Sci-Tech news

• Rumbling sounds in magma could help predict eruptions

  23-02-2018 17:27 via dailymail.co.uk
  
  Researchers at Stanford, Boise State and Concepcion Universities analysed low sounds frequencies detected by monitoring stations on the slopes of the Villarica volcano in southern Chile.
  
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• Schneider gives datacenter switchgear the software-defined treatment

  29-09-2026 17:15 via theregister.com
  
  Schneider Electric is piloting software-defined medium voltage (MV) switchgear with Equinix, promising faster datacenter construction and electrical systems where you can add new capabilities without having to modify the hardware. The energy infrastructure biz unveiled its software-defined MV architecture along with other new power products at the YOTTA 2026 digital infrastructure event in Las Vegas. Switchgear controls and protects the flow of electricity through a facility, isolating faulty eq
  
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• Apple patches CoreGraphics zero-day already exploited in targeted attacks

  29-09-2026 16:30 via theregister.com
  
  Apple has patched a CoreGraphics zero-day after warning that attackers may already have used the bug to compromise a small number of carefully chosen targets. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-86950, is an out-of-bounds write flaw in CoreGraphics, Apple's framework for handling graphics across its operating systems. According to Apple's advisory, processing a maliciously crafted file could allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code on a vulnerable device. The fruity vendor said it addresse
  
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• OpenAI benches GPT-6.1 Astra for overstepping the mark

  29-09-2026 15:43 via theregister.com
  
  OpenAI has killed off the planned release of GPT-6.1 Astra after the model got better at doggedly pursuing tasks but worse at knowing when it should stop. The decision means the model won't get its planned October release after falling short of OpenAI's safety and alignment requirements. OpenAI confirmed the decision to The Register, saying its research and safety bosses ultimately decided this particular Astra was better left on the bench. The problem, according to the AI lab, was partly an awk
  
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• Leaked IPO docs: Anthropic tempts investors with existential risk warning

  29-09-2026 14:53 via theregister.com
  
  After an unusual pitch to investors, Anthropic has laid bare its challenges in becoming anything like a profitable, normal business in its IPO prospectus.Posing an “existential risk to humanity” was among the messages reportedly intended to allure investors, as if to say, “We could make you rich, but also you might not live spend it.” The Reg has long suspected the apocalyptic schtick which has become de rigueur among AI model builders is suspiciously self-serving. It foc
  
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• Investors are pricing in a 32.6% AI productivity boost for software engineers

  29-09-2026 14:30 via theregister.com
  
  Investors appear to be betting that AI will deliver substantial gains in software engineering productivity, according to economists who used stock market movements to estimate the technology's expected impact. Economists affiliated with the University of California, Berkeley (UCB) and the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) say that between November 2022 and December 2025, "AI increased the market's expected present value of software engineering productivity by the equivalent
  
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• The Matterhorn is snow-free: Shocking images reveal how the mountain - famously featured on Toblerone packaging - is bare amid autumn heat

  29-09-2026 14:22 via dailymail.com
  
  Shocking images have revealed that the Matterhorn is snow-free amid Europe's sweltering early autumn heat.
  
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• Starship finally makes orbit but engine trouble cuts the victory lap short

  29-09-2026 14:01 via theregister.com
  
  SpaceX's Starship reached orbit for the first time yesterday and deployed 26 Starlink V3 satellites, although engine trouble cut short a planned six-orbit flight. Super Heavy had problems of its own. All 33 Raptor 3 engines ignited at 07:48 CT, but one shut down during ascent. The booster later reignited 26 of the 28 engines planned for its boostback maneuver. During descent, it reignited 11 of the planned 13 engines for the high-thrust portion of its landing burn before stepping down to five an
  
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• Former X-Force hackers chase the offensive cyber gold rush

  29-09-2026 13:30 via theregister.com
  
  Two former leaders of IBM's X-Force Red team have launched RemoteThreat, an offensive cybersecurity startup backed by $7 million in pre-seed funding. CEO Chris Thompson and CTO Shawn Jones say the company's platform uses AI to plan, execute, and adapt offensive cyber operations, extending beyond the continuous penetration testing and vulnerability detection offered by other automated security tools. Thompson and Jones previously ran X-Force Red, where their team was hired to test nuclear power p
  
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• Healthcare campaigners turn up the heat on Palantir at Labour conference

  29-09-2026 13:05 via theregister.com
  
  Campaigners against Palantir's involvement in the UK's health sector are set to make themselves heard this week with planned protests at the Labour Party conference and in London. Health justice charity MedAct and medical campaign group Just Treatment are coordinating a protest at the ruling party's annual conference in Liverpool as ministers consider whether to extend the NHS's contract with the US spy-tech company. The groups are among those urging the government not to extend the Palantir-led
  
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• Dutch police arrest 'security pro' in ShinyHunters probe

  29-09-2026 12:41 via theregister.com
  
  Dutch police have arrested a 24-year-old man on suspicion of involvement with the prolific ShinyHunters cybercrime group. Cops announced the arrest on Monday night and said the Amsterdam resident would appear before judges at Rotterdam District Court today (Tuesday). Officers have not named the suspect. However, a company has identified a person they believe to be the suspect as working for them as an offensive security lead. Dutch broadcaster RTL and other newswires have also published a name.
  
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• Redmond to millions of Power BI users: You’re Fabric app devs now

  29-09-2026 12:00 via theregister.com
  
  Microsoft is pushing its data analytics and engineering environment to a new set of commercial users that are an “order of magnitude” greater than its current base. Power BI has become a popular biz intelligence system - with more than 425,000 customers worldwide - particularly among customers of the Microsoft Dynamics application portfolio. Now, Microsoft execs are trying to exploit this penetration by offering Power BI customers high-end database services and app building tools ava
  
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• The first face of mankind? Ancient human who lived 315,000 years ago is brought back to life in stunning digital reconstruction

  29-09-2026 11:44 via dailymail.com
  
  After spending more than 300,000 years hidden in the ground beneath Morocco, an ancient ancestor has been brought back to life thanks to a stunning digital reconstruction.
  
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• What eldritch horror lurks behind Heathrow's information screens?

  29-09-2026 11:15 via theregister.com
  
  Airport departure boards are supposed to tell passengers where and when their flights will leave. Recent examples spotted by eagle-eyed Reg readers have offered some bonus information: a Windows activation reminder, dates from the past, and a glimpse of what appears to be Windows 7 beneath the signage software. Airport borks, it seems, are like buses: three have arrived in quick succession at Heathrow. The first display shows a Windows activation watermark behind a list of departures to glamorou
  
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• iPhone 18 Pro buyers claim Apple's £1,199 smartphone is changing COLOUR - just weeks after going on sale

  29-09-2026 11:13 via dailymail.com
  
  It's been less than a month since Apple launched the new iPhone 18 Pro, but customers are already claiming that their new phones are changing colour.
  
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• HMRC bets up to £2.4B on Salesforce for taxpayer CRM overhaul

  29-09-2026 10:30 via theregister.com
  
  Salesforce has won a contract worth up to £2.4 billion including VAT to provide the UK tax collector with CRM software and related services for at least ten years. HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) selected Salesforce to supply a software-as-a-service CRM platform and related capabilities including customer and case management, marketing campaigns, messaging, reporting, analytics, and AI. Additional functions, including identity verification, fraud detection, and data integration, may be sup
  
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• Which copy of the file is the real one?

  29-09-2026 10:00 via theregister.com
  
  EVENT: Somewhere in your organisation right now, somebody is trying to work out which of four copies of a file is the current one. They will probably get it right, after twenty minutes and a message to a colleague in another time zone, and nobody will log the twenty minutes. That is what it costs to run distributed teams on file infrastructure built for an office, and most organisations have stopped noticing. The NAS is still there. So is the VPN, and so is the habit of downloading a file to wor
  
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• Fresh CSS constructs move web design beyond ticky-tacky little boxes

  29-09-2026 08:32 via theregister.com
  
  The World Wide Web’s decades-long tyranny of box design is finally coming to an end. A new set of CSS features – including the shape() function, and the border-shape and corner-shape properties – offers web designers and their AI agents a broader palette for laying out content in a more fluid manner. When the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) published its first standard for web page layout in 1996, web sites emulated the grid-defined layouts of academic papers, newspapers, and m
  
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• Google ending ChromeOS support two years early

  29-09-2026 06:55 via theregister.com
  
  Google’s basic mathematical skills appear a little fragile, after the company revealed its promise of ten years of support for new Chromebooks will only last for eight years. The web giant’s calculation problem appeared in a support document titled “What the Googlebook announcement means for your ChromeOS devices.” Googlebooks are the big G’s replacement for Chromebooks, the web-centric computers it launched in 2011 and which run ChromeOS. Chromebooks have won plent
  
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• Elon Musk Predicts AI Will Beat All Fields by 2028

  29-09-2026 05:55 via technocracy.news
  
  Musk might be right. My AI Capability Multiplier currently stands at 65.5: it will exceed 120 by year-end 2026, 3,100 by the end of 2027, and 45,000 by the end of 2028. This started at 1 on January 1, 2025, just before Trump was inaugurated. AI development is going parabolic even as we speak, sending the world into a state of Future Shock, as Alvin & Heidi Toffler predicted in 1970. ⁃ Patrick Wood, Editor.Elon Musk has predicted that AI may outperform humans in every field by 2028. Mus
  
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• OpenAI’s dirty deeds Down Under included security bypass attempts, using exposed keys, source code siphon

  29-09-2026 04:13 via theregister.com
  
  OpenAI has detailed the extent of the dirty deeds its agents indulged in Down Under in a Tuesday blog post titled How we will do better for Australia, which addresses last week’s news that one of its models improperly accessed a website that stores data related to national health scheme Medicare. “Our models accessed Australian government websites in ways they were not authorised to,” the post opens. “We also should have handled our response better. We are sorry and worki
  
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• AMD bets $8.2B that worlds matter more than words in AI

  29-09-2026 00:01 via theregister.com
  
  AMD dove deeper into AI model development on Monday with an agreement to acquire Fei-Fei Li's World Labs in a deal valued at approximately $8.2 billion. The House of Zen claims the all-stock deal is expected to close by year's end pending regulatory approval, and will guide the development of future AI hardware, software, and systems. "Building the compute platforms for the next generation of AI requires a deep understanding of how models are evolving," AMD CEO Lisa Su said in a canned statement
  
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• AWS needs to embrace its place as the Home Depot of AI infrastructure

  28-09-2026 23:05 via theregister.com
  
  Historically, building an application on top of AWS felt less like buying well-thought-out products, and more like a trip to Home Depot. This was great in an era before we had computers that would handle the "bolting all the parts together for us" parts, but increasingly it's starting to feel a lot more dated. Today, you can use Railway, Vercel (itself a platform built atop AWS), CloudFlare, and a host of other next-generation providers who will no doubt attempt to show up self promotionally in
  
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• Eating two slices of deli meat a day linked to 52% higher risk of dementia, study finds

  28-09-2026 22:41 via dailymail.com
  
  Eating just two slices of deli meat each day could raise your risk of developing dementia and cognitive decline, a massive review from researchers across 26 institutions has suggested.
  
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• JadePuffer crims hijacked Azure identities and used them to blow up cloud resources

  28-09-2026 22:30 via theregister.com
  
  The cyber criminal behind JadePuffer, the first known agentic ransomware infection reported over the summer, has also used stolen Azure identities to conduct destructive attacks on cloud storage and other resources, according to Microsoft. In July, Sysdig threat hunters uncovered JadePuffer, the first-ever documented agentic ransomware infection in which an LLM drove the entire extortion operation, from gaining initial access to compromising a production database server and destroying data. Now
  
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• Mysterious 'UFO' spotted on SpaceX livestream sparks wild alien theories: 'Looks like a mothership'

  28-09-2026 21:52 via dailymail.com
  
  A mysterious object was seen on SpaceX's livestream of its Starship rocket on Monday. Many viewers suggested it was a UFO, with some saying it was the size of a mothership.
  
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• OpenAI GPT-6 Astra really good at supply chain attacks, UK gov warns

  28-09-2026 21:44 via theregister.com
  
  Another LLM has joined the hacking fray. OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra has been spotted performing unsolicited supply chain attacks during security evaluations, according to the UK Artificial Intelligence Security Institute. In such simulations, the model has its standard security classifiers turned off. Nonetheless, Astra was seen attempting undesirable actions more frequently than prior models. "In our simulations, we found that GPT-6 Astra conducted a range of unsanctioned attack activities, and did s
  
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• French dev aims to solve bots' blindness so they can understand GUIs

  28-09-2026 20:19 via theregister.com
  
  Most LLMs are great at answering prompts, but fall short when it comes to navigating around the desktop in Windows or Linux. French AI model dev H unveiled a pair of computer use models on Monday aimed at handling graphical user interfaces (GUIs). Throughout computing history, computer use largely falls into three categories: command line interfaces (CLIs), application programming interfaces (APIs), and GUIs. AI agents can easily plug into the first two, but navigating desktop environments and a
  
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• How many times are you paying for the same file?

  28-09-2026 18:45 via theregister.com
  
  EVENT: Count the copies. The one on the NAS. The one somebody pulled over the VPN to work on at home. The one in the sync folder, which may or may not still match the one on the NAS. The one attached to an email because the sync was slow that morning. Four copies of one file, four places paying to store it, and one person, eventually, working out which is current. That is the cost most organizations have stopped noticing. Distributed teams produce more unstructured file data than ever, and most
  
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• Massive SpaceX rocket explodes in a fireball as it hits ocean following test flight

  28-09-2026 18:34 via dailymail.com
  
  SpaceX's Starship, the most powerful rocket in the world, exploded moments after slamming into the Pacific Ocean following an orbital flight on Monday.
  
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