Sci-Tech news

• Mobile firm Pulsate in scaling mode as investment reaches $3m siliconrepublic.com/start-ups/puls…

  03-07-2018 07:52 via twitter.com
  Mobile firm Pulsate in scaling mode as investment reaches $3m siliconrepublic.com/start-ups/puls…
  
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• Blast from the past as GIMP 0.54 is revived in Flatpak form

  23-06-2026 12:45 via theregister.com
  
  Development of GIMP has picked up speed in recent years, but now its first public release is back as a Flatpak, allowing the 1996 version to run on modern x86-64 Linux distros, even under Wayland, without the nightmare of finding and installing its 30-year-old dependencies. If you are just looking for a quick and lightweight image editor – especially if you want modern features such as edge detection or generative fill – this is not the package for you. It's mainly for the software a
  
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• Your cats don't care about you…or each other! Felines groom one another out of SPITE, study finds

  23-06-2026 12:36 via dailymail.com
  
  Sometimes it can be hard to tell whether a cat likes or utterly despises you - and it turns out they're aloof even with their own kind.
  
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• Brits still reckon Big Tech isn't paying enough tax

  23-06-2026 12:00 via theregister.com
  
  The majority of Britons still believe Big Tech should be contributing more to the public purse, new research suggests. Polling by the Fair Tax Foundation, shared with The Register, finds that 67 percent of respondents believe the UK should ensure large technology companies such as Meta, Google, Apple, and Amazon pay more in Digital Services Tax (DST) to increase their overall tax contribution. The same proportion of Brits said the government should aim to become a world leader in regulating cryp
  
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• Heatwaves could trigger BLACKOUTS this summer: Grid operator warns of a 600% surge in wildfires - leaving vital transmission lines at risk

  23-06-2026 11:59 via dailymail.com
  
  The UK's sweltering temperatures could cause chaos for power grids - leaving Brits at risk of blackouts this summer.
  
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• Thought last night's thunderstorm was intense? Scientists say this could become the NORM - because of climate change

  23-06-2026 11:44 via dailymail.com
  
  Millions of Brits were woken up last night by a huge thunderstorm. Now, scientists have warned that these intense storms could become the norm - thanks to climate change.
  
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• Datacenters dip a toe back into waterborne computing despite obvious challenges

  23-06-2026 11:15 via theregister.com
  
  Siting datacenters either on the water or underwater is an idea that just won't sink, and there is increasing interest in it, despite the obvious fact that water and IT equipment are a potentially disastrous combination. The attraction of having a data facility in or on the water is that it offers virtually limitless natural cooling, which is an increasingly vital consideration for operators deploying hot-running systems filled with GPUs for AI processing. But set against that are potential issu
  
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• Digital indigestion: Fizzy Coca-Cola display chokes on full storage

  23-06-2026 10:27 via theregister.com
  
  BORK!BORK!BORK! Are you a glass-half-full or glass-half-empty person? Some distressed digital signage on the island of São Miguel in Portugal's Azores is running on empty, judging by today's entry into the files of signage silage. Spotted by an eagle-eyed Register reader, a Coca-Cola display has clearly had too much of the carbonated beverage and urgently needs to free up some space, a feeling many an over-caffeinated techie will be familiar with after chugging one Diet Coke too many. It'
  
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• Five Eyes spooks warn AI means infosec incidents can become ‘major operational and financial crises’

  23-06-2026 07:29 via theregister.com
  
  The leaders of intelligence agencies from the Five Eyes nations – Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the USA and the UK – have together issued strongly worded advice calling for leaders to nail cybersecurity basics or fall victim to ruinous AI-powered attacks. “The rapid pace of frontier AI development means cyber risk assumptions can become outdated in months, not years,” the advice warns, and calls for organizations to take rapid action to ensure their defenses remain pote
  
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• India and China are home to 2.9 billion people – and together they bought just 13 million PCs in Q1

  23-06-2026 06:06 via theregister.com
  
  Buyers in the world’s two most populous nations, India and China, bought just 13.1 million PCs in the first quarter of 2026, according to analyst firm Omdia. The firm’s analysts last week declared that Indian buyers acquired 4.4 million PCs – 3.5 million of them laptops – during Q1. That figure represented 32 percent year-over-year growth. “Brands and channels front-loaded their inventory, to secure pricing ahead of anticipated increases,” the firm wrote. &ldq
  
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• Sniff out stale AI override advice with this open source CLI

  23-06-2026 02:17 via theregister.com
  
  The JavaScript development ecosystem may be a security nightmare, but it's also ripe for improvement. One such tool is the CVE Lite CLI, a free open source dependency scanner that helps reduce the risk of software supply chain attacks. It runs locally and provides actionable vulnerability fixes, if any are available. The tool, endorsed by OWASP, has recently been updated to include override auditing, which has the potential to avert transitive dependency vulnerabilities such as the March 2022 no
  
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• OpenAI: Yoo-hoo, look over here, we do that security stuff too!

  23-06-2026 01:34 via theregister.com
  
  OpenAI announced a flurry of cybersecurity-related AI news on Monday, releasing an improved version of GPT‑5.5‑Cyber, its most advanced vulnerability-finding model, along with an expanded partner program for cybersecurity vendors, an update to its Codex Security scanner⁠, and an initiative to “Patch the Planet” – or at least 30 high-profile open source projects. The announcements come as Anthropic’s Mythos mess keeps getting more complicated, with nation
  
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• Seabed damaged by fishing showing signs of recovery

  23-06-2026 00:02 via bbc.com
  
  Campaigners say improvements to the area trashed by illegal dredging show that marine protection works.
  
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• Texas lassoes massive Microsoft datacenter - and 20 years of gas turbine emissions

  22-06-2026 22:31 via theregister.com
  
  Never mind the fact that datacenter environmental concerns have come under growing scrutiny across the United States. Microsoft has just inked a deal with fossil fuel giant Chevron to supply one of the largest single-capacity additions to its datacenter fleet with 2.67 gigawatts of natural gas power for a full two decades. Chevron said today that it signed a two-decade power purchase agreement with Microsoft through its subsidiary Energy Forge One to supply 2.67 GW of power for a new datacenter
  
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• Cloudflare teams up with big browsers to help websites tell welcome from unwelcome visitors

  22-06-2026 22:02 via theregister.com
  
  Cloudflare on Monday said that it has joined with the three leading commercial browser makers to create a privacy-preserving protocol that websites can use to separate desirable web traffic from undesirable network requests. Cloudflare, along with Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Mozilla Firefox, have committed to develop Private Access Control Tokens (PACTs), a way for websites to generate a digital token that asserts a given browsing session is being run by a human or bot with legitimate int
  
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• Cloudflare teams up with big browsers to help websites tell bots from people

  22-06-2026 22:02 via theregister.com
  
  Cloudflare on Monday said that it has joined with the three leading commercial browser makers to create a privacy-preserving protocol that websites can use to separate desirable web traffic from undesirable network requests. Cloudflare, along with Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Mozilla Firefox, have committed to develop Private Access Control Tokens (PACTs), a way for websites to generate a digital token that asserts a given browsing session is being run by human or bot with legitimate inten
  
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• Security shops among the 'hundreds' of Klue hack victims

  22-06-2026 21:50 via theregister.com
  
  The list of Klue customers whose Salesforce data was stolen in the latest supply-chain heist keeps growing, with an increasing number of cybersecurity companies disclosing that they are among the victims of a new data-theft and extortion crew called Icarus. Klue, which provides market intelligence to more than 250,000 companies worldwide, hasn’t said how many of its customers were caught up in the breach and didn’t immediately respond to The Register’s inquiries. Huntress was o
  
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• Half the internet goes down as Cloudflare blames issues on 'fiber cut' in North America

  22-06-2026 21:32 via dailymail.com
  
  Millions are struggling to access popular websites on Monday after a major outage triggered widespread disruptions across the internet. Dozens of sites have gone offline.
  
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• Massive cloud of Saharan dust set to engulf parts of the US in DAYS with lung-penetrating particles

  22-06-2026 21:17 via dailymail.com
  
  A giant dust plume from the Sahara Desert is making landfall in the US in the coming days. The plume is carrying fine particles that can cause health issues when breathed in.
  
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• Growth spurt! Humans 'jumped' in size two million years ago, scientists reveal

  22-06-2026 21:00 via dailymail.com
  
  Early humans experienced a 'growth spurt' around two million years ago, making it easier for them to travel long distances, a new study has revealed.
  
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• Nvidia gets all agentic about supercomputing for scientific research

  22-06-2026 20:15 via theregister.com
  
  Nvidia is pushing agentic AI for scientific computing, and says that this requires a new scientific computing stack, which the GPU giant is ready to deliver, of course. At the ISC High Performance 2026 event in Hamburg, Germany, Nvidia is lauding its own achievements in supercomputing, highlighting just how many of the world’s top compute clusters use its hardware these days. But just as agentic AI has become this year’s buzzword in the machine intelligence industry, so the GPU sling
  
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• Lost chapter of human evolution exposed after 300,000-year-old cave discovery

  22-06-2026 20:09 via dailymail.com
  
  A stunning discovery buried deep inside a cave for 300,000 years has revealed a lost chapter in human history.
  
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• I was in a coma for 18 days but spent a YEAR in hell where I was tormented by demons... the horrifying experience made me abandon the Catholic Church

  22-06-2026 19:56 via dailymail.com
  
  She was suddenly transported to a bombed-out city she compared to a ruined New York, with collapsed buildings, screaming people and chaos everywhere.
  
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• The database that refused to die: How Postgres survived its own creators

  22-06-2026 19:43 via theregister.com
  
  FEATURE Today Postgres is one of the most widely used database systems, but its launch and subsequent development were inauspicious to say the least. If it weren’t for a league of exceptionally devoted open source contributors, it probably would be another forgotten also-ran just like Ingres, the database system on which it was based (“Postgres” was shorthand for “Post-Ingres”). The creator of both systems, Michael Stonebraker, is perhaps the preeminent database pio
  
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• Ukraine puts its Russian war trophies online for allies to pick apart

  22-06-2026 19:19 via theregister.com
  
  Russia’s equipment losses in Ukraine are about to become the world’s gain, as Kyiv has decided to hand out its intel on seized Russian battlefield assets to its international partners. And it has launched a new site to do so. Announced on Friday by Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense, the TrophyLab is being billed as a place for Ukraine and its allies to analyze Russian military technology for the benefit of both Kyiv’s government in its current fight against Moscow, and for an
  
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• Inspired by musical greeting cards, DARPA demands tiny, cheap, self-modifying systems

  22-06-2026 18:30 via theregister.com
  
  What do the first general-purpose programmable electronic computer and greeting cards that play musical jingles have in common? DARPA cites both of them as the inspiration for a project seeking low-resource computing paradigms to be used on future battlefields. DARPA on Friday put out a request for information (RFI) for new low-resource computing (LRC) paradigms and processes that haven't been utilized yet in microscale systems not unlike the tiny chip-and-battery combos found in greeting cards
  
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• The memory crisis is getting so bad that even retro RAM prices are going to the Moon

  22-06-2026 18:07 via theregister.com
  
  The global memory crisis has developed a new twist as buyers turn to "legacy" products such as DDR2 and DDR3 to meet demand, according to market watcher TrendForce. The Taiwanese firm says DRAM buyers are turning to older products to secure larger supply allocations, driving up prices for components including DDR2 and DDR3. As Reg readers will be well aware by now, the AI craze has led to memory chipmakers prioritizing production of more profitable HBM and server DRAM silicon to power AI infrast
  
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• Strange detail in 1977 Elvis concert photo fuels wild time-travel theories

  22-06-2026 18:04 via dailymail.com
  
  A shocking recording from 50 years ago shows what some are claiming is a piece of 21st century technology at the King of Rock and Roll's final performance.
  
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• I was a 'good Catholic girl' until I spent a YEAR in hell... being tormented by demons convinced me to leave the church once I'd cheated death

  22-06-2026 17:59 via dailymail.com
  
  She was suddenly transported to a bombed-out city she compared to a ruined New York, with collapsed buildings, screaming people and chaos everywhere.
  
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• The new database world according to Google: Inexact queries and AI in everything

  22-06-2026 17:40 via theregister.com
  
  Google Cloud Summit came to London last week, and we took the opportunity to sit down with database execs Sailesh Krishnamurthy (VP engineering) and Yasmeen Ahmad (product executive Agentic Data Cloud). The event was wall-to-wall agentic AI, and true to the theme, Ahmad told us that "we're putting agents at the center ... with the goal that humans are not going to be using data platforms in the next three to five years. It’s going to be humans orchestrating agents, and agents actually doin
  
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