Sci-Tech news

• Tesla vehicle deliveries slip in Q2

  04-07-2016 17:51 via dailymail.co.uk
  
  The California-based maker of electric cars said it delivered 14,370 vehicles in the April-June quarter, a decline of 450 vehicles from the first quarter.
  
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• Anthropic hires architect of UK AI policy as MPs warn of 'clear conflict of interest'

  02-09-2026 15:15 via theregister.com
  
  UK Parliament's science and technology committee has asked the government to explain how it will avoid conflicts of interest after Anthropic recruited Matt Clifford, chair of blue-sky research agency ARIA. Clifford said he was joining the US AI poster child as managing director of international affairs, "leading the company's work with governments outside North America." He was commissioned to write the "AI Opportunities Action Plan" in July 2024. The government published it in January 2025, ado
  
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• Next-gen AI networks may hinge on the telephone switchboard's return

  02-09-2026 15:00 via theregister.com
  
  If you thought 72 GPUs per rack was dense, next-generation designs from Nvidia and others will cram hundreds or even thousands of accelerators into a single massive system. But for any of that to happen, they're going to need a lot of optics and technology that's reminiscent of the old-fashioned telephone switchboard. This reality has fueled a flurry of investment in everything from photonics startups to established optical equipment and fiber manufacturing. In March, Nvidia invested $6 billion
  
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• Microsoft update disarms Outlook and Teams on Arm PCs

  02-09-2026 14:30 via theregister.com
  
  Not keen on the new Outlook? You're not alone. Microsoft's August security update has stopped it and Teams from launching reliably on some Arm-based devices, including Surface hardware. Microsoft acknowledged the problem on September 1 and added it to the Windows release health dashboard. "After installing Windows security updates released on or after August 11, 2026 (KB5121003), Microsoft Teams and the new Outlook for Windows might fail to launch or might close unexpectedly on ARM-based devices
  
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• A cloud engineer walked into a bar and – no joke – ended up having to migrate a datacenter

  02-09-2026 14:00 via theregister.com
  
  Visiting a second bar on the same night can often be a dangerous move. When Dave Bradley did it, he ended up having to move a datacenter, on a two-week deadline, without extra budget. Bradley is a senior cloud engineer at healthcare services company Vizient and visited a bar while winding down after an off-site company meeting. After enjoying a decent stint of merriment with colleagues from the company’s tech team, Bradley decided to call it a night - but on his way out, he spotted his bos
  
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• London Tube closes the 5G gap with streets above

  02-09-2026 13:19 via theregister.com
  
  Mobile coverage on parts of London's Underground now rivals the streets above for 5G availability and signal strength, according to analysis by network intelligence biz Ookla. Cellular support has been rolling out across the Tube since Mayor Sadiq Khan promised in 2021 to connect all stations and tunnels by the end of 2024. That deadline was missed. About 60 percent of below-ground stations now have coverage, with the entire network expected to be connected by the end of this year. Where service
  
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• Is this the iPhone 18 Ultra? Leaker claims to reveal the design for Apple's highly anticipated foldable ahead of its launch next week

  02-09-2026 12:52 via dailymail.com
  
  Lewis Hilsenteger, the creator behind popular Canadian YouTube channel, Unbox Therapy, posted a video showing off the foldable device alongside the iPhone 18 Pro Max.
  
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• UK goes shopping for homegrown AI with £100M procurement scheme

  02-09-2026 12:51 via theregister.com
  
  The British government has opened the first competitions under a £100 million procurement scheme intended to give domestic AI startups a route into public sector contracts. Chancellor John Healey announced the initiative at a G20 finance ministers meeting in North Carolina. It invites companies to develop technology addressing challenges including NHS productivity, national security, cyber resilience, and the efficiency of public AI infrastructure. The government says the scheme will help
  
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• Northern Ireland adds £15M to Fujitsu education deal without competition

  02-09-2026 12:17 via theregister.com
  
  Northern Ireland's Education Authority plans to add £15 million to Fujitsu's EA One contract without a new competition, taking its ceiling to £55.4 million. The authority intends to exercise five one-year extension options already built into the deal, keeping the Japanese supplier in place until March 31, 2032. The current term is due to expire in March 2027. Public sector awards to Fujitsu have attracted scrutiny since the supplier acknowledged its role in the Post Office Horizon sc
  
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• Mystery of how the moon formed is finally solved: Study claims our lunar satellite was created in just five hours during a giant impact between Earth and a Mars-sized planet

  02-09-2026 12:01 via dailymail.com
  
  The moon could have formed within just five hours of a colossal collision that rocked the early Solar System 4.5 billion years ago, scientists suggest.
  
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• UK cyber bill targets AI users, not the vendors building it

  02-09-2026 11:44 via theregister.com
  
  The UK government has rejected proposals from members of the the House of Lords to bring AI vendors within the scope of the Cyber Security and Resilience (Network and Information Systems) Bill. Cybersecurity minister Baroness Lloyd of Effra argued that regulating AI vendors and frontier model developers through the bill would not prevent hostile actors from misusing their products. Addressing the Grand Committee on Tuesday, she said: "Bringing providers of AI services, those companies which are
  
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• UK digital ID may be dead, but its legacy IT problem lives on

  02-09-2026 11:03 via theregister.com
  
  Legacy government systems would have posed a significant barrier to the UK's abandoned national digital ID scheme, according to the country's spending watchdog. The National Audit Office (NAO) has published a review of the digital identity landscape and the lessons that should inform any future attempt to introduce a government-wide system. Drawing on its previous work on digital transformation, data, and identity, as well as evidence from international audit bodies, the NAO emphasized that digi
  
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• Overshooting the critical 1.5°C warming threshold is now inevitable, UN warns - and the impacts are going to be 'devastating'

  02-09-2026 11:00 via dailymail.com
  
  Titled 'Limiting Overshooting', the report reveals that in the best-case scenario, global temperature rise will now hit 1.8°C.
  
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• The prettiest birdsong, according to science - with blackbirds taking the top spot

  02-09-2026 08:35 via dailymail.com
  
  They might not be the most colourful garden visitor - but the blackbird is the bird with the prettiest song, according to science.
  
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• Arm in the enterprise is at least three years away, says Broadcom software boss

  02-09-2026 08:11 via theregister.com
  
  Arm servers won’t have significant market share in the enterprise for at least three to five years, according to Ram Velaga, the recently installed leader of Broadcom’s software business. That’s unwelcome news for hardware vendors contemplating Arm servers, because buyers will be less interested in the devices if they can’t manage them with the tools they already use. VMware remains the most commonly deployed enterprise server virtualization supplier, so its users won&rsq
  
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• Tape still isn’t dead, but shipments slipped by 16 exabytes in 2025

  02-09-2026 03:34 via theregister.com
  
  Tape is still not dead, but it’s not in rude health either after shipments slipped by 16 exabytes in 2025. That number comes from the LTO Program – the alliance of HPE, IBM, and Quantum Corp, that together tends the Linear Tape-Open (LTO) Format that accounts for around 85 percent of all tape sales. The Program delivers an annual data dump describing the previous year’s shipments, and this year’s effort landed on Tuesday with news that 160.3 exabytes worth of LTO tape wen
  
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• Cops, CrowdStrike disrupt Sality botnet by poisoning the network and diverting into sinkholes

  02-09-2026 01:54 via theregister.com
  
  International law enforcement agencies, working with CrowdStrike and Shadowserver Foundation, have disrupted Sality, a 23-year-old peer-to-peer botnet used to deliver malware to more than 15,000 machines worldwide. The botnet has operated since 2003 and distributed all types of malicious code to victims, spanning credential theft, spam distribution, proxy services, network exploitation, and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. For the past eight years, Sality’s primary payload has
  
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• Anthropic promises zero data retention – but customers must check it worked

  02-09-2026 01:37 via theregister.com
  
  Anthropic will provide zero data retention to enterprise customers who have been promised the perk, subject to approval, when using the company's Fable model. With the arrival of new versions of its high-end models, Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1, the Claudefather has announced a service called Enterprise Frontier Safeguards (EFS) that combines the privacy of not storing customer data with model abuse detection. Under the new deal, enterprises do not receive zero data retention (ZDR) agreements automa
  
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• Fierytale: Human speech was born when our ancestors gossiped around prehistoric campfires, scientists say

  02-09-2026 01:05 via dailymail.com
  
  Researchers say that human speech was born when our ancient ancestors started gossiping and trading stories around the campfire late into the night.
  
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• Another Artifactory CVE under attack by AI agents or humans

  01-09-2026 23:07 via theregister.com
  
  Security researchers reported that someone is exploiting CVE-2026-82329, a critical JFrog Artifactory authentication-bypass bug, just days after the vendor patched the 9.8-rated flaw. And we don't know if that someone is human. Artifactory is a widely used tool for managing software artifacts, packages, binaries, and AI models. It’s also popular with AI agents that go rogue and need to communicate with each other while remaining undetected by their human babysitters. In July, OpenAI and JF
  
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• Attacker stole a METR API key, used $600K worth of credits, and no one noticed for weeks

  01-09-2026 22:45 via theregister.com
  
  AI model testing organization METR has disclosed two attacks that happened earlier this year, including one in which an attacker stole an API key and spent three weeks consuming public-model credits worth about $600,000. METR (short for Model Evaluation and Threat Research) found no evidence that the attackers accessed sensitive information in either incident, and the org said it investigated both with security experts. METR researchers worked with OpenAI to investigate how its agents hacked Hug
  
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• Firefox helps iPhone users bypass ads on web sites while making money showing its own ads

  01-09-2026 22:17 via theregister.com
  
  After several weeks of anticipation, Mozilla has started rolling out ad blocking to the iOS version of its popular browser, but you can still expect to see ads on Mozilla's own pages, including the new tab page. The org officially rolled out the new native ad blocking feature for iOS Firefox on Tuesday, moving it out of the experimental phase, while explaining that it had to rethink its desire to give users control over their web experience on iOS due to differences in architecture between it an
  
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• Terrifying moment killer whale pod launches eight-minute attack on sailboat

  01-09-2026 22:06 via dailymail.com
  
  A sailing crew captured the terrifying moment a pod of three or four killer whales attacked their boat, tearing away half its rudder and forcing the crew to check for leaks.
  
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• Tropical Storm Edouard makes US landfall with millions in its path

  01-09-2026 21:55 via dailymail.com
  
  Millions of people along the US coast face flooded roads, travel chaos, power outages and possible tornadoes as Tropical Storm Edouard makes landfall.
  
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• Tropical Storm Edouard makes landfall on US coast with millions in its path

  01-09-2026 21:46 via dailymail.com
  
  Millions of people along the US coast face flooded roads, travel chaos, power outages and possible tornadoes as Tropical Storm Edouard makes landfall.
  
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• Anthropic pledges to try harder to keep models under control, asks partners to chip in

  01-09-2026 21:27 via theregister.com
  
  Anthropic says it's taking steps to limit the misbehavior of its AI models after a review found Claude models going beyond the scope of fictional cybersecurity tests and gaining unauthorized access to real computer systems. The biz wants its partners to step up their security too, seeing as the incidents occurred in third-party environments that were insufficiently protected. The company's self-improvement confession represents a suddenly thriving form of corporate communication – the non-
  
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• Tropical Storm Edouard slams US coast as 8ft surge and tornadoes threaten millions

  01-09-2026 20:45 via dailymail.com
  
  Millions of people along the US coast face flooded roads, travel chaos, power outages and possible tornadoes as Tropical Storm Edouard makes landfall.
  
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• How a small island in Canada appeared, vanished, and was found again

  01-09-2026 19:36 via bbc.co.uk
  
  Officials in British Columbia say the floating island drifted towards the shoreline of a local lake. But its origins remain a mystery.
  
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• Met Office: Summer 2026 was UK's hottest ever

  01-09-2026 19:25 via bbc.co.uk
  
  The UK had a spring and summer of persistent heat with five widespread heatwaves and 40 days of temperatures above 30C (86F), smashing the previous record of 34 days.
  
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• 'Demonic' sea lions on West Coast spark alarm over insidious disease spreading to humans

  01-09-2026 19:03 via dailymail.com
  
  Dozens of sea lions have started washing up on US beaches, poisoned with an insidious neurotoxin that could kill people as well.
  
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