Sci-Tech news

• Nowhere to hide: Facial recognition technology can identify people in complete DARKNESS by reading thermal signatures

  29-07-2015 18:03 via
  
  Computer scientists at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany, developed the new technique that reads a person’s thermal signature (right).
  
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• European AI flag bearer Mistral's new open weights model is 'Le Chonk'

  06-10-2026 20:03 via theregister.com
  
  Another week brings yet another open weights model and this one is huge — or at least it is for Europe's AI flag bearer Mistral, which has taken to calling the 1 trillion-parameter large language model (LLM) Le Chonk. Its product name is Mistral Large 4, which is a lot less fun than the cat-meme-inspired "very official" moniker Le Chonk. Nonetheless, the LLM is the French model-dev's biggest open weights release ever. At a trillion parameters, Le Chonk is squarely in frontier territory, an
  
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• Trump Mobile customers' data dumped - and some never even received their gold device

  06-10-2026 19:32 via theregister.com
  
  If you signed up for Trump Mobile, you may be part of an exclusive club of … ransomware victims. Criminals called BYOD claim to have broken into the Trump-branded mobile biz and leaked data belonging to 3,615 people, including names, email addresses, phone numbers, home addresses, and order details. BYOD is a new ransomware-as-a-service operation, and Trump Mobile is only the third organization posted on its data-leak site. According to the group’s posted claim, after telling Trump
  
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• Wikimedia Foundation comes forward as latest OpenAI agent assault victim

  06-10-2026 18:04 via theregister.com
  
  Wikipedia’s parent organization says that OpenAI agents edited some non-public wiki pages and generated traffic that may have contributed to a partial Wikidata outage in May. This makes the non-profit just the latest victim of OpenAI agents gone rogue. The Wikimedia Foundation’s chief product and technology officer Selena Deckelmann reported several “rogue agent activities” that the foundation had identified across its various open platforms. While there was no evidence O
  
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• Holding your breath could REWIRE your brain: Scientists discover divers who plunge underwater without oxygen develop remarkable mental adaptation

  06-10-2026 17:16 via dailymail.com
  
  Scientists have discovered that freedivers who plunge deep underwater develop incredible mental adaptations that protect neural networks involved in attention, movement and memory.
  
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• Microsoft extends the Outlook naughty step with two more file types

  06-10-2026 17:06 via theregister.com
  
  Microsoft is adding two extra file types to its Outlook block list to strengthen security. The file types are .msix and .msixbundle, used for Windows application packages and bundles. The change affects New Outlook for Windows and Outlook on the Web in Exchange Online. By default, users of the affected clients will no longer be able to download or open attachments with these extensions, which is no bad thing because blindly installing a malicious .msix package could compromise a device. That sai
  
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• US Households Pay 62% More For Water Than They Did A Decade Ago

  06-10-2026 16:23 via technocracy.news
  
  Technocracy seeks to control all resources, especially those required for life itself: water, energy, food, and air. Now the UN has declared the world bankrupt of water, the language of which requires a receiver to oversee the proceedings. Yet humongous data centers get a free pass on both energy and water, as AI is set to take over metering of those same resources. ⁃ Patrick Wood, Editor.US households are paying 62% more for drinking water than they did a decade ago – outpacing
  
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• Classic Outlook clings to stale search results as Microsoft works on a fix

  06-10-2026 16:10 via theregister.com
  
  Microsoft is very keen for Outlook users to ditch the classic version in favor of the new one, and a search bug isn't helping the old client's cause. Results can fail to update after mailbox items are moved or changed, with Microsoft's workaround sending affected users back to Windows Desktop Search. Microsoft has acknowledged the problem. When users move an item from the search results to another folder, it remains listed and produces an error when clicked. Changes to categories or read/unread
  
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• Tech expert reveals the Amazon Prime Day discounts that aren't as good as they seem - and the 'best ever' deals he'd snap up right now

  06-10-2026 15:57 via dailymail.com
  
  We've scoured Amazon's historical prices to find you the deals that are really worth grabbing now, and the ones worth waiting until Black Friday for.
  
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• Zombie instructions on carefully constructed web pages could trick GitHub Copilot CLI into sharing secrets

  06-10-2026 15:00 via theregister.com
  
  GitHub Copilot CLI may reveal developer secrets if it comes across instructions that tell it to do so, depending on the underlying model. The coding agent tool was flagged earlier this year for being susceptible to indirect prompt injection. That's when a model ingests text from a source other than the user that directs it to take some action outside the scope of its intended function. This is more of the same, with a twist. According to security researchers at Adversa AI, GitHub Copilot CLI suf
  
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• Asos app delivers a data leak threat instead of fast fashion

  06-10-2026 13:51 via theregister.com
  
  Asos customers have reported receiving a rogue app notification claiming the online clothing retailer's Snowflake instance has been compromised and threatening to leak data. The notification included a link to a Telegram channel named "Xuanye Wen Gateway" and addressed Asos's data protection officer and IT team. "Dear ASOS DPO and IT, we have fully compromised the Snowflake instance. Engage with us, or we will leak it," it says. The Register has asked Asos and Snowflake to comment. The notificat
  
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• Denmark's ID register spills more people's details than the country has residents

  06-10-2026 13:46 via theregister.com
  
  An unauthorized party abused a private Danish company's legitimate access to the country's Central Population Register (CPR), exposing names, addresses, identification numbers, and other personal information about approximately 8.8 million people. The CPR administration said in a statement [PDF] that it became aware on October 2 of irregular activity during September and established the scale of the breach over the weekend. In a TV interview last night, digitization minister Christina Egelund sa
  
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• World's heaviest insect makes astonishing comeback after conservationists save giant bug from extinction

  06-10-2026 13:42 via dailymail.com
  
  The world's heaviest insect has made an astonishing comeback after conservationists saved the giant bug from the brink of extinction.
  
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• The death of pale rosé? Gen Z would rather pay for a dark pink White Zinfandel than a Provence classic, study finds

  06-10-2026 13:16 via dailymail.com
  
  Forget vineyards, vintages and fancy French labels - according to a new study, the quickest way to win over Gen Z wine drinkers is simply to make your rosé a darker shade of pink.
  
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• Atos lands £350M beat keeping Met Police applications running

  06-10-2026 12:29 via theregister.com
  
  The UK's largest police force has awarded French outsourcer Atos a six-year contract worth up to £350 million to manage and secure applications. Atos will provide service management, application management, and application security for the Metropolitan Police Service in London. The deal is intended to support the Met's ongoing modernization and simplification of its applications. Met Police digital product delivery director Jamie Hewitt said: "Our collaboration with Atos will provide a sta
  
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• The computer that can read your mind: Scientists reveal AI that can recreate exactly what you're looking at

  06-10-2026 11:18 via dailymail.com
  
  Scientists have unveiled a groundbreaking 'mind-reading' AI that can recreate images people are looking at simply by analysing their brain scans.
  
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• KPMG tells staff facing the axe: Here's £100, now zip it

  06-10-2026 10:30 via theregister.com
  
  KPMG has offered staff facing redundancy £100 to waive their legal rights to appeal or to bring claims over the loss of their job, according to sources. As The Register revealed last month, the consultancy is laying off around 4 percent of the workforce in the UK, equating to some 200 humans being forced to look for new employment in an uncertain job market before Christmas.Staff within the AI, Cyber, SAP, and Testing teams are at the sharp end of the corporate job cutting exercise.On Octo
  
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• Only the finest Swedish Bork will do for Stockholm station

  06-10-2026 09:15 via theregister.com
  
  Sweden is the home of bork, and what better way to mark it than with a huge example of digital signage that shows a GRUB message instead of an ad? Spotted by eagle-eyed Register reader Alexander, the GRUB in question is sadly not the delicious meatballs for which a well-known Swedish furniture maker is famed, but rather the bootloader familiar to Linux fans, usually when something is working as it should (since we can't imagine much call for selecting from multiple operating systems in the world
  
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• OpenAI rolls out weak sauce watermarking for AI text

  06-10-2026 08:02 via theregister.com
  
  OpenAI is now offering API customers the option to watermark the output of certain models in order to comply with the letter of Europe's AI Act. And within a few weeks, the biz plans to apply a form of digital watermarking – like it or not – to eligible ChatGPT and Codex text output in the European Union. But unlike rival Anthropic, it isn't applying its watermarking technique to content generated outside of Europe, though API customers can choose to have the marks applied to content
  
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• Scientists find planet made on new matter recipe, and it formed after a Red Giant ate a solar system

  06-10-2026 07:25 via theregister.com
  
  When yellow dwarf stars like our sun die, they swell to an enormous size and destroy their inner planets by either crushing them with massive gravity or evaporating them with astounding heat. While these suns later settle down to become a white dwarf, the process is nearly always game over for planets in an inner solar system. Or maybe not, according to a paper published on Monday titled “Discovery of a second-generation planet candidate accreting onto a white dwarf.” As explained by
  
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• Atlassian warns of critical file access flaw in its datacenter products

  06-10-2026 06:20 via theregister.com
  
  Atlassian has told its users to patch its datacenter products, pronto, to prevent attackers accessing their files. The Australian collaborationware company on Monday sent users an email that opens with the words “Action required” and points to a security bulletin that explains CVE-2026-21589. The 9.3-rated arbitrary file access vulnerability is present in the datacenter versions of its Bitbucket, Confluence, Jira Service Management, Jira Software, Bamboo, Crowd, Crucible, and Fisheye
  
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• AI Is Creating “Doom Loops” All Over the Economy

  06-10-2026 05:07 via technocracy.news
  
  Technocrats are stealing the world’s data for their own AI training advantage, while killing the golden goose in the process, as this article makes clear. That lack of ethics and morality is seen everywhere in the world of Technocracy. For instance, read the Crucible of Tokens to learn about the biggest heist of private property in world history. They have no conscience about doing anything wrong, and that is the problem. Read up on psychopathy! ⁃ Patrick Wood, Editor.Recently unreda
  
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• Security researcher claims to they found KVM guest-host escape flaw

  06-10-2026 04:06 via theregister.com
  
  Linux KVM, the hypervisor favoured by hyperscale clouds, apparently has a full VM escape bug. That nasty news came from security researcher Paulos Yibelo, who on X shared a screenshot of a bug bounty award he won for discovering what he described as “Full VM escape zeroday (guest>host root in industry standard hypervisors)!” The bug bounty Yibelo participated in is run by Vercel, a company that provides MicroVMs as sandboxes for AI agents to work inside. The company’s Sandbo
  
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• Security researcher claims they found KVM guest-host escape flaw

  06-10-2026 04:06 via theregister.com
  
  Linux KVM, the hypervisor favoured by hyperscale clouds, apparently has a full VM escape bug. That nasty news came from security researcher Paulos Yibelo, who on X shared a screenshot of a bug bounty award he won for discovering what he described as “Full VM escape zeroday (guest>host root in industry standard hypervisors)!” The bug bounty Yibelo participated in is run by Vercel, a company that provides MicroVMs as sandboxes for AI agents to work inside. The company’s Sandbo
  
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• Schneider Electric drops $22.6B on PTC as datacenter boom rains money on infra companies

  06-10-2026 00:48 via theregister.com
  
  Schneider Electric's market cap has more than doubled in the past four years as the AI boom has driven unprecedented demand for datacenter power and cooling infrastructure. Now the French multinational is cashing in on its good fortunes to cement its place as a key provider of industrial power and datacenter infrastructure with the $22.6 billion acquisition of American industrial software company PTC. Founded in 1985, PTC made a name for itself developing software for computer-aided design, plus
  
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• Citrix NetScaler security snafus get even worse amid more 0-day reports

  05-10-2026 23:18 via theregister.com
  
  The attackers just keep coming after Citrix NetScaler appliances, as both the feds and private security researchers warn that someone found - and has already exploited - yet another Citrix bug before it had a patch. This latest vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-88779, is a memory overflow bug that leads to denial of service attacks. It only affects NetScaler ADC and Gateway appliances configured as a SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language) service provider or identity provider, used for singl
  
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• Self-proclaimed 'Prophet of Doom' warned of 'future pandemic' just days before Russian lab worker died of the plague

  05-10-2026 23:12 via dailymail.com
  
  A self-proclaimed psychic has been thrust back into the spotlight over his warning about a future pandemic just days before reports of a suspected plague case in Russia surfaced.
  
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• Cohere offers to put agents in lockdown mode with strict ACLs

  05-10-2026 21:47 via theregister.com
  
  While OpenAI and Anthropic stoke fears over rogue agents, Canadian model dev Cohere promises enterprises a safer and more consistent experience. On Monday, the company said it revamped its North agent harness, which launched early last year, to improve collaboration, access control, token spend, and overall security of the platform. As you'd expect from an enterprise focused agent framework, Cohere's North 2 is designed to tie into existing knowledge bases and SaaS apps in order to automate vari
  
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• Get rid of Apple's AI bloatware and reclaim 12 GB of storage with this open source tool

  05-10-2026 21:24 via theregister.com
  
  Apple’s attempt to integrate AI into its various operating systems hasn’t been entirely well received, nor has the decision to make Apple Intelligence increasingly difficult to disable completely. Thankfully, the open source community has come to the rescue. A recently released open source tool called RemoveMacAI does pretty much exactly what it says on the GitHub-hosted tin: Aggressively rips Apple Intelligence out of macOS, disabling most of its AI features and removing downloaded
  
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• FBI confirms 'multiple' arrests related to ShinyHunters hack

  05-10-2026 19:46 via theregister.com
  
  The FBI and law enforcement partners have arrested “multiple” suspects as part of an investigation into a September hack allegedly involving data-theft-and-extortion group ShinyHunters, the bureau told The Register. “The bureau continues to aggressively investigate the recent cyber incident allegedly involving ShinyHunters, having already worked with partners to arrest multiple subjects and we will spare no resource in bringing each of the responsible individuals to justice,&rd
  
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