Sci-Tech news

• Microsoft's AI can clone your voice after analyzing a 3-second audio clip

  11-01-2023 20:48 via dailymail.co.uk
  
  Microsoft announced its VALL-E, an AI that analyzes your voice in a three-second audio clip and replicates it perfectly. It can also capture your emotional range and acoustic environment.
  
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• Is this how the world will end? Scientists warn our dying sun will 'kick' the planets out into space - and it could happen 100 times sooner than previously thought

  19-10-2026 09:07 via dailymail.com
  
  Scientists have revealed a chilling glimpse into our solar system's future, and it looks like doomsday might come a lot sooner than expected.
  
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• How to tell if your online date is a scam artist, according to a former con-man - and why a video call isn't enough to know someone is real

  19-10-2026 09:07 via dailymail.com
  
  Prolific criminals like the 'Tinder Swindler' have tricked victims into giving away hundreds of thousands of pounds, and experts warn that AI has given shameless fraudsters more tools.
  
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• Engineer was so sick of office pranks, he 'wiped' his antagonist's disk

  19-10-2026 07:30 via theregister.com
  
  Monday mornings are no joke, so The Register always tries to lighten them up with a new installment of "Who, Me?" – our reader-contributed column that shares your stories of workplace japes, mistakes, and escapes. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Joe" who told us that while studying for an electrical engineering degree in the late 1990s, he scored a gig in the messaging lab at an Australian mobile carrier. "The office there was full of practical jokers," he wrote. "Boxes of conf
  
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• ConnectWise turns off its SaaS-y backup, security, and management services to probe security SNAFU

  19-10-2026 06:31 via theregister.com
  
  SaaS-for-managed services providers ConnectWise has initiated a “service interruption” for its some of its offerings after detecting unauthorized access. ConnectWise offers ERP tailored to the needs of managed services providers (MSPs), plus tools they can use to manage their customers’ environments. Cloud Backup is one of those tools and does what it says on the tin for data stored on-prem, in the cloud, or in SaaS services like M365 and Google Workspace. On October 16, the co
  
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• ICANN vows to work faster, improve transparency

  19-10-2026 05:28 via theregister.com
  
  Internet governance organization the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has come to the realization it needs to move faster. The org today opened its annual conference in Bali, Indonesia, with an opening ceremony during which chair Tripti Sinha noted that it’s now just over ten years since the US government effectively handed over internet governance responsibilities from the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) to ICANN. Sinha observed that much has changed
  
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• Artemis II astronaut reveals the terrifying moment he feared his crew would be lost in space 'after straying too far from Earth'

  19-10-2026 03:28 via dailymail.com
  
  As Commander Reid Wiseman and his three crew flew over the dark side of the Moon to what NASA had said would be their maximum distance, their odometer continued ticking upwards.
  
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• Linux KVM guest-host escape rated critical, may represent a new way to attack penguin-powered networking

  19-10-2026 02:33 via theregister.com
  
  Paulos Yibelo, the researcher who in early October claimed to have found a guest-host escape flaw in Linux KVM, the hypervisor used by most hyperscale clouds, has named the flaw PwnEscape and warned it might represent a new way to attack Linux – on top of being a 9.3-rated critical nasty in its own right. Yibelo’s work is now CVE-2026-99999. It is a scary bug because it makes a guest-host escape possible with a few malformed IPv4 packets. Such attacks are a nightmare security scenari
  
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• Time Lords kill leap seconds, before they become the new Y2K bug

  19-10-2026 01:01 via theregister.com
  
  The Time Lords at the General Conference on Weights and Measures (GCPM)* have decided to stop introducing leap seconds, citing the likelihood they could cause problems with internet of things devices – and therefore a Y2K scale remediation effort – as a reason for the change. As The Register reported last week, the GCPM works to harmonize Universal Time – UT1, which boffins calculate using the changing speed of Earth’s rotation – and the Coordinated Universal Time (
  
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• New winter forecast reveals complete shift in snow predictions for 2027

  18-10-2026 19:57 via dailymail.com
  
  A new forecast model has revealed the stunning picture of who will and won't see snow throughout the US in 2027.
  
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• David Cameron proposes dedicated dementia drug fund to help patients get access to treatments that could slow decline by a third

  18-10-2026 16:40 via dailymail.com
  
  David Cameron is calling for a dedicated dementia drug fund to help thousands of Alzheimer's patients get access to treatments that could slow the disease's progression.
  
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• IVF boom fuels adoption crisis: Number of children needing a home outstrips approved adopters by 1,600, charity warns

  18-10-2026 15:28 via dailymail.com
  
  Britain is facing its biggest adoption shortfall in decades, with experts warning that the growing popularity of IVF is contributing to the issue.
  
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• The 20-year itch! Record number of married couples are splitting after two decades together, figures reveal

  18-10-2026 15:15 via dailymail.com
  
  The seven-year itch may be a thing of the past, official figures suggest, as Britain's marriages are now most likely to unravel after two decades together.
  
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• To game, or not to game? Scientists say interactive adventures could be key to getting children interested in Shakespeare

  18-10-2026 14:50 via dailymail.com
  
  The days of poring over Shakespeare's texts and struggling through lines of Elizabethan verse could soon be over.
  
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• Oh no, what happened to my OOHPod? Windows command prompt puts in a surprise appearance

  18-10-2026 10:09 via theregister.com
  
  The Windows command line is a marvelous thing, beloved by administrators, but not quite so welcome when you're trying to get a parcel out of a locker. Today's example of Windows behaving badly comes from Ireland and one of the nation's OOHPod postal lockers. An eagle-eyed Register reader, trying to retrieve a parcel, found the locker screen instead teasing a command prompt. For the uninitiated, OOHPod is a service where people retrieve and deposit goods in lockers. Scan your ID (or enter it on a
  
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• Are YOU being secretly recorded? After Bill Nighy falls victim to Meta's glasses, here's how to tell if someone is wearing them

  17-10-2026 23:04 via dailymail.com
  
  How can you tell whether the person sitting opposite you is wearing camera-equipped glasses, and more importantly, whether they are recording? It turns out where are several key clues to look out for.
  
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• Mysterious Enchanted Rock 'haunted by ancient spirits' groans at night

  17-10-2026 20:34 via dailymail.com
  
  Deep in the Texas Hill Country, an enormous pink granite mountain groans after sunset as ghostly lights shimmer across its ancient surface.
  
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• Millions warned of record-breaking swarm of rabies-carrying bats invading Los Angeles as first infection is revealed

  17-10-2026 17:00 via dailymail.com
  
  Millions of Americans have been warned to watch for rabid bats and other animals that may be infected with an illness that is always fatal once symptoms appear.
  
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• Cybercrims go beyond stealing data to attack physical building systems

  17-10-2026 13:30 via theregister.com
  
  Late Sunday night, a still-unknown cybercriminal or group hacked thousands of remote-controlled refrigeration systems across hundreds of French grocery stores, spiking temperatures, spoiling food, and sparking fires. This is part of an ongoing trend of attacking physical systems that can do damage in the real world. In August, a ransomware attack disrupted building-management systems at a Canadian hospital, affecting door access controls, central HVAC monitoring, and the issuing of staff access
  
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• Amazon wants you to Bee-lieve wearable AI can recall it all for you

  17-10-2026 11:00 via theregister.com
  
  Amazon wants to ensure you have a personal AI that you can carry with you anywhere, listening in on your conversations so it can remind you of key details – and give you personalized shopping recommendations, of course. The global online bazaar has unveiled two new AI-based products from Bee, a startup in wearable devices that it acquired last year in a deal said to be worth $300 million. Bee’s original product for Amazon was tried out and sort of given approval by friend of The Regi
  
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• Get in the bin! UK Space Agency wants public to name its debris removal mission

  17-10-2026 09:29 via theregister.com
  
  The UK Space Agency needs a name for its Active Debris Removal Mission and has decided that the great British public are the people for the job. The agency confirmed the operation earlier this week and selected ClearSpace UK to lead it. The plan is to remove two UK-registered satellites from Low Earth Orbit, with the clean-up due to begin in 2029. The UK government is backing the effort with more than £60 million, and it expects the disposal to be completed by 2032. The spacecraft will gra
  
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• Open-weight models win hearts, minds, and wallets

  17-10-2026 01:07 via theregister.com
  
  Open-weight models more than quadrupled their share of spending through Vercel's AI Gateway between June and September, when they processed more than seven in 10 tokens. "In August, open-weight models processed the majority of AI Gateway token volume for the first time," the biz said. "The money is now following. Open weight's share of spend has more than quadrupled over the last three months, from one in twenty gateway dollars in June to nearly one in four in September." AI Gateway, like OpenRo
  
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• Benchmarked: Nvidia's RTX Spark notebook delivers serious local AI compute, at a price

  16-10-2026 22:31 via theregister.com
  
  Nvidia's RTX Spark partner systems are here, and spec-for-spec they've got all the ingredients for a hit: a potent CPU, blisteringly fast integrated graphics, and up to 128 GB of unified memory in a lightweight, ultra-premium package that's ready to run demanding models locally. But with prices for these systems starting around $2,600 and going well north of $6,000 for the top spec trims, the one thing RTX Spark isn't is a good deal. However, for the right person, by which we mostly mean AI enth
  
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• Node.js creator ditches Deno to work on open source Cloudflare Workers

  16-10-2026 22:20 via theregister.com
  
  Node.js creator Ryan Dahl is sacrificing a battle to win the war … for server-side computing and allowing Node-replacement Deno to fall by the wayside. Last week, Cloudflare announced that it had purchased Dahl’s company Deno, which was built around an open source server-side JavaScript runtime of the same name that he created, to compete with the Node.js runtime, which he also created. Nonetheless, Deno has no future at Cloudflare, which will maintain the runtime for another year b
  
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• Meta grants itself right to scrape content from business customers for model training

  16-10-2026 22:00 via theregister.com
  
  Businesses using Facebook commercially may want to think twice about what information they share online. At the end of the month, Meta plans to introduce terms that would authorize it to collect content from websites associated with its business customers and use it to train AI models or otherwise improve its products. The ad biz has revised its commercial terms of service, and the new contractual language takes effect on October 30, 2026. There are at least a million businesses using the compan
  
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• Search for Jesus' tomb leads to discovery of ancient structure marking his burial site

  16-10-2026 20:09 via dailymail.com
  
  The search for Jesus Christ's real tomb has led archaeologists to an extraordinary discovery at his burial site.
  
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• Ubuntu Stonking Stingray swims into spotlight with pre-release kernel

  16-10-2026 18:27 via theregister.com
  
  The latest interim release of Ubuntu is here, complete with kernel 7.3 – even though it isn't officially out yet. It also includes a new speech-to-text system that is intriguing but not fully useful. Ubuntu 26.10 "Stonking Stingray" arrived on time. This is just a couple of weeks after the beta version that we looked at earlier this month, suggesting that the team didn’t encounter any show-stopper bugs. The faster kernel release cycle that Canonical adopted in 2024 has slightly bitte
  
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• Want the iPhone Duo? You'll have to wait until JANUARY! Pre-orders sell out in record time as Apple fans flock to buy the £2,000 foldable

  16-10-2026 18:16 via dailymail.com
  
  If you've decided to splash out on Apple's new iPhone Duo, you might be waiting a while.
  
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• New online tool will check lawyers' sloppy AI-written briefs since they can't seem to be bothered

  16-10-2026 18:08 via theregister.com
  
  For lawyers who love to use AI to write legal briefs, there's just one problem: bots hallucinate and make things up. Fortunately, a new tool, CiteProof, promises to crawl over briefs and filings for fabricated case citations and misquoted court opinions before they result in sanctions, fines, or just plain embarrassing dressing downs from a judge. This is hardly a new problem, with lawyers relying on AI to do their work for several years with predictably horrible results. Even if GPT-4 was capab
  
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• BlackRock’s Record Asset Holdings Are Half The Size Of US Economy

  16-10-2026 17:34 via technocracy.news
  
  BlackRock is headed by Larry Fink, a prominent member of the TRILATERAL COMMISSION and co-CEO of the World Economic Forum. He has autocratic control over $15.49 trillion in assets, almost half of the US economy. Fink says “we are at the beginning of the tokenization of all assets” and on a single blockchain. As an Arch-Technocrat, he makes Elon Musk look like a financial midget. ⁃ Patrick Wood, Editor.BlackRock ended the third quarter with $15.49 trillion in assets under m
  
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