off-prem

AWS’ me-south-1 region has been offline for months, so more like beating a dead cloud

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) claims it hit an AWS datacenter in Bahrain months after taking it offline for the first time, in a move it claimed as retaliation for a US attack on a nuclear plant that was under construction.

The IRGC said in a statement on Tuesday that it had struck back at what it called the “child-killing US Army” by attacking Amazon infrastructure in Bahrain, claiming AWS’s “central data infrastructure” had been “destroyed” after being hit by “several cruise missiles,” according to Google Translate. The IRGC said the claimed strike was retaliation for what Iran described as a US attack on the under-construction Darkhovin nuclear facility.

A look at the AWS Health Dashboard shows that there are definitely issues in Bahrain and the UAE, with issues in both regions being blamed on the US-Iranian conflict. While the status of AWS me-central-1 (UAE) is just “unable to reliably support customer applications,” me-south-1 (Bahrain) is said to be “currently unavailable.”

The last update to the state of AWS services in Bahrain and the UAE in the open issues area of the Dashboard was on April 30, and the Service History tab shows that every single AWS service in Bahrain has been offline for months. 

Per our previous reporting, Iranian state-affiliated media claimed that strikes on AWS infrastructure in Bahrain and the UAE were deliberate, after US and Israeli attacks on Iran in late February. AWS-hosted providers including Snowflake and Red Hat subsequently urged affected customers to fail over or move workloads to other regions after the facilities were damaged.

AWS waived all usage-related charges for March 2026 in its me-central-1 region in the UAE following the attacks on its infrastructure. Iran has also reportedly designated facilities associated with Google, IBM, Microsoft, Nvidia, Oracle, and Palantir as legitimate targets for retaliatory strikes, citing their alleged support for US military operations.

The fact that services in Bahrain have been unavailable for months, and continue to be offline, makes it challenging for El Reg to confirm the legitimacy of Iranian claims it hit the site again. We’ve reached out to AWS to learn more, but didn’t hear back. ®

The biggest publicly traded tech companies in the world, commonly known as the “Mag 7” — or magnificent seven — may not be enjoying their stranglehold at the top of the US economy for much longer. That’s, of course, if the leaders of a swathe of new AI-centric tech firms, including OpenAI and Anthropic, have their say as they plan to IPO in the coming months. But positioning these businesses in the new big tech landscape has been a major challenge.

The Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei was reflecting on his history in the AI industry during an interview with Bloomberg that aired earlier this year.

offbeat

Don’t worry – it can autonomously attack ground targets, too

The US military is adding autonomous gun-based counter-drone systems intended to reduce its reliance on expensive interceptor missiles. They also have the potential to kill humans.

Defense robotics firm Allen Control Systems (ACS) announced a deal with the US Marine Corps on Monday to get its Bullfrog autonomous weapon system attached to the Light Marine Air Defense Integrated System (L-MADIS) expeditionary counter-drone platform. L-MADIS consists of pairs of off-road vehicles, one carrying a suite of sensors and the other slated to be outfitted with a Bullfrog autonomous weapon station.

Videos on ACS’ YouTube page demonstrate the Bullfrog in action, taking down a number of small drones in demonstrations over the past couple of years. While we didn’t hear back from ACS about the Bullfrog’s capabilities to target manned vehicles and troops, a short video on the company’s channel also shows a Bullfrog unit switching from targeting aerial drones to ground targets with ease. This suggests that Bullfrog systems aren’t just capable of knocking drones out of the sky. They are also fully capable of – and lack any software protections against – the fully autonomous targeting and killing of humans with complete autonomy.

Bullfrog systems are a little different from your typical AI-controlled counter-drone systems in that they’re not built with an attached weapon, but are designed to slot in “any legacy or modern firearm” in order to turn them into systems able to “detect, track, and defeat incoming threats at a fraction of the cost of even the least expensive kinetic interceptors.” 

In other words, ACS claims it’s cheaper to build a system that can adapt existing military firearms than to invest in a purpose-built counter-drone weapon system. Bullfrog units provide the AI, computer vision, and precision aiming robotics to take out drones, while the military only has to plug in its own hardware.

There are several variants of the Bullfrog available from ACS, with units designed for everything from the M240 machine gun to the M2 50-caliber machine gun. The company is currently working on M230 chain gun and M134 minigun variants as well. In the case of the Marine Corps contract, it appears the service is taking on some M240 variants based on a link in ACS’s press release to the M240-variant’s page.

The M240, the smallest of the weapons designed for the Bullfrog, fires up to 850 7.62×51 mm NATO rounds per minute and is effective up to 800 meters in the Bullfrog. The Bullfrog M240 is capable of taking down drones up to DoD Group 3, meaning anything with a max gross takeoff weight less than 1,320 lbs, able to operate as high as 18,000 feet above sea level, and with an airspeed of less than 250 knots. The DoD grouping goes up to Group 5, which includes some of the military’s largest drones, such as the RQ-4 Global Hawk.

The US Army and US Navy are both already fielding Bullfrog units, making the Marines the third branch to get their hands on the system. ACS cited the proliferation of cheap drones in the Russia/Ukraine conflict and in the Middle East as a need for comparable cheap counter drone tech. ®

One of Singapore’s oldest vintage furniture businesses runs a 7,000 sq ft store and offers refurbished furniture ranging from S$15 to tens of thousands of dollars.

In a world driven by consumerism, one Singapore business is giving pre-loved furniture a second life. Meet Hock Siong & Co., a family-run business that has spent decades collecting, restoring, and reselling secondhand furniture.

Today, the business is run by sisters Brillyn Toh, 38, Beaunice Toh, 33, and Blessance Toh, 30, who grew up surrounded by used furniture and discarded household items.

The trio are the second generation of a family deeply rooted in Singapore’s karung guni trade. Their grandfather went door to door collecting unwanted newspapers, clothing, and household items, while their father, Toh Chin Siong, 65, grew up helping in the trade before founding Hock Siong & Co.

We spoke with Brillyn about how she and her sisters have grown Hock Siong into a 7,000 sq ft showroom in Tai Seng, with no plans of slowing down.

It started with old newspapers & used clothing

The story of Hock Siong began not with furniture, but with old newspapers and used clothing.

It started with Brillyn’s grandfather, a karung guni man (rag-and-bone man) who, in the 1970s, travelled through Singapore’s housing estates sounding a horn to announce his arrival and collecting whatever residents no longer needed.

His son, Toh Chin Siong, grew up helping with the collections. After finishing school, he worked briefly as a lorry driver before founding Hock Siong in the early 1990s.

The business initially served as a middleman in the karung guni trade, buying from individual collectors, sorting the items, and exporting them to overseas markets where there was demand. Used clothing was shipped mainly to Indonesia, while electronics found buyers across developing countries in Southeast Asia.

The pivot into furniture came in 1998. That year, Chin Siong learned of an opportunity to tender for the contents of the former Marco Polo Hotel, which was slated for demolition in 1999. The once-prominent hotel has since been replaced by a condominium on the same site.

He partnered with a Malaysian agent to purchase everything inside the hotel—beds, mirrors, tables, chairs, restaurant furnishings and lounge pieces from roughly 300 rooms.

The pair split the haul, with half going to Malaysia and the other remaining in Singapore to be sold through Hock Siong. At the time, storage was inexpensive, and the family had access to a large warehouse in the old Sungei Kadut area, making it feasible to keep such a massive inventory.

That single project transformed the business. From then on, secondhand furniture became Hock Siong’s primary focus.

What Hock Siong won’t buy

Today, Hock Siong is run by sisters Brillyn, Beaunice and Blessance Toh.

Each oversees a different part of the business. Brillyn heads procurement, assessing and purchasing incoming furniture; Beaunice manages operations, overseeing how pieces are sorted, stored and displayed in the showroom; while Blessance handles the administrative side, including finance and payroll.

Hock Siong acquires furniture from homes, restaurants, corporate offices and hotels that are renovating or clearing out their spaces. The team is sometimes even called upon to help families empty the homes of loved ones who have passed away.

Most enquiries begin with a WhatsApp message. Customers send photographs of the items they wish to part with, and Brillyn personally reviews each one to determine whether Hock Siong can take it.

Material is the biggest deciding factor. Pieces made from solid wood, such as teak, mahogany, or elm, are far more likely to be purchased, as they are durable enough to be restored and represent decades of growth.

“Sometimes I find that this wooden piece is beautiful, and I think it has the potential to be remade,” she said. “I will buy it.”

On the other hand, Hock Siong passes on items whose storage costs would outweigh their resale value, or pieces that would require so much refurbishment that the time and effort simply wouldn’t justify the eventual selling price.

Today, Hock Siong’s sprawling showroom carries everything from a S$15 vintage desk lamp to a three-metre Raffles statue priced at S$3,000. At the top end are bronze sculptures by Chinese artist Liu Ruo Wang, which can fetch tens of thousands of dollars.

What the refurbishment process looks like

The carpentry team at Hock Siong typically performs two distinct types of work. Structural refurbishment addresses what daily use does to a piece of furniture: loose joints, stuck drawers, shelves that have buckled under weight. 

The other form is exterior refurbishment, such as sanding, refinishing, and revarnishing, which helps to make something look almost brand new.

Brillyn said that most pieces typically need both types of restoration. For example, a sideboard cabinet that arrives with cloudy, discoloured lacquer goes through structural fixes first, then sanding and refinishing. 

The refurbishment capability wasn’t baked into the business from the start, but developed gradually as a necessity. With the design of furniture evolving with the changes in interior design, some items from the Marco Polo Hotel could not be sold as-is, and so Hock Siong had to innovate and repurpose some furniture.

As such, there are some larger modifications made to match current interior design trends, like adding fluted glass to cabinets that previously had plain glass, because that conveys a contemporary look to some buyers who prefer a modern element in their secondhand furniture.

Another example is old television cabinets, the hulking built-in units that were standard in Singapore homes a generation ago. They’re often solidly built, sometimes from good wood, and almost impossible to sell as they were. 

Hock Siong’s experienced carpentry team has developed ways around this by removing the TV cavity, adding shelving, and making what was unsaleable into a storage cabinet with some character.

Such work is labour-intensive, and with skilled carpenters becoming increasingly difficult to find, every restoration has to make commercial sense.

It’s this ability to reimagine old furniture for modern homes that has become one of Hock Siong’s defining strengths—and one reason the business has remained relevant for decades.

Of course, not every item that passes through Hock Siong is an ordinary cabinet or dining table. Over the years, the business has handled its fair share of unusual pieces, each with a story of its own.

One of the most memorable was an old Mini Cooper. The team had it cut in half at a workshop before transforming it into a sofa with custom cushions. Today, it sits inside Brunches Café.

Another was a three-metre-tall statue of Sir Stamford Raffles salvaged from a hotel before it closed.

The statue was eventually bought by a retired private collector known for filling his home with unusual finds. Rather than placing it indoors, he displayed it prominently in front of his house.

The economics of a traditional business

Hock Siong currently occupies a 7,000 sq ft store at Tai Seng with a team of 28, split across sales, operations, delivery, carpentry, and administration.

With years of being in the business, Brillyn is honest about the structural limitations of Hock Siong’s business model. “This is really not a super scalable business,” she said.

A conventional furniture retailer can look at a catalogue, identify a bestselling chair, and order 20 more, but Hock Siong cannot. 

Everything in the store has arrived from a different location, in varying conditions and at an unpredictable time. When something sells, there is no restocking, and it’s more likely than not that the next piece of rosewood will be different from the last.

Brillyn explained that this means the business has to be exceptionally good at managing what it cannot control and at creating the ideal conditions for pieces to sell. 

As such, store arrangement matters more than it might appear to strangers to the business. Hock Siong’s team regularly repositions items because changing how a piece sits in the space changes how customers imagine these restored pieces in their own homes. 

Being a family business, Hock Siong is also open to dynamic pricing and bargains as they see fit. With global geopolitical instability, rising raw material costs have squeezed profit margins in ways that are harder to manage. 

For example, turpentine, a material regularly used by Hock Siong’s carpentry team, has gone from S$30 to S$40 per tin to S$50, by nearly 20 to 40%. 

Diesel for the collection trucks has climbed too. 

Despite rising costs, Hock Siong has held its free delivery threshold at S$400, absorbing some of the increase rather than passing it on, partly because it considers its relationship with regulars as a long-term asset.

“Customers are very understanding,” Brillyn said. “I’m really very grateful.”

A sunset industry that is slowly rebounding

When Brillyn joined the business full-time in 2011, after graduating from NUS Business School, the secondhand furniture trade was not exactly seen as a growth sector. 

Over the years, cheap imports from China had compressed the prices of furniture and made buying new a reasonable alternative to buying restored secondhand items. Brillyn used to refer to her family’s line of work as a “sunset industry,” a traditional business that is facing long-term stagnation.

However, what Brillyn and her sisters did instead of accepting that was to begin marketing Hock Siong online. 

Facebook pages were new in the early 2010s, and it cost almost nothing to ride the wave of social media and share about the business. On Hock Siong’s Facebook page, Brillyn would post pictures of restored pieces for sale, and that eventually led to a following.

Later, Hock Siong hopped onto other digital platforms like Instagram and eventually established its online store.

Besides digitalising the business, Brillyn shared that the secondhand furniture market in Singapore has changed over the past decade in ways that have worked in the business’s favour. 

Western thrifting culture, globalised by social media, has made buying secondhand feel like an intentional choice rather than a compromise for something brand-new. 

Moreover, a growing number of younger homeowners are prioritising items with a backstory, while more interior designers want something that stands apart from the usual offerings, leading to a demand for secondhand furniture from businesses like Hock Siong.

I think it’s really very heartening that people are beginning to accept all this and really find the beauty in old things.

Brillyn Toh

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Looking ahead, the Toh sisters are focused on growing their family business further, adding to the family history of dealing with secondhand items.

• Find out more about Hock Siong here.
• Read other articles about Singaporean businesses here.

Featured Image Credit: Hock Siong

A second update to Apple Invites for iOS in as many months adds two small changes: emoji replies and a pile of confetti.

Apple has already made one update to the Apple Invites app this summer with some handy new features. Its second is smaller, but still quite celebratory in nature.

The release of version 1.10 on the App Store explains there are two changes made to the app. The first is that the host and guests are able to reply to each other using emoji, rather than words.

The change makes responses quicker, and as Apple says, it allows everyone to “share the excitement as the guest list comes together.”

The other main change to the app is the addition of a confetti animation, which fires off when guests reply. There’s also the usual collection of bug fixes and performance improvements.

The previous update, which took place in June, added a co-hosting capability, as well as quality-of-life improvements.

Hackers are actively exploiting the critical CVE-2026-50522 vulnerability in Microsoft SharePoint to steal machine keys and maintain access even after affected servers are patched.

An attacker obtaining them can create valid authentication tokens to impersonate users and access available resources such as SharePoint sites and documents with the privileges of the forged identity.

Microsoft describes the security issue as a deserialization-of-untrusted-data flaw that allows a remote attacker to execute code over a network without authentication.

The flaw was addressed in July’s security updates from Microsoft. It was not marked as actively exploited, but the advisory noted an increased likelihood of being leveraged.

Offensive security company watchTowr has observed that hackers started to leverage CVE-2026-50522 against on-premise vulnerable SharePoint deployments, immediately after a valid proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit became public.

“On July 20th, watchTowr identified proof-of-concept exploit code for this vulnerability,” watchTowr states. “Within hours, our global honeypot network, Attacker Eye, captured exploitation attempts using this PoC that successfully compromised target systems.”

The researchers note that the attackers are stealing machine keys that allow them to maintain long-term access on breached systems.

Early warning threat intelligence company Defused detected “an undocumented SharePoint deserialization vector” being used in attacks as early as July 17 but could not link the activity to a flaw.

Yesterday, the company said that the attacks were likely driven by exploiting the CVE-2026-50522 SharePoint vulnerability.

Exploit released publicly

At least one PowerShell demonstrative exploit for CVE-2026-50522 is available on GitHub from security researcher Janggggg.

The PoC attempts to trigger remote code execution by delivering a malicious .NET ‘BinaryFormatter’ payload as the cookie of a forged ‘SecurityContextToken’ within a WS-Federation sign-in response posted to SharePoint’s ‘/_trust/default.aspx’ endpoint.

If the token is processed by a vulnerable deserialization path, the payload results in arbitrary code execution on the SharePoint server.

BleepingComputer did not test the PoC exploit, but it looks structurally and technically legitimate.

It should be noted that Janggggg’s published the PoC on the same day watchTowr started to detect attacks leveraging it. However, it is unclear if the observed incidents made use of the publicly available exploit.

While applying the latest SharePoint security updates removes the vulnerability, watchTowr advises defenders to also rotate credentials on any asset that may have been exposed.

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.

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• SK On says solid-state cells can give industrial robots the 8+ hour runtime of a human shift, but adoption might be another story
• While upcoming solid-state batteries boost productivity through longer operating times and lower overall operating costs, they are prohibitively more expensive than some of their lithium-ion peers
• Modern Li-on-based batteries are under 2% of a robot’s manufacturing cost today, and solid-state would push that share to around 8%, a premium that could come with serious tradeoffs for manufacturers

Modern robotics is a field that continues to grow over time, fueled by a mix of smarter AI, manufacturing efficiencies and at times, better materials that change what is possible on the ground.

The robots currently in use in factories and warehouses however have a key limitation that has yet to be addressed properly: Lithium-ion batteries often can not keep up with the power demand that modern robots have.

• Saronic’s Port Alpha facility could expand from 835 acres to nearly 4,400 acres
• The shipyard could eventually build vessels exceeding 1,200 feet long
• Saronic expects Port Alpha to create up to 10,000 direct jobs

Saronic has selected Brownsville, Texas, for ‘Port Alpha‘, a planned shipyard designed to produce autonomous vessels at unprecedented industrial scale.

The project is expected to attract more than $3 billion in private investment and begin construction during 2026.