# Windows said modem worked fine. That unmistakable scorched electronics smell suggested otherwise — retained record > Retained news record from news:theregister. Canonical: https://highsignal.app/data/records/73f3e6252fc3862f [← sources](https://highsignal.app/data) source: [news](https://highsignal.app/data/news) (news:theregister) published 2026-10-23 05:26 ingested 2026-10-23 15:31 [original source ↗](https://www.theregister.com/personal-tech/2026/10/23/windows-said-modem-worked-fine-that-unmistakable-scorched-electronics-smell-suggested-otherwise/5304375) ## extract AI - Torvalds: AI is fine for competent devs, but spare us the 'drive-by' patches Kernel maintainers stop asking who used AI, as long as the code is good - Nvidia woos wary Europeans with more open weights models New embedding, parsing, and reranking models promise smarter agentic RAG workflows - Jensen Huang sends in the robot ducks to sell Nvidia's AI-everywhere vision Containerized datacenters, androids, and telecoms all feature in Berlin keynote interrupted by environmental protesters - Nvidia's grand plan for speeding up datacenter deployments: AI trailer parks GPUzilla boasts modular bit barns could speed up deployments from six months to just two weeks - The spec is the new code, so brush up on your prose, says Kaseya CTO Domain expertise and clear writing will matter more than syntax, and yes, that means documentation Infosec - Security Russians are posing as Signal support to launch phishing attacks PLUS: US takes down Iranian propaganda sites; Marketing company asks 'Why Do We Have Your Information?' And more! - Security Microsoft patches failed to fix on-prem SharePoint, which is now under zero-day attack PLUS: China upgrades smartphone surveillance tools; Ring eases anti-snooping stance; and more - Black Hat and DEF CON DEF CON Franklin project enlists hackers to harden critical infrastructure Voting village reports have been so successful, says Jeff Moss, that the whole of DEF CON will now be included - Security EQT buys majority share in Swiss cybersecurity biz Acronis Went at equivalent of $3.5B+ valuation for entire firm, though portion sold not specified - Malware Month Ten years since the first corp ransomware, Mikko Hyppönen sees no end in sight On the plus side, infosec's a good bet for a long, stable career FOSS - Red Hat helps teach about tech writing But learns tough lessons about AI in the process - NetBSD may have found a new role: The AI-free FOSS OS Increasing awareness and adoption, followed by increasing donations - OpenAI dots inspire open source imitators amid technical difficulties Persistent agents appeal to AI companies, but demand isn't obvious - Ubuntu 'Stonking Stingray' beta swims out: Deeper Rust 'oxidization' plus LLM speech-to-text GNOME 51 is here, and Ubuntu interim releases are getting interesting again - Revive Raskin's 3 laws of software with humane work that considers a dev's duty of care All this, and angry NeoVim users - Firefox 157: Could bold new look be just what Mozilla needs?* Yet another new version of Firefox, with a significant reskin ## retained text ``` Energy can be hard to find on Friday mornings, which is why The Register uses them to offer a fresh instalment of On Call – the reader-contributed column that shares your hopefully empowering tech support stories. This week, meet a reader we’ll Regomize as “Lachlan,” who told us he once did tech support for a senior exec who had a side hustle writing essays for Japanese university students attending UK universities. The exec asked Lachlan for help diagnosing a sudden inability to send or receive email, an obvious hindrance to the side hustle. This story took place in the dialup age, so Lachlan sensibly assumed that the exec’s modem was misbehaving. “I checked the network settings, nothing wrong there,” he told On Call. Next, he checked the cables, and if the line the modem used had a dial tone. Again, all was well. “At this point I decided to make sure the device was correctly installed in Windows Device Manager,” Lachlan wrote. “I had a lot of experience in the dark arts of serial communications and there was an option in the advanced settings in Device Manager to send a series of low level AT commands to the modem, which would return responses.” He ran the tests, and Windows reported that the modem was in the pink of health. With all that done, Lachlan decided the time had come to replace the modem. “When I opened the PC, I got a faint whiff of that unmistakable scorched PCB smell,” he wrote. “By looking at the modem you couldn’t normally see if any of the chips were faulty. In this case there was a black soot mark in the shape of the voltage regulator chip which sits between the phone line and the sensitive chips on the modem.” “This was to protect the device from the 70V line voltage BT used to create a phone connection,” he explained. “However, in this instance the chip had been vaporized. That wasn’t just a slight over voltage – this was way higher.” Lachlan asked the exec when his email had stopped working, and if he could recall any recent electrical storms. He replied by saying his email stopped working while he watched a really impressive display of lightning. “That voltage regulator chip sacrificed itself for the greater good,” Lachlan wrote. ``` document fetched 2026-10-24 11:21 · canonical https://theregister.com/personal-tech/2026/10/23/windows-said-modem-worked-fine-that-unmistakable-scorched-electronics-smell-suggested-otherwise/5304375