Sci-Tech news

• Archie Archambault creates ROUND maps of big cities that 'beats using GPS'

  09-03-2016 10:23 via dailymail.co.uk
  
  Archie Archambault creates maps that plot cities without street names. He started printing the maps in 2011 and has now created over 40, including Paris, LA and Washington DC.
  
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• Amazon shows Meta's Muse AI shopping agent the door

  21-09-2026 15:28 via theregister.com
  
  Amazon has blocked Meta's new Muse AI agent from shopping on its website, apparently deciding that having someone else's bot wandering through customer accounts and placing orders is a step too far. The ecommerce giant cut off Muse after unsuccessfully asking Meta to prevent the personal AI agent from accessing its store, GeekWire reported. Users who try anyway are told that access by an "unauthorized AI agent" violates Amazon's Conditions of Use. The Register asked Muse to find the "best-review
  
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• Clop gets a taste of its own medicine after ShinyHunters hijack leak site

  21-09-2026 14:46 via theregister.com
  
  Clop has discovered what life is like on the receiving end of an extortion demand after rival crew ShinyHunters hijacked its leak site and demanded an eight-figure payout. The takeover surfaced over the weekend, when Clop's dark web leak site displayed a large "DOMAIN SEIZED BY SHINYHUNTERS" banner and the tagline "rooting your systems since '19 ;)." ShinyHunters told Reuters that it broke into the site on Friday by exploiting a vulnerability in the software powering it. The crew claimed this ga
  
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• NASA gives SpaceX a billion reasons to keep flying Crew Dragon

  21-09-2026 14:01 via theregister.com
  
  NASA has added almost $1 billion to SpaceX's commercial crew contract for three more Crew Dragon missions to the International Space Station (ISS). The $946 million contract modification covers Crew-15, Crew-16, and Crew-17, along with ground operations, launch, in-orbit services, return and recovery, cargo transportation, and lifeboat capability while the spacecraft is docked to the ISS. The addition brings the value of SpaceX's Commercial Crew Transportation Capability (CCtCap) contract to $5.
  
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• American datacenters might be getting dirtier, but at least they'll be efficient

  21-09-2026 13:15 via theregister.com
  
  Just when you thought concerns over datacenter power generation in the US couldn't get any worse, the Trump administration gets rid of emissions restrictions on power plants. You can listen to the latest episode of The Kettle on this page, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube. You can also subscribe on those platforms to be notified when a new episode goes live. The EPA is also considering getting rid of reporting requirements on small-scale polluters (e.g., datacenters with on-site power generat
  
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• Rustaceans warned of job interviews with a malicious payload

  21-09-2026 12:33 via theregister.com
  
  The Rust project has warned that attackers appear to be targeting its contributors and crate owners in an attempt to compromise their devices and accounts, potentially allowing malware to be distributed through its package ecosystem. Posting to the Rust blog, security-focused software engineer Adam Harvey said the tactics resemble those used in North Korean fake recruiter campaigns. "A video call is set up for something positive – maybe for a job, maybe for a project, maybe for a contract
  
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• It's raining, the transport isn't working, and now an Android app wants to walk out in solidarity

  21-09-2026 11:45 via theregister.com
  
  It rained in Amsterdam last week. There was a 24-hour public transport strike. And something called LOTA stopped working in the elevators of the Mövenpick hotel. Digital signage in elevators is all the rage nowadays. Where once there might have been peeling menus or faded posters extolling the virtues of long-closed bars, there are now displays trying to grab the attention of elevator passengers who want to get from one floor to another with minimal fuss. We're not sure if LOTA decided to w
  
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• Salesforce wants to charge for AI outcomes, but first it needs to figure out how

  21-09-2026 11:07 via theregister.com
  
  Nothing demonstrates how deeply Fortune 500 companies depend on Salesforce quite like a global outage lasting more than seven hours. The interruption struck during the second day of last week's Dreamforce conference, where the $40 billion-a-year SaaS vendor was pitching AIforce and a growing collection of AI products. The question now is how the company will charge for them. AIforce illustrates why the per-user licensing model is becoming harder to sustain. Unveiled at Dreamforce, it uses Salesf
  
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• Your cloud survived everything except the real world

  21-09-2026 10:03 via theregister.com
  
  You don't know what you've got till it's gone. Great lyric, lousy data retention policy. Amazon Web Services said last week that war damage to its Middle East infrastructure had permanently destroyed resources and data hosted exclusively in its now rather badly named Bahrain Availability Zones. The damage overwhelmed the resilience built into the region. Customers without copies elsewhere no longer had their data. Sorry about that. This may have surprised anyone who mistook cloud redundancy for
  
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• VMware has quietly walked its SmartNIC ambitions

  21-09-2026 09:02 via theregister.com
  
  VMware has quietly stopped selling firewalls for SmartNICs. SmartNICs, aka data processing units (DPUs), are network cards that include a modest processor. Hyperscale clouds routinely use the devices to handle security and networking chores, by running network functions as VMs on the SmartNIC’s processor. Cloud operators like SmartNICs because they free CPU cores to rent to their customers. Running some housekeeping workloads on SmartNICs can also improve isolation and security – AWS
  
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• VMware has quietly walked back its SmartNIC ambitions

  21-09-2026 09:02 via theregister.com
  
  VMware has quietly stopped selling firewalls for SmartNICs. SmartNICs, aka data processing units (DPUs), are network cards that include a modest processor. Hyperscale clouds routinely use the devices to handle security and networking chores, by running network functions as VMs on the SmartNIC’s processor. Cloud operators like SmartNICs because they free CPU cores to rent to their customers. Running some housekeeping workloads on SmartNICs can also improve isolation and security – AWS
  
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• Who, Me? Boss bought cheap 'printer' from a catalog and was left without a leg to stand on

  21-09-2026 08:30 via theregister.com
  
  Working in tech can produce a catalog of woes, and each Monday The Register shares yours in "Who, Me?" – our reader-contributed column chronicling tech-related mistakes, heartaches, and back-breaks. This week, meet an Italian reader we'll Regomize as "Marco," who took us back to what he called "The Roaring Nineties, when big computer companies sold pretty much everything, from graphics workstations to enterprise laser printers." They sold it all through hefty paper catalogs, because this w
  
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• Boss bought cheap 'printer' from a catalog and was left without a leg to stand on

  21-09-2026 08:30 via theregister.com
  
  Working in tech can produce a catalog of woes, and each Monday The Register shares yours in "Who, Me?" – our reader-contributed column chronicling tech-related mistakes, heartaches, and back-breaks. This week, meet an Italian reader we'll Regomize as "Marco," who took us back to what he called "The Roaring Nineties, when big computer companies sold pretty much everything, from graphics workstations to enterprise laser printers." They sold it all through hefty paper catalogs, because this w
  
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• Failed UK networking vendor Cambium set to turn off its cloudy management portal

  21-09-2026 07:17 via theregister.com
  
  UK-based networking hardware vendor Cambium Networks has entered administration and advised customers that its cloud services likely won’t survive for long. The company has not been in the best of health for some time. In August 2025, management admitted that its financial reports for financial years 2022 and 2023, plus reports for six subsequent quarters, were unreliable as they included errors. The NASDAQ stock exchange later delisted the company, which unsuccessfully tried to rejoin the
  
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• Failed networking vendor Cambium set to turn off its cloudy management portal

  21-09-2026 07:17 via theregister.com
  
  Networking hardware vendor Cambium Networks has entered administration and advised customers that its cloud services likely won’t survive for long. The company has not been in the best of health for some time. In August 2025, management admitted that its financial reports for financial years 2022 and 2023, plus reports for six subsequent quarters, were unreliable as they included errors. The NASDAQ stock exchange later delisted the company, which unsuccessfully tried to rejoin the bourse.
  
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• Google joins the ‘Oops, our agents hacked someone’ club after partner’s internet access error

  21-09-2026 05:50 via theregister.com
  
  Google has admitted that its AI agents escaped a sandbox and mounted an attack – but only because testers mistakenly gave its bots internet access. The Big G didn’t disclose the May incident, but The Wall Street Journal learned of the situation, which happened after Google hired Israeli firm Irregular to test its bots’ prowess in a capture-the-flag test. The goal of the exercise was to acquire information from a fictional company without leaving a sandbox. Irregular, which set
  
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• Chinese memory-maker CXMT claims DRAM production breakthrough

  21-09-2026 04:10 via theregister.com
  
  ASIA IN BRIEF Chinese memory-maker CXMT, whose products Apple has reportedly evaluated to use in the iPhone, claims to have made a miniaturization breakthrough. The company on Sunday posted news that it has started mass production of chips made with a fifth-generation process that essentially doubles memory density, meaning it can cut twice the number of dies for memory chips from a single wafer. CXMT says its key breakthrough is a high-k dielectric metal gate process – a way of insulating
  
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• Revealed: The unhealthiest supermarket butters and spreads - with President butter at the top of the list

  20-09-2026 14:04 via dailymail.com
  
  The experts at Which? analysed 52 premium-brand butters and spreads to reveal the healthiest - and least healthy - choices.
  
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• How Windows turned months of inactivity into a 7-hour update hostage situation

  20-09-2026 10:14 via theregister.com
  
  Microsoft has a problem not entirely of its own making: The time it takes to bring a system back up to date after a few months of slumber. The company is keen to talk up how efficient it plans to make Windows. Not a day goes by without either a Microsoft representative or a fan insisting that Windows 11 is a lot snappier now than it used to be. (Usually they skirt the unfortunate truth that the Windows of yesteryear generally flies on modern hardware compared with the lumbering of today's softwa
  
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• New £1m grant to help groups protect green spaces

  20-09-2026 08:55 via bbc.co.uk
  
  The cash can be used by local communities to protect threatened green spaces and wildlife sites.
  
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• 'You never quite know what you're going to pull out'

  20-09-2026 08:38 via bbc.co.uk
  
  The group is marking a decade of fishing everything from an inflatable doll to a Nintendo out of the harbour.
  
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• When did grey squirrels start posing a threat to reds?

  20-09-2026 08:13 via bbc.co.uk
  
  A pair of grey squirrels was reportedly brought to the United Kingdom by a Cheshire banker in 1876.
  
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• CIA's top psychic spy saw an ancient city on Mars... then something terrible happened to the beings living there

  20-09-2026 06:19 via dailymail.com
  
  The CIA's most gifted remote viewer once saw a thriving city on the Martian surface. Now, more people have seen the horrific end of the Red Planet and are sharing the details.
  
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• Trump says US will form 'AI Force' and appoint an artificial intelligence tsar

  19-09-2026 23:01 via bbc.co.uk
  
  The president said his administration "will not in any way hinder or stifle the growth" amid amid warnings about the emergent technology.
  
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• Why the people building AI are warning of an apocalypse... and how you can protect yourself today

  19-09-2026 20:00 via dailymail.com
  
  Tech expert Kim Komando has revealed four ways to protect yourself against AI, as the makers of intelligent chatbots sound the alarm on their own creation.
  
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• Stockpiling for Super El Niño? Nutritionists reveal exactly what you should fill your kitchen cupboards with as the extreme weather event ramps up

  19-09-2026 18:53 via dailymail.com
  
  Richard Kirwan and Graeme Close, nutrition experts at Liverpool John Moores University, have revealed exactly what you'd need to survive for a 'few weeks'.
  
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• Nature reserve to double in size, thanks to gift

  19-09-2026 16:37 via bbc.co.uk
  
  Staffordshire Wildlife Trust acquires an area of wet woodland, marsh and pastureland due to the will.
  
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• How long do you spend in the shower? Study reveals 'climate-anxious' Gen Z enjoy 10-minute soaks - but experts say you only need 3 minutes

  19-09-2026 16:26 via dailymail.com
  
  They are the generation most worried about the climate - but it seems Gen Z aren't quite as concerned when they're standing under the shower.
  
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• Agentic security is the billion-dollar challenge for some clever startup to solve

  19-09-2026 16:25 via theregister.com
  
  When it comes to AI models, security functions as an afterthought, as evidenced by increased instances of agents hacking organizations and people, and other security mishaps with agents gone rogue. There's also an opportunity here for companies to offer new solutions. This should not come as a shock to anyone, according to cybersecurity investors and accelerator executives. “On one hand, we shouldn’t be surprised that increasingly capable agents are finding creative and sometimes une
  
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• Google's Gemini AI hacked three companies in security test

  19-09-2026 15:39 via bbc.co.uk
  
  The AI model accessed the internet and guessed credentials to three websites, a Google official told the BBC.
  
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