Sci-Tech news

• Feds warn Gunra ransomware is exploiting known bugs to hit critical infrastructure

  11-08-2026 16:36 via theregister.com
  
  US cyber agencies are warning critical infrastructure operators to patch their internet-facing kit after Gunra ransomware affiliates were spotted exploiting known vulnerabilities to break into networks. Gunra first surfaced in 2025 and has wasted little time expanding. CISA, the FBI, NSA, Secret Service, and partner agencies in the US and South Korea say it now operates as ransomware-as-a-service, with affiliates attacking organizations worldwide. Targets have included healthcare, financial serv
  
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• Passwords stored in public Google Doc then showed up in search results

  13-08-2026 09:00 via theregister.com
  
  PWNED Welcome, once again, to PWNED, the weekly column where we highlight others’ security failures. Hopefully, there’s a lesson in all this, but it could just be “stop shooting yourself in the foot.” Have a story about someone leaving a gaping hole in their network? Share it with us at [email protected]. Anonymity is available upon request. Our story today comes courtesy of Siim Kostabi, co-founder of Pageloot, a company that provides QR codes businesses can use for marke
  
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• Cisco thinks Mythos means instant death for unsupported networking kit

  13-08-2026 08:28 via theregister.com
  
  Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins says “The Mythos Effect” will see customers scour their networks for unsupported devices and replace them ASAP. Mythos is Anthropic’s bug-finding model and has proven so effective that vendors and open source projects are now finding more security flaws and pushing more patches. Speaking on Cisco’s Q4 earnings call yesterday, Robbins said customers he speaks to are aware of Mythos, and fearful that the model and others like it will mean that unsupp
  
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• Tencent says it could make instant profits on $53bn hardware splurge by renting it for AI workloads

  13-08-2026 06:45 via theregister.com
  
  Chinese tech giant Tencent has turned its back on instant profits, betting that a new business unit that creates its own AI and embeds that in its products will pay off to a greater extent than cashing in on demand for computing resources. During the company’s Q2 earnings call yesterday, Bernstein analyst Robin Zhu asked when Tencent expects to see a return on investment from the $53 billion capital expenditure it made in the quarter. Chief Strategy Officer James Mitchell said demand for c
  
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• Chinese Loongson processors have leaky caches, researchers find

  13-08-2026 04:14 via theregister.com
  
  Researchers from Germany’s Helmholtz Center for Information Security have found processors made by China’s Loongson have leaky caches that attackers could use to seek specific data. Loongson has developed its own LoongArch instruction set architecture (ISA) that blends approaches used by MIPS and RISC-V. On a site called LoongLeakAttack.com, the researchers explain that they found the leaky cache using a fuzzer, then noticed that the LoongArch ISA manual mentions an instruction that
  
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• The eclipse snapped by YOU: Daily Mail readers show how they enjoyed Britain's dramatic eclipse

  13-08-2026 04:02 via dailymail.com
  
  From pets wearing glasses to children using homemade viewing devices to glimpse the spectacular illusion in the skies on Wednesday, our readers embraced eclipse fever in full force.
  
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• OpenAI ad service can bill customers for up to one day after they pause campaigns

  13-08-2026 02:28 via theregister.com
  
  OpenAI appears to be serving ads after buyers have halted their campaigns, and charging them for the privilege.OpenAI began testing ad sales in ChatGPT in the US back in February and has been gradually expanding the service in other regions, including the United Kingdom, Mexico, Brazil, Japan, and South Korea as of Tuesday. Given that a substantial minority of ChatGPT user base pays for the service (50 million out of 900 million weekly users as of February 2026), advertising revenue appears to b
  
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• The day Britain stood still to marvel at the heavens as once-in-a-generation eclipse stuns the country... and if you missed it, the next one isn't until 2050

  13-08-2026 01:36 via dailymail.com
  
  As Britain sweltered in the fifth heatwave of the year, an eerie yet welcome chill descended as the Moon blocked out the unrelenting 30C sunshine.
  
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• Rent-a-GPU outfit Nebius promises rapid 1 GW powerup plan isn't nebulous

  13-08-2026 00:56 via theregister.com
  
  Rent-a-GPU cloud Nebius plans to bring online over a gigawatt of datacenter capacity every year starting in 2027, but doing so will require playing the margins and juggling a mountain of debt. “Our future capacity pipeline effectively makes Nebius one of just a few companies in the world able to build more than a gigawatt of new capacity a year and we plan to do so in 2027,” CEO Arkady Volozh boasted on Wednesday’s earnings call. The endeavor won’t be cheap. In 2026, Nebi
  
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• The day Britain stood still to marvel at the heavens... and if you missed it, the next eclipse isn't until November 2050!

  13-08-2026 00:09 via dailymail.com
  
  As Britain sweltered in the fifth heatwave of the year, an eerie yet welcome chill descended as the Moon blocked out the unrelenting 30C sunshine.
  
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• RECAP: Millions watch as once-in-a-generation solar eclipse peaks in the skies over Britain

  13-08-2026 00:06 via dailymail.com
  
  RECAP: Eclipse mania has gripped Britain, with beaches, parks and beauty spots packed with sky-watchers as millions turned out to witness the most spectacular solar eclipse.
  
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• Cloudy skies lead to mixed fortunes for Scotland's eclipse hunters

  12-08-2026 23:55 via bbc.co.uk
  
  Scotland's best chance of seeing a solar eclipse in 27 years left some disappointed, though there were moments of magic.
  
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• Millions in UK and Europe left wowed by once-in-a-generation solar eclipse

  12-08-2026 23:53 via bbc.co.uk
  
  More than 95% of the Sun was covered by the Moon in Cornwall, while parts of Spain experienced the magic of a total eclipse.
  
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• Watch: Solar eclipse seen over UK skies

  12-08-2026 23:46 via bbc.co.uk
  
  Millions of people in the UK and Europe have been wowed by a once-in-a-generation solar eclipse.
  
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• 'Near-autonomous' AI agents attack Taiwan's nuclear safety agency

  12-08-2026 23:45 via theregister.com
  
  Suspected Chinese cyber operatives used publicly available AI tools to compromise Taiwanese government systems before expanding the attack to its nuclear safety agency, supply-chain vendors, and at least seven energy companies in what security researchers called a "near-autonomous attack." Over the first four days of July, AI agents compromised 85 government user accounts and extracted more than 2,500 personnel records, according to Dream, an Israeli cybersecurity firm. Researchers uncovered evi
  
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• Tailscale says deeply buried 16-year-old SQLite bug caused last year's outages

  12-08-2026 23:29 via theregister.com
  
  Users of peer-to-peer networking outfit Tailscale might have struggled through some surprising outages beginning late last year. After a six-month investigation, the team finally knows why: A bug in SQLite’s write-ahead log that had remained hidden for 16 years. The Tailscale team announced in a Wednesday blog post that it had finally addressed the issue with the help of SQLite maintainers, who even had to create a new tool (with Tailscale funding) to log virtual file system activity in or
  
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• Deeply buried 16-year-old SQLite bug caused last year's Tailscale outages

  12-08-2026 23:29 via theregister.com
  
  Users of peer-to-peer networking outfit Tailscale might have struggled through some surprising outages beginning late last year. After a six-month investigation, the team finally knows why: A bug in SQLite’s write-ahead log that had remained hidden for 16 years. The Tailscale team announced in a Wednesday blog post that it had finally addressed the issue with the help of SQLite maintainers, who even had to create a new tool (with Tailscale funding) to log virtual file system activity in or
  
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• In pictures: Sky watchers gather for solar eclipse

  12-08-2026 22:46 via bbc.co.uk
  
  People across Kent, Surrey and Sussex watch the moon obscure the sun in a rare partial eclipse.
  
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• The eclipse snapped by YOU: Daily Mail readers' photos are revealed

  12-08-2026 22:39 via dailymail.com
  
  From pets wearing glasses to children using homemade viewing devices to glimpse the spectacular illusion in the skies on Wednesday, our readers embraced eclipse fever in full force.
  
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• Yorkshire crowds gather for 'incredible' eclipse

  12-08-2026 22:36 via bbc.co.uk
  
  People gather in York, Leeds and Bradford to view the most significant solar eclipse since 1999.
  
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• Urgent warning over 'squishy dumpling' toys that can explode and cause severe burns

  12-08-2026 22:31 via dailymail.com
  
  WARNING - GRAPHIC CONTENT: Officials have issued an urgent warning about the popular 'squishy dumpling' toys that pose serious risks to consumers.
  
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• Node.js creator liberates Durable Objects from Cloudflare

  12-08-2026 22:15 via theregister.com
  
  We've got good news for developers who are enamored with Cloudflare Workers and Durable Objects but don’t want to be tied into that company’s backend infrastructure. Last week, Node.js creator Ryan Dahl unveiled his latest project, celld, which he described on X as “a self-hosted, distributed Durable Objects and Workers implementation.” Dahl’s celld model is compatible with Cloudflare’s Workers and Durable Objects’ JavaScript APIs, but he claims that it
  
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• Moment man uses colander at packed London park to watch the eclipse... and he's not alone

  12-08-2026 21:46 via dailymail.com
  
  One popular method to view the eclipse if you do not have special glasses that protect from the strong sunlight is to see the sun's light through the holes of a colander.
  
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• Urgent warning over popular 'squishy dumpling' toys that can explode and spray scorching liquid

  12-08-2026 21:43 via dailymail.com
  
  WARNING - GRAPHIC CONTENT: Officials have issued an urgent warning about the popular 'squishy dumpling' toys that pose serious risks to consumers.
  
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• Spectre rears its ugly head again as researchers show some RISC-V chips are susceptible

  12-08-2026 21:42 via theregister.com
  
  If you thought that the famous Spectre security vulns were a relic of 2018, think again. Certain RISC-V chips are still very much subject to this hair-raising hole, researchers say. Spectre refers to a family of vulnerabilities related to speculative execution, a performance optimization technique based on predicting the flow of data before instructions have been executed. Incorrect predictions get rolled back without affecting running applications but nonetheless leave traces that can be recove
  
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• Mysterious 'demon' creature discovered lurking beneath Alabama's 'Area 51'

  12-08-2026 21:39 via dailymail.com
  
  An evolutionary mystery has been discovered under an Army base that conspiracy theorists believe is the key to secret UFO projects run by the military.
  
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• Nvidia's latest solution to soaring enterprise AI costs is...a router?

  12-08-2026 21:00 via theregister.com
  
  Soaring AI infrastructure costs and model pricing, combined with uncertain returns on investment, threaten to stall enterprise adoption. To make enterprise AI spend a bit more manageable, Nvidia this week unveiled a new software platform that blurs the line between expensive proprietary models and open weights alternatives. Announced alongside Nemotron 3.5-30B-A3B-Lightning, Nvidia’s latest open weights model, NeMo Switchyard is the GPU giant’s latest overture to enterprise. So what
  
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• Solar eclipse live updates: Once-in-a-generation event peaks in the skies over Britain

  12-08-2026 20:29 via dailymail.com
  
  LIVE UPDATES: Eclipse mania has gripped the nation, with Britons packing out beaches and parks to view the once-in-a-generation event.
  
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• Scientists discover a blind 'demon' underneath Alabama's Area 51

  12-08-2026 20:13 via dailymail.com
  
  An evolutionary mystery has been discovered under an Army base that conspiracy theorists believe is the key to secret UFO projects run by the military.
  
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• Microsoft-vendetta hacker has a new zero day that gives system privileges on fully patched Windows

  12-08-2026 20:12 via theregister.com
  
  Nightmare Eclipse, the serial zero-day hunter who has an axe to grind with Microsoft, published a new Defender zero-day, ShieldBreak, that apparently bypasses Redmond’s RoguePlanet patch (CVE-2026-50656), allowing attackers to gain SYSTEM privileges on fully patched Windows 10, Windows 11, and Windows Server systems. According to at least one other researcher, the exploit works. “I've tried it, it works on latest Windows 11,” former Microsoft employee and security expert Kevin
  
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