Sci-Tech news

• Apple's Siri calls ambulance for baby

  07-06-2016 14:50 via bbc.co.uk
  
  A woman from Cairns, Australia, used Siri to call an ambulance for her one year old daughter when she stopped breathing.
  
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• Deadly bacteria found in major US city's water system traced to Mark Zuckerberg's $800m data center

  08-07-2026 20:42 via dailymail.com
  
  Meta has come under fire after its data center contaminated a major US city's water system with a rare bacteria, months before the facility is set to go online.
  
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• Allstate Insurance quits Broadcom, alleges vengeful license audit on the way out

  08-07-2026 19:28 via theregister.com
  
  Broadcom has accused Allstate Insurance of dodging a software license audit that the insurer claims only happened after it decided to stop using VMware and CA software. Those two Broadcom business units – CA and VMware – have brought copyright infringement lawsuits against Allstate. The CA suit, filed in May 2025, alleges that the insurer breached contracts after the sale of its Employer Voluntary Benefits business to an outfit called StanCorp. The VMware suit, filed in December 2025
  
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• Warning as deadly 'fungal storms' sweep America with toxic dust carrying disease

  08-07-2026 18:49 via dailymail.com
  
  Dangerous spores hidden in the ground are set to sweep across the US this summer, causing potentially fatal respiratory infections in several states.
  
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• AI memory crunch takes a bite out of PC shipments

  08-07-2026 17:57 via theregister.com
  
  The memory chip crisis caused PC shipments to fall by 5 percent from last year in Q2 2026 as vendors struggled to secure supplies, and IDC warns smaller suppliers may be forced out of business if the situation continues. While rising component costs have already priced budget PCs out of existence, the market intelligence biz says the AI-driven shortage also pushed shipments down to 68.2 million units during the quarter spanning April, May, and June. This was the first decline after nine consecut
  
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• Tool promises to make lazy academics' AI-written papers sound more human

  08-07-2026 17:55 via theregister.com
  
  It's bad enough that you used AI to write a research paper instead of composing it yourself. Now, you can take the extra step to hide the evidence of your sloth. A startup has decided academics need a way to hide LLM tells, yet they insist their goal isn’t to support bad habits among boffins. AI humanizers are nothing new - take a cursory look online and you’ll find that companies pushing AI that helps AI writing sound less like AI wrote it are a dime a dozen. None, says the team beh
  
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• America's bed bug hotspots revealed in new map showing the 50 worst cities for blood-sucking pests... is your hometown infested?

  08-07-2026 17:35 via dailymail.com
  
  New data has revealed the 50 US cities where the blood-sucking pests are causing the biggest headaches for homeowners and travelers.
  
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• Police intercept tipsy teens after Waymo snitches for shooting Orbeez out of the car

  08-07-2026 17:24 via theregister.com
  
  If you misbehave in the back of a taxi, your driver might report you to authorities. And if there's no driver, you should also expect no quarter. Two San Mateo 15-year-olds this week had a run-in with the law after their Waymo robotaxi called the cops on them. According to the San Mateo Police Department’s account of the matter, the teens treated a hired Waymo as their own personal battle taxi, firing Orbeez out of the car windows while sipping what police called "afternoon libations" - in
  
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• Bug in top AI coding agents shows that Unix-era security headaches never really die

  08-07-2026 16:00 via theregister.com
  
  A “systematic vulnerability pattern” in at least six of the most widely used AI coding assistants can be abused to trick agents into accessing files outside the workspace sandbox, leading to remote code execution on the developer's machine. Google-owned security biz Wiz found the security gap, which it's named "GhostApproval," and reported it to all six: Amazon Q Developer, Anthropic Claude Code, Augment, Cursor, Google Antigravity, and Windsurf. Amazon, Cursor, and Google deemed the
  
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• China tells devs to ditch Claude Code over 'backdoor code' fears

  08-07-2026 15:58 via theregister.com
  
  China's National Vulnerability Database (CNVDB) is urging developers to uninstall recent Claude Code versions over the fear that they can scoop up sensitive user data without consent. Referring to it as "backdoor code," the state-run body claimed over WeChat and in an online statement that a "built-in monitoring mechanism" can gather details such as a user's location and identity, and forward them to remote servers. It said the alert only applies to Claude Code versions 2.1.91 (April 2) to 2.1.1
  
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• Secret CIA 'workbook' claims simple five-step exercise can supercharge the human body

  08-07-2026 15:10 via dailymail.com
  
  A secret handbook created for the Army and the CIA allegedly gave users the instructions on how to access secret energy within their own bodies.
  
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• Ex-NASA boss points out small flaw in Moon landing plan: No lander

  08-07-2026 14:50 via theregister.com
  
  Former NASA boss Jim Bridenstine has warned that the space agency's plan to land astronauts on the Moon risks becoming too complicated for its own good. Bridenstine, who ran NASA during the first Trump administration and departed in 2021 before the Artemis I launch, told This Week In Space that the current lunar lander architecture looks worryingly elaborate compared with Apollo. It is not Bridenstine's first intervention on the matter. In 2025, he questioned the architecture NASA selected &ndas
  
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• Unexpected Windows bloat is due to bug, not by design

  08-07-2026 14:29 via theregister.com
  
  Lurking in the release notes for this month's Patch Tuesday preview is a fix for a world of storage pain being experienced by some unlucky Windows 11 users. At the end of June, Microsoft said: "This update improves disk space usage for the CapabilityAccessManager.db-wal file" to KB5095093, the preview for July's patch Tuesday. The fix addresses a problem in which the CapabilityAccessManager.db-wal file can keep growing, potentially consuming gigabytes of disk space instead of the expected megaby
  
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• The next pandemic? Virus catalogue reveals the terrifying pathogens that are most likely to spark a global outbreak

  08-07-2026 14:06 via dailymail.com
  
  A new virus catalogue reveals the terrifying pathogens most likely to spark the next global health emergency.
  
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• Heatwave prompts summer SNAKE warning in Britain: Shock new figures reveal a sharp rise in incidents during warm weather

  08-07-2026 13:57 via dailymail.com
  
  As Britain endures its third heatwave of the summer, many Brits will be worried about sunburn, sleep issues, and heatstroke. Now, experts have revealed a new cause for concern - snakes.
  
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• Telstra outage: Failed emergency services calls, train chaos, payment systems down

  08-07-2026 13:45 via theregister.com
  
  Aussie telco Telstra is currently battling the mother of all borks after blaming a “software defect” for an outage that downed emergency services calls and public transport lines. Telstra blamed the 12-hour outage, which it discovered at around 0430 AEST on Wednesday, on issues at time-keeping servers located in datacenters in Sydney and Melbourne. It explicitly ruled out the possibility of a cyberattack. Australia’s Triple Zero Custodian, which oversees the functionality of th
  
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• The humanoid robot designed 'for a lifetime': China reveals creepy bots that look and feel like real humans - and they can even reproduce 90% of our movements

  08-07-2026 13:44 via dailymail.com
  
  These Uworld U1 androids are covered with 'biomimetic skin' that looks and feels just like that of a real human.
  
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• Tech divorce from Walmart cost Brit retail giant Asda £1.22B

  08-07-2026 13:31 via theregister.com
  
  The UK’s third-largest supermarket, Asda, has reported that the cost of its tech divorce from Walmart — which included building a new SAP ERP system — reached £1.22 billion, four years after it first separated from the US retail giant. Results published last month said that one-off separation program would transfer the UK retailer to “a standalone, IT infrastructure using software as a service from best-in-class digital partners”. Asda said the program would &
  
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• Clingy Virgin Media fined £28M for refusing to take the hint

  08-07-2026 12:51 via theregister.com
  
  UK comms regulator Ofcom has fined Virgin Media £28 million for repeatedly obstructing customers seeking to switch broadband, pay TV, and landline providers, or to cancel their contract with the company. The watchdog says it uncovered deliberate stalling tactics by Virgin Media agents, including dropping calls, repeatedly putting customers on hold for no reason, and excessive and unnecessary call transfers between agents. Millions of calls made by customers between January 1, 2022, and Sep
  
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• Mint condition: how the humble herb can help to soothe your gut, freshen breath and lower stress levels

  08-07-2026 12:04 via dailymail.com
  
  Mint has long been treated as an afterthought: a sprig in a drink, a few leaves chopped over new potatoes, or simply just a toothpaste flavour - but it's so much more.
  
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• Another German state heads down the open source sovereignty road

  08-07-2026 12:03 via theregister.com
  
  Other regions of Germany are starting to move away from proprietary tools and cloud services from the US in favor of FOSS. The state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, in the northeast of Germany, has confirmed it is on the road to digital sovereignty and in the process of moving to Nextcloud in place of Microsoft SharePoint. So far, around 5,000 staff are using their new FOSS tools for chat, video conferencing, and groupware, but the plan is to roll it out to more than 50,000 public employees. It is al
  
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• Scientists discover 73 volcanoes hidden across the ocean floor - and several could erupt at any moment

  08-07-2026 11:31 via dailymail.com
  
  Scientists have discovered 73 previously unknown volcanoes hidden across the ocean floors.
  
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• Home Office's glitchy eVisa rollout lands UK privacy regulator in campaigners' crosshairs

  08-07-2026 11:15 via theregister.com
  
  The UK's privacy watchdog is facing calls for parliamentary scrutiny after campaigners accused it of failing to get a grip on the Home Office's glitch-plagued eVisa system. A coalition of 20 immigration, digital rights, and human rights organizations, including the Open Rights Group, has written to the chair of the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee, urging MPs to open an inquiry into what it describes as the Information Commissioner's Office's (ICO) failure to enforce data protection
  
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• Red cards have more than TRIPLED since the last World Cup, study reveals

  08-07-2026 11:07 via dailymail.com
  
  If you've noticed an exceptional number of red cards at the World Cup, you're not imagining it. A new study has revealed that red-card issuances have more than tripled.
  
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• NHS told to show its working on Palantir platform benefits

  08-07-2026 10:30 via theregister.com
  
  A campaign group has written to the UK health minister to force him to clarify data used by the government in Parliament to justify its controversial £330 million investment in a data-sharing system supported by Palantir. The Register understands that the UK's regulator for the use of statistics in the public sector is assessing how the government is using data to justify its use of Palantir technology. The move follows an investigation challenging claims by NHS England that as of June, 13
  
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• AI's biggest challenge is not compute - it's data storage

  08-07-2026 10:00 via theregister.com
  
  AI continues to evolve at pace. The novelty of generative models producing their own content is already giving way to the buzz around agentic systems that can set goals autonomously and execute multi-step workflows without human involvement. Each staging post on AI's journey raises the bar for compute resources and demands more powerful processing. But in the headlong dash towards newer and more specialized architectures, and amid the fuss that greets each silicon innovation, the industry is ove
  
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• AI is becoming a bargain hunter's market, with a few luxury models on top

  08-07-2026 08:30 via theregister.com
  
  The price of AI tokens is fluctuating widely, with some becoming cheaper and others more expensive, leaving users of AI services struggling to assess if the price is right. Aman Panjwani, an AI engineer based in India, says that GPT-4-class model output cost about $20 per million tokens in late 2022. Today, equivalent capability costs about $0.40, a 55x decline in less than four years, he said, citing Introl's December 2025 unit-economics analysis. "When DeepSeek released its R1 reasoning model
  
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• Just ONE hit of cocaine 'rewires' the brain and may increase risk of addiction, study suggests

  08-07-2026 08:19 via dailymail.com
  
  One dose of cocaine leaves a lasting 'scar' on the brain for weeks - and as teen use rises, scientists warn that even occasional use comes with hidden risks.
  
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• Media Over QUIC can scale real-time streaming and carry the world's vids

  08-07-2026 08:01 via theregister.com
  
  SYSTEMS APPROACH A few weeks ago, Larry and I independently received the same advice from two different sources: take a look at Media Over QUIC (MoQ) for your next edition. I’ve been following the standardization of QUIC for several years (and wrote about it) but MoQ had not yet come onto my radar. A quick look at some IETF drafts gave me some of the main concepts, but it can be frustratingly hard to pick out the important high-level ideas from the masses of protocol-specific detail that g
  
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• Doctors issue warning over misuse of popular toy that leads to hospitalizations with life-threatening injuries

  08-07-2026 07:57 via dailymail.com
  
  GRAPHIC CONTENT WARNING. Doctors are sounding the alarm about popular sensory toys after multiple children have suffered horrific third-degree burns.
  
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