Sci-Tech news

• SpaceX satellite plans 'unsustainable' warns competitor Arianespace

  28-05-2021 20:56 via dailymail.co.uk
  
  Launching thousands of satellites into low Earth orbit is 'unsustainable' and could lead to a few companies like SpaceX having a de-facto monopoly, warns France-based Arianespace.
  
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• The Era of More Junk in Orbit (Thanks, Elon)

  25-09-2026 18:55 via technocracy.news
  
  Arch-Technocrat Elon Musk wants to go to Mars with 1 million people to establish a Technocracy in space. Everything that he has done with SpaceX enshrines that goal. Along the way, he has littered outer space with his junk. Imagine the trail of trash from Earth to Mars, and then the trash heaps on Mars itself. Didn’t his mother ever tell him to clean up his messes? ⁃ Patrick Wood, Editor.As early as next week, the world will leave behind 69 years of space exploration and commerce and
  
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• Office 2016 and 2019 holdouts blame update for license deactivation bug

  25-09-2026 17:01 via theregister.com
  
  Users report that a recent optional update for out-of-date Microsoft 365 applications might be connected to suddenly deactivated Microsoft Office 2016 and 2019 installations. The activation bug cropped up this week and appears to mostly impact Home and Business perpetual license installations, stripping away their authenticated status and forcing users into a loop where they are asked over and over again to re-enter their product key or face deactivation or reduced-functionality mode. The sympto
  
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• Which copy of that file is the real one? Dinner, off the record, in Midtown

  25-09-2026 17:00 via theregister.com
  
  EVENT: The Register is hosting a private dinner in New York on Tuesday 27 October for senior technology, infrastructure and data leaders, with LucidLink. Joe Fay takes the chair, it runs under the Chatham House Rule, and nothing said leaves the table. Distributed teams are producing more unstructured file data than ever, and most of them reach it through infrastructure designed for an office: legacy NAS, a VPN, and a sync-and-download habit nobody actually chose. It rarely fails outright. It cha
  
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• Raspberry Pi surfs memory crunch to record first half

  25-09-2026 16:15 via theregister.com
  
  Raspberry Pi has posted a record first half after a well-timed memory stockpile helped it ride out soaring prices and shortages. The Cambridge-based company reported revenue of $256.9 million for the six months ended June 30, up 90 percent from $135.5 million a year earlier, while pre-tax profit more than tripled to $19.6 million. Raspberry Pi shipped 4.2 million boards during the six-month period, up 17 percent year-on-year, while its order backlog doubled to 2.6 million units. Behind some of t
  
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• Windows update leaves some virtual desktops staring into the void

  25-09-2026 15:32 via theregister.com
  
  Microsoft has admitted that some Windows 11 virtual desktops may fail to load after sign-in, leaving users staring at a black screen until they launch Explorer manually. The glitch affects devices running the August 2026 non-security preview update or later releases and, according to Microsoft, "has been primarily observed on Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) hosts, using FSLogix." Windows Explorer crashes may appear in the affected device's Application event log. Users can temporarily recover the des
  
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• It's not just Karens! Study reveals young men are just as likely to complain in restaurants as older women

  25-09-2026 14:48 via dailymail.com
  
  We all know the dreaded 'Karen' stereotype. But a new study suggests that when it comes to complaining in restaurants, age and gender actually have little to do with it.
  
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• Uncle Sam wants in on Musk's €120M fight with Brussels

  25-09-2026 14:46 via theregister.com
  
  The US government wants to join Elon Musk and X's legal challenge to the European Commission's €120 million fine against the social media platform. The Commission issued its first fine under the Digital Services Act (DSA) in December 2025, finding that X had breached transparency rules through its paid blue checkmarks, advertising repository, and restrictions on researchers' access to public data. X owner Elon Musk described the decision as "crazy" and "insane" in a Xeet, and compared the "
  
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• Asahi fork embraces LLMs and lands Linux on the M4 Mac mini

  25-09-2026 14:00 via theregister.com
  
  Gravity Linux is a newly announced distro targeting newer Apple Silicon Macs, and its first experimental alpha already boots an accelerated desktop on the M4 Mac mini. The project homepage says: "Gravity Linux is a Fedora remix that brings a fast, modern Linux desktop to Apple Silicon – built in the open, by people like you." If this sounds familiar, the About page explains: "Gravity Linux was initially forked from Asahi Linux over differences in policy, namely regarding LLM use. We have t
  
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• Is bread ever worth $60? As New Yorkers flock to buy eye-wateringly expensive loaves, nutritionists warn 'Austrian origin and a $60 price tag do not establish nutritional superiority'

  25-09-2026 13:53 via dailymail.com
  
  Is bread ever worth $60? According to Dr Vanessa Kimbell, the founder of The Sourdough School, the answer is no.
  
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• Amazon sellers watch as inventory vanishes into pending-order purgatory

  25-09-2026 13:13 via theregister.com
  
  Traders on Amazon's UK marketplace say a wave of "abnormal" orders stuck in pending status is tying up their inventory and preventing legitimate customers from buying the affected items. Vendors on Amazon's Seller Central forums report unusually high numbers of pending orders in their accounts, often involving products priced at £100 ($132) or more. Reports began appearing on September 20. Within days, some sellers – often individuals or small businesses – said their entire sto
  
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• BOFH: The Helldesk opens its third eye and ascends to a higher plane of troubleshooting

  25-09-2026 13:09 via theregister.com
  
  The Boss has had some feedback from the using classes about our method of fixing IT problems (i.e. fixing them), and how we could do things a little better. "So... you want us to... not fix the problems?" the PFY asks. "No, that's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that your approach could maybe do with a bit of an overhaul. Instead of attacking the problem head-on, perhaps you could take a more... holistic approach? See how the user feels and maybe engage them in how the problem is affecti
  
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• Dyfed-Powys Police cops to cyberattack, staff data potentially nicked

  25-09-2026 12:45 via theregister.com
  
  Dyfed-Powys Police has revealed it was hit by a cyberattack that knocked some of its systems offline, with investigators now trying to establish whether the intruders got their hands on staff data during the break-in. The Welsh police force said it identified the incident on September 14 and that it caused disruption to some non-emergency systems. Emergency policing remained operational throughout, according to the force, while its 999 and 101 telephone services were unaffected. Online and email
  
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• Another week, another data breach for Revolut customers

  25-09-2026 12:04 via theregister.com
  
  Revolut customers have been caught up in a second data breach this month after attackers socially engineered their way into US brokerage DriveWealth and stole historic personal information. DriveWealth provides execution and clearing services for investment firms and previously held brokerage accounts directly for Revolut customers trading US stocks. It said the unauthorized access occurred on September 4 and 5. In an email sent to affected customers and seen by The Register, the broker blamed a
  
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• Try before you buy! Tesco is testing virtual tech that lets you see what F&F clothes look like on you

  25-09-2026 11:47 via dailymail.com
  
  The Sandhurst Extra store is trialling the system, which will allow shoppers to virtually try on 1,500 items of F&F clothing across womenswear and menswear.
  
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• Men don't need to splash the cash to impress women! Study reveals spending just £40 is enough to get in the good books

  25-09-2026 11:29 via dailymail.com
  
  Forget fancy dinners and flashy gifts - women are actually less attracted to men who are too generous, according to a new study.
  
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• The teenager with a SUPER-memory: 16-year-old can 'time travel' through any event from the age of three

  25-09-2026 11:28 via dailymail.com
  
  While many of us struggle to recall what happened last week, one teenager has the ability to remember almost everything he has ever done.
  
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• Revealed: The people most likely to complain in restaurants, according to science - and it throws the 'Karen' stereotype out the window

  25-09-2026 11:28 via dailymail.com
  
  We all know the dreaded 'Karen' stereotype. But a new study suggests that when it comes to complaining in restaurants, age and gender actually have little to do with it.
  
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• Judge uses electronic tag on Pokémon card tracker. It's super effective!

  25-09-2026 11:15 via theregister.com
  
  A 72-year-old Ohio man who planted a GPS tracker on a Pokémon card delivery van has been sentenced to a year of probation – including 90 days wearing a tracker of his own. Kent Kubasta, of Medina, Ohio, attached a Spytec device to the woman's van. She discovered it while making a delivery to Walmart on June 18 and was described in court documents as "a carrier/vendor of Pokémon cards." Kubasta initially pleaded not guilty to illegal use of a tracking device, but later waived
  
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• Your files are in four places and nobody knows which one is right

  25-09-2026 10:45 via theregister.com
  
  EVENT: The Register is hosting a private dinner in Soho on Tuesday 20 October for senior technology, infrastructure and data leaders, with LucidLink. Joe Fay takes the chair, it runs under the Chatham House Rule, and nothing said is on the record. The problem on the table is the one most organisations have stopped saying out loud. Unstructured file data keeps growing, distributed teams keep needing to reach it, and the infrastructure underneath is still legacy NAS, a VPN and a sync-and-download
  
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• UK wants more homes heated by waste heat from datacenters

  25-09-2026 10:30 via theregister.com
  
  The UK government says it is pumping £90 million ($119 million) into building and improving heat networks that redirect excess heat energy generated by a datacenter or factory and use it to warm homes or for other purposes. According to the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ), more than 750,000 homes will get cheaper heating as part of the scheme, which includes plans for a “mega heat project” that involves distributing hot water via a tunnel under the River Tha
  
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• Huawei Cloud Rolls Out Enterprise AI Products Across the Board, Building an Open Agentic Cloud

  25-09-2026 10:00 via theregister.com
  
  Shanghai, China, September 18, 2026: On September 18, Dr. Peter Zhou, Director of the Board at Huawei and CEO of Huawei Cloud, delivered a keynote titled "The Agentic Cloud for the Agentic World: Build Together, Grow Together" at HUAWEI CONNECT 2026. He shared Huawei Cloud's latest progress. He announced the global launch of the latest AI Cluster Service (AICS), a key step in Huawei Cloud's strategy to strengthen the silicon bedrock on the cloud and reinforce the foundation for agentic AI. The k
  
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• Project leader thought his team understood the plan, ended up fixing their 'interpretation' of it

  25-09-2026 08:37 via theregister.com
  
  Welcome to another edition of On Call, The Register’s reader-contributed Friday column that celebrates the unique workplace cultures that make delivering tech support such delightful fun. This week, meet a reader we’ll Regomize as “Antonio” who told us that in the late 1990s he worked for a multinational financial services organization. Not long after taking the job, Antonio was dispatched to Hong Kong to oversee the regional rollout of a new reverse proxy. Antonio gather
  
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• Astronomer watches Starlink satellites sinking to build a ‘planetary barometer’

  25-09-2026 06:46 via theregister.com
  
  Astronomer and author, Dr. Tony Phillips, says he has found a way to turn SpaceX’s Starlink satellite constellation into a barometer. Phillips runs spaceweather.com, which tracks solar flares, the solar wind, shifts in Earth’s geomagnetic field, and other phenomena. On Tuesday, he published an article that opens “Starlink has many downsides.” “The megaconstellation interferes with astronomy, pollutes the atmosphere with metallic re-entry debris, and has pushed Low E
  
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• 2026 just became the year of FreeBSD on the (Amazonian cloud) desktop

  25-09-2026 05:04 via theregister.com
  
  FreeBSD is now available for the desktop, in a roundabout way. Colin Percival, a maintainer and release engineering lead for the open-source OS’s release, announced the desktop distro on Thursday. “Most people think of FreeBSD as being a server OS which is used only via the command line, but as anyone who has attended a BSD conference can attest, it works just fine with a GUI too,” he wrote. He’s not wrong about that, but left unsaid is that FreeBSD doesn’t include
  
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• Google Gemini can present cartoon or lifelike avatars to lip-sync generative chatter

  25-09-2026 01:57 via theregister.com
  
  Google has augmented its live dialogue model Gemini 3.8 Live with a feature called "Live Avatar" that's capable of conjuring animated characters and realistic human simulacra to lip-sync Gemini's machine-generated speech. "Conversation is inherently multimodal: we listen, look, speak, and use facial expressions to communicate," explained Shuo-yiin Chang, research scientist at Google DeepMind, and CJ Zheng, Gemini software engineer, in a blog post. "Live Avatar brings these capabilities to enterp
  
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• Crook used three open source agents to break into a Fortune 500 hospitality company, a major US airline and 25+ other orgs

  25-09-2026 01:32 via theregister.com
  
  A crook has been using three open source AI harnesses to target hundreds of online retailers and other companies, swiping more than 600,000 credit card records and installing card-stealing skimmers - and all at trivial cost. AI security company Gambit recovered the human operator’s staging server, and used that access to reconstruct the data-theft campaign, whose victims include a Fortune 500 hospitality company, a major US airline, a large private US industrial supplies distributor, and a
  
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• Google's TPUs to catch some rays in orbit next week

  25-09-2026 00:12 via theregister.com
  
  Google will loft its tensor processing units (TPUs) into orbit aboard a SpaceX rocket next week, in the latest phase of its previously announced Project Suncatcher space datacenter initiative. The launch is part of a test mission to better understand how its homegrown compute platform will handle both the rigors of launch and the harsh environment of space. Long term, the Chocolate Factory believes that space-based datacenter clusters powered by a limitless supply of solar energy from our sun co
  
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• F-Droid app store thumbs its nose at Google's dev crackdown

  24-09-2026 22:52 via theregister.com
  
  Undeterred by a looming Google policy change that could effectively destroy it, open-source Android app store F-Droid has released its largest upgrade in a decade. F-Droid, a third-party app repository that only distributes free and open-source software packages for Google’s Android mobile platform, on Thursday announced version 2.0 of its Android app. The F-Droid team describes version 2.0 as a complete redesign on both the visual side and beyond. “For more than a decade, F-Droid ha
  
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• Docker's new sandboxes aim to contain AI agents for real

  24-09-2026 21:51 via theregister.com
  
  In a market where AI agents keep breaking the rules and escaping their containers, Docker has a new solution. On Thursday, the company debuted Cloud Sandboxes in a bid to keep AI agents within boundaries. Despite the existence and implementation of sandboxing technology as a way to limit the reach of AI agents, industry leaders like Anthropic and OpenAI keep reporting containment failures. On Thursday, Australian officials disclosed that an OpenAI agent had accessed an Australian government port
  
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