Sci-Tech news

• A cloud engineer walked into a bar and – no joke – ended up having to migrate a datacenter

  02-09-2026 14:00 via theregister.com
  
  Visiting a second bar on the same night can often be a dangerous move. When Dave Bradley did it, he ended up having to move a datacenter, on a two-week deadline, without extra budget. Bradley is a senior cloud engineer at healthcare services company Vizient and visited a bar while winding down after an off-site company meeting. After enjoying a decent stint of merriment with colleagues from the company’s tech team, Bradley decided to call it a night - but on his way out, he spotted his bos
  
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• Site where the Bible says Jesus walked on water discovered after 2,000 years

  02-09-2026 22:07 via dailymail.com
  
  Archaeologists say they've uncovered the site of Jesus' famous miracle, located along the Sea of Galilee. It is within an ancient city the Bible says Jesus spent time in.
  
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• Major earthquake threat rises in California for first time in 12 years

  02-09-2026 21:47 via dailymail.com
  
  A new assessment has revealed an increased risk of a major earthquake striking California. Scientists are now telling residents to be ready for a destructive event.
  
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• Blame it on the hormones! Women are more likely to splash out on luxury items when they're ovulating, study finds

  02-09-2026 20:00 via dailymail.com
  
  The sudden urge to splurge on a designer handbag might not be as random as it seems.
  
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• The three tactics that could save your life if you're held at gunpoint, according to a former FBI agent

  02-09-2026 18:49 via dailymail.com
  
  A former FBI agent, who spent 25 years as a special agent, has faced armed attackers himself and recently revealed three tactics that helped him escape alive.
  
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• SonicWall's SMA1000 boxes under active attack again

  02-09-2026 18:05 via theregister.com
  
  SonicWall says attackers are actively exploiting two chained zero-days to take over Secure Mobile Access (SMA) Series 1000 boxes. Aimed at midsize and large enterprises, SMA1000 gateways secure remote access and VPN connections. Compromising one can therefore provide attackers with a valuable route into corporate networks. So, get to applying those hotfixes, says SonicWall. There are no workarounds. The first zero-day, CVE-2026-83548, is a pre-authentication server-side request forgery (SSRF) vu
  
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• Microsoft will stop finishing your sentences in Word and Outlook

  02-09-2026 17:31 via theregister.com
  
  Microsoft is switching off text predictions by default in Word and Outlook after acknowledging that unwanted suggestions can interrupt rather than assist some users. The change is coming to Word for Windows, the web, iOS, and Android, as well as classic Outlook for Windows and Outlook for Mac. The feature will remain available but will no longer be enabled by default. Introduced several years ago, the feature is the computing equivalent of Microsoft peering over users' shoulders and suggesting w
  
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• Storm Marie to become hurricane TODAY as rare track threatens millions in California

  02-09-2026 17:04 via dailymail.com
  
  Weather officials along the US West Coast are warning of potentially dangerous conditions this Labor Day weekend as Marie is poised to erupt into a hurricane.
  
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• Overseas Book Review: The New Economics Of Technocracy

  02-09-2026 17:00 via technocracy.news
  
  This book review appeared in a professional journal in France. My books are written for all the people of the world, regardless of political or spiritual orientation. It is useful for my American readers to see outside the bubble that there are thoughtful people all around the world who see Technocracy as a major threat. ⁃ Patrick Wood, Editor.In the last issue, I reviewed Patrick Wood’s then most recent book (p. 68), The Final Betrayal, on how technocracy has gone into overdrive wit
  
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• NASA's Swift shortens orbital lifetime for the sake of science

  02-09-2026 17:00 via theregister.com
  
  NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory may now be beyond rescue, but the team behind the spacecraft has reactivated its instruments to eke out a final few months of science data before it reenters Earth's atmosphere. The Ultraviolet/Optical and X-ray telescopes were reactivated last week, and the team hopes to return the Burst Alert Telescope to data collection during September. The former two telescopes were turned off in February to minimize drag and buy time for the reboost effort. The latter
  
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• Firefox and Thunderbird hit the fortnightly release treadmill

  02-09-2026 16:53 via theregister.com
  
  Mozilla's Firefox 155 and subsidiary MZLA's Thunderbird 155 have arrived. Yes, already. Firefox officially debuted yesterday, although The Reg FOSS desk wasn't offered the upgrade until early evening. Thunderbird followed several hours later. If this seems soon after the previous releases, that's because it is. Mozilla announced Firefox's new fortnightly cadence in July, and MZLA subsequently confirmed that Thunderbird would keep pace. September marks the start of the accelerated schedule. Much
  
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• Legacy Lenovo login opens 5,000 Dropbox accounts to attackers

  02-09-2026 16:25 via theregister.com
  
  Dropbox has warned around 5,000 users that attackers compromised their accounts by abusing a legacy Lenovo login integration. In an email sent to affected customers, the cloud storage biz said attackers exploited an integration that allowed users to access Dropbox using Lenovo IDs. Dropbox blamed "an issue with Lenovo's email verification process," which allowed attackers to register Lenovo IDs using Dropbox users' email addresses and then access the corresponding storage accounts. It did not ex
  
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• Offshoots of cancelled TrueNAS Core upgrade to FreeBSD 15

  02-09-2026 15:49 via theregister.com
  
  Good news if you want to keep your NAS boxes on FreeBSD – two new contenders just stepped up, with updated forks of the cancelled TrueNAS Core. FreeBSD has a strong reputation as a stable server OS, and integrates highly reliable ZFS filesystem right into its kernel. The snag is that Linux is rather more widespread, meaning more people know their way around a Linux box – but Linux knowledge doesn’t transfer well over to FreeBSD. The Reg FOSS desk just found out about two differ
  
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• Anthropic hires architect of UK AI policy as MPs warn of 'clear conflict of interest'

  02-09-2026 15:15 via theregister.com
  
  UK Parliament's science and technology committee has asked the government to explain how it will avoid conflicts of interest after Anthropic recruited Matt Clifford, chair of blue-sky research agency ARIA. Clifford said he was joining the US AI poster child as managing director of international affairs, "leading the company's work with governments outside North America." He was commissioned to write the "AI Opportunities Action Plan" in July 2024. The government published it in January 2025, ado
  
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• Next-gen AI networks may hinge on the telephone switchboard's return

  02-09-2026 15:00 via theregister.com
  
  If you thought 72 GPUs per rack was dense, next-generation designs from Nvidia and others will cram hundreds or even thousands of accelerators into a single massive system. But for any of that to happen, they're going to need a lot of optics and technology that's reminiscent of the old-fashioned telephone switchboard. This reality has fueled a flurry of investment in everything from photonics startups to established optical equipment and fiber manufacturing. In March, Nvidia invested $6 billion
  
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• Microsoft update disarms Outlook and Teams on Arm PCs

  02-09-2026 14:30 via theregister.com
  
  Not keen on the new Outlook? You're not alone. Microsoft's August security update has stopped it and Teams from launching reliably on some Arm-based devices, including Surface hardware. Microsoft acknowledged the problem on September 1 and added it to the Windows release health dashboard. "After installing Windows security updates released on or after August 11, 2026 (KB5121003), Microsoft Teams and the new Outlook for Windows might fail to launch or might close unexpectedly on ARM-based devices
  
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• London Tube closes the 5G gap with streets above

  02-09-2026 13:19 via theregister.com
  
  Mobile coverage on parts of London's Underground now rivals the streets above for 5G availability and signal strength, according to analysis by network intelligence biz Ookla. Cellular support has been rolling out across the Tube since Mayor Sadiq Khan promised in 2021 to connect all stations and tunnels by the end of 2024. That deadline was missed. About 60 percent of below-ground stations now have coverage, with the entire network expected to be connected by the end of this year. Where service
  
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• Is this the iPhone 18 Ultra? Leaker claims to reveal the design for Apple's highly anticipated foldable ahead of its launch next week

  02-09-2026 12:52 via dailymail.com
  
  Lewis Hilsenteger, the creator behind popular Canadian YouTube channel, Unbox Therapy, posted a video showing off the foldable device alongside the iPhone 18 Pro Max.
  
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• UK goes shopping for homegrown AI with £100M procurement scheme

  02-09-2026 12:51 via theregister.com
  
  The British government has opened the first competitions under a £100 million procurement scheme intended to give domestic AI startups a route into public sector contracts. Chancellor John Healey announced the initiative at a G20 finance ministers meeting in North Carolina. It invites companies to develop technology addressing challenges including NHS productivity, national security, cyber resilience, and the efficiency of public AI infrastructure. The government says the scheme will help
  
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• Northern Ireland adds £15M to Fujitsu education deal without competition

  02-09-2026 12:17 via theregister.com
  
  Northern Ireland's Education Authority plans to add £15 million to Fujitsu's EA One contract without a new competition, taking its ceiling to £55.4 million. The authority intends to exercise five one-year extension options already built into the deal, keeping the Japanese supplier in place until March 31, 2032. The current term is due to expire in March 2027. Public sector awards to Fujitsu have attracted scrutiny since the supplier acknowledged its role in the Post Office Horizon sc
  
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• Mystery of how the moon formed is finally solved: Study claims our lunar satellite was created in just five hours during a giant impact between Earth and a Mars-sized planet

  02-09-2026 12:01 via dailymail.com
  
  The moon could have formed within just five hours of a colossal collision that rocked the early Solar System 4.5 billion years ago, scientists suggest.
  
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• UK cyber bill targets AI users, not the vendors building it

  02-09-2026 11:44 via theregister.com
  
  The UK government has rejected proposals from members of the the House of Lords to bring AI vendors within the scope of the Cyber Security and Resilience (Network and Information Systems) Bill. Cybersecurity minister Baroness Lloyd of Effra argued that regulating AI vendors and frontier model developers through the bill would not prevent hostile actors from misusing their products. Addressing the Grand Committee on Tuesday, she said: "Bringing providers of AI services, those companies which are
  
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• UK digital ID may be dead, but its legacy IT problem lives on

  02-09-2026 11:03 via theregister.com
  
  Legacy government systems would have posed a significant barrier to the UK's abandoned national digital ID scheme, according to the country's spending watchdog. The National Audit Office (NAO) has published a review of the digital identity landscape and the lessons that should inform any future attempt to introduce a government-wide system. Drawing on its previous work on digital transformation, data, and identity, as well as evidence from international audit bodies, the NAO emphasized that digi
  
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• Overshooting the critical 1.5°C warming threshold is now inevitable, UN warns - and the impacts are going to be 'devastating'

  02-09-2026 11:00 via dailymail.com
  
  Titled 'Limiting Overshooting', the report reveals that in the best-case scenario, global temperature rise will now hit 1.8°C.
  
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• The prettiest birdsong, according to science - with blackbirds taking the top spot

  02-09-2026 08:35 via dailymail.com
  
  They might not be the most colourful garden visitor - but the blackbird is the bird with the prettiest song, according to science.
  
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• Arm in the enterprise is at least three years away, says Broadcom software boss

  02-09-2026 08:11 via theregister.com
  
  Arm servers won’t have significant market share in the enterprise for at least three to five years, according to Ram Velaga, the recently installed leader of Broadcom’s software business. That’s unwelcome news for hardware vendors contemplating Arm servers, because buyers will be less interested in the devices if they can’t manage them with the tools they already use. VMware remains the most commonly deployed enterprise server virtualization supplier, so its users won&rsq
  
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• Tape still isn’t dead, but shipments slipped by 16 exabytes in 2025

  02-09-2026 03:34 via theregister.com
  
  Tape is still not dead, but it’s not in rude health either after shipments slipped by 16 exabytes in 2025. That number comes from the LTO Program – the alliance of HPE, IBM, and Quantum Corp, that together tends the Linear Tape-Open (LTO) Format that accounts for around 85 percent of all tape sales. The Program delivers an annual data dump describing the previous year’s shipments, and this year’s effort landed on Tuesday with news that 160.3 exabytes worth of LTO tape wen
  
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• Cops, CrowdStrike disrupt Sality botnet by poisoning the network and diverting into sinkholes

  02-09-2026 01:54 via theregister.com
  
  International law enforcement agencies, working with CrowdStrike and Shadowserver Foundation, have disrupted Sality, a 23-year-old peer-to-peer botnet used to deliver malware to more than 15,000 machines worldwide. The botnet has operated since 2003 and distributed all types of malicious code to victims, spanning credential theft, spam distribution, proxy services, network exploitation, and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. For the past eight years, Sality’s primary payload has
  
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• Anthropic promises zero data retention – but customers must check it worked

  02-09-2026 01:37 via theregister.com
  
  Anthropic will provide zero data retention to enterprise customers who have been promised the perk, subject to approval, when using the company's Fable model. With the arrival of new versions of its high-end models, Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1, the Claudefather has announced a service called Enterprise Frontier Safeguards (EFS) that combines the privacy of not storing customer data with model abuse detection. Under the new deal, enterprises do not receive zero data retention (ZDR) agreements automa
  
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• Fierytale: Human speech was born when our ancestors gossiped around prehistoric campfires, scientists say

  02-09-2026 01:05 via dailymail.com
  
  Researchers say that human speech was born when our ancient ancestors started gossiping and trading stories around the campfire late into the night.
  
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