Sci-Tech news

• FIVE planets visible on Saturday morning - how to see Jupiter, Saturn, Mercury, Neptune and Uranus

  15-06-2023 11:43 via dailymail.co.uk
  
  Stargazers are in for a treat this weekend as five planets are set to align in a rare planetary parade on June 17. Mercury, Uranus, Jupiter, Neptune and Saturn should be visible an hour before sunrise.
  
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• Cisco SD-WAN make-me-root bug under attack

  15-06-2026 23:48 via theregister.com
  
  Cisco today issued a fix for a Catalyst SD-WAN Manager bug that attackers have already spotted and exploited to get root privileges, according to both the networking vendor and the feds. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-20262, is in the web UI of Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Manager, and exists because the software is not properly validating user-supplied input during a file upload process. “An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a crafted HTTP request to an affected API en
  
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• Feds freaked over Fable 5 after simple 'fix this code' prompt, not jailbreak, says researcher

  15-06-2026 23:07 via theregister.com
  
  The “jailbreak” that prompted the Trump administration to block Anthropic’s most advanced models was actually a simple three-word prompt: “Fix this code.” That's according to Katie Moussouris, founder and CEO of Luta Security, and the fairy godmother of bug bounties. She says she was the only outside expert to read the third-party research paper on Fable 5 guardrail bypass techniques that prompted the ban. On Friday, the US government, reportedly citing national sec
  
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• AI has changed data architecture, but storage hasn't caught up

  15-06-2026 22:25 via theregister.com
  
  Your GPU dashboard says 70% utilization. On paper, the cluster is busy. In practice, a large chunk of that time is spent with your $40,000 accelerators sitting idle, waiting on a file that lives three network hops away on a NAS box. The compute queue is empty, and the pipeline is fine. The problem is that data is just somewhere else. This is the awkward truth underneath most stalled AI projects. The constraint in modern AI infrastructure stopped being storage capacity years ago. Now, it's more a
  
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• DARPA seeks swappable satellites to help with future star wars

  15-06-2026 22:17 via theregister.com
  
  War may never change, but its domains evolve, and DARPA is looking for ideas to ensure space infrastructure destroyed in future orbital skirmishes can be rapidly replaced. DARPA, on Friday, put out a request for information for an initiative to develop what it’s calling Rapid Reconstitution of Space Capabilities. “Other nations seek to position themselves as leading space powers while undermining the stability and tranquility that allows space to benefit all nations,” DARPA sai
  
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• Chances of tropical storm forming in Gulf of America nearly double as models show paths to US coast

  15-06-2026 21:55 via dailymail.com
  
  A tropical threat brewing in the Gulf of America gained strength Monday, prompting hurricane forecasters to raise the odds of development.
  
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• Anthropic reserves right to check ID for Claude subs

  15-06-2026 21:39 via theregister.com
  
  Claude wants to know if you are who you say you are. Anthropic last week updated its privacy policy to say that it may subject consumer account holders to identity checks. The new legalese arrived one day before the company released its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models, presently disabled to comply with a US government export control order that has elicited protest from more than 60 cybersecurity and technical experts. Anthropic last year said that it supported "policies like strong export controls"
  
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• Urgent warning to all Outlook users about scam hijacking email accounts... here's how to stay safe

  15-06-2026 20:42 via dailymail.com
  
  The FBI has issued a Public Service Announcement about a new scam stealing Outlook and Microsoft Teams accounts used by millions of Americans.
  
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• HPE offers VMware refugees a year off the meter

  15-06-2026 20:30 via theregister.com
  
  HPE is taking advantage of VMware's expensive licensing changes by offering customers free use of its own VM Essentials product for a year, plus a $1 license for its Zerto data protection product to help ease migrations. The jolly green giant announced the cheapies at the Partner Growth Summit staged alongside its HPE Discover event in Las Vegas, and framed them as a migration assistance program intended to arm channel partners who want to help customers reduce their financial risk when migratin
  
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• FBI issues warning for all Outlook and Microsoft Teams users over scam hijacking accounts... here's how to stay safe

  15-06-2026 20:04 via dailymail.com
  
  The FBI has issued a Public Service Announcement about a new scam stealing Outlook and Microsoft Teams accounts used by millions of Americans.
  
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• Council of Europe hacked in ShinyHunters' PeopleSoft heist

  15-06-2026 19:44 via theregister.com
  
  ShinyHunters claims to have breached the Council of Europe and stolen more than 297 GB of data after exploiting a zero-day flaw in Oracle PeopleSoft and abusing that hole to hack more than 100 organizations. According to a post on the extortion crew’s data-leak site, the 429,000 pilfered files contain HR and payroll records, payslips, purchase-order records, CVs, and employees’ salary, banking, tax, and medical records. A Council of Europe spokesperson told The Register that it is &l
  
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• Java's Project Valhalla finally lands a preview in JDK 28

  15-06-2026 19:15 via theregister.com
  
  Oracle software engineer Lois Foltan has confirmed that Java Enhancement Proposal 401 for Value Classes and Objects – part of Project Valhalla – will be integrated into the OpenJDK mainline early next month, targeting JDK 28. Previews of JEP 401 have so far been available only in early-access builds. The current JDK (Java Development Kit) is 26, with JDK 27 expected in September and JDK 28 in March 2027. The next long-term support version is likely to be JDK 29 in September 2027. Fol
  
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• Feds snooze as US datacenter law set to lapse with no replacement in site

  15-06-2026 18:47 via theregister.com
  
  US legislation covering federal datacenters is set to expire in September and it appears that the Trump administration is simply going to allow it to lapse without replacement. The Federal Data Center Enhancement Act (FDCEA) of 2023 covers certain standards that are to be adhered to for facilities that are wholly or partially owned, operated, or maintained by a federal agency. It includes requirements relating to availability and uptime of the facility; the use of sustainable energy sources; pro
  
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• Glowing 'mother orb' launched swarm of mystery objects near secret US site, Pentagon files reveal

  15-06-2026 18:35 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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• The Y2K bug is back! Dutch dev digs up untimely flaw in old BSD build

  15-06-2026 18:30 via theregister.com
  
  It’s been more than a quarter century since the Y2K bug threatened to disrupt the not-so-modern world, and while the patching efforts of global IT heroes prevented a millennial mess, the problem persists as a Dutch dev just found a new instance of the numeric nightmare. While working on an emulator for the venerable Programmed Data Processor (PDP) series of “minicomputer” systems manufactured between the 1950s and 1990s, Folkert van Heusden spotted an unpatched Y2K bug in the N
  
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• The Y2K bug is back! Danish dev digs up untimely flaw in old BSD build

  15-06-2026 18:30 via theregister.com
  
  It’s been more than a quarter century since the Y2K bug threatened to disrupt the not-so-modern world, and while the patching efforts of global IT heroes prevented a millennial mess, the problem persists as a Dutch dev just found a new instance of the numeric nightmare. While working on an emulator for the venerable Programmed Data Processor (PDP) series of “minicomputer” systems manufactured between the 1950s and 1990s, Folkert van Heusden spotted an unpatched Y2K bug in the N
  
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• NASA Management wants a word and won't say why

  15-06-2026 18:15 via theregister.com
  
  We've all seen it: an unexpected management meeting that turns up in your calendar. It could mean HR wants a quiet and perhaps terminal word, or, in the case of NASA, something altogether different. During a chat with Space.com, NASA astronaut Bob Hines explained that the meeting was engineered to ensure all five Artemis III astronauts would be in the same room together and introduced face-to-face. The process space NASA uses to select astronauts has long been shrouded in mystery. The first Amer
  
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• Red Hat gives Ubuntu a bootc up the backside at Canonical shindig

  15-06-2026 17:54 via theregister.com
  
  UBUNTU SUMMIT At a Canonical event, we didn't expect a presentation on using Red Hat's container management tools, but if this is something you might need, it does sound useful. At Ubuntu Summit 26.04, Red Hat Principal Software Engineer Joseph Marrero Corchado presented a talk called Bootc: Use your container knowledge and infrastructure to build and deploy your Ubuntu hosts. Although Ubuntu is very strong in the desktop Linux space, in large corporate server environments, Ubuntu is just anothe
  
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• Eerie WWII photo sparks wild time-travel claims after viewers spot impossible detail

  15-06-2026 17:54 via dailymail.com
  
  A decades-old photograph has sparked bizarre time-travel theories over a detail that seemingly does not belong.
  
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• Microsoft site throwing warnings after someone forgot to renew cert

  15-06-2026 17:33 via theregister.com
  
  Microsoft appears to have dropped the ball with its certificate management after a domain used by sysadmins worldwide to test connectivity to Microsoft 365 started throwing untrusted connection warnings in browsers. The connectivity.office.com domain is used by IT pros to test their network's connectivity to Microsoft 365 and ensure their firewalls aren't blocking anything that could affect an organization's access to Microsoft servers. An SSL server report retrieved on Monday showed that the ce
  
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• Europe's AI paralysis has a solution - and it starts with a semantic twin

  15-06-2026 17:00 via theregister.com
  
  Most large European enterprises have no shortage of AI ambition, but they lack the data foundation to support it. Fragmented legacy systems, strict GDPR obligations, and anxiety about handing sensitive data to foreign cloud infrastructure have left many IT leaders running the same modernization projects on a loop, stuck in AI pilot purgatory before they reach production. Onix, a leading services-as-software data and AI specialist, thinks it has the answer. The outfit is rolling out Wingspan acro
  
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• Steven Spielberg claims aliens have already visited Earth - now scientists say he might be right

  15-06-2026 16:58 via dailymail.com
  
  While Steven Spielberg has created some of the best aliens in cinema, the 79-year-old director now claims he also knows a thing or two about real-life extraterrestrials.
  
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• Swarms of mystery objects launched near secret US site by glowing 'mother orb,' new Pentagon files reveal

  15-06-2026 16:46 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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• 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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