BT Email customers say they have been bombarded with hundreds – and in one case more than 1,000 – unsolicited password reset messages, leaving the telco investigating what is causing the deluge. The reports began appearing on BT's community forums over the weekend, with customers describing sudden bursts of PIN messages arriving within minutes despite them making no attempt to reset their passwords. One customer said they received between 50 and 70 PIN texts "in the space [of] a few minutes," while a second reported more than 100. A third said the number had passed 500, and another claimed to have received more than 1,000. One BT customer who contacted The Register separately said they had received around 300 password reset emails over the previous 24 hours, typically arriving in bursts of around 50 within a minute before stopping for several hours. BT has acknowledged the problem but has yet to explain what is behind it. "We are aware that some customers have received a large number of password reset pin messages and we are actively investigating the cause of this," a BT moderator said on the company's community forum. "If you have received multiple messages like this, please ignore them and remain vigilant for any unusual activity with further messages or unexpected calls." BT added that customers' email accounts are secure and that those receiving the messages do not need to take any action. At least one customer, however, claims someone accessed their account during the PIN barrage. The user said they lost access to both their email and BT ID overnight, but managed to request a PIN before whoever was accessing the account could change the telephone number attached to it. That account has not been independently verified, and it isn't clear whether the apparent takeover was connected to the flood of PIN messages. The cause of the wider problem remains a mystery. It isn’t yet clear whether it’s the result of someone deliberately hammering a password recovery mechanism, a fault within BT's systems, or something else entirely. The Register has asked BT how many customers are affected, whether the messages are being generated by external password-reset attempts, and whether it has found any evidence of malicious activity. We've also asked the telco what rate limiting it applies to password reset requests, given reports of hundreds of PINs arriving within minutes, and whether both email and SMS messages are affected. BT says it's investigating. In the meantime, some customers are getting enough PINs to start their own lottery. ®

The UK's Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) is funding projects aimed at delivering connectivity using high-flying aircraft, including technology to beam power from the ground to keep them in the air. Britain's science and technology body, inspired by America's DARPA but on a more modest budget, says it is backing 18 projects to develop aircraft capable of operating reliably and cost-effectively in the stratosphere, as part of a program known as Enduring Atmospheric Platforms. Success will be measured by whether any aircraft can continuously supply 300 W of power to a communications payload for an entire week, while holding station above the UK. The intent is to create an alternative to orbital satellites for providing connectivity to underserved parts of the UK and elsewhere in the world. These are known as high-altitude pseudo-satellites (HAPS). The agency says that satellites have been the default way to reach users or communities that are not well served by terrestrial networks, but their distance and orbits impose physical limits on what they can deliver. ARIA is allocating £70 million ($94 million) in funding over three and a half years for the projects, which will tackle the power and reliability challenges of sustained operations above the UK. The projects are split into three technical areas, with TA1 set to cover enabling technologies, TA2 comprising system integration and testing, and TA3 focused on deployment and communications. ARIA highlighted a project called Carousel from aerospace startup Menapia. This plans to produce a constellation of high-altitude multi-rotor aircraft, capable of routine operations at altitudes up to 20 km (12 miles), with the intention of forming a persistent "canopy" over the UK. Another is Enduring Drone Networks, being developed by VFP Aerospace, which is aiming for persistent presence via a relay team of units that will cycle between their service altitude and ground stations for recharging. It says it is targeting a production cost of £50,000 ($67,000) per drone. In the enabling technologies category, a firm called Hypanode Ltd is working on a fuel cell power system to deliver 20 times more energy than current battery technology. Scalable Laser Ltd is developing laser-based power beaming technology, pairing high-power laser diodes with advanced photovoltaic receivers, while Space Solar Engineering Ltd is looking at radio frequency power beaming to deliver continuous power to a HAPS aircraft. A more exotic-sounding technology is Stratospheric Navigation and Gravity (STRAT-NAV) from the University of Bath. This seeks to extend the endurance of HAPS craft by allowing them to predict and make use of atmospheric gravity waves – caused when air is forced upward by weather fronts or hills, and gravity pulls it back down, creating a ripple. "This research expands the UK's leadership in high-altitude platforms to become the place where this industry is designed, built, and scaled," says Rico Chandra, ARIA's program director for Enduring Atmospheric Platforms. "Getting there means backing bold ideas, from fixed-wing solar aircraft to designs nobody predicted, including aircraft that fly on spinning wings instead of propellers." ARIA funds teams of scientists and engineers to pursue cutting-edge research. It is a non-departmental public body sponsored by the Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade (BIST). It was until recently chaired by entrepreneur Matt Clifford, who stepped down after taking up a role with US AI firm Anthropic. The agency was also controversially spared being asked to make savings leading up to the UK government's Spending Review last year. ®

Huawei wants near-packaged optics (NPO) standardized for AI networks, pitching it as a replacement for conventional pluggable modules without the cost and maintenance headaches it attributes to co-packaged optics. The Chinese tech giant showcased an NPO module with a capacity of 7.2 terabits per second (Tbps) at the China International Optoelectronic Exposition (CIOE) held in Shenzhen over September 9-11, and said this will form part of the company's next-gen SuperPOD AI systems. NPO refers to the placement of the optical engine in a network switch as close as possible to the switch's application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC), but still as a separate package plugged into the mainboard. This is one potential option to supersede the pluggable modules now widely used to terminate optical fiber links to a switch. Pluggable modules typically contain a digital signal processor (DSP) to clean up the incoming signal, and their power consumption and heat output increase with network speed. With AI infrastructure pushing network connections to 800 Gbps and even 1.6 Tbps, this is becoming a problem. Another upgrade path for switches is co-packaged optics (CPO), where the optical engine sits even closer – on the same substrate as the switch ASIC silicon. This is expected to deliver low latency and power consumption, but Huawei says the advanced packaging is expensive and makes failed optical engines difficult to replace in the datacenter. This is why Huawei says it is pushing NPO as the pragmatic choice for the near future. "When it comes to optical interconnects, there are two technical choices. One is NPO, near package optics. The other is CPO, co-packaged optics. Compared with CPO, the NPO technology is more mature, making it easier for production ramp up and it's easier for maintenance. So NPO stands as the most mature technology at the moment, and it is also a practical choice in this day and age," said Dr Man Jiangwei, director of Huawei's Advanced Opto-Electronics Laboratory. Huawei says its NPO design eliminates the module's separate DSP by integrating those functions into the ASIC. Man claims this cuts latency from 100 nanoseconds to 10 nanoseconds and reduces power consumption by around 60 percent. "When you put all these factors together, we're able to bring down the cost by a large margin," he claimed. But a project to define NPO standards was officially started only in May this year, at the Q2 meeting of the Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF). Its members include Cisco, HPE, Arista, and Nvidia. The members there were focused on defining a 6.4 Tbps NPO interface with a future extension to 12.8 Tbps, while Huawei is already demonstrating its 7.2 Tbps product. Asked about this at a roundtable to discuss NPO, Dr Man said 6.4T and 7.2T represent the fan-out bandwidth capabilities required by different vendors and system players. "I believe this kind of technical divergence or differing opinions is quite common in standardization. Looking ahead on the standards platform, I'm confident we'll find an appropriate way to ensure compatibility between 6.4T and 7.2T, meeting the needs of the entire industry chain," he said. One of the goals of the OIF NPO project is to come up with common electrical interfaces, mechanical form factors and connectors. Huawei's NPO is understood to employ 200 gigabits per second per lane across a total of 36 lanes, while the proposed 6.4 Tbps OIF interface would use 32 lanes. The company has already committed to using its own NPO in the upcoming third generation of its SuperPOD AI infrastructure platform, an analog of Nvidia's NVL rack-scale systems. The SuperPOD platform links large numbers of Huawei's Ascend neural processing units (NPUs). Huawei declined to say when this SuperPOD will be available, but Dr Man hinted more will be revealed at the Huawei Connect event in Shanghai later this week. He also said Huawei will be "more than happy to share this product with our customers in the downstream, and not only downstream, but we also like to share this technology with the suppliers on the upstream, including various vendors from different countries and regions." Huawei's exposure to US export restrictions, imposed on national security and foreign policy grounds, raises a related question. One roundtable participant asked whether industry adoption could suffer if the Trump administration perceives NPO as Huawei-driven technology. Man said he wasn't the right person to discuss the political environment and reiterated Huawei's commitment to openness and collaboration. "We are happy to work with vendors from different regions, including vendors from the United States, from China, and from Japan. So together we can advance the development of the NPO ecosystem and ultimately contribute to the booming AI ecosystem," he said. NPO isn't the only alternative to CPO. Earlier this year, Arista Networks unveiled its eXtra-dense Pluggable Optics (XPO) concept, which proposes updating pluggable modules to include cooling via an integrated liquid cooling cold plate, and offering up to 12.8 Tbps per module (64 lanes at 200 Gbps each). Huawei pitches NPO as the most mature option; XPO retains the front-panel plug-in module format. Which format will get the widest adoption will depend on switch vendor support as well as customer priorities, and it is likely that NPO, CPO and XPO will coexist for some time. ®

Virgin Media is ditching its email services and offering customers a window in which to download their data and move to another email provider. The UK's second-biggest broadband provider is closing its own email service and offering users the option of transferring their addresses and mailboxes to Junara, a service operated by Australian email provider Atmail. Customers who want to retain their Virgin Media email address will be invited to transfer to Junara. The first year will be free for current Virgin Media customers, after which they will have to pay to continue using the service. Virgin Media email users will be contacted directly and given 45 days to sign up with Junara, save their data and move to another provider, or allow their account to close. The change affects all addresses ending in @ntlworld.com, @blueyonder.co.uk, @virgin.net, and @virginmedia.com. Virgin Media stopped issuing new email addresses to broadband customers in 2022, citing the growing popularity of dedicated services such as Gmail and Outlook. A spokesperson for the company told The Register: "As we focus and prioritize our investments and resource on ensuring our customers have the best connectivity experience, we have taken the decision to close the remaining Virgin Media email accounts. We're transferring our email service to Junara, a specialist cloud-based email provider owned by Atmail, giving users a clear route to keep their existing Virgin Media email address if they choose to." "We are writing directly to all impacted customers to clearly explain the changes and will provide a 45-day window to either sign up with Junara, move to an alternative email provider, or close their account. To support users through this transition, all current Virgin Media customers wishing to move to Junara will receive their first year of service free of charge, with additional support available for those who need it." Announcing the change in a blog post, Virgin Media O2 chief operating officer Alan Stott said most people now prefer dedicated email providers to accounts supplied by telecoms operators. "By transferring these email accounts to a specialist provider, we can focus our attention and investment on what we're ultimately here to do – provide fast and reliable broadband, mobile, landline and TV services, and give our customers the best possible experience." Virgin Media has not said how many active email accounts will be affected, but their users will have just 45 days to decide whether keeping their old address is worth signing up for a separate service. ®