No lesser authority than the MIT Technology Review says that the Emacs editor has turned 50 years old. But then, it is biased — Emacs was invented in MIT’s AI lab.

Simson Garfinkel’s article is simply called EMACS turns 50, but the sub-heading explains why it matters more:

“How the MIT AI Lab’s text editor gave birth to the free software movement.”

There are multiple timelines and accounts of the origins of Emacs, and it is not a single monolithic application. The name is an abbreviation for “Editing MACroS“, and the original editor for which this set of macros was developed was TECO – “Text Editor and COrrector,” written by Dan Murphy in 1962. Murphy died earlier this year at the age of 83.

The inimitable Jamie Zawinski has an encyclopedic Emacs Timeline – as he mentions at the start, his interest being that he long ago maintained a fork of GNU Emacs, originally called Lucid Emacs. It’s still around, under its later name XEmacs. There are a lot of forks and re-implementations of Emacs out there, and we are not going to go into all of them, or this article would become a book – one only interesting to programmer-archeologists (to use a term coined by the late great Vernor Vinge).

As for who originally wrote those Editing Macros, though, another history has quotations from several of the people involved: On the Origin of Emacs in 1976. (Note – some of the quotes still contain the | symbols that marked quoted text.)

This credits Lisp boffin Guy L. Steele Jr with the original work in 1975, but in it, Steele says:

“RMS is responsible for the names ‘E’ and ‘EMACS’. RMS still deserves 99% or 99.9% or 99.99% or 99.999% of the credit for taking a package of TECO macros and turning it into the most powerful editor on the planet.”

RMS is of course Richard Stallman, and the page also quotes some emails from RMS on October 23 and 31, 1976. Mind you, just a few years after the event, in a 1981 talk now preserved on the GNU website, Stallman said, “I began the development of EMACS in 1974 with an improvement to TECO”. Like all the best FOSS, even in its very early stages, it was a collaborative effort – but around late October 1976 is when RMS took over the bulk of the development.

Of the many forks of Emacs over its half a century of development, some are still just about hanging on in there. When we looked up the link for XEmacs, we were surprised to see that there was a new release: XEmacs 21.5.37 “lettuce” appeared just last month. And even the forks have forks: in this case, SXEmacs, last updated in 2020.

Most of the changes in XEmacs and SXEmacs eventually made their way back upstream to GNU Emacs, which is still in active development, although as The Register reported in 2008, RMS is no longer the primary maintainer. GNU Emacs 31.1 appeared in August.

Cards on the metaphorical table: this vulture is not an Emacs user. We have tried. A major influence was one of the Reg FOSS desk’s favorite writers, Neal Stephenson, who in 1999 published an essay called In the Beginning… Was the Command Line. (It was later republished as a rather short book, but the text is still online.) In it, he says:

“In the GNU/Linux world there are two major text editing programs: the minimalist vi (known in some implementations as elvis) and the maximalist emacs. I use emacs, which might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor. It was created by Richard Stallman; enough said. It is written in Lisp, which is the only computer language that is beautiful. It is colossal, and yet it only edits straight ASCII text files, which is to say, no fonts, no boldface, no underlining. In other words, the engineer-hours that, in the case of Microsoft Word, were devoted to features like mail merge, and the ability to embed feature-length motion pictures in corporate memoranda, were, in the case of emacs, focused with maniacal intensity on the deceptively simple-seeming problem of editing text. If you are a professional writer–i.e., if someone else is getting paid to worry about how your words are formatted and printed–emacs outshines all other editing software in approximately the same way that the noonday sun does the stars.”

Emacs is 50-plus-year-old software, and it shows. This is a huge and complicated program: decades ago, the joke was that EMACS stood for “Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping”. It is not an easy program to learn. Despite lavish documentation and a built-in tutorial, this is software so old that its terminology predates microprocessors and the personal computer.

Its exhaustive manual is 804 pages long, and to pick some trivial examples, its terms for parts of the screen use “frame” to mean what’s now called a window, and “window” to mean what’s now called a pane. In the section on Keys, it discusses the Control and Meta keys. That’s a slight snag: you don’t have a Meta key, and neither do the authors of Emacs. It was a key on the now almost legendarily rare Space Cadet Keyboard, of which the Deskthority keyboard wiki says:

“It is known as the holy grail of keyboards.”

You can buy a modern replica, the Keymacs keyboard. They are hand-made in the Czech Republic, and depending on exactly what model and specifications you want, they cost from €2,998 for the Lispsaver up to €6,878 for the A624N Space Cadet.

In other words, you can have a keyboard with a real Meta key if you want, but it is going to cost you.

One of the problems with these historical terms, unfamiliar to anyone who wasn’t already programming in the 1970s, is that meanings drift. In the context of Emacs, “Meta” means Alt, or Opt on Macs. However, KDE also uses the Meta key – but what the KDE documentation calls “Meta” is the Windows key – or Command on Macs. Like most Linux folks, the GNOME documentation calls it the Super key.

Names are important. They matter. Who’s right, the Emacs folks or the KDE folks? Well, neither: nobody has Meta keys any more. We have Ctrl, Alt, and Cmd/Super/Windows.

There have been valiant efforts to modernize Emacs and bring it into line with modern UI and terminology. This vulture tried to learn Aquamacs, which modernized Emacs with a native macOS UI, but sadly it’s no longer maintained.

Another, which we enjoyed trying, is ErgoEmacs, which changes the key bindings and rearranges the UI into something much more like the IBM Common User Access arrangement, as used in Windows and most Linux desktops. However, it never really caught on and you need to know your way around Emacs to install it and configure it for your regional keyboard layout.

So complex is it to configure Emacs that there are multiple pre-configured distributions of Emacs, such as Doom Emacs, or the minimalist Emacs Solo. We wish someone did a “CUA-Macs” config, with ErgoEmacs integrated and able to pick up your existing keyboard config.

Come to that, the Gershwin Desktop project that we mentioned along with GhostBSD last year is in active development, and it’s based around GNUstep. Maybe its developers could pick up Aquamacs, and adapt it to GNUstep.

There is a long history of such Emacs facelifts. One instance is Borland’s Sprint word-processor, one of the selling points of which was that it could emulate the user interfaces of most of the leading MS-DOS word-processors of its day (just before they all converged on IBM CUA). Before Borland acquired it, Sprint was called The Final Word, developed by musical equipment makers Mark of the Unicorn. FinalWord was based on an Emacs clone called MINCE.

The Great Rival

Another well-known Emacs distribution is Spacemacs, which adapts Emacs to have a more Vi-like user interface.

Vi is the other seminal Unix text editor, as the Stephenson quote above mentions. As this article on Origins and the Evolution of Vi & Vim notes, it too dates back to 1976. Indeed, that’s the reason we chose the year in this story: Tilde, a text editor that doesn’t work like it’s 1976. One feature of Tilde we enjoy is that it supports use of the mouse even on the Linux console – which is the headline new feature of GNU Emacs 31.1.

Vi is very much alive and well today. GNU Emacs is based on the original source code, but Vi mainly survives as re-implementations. The recreation Stephenson mentions, Elvis, lives on today in the form of nvi.

However, by far the best known is Vim, maintained by Bram Moolenaar until his death in 2023. In the grand FOSS forking tradition, it too has forks, including Neovim, as used in Omarchy, and more recently, the AI-free Vim Classic – a new project led by Drew DeVault, who just launched the similarly LLM-free AlpineBSD. ®

Openreach has issued a stark reminder to customers that the legacy phone network is being officially switched off on January 31, and says the deadline will not be postponed.

The infrastructure arm of BT Group, Britain’s biggest telecoms biz, circulated the warning this week in a letter to comms providers that use its network to deliver their services.

It informs them that any customers still on legacy public switched telephone network (PSTN) connections are at risk of disruption when these are retired at the end of January, 2027.

The switch-off could affect businesses and consumers alike. Beyond the plain old telephone, systems that rely on PSTN connectivity include point-of-sale terminals, fire and security alarms, and personal care alarms for elderly and vulnerable people.

The move is part of a wider government scheme to get the UK onto all-digital high-speed networks running on fiber-optic infrastructure, and the legacy phone service – with its dependency on copper cabling – was standing in the way.

Many households have now ditched landline handsets and instead use only mobile phones, yet for those who still want a landline, the changeover means plugging the phone into the back of a broadband router to access a Digital Voice service.

Openreach has been planning this move for the best part of a decade. It has already pushed back the deadline at least once, after the government asked telecoms providers not to force vulnerable customers who use phone-network systems such as TeleCare to switch until fixes are in place.

Nevertheless, public awareness seems low that analog phone services will soon be disconnected. “Openreach and all providers need to coordinate a much more cohesive campaign that reaches customers directly,” said telecoms analyst Paolo Pescatore at PP Foresight.

“TV, billboards and newspaper advertising should reinforce a consistent message, supported by targeted letters, calls and door-to-door support for older and vulnerable people who need extra help,” he told The Register.

“Customers need to understand what is changing, what action to take, and who will help them. Providers must take responsibility for ensuring people remain safely connected, especially those who rely on their landline or a care alarm.”

Caroline Abrahams, charity director at Age UK, agreed.

“With only three months to go, the digital landline switchover is entering a critical final phase. Most people have moved over without major problems, but nobody who relies on their landline or TeleCare should be left behind,” she told us.

“Anyone with concerns should contact their provider, but the responsibility cannot rest with customers alone. Providers must not give up on people who have not responded. They need to keep trying to reach them and offer practical, individual support, recognizing that some may be unwell, living with dementia, worried about scams or without anyone nearby to help.”

Openreach has a webpage with information regarding the switch-off. This advises consumers to call their service provider as soon as possible to ensure service is not interrupted.

The company previously told The Register that customers without a fiber connection will likely be switched to SOTAP for Analog (Single Order Transitional Access Product), where equipment is installed in the local telephone exchange to allow them to continue to use their old phone line as before.

Openreach has warned that commercial customers delaying migration risk significant disruption and unnecessary costs – leaving it until the last minute could make it harder to secure the requisite engineering support before the deadline hits.

“Businesses and organizations that delay action are making things harder for themselves,” said James Lilley, Openreach Director of All-IP.

“The straightforward migrations have largely been completed. What’s left are the complex connections that underpin critical operations, requiring careful planning, supplier coordination, and thorough testing. We are urging businesses to act now, audit their remaining analog services, and work with their communications provider on a migration plan today.”

Earlier this year, the firm tried to drive home the message by announcing it was stepping up its charges to service providers and companies still operating legacy business lines, who will by now be paying double the rental cost compared to last year. ®

Google on Friday celebrated receiving a poem from its first experimental orbital AI datacenter satellite.

The company’s Suncatcher satellite, launched at the start of the month and put into low Earth orbit, has responded to a ground station prompt to “Write a haiku from the perspective of a TPU orbiting Earth, with the wonderful world spinning beneath you.”

Travis Beals, senior director of Google’s interdisciplinary Paradigms of Intelligence research team, said that with Suncatcher’s host and TPU trays powered up and machine learning tests completed, the onboard Gemma 4 model achieved its “Hello World” milestone by sending an inference response from orbit.

“During a ground-station pass, we uplinked our first prompt to our onboard Gemma 4 open model, asking it to generate a haiku about being in space,” wrote Beals in a blog post.

And as the satellite passed over Svalbard, Norway, the orbiting AI model responded over the downlink:

Blue marble below,

Data streams in silent grace,

Starlight feeds my core. ✨

Those roughly 20 tokens would cost about $0.000012 if generated through the Google Cloud API, based on Gemma 4 26B’s pricing of $0.15 per million input tokens and $0.60 per million output tokens, excluding input costs.

Add in a satellite weighing perhaps 500 kg, based on the mass of SpaceX’s Starlink satellites, and a retail launch price of around $7,000 per kg, and you have a very expensive haiku.

According to Google’s calculations, if the cost of getting a satellite into low Earth orbit can be brought down to $200/kg, the launch cost amortized over the satellite’s useful life (~$810–7,500/kW/year) could be comparable to current electricity spending for terrestrial datacenters in the US (~$570–3,000/kW/year).

Google predicts that SpaceX could achieve that by 2035, more or less, and considers it strategically beneficial to prototype well in advance of that actually happening.

After the haiku, Beals said, “we tested space-themed limericks and telemetry prompts reporting the technical status of the payload systems.” Next up: tests for evaluating how TPUs perform under thermal stress and radiation.

Google has already done some laboratory testing of its Trillium Cloud TPU and AMD host server to see how well they can withstand a 67 MeV proton beam.

The system’s high-bandwidth memory shows the most sensitivity in terms of the total ionizing dose – it exhibits irregularities after a cumulative dose of 2 krad(Si), which is about 3× Google’s minimum requirement for TID survival of 750 rad(Si).

“For typical transformer workloads, the observed SDC [silent data corruption] rate of approximately one event/17 rad, at an estimated orbital dose of 150 rad(Si)/year, translates to a very low failure probability on the order of 1 per 3 million inferences, assuming 1 inference per second,” Google researchers said in a paper published earlier this month.

“While this error rate is likely acceptable for inference, the impact of SEEs on training jobs, and the efficacy of system-level mitigations, requires further study.”

Indeed, the study will continue. Next year, the plan is to test a pair of interconnected satellites. Rather than lofting large satellites into orbit, Google anticipates sending a constellation of many smaller satellites that communicate with one another. ®

Microsoft senior software engineer Raymond Chen has explained what Windows is doing when you hold down the power button, and shared a story about the time a customer accidentally created a Goth Mode for Windows 3.1.

There’s a section in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (actually, page 116 of this writer’s dog-eared copy of The Restaurant at the End of the Universe) in which Zaphod Beeblebrox observes of a ship’s interior: “Every time you operate one of these weird black controls that are labeled in black on black background, a little black light lights up black to let you know you’ve done it.”

The same turned out to be true of a user who called Microsoft customer support to complain that after Windows 3.1 booted up, all that remained after the product logo disappeared was a blank screen.

It turned out the customer liked black a little too much and, according to Chen, made themself a Goth theme.

The customer support engineer on Microsoft’s end pieced it together. The customer had, according to Chen, “set the wallpaper color to black. They set the title bar color to black. They set the button color to black. They set the window background color to black. They set the window text color to black.

“Every possible color you could pick in the Colors control panel was set to black.”

We suspect the mouse pointer, at least, would have stuck around, unless the customer had also managed to change some settings around this. And then there are the icons… However, Windows 3.1 was a long time ago, and this writer’s attempts at theming then were the consequences of growing up in the ’70s and ’80s, which resulted in some interesting neon, orange, and brown combinations.

As for Goth mode, Chen said, “Once you get yourself into this situation, it’s hard to get out because you can’t see anything.” One solution he suggested was deleting the [colors] section from the win.ini file.

Chen told the anecdote as a coda to the question – what exactly is modern Windows doing when you hold down the power button on a PC? According to Chen, after eight seconds of holding the power button, the Windows kernel realizes a forced power-off is happening and tries to take a kernel dump for diagnostics.

He explained that the kernel dumps were classified by Microsoft as “long power button hold” (LPBH) failures, with one of the bits of information captured indicating if all the pixels on the screen were black. The video driver might therefore be the culprit. Or whatever was responsible for drawing to the screen.

Today’s Windows struggles with dark mode. But in the dim, distant past, every pixel being black might mean the user was either Hotblack Desiato or had done something very silly indeed. ®

There’s a ridiculously simple test you can use to figure out whether AI mandates at a given company are well-considered, or are being shoved out the door by out-of-touch buffoons: What happens when an engineer documents that AI made a task worse? Are they taken seriously, or are they marginalized and eventually managed out?

Conveniently, this week Amazon published a treatise by Terk Terkowitz, a VP/Distinguished Engineer/Final Boss of Their Independent Contributor Technical Career Track, on the role of the developer in the age of AI. It was originally an internal missive sent to their software engineers and their managers back in September, which is an interesting lag for a document that sounds this confident. It also maps exceedingly well to what other organizations are struggling with.

I think it’s a good document, but I can’t help but view it with a somewhat cynical eye. I see it as an attempt to make the future of the profession of software engineering feel less bleak. And it’s feeling mighty bleak for a lot of folks right now.

What’s the context?

This treatise comes at a time of dramatic upheaval. Tech as an industry is no stranger to change (usually at 3AM, heralded by the pager), but something about the current AI-ification of the world strikes many of us as fundamentally dissimilar from previous revolutions. Folks are scared about their career prospects. “Should I give up tech and get into farming?” is a sincere question multiple people have asked me. I don’t know! Tech is already a goat rodeo, so you’ve got a leg up if you do?

This anxiety isn’t theoretical. In May, Amazon wisely shut down KiroRank, an employee-built cash incineration leaderboard that ranked people by token usage, after the obvious thing happened: people spun up junk tasks to climb the ranks. This is now called “tokenmaxxing,” and the Terkowitz treatise specifically calls it out as being at odds with “frugality.” Meta did the same thing with “Claudenomics” and 85K employees that same week. And Amazon reportedly announced another 250 job cuts this week. I can’t tell you that these things are related. But I can tell you that every engineer who read the memo assumes that they are.

What’s the thing say?

This document contains a lot of great stuff. I have a tremendous level of respect, both personal and professional, for Amazon’s Principal Engineering community; I’m led to understand that that respect may not be reciprocated, but that’s okay. I am, by their standards, a lapsed engineer who ran away to join the circus as one of its lesser clowns.

Terkowitz’s memo emphasizes customer outcomes and engineering judgement, two things I would absolutely not delegate to AI any time soon. (Note: I am writing this in October of 2026, with the full understanding that previous comments on the capabilities where AI falls short tend to age like fine milk.) It documents work that (today) AI tools aren’t improving. That’s way better than assuming that every objection to AI inherently comes from some self-interested Luddite who’s scared of being replaced. It also says something smart about measurement: look at the 90th percentile of AI adoption, at those teams burning the most tokens, and check whether their delivery actually went up commensurately. This is great! Shout it from the rooftops; we should all be doing such things.

But still, I wonder.

The memo says “If your work does not benefit from current AI tooling, that is a finding, not a failing.” Document it, bring it to your manager, work through the problem. I agree with every word of that! The question is whether anyone’s promo doc is gonna survive citing it.

Here’s what happens next. The memo concedes that input metrics are “deeply flawed,” but then in the next paragraph says to go ahead and use them anyway, carefully. It then warns that non-adopters are falling behind. Those are three different positions within three sentences and they’re not at all aligned with one another.

That’s not muddled; I think it’s cover. A manager can cite “a finding, not a failing” when a strong engineer skips the AI tool, and then cite “falling behind” when it’s time to PIP someone. Both are congruent with their stated policy; you get to decide which interpretation you want to go with in a given situation.

How will managers handle justified AI non-use? Are promotion and performance decisions being made in a way that rewards these long term outcomes? Or are they instead taking the easy weasel way out, optimizing for what’s cheap to measure, and rewarding tool activity? Because if you give me a metric, I will turn it into a target. So will an overwhelming majority of employees. When that happens, everyone loses — it’s how KiroRank happened in the first place.

Everyone’s selling tokens — including Amazon

I write this after two days of attending GitHub Universe, where they talked about how agents start roughly 40% of PRs now. And yet, Jay Parikh’s keynote argument was that useful output wasn’t “more code,” but rather completed outcomes: features shipped, bugs fixed, security issues addressed, loudmouth columnists silenced, etc. The problem here is that their entire business model cuts against that; they’re billing in a model that charges customers on a consumption basis, not an output basis. There’s nothing, today, that ties “AI spend” to “output that was worth the effort.”

Which brings us back to Amazon. The memo says tokenmaxxing is at odds with frugality, and for Amazon’s internal cost line, it is. Meanwhile AWS bills Bedrock and Kiro customers by the token. Inside the building, tokenmaxxing is a problem to be stamped out. Outside it, it’s the revenue plan. ®

An official extension for Anthropic’s Claude model was backdoored and threatened as many as 5,000 developers’ machines, multiple sources reported Friday. Anthropic so far has yet to warn customers of the incident.

The compromised package was a VS Code extension available in the marketplace of Cursor, a maker of AI-assisted developer tools, the company said Friday. The malicious version, 2.1.313, subsequently affected “at most 5,000 users,” presumably when they either downloaded it or their systems automatically fetched and installed it. Anthropic pushed version 2.1.314 several hours after the previous version became available on Cursor, according to independent researcher Kevin Beaumont. Both Beaumont and the CTO and co-founder of security firm Phorian said that version 2.1.313 was distributed through Anthropic’s official account on Cursor. So far, neither Cursor nor Anthropic has explained how the attackers gained control of the account.

In search of cloud credentials

“It was a supply-chain compromise where the attacker gained access to the official distribution channel,” Phorian CTO and co-founder Luke Roberts told Ars. “The malicious version 2.1.313 was posted to the official Anthropic account, effectively superseding 2.1.312. Extensions auto-update in Cursor by default, but users can configure this in settings.” Phorian has more details here.

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Defenders across the world face the burden of responding to yet another botched code-execution vulnerability, this time in boot-time firmware used by most of the world’s server vendors and data centers.

The vulnerability, with a severity rating of 9.5 out of 10, resides in the TianoCore EDK II, an open source codebase that hardware makers and cloud providers use to create the UEFI firmware that runs during the boot-up sequence. Last year, a representative of the UEFI Forum called EDK2 the “preeminent solution / implementation of the UEFI specifications.” Virtually all UEFI suppliers (sometimes still called IBVs or independent BIOS vendors), including AMI, Insyde, and Phoenix, use the reference code extensively. Project Mu, Microsoft’s hardened EDK2 fork, used the code containing the vulnerable component as well.

The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-97631, is a memory-corruption flaw in an ICMP component that attackers can exploit to execute malicious code that runs before the operating system and firmware can implement defenses like Secure Boot, which establishes a chain of trust for all code, including the Trusted Platform Module (TPM), loaded during boot. While final payloads delivered by CVE-2026-97631 have no persistence—meaning they run only once—they can give attackers a wide opening to install other payloads that also run each time early in the boot process.

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eMudhra, the certificate authority that issued eight intermediate TLS credentials so weak that anyone could mint certificates for any website or mail server—one had a private encryption key of just 4—said it’s getting out of the business.

V. Srinivasan, chairman of India-based eMudhra Limited, cited increasing costs and complexities of compliance requirements—paired with the business generating just 1 percent of its revenue. He also said that the emergence of organizations providing TLS certificates free of charge further reduced returns on investment when compared to other products and services the company offers.

Don’t let the door hit you on the butt

“However, the level of social media amplification around this incident has brought scrutiny that is out of proportion to SSL/TLS’s place in our business,” the company continued in a Thursday post. “In view of this, after detailed deliberations our board has concluded that withdrawing from global SSL/TLS is the right decision for eMudhra and its shareholders.”

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Unknown hackers hijacked more than 300 Tor exit nodes and reconfigured them to favor unencrypted email traffic and redirect SSH connections through servers they controlled, a researcher reported Tuesday.

The hijacking began in late August, when, ********@**************ct.org/thread/QHRD6YOX6RZRDR7NCHNDO7GLCEA6VFM6/”>according to Tor volunteers, the attacker used a valid password that had been reused to gain access to a Tor management server. The attacker then installed Ebury, a backdoor written for Linux that was discovered 12 years ago.

Mysteries remain

Then the attacker connected from the management server to a second Tor server, called Switzerland2, through SSH, using an RSA key that, for unknown reasons, investigators couldn’t find among Switzerland2’s authorized keys. With administrative control of Switzerland2, the attackers installed Ebury there as well. Finally, the attacker reconfigured settings on two exit nodes that Switzerland2 hosted.

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Enterprise-sized businesses spend, on average, 28 percent of their software budgets on unwanted upgrades, migrations, and licensing changes. Often, those firms’ IT heads think those changes are detrimental.

Those results are according to a survey of 2,018 chief information officers and senior IT decision-makers at companies with at least 10,000 employees that Origina commissioned for its report, “The Software Tax.” About half of the respondents (1,011) are from the US, and the rest are from the United Kingdom. All respondents worked at companies with at least $1 billion in annual revenue.

Keep in mind that Origina provides maintenance for various enterprise software. Its report points to independent software maintenance as a way for IT leaders to regain control over software budgets, illustrating its potential bias. A third-party research consultancy, Censuswide, conducted the survey.

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