ON CALL By the end of the working week it can be tempting to phone it in, but The Register instead works to bring you extra amusement in the form of a new edition of On Call – the reader-contributed column that shares your tech support stories. This week, meet a reader we’ll Regomize as “Orson” who told us they very much enjoyed the recent On Call about the lawyer who didn’t understand italics. “It reminded me of an incident many years ago when I was a Facilities Manager for a major UK food company,” Orson told On Call. “I came in one morning and was summoned by the Company Secretary, who was clearly annoyed because the night before, she tried to send an extremely urgent fax and the fax machine did not work.” For those who don’t remember fax machines, or successfully tried to forget them, they packed a low-res scanner, a nasty printer, and a slow modem into a small appliance. The user interface included a numeric keypad used to enter the phone number of whichever remote fax machine you wanted to send a document to. Faxes were horrible, but faster than the postal service. Email killed faxes in the late 1990s (except in Japan) though manufacturers kept including fax functions in multifunction printers (MFPs) for years. But we digress: Orson decided the way to solve this problem was to start with the wetware. “I asked her to show me what she had done and watched as she placed the document on the in-tray, used the keypad to dial the number, and then hit Enter,” he told On Call. Having gone through those steps, the Company Secretary stared at Orson, her pose clearly communicating a desire for him to swiftly explain why technology had let her down – and why the facilities team had left the fax machine in such a state. “I told her she was trying to use the photocopier,” Orson told On Call. To be fair, the presence of MFPs in many workplaces meant that wasn’t a completely horrible mistake. But as an example of a rather silly tech support moment, it makes for a fine On Call! Does a similar tale lurk in your memory? If so, click here to send your story to On Call. We’d offer to let you fax it in, but The Register doesn’t have a fax machine anymore. ®

There'll be no rest for X's lawyers this weekend after startup Operation Bluebird rolled out the twitter.now social media network this week. The launch came the same week as Nitter was served a cease-and-desist letter, and it's the latest in the saga of Twitter branding that X boss Elon Musk dispensed with when renaming his $44 billion purchase as 'X'. Unlike Nitter, which lets users view X content without an account, twitter.info is a new social media platform and "not affiliated with X Corp." Users must sign up for a paid account and can then post and view posts. "You'll see trust signals on posts," a FAQ on the service's website explains, "and you control your own feed with a simple dial — freedom of speech, not freedom of reach." At present, the service is asking $20 for early access as a founder, and $40 for the "Fighter" tier, which adds a slingshot badge to the user's profile. As for why the service isn't free, like other X alternatives such as Bluesky or Mastodon, the answer is, "To keep bots out and stay independent." The FAQ continues, "A paid door proves there's a real person behind an account, and member funding keeps us answerable to you instead of advertisers." Operation Bluebird filed to claim the Twitter trademark last year, reasoning that since Musk ditched it in favor of X, it was fair game. X disagreed, and snapped back: "Twitter never left and continues to be exclusively owned by X Corp." The case is ongoing, and no judgment has been made. However, the team behind Operation Bluebird is clearly confident enough in the outcome to launch twitter.now and posted, "Twitter is a reclaimed brand." It also notes, "Twitter.now is not an attempt to recreate the old platform." The Register asked X what it makes of it all, but Musk's mouthpiece has yet to respond. In a week in which X lawyers have seen off the likes of XCancel and Nitter, at least for the time being, it will be interesting to see what happens to twitter.now. X's content is not what the service is offering, but the old Twitter branding is certainly in its crosshairs. Your move, X. ®

HP reckons enterprises fretting about the spiraling cost of AI tokens have an obvious alternative: run the models locally and spend the money on a more expensive PC instead. The pitch emerged during HP's third-quarter earnings call on Wednesday, where executives repeatedly pointed to cloud AI costs as one reason customers are buying higher-spec machines that can do more AI work locally. AI PCs are becoming harder to avoid as HP pushes more of its lineup upmarket, but the company insists customers are getting something for the extra cash. "Clearly, the AI PCs are now providing more value than what it was last year," said Ketan Patel, president of HP's Personal Systems business. "Clearly, as the workloads are coming from cloud to the device, it is adding significant value for our customers, especially on token economics, which is a big topic right now, as you start deploying workloads in a customer environment." Patel also pointed to keeping sensitive data closer to where it is generated, reduced dependence on network connectivity, and faster response times as reasons to run AI locally. HP says it is already seeing customers use the machines for employee productivity, engineering and design, customer service, and predictive maintenance. The token issue came up again later in the earnings call, when HP was asked whether enterprises were looking at AI PCs specifically to get models off the internet and avoid cloud charges. "Yes, there are two meaningful conversations which are going on right now," Patel replied. The first, he said, was "this increasing cost of token and how bringing models locally on the edge can help them optimize cost." The second was how enterprises securely govern the growing number of AI agents wandering around their environments. All of this is rather convenient for HP, since AI PCs cost more and, by the company's own admission, are good for its margins. AI PCs made up 46 percent of HP's PC mix during the quarter, and the company expects that to rise to between 60 and 70 percent in fiscal 2027 and more than 70 percent in 2028. Patel said the shift would be "margin accretive," while interim CEO Bruce Broussard noted that AI PCs come at "premium pricing" and give HP opportunities to pile additional services and security products on top, making them "more valuable to the customer and frankly, more valuable to us." The effect is already showing up in HP's numbers. Personal Systems revenue jumped 18 percent year over year to $11.8 billion even though PC volumes fell 16 percent. HP attributed that seemingly improbable combination to higher prices, a richer mix of premium machines and AI PCs, and sales of attached services and peripherals. Those non-hardware businesses now contribute about a third of Personal Systems gross profit. Anyone hoping PC prices have finished climbing may also want to look away. CFO Karen Parkhill said HP has been increasing prices as component costs rise and "expect[s] to continue to increase pricing." Patel added that, depending on how a machine is sold, it can take anywhere from immediately to "a few months" for those increases to reach customers. Still, HP's AI ambitions aren't confined to convincing enterprises they need beefier laptops. The company has also deployed AI to tackle one of computing's more enduring problems: people printing all the rubbish surrounding the thing they actually wanted. It talked up its Precise Print software, which uses AI to remove unnecessary web content before printing, which HP claims can cut paper use by up to 38 percent and ink consumption by as much as 47 percent. After decades spent finding increasingly imaginative ways to sell us printer ink, HP has apparently decided artificial intelligence can help us use less of it. ®