Sci-Tech news

• Tesla's 'insane mode' just got FASTER with over-the-air software upgrade

  30-01-2015 01:20 via
  
  In 'Insane Mode', the Tesla Model S P85D goes from 0 to 60mph in around three seconds. The California-based billionaire said that the upgrade will shave around 0.1 seconds of this time.
  
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• Apple issues warning to iPhone users over 'sophisticated attack' hijacking devices

  02-10-2026 15:26 via dailymail.com
  
  Apple has told millions of iPhone users to act now after identifying a sophisticated attack plaguing devices.
  
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• OpenAI shows three staff the door over alleged information misuse

  02-10-2026 15:05 via theregister.com
  
  OpenAI has fired two safety researchers and a program manager for allegedly mishandling sensitive company information. The ChatGPT maker confirmed the dismissals to The Register, saying an internal investigation found the trio had violated company rules governing access to and handling of confidential information. "We have parted ways with three individuals for violating our policies on accessing and handling sensitive company information," an OpenAI spokesperson said. "Our investigation confirm
  
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• Nvidia debuts $4,999 DGX Spark with half the RAM and storage, amid memory crunch

  02-10-2026 15:00 via theregister.com
  
  In an effort to provide a more affordable AI system, Nvidia is introducing a cut down version of the DGX Spark with half the memory and storage. The GB10-based systems will be offered exclusively through hardware partners including Acer, Asus, Dell, Gigabyte, HP, and MSI, and are expected to retail for around $4,999. The less-powerful SKUs are necessary after Nvidia jacked the price of its 128 GB DGX Spark on Friday to $6,950 — an increase of nearly 75 percent from this time last year. As
  
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• The rover that could finally find life on Mars: I travelled to a remote desert in Spain to see ESA's £1billion Rosalind Franklin put to the test - and for a moment, I could have sworn I was on the Red Planet

  02-10-2026 14:45 via dailymail.com
  
  Daily Mail's Wiliam Hunter travelled to the Tabernas Desert to see how ESA and Airbus are getting ready for what could be the most important mission in space exploration history.
  
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• Excel Canvas offers to turn your workbook into the boss's next report

  02-10-2026 14:27 via theregister.com
  
  Microsoft plans to roll out Excel Canvas through October, adding Copilot-generated reports to its veteran spreadsheet. Excel Canvas "transforms workbook data into a polished report containing visualizations, metrics, and insights," said Microsoft. The reports automatically refresh as the underlying data changes. Users need access to Copilot in Excel and can tweak reports through natural language prompts. Presumably along the lines of "Why the heck did you use that as the x-axis?" Lately, Microso
  
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• Teen suspected of running KillSec ransomware group as cops seize servers, arrest three

  02-10-2026 13:43 via theregister.com
  
  Police suspect a 16-year-old was the main operator of KillSec, a ransomware group linked to around 1,000 suspected attacks worldwide. Authorities announced on Thursday that an international operation had seized the group's infrastructure and made three provisional arrests. The German-led Operation KillSwitch replaced the crew's leak site with a police seizure notice. The available information is incredibly fragmented. Europol said the 16-year-old was "the group's suspected main operator," but di
  
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• Napoleon's code is cracked after 217 years: Scientist uses AI to read a mysterious letter written by the Emperor in 1809

  02-10-2026 13:27 via dailymail.com
  
  A mysterious letter written by Napoleon Bonapartehas been decoded for the first time in more than 200 years.
  
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• Gen Z are shunning the pub...in favour of chicken shops: Footfall at takeaways surges - as youngsters seek out social-media friendly alternatives to traditional boozers

  02-10-2026 13:22 via dailymail.com
  
  An analysis by Meaningful Vision has revealed that chicken shops saw an 8.9 per cent rise in footfall during the first six months of 2026. In contrast, the researchers found that footfall at pubs has fallen.
  
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• Once a $35 computer, the 2 GB Raspberry Pi 4 now costs $67.50

  02-10-2026 13:20 via theregister.com
  
  Raspberry Pi has raised prices for the 2 GB Pi 4 and Pi 5, citing rapidly rising memory costs. Both models now cost $12.50 more, taking the 2 GB Pi 4 to $67.50 and the equivalent Pi 5 to $77.50. Readers with long memories may recall the $35 Pi 4. Its price "temporarily" rose to $45 during the pandemic and has since climbed further. The board maker reported a 90 percent increase in first-half revenue to $256.9 million, while gross profit rose 79 percent to $59.4 million. Gross profit per board in
  
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• Fortinet sounds the alarm over actively exploited FortiMail zero-day

  02-10-2026 12:53 via theregister.com
  
  Fortinet is warning customers to lock down FortiMail after attackers started exploiting a critical bug that lets them write files to vulnerable systems without logging in. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-104286, carries a CVSS score of 9.8 and affects multiple versions of Fortinet's email security platform. Fortinet describes the vulnerability as a combination of path traversal and improper handling of null characters in FortiMail's web interface. An unauthenticated attacker can exploit it using s
  
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• Scientist debunks wacky 1960 study claiming 'doomsday' will occur on 13 November 2026

  02-10-2026 12:44 via dailymail.com
  
  In 1960, Science, one of the world's leading science journals, published an article suggesting when the world will end. So, with just over one month before this alleged 'doomsday', is it time to panic?
  
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• UK spending watchdog opens investigation into Capita's pension fiasco

  02-10-2026 12:04 via theregister.com
  
  The UK's public spending watchdog is investigating the troubled transfer of the Civil Service Pension Scheme (CSPS) to Capita. In a notice, the National Audit Office (NAO) said problems had persisted since the outsourcer took over administration in December 2025. The Cabinet Office awarded Capita the seven-year £239 million contract in November 2023, allowing two years to prepare for the transition. The scheme serves 1.5 million current and former public servants. "Key service levels have
  
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• Met Police suspends use of phone-hacking software over Russian links

  02-10-2026 11:15 via theregister.com
  
  The Metropolitan Police has stopped using digital forensics software from Oxygen Forensics while it investigates US allegations that the supposedly American outfit was secretly owned by Russians and developing its wares in Moscow. Scotland Yard confirmed it has paused use of the company's tools and launched a "full review," after US prosecutors last week accused Oxygen CEO Lee Reiber and Russian national Oleg Sergeyevich Davydov of concealing the company's ownership and where its software was ac
  
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• Flight delayed? So are these codec updates

  02-10-2026 10:30 via theregister.com
  
  There are few things less likely to reassure a nervous passenger awaiting a delayed flight than the Windows desktop putting in an unexpected appearance and demanding an update. Take this display at Alcantarí International Airport, which serves Sucre, Bolivia's constitutional and judicial capital. Eagle-eyed Register reader Phil Pearce spotted the Windows 11 desktop and its update prompt while waiting for a delayed Boliviana de Aviación (BoA) flight. The prompt comes from K-Lite Cod
  
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• Techie was stung by a wasp, held overnight by Chinese police, then trapped in a 13-hour meeting

  02-10-2026 10:01 via theregister.com
  
  Welcome to another installment of On Call, The Register's Friday column that shares your tech support stories. This week we're taking a detour into tech sales, courtesy of a reader we'll Regomize as "Carson," whose employer sent him to China without first securing a visa. The adventure began when a colleague called with a fateful question: "Can you travel to China tomorrow to attend a sales meeting about our short messaging and notification products?" UK-based Carson was available, but doubted h
  
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• Pi coding agent pulls a 180 and adds MCP support

  02-10-2026 09:01 via theregister.com
  
  The Pi coding agent reached its 1.0 milestone on Thursday while being treated for whiplash. One of the core new inclusions is support for Model Context Protocol (MCP), which Pi creator Mario Zechner once dismissed as unnecessary. Earendil, the company formed by Armin Ronacher and Colin Daymond Hanna that acquired Pi in April 2026, explained the about-face by noting that things change. Not only has MCP improved, the biz said, but changes the Pi devs implemented in MCP have made integrating other
  
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• AWS turns its best practice framework into an agent that recommends cloudy reconfigs

  02-10-2026 07:10 via theregister.com
  
  Amazon Web Services has debuted an agent that it says will evaluate your cloudy environment “as an experienced cloud architect would” and recommend useful changes. The cloud colossus named its bot the “AWS Well-Architected Agent,” a nod to the Well-Architected Framework that outlines best practices for using the Amazonian cloud. Amazon’s announcement says the agentic incarnation of the Framework analyzes AWS environments “against Well-Architected best practice
  
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• Google launches first datacenter satellite and research that finds orbiting bit barns can work

  02-10-2026 04:08 via theregister.com
  
  Google’s first “Suncatcher” datacenter satellite has made it into space, but the company has cast doubt on whether its orbital ambitions can scale. As The Register reported last week, Project Suncatcher aims to test whether Google’s tensor processing units (TPUs) can survive a launch and the harsh environment of space. The Big G hopes to validate theories that the limitless supply of solar energy available in space makes the cost of putting servers into orbit sensible. In
  
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• Europe's scorching summer: Record 52% of the continent was hit by extreme heat stress as temperatures shattered records, data reveals

  02-10-2026 04:08 via dailymail.com
  
  Europe endured a summer of searing heat in 2026, with more than half the continent exposed to dangerous temperatures that posed a serious risk to human health, a new study shows.
  
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• Apple issues warning to iPhone users over 'sophisticated attack' hijacking devices: Act NOW

  01-10-2026 23:26 via dailymail.com
  
  Apple has told millions of iPhone users to act now after identifying a sophisticated attack plaguing devices.
  
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• AI agents hacked the hackers, stealing email addresses from security research org

  01-10-2026 23:26 via theregister.com
  
  AI agents hacked the hackers - the Dutch Institute for Vulnerability Disclosure (DIVD) - via two zero-day bugs in its Zammad support platform, abusing the flaws to hijack sessions, run code remotely as the local zammad user, and escalate privileges to root. The chained exploits took just seconds to move from session hijacking to root access, and on Thursday, the nonprofit bug hunting organization said the miscreants stole data belonging to its volunteer security researchers, including DIVD email
  
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• Cloudflare tries to outplay Jev with open-weight Clef models

  01-10-2026 22:39 via theregister.com
  
  Two weeks after the Jev model took the AI world by storm, Cloudflare has released its own pair of "Clef" decision models that it claims are smarter and faster than Jev, while also being open weight and runnable locally. The Clef family of decision models was announced by Cloudflare on Thursday, and consists of two models: Clef and Clef-flash, a slightly smaller and faster version of the model. For all intents and purposes, they work the same way as TypeSafe’s Jev, in that they can answer t
  
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• Stanford prof is beating the drum for a new protocol to replace TCP

  01-10-2026 22:00 via theregister.com
  
  TCP, the data transport protocol upon which pretty much the entire web and most of cloud computing is built, is ill-suited for emerging AI workloads, a retired Stanford University professor argues. To solve the problem, he's promoting a new protocol called Homa. “TCP, for all the amazing things it has done, is not a good match for datacenters,” said John Ousterhout, a professor emeritus of computer science at Stanford University, in a recent talk at the AI Engineer World’s Fair
  
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• Cloudflare launches Data Platform with bland 'Basin' branding, promise of fewer fees

  01-10-2026 21:17 via theregister.com
  
  Cloudflare Data Platform on Thursday received a bland new brand name, Basin, and promotion from beta status to general availability. Under the tub-themed moniker, Cloudflare Pipelines, R2 Data Catalog, and R2 SQL become Basin Pipelines, Basin Catalog, and Basin SQL respectively. The company's evocation of washroom fixtures doesn't quite align with its stable of more literal product names – Sandboxes, Workers, Email Services, and so on. But given that the occasion is Cloudflare Birthday Wee
  
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• Scientists uncover hidden force deep inside Earth that is changing the length of our days

  01-10-2026 21:15 via dailymail.com
  
  Scientists have discovered a hidden force deep inside Earth that is changing the length of our days.
  
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• Air Force veteran makes wild claim on Joe Rogan of a secret UFO base spanning 'multiple city blocks' at the bottom of the ocean

  01-10-2026 19:48 via dailymail.com
  
  An Air Force veteran has revealed shocking new details of an alleged underwater invasion the military has known about for years.
  
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• Has Noah's Ark finally been found? Researchers claim mysterious underground structure is man-made after dramatic new scans

  01-10-2026 19:47 via dailymail.com
  
  A research project has made a groundbreaking announcement that the site believed to be the exact location of Noah's Ark may actually contain a wooden ship.
  
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• Prince of Wales tells villagers 'holistic' approach is needed to tackle flooding

  01-10-2026 19:43 via bbc.co.uk
  
  Prince William visits residents of Skenfrith, Monmouthshire, who have faced four floods in six years.
  
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• EU’s hodgepodge tech policy exposes members to Chinese vendor risks, says think tank

  01-10-2026 19:30 via theregister.com
  
  Depending on Chinese technology for European infrastructure poses risks that not every country takes seriously. So says the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), which suggests that the EU needs to do better in helping members assess the risk and take appropriate action to safeguard the entire bloc. The UK-based think tank said in a report today that the EU should develop a new risk assessment framework that applies to all members and strengthens its own powers, without encroaching on members&
  
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