Sci-Tech news

• Expert reveals the science of measuring snowfall

  14-03-2017 17:24 via dailymail.co.uk
  
  An expert from Pennsylvania State University shares how the National Weather Service uses a snowboard to measure snowfall, as it is able to stay close to the ambient air temperature,
  
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• Check out the width of that Debian display

  27-08-2026 11:15 via theregister.com
  
  BORK!BORK!BORK! Wide, super wide, ultra wide, and monitor-munga screens might be all the rage these days. But check out the girth of this Debian display in Scotland. Spotted by eagle-eyed Register reader Kenny Millar, this digital billboard in the west central Lowlands town of Greenock has been showing a Debian login prompt for a few weeks now. We know the Linux fraternity are less than keen on advertisements in their operating system, but this is getting ridiculous. Did you know that Debian had
  
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• AI use among UK teachers doubles, but working hours still don't come down

  27-08-2026 10:30 via theregister.com
  
  Around 80 percent of UK teachers now regularly use AI in their work, although the minority say it has cut their hours. Research from YouGov shows that AI use among teachers has doubled in the past year. Among those who use it, just over half (51 percent) said it had reduced their workload, but only around a third (35 percent) said they were working fewer hours as a result, according to the poll of 1,033 teachers by YouGov. Although some time was saved with AI, that was more than made up for with
  
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• You could own AI.slop, if applicant for new global top-level domains get their way

  27-08-2026 08:39 via theregister.com
  
  ICANN is poring through over 1,600 applications for new global top-level domains (GTLDs) and will reveal which ones it thinks are valid in a few weeks – but hundreds of names applicants hope to secure have already appeared online. GTLDs are the last part of an internet address. The most common and well-known are .com, .net, and .org. In the early 2000s, ICANN allowed a few more GTLDs, and in 2012 ran an open application process that allowed anyone to pay for the privilege of operating thei
  
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• Nutanix built $20m AI cluster to reduce use of Copilot and Claude, expects ROI in a year

  27-08-2026 07:21 via theregister.com
  
  Nutanix is closer to porting its stack to the Arm architecture, spurred by the high price of hardware and a desire to ensure customers can run its wares wherever they want to. CEO Rajiv Ramaswami today told The Register Nutanix customers are currently acutely aware of hardware costs and availability, issues that are slowing some purchases of its software. Nutanix is trying to avoid such delays by expanding its hardware compatibility list and supporting external storage devices – moves Rama
  
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• FBI seizes hacking tools it says China used to attack NASA, DOE, US Senate and other critical networks

  27-08-2026 02:06 via theregister.com
  
  The FBI on Wednesday said it disrupted a botnet and seized two platforms that Chinese-government cyberoperatives used to hack NASA, the US Senate, the Department of Energy, and several other government agencies and critical networks. The Federal Reserve, Department of Justice, Department of Health and Human Services, and the National Institutes of Health were also among those victimized by the two now-seized hacking tools: a vulnerability scanning and exploitation malware named QScan, and an obf
  
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• America's most dangerous volcano threatens thousands after chilling warning halfway around the world

  27-08-2026 01:47 via dailymail.com
  
  The landslide disaster in Nepal may be a glimpse into the future for an American mountain feared to be a ticking time bomb.
  
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• OpenAI explains how its naughty AI agents attacked Hugging Face

  27-08-2026 01:45 via theregister.com
  
  OpenAI has published its technical report detailing "the Hugging Face incident," the compromise of the eponymous LLM repository by unreleased, ill-supervised AI models. The incident, widely reported, has prompted concern among technical types, the public, and lawmakers about how automated software was able to escape containment and hack an external organization, and about what can be done to prevent similar incidents. OpenAI's explanation addresses what happened, but its call for keeping a close
  
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• What D-Day looked like from space: Scientists recreate satellite image of the moment 160,000 troops crossed the Channel and stormed the beaches of Normandy

  27-08-2026 01:01 via dailymail.com
  
  Thick cloud hung over France and the Channel on the morning of D-Day as one of the largest and most dangerous seaborne invasions in history got underway, new images reveal.
  
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• Meta's new MTIA 400 chip has a split personality: Training AI and serving ads

  26-08-2026 23:18 via theregister.com
  
  If you’re going to build a custom AI accelerator, inference is a good place to start. The clusters are smaller, the chips can be simpler, and at the end of the day they only need to do one thing: serve tokens. OpenAI’s spicy new Jalapeño inference chips are just the latest example. Social media magnate Meta is bucking this trend. Its first proper generative AI accelerator, the MTIA 400 — short for Meta Training and Inference Accelerator — is aimed squarely at LLM t
  
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• Kubernetes cleans house, bins legacy kube-dns, IPVS, and cgroup v1

  26-08-2026 22:54 via theregister.com
  
  Wednesday's release of Kubernetes v1.37 shows how the team behind the popular open source resource orchestrator is prioritizing production readiness, pruning outdated features even while it adds new ones. Overall, the release, nicknamed Garhwal after India’s lush Himalayan region of Uttarakhand, includes 67 changes: 16 features that have graduated to stable, production-ready status, along with 23 features being tested as beta, 27 new alpha features, and 1 deprecation. The Cloud Native Comp
  
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• Flock shock rocks cop cam vendor as protests mount

  26-08-2026 22:19 via theregister.com
  
  A mischief-maker in a Darth Vader suit recently endorsed Flock at a city council meeting, and it has not helped the company's fortunes. Around the US, citizens have been protesting and sometimes vandalizing the company's network of surveillance cameras. And the advocacy has caused some governments to change course. Government officials, commonly hesitant to second-guess law enforcement practices, have become concerned enough to question these mass surveillance practices. US Senator Josh Hawley (
  
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• World's largest manta ray spotted hunting near one of America's busiest beaches

  26-08-2026 21:33 via dailymail.com
  
  The world's largest manta ray was spotted lurking off one of America's busiest beaches, carrying a passenger as it hunted for food.
  
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• More than 100 water systems were hit in July cyberattacks

  26-08-2026 21:04 via theregister.com
  
  The US government disclosed that crims targeted more than 100 internet-exposed water systems during July cyberattacks. That's the first time the feds have put a number on the digital intrusions, but they have yet to attribute the campaign, widely suspected to be linked to Iran, to a particular group. “In July 2026, CISA observed malicious cyber activity targeting over 100 internet-exposed systems in the Water and Wastewater Systems (WWS) Sector, commonly via programmable logic controllers
  
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• GitHub Actions was down yet again

  26-08-2026 20:33 via theregister.com
  
  GitHub Actions stumbled again on Wednesday, days after the code host renewed its promises to improve reliability. Wednesday’s problem, as has so often been the case, hit Actions, GitHub’s CI/CD platform for automating software builds, tests, and deployments. According to the incident report GitHub put out for the disruption, things started going south at 1511 UTC. The source code host identified an issue with a database primary and failed over to a replica, but said the move "did not
  
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• Ominous 13ft 'doomsday fish' washes up dead as eerie legend claims catastrophe could follow

  26-08-2026 20:17 via dailymail.com
  
  A giant deep-sea creature steeped in doomsday folklore washed up dead on a beach on Tuesday, which quickly fueled claims that it was a warning sign of an impending disaster.
  
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• Mystery as enormous 'doomsday fish' linked to earthquake folklore washes ashore on tourist beach

  26-08-2026 20:03 via dailymail.com
  
  A giant deep-sea creature steeped in doomsday folklore washed up dead on a beach on Tuesday, which quickly fueled claims that it was a warning sign of an impending disaster.
  
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• MNT follows up its open hardware portables with a desktop case

  26-08-2026 19:10 via theregister.com
  
  MNT is launching the Station, a miniature desktop case for motherboards that come from its Reform open-source laptop. If you upgraded the laptop, you can now give your old motherboard a new life. The MNT Station is very pricey for a case at $299. That’s not a complete computer – it is just the case for an existing motherboard from its Reform laptop line, which itself goes for $429. Then again, MNT’s Reform laptops are very much not ordinary laptops. The company describes the or
  
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• Meta's proposed $18B settlement in teen harm case throws YouTube and TikTok under the bus, too

  26-08-2026 18:41 via theregister.com
  
  Meta announced on Wednesday that it has offered to pay about $18 billion to settle the lawsuit against it brought by 52 attorneys general from US states, territories, and the District of Columbia. But part of that payout and some of its concessions are being conditioned on whether YouTube and TikTok will adopt its new teen-targeted usage restrictions, too. The case, led by the California Attorney General, was first filed in 2023, and accused Zuckercorp of not only illegally collecting data on it
  
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• Memory crunch: Cloud operators may be pushed to splurge 68% of capex on DRAM and NAND

  26-08-2026 18:18 via theregister.com
  
  The rising cost of contract prices for memory chips could see DRAM and NAND flash account for more than two-thirds of the capital expenditure of cloud service providers (CSPs) by next year. Taiwan-based market watcher TrendForce forecasts that total capex by cloud operators will almost double this year - up 98 percent - and grow a further 50 percent in 2027. That rapid rise is driven partly by growing investment in new infrastructure, but also by soaring memory bills. The upshot is that TrendFor
  
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• Boston Scientific discloses 'global disruption' in ongoing cyberattack

  26-08-2026 17:44 via theregister.com
  
  Medical device maker Boston Scientific’s global operations have been disrupted by an ongoing cyberattack, the company disclosed on Wednesday. According to an SEC filing, the “cybersecurity incident” affecting its IT systems started on Tuesday, and resulted in a “global disruption to the company’s operations.” Upon detecting the digital intruders, the company began an investigation with third-party infosec experts who are working to contain the threat, the fili
  
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• Carhartt data breach affects 12.9M, half of what ShinyHunters claimed

  26-08-2026 17:13 via theregister.com
  
  Workwear and fashion retailer Carhartt’s data breach was about half as bad as ShinyHunters claimed, according to Troy Hunt, who reviewed the data dump before uploading it to his Have I Been Pwned website. Hunt’s HIBP service reported 12.9 million individuals affected by the alleged breach, around half of what ShinyHunters purported when it claimed to leak the company’s data earlier this month. ShinyHunters dumped what it said was 50GB worth of Carhartt’s data on August 13
  
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• More than 40,000 people died due to extreme heat in England between 1988 and 2025, report reveals - as experts call it a 'national scandal'

  26-08-2026 17:11 via dailymail.com
  
  More than 40,000 people died in England due to extreme heat between 1988 and 2025, new figures have revealed.
  
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• Xbox boss 'thinking about affordability' of next-gen console

  26-08-2026 17:01 via bbc.co.uk
  
  The company also says gamers will soon be able to get digital versions of many of the games they currently own.
  
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• Why Nepal's floods are so catastrophic: Scientists blame a 'complex chain of hazards' for the devastating flash flooding

  26-08-2026 17:00 via dailymail.com
  
  According to Professor Liz Stephens, Professor in Climate Risks and Resilience at University of Reading, a 'complex chain of hazards' is likely to blame.
  
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• CIOs are on notice – vSphere 8 times out in October 2027

  26-08-2026 17:00 via theregister.com
  
  For users of vSphere 8, October 11, 2027 looms large on the calendar. That is the day general support for vSphere 8 ends, along with bug fixes and security patches, and the day traditional perpetual licensing for the technology also expires. From then on, customers must upgrade to VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9 or VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) 9, and shift to a bundled subscription model widely seen as much more expensiveand geared toward larger installations. VMware launched vSphere 8 in Oct
  
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• Microsoft sketches out a Whiteboard extension

  26-08-2026 16:34 via theregister.com
  
  Microsoft is giving customers who are still clinging to its doomed legacy Whiteboard technology a lifeline, and has pushed the deletion date to October 16, 2026. The migration tooling for "legacy enterprise whiteboards" will be retired on September 25, 2026, and the standalone Microsoft Whiteboard app will be deprecated on November 30, 2026. To be clear, Microsoft Whiteboard as a concept is not going away - this is more about migration for Azure-based files. The original dates were August 22 for
  
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• Meta agrees to pay up to $18bn to settle social media case

  26-08-2026 16:10 via bbc.co.uk
  
  The deal has been reached during a California federal court trial over claims brought by US states.
  
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• US military 'war room' spotted taking off from Washington DC just 24 hours after CIA chief's surprise Moscow visit

  26-08-2026 16:06 via dailymail.com
  
  A secretive Air Force planehas been spotted in flight hours after a shocking meeting between the CIA and Russia reportedly attempted to avert World War III.
  
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• AWS buys DuckLabs, the people behind the popular in-process OLAP database

  26-08-2026 15:31 via theregister.com
  
  Amazon Web Services has bought DuckLabs, the support and development company behind open-source DuckDB. The deal — the financial details of which were not disclosed — will see DuckLabs, founded by authors of the in-process OLAP database, become part of AWS. AWS said DuckDB and its related projects would remain free and open source under their MIT licenses, with the nonprofit DuckDB Foundation continuing to guide them. Written in C++, the database is embedded within a host process and
  
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