Sci-Tech news

• Huawei boss claims homegrown AI chip sales top Nvidia in China

  30-09-2026 22:16 via theregister.com
  
  The Trump administration's export control policies governing the sale of AI accelerators to China haven't stopped homegrown Huawei from filling the void. In a Q&A-style release this week, the company's rotating chairman Eric Xu claimed that its Ascend line of neural processing units (NPUs) had exceeded Nvidia in Chinese market share. "It's pretty hard to collect data about the market share of Nvidia in China, but based on the data we have collected, Ascend has surpassed Nvidia," he said. "Ch
  
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• Sopra Steria widens legal challenge to Capita's Whitehall outsourcing deal

  01-10-2026 12:00 via theregister.com
  
  Sopra Steria has expanded its legal challenge to a major UK government contract award after obtaining an unredacted copy of the agreement between Capita and the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP). The company alleges that previously undisclosed terms gave Capita preferential treatment, reduced the outsourcer's exposure to risk, and left the DWP carrying more of it. One clause could allow the department to fund technology needed to compensate for deficiencies in Capita's tender, Sopra Steria
  
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• Fewer women than ever in UK's 'old boys' club' cyber industry

  01-10-2026 11:15 via theregister.com
  
  The proportion of workers in the UK cybersecurity industry identifying as women has dropped to 16 percent, the lowest level since 2021. Gender diversity has long been an issue pervading the STEM fields, although in cybersecurity this is especially pronounced, both at senior leadership and education levels. This is despite evidence that girls regularly outperform boys in STEM subjects at UK schools when they do participate.Not only are there still fewer women students in cybersecurity courses tha
  
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• Erase social media tomorrow? Brits say yes

  01-10-2026 10:29 via theregister.com
  
  Just 7 percent of Brits think social media is a force for good and around one in three suspect that life would get better if all these sites were erased from the internet tomorrow.Or so claims Opinium Research, which describes itself as a “strategic insight agency.” It polled 2,000 adults and 1,100 parents in May and The Register’s major surprise is that more people of Britland didn’t want to see social media rubbed out.Some 42 percent surveyed said these networks are add
  
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• The tech industry is hot for shopping bots, but they're years away

  01-10-2026 09:30 via theregister.com
  
  The thought of automated software making purchases on behalf of consumers from online merchants thrills much of the tech and financial industry. The chatter started in early 2025 and has surged since then, giving rise to the term "agentic commerce." A few reality checks have called the idea into question. For example, Amazon recently blocked Meta's Muse bot, citing terms of use restrictions. This was after the e-commerce giant had previously blocked Perplexity's AI bot, and even won a preliminar
  
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• Singapore’s government creates a dating app

  01-10-2026 07:34 via theregister.com
  
  Singapore’s digital transformation agency, GovTech, is piloting a dating app. GovTech says the app came about after discussions among its staff, who apparently “shared an interest in exploring some of the challenges people can face when meeting someone new.” “They wondered whether a different approach that places greater emphasis on compatibility through values and preferences, and offers fewer matches at a time, could give users more space to consider each introduction a
  
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• RAM supply set to worsen, says Micron, as CEO celebrates ‘much higher’ prices

  01-10-2026 04:37 via theregister.com
  
  Memory-maker Micron has warned that RAM shortages will persist into 2028, and perhaps beyond. Speaking on the company’s FY 2026 earnings call, CEO and company chair Sanjay Mehrotra reminded investors that Micron has already sold most of the memory it will make next year and said customers will pay “much higher prices” than they shelled out this year. “In calendar 2027 as well as 2028, we see demand exceeding supply,” he added. “In fact, we see greater tightnes
  
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• Azure maintenance mess disrupts hybrid clouds, VPNs, cloudy VMware services

  01-10-2026 01:54 via theregister.com
  
  Microsoft has advised users of its ExpressRoute Gateway, VPN Gateway, and Azure VMware service that they may experience degraded or interrupted network connectivity, and struggle to perform some network management operations. This looks like a self-inflicted wound because Microsoft’s status page says it has “paused the infrastructure servicing activity associated with the onset of this event.” The event started at 20:30 UTC on 30 September 2026. ExpressRoute Gateway is a servic
  
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• Azure maintenance mess disrupted hybrid clouds, VPNs, cloudy VMware services

  01-10-2026 01:54 via theregister.com
  
  Microsoft has advised users of its ExpressRoute Gateway, VPN Gateway, and Azure VMware service that they may experience degraded or interrupted network connectivity, and struggle to perform some network management operations. This looks like a self-inflicted wound because Microsoft’s status page says it has “paused the infrastructure servicing activity associated with the onset of this event.” The event started at 20:30 UTC on 30 September 2026. ExpressRoute Gateway is a servic
  
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• Irony alert: OpenAI whines that Chinese model stole its special IP that it stole from everybody else

  30-09-2026 23:36 via theregister.com
  
  OpenAI, which hoovered up vast amounts of internet content amid copyright fights, has accused individuals associated with China’s Moonshot AI of being involved in a "distillation attack" that began July 1. The house of Altman warns that extracting its models’ reasoning at scale could help rivals train capable models without preserving the same guardrails. Model distillation is a machine learning technique that can involve using one model’s outputs to train another – in ad
  
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• 'Noah's Ark's final resting place' confirmed to be a 'man-made object' in groundbreaking announcement

  30-09-2026 23:07 via dailymail.com
  
  A research project has made a groundbreaking announcement that the site believed to be the exact location of Noah's Ark may actually contain a wooden ship.
  
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• Hot Dog! America's new chatbot is packed with wieners

  30-09-2026 23:07 via theregister.com
  
  The White House's new AI chatbot, America.gov, turns out to be a bit of a sausage fest. Not long after the AI-powered portal went live this week, El Reg readers were met face-to-face with a life size Frankfurter. The prompt? "hotdog." How the apparent Easter egg, a raw dog criminally devoid of condiments, made it onto the site, we can't say. We reached out to the White House for comment on the mystery meat, but sadly haven't heard back. But given the AI chatbot's general lack of polish, it would
  
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• YouTube lunatic designed and 3D printed a working mechanical calculator

  30-09-2026 22:39 via theregister.com
  
  Mechanical calculators are precise, fascinating gadgets that you wouldn’t think would take well to being 3D printed, but a YouTuber has proved that a pocket-sized unit can be made purely from plastic filament. YouTuber 3D all Workshop detailed his working, but limited, build in a recent video. If you’re familiar with the holy grail of palm-sized mechanical calculators, the Curta, also known as the “pepper mill,” you already have a working understanding of how this 3D-prin
  
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• Peter Norvig says all aboard for AI coding

  30-09-2026 21:05 via theregister.com
  
  What comes next after a moment when companies sell existential risk but pursue public funding and DIY regulation, even as software developers question their life choices? Peter Norvig, distinguished education fellow at Stanford HAI and former Google research director, used his opening keynote at The AI Conference in San Francisco on Wednesday to speculate on the answer. Almost certainly, it's another AI conference – on Thursday in fact – given the two or three dozen of them that have
  
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• 16-year-old researcher found a Microsoft bug, got admin access to databases with 17.3 trillion rows

  30-09-2026 20:29 via theregister.com
  
  A 16-year-old security researcher named Faav found an authentication flaw in Microsoft’s Titan analytics service that allowed him to gain administrator access, submit unauthorized SQL queries with no valid credentials, and potentially reach analytics databases containing an estimated 17.3 trillion stored rows. Titan is an internal analytics platform, and Redmond restricts access via its web interface to Microsoft employees. Faav, with an assist from an AI hackbot he built called Antares, f
  
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• Canonical begins pushing Resolute Raccoon

  30-09-2026 19:33 via theregister.com
  
  Resolute Raccoon is ready to roll out to existing Ubuntu users. Canonical has flipped the switch, and users on 24.04 will start to get offered 26.04.1. Canonical has marked the occasion with an official announcement that it's time to upgrade your desktop. Normally, a given LTS release of Ubuntu starts nagging offering the upgrade to the new release when the following LTS version gets its first point-release. This time around, there has been a substantial delay: Ubuntu 26.04.1 appeared over a mon
  
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• Trump decrees era of 'Super Intelligence' upon us

  30-09-2026 19:01 via theregister.com
  
  According to the US President, the term Artificial Intelligence (AI) is tired while "Super Intelligence" is wired. Trump has issued an executive order to compel the Federal Government to use the new name instead. The term Artificial Intelligence was introduced by American computer and cognitive scientist John McCarthy in 1956, although the concept derives at least in part from work by British mathematician Alan Turing published in 1950. Regardless of its origin, the technology has outgrown the t
  
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• Mystery erupts as US spy satellite explodes… and Space Force won't rule out an attack

  30-09-2026 18:43 via dailymail.com
  
  A US spy satellite has mysteriously exploded in Earth orbit and no one knows why, sparking concerns over what satellites might be next.
  
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• So that's why parents are always so exhausted! Three-year-olds take as many as 30,000 steps a day, study finds

  30-09-2026 18:23 via dailymail.com
  
  They're only small, but it turns out toddlers are putting a lot of steps in. A new study has found that children as young as three take up to 30,000 steps a day.
  
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• Show colleagues how much you care by sending an AI avatar to your Google Meet call

  30-09-2026 18:03 via theregister.com
  
  If you've always wanted to say you have "people" to attend your meetings, there's an app in development for that, as long as you're comfortable with the idea of eventually sending an AI bot in your place and potentially offending your human colleagues. MeetTwins, from Indian developer Aditya Shinde, is an AI assistant currently recruiting users for its beta. It's designed for a single purpose: to attend Google Meet calls on behalf of its operator and relay approved information to colleagues with
  
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• AI market needs to make $6 trillion a year by 2031 to fund its infrastructure habit

  30-09-2026 17:51 via theregister.com
  
  The AI industry must generate $6 trillion in annual revenue by 2031 to keep funding the infrastructure needed to meet anticipated demand, and this will require imaginative new uses beyond simply enhancing employee productivity. That $6 trillion figure comes from the 2026 annual Global Technology Report from management consultants Bain & Company, which put its thinking cap on to figure out how the AI sector can possibly meet this challenge. It says the massive demand for AI compute infrastruc
  
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• Ex-NCA officer who worked on Silk Road operation ordered to repay £1.8M for stealing seized Bitcoin

  30-09-2026 17:11 via theregister.com
  
  A former National Crime Agency (NCA) officer who stole Bitcoin seized during an investigation into Silk Road 2.0 has been ordered to hand over more than £1.8 million ($2.4 million). Paul Chowles, 44, stole 50 of the 97 Bitcoin recovered from convicted Silk Road 2.0 administrator Thomas White. Police later recovered 30 of the stolen coins. US and European authorities shut down Silk Road 2.0 in November 2014 as part of an international operation targeting dark web marketplaces. The 50 Bitcoi
  
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• Ex-NCA officer ordered to surrender £1.8M for stealing seized Bitcoin

  30-09-2026 17:11 via theregister.com
  
  A former National Crime Agency (NCA) officer who stole Bitcoin seized during an investigation into Silk Road 2.0 has been ordered to hand over more than £1.8 million ($2.4 million). Paul Chowles, 44, stole 50 of the 97 Bitcoin recovered from convicted Silk Road 2.0 administrator Thomas White. Police later recovered 30 of the stolen coins. US and European authorities shut down Silk Road 2.0 in November 2014 as part of an international operation targeting dark web marketplaces. The 50 Bitcoi
  
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• Where does your AI data actually live?

  30-09-2026 17:00 via theregister.com
  
  EVENT: There are two boundaries around any AI system in a regulated industry, and they have different owners. One is the jurisdiction: what data can leave the country, and under whose rules. The other is the building: what can leave your own estate at all, and who signs for it when it does. Most AI programs do not stall on the model. They stall here, on where the data lives, who can reach it, and what an auditor will accept as evidence twelve months from now. The proprietary data that makes an A
  
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• OpenAI apes AWS Marketplace while Anthropic remains stubbornly Microsoftian

  30-09-2026 16:53 via theregister.com
  
  OpenAI’s DevDay keynote was this week, and it featured a cameo mention of everyone’s favorite underpants merchant who also sells databases, AWS. I saw Simon Willison’s liveblog comment and felt very seen: “My eyes glazed over a bit at the AWS partnership section, but it only lasted a few seconds.” With today's more interesting but also largely unheralded announcement, you can now retire your OpenAI spend commitments via a list of (at launch) 32 partners, just like t
  
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• Scientist uncovers a hidden pattern in Taylor Swift's songs - and it hints at what she could release next

  30-09-2026 16:10 via dailymail.com
  
  A scientist who analysed more than 100,000 words from the superstar's song catalogue has uncovered a hidden pattern running through Taylor Swift's lyrics.
  
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• Firefox 157: Could bold new look be just what Mozilla needs?*

  30-09-2026 15:44 via theregister.com
  
  Firefox 157 is here, but this time, Mozilla is making an unusual amount of noise about this release and its new look. This release has a new theme called “Nova,” which in the release notes Mozilla calls “Firefox’s biggest visual refresh in years.” The new theme is the flagship here, and aside from that, the new features in this version are fairly modest. They’re all welcome enough, though. Video calls which use WebRTC – Web Real Time Compression –
  
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• 7 in 10 enterprises expected to abandon vendor-built agentic AI by 2028

  30-09-2026 14:58 via theregister.com
  
  Gartner predicts that by 2028, 70 percent of enterprises will abandon agentic AI systems built with vendor assistance as costs climb and customers struggle to modify the technology without outside help. What the consultancy calls forward-deployed engineering (FDE) embeds a vendor's engineers with a customer to build and deploy software for its particular requirements. Gartner argues that the model can deliver rapid early progress but leave customers dependent on expensive external expertise. Acc
  
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• Apple makes the AirPods 5 slightly less hostile to repair

  30-09-2026 14:13 via theregister.com
  
  Apple's latest AirPods make a small concession to repairability. And by "small," we mean they scored two out of ten rather than zero. Every previous generation of AirPods tested by iFixit has received a repairability score of zero out of ten. "We've bled for AirPods. We've sliced them, melted them, cursed at them," the team stated. Apple's earbuds resisted every attempt to repair them without destructive surgery. The AirPods 5 have finally broken that streak – barely. The AirPods 5 arrived
  
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• Drunk Van Halen fan called Microsoft support and demanded to speak to Gates

  30-09-2026 13:29 via theregister.com
  
  Some support calls become memorable because of the technical problem. Others stick in the mind because the caller has apparently consumed an adult beverage or three before demanding to speak to the boss. Microsoft veteran Raymond Chen has shared one from the latter category. His tale comes from a now-retired colleague who once staffed Microsoft's FrontPage support line. The caller was building a Van Halen fan site using FrontPage, and it wasn't going well. A Java applet was supposed to play musi
  
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