Sci-Tech news

• The optical illusion that fools monkeys: Study finds primates see visual tricks just like humans

  29-09-2015 02:07 via dailymail.co.uk
  
  Researchers at Georgia State University made the discovery after presenting capuchin and rhesus monkeys with a version of the Delbouef illusion – a trick that causes dots to appear different sizes.
  
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• Exposed: Woeful security at UK criminal records office that led to sensitive data leak

  12-08-2026 15:40 via theregister.com
  
  The UK's criminal records office, ACRO, has escaped a fine and received a regulatory reprimand after security failings potentially exposed highly sensitive data belonging to nearly 11,000 people. ACRO disclosed the "cybersecurity incident" in April 2023, and said at the time that it had no evidence to suggest that any data was compromised. However, it has now emerged that attackers maintained persistent access to ACRO's website and content management system for more than seven months, and staged
  
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• Akira ransomware scum blocked victim's security tools – and broke their own encryptor

  12-08-2026 15:00 via theregister.com
  
  An Akira ransomware affiliate rebooted a victim’s computer into Safe Mode to kill its security tools – and in the process sabotaged their own malware when the limited-function startup mode also broke their encryptor. But the ending wasn't entirely happy for the victim. The attacker had already stolen credentials and data from file shares before Safe Mode prevented the ransomware from doing its job. Huntress security operations analyst James Northey detailed the incident in a Wednesda
  
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• Map reveals where partial solar eclipse will be visible across the US in HOURS

  12-08-2026 14:57 via dailymail.com
  
  A partial solar eclipse will sweep across parts of the US on Wednesday, giving millions of Americans a chance to witness the rare celestial spectacle.
  
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• Can I still get certified glasses to watch tonight's solar ECLIPSE and how can I watch it without them: Everything you need to know about the historic celestial event - no matter where you are in Ireland

  12-08-2026 14:49 via dailymail.com
  
  The glasses are all but sold out at this late stage - but not quite - and there are other ways to view this historic celestial event safely.
  
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• Bumble users are FURIOUS as the app ditches women-first rule and allows men to make the first move - as one dubs it 'Tinder 2.0'

  12-08-2026 14:45 via dailymail.com
  
  Bumble has enraged its users after announcing a dramatic U-turn on its women-first rule.
  
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• How Voyager engineers found two more years in a 50-year-old power budget

  12-08-2026 14:02 via theregister.com
  
  SPACE EXTENDERS Adding a few extra years to Voyager 2's prodigiously long life was the result of an effort that began more than a year ago, as engineers and managers pondered how to eke out a few more watts from the spacecraft's dwindling power supply. "We came up with the 'Big Bang' idea probably more than a year ago now," recalls Suzanne Dodd, Project Manager for the Voyager project. "We were looking for ways to extend the lifetime of the mission, which means really extending how long we can o
  
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• The REAL mummy's curse: Global trade in human heads could unleash ancient microbes on the world, scientists warn

  12-08-2026 13:59 via dailymail.com
  
  A growing global trade in preserved body parts could unleash ancient fungal spores on the world, scientists have warned.
  
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• Brit rail cops bring live facial recognition to the London Underground

  12-08-2026 13:19 via theregister.com
  
  British Transport Police is expanding its trial of live facial recognition (LFR) to the London Underground, despite concerns about privacy and mistaken identification. The force, which polices railways across England, Scotland, and Wales, will begin its Tube deployments at Victoria Underground station. The cameras will then rotate between Underground and Network Rail stations until the trial ends in November. The trial began at London Bridge railway station in February and is intended to assess
  
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• Big Cloud is poised to corner the market for enterprise hardware

  12-08-2026 12:52 via theregister.com
  
  OPINION Whenever I talk to execs from hyperscale clouds, they suggest it is their destiny to eventually host the majority of enterprise workloads. That future is now in sight because the AI boom has shown how they can use their financial muscle to command the hardware supply chain. Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami made the situation plain in May when he pointed out that the fastest way to access a new server was to rent it from a hyperscaler rather than wait for an established hardware provider to de
  
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• Revealed: The weirdest things that will happen during tonight's solar eclipse - from animals falling silent to a spike in traffic accidents

  12-08-2026 12:49 via dailymail.com
  
  Aside from being incredible to look at, solar eclipses are also known to spark cascades of strange events.
  
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• We don't serve pies, but we do like a Pi

  12-08-2026 11:57 via theregister.com
  
  BORK!BORK!BORK! There is an old IT truism that the best tip anybody can give is "turn it off and turn it on again." But this is probably not the sort of tip that the staff at this London pub were expecting. Today's entry into the world of embedded borks comes from the tipping machine in a London pub, spotted by an eagle-eyed Register reader. Tipping culture has yet to take root in the UK to the same extent as in the US, but it is spreading. Rather than dropping a few coins into a jar or mutterin
  
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• Everything you need to know about tonight's total solar eclipse as huge queues form in last-minute scramble for glasses: The best times and locations to see it

  12-08-2026 11:34 via dailymail.com
  
  Britons across the country are queuing up by the hundreds in a last minute bid to get their hands on eclipse glasses ahead of the best solar eclipse in a generation.
  
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• UK puts £14B cloud framework in place with SMEs promised a bigger slice

  12-08-2026 11:02 via theregister.com
  
  The British government has awarded places on its latest G-Cloud procurement framework, through which the public sector could spend an estimated £14 billion ($18.9 billion) over four years. Whitehall hopes smaller UK suppliers will capture more of that business than they have in the past. G-Cloud 15 is billed as the most significant upgrade to the UK's public sector cloud procurement framework since its inception over a decade ago. It was signposted by the Crown Commercial Service last year
  
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• Huge queues form outside UK corner shops as Brits rush to stock up on solar eclipse glasses

  12-08-2026 10:49 via dailymail.com
  
  Desperate Britons have queued for hours through the night in a bid to get their hands on solar eclipse glasses.
  
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• Nailed it: Toolstation gives its store IT an ASUS NUC refurb

  12-08-2026 10:00 via theregister.com
  
  When Toolstation's customers walk into a branch, work has usually paused somewhere else. A plumber, decorator or electrician is there because a plug won't fit, a roller has worn out, or the van needs restocking with brushed-steel double sockets. It is a place where trades and dedicated DIYers go when they need to get on with the job. Toolstation's point-of-sale terminals therefore need to keep pace with staff answering questions, checking stock and closing the sale before a quick visit turns int
  
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• Everything you need to know about tonight's total solar eclipse: The best times and locations to see it

  12-08-2026 09:37 via dailymail.com
  
  Tonight, millions of Britons will witness the best solar eclipse in a generation - and you will not want to miss out.
  
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• Agents made my retro tech safe to use again and showed their real value as testers of ideas

  12-08-2026 08:29 via theregister.com
  
  Over the years, my home has become something of an Island of Misfit Kit because it’s filled with ancient computers, all of them well and truly out of support. Most still work but it was always inadvisable to use them, and more so since Mythos came along. So I mostly left them alone until a few months ago when I decided to see if an agent could help to revive a 15 year old device with a tiny CPU, an ancient version of Arch Linux , and a browser so old it lacks the necessary encryption to co
  
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• Zuck’s Chinese agentic prey escapes, will resume standalone ops

  12-08-2026 06:54 via theregister.com
  
  China’s decision not to allow Meta to acquire local AI outfit Manus AI has become reality, with the upstart advising users it will soon “return to operating as an independent company.” Manus burst onto the AI scene in March 2025 with a “general agent” that allowed users assign tasks to an AI. To illustrate its powers, Manus claimed it could select the best candidate for a job by evaluating job applications stored in a .ZIP file, which it would open and read, then as
  
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• India’s central bank wants AI to approve loans that humans would reject

  12-08-2026 03:18 via theregister.com
  
  The governor of India’s Reserve Bank wants the nation’s financial institutions to use AI to approve loans that human assessors would likely reject. In a speech delivered yesterday at the FIBAC conference in Mumbai, Sanjay Malhotra said the regulator “sees AI as a capability to be responsibly harnessed and not merely as a risk to be contained,” then offered several reasons to support that statement. The first reason is that banks currently find it hard to justify loans to
  
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• Modular's Mojo programming language hits 1.0 milestone

  12-08-2026 01:50 via theregister.com
  
  Modular's Mojo reached its 1.0 milestone on Tuesday, promising developers a stable, production-ready, general-purpose programming language. But its primary purpose is more specific: to unify the AI software stack by providing a way to target the diverse set of GPUs, CPUs, ASICs, and other heterogeneous systems that are used to run AI workloads. Mojo, in conjunction with the MAX inference framework, aspires to make it easier to develop AI software, systems, and tools without being tied to vendor-
  
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• Everything you need to know about tonight's total solar eclipse

  12-08-2026 01:22 via dailymail.com
  
  CHRISTOPHER STEVENS: The conditions are practically perfect. For most people, this evening offers the best chance in a lifetime to see an almost total solar eclipse.
  
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• Tastes like home! First 100% British chocolate bar made since 1932 - using cocoa from Berkshire

  12-08-2026 01:02 via dailymail.com
  
  Forget Belgian truffles and Swiss chocolate - this bar is about as British as they come, with cocoa grown not in the tropics but in Berkshire.
  
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• Signal adds an extra layer of security to make sure you're actually chatting with the right person

  11-08-2026 23:45 via theregister.com
  
  Signal has introduced a new layer of security to help make sure no one has secretly interfered with your encrypted chats. The chat app is favored by diplomats, activists, and journalists for its security. It uses end-to-end message encryption and “safety numbers” – cryptographic fingerprints associated with the keys securing a conversation – which users can compare to verify they have the expected encrypted connection with a contact. But in theory, someone could still int
  
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• 421 bugs in Microsoft's Patch Tuesday release, and the Norks have already attacked one

  11-08-2026 23:31 via theregister.com
  
  This is an epic month for Microsoft patches, though not a record-setting one. Redmond addressed 421 bugs in its own products this month - about 200 fewer CVEs than last month, but likely the new norm with AI-assisted vulnerability disclosures and fixes. The big news is that North Korea’s Lazarus Group (and possibly other miscreants) found and attacked one of these flaws as a zero-day in early June. The bug, tracked as CVE-2026-68820, is a use-after-free in the Windows Ancillary Function Dr
  
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• Give Palantir up to $244m through 2028, says internal Defense Department memo

  11-08-2026 23:15 via theregister.com
  
  EXCLUSIVE US Deputy Secretary of Defense Stephen Feinberg has drafted a memorandum directing Defense Department subordinates to purchase up to $243.9 million in services from AI-enabled data analytics biz Palantir through March 31, 2027, without a competitive bidding process, The Register has learned. The August 4th, 2026, memo calls for what would effectively be a sole-source or no-bid consulting contract. Its subject line is "Funding Palantir." It's unclear, our source told us, whether the dea
  
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• Wild theory claims Earth will lose gravity for seven seconds TOMORROW in cosmic catastrophe

  11-08-2026 22:52 via dailymail.com
  
  A shocking conspiracy theory claims NASA has been working on a plan to survive a doomsday-like event that would kill millions worldwide.
  
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• Together AI embraces the competition with $240M IBM Cloud deal

  11-08-2026 20:51 via theregister.com
  
  With power, datacenter capacity, and other supply chain constraints, AI infrastructure is in short supply, and service providers will rent all the compute they can get, even if it means working with competing cloud providers. Together AI is the latest example. This week the service provider announced a $240 million deal to run its open weights inference platform on a “large cluster” of Nvidia GPUs housed in IBM Cloud. “Together AI selected IBM with Nvidia because of their innov
  
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• Millions of Americans across Midwest placed under urgent tornado warning as Chicago braces for impact: 'Take cover now!'

  11-08-2026 18:32 via dailymail.com
  
  Extreme winds and heavy rain have struck Illinois and Indiana, setting off tornado warnings throughout the region.
  
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• DEF CON dingus suspected of trying to take over Delta in-flight Wi-Fi

  11-08-2026 18:27 via theregister.com
  
  A passenger on a Delta Air Lines flight from Las Vegas to Atlanta after DEF CON is suspected of jamming the in-flight Wi-Fi and broadcasting an unauthorized network in what could amount to a federal offense. It seems like someone forgot the old truism "what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas." News of the incident began circulating late Monday when flight watchers spotted Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS) messages from the crew of Delta Flight 591 indicating that somet
  
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