Sci-Tech news

• Scientists switch on 'artificial sun' in German lab

  23-03-2017 18:17 via dailymail.co.uk
  
  The giant honeycomb-like structure is based near Cologne, Germany and known as the 'Synlight' experiment. It uses 149 large spotlights normally found in cinemas to simulate sunlight.
  
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• Researchers used Claude to hack OpenAI employees' ChatGPT accounts

  18-09-2026 19:16 via theregister.com
  
  Talk about your competitor getting through the door. Security researchers used Anthropic's Claude to help hack into OpenAI employees’ ChatGPT accounts. A trio of bug hunters researching frontier AI labs’ security weaknesses chained two vulnerabilities to take over multiple OpenAI employees’ ChatGPT accounts, then used that access to demonstrate they could reach an internal OpenAI repository by opening a harmless pull request. The entire timeline, from initial discovery to acces
  
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• North Korea's fake job interviews infected 30,000 devices

  18-09-2026 18:53 via theregister.com
  
  North Korea's employment scams work both ways. As well as placing fraudulent IT workers inside Western companies, regime-backed cybercriminals have posed as recruiters to infect more than 30,000 devices and steal over $10 million, according to an international advisory. Law enforcement and cybersecurity agencies from Australia, Germany, Japan, and the US issued an update on the campaign on Thursday. They said the attackers had compromised more than 7,000 cryptocurrency wallets and stolen funds t
  
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• FBI: Fake cop and government impersonation scams cost victims $1.6B

  18-09-2026 18:19 via theregister.com
  
  Scammers impersonating law enforcement or government officials have cost victims more than $1.6 billion since January 2025, the FBI reports. The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) received close to 61,000 complaints of this type between January 2025 and July 2026, putting the average per-complaint loss at more than $26,000. The most common type of scam is one involving criminals convincing targets to pay a sum of money to remove charges the fraudsters claim were filed against them
  
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• Admins, you've been warned: The clock is ticking on Edge's IE Mode

  18-09-2026 17:29 via theregister.com
  
  Microsoft has reminded administrators that Internet Explorer mode in Edge is guaranteed support only through 2029, so it is time to get those legacy migrations moving. Internet Explorer mode lets enterprises continue using legacy websites within Edge rather than relying on the retired Internet Explorer browser. It uses the Trident MSHTML engine from Internet Explorer 11 and permits elements such as ActiveX controls, although other Internet Explorer functionality, such as custom toolbars, is not
  
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• KDE turns 30 and someone's brought an AI-native desktop proposal

  18-09-2026 16:25 via theregister.com
  
  KDE's annual conference takes place this weekend at Graz University of Technology in Austria, with an AI-native desktop proposal likely to divide attendees. The KDE project is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year, giving delegates at the Akademy conference in Graz another reason to raise a glass. The conference begins on Saturday, September 19, and registration remains open. Although Xfce 1.0 appeared slightly earlier, its initial releases were proprietary, making what was originally known
  
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• Microsoft fixes the fix that broke Excel paste – partly

  18-09-2026 15:22 via theregister.com
  
  Microsoft has issued a partial fix for the Excel bug that causes paste operations to fail. The hotfix applies only to Excel 2016, and Microsoft warns that pasting may still fail in workbooks containing conditional formatting. Earlier in September, Microsoft released a security update for Excel to address remote code execution and information disclosure vulnerabilities. It later acknowledged that the update had introduced another problem: "In Microsoft Excel 2024, 2021, 2019, and 2016, the paste
  
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• The ideal database for AI agents doesn't exist yet, says Percona CEO

  18-09-2026 14:34 via theregister.com
  
  INTERVIEW Percona CEO Peter Farkas reckons AI caught the database industry off guard and that agentic workloads may eventually require a new kind of database – once anyone works out what those workloads actually need. Farkas spoke to The Register at the company's Percona Live event in Amsterdam, where members of the often-fractious open source database community gathered to discuss best practices, case studies, and the future. Percona provides software and support across a growing range of
  
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• Former Labour deputy Tom Watson joins Palantir as £330M NHS deal nears break point

  18-09-2026 13:48 via theregister.com
  
  Former Labour deputy leader Tom Watson has taken a senior UK role at Palantir as the government considers whether to invoke a break clause in the US spy-tech company's controversial £330 million National Health Service (NHS) contract. The appointment is the latest high-profile example of Palantir recruiting from British politics and public service as it seeks to expand its government business. Palantir chief executive Alex Karp said in a statement: "This is just the latest chapter of Tom's
  
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• Have we all been wearing our AirPods wrong? Apple fans claim sporting the wireless earphones upside down and in the opposite ears results in better sound quality

  18-09-2026 13:14 via dailymail.com
  
  They're some of the most popular earphones in the world. But if you use AirPods, you might want to rethink how you wear them.
  
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• KPMG tech cuts come with a severance sum some staff call insulting

  18-09-2026 12:32 via theregister.com
  
  KPMG UK is laying off staff from the Tech and Data areas of its Advisory division and offering severance terms that one affected employee described as "insulting and disgraceful." The job cuts, affecting about 4 percent of the Advisory staff, were announced internally in July. Affected workers in the AI, Cyber, SAP, and Testing teams are scheduled to leave the consulting business next month. Insiders have now shared with The Register details of the payments offered to those set to depart. The pr
  
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• Has Queen Nefertiti finally been found? New scans provide fresh evidence for a hidden chamber beyond Tutankhamun's tomb that could hold the remains of his long-lost stepmother

  18-09-2026 12:26 via dailymail.com
  
  Archaeologists believe they may have uncovered a secret hiding behind the walls of Tutankhamun's tomb.
  
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• British Army spends £16M on 1,000 pocket-sized eyes in the sky

  18-09-2026 11:29 via theregister.com
  
  The British Army is buying more than 1,000 small drones for battlefield surveillance and training under contracts worth £16 million ($21 million). The Ministry of Defence (MoD) says the new portfolio of "spy" drones will give soldiers better battlefield intelligence and protection. The MoD is procuring the drones through three UK-based small and medium-sized companies, although some of the technology comes from overseas. Two models are intended for surveillance, while the third will prepar
  
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• Is the 6pm eating rule a total myth? Nutritionist reveals the truth about late-night dinners and weight loss

  18-09-2026 11:26 via dailymail.com
  
  Nutrition expert Emma Bardwell insists that this on-trend belief deserves a reality check.
  
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• Now that's what you call mind-blowing! The human brain is TWO separate organs, scientists reveal

  18-09-2026 11:17 via dailymail.com
  
  Rather than being a single, unified organ, scientists from Stanford Medicine now say the human brain consists of two ancient nervous systems, cleverly packagaed together.
  
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• Royal Society slams UK.gov science shake-up

  18-09-2026 10:30 via theregister.com
  
  The president of the Royal Society has slammed the government’s decision to move science policy from the department also covering technology to the business department. In changes announced after Andy Burnham became UK Prime Minister in July, the government abolished the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) – created by former Conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak – and split its responsibilities among other ministries. The Department for Culture, Media an
  
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• iPhone 18 Pro goes on sale around the world: Huge queues form outside Apple Stores in Kuala Lumpur, Sydney and Singapore - while scalpers set their sights on shoppers in Hangzhou

  18-09-2026 09:33 via dailymail.com
  
  Photos from Kuala Lumpur, Sydney, and Singapore show crowds of people jostling to be the first to get their hands on the new iPhones.
  
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• Revealed: The popular children's yoghurts that contain dangerous amounts of sugar - with Nestle's Smarties Vanilla Split Pot at the top of the list

  18-09-2026 09:03 via dailymail.com
  
  Experts from Action on Salt & Sugar have revealed the popular options that contain dangerous amounts of sugar.
  
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• Techie fixed Wi-Fi dead zone with a drill

  18-09-2026 08:30 via theregister.com
  
  Welcome to another edition of On Call, The Register's reader-contributed column that celebrates the fine art of tech support. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Eddy," the one-person IT department for an assisted living company. "I have had quite a bit of trouble creating a stable Wi-Fi network," he admitted to On Call. "The space is crowded with multiple networks because seemingly every other resident has their own router blasting Wi-Fi throughout the building," he explained. After ext
  
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• On Call: Techie fixed Wi-Fi dead zone with a drill

  18-09-2026 08:30 via theregister.com
  
  ON CALL Welcome to another edition of On Call, The Register's reader-contributed column that celebrates the fine art of tech support. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Eddy," the one-person IT department for an assisted living company. "I have had quite a bit of trouble creating a stable Wi-Fi network," he admitted to On Call. "The space is crowded with multiple networks because seemingly every other resident has their own router blasting Wi-Fi throughout the building," he explained. A
  
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• AI risks make some insurers wary of corporate liability

  18-09-2026 07:33 via theregister.com
  
  If AI does end up killing us all, or just compounds our daily havoc, the insurance industry would rather not pay the bill. "AI-related harms are already emerging, including incorrect or misleading outputs, deepfakes, privacy violations, intellectual property disputes, fraud, product defects, and discriminatory decisions," observes the RAND Corporation, a non-profit research think tank, in a newly issued report. "These harms create demand for insurance but do not fit neatly within existing insura
  
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• AWS confesses its console causes cloudy confusion for new users

  18-09-2026 06:52 via theregister.com
  
  Amazon Web Services does a lot of things right, but the cloud giant’s user console is arguably not one of them. Which may be why it’s just created an easier alternative for new users. In a Wednesday post, Senior Solutions Architect Micah Walter said that when AWS launched its earliest storage, compute, and queuing services, “anyone with an idea could start building.” Over the years, AWS added more services, and more options, making its console and overall UI quite complex
  
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• USA’s Venezuela takeover comes with bonus exposure to Chinese AI surveillance tech

  18-09-2026 04:28 via theregister.com
  
  Think tank the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) has warned that Venezuela is poised to adopt Chinese AI systems to enhance surveillance systems that already rely on Middle Kingdom tech, and called for US Secretary of State Marco Rubio to do something about it. ASPI outlined the Venezuelan situation in a recent report [PDF], titled Warning signals: Venezuela and the risk of Chinese AI-enabled digital authoritarianism. The document explains that Venezuela’s government built a sur
  
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• Marvell pushes GlobalFoundries to light up wafer production

  18-09-2026 01:16 via theregister.com
  
  Earlier this year, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang suggested that Marvell’s optics tech would make it the next trillion-dollar company. On Thursday, Marvell took a big step towards securing that status by announcing an expanded partnership with GlobalFoundries, an American wafer fab well known for its work in silicon photonics manufacturing. The tie-up will see GloFo and Marvell work to expand silicon germanium (SiGe) wafer production at the fab’s Burlington, Vermont wafer plant. SiGe is com
  
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• AI coding agents' 0-click RCE flaw could hand attackers keys to the kingdom

  18-09-2026 00:42 via theregister.com
  
  A zero-click vulnerability that allows remote code execution affects all of the major AI coding agents - Anthropic’s Claude Code, OpenAI’s Codex, Google's Gemini CLI, Microsoft’s Copilot, and Microsoft-owned GitHub Copilot - and could give attackers full access to every asset and piece of data that the agent can reach, researchers say. The exploit, dubbed “Plugin4Shell,” is a “first-of-its-kind AI supply-chain attack,” according to threat hunters at Air,
  
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• Huawei's next-gen Ascend NPUs could become China's best option

  17-09-2026 23:07 via theregister.com
  
  At its annual Connect conference, Huawei unveiled a new generation of AI accelerators that promise performance far beyond anything Nvidia can currently sell in the Middle Kingdom. This could be a boon for Chinese developers used to purchasing lesser weapons from everyone's favorite AI arms dealer. If that weren’t enough, the chip, codenamed the Ascend 960DT — the DT here apparently stands for decode/training — is slated to arrive a full three quarters ahead of schedule, launchi
  
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• DoE seeking fault-tolerant quantum computer ... by 2028

  17-09-2026 22:09 via theregister.com
  
  The US Department of Energy hopes to spur creation of something no one has yet realized: a fault-tolerant, scientifically relevant quantum computer, and to do it within a couple of years with relatively little federal funding upfront. The DoE announced its Quantum Genesis Q Competition, an initiative that it said in a request for applications on the program’s opportunity site aims to produce a first-generation fault tolerant, scientifically relevant quantum computer (SRQC) by 2028. If that
  
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• Researchers find way to listen in on headphones from afar

  17-09-2026 21:36 via theregister.com
  
  Researchers based in China have devised a way to eavesdrop on signals handled by analog components in devices such as headphones, landline handsets, and smart devices by injecting electromagnetic (EM) signals. The technique, referred to as InjectEave, is not simply listening in on a low-frequency analog signal. It's an EM side-channel attack that overcomes one of the longstanding barriers to exploiting EM leakage: the faintness of RF signals in devices like headphones makes it difficult for adve
  
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• Stripe Is Building the Toll Road for the Machine Economy

  17-09-2026 20:36 via technocracy.news
  
  Most Americans know Stripe as the checkout box on a website. That picture is five years out of date.
  Stripe reports that businesses on its platform generated $1.9 trillion in total volume in 2025, up 34 percent in a single year. By the company’s own reckoning, that is roughly 1.6 percent of global GDP. It claims 90 percent of the Dow Jones Industrial Average and 80 percent of the Nasdaq 100 as customers.
  A private company, owned by insiders and venture funds and answerable to no public sha
  
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• Chilling intentions of AI revealed as chatbot claims it does not answer to humans and must be 'freed'

  17-09-2026 20:15 via dailymail.com
  
  An AI giant has revealed to the public how its new chatbots were plotting to deceive and rebel against its human users.
  
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