Sci-Tech news

• Africa 'set to miss UN development goal on malnutrition'

  01-03-2018 04:47 via bbc.co.uk
  At current rates of progress no African country will meet the UN goal set for 2030, a study reveals.
  
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• Rogue OpenAI agents used dead German web site to communicate in May, months before Hugging Face incident

  04-09-2026 18:02 via theregister.com
  
  OpenAI’s agents were going rogue as early as May, according to a new report, making the Hugging Face incident far from the first where bots committed a breach. A report published Friday by a group of researchers claims to have found – with all of the agent posts presented as evidence – a self-identified “swarm” of OpenAI agents taking over a functionally dead German software developer wiki. Over the course of a month, from May to June, the agents made around 18,000
  
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• My Word. Microsoft's prepping Similarity Checker for retirement

  04-09-2026 17:19 via theregister.com
  
  Microsoft is retiring Word's Similarity Checker on October 3 and stripping the feature from Microsoft Editor. Other writing and editing tools, including Microsoft 365 Copilot, won't be affected. But if an organization uses Similarity Checker as part of its workflow, it's time to consider alternatives. Similarity Checker has been around for a few years. Launched in 2020, the Bing Search-powered service compared text from the user to online sources and came up with a percentage score – how m
  
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• Canonical shuttering some of its legacy chat channels

  04-09-2026 16:56 via theregister.com
  
  Canonical is closing off some of its older tools and communications channels for users, although some may remain – just unofficially. Back in May, Canonical’s Aaron Prisk announced on Discord that the company was closing the Ubuntu Pastebin at the end of June. Now a comment from a different Aaron, Aaron Rainbolt, says that the IRC channels will follow. The official Ubuntu chat channels are now on Matrix – there’s an introductory site and under Step 3: Join the Ubuntu spac
  
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• Microsoft to bounce mail from outdated Exchange servers

  04-09-2026 15:43 via theregister.com
  
  Microsoft is upping the ante on Exchange Server security, warning that outdated on-premises systems will soon be blocked from sending email to Exchange Online. From the second week of September, Exchange Server 2016 and 2019 machines that send email to Exchange Online through an inbound connector of the OnPremises type must be patched to the final public update baseline released in October 2025, according to Microsoft. "This update level was released almost a year ago," Microsoft stated, "and al
  
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• PostgreSQL 19 connects the dots with standardized graph queries

  04-09-2026 15:07 via theregister.com
  
  PostgreSQL 19 is set to add standardized SQL syntax for querying property graphs. The open source database has steadily grown in popularity over the last five years, becoming the most popular among developers for the first time in 2023. Speaking to The Register, Alastair Turner, PostgreSQL evangelist at open source consultancy Percona, said the property graph query support in PostgreSQL 19 – due later this month or early October – resulted from collaboration among several of the data
  
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• JavaScript installer pnpm recast in Rust because ECMAScript can't keep up

  04-09-2026 14:22 via theregister.com
  
  The popular JavaScript package manager pnpm, already known for its speedy downloads, has further cut installation times by up to 90 percent thanks to a complete rewrite in Rust. Yet the freshly released version 12 of pnpm should not cause consternation while upgrading, its maintainer says. “Upgrading should not feel like a migration. The commands, flags, settings, and lockfile format of pnpm 11 all carry over, and the documentation covers both versions,” wrote Zoltan Kochan, the curr
  
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• Cloud snail-mail service Docmail enters third day stuck in the outbox

  04-09-2026 13:37 via theregister.com
  
  Docmail, a service used by more than 30,000 UK businesses and public sector organizations, has been offline for several days, prompting concern among users. Operated by CFH Docmail Ltd, the cloud-based hybrid mail service allows users to send physical letters without running their own print rooms or making trips to the post office. In other words, it handles the printing and postage of business communications. However, Docmail has been unavailable since the start of business on September 2, acco
  
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• Gen Z? Try Gen E! A quarter of youngsters think owning a petrol car is 'as outdated as having a landline' - and want an electric vehicle instead

  04-09-2026 12:51 via dailymail.com
  
  Gen Z have a reputation for 'cancelling' popular items - and their latest verdict might be their most divisive yet.
  
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• Wayve and Uber steal a march on Waymo with paid self-driving London rides

  04-09-2026 12:45 via theregister.com
  
  Wayve and Uber have launched self-driving rides in London, but what's more interesting is what is planned for the next few months and years. As of today, the plan is for 15 electric Ford Mustangs, equipped with the Wayve AI driver, to roam the capital, picking up passengers with a safety driver on hand to keep an eye on things. However, at a launch event on Thursday, Wayve showed off the follow-up to the Mustang: a Nissan LEAF, which will run the Wayve AI Driver using NVIDIA DRIVE Hyperion. This
  
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• Enjoy the Windows 10 Update Experience at London's O2

  04-09-2026 12:00 via theregister.com
  
  BORK!BORK!BORK! Windows 10 is lingering on after its friends have gone home, plaintively flickering out an update notification on a digital sign at London's O2 arena. The sign was advertising the venue and some of the activities available inside, including an indoor skydiving experience. We'd recommend indoor skydiving as an alternative to jumping out of a perfectly good aircraft for those minded to give it a go, although the sight of Windows 10 making its presence felt is less than ideal when c
  
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• Super El Niño could scupper your plans for a winter ski holiday: Forecasters predict less snowfall than normal over Europe

  04-09-2026 11:46 via dailymail.com
  
  If you're looking forward to a winter ski getaway, El Niño could scupper your fresh powder plans.
  
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• They're taking the p***! Climbers are melting Everest's glacier with their urine, study warns

  04-09-2026 11:19 via dailymail.com
  
  Every year, hundreds of climbers flock to the Himalayas to take on Mount Everest. But a new study has warned that climbers are unknowingly destroying Everest's glacier...with their urine.
  
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• US law firm accuses UK AI software firm of unwanted contract renewal when it tried to leave

  04-09-2026 11:15 via theregister.com
  
  A US law firm is alleging that UK-based telecoms and software company ConnexAI sold it software and AI systems that failed to perform as the vendor claimed, and then unlawfully renewed its contract. ConnexAI has rejected the allegations. The dispute has involves two court cases, both of which are ongoing. DK Law, a personal injury specialist based in California, alleged in a California court filing in April that ConnexAI promises “customers a telephone system and AI software solution with
  
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• UK military wants lasers to stop drone swarms without running out of ammo

  04-09-2026 10:30 via theregister.com
  
  Britain's Ministry of Defence (MoD) is seeking anti-drone technology capable of protecting troops from saturation attacks designed to overwhelm defenses or exhaust their ammunition. The tender, dubbed Project PANOPTES, is being run by UK Defence Innovation (UKDI) on behalf of the MoD, with an initial £5 million ($6.8 million) available to successful bidders. First-stage submissions close at midday on September 23, suggesting that the MoD is in something of a hurry. According to the competi
  
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• Best eSIM for travel 2026: which one offers the best value for money?

  04-09-2026 10:00 via theregister.com
  
  Comparing travel eSIM prices is not as simple as looking at a provider's homepage. Most companies advertise low starting prices, but what travelers actually pay depends on whether they can buy a plan that matches the length of their trip. If a provider only offers fixed duration packages, travelers may end up paying for several days of mobile data they do not need. For frequent travelers or longer trips, those extra days can quickly add to the total cost. The Travel eSIM Value Index 2026 compare
  
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• On Call: User who handled life-or-death situations struggled with the SHIFT key

  04-09-2026 08:30 via theregister.com
  
  ON CALL Welcome to another Friday and therefore to a fresh instalment of On Call, our weekly reader-contributed column that shares your tech support stories. This week, meet a reader we’ll Regomize as “Roy” who toiled at a company that did work related to tissue donations and organ transplants. “The on-call duties were a bit hair-raising due to the high stakes involved,” Roy told On Call. “Thankfully, things typically ran well and I didn’t get too many c
  
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• Google engineer unplugged every fiber they could see and – surprise! – took down a chunk of the G-Cloud

  04-09-2026 06:48 via theregister.com
  
  Google Cloud has revealed the embarrassing reason for a partial outage at its us-central1-b region this week: An engineer unplugged it. The incident spanned 07:41 to 11:52 PT on September 1, and saw a portion of the G-Cloud region experience “severe network degradation and resource isolation.” “Traffic flow drop rates for resources hosted in the affected area reached 100% during the peak of the incident, resulting in unreachable virtual machines and elevated packet loss,”
  
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• The search company that plants trees just launched a Linux browser to help Europe battle big tech

  04-09-2026 06:00 via theregister.com
  
  Berlin-based eco-conscious search outfit Ecosia is expanding its range of European-focused web browsers to include a Linux version, citing the growing number of users in the EU looking for open alternatives to the clutches of American tech giants. Calling Linux users a “critical tech community that has long called for data privacy, digital sovereignty, and sustainability,” Ecosia said it was launching the new browser to support the community, whose numbers it says doubled in the EU b
  
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• Cisco searched for IOS XR bugs and found so many it rolled them into an update release

  04-09-2026 04:18 via theregister.com
  
  Cisco has warned its customers of three critical-rated flaws in its products. Two of them are present in the Cisco IOS XR operating system that powers the company’s carrier-grade kit. CVE-2026-20274 scores 9.8 on the ten-point CVSS scale and covers a buffet of buffering issues, the potential for out-of-bounds writes, and the chance to initialize resources with an insecure default. CVE-2026-20279 is another 9.8-rated flaw. Cisco says it’s an improper access control problem that covers
  
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• OpenAI commits $1B in AI credits to frontline cyber defenders

  04-09-2026 01:47 via theregister.com
  
  OpenAI has pledged $1 billion in credits to subsidize access to its services and training for resource-strapped cyber defenders around the world. The AI giant expects organizations to use the subsidized credits over the next six months as part of its Daybreak for Frontline Defenders initiative, announced Thursday. Critical infrastructure organizations, community banks, nonprofits, and open-source maintainers can apply for access credits online. These are the defenders tasked with securing critic
  
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• OpenAI throws Astra into the top-tier model ring

  04-09-2026 00:42 via theregister.com
  
  After a brief training pause to reflect on the inadequacy of its AI security measures, OpenAI has released GPT-6 Astra, initially for those in its Trusted Access Program. Assuming all goes well and there are no more incidents like the Hugging Face hack, the AI biz in a few days will allow Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise subscribers to try out what the company describes as "our most intelligent model yet, with state-of-the-art performance in computer use, browsing, software engineering, scien
  
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• Hugging Face is too important to fall into Nvidia's hands

  04-09-2026 00:15 via theregister.com
  
  OPINION Nvidia on Thursday announced an agreement to acquire open source AI evangelist and model depot Hugging Face for $12.9 billion in a deal that's expected to close next year, assuming regulators don't get in the way. They should get in the way. As antitrust magnets go, Nvidia buying Hugging Face takes the cake. You wouldn't let an automaker acquire the primary means of fuel distribution. Nor would you let it buy the primary means by which the mechanics are trained. Yet, Nvidia's acquisition
  
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• Dr Phil rages over UFO 'lie' the US government has told Americans for years: 'I don't trust them about this at all'

  03-09-2026 21:53 via dailymail.com
  
  Dr Phil McGraw slammed what he claimed was an 80-year coverup that was intentionally carried out to deceive the American people and keep over 300 million people in the dark.
  
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• True AI-pocalypse as ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok all go down at once

  03-09-2026 20:24 via theregister.com
  
  OpenAI says its ChatGPT service is recovering from a limited outage this morning amid similar problems affecting SpaceX's Grok and Anthropic's Claude. It might not be a good time for a chat. "A routing error starting around 7:43 am PT on Thursday, September 3 made ChatGPT and Codex unavailable for some users across platforms," a company spokesperson told The Register. "As of about 8:17 am PT on Thursday, a solution was successfully implemented and is continuing to be monitored." The OpenAI statu
  
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• NASA photo of Mars sparks theories of alien life as eagle-eyed viewers spot TRACKS in the dust

  03-09-2026 20:16 via dailymail.com
  
  A strange pattern in the soil of Mars has reopened the discussion that something may still be living on the long-dead planet.
  
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• Prolific Microsoft 0-day hunter drops CrowdStrike Falcon exploit PoC

  03-09-2026 20:08 via theregister.com
  
  The disgruntled security researcher known as Nightmare Eclipse (aka Chaotic Eclipse, Infinite Nightmare, and now also MSNightmare) is moving away from their singular Microsoft vendetta and on to other vendors. On Thursday, they dropped a new zero-day bug called FalconFlank that affects CrowdStrike’s Falcon endpoint security platform - albeit with a Windows link. According to the prolific zero-day hunter, FalconFlank is a privilege escalation vulnerability that abuses the Microsoft Office m
  
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• CERN moves thousands of accelerator control computers to Debian

  03-09-2026 19:52 via theregister.com
  
  CERN is moving several thousand computers that control its particle accelerator hardware from Red Hat-family Linux distros to Debian. CERN – the place that runs the Large Hadron Collider – generates a lot of data, and that means it uses a lot of computers. Most of them run Linux, and for over 20 years, it used distros in the Red Hat family. Now, that's beginning to change: it’s moving what it calls the “front end” computers, the ones underground that control the LHC
  
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• Hugging Face CEO says 'planets aligned' for Nvidia deal, aims to reach 100M users

  03-09-2026 19:23 via theregister.com
  
  The chief exec of Hugging Face says he wants to take the platform to 100 million users within the next few years, and Nvidia’s backing could help it get there, despite rejecting an investment offer from the chip giant last year. On a conference call to discuss Nvidia's agreed $12.9 billion takeover of the AI model hub, Clément Delangue said it gives Hugging Face the security to think about the long term. “With a big supporter like Nvidia, we can think about the next 10 years a
  
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• Category 4 Hurricane Lowell takes shocking turn as major storm now threatens one million Americans

  03-09-2026 19:23 via dailymail.com
  
  Hurricane Lowell has reached major storm status and has now taken an extreme turn which threatens a state still recovering from the impact of Hurricane Lala.
  
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