport details, and so on. Anti-vaxxers, for instance, can flood the system with false or misleading reports. And, by some accounts, they do that very thing. The point of all of this very long opening is this: you can’t trust an individual report that claims an adverse vaccine effect to be accurate or true.

Take Andrea Shaw of Idaho, for instance. Shaw has been very public on the internet and podcasts after the death of her two 18 month old twins with claims that they were the result of adverse effects of vaccines. Shaw also reported the deaths in VAERS, claiming an association with several childhood vaccines received a week before their deaths. As a counterpoint to that claim, she also has now been charged with purposefully suffocating her children to death.

The Payette Police Department announced the indictment of 23-year-old Andrea Shaw, formerly of Payette, on two counts of First Degree Murder in connection with the deaths of her 18-month-old twins. Shaw was arrested by Boise Police on June 30th.

The newly released indictment accuses Shaw of suffocating both of her twins to death. Both charges are of Murder in the First Degree, meaning the prosecution is alleging that Shaw deliberately, with premeditation and with malice aforethought, killed both of her children, meaning she will be eligible for the death penalty, though the prosecution has not yet announced whether they intend to seek it.

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This is an investigation that’s been going on for nearly a year. While that was happening, Shaw appeared on the podcast for Children’s Health Defense (CHD), the disgusting anti-vaxxer organization that RFK Jr. used to head up. Not happy to merely pump out misinformation via podcast, CHD teamed up with Shaw to file a lawsuit against the American Academy of Pediatrics, claiming that AAP had misled the public about the safety of vaccines.

The charge is first degree murder for Shaw. I, of course, will not claim that police and prosecutors are perfect when it comes to their work, but the length of the investigation and the charges sure point to a prosecutor who is confident in their evidence. Shaw is, of course, innocent until proven guilty, but anyone with any sense can see where this is most likely headed.

Children’s Health Defense should be ashamed of itself. But it won’t be. In fact, I have little doubt that it, or its fans, will claim that any evidence against Shaw and that her prosecution has been bought and paid for by the vaccine industry. That’s just how they roll.

That’s how they lie.

Filed Under: andrea shaw, anti-vaxxers, murder, vaccines, vaers

Companies: children’s health defense

It’s giving away its ‘series 1’ trading cards online and at in-person event.

A patch Microsoft released on Wednesday to fix a zero-day vulnerability in its Defender security engine may cause Windows machines to write files large enough to completely consume available disk space, the researcher who discovered the flaw said.

RoguePlanet, tracked as CVE-2026-50656, came to public notice in June when NightmareEclipse, the pseudonymous name used by a researcher, disclosed it along with code for exploiting it. The vulnerability allows remote attackers to gain administrative control of Windows 10 and Windows 11 machines, even when real-time protection has been disabled. Over the past few months, the anonymous researcher has published a handful of other zero-days that have sent Microsoft scrambling to develop patches.

Writing files of unlimited size

Microsoft said Wednesday that it patched RoguePlanet with an update to the Microsoft Malware Protection Engine, which is used by the Defender antivirus app. The fix will automatically be downloaded and installed without users having to take any action. Wednesday’s update also includes “defense-in-depth updates to help improve security-related features.”

In a post on Thursday, NightmareEclipse said the defense-in-depth additions produce behavior that may allow attackers to exhaust all available space on a hard drive by writing massive amounts of data to it. The newly introduced mitigations create a problem in mpengine.dll, the driver associated with the Microsoft Malware Protection Engine, that in some cases causes it to leak 8 bytes of data when trying to open a file. New functionality in SpyNet, a cloud service that allows Microsoft Security Essentials or Forefront Endpoint Protection to send reports about suspicious software and programs to Microsoft, also plays a role in the potential mass file-writing behavior.

Defender normally places hard limits on how big a file can be written to disk when scanning and quarantining a machine.

“This implementation make [sic] sense, because quarantining a huge file will cause Defender to completely exhaust the available disk space,” the researcher wrote. “I found a small exception to this rule, apparently the spynet functions in mpengine.dll really wants [sic] to keep a local copy of Zone.Identifier ADS file and it does not matter how big this file is, Windows Defender will cache it locally anyways.”

Microsoft has recently been cleaning up some longstanding Windows 11 pain points, including parts of the Start menu and Search. According to a new report from Windows Latest, the company is also preparing several useful changes for the new Outlook app on Windows 10 and Windows 11, which became generally available in 2024.

Microsoft is adding a warning for users who start replying to an older email after a newer response has arrived in the same conversation. The alert is meant to stop people from replying without seeing the latest information in the thread.

How will the warning work?

Outlook will check whether the message you are answering is still the most recent one in the conversation. If another response has arrived, the app will warn you before you continue replying. Microsoft plans to switch the feature on by default, although it has not revealed what the alert will look like.

Microsoft’s roadmap says testing began around July 7, while the public rollout is expected by the end of August 2026. Outlook.com will receive the warning feature as well.

What else is coming to Outlook?

Microsoft is also improving categories in the new Outlook. Users will be able to apply a category from the right-click menu, pin frequently used categories to Favorites, and drag messages onto a pinned category to label them. These category controls are expected to arrive by the end of September 2026.

Rule-based replies using saved templates are also planned. Users will be able to create a template, set conditions for incoming messages, and have Outlook send the prepared response automatically when those conditions are met. The rollout is expected to begin in September 2026.

ON CALL The 2026 FIFA World Cup continues and at the time of writing, The Register‘s home nation – England – remains in with a chance to bring home the trophy!

We therefore devote this week’s edition of On Call, our weekly reader-contributed tale of tech support, to the beautiful game.

We’re able to do so thanks to a reader we’ll Regomize as “George” who once pulled off a great save when, decades ago, he worked as one half of the two-person tech team at one of Europe’s most famous football clubs.

“The IT manager wouldn’t work weekends,” George told On Call, and that meant he had to attend most home games to provide tech support.

“Mostly I’d be paid overtime to sit around in the police control room for a few hours, eat free pies, and pretend I was vital to operations,” George wrote. “Occasionally, a minor issue would require my input, but typically it was a quiet day spent watching the match in comfort.”

The club George worked for enjoys an ancient and enormously fierce rivalry with another. When the two teams meet, it’s a major event, authorities insist on extra security, and police brace for trouble across an entire city.

That caution extends into the club’s stadium.

“The club would hand over overall responsibility for stadium safety to a suitable deputy chief constable for the duration of the game,” George explained. “That officer had the ultimate say on whether the match would go ahead in the case of any safety issues.”

On the day in question, power to the police control room suddenly went out – just as the ground started filling for the big match.

“This was a major issue. We had no radio to coordinate hundreds of stewards and police officers, no CCTV monitoring stations, and most critically, no exit gate control – an essential requirement for acceptable match day safety,” George told On Call.

Club officials therefore dispatched an electrician to sort things out, but the sparky soon returned with bad news: a recent upgrade had burned out, and a fix would take days.

On most match days, the outage would mean immediate cancellation of the match – and a big fine for the club for failing to stage the game. But with a fevered crowd flooding in from the streets near the stadium, calling off the match had the potential to see frothing fans turn ugly.

The officer in charge and the stadium operations director therefore entered had a terse discussion, during which they asked the electrician if a portable generator might address the problem – but that wasn’t possible.

At this point, George asked the officer in charge what minimum setup would make it safe to let the game proceed.

“The response was that if we could centrally open the exit gates at the end of the match, or in the event of an evacuation, and get the CCTV and radio working, the match could go ahead.”

George then revealed that he had just that week installed a new 4U uninterruptible power supply (UPS) in the football club’s server room and had been charging it ever since. (In case any tech-averse football fans stumble upon this story, a UPS is a substantial battery used to keep critical computers running when power drops out. They store plenty of energy, but nobody assumes they’ll last for hours.)

George felt the UPS unit might do the job.

“After some quick napkin math, I suggested it might have enough juice to power those critical systems for long enough to allow the match to proceed,” he wrote.

The police officer and operations director agreed to let George try to make it work.

“I rounded up a few lingering stewards, the electrician, and two uniformed coppers, and we set off to the server room. We retrieved the UPS and humped the massive bloody thing halfway round the stadium, through the crowds, and up the tight stairwell into the control room.”

George then jury-rigged extension cables to the systems that needed power and turned them on.

“I felt like Tom Hanks trying to get that guidance computer online in Apollo 13,” he told On Call.

“Amazingly, everything actually came up and stayed up, the UPS’s extremely vague five LED capacity lights held solid at full green and the order was given for the match to proceed,” George said.

He spent the entirety of the match staring at those LEDs, and as the match progressed, he started praying it would not go too deep into stoppage time.

“The final whistle blew, we opened the gates, and the UPS lasted another 10 minutes before finally conking out,” he told The Register.

“For my MacGyveresque efforts, saving the high-stakes match, protecting the safety of tens of thousands of fans, and saving the club a fortune in fines, I was duly awarded a gift voucher to be spent at the club’s on-site superstore,” George told On Call. “The value of the voucher was not even enough to buy myself a single home-team shirt.”

Adding insult to injury, when he checked his next payslip, George realized the club had counted the value of the voucher as additional income, and he had therefore paid tax on it.

Have you saved a big event or MacGyvered a tech support fix? If so, click here to send your story to On Call. We’d love the chance to steer it into the back of the net on a future Friday. ®

The takeaway: Block, the parent company of mobile payment service Cash App, has reached a $45 million settlement with regulators and the attorneys general of 46 states and the District of Columbia to resolve allegations that it failed to adequately protect users from fraud. As part of the settlement, Block also agreed to provide live customer support to all users.

According to the indictment, Block exposed its users to fraud by misleading them about Cash App’s security. The company promised advanced fraud detection mechanisms but allegedly allowed scammers to operate freely. Investigators further alleged that the app did not provide a phone number for customer support, leading many users to search online, where they found fake numbers created by scammers.

Investigators claimed that Block, founded by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey in 2009, was aware of the phone support scams but did little to prevent them. In fact, the company reportedly did not establish an official support hotline until 2021. Cash App also did not require a Social Security number or date of birth during signup, making it easier for potential scammers to target unsuspecting users.

In separate press statements, attorneys general from several states including New York, Texas, Wisconsin, California, Oregon, and Colorado heralded the settlement as a major victory for consumers. They also slammed the company for not being forthright to its users about its lax security protocols and inadequate customer support mechanisms.

According to New York Attorney General Letitia James, Block marketed Cash App as a secure service comparable to traditional banks, leading customers to believe that their funds were protected by cutting-edge security protocols. In reality, the company allegedly did not have a proper fraud detection system and offered no way for customers to report scams and fraud.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton claimed that “lax verification standards, a years-long absence of phone support, and deceptive social media promotions” by Block left users exposed to scammers. He added that the company was also accused of delaying internal fraud investigations and locking legitimate users out of their accounts, leaving them with no way to recover stolen funds.

Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul noted that people who entrusted Cash App with their earnings deserved “a clear picture of how safe their money would be.” Instead, Block misled them about the strength of its consumer protections. Kaul added that the company’s lackadaisical approach was especially alarming, given that many of its customers are unbanked or underbanked Americans.

Washington Attorney General Nick Brown said that Block had separately agreed to pay $20 million to settle a lawsuit filed by the Washington Department of Justice, alleging that the company facilitated at least $22 million in fraudulent unemployment insurance payments over a five-month period during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020.

The Goodwood Festival of Speed sets the stage for McLaren’s next release, the 788HS, which is promoted as the final iteration of a mid-engine V8 supercar line that began with the 720S in 2017 and has since included the 765LT and 750S. The 4.0-liter twin turbo V8 delivers 777 horsepower, a 37-horsepower improvement from the 750S. Not that it counts, but the torque remains at 590 pound-feet, and the engine continues to spin at 8500 rpm.

The acceleration is quick enough to hit 60 mph in 2.8 seconds, 124 mph in 7 seconds, and 205 mph in no time at all. The coupe’s dry weight is a svelte 2789 pounds, thanks to McLaren engineers’ efforts to reduce any unnecessary weight. They retuned the linked hydraulic suspension and sharpened the front end, lowering it by 0.2 inches compared to the 750S, with the intention of increasing body control and steering response.

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There’s more, including carbon-ceramic brakes, which are only seen on the Senna, so that speaks volumes about what they’re up to. Six-pot forged aluminium calipers hold the front discs tightly in place. We also obtained our first center-lock wheels on this car, which were lifted directly off the Senna. This vehicle has advanced aerodynamics, producing 10% more downforce than the 765LT. We now have a new S-duct that channels air through the hood and across the cockpit, and the active rear wing has been updated. We also get a larger diffuser; more on that in a minute.

Its aerodynamic components are made of carbon fiber, because why not? Because you are receiving symposer tuning, the crew has also incorporated a quad-exit titanium exhaust, allowing you to enjoy the engine sound from start to finish. The improved engine-mount calibration allows for an almost direct connection from powerplant to driver.

The interior has been redone, and they just went a bit further, so no one is complaining. It has a carbon fiber center console, seats with a new perforation pattern, and a special number plate with distinguishing badging. Only 200 of these will be built, with half coupes and half spiders developed by McLaren’s Special Operations division. Owners can customize the colors, materials, liveries, and other interesting elements to make each one truly unique.

You’re looking at a starting price of £450,000 before you even consider all the choices. The 750S already costs that much, so adding all of the bells and whistles will make this car even more pricey. Until recently, the HS badge was rather uncommon, appearing on only two other McLarens in history. This is it, the third installment, and it concludes the current platform saga, but a new generation is just around the way.