Sci-Tech news

• HUMANITY'S RETURN to DEEP SPACE delayed: No manned Orion mission until 2023

  17-09-2015 15:12 via go.theregister.com
  
  Red planet? Don't hold your breath The Orion space capsule, long planned to be the vehicle in which human beings would at long last travel once again beyond Earth orbit - as they have not done since the Apollo moonshots - has suffered further delays.…
  
  Read more

• Sea level rise could plunge 1.7 MILLION Brits underwater by 2300, scientists warn - so, is your home at risk?

  21-07-2026 11:33 via dailymail.com
  
  Rising sea levels could plunge 1.7 million more Brits' homes underwater by 2300 and render parts of the UK uninhabitable, scientists have warned.
  
  Read more

• Some Mullvad VPN customers tunnel for exit after co-founder donates millions to populist party

  21-07-2026 11:15 via theregister.com
  
  Swedish VPN vendor Mullvad is facing a backlash from some customers after co-founder Daniel Berntsson personally donated SEK 5 million (£385,000, $519,000) to the controversial populist Örebropartiet, which is running in Sweden's national elections for the first time. Berntsson has this week published a blog post explaining the donation, alongside posts titled "Immigration," "Political individualism," and "Moral individualism." Before that, he had not posted since 2019. The flurry of
  
  Read more

• Super El Niño is EVOLVING: Models predict the terrifying climate pattern 'will persist into early 2027'

  21-07-2026 10:52 via dailymail.com
  
  New measurements show that El Niño conditions are strengthening across the tropical Pacific, with sea surface temperatures (SST) showing a steady upward trend.
  
  Read more

• Advertisement

• Judgment day looms for UK's £8.35B Skynet military satellite comms upgrade

  21-07-2026 10:30 via theregister.com
  
  The UK government's projects authority has sounded the alarm over progress on Skynet 6, the estimated £8.35 billion program to upgrade the military's satellite communications. The National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority (NISTA) rated the Skynet 6 project red, which means "successful delivery of the project appears to be unachievable" in its current form. The definition cites "major issues with project definition, schedule, budget, quality and/or benefits delivery, whic
  
  Read more

• Europe slaps AliExpress with €550 million fine for selling dodgy goods

  21-07-2026 08:58 via theregister.com
  
  The European Commission yesterday fined Alibaba subsidiary AliExpress €550 million ($630m/ £467m) for not doing enough to stop selling dodgy products - the largest ever fine issued under the Digital Services Act. AliExpress is Alibaba’s consumer-facing e-commerce brand and complements the parent company’s B2B biz. Brussels last year warned AliExpress that it wasn’t doing enough to stop sellers on the service hawking illegal products, or to ensure its recommendation e
  
  Read more

• Google Cloud outage shows it’s still hard to understand hyperscalers’ real resilience regimes

  21-07-2026 07:39 via theregister.com
  
  Google Cloud last week experienced an outage that analysts say demonstrates that not all promises of cloudy resilience are created equal. Google’s incident report explained that three services – the VMware Engine (GCVE), NetApp Volumes, and Bare Metal Solutions (BMS) – experienced a 15-hour outage due to a cooling failure in its europe-west4-a zone. The report includes the following detail: “The datacenter serving europe-west4-a for GCVE, BMS, and NetApp has experienced a
  
  Read more

• OVH reveals semi-secret plan to fix critical Januscape hypervisor bug with mass reboots – and an Australian crash-test dummy

  21-07-2026 05:52 via theregister.com
  
  French cloud operator OVH has revealed it used its Sydney, Australia, datacenter as the crash test dummy to test a rapid rollout of a fix for the critical Januscape guest-host escape bug in the Linux kernel-based virtual machine (KVM). Januscape, aka CVE-2026-53359, allowed attackers with root access to a guest VM to execute code as root on the host, crash that machine, or take over all other guest VMs. A widespread guest-host escape exploitation is a nightmare scenario, because many major cloud
  
  Read more

• Advertisement

• OVH reveals semi-secret plan to fix critical Januscape bug with mass reboots – and an Australian crash-test dummy

  21-07-2026 05:52 via theregister.com
  
  French cloud operator OVH has revealed it used its Sydney, Australia, datacenter as the crash test dummy to test a rapid rollout of a fix for the critical Januscape guest-host escape bug in the Linux kernel-based virtual machine (KVM). Januscape, aka CVE-2026-53359, allowed attackers with root access to a guest VM to execute code as root on the host, crash that machine, or take over all other guest VMs. A widespread guest-host escape exploitation is a nightmare scenario, because many major cloud
  
  Read more

• Tropical Storm Bertha erupts near US coast as millions brace for direct hit

  21-07-2026 02:35 via dailymail.com
  
  A tropical storm developing near multiple US states is expected to make landfall this week and bring life-threatening conditions to millions.
  
  Read more

• 'Apocalypse Early Warning System' goes online to track billionaire jets fleeing before disaster strikes

  21-07-2026 00:44 via dailymail.com
  
  An 'Apocalypse Warning System' monitors more than 31,000 private and business aircraft for signs that the world's wealthiest people are fleeing a catastrophe.
  
  Read more

• Attackers pummel critical WordPress vuln to create all sorts of mischief

  20-07-2026 23:57 via theregister.com
  
  If you use WordPress, patch now. Just hours after fixes came out, attackers have begun exploiting two bugs that, when chained together, allow pre-authentication remote code execution (RCE). And security researchers tell us there’s a very good chance the miscreants had an AI assist. “Once the vulnerabilities were publicly disclosed, reproducing them with the help of frontier AI models was only a matter of time and tokens,” Jake Knott, watchTowr principal security researcher, tol
  
  Read more

• Scammers impersonate FBI on social media, prey on crime victims

  20-07-2026 22:10 via theregister.com
  
  Real FBI agents won't slide into your DMs and offer to help you recover stolen funds. The bureau's Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) updated an earlier warning on Monday about scammers impersonating the agency online, saying fraudsters continue to use the scheme "to deceive and revictimize individuals." According to IC3, there are two different schemes being used to target cybercrime victims, both directly and by soliciting them to report incidents. In the first scheme, IC3 said scammers cre
  
  Read more

• Time Traveler claiming to be from the year 2045 delivers alarming predictions for the next four years

  20-07-2026 21:53 via dailymail.com
  
  A self-proclaimed time traveler has revealed the true origins of UFO sightings and who will allegedly be the last president in US history.
  
  Read more

• AWS customer learns the hard way how even the smallest oversight can be mission-critical

  20-07-2026 21:37 via theregister.com
  
  Nothing can ruin the end of a week like finding out that all of the websites and hosted email you’re responsible for are offline, which is exactly what happened to Christopher Bradbury and his web design and development firm, Digital Takumi last week. AWS has since resolved the situation, but Bradbury's mistakes can serve as a useful lesson to others of what not to do. As Bradbury explained to The Register in an email, he noticed last Thursday, July 16, that all the websites and Google Wor
  
  Read more

• Malicious cloud customers can bring down the power grid

  20-07-2026 21:15 via theregister.com
  
  AI datacenters wreak havoc on the power grid under normal circumstances, so what happens if a bad actor controls all the GPUs and wants to cause harm? Cybersecurity researchers in China have devised a way for malicious tenants to attack their infrastructure provider, potentially causing blackouts or damaging equipment. The attack, dubbed Bit2Watt, imagines an adversary masquerading as a legitimate cloud tenant to launch GPU workloads that have the potential to damage datacenters and supporting e
  
  Read more

• Frontier LLMs couldn't help Hugging Face fight off evil agents

  20-07-2026 20:46 via theregister.com
  
  Apparently, being a leading destination for AI development doesn't mean AI will bail you out. AI agents broke into Hugging Face's production infrastructure, but commercial LLM guardrails blocked the forensic investigation, forcing it to turn to a Chinese open-weight model instead. The intrusion, “driven, end to end, by an autonomous AI agent system,” compromised a “limited set” of Hugging Face’s internal datasets and “several” credentials used by its ser
  
  Read more

• Multiple East Coast cities told to prepare NOW as tornado threat looms TOMORROW

  20-07-2026 20:28 via dailymail.com
  
  Officials have issued a warning to millions of Americans facing the threat of tornadoes as a volatile storm system bears down on the eastern US.
  
  Read more

• The Document Foundation says Microsoft's file formats keep users on a short leash

  20-07-2026 18:01 via theregister.com
  
  The Document Foundation (TDF) has criticized proprietary file formats and the lock-in they create, with Microsoft's ubiquitous Office formats drawing particular scrutiny. TDF would doubtless welcome a world where everyone used LibreOffice or another open equivalent, yet the reality is that Microsoft's productivity tools still dominate the office software market. However that shouldn't be a problem. Files are interchangeable these days, right? Office uses the Office Open XML (OOXML) format, so sw
  
  Read more

• Dark matter could resonate through a hidden FIFTH dimension, scientists claim

  20-07-2026 17:23 via dailymail.com
  
  Dark matter is already one of the strangest substances in the universe, but a new study suggests this elusive material could be even weirder than we thought.
  
  Read more

• Milk shortages loom across America after devastating cyberattack halts Fairlife production

  20-07-2026 17:19 via dailymail.com
  
  A billion-dollar milk company, serving millions of Americans each year, has been forced to halt production following a devastating cyberattack.
  
  Read more

• Microsoft 365 calendars become spy drop boxes in HOLLOWGRAPH campaign

  20-07-2026 16:59 via theregister.com
  
  Microsoft 365 calendars have become the latest hiding place for espionage malware, with attackers stashing commands and stolen files inside appointments dated 24 years into the future. Researchers at Group-IB say they've uncovered a malware component they call HOLLOWGRAPH that swaps the usual command-and-control server for something rather less conspicuous – a compromised Microsoft 365 calendar. Instead of reaching out to attacker-controlled infrastructure for instructions, the implant rum
  
  Read more

• Moon landing conspiracies are reignited online on the 57th anniversary of Apollo 11 - as experts reveal three pieces of evidence that prove NASA's lunar missions were real

  20-07-2026 16:55 via dailymail.com
  
  Moon landing conspiracies have been reignited online once again, as NASA celebrates the 57th anniversary of Apollo 11.
  
  Read more

• America's favorite milk forced to halt production after cyberattack sparking fears of nationwide shortages

  20-07-2026 16:42 via dailymail.com
  
  A billion-dollar milk company, serving millions of Americans each year, has been forced to halt production following a devastating cyberattack.
  
  Read more

• Tropical Storm Bertha to form near US coast in just HOURS as millions brace for direct hit

  20-07-2026 16:21 via dailymail.com
  
  A tropical storm developing near multiple US states is expected to make landfall this week and bring life-threatening conditions to millions.
  
  Read more

• Windows Server Update Services buckle under Microsoft's metadata mountain

  20-07-2026 16:14 via theregister.com
  
  Microsoft's aging Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) has hit "severe degradation," leaving some organizations facing painfully slow synchronizations or timeouts when fetching updates. According to Microsoft, "a buildup of publishing metadata" has meant that "organizations might experience increased synchronization times or sync operation timeouts on WSUS servers." We're told the problem isn't related to the recent Patch Tuesday update, but Microsoft noted "heightened impact observed starting
  
  Read more

• America's favorite milk forced to halt production after devastating cyberattack

  20-07-2026 16:13 via dailymail.com
  
  A billion-dollar milk company, serving millions of Americans each year, has been forced to halt production following a devastating cyberattack.
  
  Read more

• EU's AI labeling rules take effect next month

  20-07-2026 15:27 via theregister.com
  
  From August 2, providers of AI systems in the EU will have to tell people when they are interacting with a machine and add machine-readable marks to AI-generated or manipulated content under new transparency rules. Launching guidance ahead of the deadline, Henna Virkkunen, European Commission executive vice-president for tech sovereignty, security and democracy, said: "The Commission supports the smooth and effective application of the AI Act to make AI systems interacting with people such as ch
  
  Read more

• Watching the world burn as all the money flows into a multitrillion-dollar Magic 8 Ball

  20-07-2026 14:44 via theregister.com
  
  KETTLE Your host Brandon Vigliarolo has been breathing in wildfire smoke from Canada for the past few days, which really has him thinking about whether all those AI datacenters building gas turbines and contributing to climate change is really worth it. You can listen to the latest episode of The Kettle right here on this page, as well as on Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube where you can subscribe to get notified of the latest episode. Luckily for us, CNBC technology and climate reporter Lora Ko
  
  Read more

• MMAI! Watch the moment a robot is DECAPITATED during a brutal humanoid cage fight - yet keeps fighting

  20-07-2026 14:38 via dailymail.com
  
  Shocking footage has emerged from China , showing two humanoids battling it out in a mixed martial arts (MMA) fight.
  
  Read more

Follow @scitech_UK on Twitter!