Sci-Tech news

• Philips to replace bricked Hue Bridge Pro devices

  13-07-2026 17:50 via theregister.com
  
  Philips is replacing Hue Bridge Pro devices after a software update left several units bricked with no way for users to restore them. Rumblings began in forums in June after a seemingly innocuous update left users, quite literally, in the dark. After a few weeks attempting to resolve the issues, Philips has thrown in the towel and said it will replace affected devices. A spokesperson told The Register, "We have identified a firmware issue affecting a limited number of Philips Hue Bridge Pro devi
  
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• 'The bots are alive!' Jailbroken Gemini spun up new C2 server for Russian fraudster in just 6 minutes

  14-07-2026 14:15 via theregister.com
  
  EXCLUSIVE A jailbroken Google Gemini did 90 percent of the work in a credential- and cryptocurrency-stealing spree, including spinning up a new command-and-control (C2) server in just six minutes, according to a TrendAI report shared exclusively with The Register. The human behind the heist – a solo Russian-speaking miscreant known as “bandcampro” – acted as the manager of the cyber-fraud operation, which targeted hardcore Trump supporters and conspiracy theorists. Meanwh
  
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• Scientists reveal the most attractive facial features in men and women - and David Gandy and Margot Robbie are the closest real-life examples

  14-07-2026 14:01 via dailymail.com
  
  They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder - but scientists believe they have identified the facial features most people find irresistible.
  
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• Hands off our VPNs, privacy groups tell UK ministers

  14-07-2026 13:59 via theregister.com
  
  Privacy campaigners, browser makers, and VPN providers have united to warn the UK government against restricting virtual private networks, saying age-gating the technology would weaken online security while doing little to stop kids dodging social media bans. The Open Rights Group on Tuesday published an open letter signed by more than 20 organizations, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, ExpressVPN, the Internet Society, Mozilla, Mullvad, Proton, and the Tor Project. It urges minister
  
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• A-head of the game! England is the most dangerous team in the AIR at the World Cup - with impressively accurate headers, study reveals

  14-07-2026 13:10 via dailymail.com
  
  Scientists from Northeastern University have analysed the headers performed by teams at the World Cup so far.
  
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• Baddies caught exploiting extensions bugs with perfect 10 scores on vulnerable Joomla websites

  14-07-2026 13:06 via theregister.com
  
  CISA has added two critical Joomla extension bugs to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog after attackers were caught exploiting both flaws to upload malicious code onto vulnerable websites. The newly listed bugs affect iCagenda, an events calendar extension for the open source Joomla content management system, and Balbooa Forms, a popular form builder used to collect contact requests, registrations, surveys, and file uploads. Joomla powers roughly 1.2 percent of all websites – arou
  
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• WhatsApp has quietly introduced a new message animation that has left users FURIOUS - as one vents 'there has to be some way to get rid of that'

  14-07-2026 12:39 via dailymail.com
  
  The Meta-owned app has quietly introduced a new animation for sent message bubbles.
  
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• Frame: A new X11 server – implemented directly in assembly

  14-07-2026 12:37 via theregister.com
  
  Wayland is dominating the recent news about FOSS GUIs – even dignified elder Xfce’s official support is getting close. However, X11 is very much not dead yet, and new developments keep appearing. Last week, Norwegian FOSS developer Geir Isene announced his all-new server for the venerable X11 display protocol. Its description is in the title of the announcement post: Frame - the first Linux Assembly X server. Isene explains his motivation thus: “On my quest to own my software,
  
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• WhatsApp has made a subtle change that has left users FURIOUS - as one vents 'there has to be some way to get rid of that'

  14-07-2026 12:18 via dailymail.com
  
  The Meta-owned app has quietly introduced a new animation for sent message bubbles.
  
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• India's crewed space mission is ready for splashdown, but not launch

  14-07-2026 11:57 via theregister.com
  
  Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has successfully tested systems it plans to use on the nation's first crewed space mission, but when that mission will launch remains a mystery. ISRO's crewed mission program, "Gaganyaan," is intended to carry astronauts on a rocket called the Human-Rated Launch Vehicle Mark 3 (HLVM3) into orbit. The space agency has already launched the cargo-rated version of the three-stage LVM3 rocket nine times and has a perfect success rate. When India launches huma
  
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• 'Franken-trout' are infesting Scottish lochs: Artificially enlarged fish are 20 TIMES heavier than normal

  14-07-2026 11:56 via dailymail.com
  
  Artificially enlarged 'Franken-trout' that have ballooned to 20 times their usual weight are taking over Scottish lochs, activists claim.
  
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• Trying to beat the heat? Scientists claim applying YOGHURT to the outside of your windows can cool your home by as much as 3.5°C

  14-07-2026 11:18 via dailymail.com
  
  Dr Ben Roberts, a senior lecturer in healthy buildings at Loughborough University, claims Brits should apply yoghurt to the outside of their windows.
  
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• How do you solve a problem like Capita?

  14-07-2026 11:14 via theregister.com
  
  OPINION Capita's share price tanked 9 percent last week after it told investors it was taking a hit on its contract with the UK government's Civil Service Pension Scheme (CSPS), which has left some of its 1.7 million members unpaid following a disastrous launch. A trading update said operating profit would be down between £25 million and £40 million in 2026 as a result. Sage voices were soon on hand to calm fears, though. "The scale of the reaction sits oddly with the contract's mode
  
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• Ministers arm under-16s social media ban with least surprising study of the year

  14-07-2026 10:30 via theregister.com
  
  Whitehall has spent time and taxpayer money confirming that teenagers who spend less time on social media tend to be happier, better rested, and more willing to interact with the people sitting in the same house. Ministers say the government-backed trial strengthens the case for their planned ban on social media access for under-16s after providing real-world evidence that cutting back on apps does exactly what parents have been saying for years. The study followed more than 300 families across
  
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• Why your flights are getting bumpier: Experts reveal the surprising reason severe turbulence has soared by 55 per cent

  14-07-2026 09:39 via dailymail.com
  
  The seatbelt sign is staying on for longer. New research shows severe turbulence has jumped. Here's why your next flight could be a rougher ride.
  
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• Anthropic's extravagant tokenizer complicates AI pricing

  14-07-2026 08:28 via theregister.com
  
  Claude looks substantially more token-hungry than OpenAI's GPT-5.x, thanks to the new tokenizer that Anthropic shipped with recent releases. Large language models (LLMs) use tokenizers to handle the mapping of text into tokens. There's no set definition of a token, but they're typically a set of three or four characters that are mapped to the integers LLMs actually process. Tokens have become the basic economic unit for billing use of AI models. Because the slicing of words into tokens and the t
  
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• Big Blue thinks small, again, with POWER tower

  14-07-2026 07:01 via theregister.com
  
  IBM has again teased small hardware, this time in the form of an update for its smallest POWER server. The model S1112, teased Tuesday in a customer announcement, is a 2U, single-socket POWER11 server IBM offers in rack-mountable and what the company calls “Tower/deskside configuration.” The rackable model can handle a ten-core POWER processor. The Tower/deskside form factor machine must make do with a four-core engine IBM seems to have two roles in mind for the new machines: edge de
  
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• Big Blue thinks small, again, with 2U POWER tower

  14-07-2026 07:01 via theregister.com
  
  IBM has again teased small hardware, this time in the form of an update for its smallest POWER server. The model S1112, teased Tuesday in a customer announcement, is a 2U, single-socket POWER11 server IBM offers in rack-mountable and what the company calls “Tower/deskside configuration.” The rackable model can handle a ten-core POWER processor. The Tower/deskside form factor machine must make do with a four-core engine IBM seems to have two roles in mind for the new machines: edge de
  
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• India’s tech services giant HCL is getting into the AI datacenter business

  14-07-2026 04:18 via theregister.com
  
  Indian tech services giant and retro software house HCL has decided to get into the AI datacenter business. The company yesterday revealed its plan in an announcement [PDF] released alongside its Q1 results, which included news of three-percent year-over-year revenue growth to $3.65 billion and 20 percent growth in net income which reached $488 million. CEO C. Vijayakumar also pointed to 62 percent year-over-year revenue growth for a segment HCL calls “Advanced AI” that encompasses b
  
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• Gobi X: Creating more energy for AI, not taking it from society

  14-07-2026 03:00 via theregister.com
  
  The hardest problem in AI is no longer the chip but the megawatt. For much of the past three years, the global AI race has focused on semiconductors, with governments competing for advanced chips, technology outfits scrambling to secure GPUs, and investors pouring billions into ever larger datacenters. Yet the binding constraint has shifted from compute to the power required to run it. For anyone trying to energize a new AI cluster today, the bottleneck is rarely silicon; it is grid access, inte
  
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• Zuck's AI ambitions put Meta on course to become America's next big cloud provider

  14-07-2026 01:37 via theregister.com
  
  Meta seems to be having a bit of an identity crisis. On Monday, the social networking singularity said it would spend $50 billion to expand its Hyperion datacenter project in Richland Parish, Louisiana, from 2.2 to 5 gigawatts. The news comes less than a week after a report broke claiming that Meta was actively exploring options to offload its excess compute capacity to other AI labs. So, which is it, Zuck? Did you invest too much or too little in AI? The easy answer is that Meta overcommitted.
  
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• Zig creator calls Bun’s Claude Rust rewrite ‘unreviewed slop’

  14-07-2026 01:21 via theregister.com
  
  An AI rewrite of a popular Anthropic-owned JavaScript runtime and toolchain has sparked praise for the speed of its execution, but also criticism of the coding practices behind the project itself. Last week, Bun creator Jarred Sumner announced that he ported Bun from the Zig programming language to Rust in only 11 days, using a fleet of Claude agents running in parallel. The work cost an estimated $165,000 at API pricing, suggesting that software revisions previously considered too large to unde
  
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• What? Most AI Is Now Written by AI?

  14-07-2026 00:24 via technocracy.news
  
  For the better part of the last two years, I have been tracking what appeared to be a reasonably predictable pattern in AI development: a doubling of capability roughly every 3.5 months. That figure came from METR’s time horizon benchmarks — measurements of how long an AI agent can work autonomously on a task before failing. Early 2024 through early 2026, the data held with uncomfortable consistency. If you plotted it, the curve bent upward with almost mechanical precision.
  I say &ld
  
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• What? Most AI Is Now Written by — AI?

  14-07-2026 00:24 via technocracy.news
  
  For the better part of the last two years, I have been tracking what appeared to be a reasonably predictable pattern in AI development: a doubling of capability roughly every 3.5 months. That figure came from METR’s time horizon benchmarks — measurements of how long an AI agent can work autonomously on a task before failing. Early 2024 through early 2026, the data held with uncomfortable consistency. If you plotted it, the curve bent upward with almost mechanical precision.
  I say &ld
  
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• What? Most AI Is Now Written by… AI

  14-07-2026 00:24 via technocracy.news
  
  Check the counter to the right ==>
  For the better part of the last two years, I have been tracking what appeared to be a reasonably predictable pattern in AI development: a doubling of capability roughly every 3.5 months. That figure came from METR’s time horizon benchmarks — measurements of how long an AI agent can work autonomously on a task before failing. Early 2024 through early 2026, the data held with uncomfortable consistency. If you plotted it, the curve bent upward with
  
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• Biggest great white shark ever recorded in Atlantic resurfaces after vanishing for months

  13-07-2026 23:13 via dailymail.com
  
  A gigantic great white shark that disappeared near the East Coast three months ago has been spotted again as thousands of its fellow predators near US beaches.
  
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• Excel competition goes extreme, makes spreadsheet geeks compete from the street

  13-07-2026 22:18 via theregister.com
  
  The Excel games have gone extreme, tossing four top competitors into urban wilds around the world in a one-off battle, which reigning champion Diarmuid Early won at the last minute. Irish phenom Early captured the win in the Microsoft Excel World Championship’s (MEWC) inaugural Landmark Battle over the weekend after a last-minute comeback that saw him take down Andrew Ngai by a mere 40 points (1060 to 1020) in the 30-minute contest. Jaq Kennedy and Nicolas Micot made up the back half of th
  
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• Wildfire raging south of Paris could have been set deliberately, says minister

  13-07-2026 22:15 via bbc.co.uk
  
  The interior minister has said the fire near Paris could have been set deliberately and two people have been arrested.
  
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• Apple issues warning to all iPhone owners as criminals weaponize FaceTime to drain bank accounts... here's how to stay safe

  13-07-2026 21:42 via dailymail.com
  
  Apple has issued a new warning to all iPhone users, alerting them to a fast-growing scam that is draining victims' bank accounts.
  
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• The price is wrong: AI cost calculation has to consider task completion rates, not just token costs

  13-07-2026 21:26 via theregister.com
  
  When it comes to AI services, you don't necessarily get what you pay for. It turns out that AI models with expensive tokens may cost less than models with cheap tokens for particular tasks. And the tooling attached to those models can have a significant effect on cost and output quality. Databricks, which sells data analytics software and services, recently devised an internal coding benchmark to assess the tradeoff between price and performance using various AI models. Matei Zaharia, CTO of Dat
  
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