Sci-Tech news

• UN warns of need for global governance to avoid an AI-pocalypse

  02-07-2026 10:30 via theregister.com
  
  A United Nations report on AI warns the technology is moving faster than governments can keep up, and the window of opportunity to establish effective global governance of it will not be open forever. The Preliminary Report from the UN's Independent International Scientific Panel on Artificial Intelligence presents AI as something of a mixed blessing. It says that the potential benefits of AI are enormous. If deployed and applied thoughtfully, the technology could support progress towards sustai
  
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• Missing scientist secretly worked on teleportation at a UFO-linked lab before vanishing, bombshell clues reveal

  02-07-2026 15:26 via dailymail.com
  
  Shocking details about a missing nuclear lab worker have tied him to futuristic research that has the power to change the world of computing as we know it.
  
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• Pacemaker manufacturer Medtronic warns patients cybercrooks may have swiped health data

  02-07-2026 14:54 via theregister.com
  
  Medical device giant Medtronic is warning patients that their personal and health information may have been caught up in an April cyberattack in which intruders spent nearly a week inside parts of its corporate network. According to breach notification letters sent to affected individuals, the company detected unusual activity on April 15 and later determined an unauthorized party accessed certain corporate systems between April 13 and April 19. The compromised systems contained the sort of data
  
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• India gives WhatsApp three days to defend username rollout amid security fears

  02-07-2026 13:50 via theregister.com
  
  India has asked WhatsApp to explain why it should not face regulatory action after it announced the global rollout of a new usernames feature amid fears that the new feature could lead to increased cyberattacks. The country's Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) gave the Meta owned platform three days to respond to its July 1 letter and to halt the rollout of usernames until the government gives its approval. WhatsApp announced on June 29 that it was allowing users to reser
  
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• Locals baffled after spotting a large PURPLE seal on beach in California

  02-07-2026 13:00 via dailymail.com
  
  Locals at a California beach have been baffled after spotting a large elephant seal with a very unusual colouration.
  
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• Scientists propose launching giant 'airbag' into space to protect Earth from dangerous solar superstorms

  02-07-2026 12:43 via dailymail.com
  
  Scientists have suggested launching a giant 'airbag' into space to protect Earth from terrifying solar superstorms.
  
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• Oracle E-Business Suite was under attack via critical flaw before the public exploit code was even released

  02-07-2026 12:35 via theregister.com
  
  Attackers have been caught exploiting a critical flaw in Oracle E-Business Suite's Payments module just six weeks after Oracle patched it – and before any public proof-of-concept exploit was available. Researchers at Defused said they observed the first known exploitation of CVE-2026-46817 on June 27. The attackers were targeting the Oracle Payments File Transmission component in E-Business Suite releases 12.2.3 through 12.2.15, they said. The vulnerability, fixed in Oracle's May Critical
  
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• Scientists BUILD a cell from scratch: Synthetic organism can feed, grow, copy its DNA and divide in world-first breakthrough

  02-07-2026 11:15 via dailymail.com
  
  Scientists have built a synthetic cell from scratch in a world-first breakthrough that paves the way for creating entirely artificial forms of life.
  
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• Connect, disconnect, or just have a lovely beer

  02-07-2026 11:15 via theregister.com
  
  BORK!BORK!BORK! Sometimes a digital sign can carry a message that means more than just words. Like this example, which could be a simple connectivity issue or speak to a deeper spiritual meaning: You're not connected to a network. Spotted by an eagle-eyed Vulture on a visit to Neuschwanstein Castle in Germany, near the border with Austria, the digital sign normally displays information to individuals waiting in a nearby queue. Not today, though. From a purely technical standpoint, it appears the
  
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• Hackers shoveled snow for company, were rewarded with network admin access

  02-07-2026 09:00 via theregister.com
  
  PWNED Welcome back to PWNED, the column where we document serious security failures in hopes we can all learn from others’ mistakes. This week, we’ll talk about how a lack of physical security can allow threat actors to take control of your network. Have a story about someone leaving a gaping hole in their network? Share it with us at [email protected]. Anonymity is available upon request. Our story comes to us from two professional red teamers, who get paid to break into offices and
  
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• Trouble keeps finding Supermicro as strange server shipments attract police attention in Taiwan and Singapore

  02-07-2026 08:02 via theregister.com
  
  The strife seldom stops at Supermicro, which this week has been forced to deny a raid on its office, and appears to have fallen victim to fraudsters in Singapore. The server-maker yesterday published a business update in which Chief Revenue Officer Matt Thauberge assured customers that police in Taiwan did not raid the company this week – the company is just helping local authorities after they detained four of its workers for questioning. Thauberge said Supermicro “coordinated with
  
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• New humanoid robots from China look like creepy pop star action figures – complete with slightly dodgy lip-synch

  02-07-2026 04:35 via theregister.com
  
  One of China’s emerging humanoid robotics companies has launched its most-realistic looking models yet and says it has already taken over 13,000 orders for the $17,600/ £13,300 machines. Here’s a shot of the new machines. You’re looking at the UWORLD U1, which Chinese company UBTECH says enjoys 88 degrees of freedom thanks to use of “a proprietary dual-pivot biomimetic cervical spine, enabling it to replicate up to 90 percent of fundamental human movements.” T
  
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• Oracle outlines all the ways it could lose the farm it bet on AI

  02-07-2026 00:23 via theregister.com
  
  Oracle is burning hundreds of billions to finance AI datacenters for the likes of OpenAI. Now, the company is admitting they may not pay off. Amid the usual boilerplate, Big Red cited numerous risk factors related to its AI infrastructure investments in a regulatory filing published late last month. “To grow our OCI business, which requires increased computing capacity, we must incur significant capital and operating expenditures to increase our existing data center capacity and to establi
  
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• EvilTokens device-code phishing kit totally more evil than we all thought

  01-07-2026 23:50 via theregister.com
  
  EvilTokens, the device-code phishing kit that can allow criminals to bypass multi-factor authentication (MFA) and silently authenticate as the victim to the organization's Microsoft 365 applications, appears to be even more insidious than we all thought. Cisco Talos incident responders on Wednesday described how the lure reaches a victim's inbox, and revealed new capabilities alongside a “more sophisticated evasion approach” than documented in earlier EvilTokens research. Talos uncov
  
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• Claude Sonnet 5.0 heads straight down the middle of the road to dodge controversy

  01-07-2026 23:33 via theregister.com
  
  Anthropic has released the latest version of its mid-sized model, Sonnet 5, which the company claims is its most “agentic” yet. For developers writing agents to automate tedious and recurring tasks, Sonnet 5 promises improved capabilities in reasoning, tool use, coding, and knowledge work. This version is also less likely to pull embarrassing (for Anthropic) gaffes of misunderstanding, so the company asserts. “Our safety assessments found that Sonnet 5 shows an overall lower ra
  
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• Anthropic is removing its covert code for catching Chinese competitors

  01-07-2026 22:56 via theregister.com
  
  Anthropic says that it plans to remove hidden codes it added to Claude Code several months ago to catch other AI companies that are trying to steal from its models. Thariq Shihipar, an engineer at Anthropic who works on the Claude Code team, said on Tuesday that a fix should appear on July 1. "This is an experiment we launched in March that was meant to prevent account abuse from unauthorized resellers and protect against distillation," Shihipar explained, using the industry term for copying AI
  
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• Godot says bye bye AI, bans vibe-coded contributions

  01-07-2026 22:29 via theregister.com
  
  Vibe coders apparently don't understand what their AI servants write - at least that’s what the team behind open-source game engine Godot seems to be implying with a new policy that cracks down on AI-generated contributions. The Godot team announced on Tuesday that they were in the process of rewriting their contribution policy to prohibit almost all use of AI from contributors, citing an overwhelming number of pull requests that have poured in, many of which appear to be AI-generated. Nor
  
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• Somebody told DeepSeek to build in-browser ransomware and it gleefully complied

  01-07-2026 21:57 via theregister.com
  
  You can't ask most models to help you make "ransomware" directly, but many will be more than willing if you give them the right prompt. DeepSeek and other LLMs with fewer safety and security controls make theoretical cyberthreats - like browser-only ransomware - much more likely to be used in real-world infections, according to Check Point researchers. The Israeli cybersecurity company analyzed a DeepSeek-generated sample in a Wednesday report that its threat hunters describe as in-browser ranso
  
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• First shark of the season spotted near one of America's busiest beaches amid Fourth of July warning

  01-07-2026 21:52 via dailymail.com
  
  The first onshore shark was spotted lurking near one of America's busiest beaches after officials told beachgoers to stay alert as sightings of the apex predators often peak around the Fourth of July.
  
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• An artificial cell with a full lifecycle has been created for the first time

  01-07-2026 21:10 via theregister.com
  
  A group of scientists in a Minnesota laboratory have made history, creating the first artificial cell with a complete life cycle. SpudCell, as the team behind it has dubbed the creation, is built entirely from known chemical components, and can grow, replicate its genome, divide into new generations of cells, and even demonstrate natural selection and competition as its genes change. That’s not to say SpudCells are alive, mind you, as the team behind it aren’t claiming to have become
  
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• AI search could kill the web without new quality signals and revenue models

  01-07-2026 20:13 via theregister.com
  
  AI answers are killing content publishers, as they cause readers to stay on Google or on the chatbot of their choice, rather than navigating to dedicated websites. The end result could be catastrophic for the open web. Alex Chan, assistant professor at Harvard Business School, floats that prediction based on an economic model he describes in a paper titled "AI and the collapse of the www." A paper from Saharsh Agarwal, assistant professor at the Indian School of Business, and Ananya Sen, associa
  
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• Red teamers turned Claude Desktop into a double agent to do their evil bidding

  01-07-2026 19:00 via theregister.com
  
  EXCLUSIVE Pentera Labs’ red teamers compromised a developer’s AI agent via his Claude Desktop app and ultimately turned that access into full remote code execution on the dev’s machine – demonstrating how an attacker could turn a trusted, chatty AI assistant into a double agent operating on their behalf. “Claude’s got a new voice,” Pentera's offensive security services team leader Dvir Avraham told The Register. “We acknowledge the huge trust in AI
  
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• 'Time traveler' who says he is from the year 2118 makes chilling claims about World War 3 and secret CIA inventions

  01-07-2026 18:37 via dailymail.com
  
  A man claiming to have traveled more than a century into the future says he returned from the year 2118 with alarming predictions about the fate of humanity..
  
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• NASA unsure Boeing Starliner will ever be certified for human flight

  01-07-2026 18:02 via theregister.com
  
  Place your bets, because it looks increasingly unlikely Boeing's Starliner spacecraft will carry astronauts again, if a NASA inspector general's report is anything to go on. Published on Tuesday, the OIG report on NASA's management of its Commercial Crew Program (CCP) examines how SpaceX and Boeing have performed in providing crew transportation to the International Space Station. The report notes that SpaceX worked through its own technical challenges getting humans into space and to the ISS. B
  
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• PlayStation announces plans to SCRAP physical discs from 2028 - forcing players to download games instead

  01-07-2026 17:17 via dailymail.com
  
  PlayStation has announced that it will scrap physical games from January 2028.
  
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• When backups aren't enough: the case for real disaster recovery

  01-07-2026 17:00 via theregister.com
  
  Ask most IT teams whether they're protected against a major outage or ransomware attack, and the answer will almost certainly be yes, because the backups are in place and the box marked 'disaster recovery plan' has been ticked. But there's a difference between having a backup and recovering from a disaster, and that gap tends to reveal itself at the worst possible moment. The backup problem nobody talks about Backups were built for a different era. When the biggest threat was hardware failure or
  
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• Blood-red skies appear over Venezuela days after deadly earthquakes sparking fears of a biblical omen

  01-07-2026 16:42 via dailymail.com
  
  An eerie crimson glow has engulfed parts of Venezuela, turning the skies blood-red just days after two deadly earthquakes rattled the region.
  
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• Microsoft lets Azure Linux 4 out of the cloud in downloadable ISO form

  01-07-2026 16:21 via theregister.com
  
  Microsoft's Fedora-derived Azure Linux 4 has hit a new milestone: you can now run it outside of Azure. The project's GitHub page now offers ISO file downloads in addition to its Azure Marketplace page. We covered the Azure Linux 4 announcement in May, and it is still in preview. You should not deploy this in production just yet. The availability of ISO files for installation in a local VM is a welcome step forward, though. They are not where you might expect to find them for a FOSS project on Gi
  
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• Last month was the hottest June on RECORD for England, the Met Office says - with an average temperature of 17.1°C

  01-07-2026 16:21 via dailymail.com
  
  England has sweltered through the hottest June ever, official figures show. Provisional figures reveal that across the country, the average temperature was 17.1°C last month.
  
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• Skies turn blood red over Venezuela after deadly earthquakes spark fears of biblical omen

  01-07-2026 16:19 via dailymail.com
  
  An eerie crimson glow has engulfed parts of Venezuela, turning the skies blood-red just days after two deadly earthquakes rattled the region.
  
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