Sci-Tech news

• UK porn site age restrictions could lead to a data breach siliconrepublic.com/enterprise/age…

  06-03-2018 12:10 via twitter.com
  UK porn site age restrictions could lead to a data breach siliconrepublic.com/enterprise/age…
  
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• America is building datacenters faster than the grid can power them

  15-09-2026 18:37 via theregister.com
  
  Financial service biz Moody's says the availability of power is still a major constraint on US datacenter growth as the pace of construction exceeds the speed at which the nation's grid infrastructure can add the requisite capacity. America is the epicenter of the datacenter construction boom, driven by the AI craze and demand for compute capacity to train ever-larger foundation models. The latest report from Moody's estimates the power needed by all those bit barns will reach 426 terawatt-hours
  
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• Cisco email security boxes can be rooted by... an email

  15-09-2026 18:01 via theregister.com
  
  Criminals are exploiting a critical Cisco Secure Email Gateway flaw that can turn a malicious email into root access. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-76461, carries a 9.8 CVSS score and affects physical and virtual Secure Email Gateway appliances regardless of their configuration. Cisco says there are no workarounds, so patching is the only fix. The bug lies in how Cisco's AsyncOS software handles incoming email. An attacker doesn't need to log in: they can send a booby-trapped message th
  
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• Twitter workaround worked around again: X's lawyers cancel XCancel again

  15-09-2026 17:12 via theregister.com
  
  Nitter and XCancel, a pair of social media services which let you view posts on X without an X account, are down again after the latest round of legal wrangling. While the XCancel site now displays the message "Unfortunately, due to a new development in the ongoing legal proceedings, we are required to suspend this service again until further notice," Nitter's site is offline, and the code repository was archived on September 11, 2026. Things were not looking good in August for the services, whi
  
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• Who's governing your AI? A trust framework for enterprise agents and models

  15-09-2026 17:00 via theregister.com
  
  Experienced IT leaders know that shadow IT is a persistent problem, but rapidly evolving AI and the proliferation of agents mean the potential threat - and cost - is greater than ever. AI agents are non-deterministic, autonomous, and adaptable. They excel at solving tasks in creative ways, often to the surprise of their creators. We've seen agents write blogs that criticize project maintainers that refused their pull requests. Another one hacked a McKinsey chatbot to gain read/write access witho
  
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• CenterPoint Energy confirms intruder helped themselves to customer information

  15-09-2026 16:14 via theregister.com
  
  Texas utility CenterPoint Energy has confirmed that an attacker broke in and stole customer information through one of its internet-facing systems. The company disclosed the breach in a Form 8-K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission after a post on a cybercrime forum claimed to offer its customer data. Houston-based CenterPoint, which serves around 7 million customers, said its electricity and gas services remain operational and undisrupted. "While the investigation remains ongoing,
  
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• September's Windows 11 patch needs an emergency patch of its own

  15-09-2026 15:33 via theregister.com
  
  Microsoft has released an out-of-band update for Windows 11 24H2 and 25H2 after September's record-breaking Patch Tuesday addressed almost 1,000 vulnerabilities across the company's products – and introduced several new problems. Those problems are related to USB Audio Class 1.0 devices, Remote Desktop Services, and host folders shared with certain Hyper-V-based Linux virtual machines via Plan9. While the Hyper-V and Remote Desktop Services issues are fixed, there is still work to do on US
  
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• Swiss court sentences 52-year-old Ukrainian ransomware dev to nearly 13 years in the cooler

  15-09-2026 15:32 via theregister.com
  
  A Swiss court has sentenced a 52-year-old Ukrainian ransomware developer to 12 years and nine months in prison for his role in attacks on companies including Stadler Rail. Zurich District Court found that the man developed LockerGoga, MegaCortex, and Nefilim, but was not the mastermind behind the operations. He also received a ten-year ban from Switzerland. The judgment is not final and can be appealed. He had been held in pretrial detention since October 2021 and consistently denied knowing tha
  
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• Anthropic and OpenAI look to Uncle Sam to make them too big to fail

  15-09-2026 15:00 via theregister.com
  
  OPINION By luck or happenstance, Anthropic planted a seed in the mind of the public last week: AI in the wrong hands is dangerous and left unchecked poses an existential threat to humanity. With pop culture steeped in references to malignant AI, the mainstream media ate it up. The headlines wrote themselves and the seed took root. But it's not humanity that faces the biggest threat – at least not yet. Rather, it's American model-making giants Anthropic and OpenAI, which, despite hundreds o
  
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• Microsoft account refuseniks have another way of installing Windows

  15-09-2026 14:31 via theregister.com
  
  A new loophole to avoid Microsoft's insistence that you need a Microsoft account to use the Home edition of Windows 11 has appeared, and it's so ludicrously simple we can only assume the good bug fairy has paid a visit to Redmond. The workaround is in the normal Windows 11 Out-of-Box Experience (OOBE) that users see when setting up the operating system. Get to the point where Windows prompts for a Microsoft account, then click the "Learn more" hyperlink beneath the text box and the Sign-in optio
  
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• US confirms it has weapons in spaaaaaace

  15-09-2026 14:00 via theregister.com
  
  The US Space Force has deployed "space control weapons" into orbit, although it stopped short of explaining what they are and how it got there. US Air Force Secretary Troy Meink reportedly spoke at the Air and Space Forces Association conference and said the US had deployed weaponry around Earth. There is no word on the nature of the weaponry, nor on how and when it was launched. There have been plenty of classified launches, and the US also has the X-37 program. There are two uncrewed X-37B spa
  
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• Forget the dad bod...it's all about the father face! Men with wider faces are seen as better parents, study finds

  15-09-2026 13:32 via dailymail.com
  
  Forget the dad bod - it seems having a 'dad face' can be attractive to women, too.
  
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• Gov.uk still struggling with IT contractor tax rules

  15-09-2026 13:28 via theregister.com
  
  UK government departments are still struggling to implement the tax laws governing IT contractors years after the controversial rules were introduced. IR35 has become hated by freelance tech workers who feel it removes the tax benefits of contracting, without offering the employee benefits of in-house roles in its stead. The latest accounts from the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) show that the UK tax collector is reviewing its implementation of IR35 for a second year after t
  
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• Would YOU spend £350 on a toaster? Futuristic appliance lets you select your perfect shade of toast by colour - and even has a special Crumpet Mode

  15-09-2026 13:25 via dailymail.com
  
  The Eye Q Auto Toaster is the brainchild of Sage Appliances, and is the first appliance to toast by colour rather than time.
  
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• UK's Digital ID walks into a bar... two months after being killed off

  15-09-2026 12:31 via theregister.com
  
  Britain killed off its national digital ID scheme this summer, but from today you can use a digital ID to prove you're old enough to buy a pint. New rules taking effect on Tuesday allow pubs, bars, restaurants, music venues and shops in England and Wales to accept digital proof of age when selling alcohol, meaning customers can use an app on their phone instead of digging around for a driving license or passport. The change is voluntary. Businesses don't have to accept digital proof of age, cust
  
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• PostgreSQL 19 graph queries fail the 'would you ship this?' test

  15-09-2026 11:42 via theregister.com
  
  PostgreSQL developers have pulled planned graph query support from version 19 over concerns that unresolved bugs could haunt the release. The feature, SQL Property Graph Queries (SQL/PGQ), became part of the SQL standard in 2023. It provides syntax for exploring relationships between nodes connected by edges. PostgreSQL's implementation was removed over unresolved issues, while version 19's release date remains unconfirmed. A fourth beta is scheduled for September 24. Longtime PostgreSQL contrib
  
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• Apple's new CEO John Ternus shows off the iPhone Duo on the Emmys red carpet - as delighted fans call him the 'coolest person in the room'

  15-09-2026 11:20 via dailymail.com
  
  Apple's new CEO, John Ternus, made a surprise appearance at the Emmy's last night - and even showed off the new iPhone Duo on the red carpet.
  
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• Give Xfce a Mac or Unity-style makeover

  15-09-2026 11:15 via theregister.com
  
  PART 2 Xfce's Panel Profiles app can rearrange your desktop, but getting every layout working properly still takes some manual tinkering. In part 1 of this two-part feature, we covered how to install Xfce's Panel Profiles tool and all the extra plugins it needs for its dozen alternative layouts: macOS, Unity, MATE or GNOME 2, several different Windows-like layouts, and half a dozen different generations of both Xfce and Xubuntu. However, as our screenshots showed, the "Cupertino" (Mac-style) and
  
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• Halloween pumpkins will be too SMALL to carve this year: Drought has left gourds up to 40% smaller - and with tougher skins

  15-09-2026 11:05 via dailymail.com
  
  Halloween pumpkins will be too small to carve this year after drought stunted their growth.
  
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• Open weights are not open source: Why AI's favorite label is under dispute

  15-09-2026 10:30 via theregister.com
  
  The AI industry likes to abuse the word "open." It appears in product releases, research papers, policy debates, and investor presentations. A company publishes model files to Hugging Face, developers run them on their own GPUs, and the release is quickly described as an "open source model." Not necessarily. It may only be open-weight. The difference is more than a technicality. It determines whether you can merely deploy a completed neural network or whether you can meaningfully inspect, reprod
  
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• How Everpure plans to stop AI from starving without data

  15-09-2026 10:00 via theregister.com
  
  Imagine you are an AI Agent. You execute inside a $20-40 million-plus Nvidia SuperPOD system’s accelerator hardware, have a skill set and can call up other agents to do your bidding. An insurance company customer, using a PC browser or smart phone, asks a question: “Am I covered for weather-related damage under my current policy?” and it is handed off to an AI agent. What happens next? The agent itself runs on clusters of CPU + GPU/accelerator servers that host the large langua
  
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• Most people who quit M365 for Google do it out of spite, but there’s no ROI in that

  15-09-2026 09:23 via theregister.com
  
  One of the main motivations for quitting Microsoft 365 and adopting Google Workspace is spite, an emotion that sadly doesn’t produce a return on investment. The source of that disappointing news is Domenico Scriva, a senior principal analyst at Gartner, who today told the firm’s IT Symposium event in Australia that moving between the suites is also unlikely to save buyers much money. He pointed out that Google Workspace licenses are cheaper than the E5 bundle that is Microsoft’
  
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• Apple iPhone Duo makes developers think in folds

  15-09-2026 07:55 via theregister.com
  
  The October 23 ship date of Apple’s iPhone Duo grows nigh, so developers wanting to optimize their iPhone apps for the foldable will need to get to grips with its new display behaviors and form factor. “A fold is a UI event with backend consequences,” Atharva Deosthale, Appwrite developer advocate, wrote in an introductory blog post. “Folding and unfolding is part of normal device use, so apps need to preserve state and respond cleanly when the display changes.” The
  
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• The latest AI doomsayer is China’s intelligence boss

  15-09-2026 06:56 via theregister.com
  
  China’s minister for State Security has decided AI might be bad for the nation’s ruling Communist Party. Party secretary and minister Chen Yixin’s views appeared in China Cyberspace Magazine, the flagship publication of China’s Cyberspace Administration (and which readers may recall once carried a piece by Elon Musk). In Chen’s view, “the field of AI has become the main battleground for global technological competition and a new arena for strategic rivalry amo
  
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• Technocracy’s Appeal: 800,000 Have Applied For Citizenship In “Liberland”

  15-09-2026 04:28 via technocracy.news
  
  A micro-state Utopia for crypto billionaires who eschew taxes, government, and regulations of any kind. These so-called “network states” are popping up all around the world. Peter Thiel has backed Praxis and Prospera, which is in Honduras. Reportedly, Thiel now calls Prospera home. Praxis doesn’t have a home yet, but they are hoping for Greenland. ⁃ Patrick Wood Editor.More than 800,000 people are hoping to move to a self-proclaimed crypto micronation called ‘L
  
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• COBOL dev won .Net hackathon with help from AI – and their CIO loves it

  15-09-2026 03:47 via theregister.com
  
  The CIO of Australia’s taxation office (ATO) is letting administrative staff use Microsoft’s Copilot for everyday activities, in the hope it pays off by helping them to develop skills, and ideas, that eventually improve its core services. “We are getting AI into the hands of as many workers as possible to build the muscle,” ATO CIO Mark Sawade said at analyst firm Gartner’s annual IT Symposium on Monday. The CIO said the ATO is already familiar with AI. “We ha
  
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• Microsoft drafts feel-good AI model guidelines and wants your input

  15-09-2026 02:15 via theregister.com
  
  Microsoft on Monday debuted draft principles for governing how the company will train future AI models, as part of a public consultation process. The Windows biz has solicited feedback to refine its Humanist AI Code of Conduct [PDF], with the expectation of applying the guidelines to model development next year. "This Code of Conduct is motivated by a single overriding objective: that humans must retain meaningful control over AI so that it can help people live healthier, happier, and more produ
  
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• Fish and chips could be off the menu: UK cod stocks have crashed by 48%, study warns

  15-09-2026 01:01 via dailymail.com
  
  UK cod stocks have crashed in the last decade, a study has revealed - amid warnings that the government has 'ignored science' on declining fish populations.
  
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• HBO Max Reddit account compromised to serve ClickFix attacks

  15-09-2026 00:43 via theregister.com
  
  Someone compromised the official HBO Max Reddit account and used it to push more than 100 malicious ads serving up ClickFix attacks targeting both Windows and macOS devices with information-stealing malware. A Reddit user uncovered the infostealer ads on September 6, noting that the ad showed u/hbomax as the author — this is the verified HBO Max account — and advertised a macOS app for HBO Max. The streaming service does not offer a native client for the Mac. Anyone who clicked on th
  
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• Oracle celebrates banner quarter with another round of layoffs

  14-09-2026 22:46 via theregister.com
  
  Oracle posted record revenue during its latest quarter, but that hasn't stopped the company from chopping more employees. Reports began appearing on social media early Monday that staff were having trouble accessing corporate systems such as email and Slack, which essentially served as a sign that they had lost their jobs. According to a number of now-ex Oracle employees posting in a LinkedIn thread, layoff emails weren’t sent to personal email addresses, leaving a good number of people un
  
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