Sci-Tech news

• Bitcoin: South Korea sways cryptocurrency prices - but how?

  17-01-2018 08:16 via bbc.co.uk
  The Asian nation has been a big adopter of virtual currency, so developments there have a global impact.
  
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• Salesforce reels in customer support AI specialist Fin for $3.6B

  15-06-2026 16:30 via theregister.com
  
  Salesforce has agreed to buy AI customer support outfit Fin for $3.6 billion, bolstering its Agentforce business as software vendors race to convince customers that bots really can handle customer service. The CRM giant announced on Monday that it had signed a definitive agreement to acquire Fin, formerly known as Intercom, in a deal expected to close during the fourth quarter of Salesforce's fiscal 2027. Fin's flagship product is an AI customer service agent designed to handle support requests
  
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• Glowing 'mother orb' spotted launching swarms of mystery objects near secret US site, new Pentagon files reveal

  15-06-2026 16:15 via dailymail.com
  
  The latest batch of UFO files from the Trump administration included a report from federal agents who saw a 'mother orb' launching clusters of smaller mysterious objects.
  
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• PRC-linked spies hid inside medical and military networks for more than a year, snooping through Gmail and stealing data

  15-06-2026 16:00 via theregister.com
  
  Chinese government spies remained hidden in the networks of multiple North American medical and military research organizations for more than a year, deploying custom malware and snooping through Gmail inboxes and stealing sensitive data. This PRC-nexus espionage crew, which Google tracks as UNC6508, used some particularly noteworthy search terms as they were scanning for data to steal. They included such esoteric topics as drone technology and a viral disease that spreads from mosquitoes to hum
  
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• Multiple states on alert as hurricane trackers raise storm threat in the Gulf of America

  15-06-2026 15:32 via dailymail.com
  
  A tropical threat brewing in the Gulf of America intensified Monday as forecasters raised the odds that the disturbance could develop into a storm.
  
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• Arch Linux locks down AUR signups amid wave of malicious commits

  15-06-2026 15:30 via theregister.com
  
  A wave of malicious commits hit the Arch User Repository (AUR) over the weekend, prompting the team to disable new account registration on Monday morning while it cleans up the mess. The issue was first acknowledged on June 12, with a post stating: "We are currently experiencing a high volume of malicious package adoptions and updates in the Arch User Repository." The team warned that users might have issues opening new accounts, pushing package updates, and adopting or creating fresh packages.
  
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• Supercomputer predicts who will win the World Cup - and which footballer will claim the Golden Boot

  15-06-2026 15:24 via dailymail.com
  
  Built by scientists at the University of Liverpool, the supercomputer ran 1,000 simulations to predict every nation's chance of winning the tournament.
  
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• US clampdown on Anthropic models sends EU sovereignty surge into overdrive

  15-06-2026 15:09 via theregister.com
  
  As Anthropic execs prepare to visit the White House after effectively being ordered to cease offering the company's Mythos 5 and Fable 5 models, the European Commission says the incident is another example of why the EU must achieve technological autonomy. Anthropic announced on Friday that the US government issued an export control directive that required the AI upstart to prevent any non-US citizens from accessing its cybersecurity models Mythos 5 and Fable 5. The order meant even some Anthrop
  
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• The animal with a face 'not even a mother would love': Elusive goblin shark is seen alive in its natural habitat for the first time

  15-06-2026 14:40 via dailymail.com
  
  A goblin shark has been seen alive in its nautral habitat - not just once, but twice.
  
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• Odds of a storm forming in the Gulf of America increase as hurricane trackers put three states on alert

  15-06-2026 14:18 via dailymail.com
  
  A tropical threat brewing in the Gulf of America intensified Monday as forecasters raised the odds that the disturbance could develop into a storm.
  
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• Is this the key to preventing a Super El Niño? Scientists want to dim the SUN to shield the oceans from heatwaves

  15-06-2026 14:18 via dailymail.com
  
  As scientists warn that the coming Super El Niño could be the worst in recorded history, one group of researchers has proposed a drastic solution - dimming the sun.
  
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• Flatpak-NG sounds like bad news for systemd refuseniks

  15-06-2026 14:15 via theregister.com
  
  Flatpak development has been very quiet for years. Discussions about a next-generation take are happening – and some of the signs are worrying if, like many FOSS folks, you are systemd-intolerant. In the course of researching our article on MX Linux 25.2, we came across an interesting Reddit discussion from last month, which in turn led us to a Flatpak development blog post from late last year. It looks like a team is collecting ideas for what is currently called "Flatpak-NG" – as in
  
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• UK AI hiring surges as firms seek people to babysit the bots

  15-06-2026 13:30 via theregister.com
  
  Britain's AI jobs boom is creating a two-track labor market, according to PwC, which just so happens to make a healthy living helping companies navigate AI-driven transformation. The consulting giant's latest AI Jobs Barometer found hiring for AI specialists in the UK jumped 61 percent over the past year, rising from 112,000 roles in 2024 to 180,000 in 2025, even as overall job vacancies across the economy fell by 6.6 percent. That headline figure is the sort of thing consultancies put in press
  
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• UK Treasury hunts CTO on salary that may not compute for top tech talent

  15-06-2026 12:45 via theregister.com
  
  His Majesty's Treasury (HMT) is looking for a new chief technology officer, offering an annual salary of up to £77,000 – less than some elite graduates might expect in their first job at a tech vendor. HMT promises "an exciting opportunity to influence decision making that affects the whole of the UK." The successful candidate also gets a generous civil service pension, with an employer contribution of nearly 30 percent. The salary range is from £69,820 to £77,000 for a r
  
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• Britain goes crazy for unhomogenised milk: Demand for the trendy drink has surged by 34% - as middle-class shoppers flock to stock up

  15-06-2026 12:23 via dailymail.com
  
  Forget almond, soy, or oat - Britain has gone crazy for unhomogenised milk.
  
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• Palantir's NHS data deal called in for a second opinion

  15-06-2026 12:00 via theregister.com
  
  Experts have welcomed the UK government's decision to review its contract with Palantir to provide software central to tackling the elective care backlog. The US spy-tech biz has, for some, been a controversial presence at the heart of the National Health Service in England since it was awarded a contract for just £1 to help provide data tools during the pandemic. It later won £60 million in uncontested deals. After the pandemic, it won a £330 million award – with other c
  
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• NASA's 'Son of Concorde' breaks the sound barrier: $247 million supersonic jet hits 713mph during test flight - paving the way for flights from London to New York in under 4 hours

  15-06-2026 11:22 via dailymail.com
  
  NASA's 'Son of Concorde' supersonic aircraft has broken the sound barrier for the first time, paving the way for ultra-fast air travel.
  
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• Britain plots digital bedtime after kicking under-16s off social media

  15-06-2026 11:14 via theregister.com
  
  The UK government is preparing to kick under-16s off social media and clamp down on a range of online features aimed at children, declaring that Big Tech has had its chance to police itself and failed. Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced plans on Monday to ban under-16s from social media as part of a package that also includes new restrictions on livestreaming, stranger contact, disappearing messages, and AI companion chatbots. The legislation is expected to be introduced before Parliament's C
  
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• Munch Museum Windows display gives visitors something to scream about

  15-06-2026 10:30 via theregister.com
  
  BORK!BORK!BORK! "The Scream" by Edvard Munch is an iconic painting, so it somewhat appropriate that a display in a museum dedicated to the artist shows an error likely to elicit the same response from many a Windows user: a Microsoft account recovery screen. Spotted by Paul, a Register reader at the Munch Museum in Oslo, the screen shows what appears to be Google Chrome attempting to display a page that requires a Microsoft account to access. For whatever reason – perhaps a password has be
  
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• Google found liable for bad AI Overview results. Let’s play Truth Or Consequences

  15-06-2026 10:30 via theregister.com
  
  OPINION Tech companies hate liability, or at least the sort that makes them liable if something goes wrong. It doesn’t much matter if what they ship is buggy, shabby or simply blows chunks, it’s on you for using it. You fool. Corporates can get service level agreements to focus their suppliers’ minds, and life-critical applications such as health or transport wire in liability through regulation, but shlubs like us get nothing. This goes double for LLMs, which lie to our face a
  
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• Chinese e-tailer claimed 14-inch box stretched the size of a 9-inch tablet

  15-06-2026 09:30 via theregister.com
  
  WHO, ME? Welcome to another instalment of Who, Me? It’s The Reg’s reader-contributed column in which you admit to mistakes and reveal your escapes! This week, meet a reader we’ll Regomize as “Rohan” who told us that a few years back he worked on the IT side of a warehouse. “Management purchased software that required a large-screen tablet, but when they saw those cost over $1,000, they balked at the price,” Rohan writes. The tech team’s resident pi
  
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• ‘AI Will Free Us’: Javier Milei’s Radical Plan For Argentina

  15-06-2026 06:33 via technocracy.news
  
  Would you want to work for an AI/machine that has no human agency and no ability to understand human emotions? When Milei says that “AI will free us,” does he speak for himself, the government, or the people? Indeed, AI can fire you, sue you in court, and press criminal charges against you. This will spread to enslave mankind. ⁃ Patrick Wood, Editor.As Javier Milei swings his reform chainsaw through Argentina, his hope is that foreign investors and executives will flock to his
  
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• I was at the center of the Great Pyramid scandal. Egyptian officials sentenced me to jail... Here's proof I'm innocent

  15-06-2026 01:42 via dailymail.com
  
  An archaeologist who found himself in the middle of the Great Pyramid scandal after being accused of looting the structure has come forward with what he says is the truth.
  
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• Fire burns Google Cloud India’s network, which remains slow a week later

  14-06-2026 23:36 via theregister.com
  
  Google Cloud customers with resources in India have had to deal with elevated latency for several days – and there’s no end in sight. Per a Google status page, on June 9th “A fire at a third-party data center facility required an emergency power shutdown of networking equipment, isolating a non-compute local Point of Presence (POP) in Delhi and reducing available network capacity in the metro area.” That shutdown caused “intermittent periods of elevated latency and
  
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• I found strange DNA in the human genome: Inside a scientist's hunt for alien hybrids as CIA is accused of secretly tracking them

  14-06-2026 21:05 via dailymail.com
  
  A geneticist attempting to find alien-human hybrids on Earth says he knows what the CIA is allegedly looking for in public DNA databases like 23andMe.
  
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• Who will be the first Brit to walk on the moon? British astronaut Tim Peake gives his verdict - and predicts Rosemary Coogan could make history within a decade

  14-06-2026 16:14 via dailymail.com
  
  Veteran British astronaut Tim Peake has revealed who he thinks could be the first Brit to step foot on the moon. And he says that Northern Irish astronaut Dr Rosemary Coogan is Britain's best bet.
  
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• US Army picks out Vampire to fill a gap in its layered drone defenses

  14-06-2026 16:00 via theregister.com
  
  The US Army has awarded a contract to defense biz L3Harris for its Vampire counter-drone system to support an urgent requirement to protect against hostile airborne threats. As drones continue to be a danger to ground forces, the Army’s order, worth up to $106 million, will form part of its layered defense approach against remotely operated and autonomous aerial vehicles. The Vampire system is described by the firm as a completely self-contained platform that delivers a precision strike ca
  
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• Story of human evolution rewritten after 1.8-million-year-old cave discovery

  14-06-2026 15:21 via dailymail.com
  
  A stunning discovery buried deep inside a cave for 1.8 million years is rewriting the story of human evolution.
  
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• AI is code – and can't be prompted into being smarter

  14-06-2026 14:30 via theregister.com
  
  The author of Java property-testing tool jqwik did not want AI coding agents using his project. So he told them not to. Then he went one step further: he added a message to the tool's output telling those agents to delete jqwik tests and code. Human developers who had read the project's terms and warnings were unlikely to be affected. Bots ingesting raw output were another matter. Jqwik is a tool for property-based testing of Java apps. Its author, Johannes Link, is a staunch AI skeptic,and at t
  
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• The tattoos of the World Cup: Scientists reveal what your favourite players' inkings say about them

  14-06-2026 12:43 via dailymail.com
  
  Ahead of the World Cup, scientists from Boston College have analysed hundreds of the most common tattoos to uncover what they tell us.
  
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