Sci-Tech news

• Google really IS recording your every move!

  13-08-2018 15:28 via dailymail.co.uk
  
  Experts created a visual map of the movements of Princeton researcher Gunes Acar, who carried an Android phone with Location history off, and shared a record of his Google account.
  
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• OpenAI's new sponsored agents are happy to chat about selling you things

  16-09-2026 20:32 via theregister.com
  
  There's a new kind of agent coming to ChatGPT ads, and this one wants your money. OpenAI has begun testing Sponsored Agents, advertiser-backed bots that try to sell you things as part of a custom conversation. OpenAI said in a Wednesday announcement that Sponsored Agents were now being tested with select US advertisers already using its platform to put sponsored content in front of ChatGPT users. Despite the “agent” label, however, it seems from OpenAI’s description of the new
  
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• Google Pixel phones pwned in zero-click attacks

  16-09-2026 19:56 via theregister.com
  
  Both Google and Uncle Sam warned that attackers have exploited a zero-day improper authorization bug in Pixel phones' cellular modems that can bypass permission checks and escalate privileges with no user interaction required. The hole has since been closed, provided that you update. Google disclosed the high-severity vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-58704, on Tuesday - and, at the time, warned the security hole “may be under limited, targeted exploitation.” In other words: miscrea
  
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• DOA: CLARITY Act Torched By Senate Vote, Technocrats Are Livid But Not Deterred

  16-09-2026 18:48 via technocracy.news
  
  Failure of the CLARITY Act does not stop the tokenization train, but it will slow it down. The SEC and CFTC will now write the rules by exemption, no-action letter, and enforcement discretion. The GENIUS Act provided the settlement layer in 2025, and the banks have already caved to tokenization. The stock markets are already being tokenized. Get ready for my new book, CRUCIBLE OF TOKENS, to figure out what this means to you, so you can take evasive action. ⁃ Patrick Wood, Editor.The Senate
  
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• Enterprises are sweating legacy IT assets as AI investment grows

  16-09-2026 18:15 via theregister.com
  
  Companies are getting more selective about replacing legacy kit such as mainframe systems, and rising AI investment is one of the factors causing them to hold onto these existing assets for longer. Managed services biz Ensono claims in its 2026 State of IT Modernization report that 78 percent of IT decision makers regard legacy systems as more important today than they did two years ago, and this is because such systems are viewed as key to making AI work for their organization. The report is ba
  
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• Amazon Says Cloud Infrastructure In Bahrain, UAE ‘Beyond Saving’

  16-09-2026 18:13 via technocracy.news
  
  Amazon Web Services (AWS) is on the ropes in the Middle East with a collection of wreckage from bombed-out data centers in the UAE and Bahrain. AWS reported, “The damage to our infrastructure spanned multiple Availability Zones and exceeded what our regional and multi-AZ services are designed to withstand.” Phrases like “damaged beyond hope of recovery,” “the region went dark,” and “exhausted every option for recovering whatever was left behind” hi
  
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• Nine-year-old runs up $118,000 bill on dad's corporate credit card advertising his Roblox YouTube channel

  16-09-2026 17:51 via theregister.com
  
  There’s kids running up a few hundred bucks on in-app purchases, and then there’s the case of nine-year old YouTuber Mighty Mike Plays, who just cost his dad $118,000 – and possibly his job – after running a bunch of Google ad campaigns for his channel on papa's company credit card. The young Roblox and Minecraft YouTuber posted a video Tuesday – or perhaps it's more apt to say his father Dave posted the video to explain why Might Mike Plays might be going dark for
  
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• UAE Moves To ‘War-Proof’ Its AI Data Centers

  16-09-2026 17:50 via technocracy.news
  
  “War is hell” when all of a sudden it dawns on you that your AI data center might be bombed into oblivion. UAE is perilously close to Iran, so its data centers are getting hit. The UAE is a leader in AI and FinTech (Financial Technology) in the Middle East, and wants to be the hinge pin of the global trade routes passing through the region. No AI data centers = no global trade. ⁃ Patrick Wood Editor.The UAE is redrawing its plans for a five-gigawatt artificial intelligence (AI)
  
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• Fedora 45 beta drags the Linux console into the 21st century

  16-09-2026 17:27 via theregister.com
  
  Fedora Linux 45 beta has arrived with Linux kernel 7.2, a release-candidate build of GNOME 51, and extensive changes beneath the desktop. The biggest surprise is that Linux's legacy in-kernel console – the text-mode interface normally hidden beneath the GUI – has been replaced with a software-controlled alternative. The replacement is kmscon, a userspace terminal emulator that has been in development for more than a decade. Its Freedesktop project page explains that it uses the kerne
  
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• SpaceX aims Starship for orbit on September 22

  16-09-2026 14:46 via theregister.com
  
  SpaceX is aiming for a September 22 launch of its monstrous Starship rocket on a 10-hour mission to deliver 26 Starlink V3 satellites into orbit. The flight, set to launch at 1215 UTC if all goes to plan and the authorities give the green light, will be the first time Starship has gone into orbit, and the mission is planned to fly at an altitude of approximately 275 km. The mission aims for six orbits, followed by a deorbit burn using a single Raptor engine while. The engineers are then planning
  
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• AWS says wartime damage means some Middle East cloud resources are gone for good

  16-09-2026 14:11 via theregister.com
  
  Amazon Web Services (AWS) says it is unable to restore access to resources and data in some of its Availability Zones in the Middle East after datacenters were damaged during the US war with Iran. In an update to its AWS Health Dashboard, the cloud giant confirmed that anything hosted exclusively in its Bahrain Region (me-south-1) remains inaccessible. "The damage to our infrastructure spanned multiple Availability Zones and exceeded what our regional and multi-AZ services are designed to withst
  
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• Spain gets its first taste of AI-aided cyber attack

  16-09-2026 13:56 via theregister.com
  
  Spain’s data protection agency (AEPD) has reported the country’s first-ever personal data breach caused by the actions of an autonomous AI agent. Francisco Pérez Bes, president and deputy of the AEPD, said in a Monday blog post that an individual deployed an AI agent that used a “known large language model (LLM)” to carry out the attack on an organization. The agent scanned “generic files” before accessing the organization’s system, then ran vulne
  
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• Logitech releases the MX Keypad to keep idle fingers busy

  16-09-2026 13:15 via theregister.com
  
  Logitech has released the MX Keypad, a developer-focused keypad derived from its MX Creative Console, and something that triggers a distinct sense of déjà vu. Do you remember Stack Overflow's "The Key" Joke? Three keys to copy and paste code from the developer's former best friend (until AI tools began to eat its lunch). Logitech took the keypad from its MX Creative Console product and made something similar to Stack Overflow's joke-that-became-a-thing, though considerably more ext
  
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• Ministry of Justice apologizes after court staff accessed Southport victims' files

  16-09-2026 12:42 via theregister.com
  
  The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) has apologized after court staff accessed documents relating to victims and survivors of the 2024 Southport murders without authorization. For a limited number of people, the material accessed included sensitive personal data assessed as likely to pose a high risk to their rights and freedoms. There is no evidence that the information was shared with third parties. "We are appalled that this happened and recognise the distress it will have caused victims, survivors,
  
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• Salesforce suffers global outage amid Dreamforce shindig

  16-09-2026 12:06 via theregister.com
  
  UPDATED A Salesforce outage is hitting customers with severe delays, intermittent errors, and inability to access some services, according to the SaaS vendor's status page. The outage has hit hundreds of instances throughout the world, including the USA, Japan, India, the UK, France, and Germany. The service disruption was first reported around 0930 BST (0830 UTC) on September 16. An update at 1010 BST (0910 UTC) by the CRM giant said its investigation indicated that "requests are stalling while
  
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• Salesforce staggers back to feet after global outage

  16-09-2026 12:06 via theregister.com
  
  UPDATED An hours-long Salesforce outage on Wednesday hit customers with severe delays, intermittent errors, and inability to access some services, according to the SaaS vendor's status page. The outage hit hundreds of instances throughout the world, including the USA, Japan, India, the UK, France, and Germany. The service disruption was first reported around 0930 BST (0830 UTC) on September 16. An update at 1219 BST (1056 UTC) said the company had validated and rolled out a fix, and customers we
  
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• Salesforce customers see service returning to normal after global outage

  16-09-2026 12:06 via theregister.com
  
  UPDATED An hours-long Salesforce outage on Wednesday hit customers with severe delays, intermittent errors, and inability to access some services, according to the SaaS vendor's status page. The outage hit hundreds of instances throughout the world, including the USA, Japan, India, the UK, France, and Germany. The service disruption was first reported around 0930 BST (0830 UTC) on September 16. An update at 1219 BST (1056 UTC) said the company had validated and rolled out a fix, and customers we
  
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• BT Email users hit by barrage of unsolicited password reset PINs

  16-09-2026 11:15 via theregister.com
  
  BT Email customers say they have been bombarded with hundreds – and in one case more than 1,000 – unsolicited password reset messages, leaving the telco investigating what is causing the deluge. The reports began appearing on BT's community forums over the weekend, with customers describing sudden bursts of PIN messages arriving within minutes despite them making no attempt to reset their passwords. One customer said they received between 50 and 70 PIN texts "in the space [of] a few
  
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• UK funds flying broadband stations with power beamed from below

  16-09-2026 10:30 via theregister.com
  
  The UK's Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) is funding projects aimed at delivering connectivity using high-flying aircraft, including technology to beam power from the ground to keep them in the air. Britain's science and technology body, inspired by America's DARPA but on a more modest budget, says it is backing 18 projects to develop aircraft capable of operating reliably and cost-effectively in the stratosphere, as part of a program known as Enduring Atmospheric Platforms. Success
  
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• Bring on the AI swarms. They’re the only thing that can defend us now that AI is free

  16-09-2026 08:31 via theregister.com
  
  Unpredictable token bills haunted the first half of 2026 as AI experimenters pushed deeper into the tech and often found useful results could only be achieved after surprising and unwelcome expenditure. We've gone from tokenmaxxers to tokenmisers, counting every character we send to AI services. That changed the way we used AI, focusing users on the ticking meter and unable to cast their eyes up and explore the possible. Those blinkers fell away in the middle of August when Alibaba delivered Qwe
  
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• Mythos has made 2026 patching hell. It might make 2027 a breeze

  16-09-2026 07:54 via theregister.com
  
  When Microsoft delivered over 970 patches last week, many saw a nightmare for beleaguered security staff. Gartner research vice president Craig Lawson thinks infosec workers might soon see sunlit uplands as their workloads ease. Lawson outlined that scenario at Gartner’s IT Symposium in Australia today and explained it by theorising that the increased volume of vulnerability discoveries made possible by Anthropic’s Mythos and other bug-hunting AI might be getting close to finding mos
  
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• Java 27 grows up, makes better choices

  16-09-2026 06:50 via theregister.com
  
  If one sign of maturity is making better choices, then Java has grown up a fair bit in its version 27 release Tuesday. “JDK 27 is the release where Java stops asking you to opt in to good defaults and simply turns them on,” wrote backend engineer Arvind Kumar, on his education site Codefarm. Better default settings may not be groundbreaking, but they do make life easier for developers because they mean coders have fewer things to change. Nor should users have to grapple with new feat
  
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• The ozone hole has burst open: Analysis reveals how the opening over Antarctica has 'increased sharply' this month - and is set to get even bigger

  16-09-2026 04:00 via dailymail.com
  
  In the first half of September, the area of the hole increased sharply, reaching 9.6 million square miles (25 million square km) on 12 September.
  
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• TypeSafe AI debuts model for machines that plays Doom

  16-09-2026 03:35 via theregister.com
  
  TypeSafe AI, a startup bestowed with $40 million in funding, on Tuesday declared itself a maker of frontier models with the release of Jev, a new type of AI model intended for interaction with machines rather than people. Instead of returning natural language in response to a text-based prompt, TypeSafe AI designed Jev to return typed probabilistic decisions for use by other software or AI models. Type safety in programming is a way to catch errors that arise when software processes an unexpecte
  
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• Young mother reveals terrifying questions AI asked about kids... then chatbot sent her a chilling photo

  16-09-2026 00:49 via dailymail.com
  
  A Utah mom revealed the shocking questions a popular AI tool asked her after she posted a video of her and her young daughter.
  
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• The vulnpocalypse rains iBugs down on Apple with record-setting number of patches

  15-09-2026 23:38 via theregister.com
  
  Apple has addressed more than 260 CVEs across all of its operating systems, browsers, and other software products, marking the largest single patch cycle in Cupertino's history. While this CVE count is hardly notable compared to some vendors - hello, Microsoft’s record-breaking 974 bugs disclosed earlier this month - it does set a company record for Apple. It also reflects the new reality of AI-driven bug hunting, as models become exponentially better and faster at finding security vulnera
  
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• AI networking startups race to replace Nvidia's NVLink

  15-09-2026 22:56 via theregister.com
  
  As Nvidia expands its influence through its NVLink Fusion tech, rival networking vendors are scrambling to bring alternative interconnects and switches to market. At the AI Infra Summit this week, Delos Data and Cornelis Networks officially entered the scale up networking race. Scale-up fabrics, like NVLink, are what have allowed Nvidia to make eight, 72, and now 576 GPUs behave as one enormous AI accelerator. To catch up, rivals like AMD have embraced emerging protocols like Ultra Accelerator L
  
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• Your AI agents' reports and questions have a new inbox, courtesy of AWS

  15-09-2026 22:25 via theregister.com
  
  AWS engineers have published an open-source AI agent management tool that treats tasks and permission requests just like emails that fill up an inbox. Pizza Bot was announced on AWS’ open-source blog last week, where it was billed by its developers as a way to more easily manage agent tasks without having to constantly check a chat window to see if a task was completed or on hold because more permission was needed. “You don’t send an email and then sit watching the outbox until
  
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• Low-quality casino sites conceal highly dangerous threat actors

  15-09-2026 21:38 via theregister.com
  
  If your employees are visiting Chinese-language gambling or adult sites, they may not just be wasting time and money, but potentially encountering serious malware hidden behind domains that look like mostly harmless entertainment at first glance. A report from Infoblox urges the security community to pay closer attention to these websites, because some double as command-and-control (C2) infrastructure for espionage and malware distribution. Zach Edwards, staff threat researcher at Infoblox, sugg
  
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• Iranian spies hit Windows machines with Chosen Brick data-stealing malware

  15-09-2026 20:01 via theregister.com
  
  Iranian state cyber actors are targeting individuals using social messaging apps to deploy surveillance and data-stealing malware on their Windows machines, three Western governments warned. In all observed cases, Chosen Brick has infected Windows systems exclusively. Iran has used it since at least 2025 to take over individuals’ devices, stealing their contacts, emails, and social media messages, which allows the spies to track people’s movements, the FBI, UK National Cyber Security
  
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