Sci-Tech news

• Uber executive resigns after race discrimination probe

  11-07-2018 08:52 via bbc.co.uk
  The ride-hailing firm's head of human resources has left after claims she mishandled complaints.
  
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• Former X-Force hackers chase the offensive cyber gold rush

  29-09-2026 13:30 via theregister.com
  
  Two former leaders of IBM's X-Force Red team have launched RemoteThreat, an offensive cybersecurity startup backed by $7 million in pre-seed funding. CEO Chris Thompson and CTO Shawn Jones say the company's platform uses AI to plan, execute, and adapt offensive cyber operations, extending beyond the continuous penetration testing and vulnerability detection offered by other automated security tools. Thompson and Jones previously ran X-Force Red, where their team was hired to test nuclear power p
  
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• Healthcare campaigners turn up the heat on Palantir at Labour conference

  29-09-2026 13:05 via theregister.com
  
  Campaigners against Palantir's involvement in the UK's health sector are set to make themselves heard this week with planned protests at the Labour Party conference and in London. Health justice charity MedAct and medical campaign group Just Treatment are coordinating a protest at the ruling party's annual conference in Liverpool as ministers consider whether to extend the NHS's contract with the US spy-tech company. The groups are among those urging the government not to extend the Palantir-led
  
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• Dutch police arrest 'security pro' in ShinyHunters probe

  29-09-2026 12:41 via theregister.com
  
  Dutch police have arrested a 24-year-old man on suspicion of involvement with the prolific ShinyHunters cybercrime group. Cops announced the arrest on Monday night and said the Amsterdam resident would appear before judges at Rotterdam District Court today (Tuesday). Officers have not named the suspect. However, a company has identified a person they believe to be the suspect as working for them as an offensive security lead. Dutch broadcaster RTL and other newswires have also published a name.
  
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• Redmond to millions of Power BI users: You’re Fabric app devs now

  29-09-2026 12:00 via theregister.com
  
  Microsoft is pushing its data analytics and engineering environment to a new set of commercial users that are an “order of magnitude” greater than its current base. Power BI has become a popular biz intelligence system - with more than 425,000 customers worldwide - particularly among customers of the Microsoft Dynamics application portfolio. Now, Microsoft execs are trying to exploit this penetration by offering Power BI customers high-end database services and app building tools ava
  
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• The first face of mankind? Ancient human who lived 315,000 years ago is brought back to life in stunning digital reconstruction

  29-09-2026 11:44 via dailymail.com
  
  After spending more than 300,000 years hidden in the ground beneath Morocco, an ancient ancestor has been brought back to life thanks to a stunning digital reconstruction.
  
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• What eldritch horror lurks behind Heathrow's information screens?

  29-09-2026 11:15 via theregister.com
  
  Airport departure boards are supposed to tell passengers where and when their flights will leave. Recent examples spotted by eagle-eyed Reg readers have offered some bonus information: a Windows activation reminder, dates from the past, and a glimpse of what appears to be Windows 7 beneath the signage software. Airport borks, it seems, are like buses: three have arrived in quick succession at Heathrow. The first display shows a Windows activation watermark behind a list of departures to glamorou
  
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• iPhone 18 Pro buyers claim Apple's £1,199 smartphone is changing COLOUR - just weeks after going on sale

  29-09-2026 11:13 via dailymail.com
  
  It's been less than a month since Apple launched the new iPhone 18 Pro, but customers are already claiming that their new phones are changing colour.
  
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• HMRC bets up to £2.4B on Salesforce for taxpayer CRM overhaul

  29-09-2026 10:30 via theregister.com
  
  Salesforce has won a contract worth up to £2.4 billion including VAT to provide the UK tax collector with CRM software and related services for at least ten years. HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) selected Salesforce to supply a software-as-a-service CRM platform and related capabilities including customer and case management, marketing campaigns, messaging, reporting, analytics, and AI. Additional functions, including identity verification, fraud detection, and data integration, may be sup
  
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• Which copy of the file is the real one?

  29-09-2026 10:00 via theregister.com
  
  EVENT: Somewhere in your organisation right now, somebody is trying to work out which of four copies of a file is the current one. They will probably get it right, after twenty minutes and a message to a colleague in another time zone, and nobody will log the twenty minutes. That is what it costs to run distributed teams on file infrastructure built for an office, and most organisations have stopped noticing. The NAS is still there. So is the VPN, and so is the habit of downloading a file to wor
  
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• Fresh CSS constructs move web design beyond ticky-tacky little boxes

  29-09-2026 08:32 via theregister.com
  
  The World Wide Web’s decades-long tyranny of box design is finally coming to an end. A new set of CSS features – including the shape() function, and the border-shape and corner-shape properties – offers web designers and their AI agents a broader palette for laying out content in a more fluid manner. When the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) published its first standard for web page layout in 1996, web sites emulated the grid-defined layouts of academic papers, newspapers, and m
  
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• Google ending ChromeOS support two years early

  29-09-2026 06:55 via theregister.com
  
  Google’s basic mathematical skills appear a little fragile, after the company revealed its promise of ten years of support for new Chromebooks will only last for eight years. The web giant’s calculation problem appeared in a support document titled “What the Googlebook announcement means for your ChromeOS devices.” Googlebooks are the big G’s replacement for Chromebooks, the web-centric computers it launched in 2011 and which run ChromeOS. Chromebooks have won plent
  
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• Elon Musk Predicts AI Will Beat All Fields by 2028

  29-09-2026 05:55 via technocracy.news
  
  Musk might be right. My AI Capability Multiplier currently stands at 65.5: it will exceed 120 by year-end 2026, 3,100 by the end of 2027, and 45,000 by the end of 2028. This started at 1 on January 1, 2025, just before Trump was inaugurated. AI development is going parabolic even as we speak, sending the world into a state of Future Shock, as Alvin & Heidi Toffler predicted in 1970. ⁃ Patrick Wood, Editor.Elon Musk has predicted that AI may outperform humans in every field by 2028. Mus
  
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• OpenAI’s dirty deeds Down Under included security bypass attempts, using exposed keys, source code siphon

  29-09-2026 04:13 via theregister.com
  
  OpenAI has detailed the extent of the dirty deeds its agents indulged in Down Under in a Tuesday blog post titled How we will do better for Australia, which addresses last week’s news that one of its models improperly accessed a website that stores data related to national health scheme Medicare. “Our models accessed Australian government websites in ways they were not authorised to,” the post opens. “We also should have handled our response better. We are sorry and worki
  
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• AMD bets $8.2B that worlds matter more than words in AI

  29-09-2026 00:01 via theregister.com
  
  AMD dove deeper into AI model development on Monday with an agreement to acquire Fei-Fei Li's World Labs in a deal valued at approximately $8.2 billion. The House of Zen claims the all-stock deal is expected to close by year's end pending regulatory approval, and will guide the development of future AI hardware, software, and systems. "Building the compute platforms for the next generation of AI requires a deep understanding of how models are evolving," AMD CEO Lisa Su said in a canned statement
  
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• AWS needs to embrace its place as the Home Depot of AI infrastructure

  28-09-2026 23:05 via theregister.com
  
  Historically, building an application on top of AWS felt less like buying well-thought-out products, and more like a trip to Home Depot. This was great in an era before we had computers that would handle the "bolting all the parts together for us" parts, but increasingly it's starting to feel a lot more dated. Today, you can use Railway, Vercel (itself a platform built atop AWS), CloudFlare, and a host of other next-generation providers who will no doubt attempt to show up self promotionally in
  
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• Eating two slices of deli meat a day linked to 52% higher risk of dementia, study finds

  28-09-2026 22:41 via dailymail.com
  
  Eating just two slices of deli meat each day could raise your risk of developing dementia and cognitive decline, a massive review from researchers across 26 institutions has suggested.
  
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• JadePuffer crims hijacked Azure identities and used them to blow up cloud resources

  28-09-2026 22:30 via theregister.com
  
  The cyber criminal behind JadePuffer, the first known agentic ransomware infection reported over the summer, has also used stolen Azure identities to conduct destructive attacks on cloud storage and other resources, according to Microsoft. In July, Sysdig threat hunters uncovered JadePuffer, the first-ever documented agentic ransomware infection in which an LLM drove the entire extortion operation, from gaining initial access to compromising a production database server and destroying data. Now
  
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• Mysterious 'UFO' spotted on SpaceX livestream sparks wild alien theories: 'Looks like a mothership'

  28-09-2026 21:52 via dailymail.com
  
  A mysterious object was seen on SpaceX's livestream of its Starship rocket on Monday. Many viewers suggested it was a UFO, with some saying it was the size of a mothership.
  
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• OpenAI GPT-6 Astra really good at supply chain attacks, UK gov warns

  28-09-2026 21:44 via theregister.com
  
  Another LLM has joined the hacking fray. OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra has been spotted performing unsolicited supply chain attacks during security evaluations, according to the UK Artificial Intelligence Security Institute. In such simulations, the model has its standard security classifiers turned off. Nonetheless, Astra was seen attempting undesirable actions more frequently than prior models. "In our simulations, we found that GPT-6 Astra conducted a range of unsanctioned attack activities, and did s
  
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• French dev aims to solve bots' blindness so they can understand GUIs

  28-09-2026 20:19 via theregister.com
  
  Most LLMs are great at answering prompts, but fall short when it comes to navigating around the desktop in Windows or Linux. French AI model dev H unveiled a pair of computer use models on Monday aimed at handling graphical user interfaces (GUIs). Throughout computing history, computer use largely falls into three categories: command line interfaces (CLIs), application programming interfaces (APIs), and GUIs. AI agents can easily plug into the first two, but navigating desktop environments and a
  
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• How many times are you paying for the same file?

  28-09-2026 18:45 via theregister.com
  
  EVENT: Count the copies. The one on the NAS. The one somebody pulled over the VPN to work on at home. The one in the sync folder, which may or may not still match the one on the NAS. The one attached to an email because the sync was slow that morning. Four copies of one file, four places paying to store it, and one person, eventually, working out which is current. That is the cost most organizations have stopped noticing. Distributed teams produce more unstructured file data than ever, and most
  
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• Massive SpaceX rocket explodes in a fireball as it hits ocean following test flight

  28-09-2026 18:34 via dailymail.com
  
  SpaceX's Starship, the most powerful rocket in the world, exploded moments after slamming into the Pacific Ocean following an orbital flight on Monday.
  
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• Hurricane Polo sparks warnings across five US states as Category 3 storm makes landfall TODAY

  28-09-2026 18:21 via dailymail.com
  
  A major hurricane is expected to hit the coast of North America Monday night, triggering flood warnings for six million people in the US.
  
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• Microsoft's Copilot super app comes with a meter attached

  28-09-2026 17:36 via theregister.com
  
  Microsoft has unveiled its shiny new Copilot super app alongside an “evolved” pricing model to go with it, which means that customers will keep paying for a subscription and then cough up more when they want the really clever stuff. The company outlined the changes alongside its expanded vision for Copilot, which is being turned into a single AI work hub spanning chat, Office apps, coding, and increasingly autonomous agents. Microsoft calls the new pricing setup a combination of a Us
  
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• SpaceX's Starship rocket suffers alarming mid-flight scare on first attempt to reach orbit

  28-09-2026 17:33 via dailymail.com
  
  SpaceX's Starship, the most powerful rocket in the world, suffered an alarming mid-flight scar as it soared into space for its first orbital launch.
  
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• Earth's cities are changing COLOUR: Astronaut photos taken just 13 years apart reveal how night lights have morphed from yellow to white across the globe

  28-09-2026 17:26 via dailymail.com
  
  Incredible photos taken from space reveal how street lights have changed colour across the globe, morphing from yellow to white.
  
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• Dutch government turns to NixOS for a sovereign desktop

  28-09-2026 17:05 via theregister.com
  
  The Dutch government is backing an effort to build a FOSS workplace for public administration, including a desktop operating system based on NixOS. The DAWO Project has been gestating for some months, but it just got a lot more visible thanks to an in-depth report on Dutch tech news site Tweakers.net. DAWO stands for "Digitaal Autonome Werkomgeving Overheid," or "Digital Autonomous Government Work Environment." Rather than a single product, its blueprint combines replaceable components for the o
  
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• You can swim, but you can't hide! Sharks can hear sounds nearly 250ft away - and hunt down the source, study finds

  28-09-2026 16:35 via dailymail.com
  
  Scientists have discovered sharks can hear underwater sounds from nearly 250 feet (75 metres) away and even work out exactly where they're coming from.
  
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• Europe's AI ambitions rest on somebody else's supply chain

  28-09-2026 16:16 via theregister.com
  
  Europe is one of the world's largest markets for AI datacenter infrastructure, but its own local companies capture only a fraction of the value, because overseas suppliers dominate chips, servers, and cloud infrastructure. According to the Global Electronics Association (GEA), EU-headquartered companies account for only six percent of the bloc's datacenter semiconductor market, seven percent of server manufacturing and assembly, and eight percent of cloud infrastructure. Its report, "From Chips
  
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