Sci-Tech news

• AWS key exposed in JavaScript may have lit way to Beacon's charity data

  13-08-2026 13:34 via theregister.com
  
  Beacon, a CRM provider for charities and nonprofits, says an AWS access key "potentially exposed in public JavaScript build artifacts" is the leading suspect in its July breach. The revelation came in the company's first update on the attack in more than a week. If the access key was exposed in public build artifacts, it raises questions about why Beacon's development pipeline and code review controls failed to catch it. Beacon used stronger wording about the potential data loss, confirming that
  
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• The best time to run a wash, revealed: Interactive tool shows exactly how Britain is being powered - and the ideal slot to switch on your appliances

  14-08-2026 12:30 via dailymail.com
  
  It's now easy to work out the best time to put on a wash, charge an electric car or run the dishwasher.
  
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• Crypto wallet maker Trezor confirms 13,000 customers' details exposed in logistics breach

  14-08-2026 12:29 via theregister.com
  
  Cryptocurrency hardware wallet maker Trezor has confirmed that a breach at one of its shipping partners exposed the personal data of more than 13,000 customers. The company's initial findings suggested the breach was limited to orders placed in certain countries during the previous 90 days. New information indicates that earlier orders may also be affected. The breach exposed the names, email addresses, phone numbers, and shipping addresses of 11,742 customers in the US, UK, Sweden, Colombia, Br
  
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• BOFH: How our Covid ransomware protocol's Y2K blockchain lowered uptime

  14-08-2026 11:29 via theregister.com
  
  EPISODE 15: The Boss has popped into Mission Control to remind us to send him the numbers he needs for his monthly management report. Once's he's gone the PFY sighs, makes up a set of numbers, appends believable exponents, adds some fancy sounding units to the end and then sends them to through a script file to convert them into something the Boss can use. None of it matters, as no one cares about the numbers anyway. At Management level there's likely to be more interest in the undigested-meat p
  
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• Couples who exercise together stay together! Study claims working out with your partner can strengthen your marriage

  14-08-2026 11:18 via dailymail.com
  
  Forget couples therapy or grand romantic gestures - scientists say the secret to a successful marriage could be working out together.
  
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• Charities issue urgent warning over 'Frankenstein cats' including Scottish folds, Persians and new 'XL bully' breeds

  14-08-2026 11:03 via dailymail.com
  
  Charities have issued an urgent warning over a wave of 'Frankenstein cats' with extreme, unnatural features.
  
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• Scottish prosecutors cast eye over leaky supplier after staff data exposed

  14-08-2026 10:46 via theregister.com
  
  Scotland's public prosecution service has warned 300 staff that their personal information may have been caught up in a cyberattack on one of its suppliers. The Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service (COPFS) disclosed the incident on Thursday, saying an unnamed third-party supplier detected suspicious activity on August 5 and subsequently launched an investigation. COPFS said its own systems were not compromised and that the incident involves information provided for an online data maturity
  
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• Claude Code returns blank thinking blocks, but reasoning still costs you

  14-08-2026 09:30 via theregister.com
  
  Anthropic's Claude Code appears to be having trouble displaying summaries of its "thinking," according to several bug reports, while the underlying reasoning tokens still cost money. According to complaints, the API has been returning empty thinking blocks for Opus 4.8 and Sonnet 5 even when users explicitly request summarized thinking. Models from several sources can display their "thinking," a process that gives models additional tokens to reason through complex problems before producing a res
  
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• Five years after quitting a job, developer’s former boss asked for rapid tech support

  14-08-2026 08:25 via theregister.com
  
  ON CALL “I can't stand it, I know you planned it, I'm gonna set it straight, this Watergate” is the opening of the Beastie Boys classic Sabotage, a fact we mention as it will soon become pertinent to today’s edition of On Call, The Register’s weekly reader-contributed column that shares your tech support stories. This week, meet a reader we’ll Regomize as “Wade” who in the mid-1980s made a crust by programming in Pick – the minicomputer OS entangle
  
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• New Zealand says China tried using space investments to spy on local affairs

  14-08-2026 05:23 via theregister.com
  
  New Zealand’s Security Intelligence Service (NZSIS) has claimed Chinese companies are building space facilities in the nation to gather military intelligence. Director-general of security Andrew Hampton yesterday made that allegation in the SIS’s annual threat environment assessment. The document points out that New Zealand’s space sector is booming, because the nation’s location makes it “an ideal place to install Ground Based Space Infrastructure (GBSI) … t
  
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• OpenAI ditches Recall-style screenshot surveillance for friendly keylogging

  14-08-2026 02:27 via theregister.com
  
  If you want to record whatever you do on a computer, send those records to OpenAI, use more ChatGPT tokens, and increase your vulnerability to prompt injection, then OpenAI has something for you. It's called Computer History, an opt-in way to record your computer interactions across apps and websites as memories organized on a timeline. Why would you want to do so? Maybe you found Chronicle, the predecessor of Computer History which compiled similar histories using screenshots, a bit too intrusi
  
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• Give Google the boot by building your own search engine

  13-08-2026 22:48 via theregister.com
  
  If you're fed up with search results drowning out the bits of the web you actually care about, you could always build your own search index, as one developer did. Nottingham, UK-based software dev Alex Morley-Finch built the open-source project dubbed Marlin for himself, cataloging around 560,000 homepages for roughly $10 in rented cloud GPU time and using less than a gigabyte of disk storage. Morley-Finch said in a writeup of the project that he wanted a search engine of things he cared about,
  
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• Hurricane Watch issued as monster storm prepares to deliver life-threatening direct hit on US in hours

  13-08-2026 21:23 via dailymail.com
  
  Officials have issued a hurricane watch as monster storm moves closer to the US. They warned the storm could strengthen into a Category 1 hurricane.
  
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• Microsoft's dueling Copilot apps have combined into a single entity

  13-08-2026 21:04 via theregister.com
  
  Microsoft’s consumer Copilot app and Microsoft 365 Copilot are separate no more, with a unified Copilot app beginning its rollout Thursday - minus a few features. The Windows maker and AI pusher announced the Copilot superapp rollout in a help page update Thursday, describing the move as a way to simplify its app ecosystem and make the entire Copilot-first experience “more cohesive” for both consumer and business users. “Depending on the account and device you use, you wi
  
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• Rapid-fire earthquakes strike 'America's most dangerous fault line' in California

  13-08-2026 20:05 via dailymail.com
  
  A series of earthquakes has been felt by millions and disrupted transportation throughout one of California's most populated regions.
  
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• Tropical Storm Lala erupts just miles from US as life-threatening direct hit expected in hours

  13-08-2026 18:06 via dailymail.com
  
  Tropical Storm Lala has formed and is just hours away from making landfall in a busy state with more than one million residents and tourists.
  
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• Chilling Christian prophecy says humanity entered the end times... and the signs have been hiding in plain sight

  13-08-2026 17:51 via dailymail.com
  
  A Christian ministry has identified several signs it believes are evidence that humanity is approaching the end times.
  
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• The Posse Comitatus Presidency: Trump’s Standing Army On American Streets

  13-08-2026 17:43 via technocracy.news
  The US military is supposed to be under the Constitutional authority of Congress to declare war and provide funding, with the President being the commander-in-chief. The Posse Comitatus Act prohibits the deployment of military forces on U.S. soil, but Trump is increasingly using the military to condition citizens to accept martial law. In short, the military is not to be the enforcer of the President’s will.The military was used in Operation Warp Speed to deliver vaccines to every corner o
  
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• This JCB doesn't dig – it does 406 mph

  13-08-2026 17:41 via theregister.com
  
  A JCB has set a new world land speed record, passing 406 mph (653 kph) at Utah's Bonneville Salt Flats. The JCB in question isn't a digger or a dumper, but a hydrogen-powered racer known as the JCB Hydromax, driven by retired Royal Air Force fighter pilot Wing Commander Andy Green. It set the record for the fastest a hydrogen-powered internal combustion car has ever travelled, averaging 406.320 mph (653.909 kph) across two runs at the salt flats this week. JCB says the Hydromax is powered by two
  
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• Chilling prophecy claims signs of Jesus's return began appearing in 1917

  13-08-2026 17:40 via dailymail.com
  
  A Christian ministry has identified several signs it believes are evidence that humanity is approaching the end times.
  
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• Mysterious 'jellyfish' spotted in NASA Mars photo sparks theories of life on the Red Planet

  13-08-2026 17:24 via dailymail.com
  
  A NASA image of Mars appears to show an eerie, jellyfish-like figure lurking in the distance.
  
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• Trump wants to grant private cyber firms a license to hack back

  13-08-2026 17:04 via theregister.com
  
  Donald Trump is allowing government agencies to contract private cybersecurity companies to carry out operations against cyber-enabled transnational criminal organizations (CE-TCOs). The US President signed a memo on Wednesday confirming a strategy hinted at earlier this year, saying participating companies can support national operations against criminals, including cyber surveillance and technical disruptions of their networks. The latter, described as "Cyber Effects Operations," covers activi
  
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• The backup Microsoft never promised you

  13-08-2026 17:00 via theregister.com
  
  Confidence in an organization's cyber recovery capabilities deserves scrutiny. If a ransomware attack disables the SaaS data tenanted in the Microsoft cloud ecosystem, the data the business depends on as its lifeblood, the pace at which operations resume rests on assumptions that often prove wrong. Anyone whose answer is "It's all good. Microsoft has my back on this one with its comprehensive native retention and recovery capabilities" is due a reality check. With agile business tools like M365
  
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• Christian prophecy makes wild claims the apocalypse began a century ago... and the signs have been hiding in plain sight

  13-08-2026 16:51 via dailymail.com
  
  A Christian ministry has identified several signs it believes are evidence that humanity is approaching the end times.
  
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• Diamonds ARE a girl's best friend: Lab-grown alternatives mean women are increasingly buying their own jewellery, Swarovski boss says

  13-08-2026 16:19 via dailymail.com
  
  Forget waiting for Prince Charming - women are increasingly buying their own jewellery thanks to the rise in lab-grown diamonds, the chief executive of Swarovski has revealed.
  
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• Mystery attacker spent a year raiding Salesforce and ServiceNow portals

  13-08-2026 15:32 via theregister.com
  
  Someone has spent more than a year rifling through Salesforce and ServiceNow portals around the world, harvesting data that organizations accidentally left open to anyone who came looking. Researchers at Reco have named the operation "City-Forum" after a domain connected to its infrastructure. The domain has pointed to the attacker's server since March 2025, although exactly when the campaign began is unclear. Reco says the activity is continuing and increasing in volume. Reco isn't naming the t
  
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• The Scottish soldier whose skull was crushed by a trebuchet: Skeleton found at Stirling castle is first confirmed victim of trebuchet attack

  13-08-2026 14:58 via dailymail.com
  
  Scientists have found the remains of a soldier in Scotland's Stirling Castle who may be one of the unluckiest people in history.
  
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• Medieval missile: Skeleton found at Scottish castle is first confirmed victim of a trebuchet attack

  13-08-2026 14:45 via dailymail.com
  
  Scientists have found the remains of a soldier in Scotland's Stirling Castle who may be one of the unluckiest people in history.
  
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• Ryanair adds Google to its dual-cloud flight plan

  13-08-2026 14:31 via theregister.com
  
  Ryanair has signed a five-year agreement with Google Cloud covering AI, productivity tools and multi-cloud infrastructure, just weeks after renewing its deal with rival AWS for another five years. The Irish budget airline says it will deploy Google Workspace and Google Cloud services across its 35,000-strong workforce as it pursues a target of 300 million passengers a year by 2034. We asked how much this deal is worth, but Google declined to say and Ryanair did not respond. The rollout includes
  
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• Ryanair adds Google Cloud to its dual-cloud flight plan

  13-08-2026 14:31 via theregister.com
  
  Ryanair has signed a five-year agreement with Google Cloud covering AI, productivity tools and multi-cloud infrastructure, just weeks after renewing its deal with rival AWS for another five years. The Irish budget airline says it will deploy Google Workspace and Google Cloud services across its 35,000-strong workforce as it pursues a target of 300 million passengers a year by 2034. We asked how much this deal is worth, but Google declined to say and Ryanair did not respond. The rollout includes
  
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