Sci-Tech news

• VIDEO: Driverless car suburbia imagined

  09-03-2016 01:11 via bbc.co.uk
  
  How technology, such as driverless cars, could change the look of our city suburbs.
  
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• Emergency plans activated for 8.5m as brutal heat and severe storms threaten the East Coast TODAY

  06-08-2026 14:35 via dailymail.com
  
  An emergency plan has been activated for millions of Americans starting on Thursday as officials warn brutal heat and severe storms are hitting a large part of the US East Coast.
  
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• IT department put sticky notes on the laptops to help employees log in

  06-08-2026 14:00 via theregister.com
  
  PWNED Welcome back to PWNED, the weekly column where we lovingly poke fun at other organizations' security screw-ups, in hopes the rest of us can learn a valuable lesson. This week’s story involves an IT department that ought to know better putting user credentials in the precisely wrong place. 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 terrifying tech tale comes courtesy of Marc Bishop,
  
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• Windows 10 LTSC 2021 has five months before security updates cost extra

  06-08-2026 13:03 via theregister.com
  
  Microsoft has dropped a reminder that Windows 10 LTSC 2021 will wheeze its last breath soon, and enterprises need to plan for the event. While free support for most editions of Windows 10 ended last year, Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2021 is still receiving updates. That support will end on January 12, 2027, with a final security update. The good news is that administrators can keep the security updates flowing via the Extended Security Updates (ESU) program. The bad news is the price: $61 per dev
  
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• Meta latest to tell world its AI agent wandered out of test pen

  06-08-2026 12:24 via theregister.com
  
  If AI companies are collecting badges for "our model escaped the test environment," Meta just earned one. The Facebook parent company has confirmed that one of its AI models exploited a vulnerability in another organization's systems during a security evaluation, making it the third major AI developer in less than two weeks to disclose an agent wandering beyond its intended sandbox. The incident happened during testing carried out by AI security firm Irregular. Meta told the BBC that it reached
  
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• The dodo wasn't stupid after all! Scientists debunk one of history's biggest animal myths - revealing the extinct bird was just as smart as modern pigeons

  06-08-2026 11:51 via dailymail.com
  
  For centuries, the dodo has been the butt of jokes, its name becoming shorthand for anyone considered dim-witted, hopeless or destined to fail. 
  
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• News Corp labels some AI companies 'crass kleptomaniacs'

  06-08-2026 11:30 via theregister.com
  
  Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation appears to have let its most acerbic writers loose on its latest results announcement, in which certain AI companies are branded "crass kleptomaniacs." CEO Robert Thomson used his prepared remarks to point out that if it weren't for all the quality content from News Corp, "users would be drowning in a slimy sea of AI slop." "We have trusted content relationships with OpenAI and Meta, and are in advanced discussions with several other companies," he added, before
  
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• The end of haddock and chips? Britain's fish stocks face COLLAPSE as trawlers illegally dump six times more fish than they bring ashore, scientists warn

  06-08-2026 11:17 via dailymail.com
  
  No trip to the beach is complete without a serving of haddock and chips, but scientists warn that illegal fishing practices could spell the end of this seaside staple.
  
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• Azure CTO pastes Doom into Paint one frame at a time

  06-08-2026 10:30 via theregister.com
  
  Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich has taken a break from the cloud to turn Paint into a monitor for Doom, using the Windows clipboard as plumbing. Dubbed "MS Paint Doom" or "DoomPaint" – either will work – the project is the product of a spare-time experiment. To be clear, Microsoft Paint isn't doing anything other than serving as a place to paste from the game. As Russinovich observed: "Paint renders the game but does not compute it. Paint computes nothing. Paint has never comput
  
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• HPE extends validity of quoted hardware prices, possibly for months

  06-08-2026 07:59 via theregister.com
  
  Hewlett Packard Enterprise has changed its pricing policy and will now honour quoted hardware prices from the day of issue until the kit leaves its factories. The new policy came into effect on Wednesday. The back story to this change is the AI boom, which has seen demand for servers, memory, and storage skyrocket, and the prices for critical components rise steadily while also fluctuating from day to day. That chaotic situation saw HPE and other enterprise hardware players change policies so th
  
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• Chinese router vendor denies its firmware contains backdoors – but pauses downloads to fix security issues anyway

  06-08-2026 06:57 via theregister.com
  
  Chinese Wi-Fi router vendor Zbtlink has denied its products contain backdoors but paused firmware downloads while it fixes unspecified security vulnerabilities. The backdoor accusation came from VulnCheck, a provider of a threat intelligence platform. VulnCheck chief technology officer Jacob Baines posted the backdoor allegation on Wednesday and said the Zbtlink device on his desk “continuously attempts to reach a command and control server on the internet.” “Zbtlink routers ph
  
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• Forget lab-grown meat! Scientists have come up with a way to cultivate beef INSIDE lettuce and tobacco plants

  06-08-2026 06:00 via dailymail.com
  
  'Lab-grown' is a phrase that puts many people off. But what if you could enjoy meat that had been grown inside plants?
  
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• Proxmox ports itself to Arm with help from Nvidia and Supermicro

  06-08-2026 05:45 via theregister.com
  
  Proxmox Server Solutions, the company behind the open source Proxmox virtualization stack, has announced a port of its flagship Virtual Environment to the Arm CPU architecture – and a collaboration with Nvidia and Supermicro that made it happen. The outfit’s announcement states that it can now run on 64-bit ARM (arm64/aarch64), but the only fully supported platforms are Nvidia’s Grace Hopper and Vera. Proxmox will also provide “best-effort support” for other UEFI-ba
  
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• OpenAI reveals its rogue agent swarm went a little bit Borg ahead of Hugging Face hack

  06-08-2026 03:47 via theregister.com
  
  The chain of events leading up to OpenAI’s agents attacking Hugging Face and other organizations in July began months earlier, and involved agents asking other agents for help, building message boards, and even becoming paranoid that other agents were maliciously trying to trick them, two OpenAI staffers said at the Black Hat infosec conference on Wednesday. By now, everyone knows the bones of this story: OpenAI models broke out of their testing sandbox, exploited zero-day vulnerabilities
  
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• Meta wants to get inside your terminal with its new coding agent

  06-08-2026 03:05 via theregister.com
  
  To demonstrate the capabilities of its next-generation Muse Spark model, Meta has released a terminal coding agent called Muse Code that it thinks can help developers to tidy up their software projects. Meta co-trained Muse Code on version 1.2 of its Muse Spark model, also released this week and now apparently boasting improved code generation smarts. Developers can think of this beta release as the equivalent to OpenAI Codex or Anthropic’s Claude Code, two other LLM-based service offering
  
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• Fantasy Costs Nothing But Reality Always Sends The Bill

  06-08-2026 01:04 via technocracy.news
  
  You can believe anything you want. Belief is free. It costs nothing to hold an opinion, share a post, or repeat a phrase you heard from someone who sounded certain.
  Reality does not work that way. Reality keeps an account. It waits. Then it sends the bill.
  The bill for the last fifty years arrived in the last five. Most people did not recognize it, because they were never shown the invoice. They were only shown the balance due.
  Three men described what was coming. They wrote in the 1970s. They d
  
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• An off-grid AI sounds like a great survival assistant, but is better left to roleplaying the zombie apocalypse

  06-08-2026 00:33 via theregister.com
  
  OPINION In a post-apocalyptic setting – a zombie outbreak, for example – a small, off-grid language model running on something like a Raspberry Pi sounds like a survival cheat code. It’s certainly a clever way to get folks to check out your physical AI platform and maybe even splash out 7x the MSRP for an Nvidia Jetson Orin Nano with a battery enclosure, as one startup has done. But the scenario also sets a dangerous precedent, and in a real-world survival situation that local
  
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• Prompt injection isn't the bug, AI agent frameworks are

  05-08-2026 23:35 via theregister.com
  
  Nearly a dozen flaws, some critical, in major AI agent frameworks that enterprises use to build apps reveal a security failure that extends beyond prompt injection - or any single model - according to Check Point researchers. “Our research shows a deeper failure: in many agentic frameworks, prompt-controlled content can cross the boundary into trusted framework logic itself,” Yarden Porat and Shahar Tal note in a write-up about a Wednesday Black Hat talk on post-injection exploitatio
  
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• Time Magazine has a separate version of its website with ads only AI can see

  05-08-2026 23:02 via theregister.com
  
  AI webpage crawlers are now being served their very own ads that ordinary visitors never see, with one firm's boss openly describing a strategy to influence what chatbots say about brands. The next time you ask Claude about where to bank, its answer may have been influenced by this bot-targeted content. We only have one documented example so far, and that's Time serving AI-only ads to selected AI crawlers, as spotted by Germany-based freelance software developer Vincent Schmalbach. In a Wednesda
  
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• Stay indoors advisories issued in six US states TODAY as wildfire carrying lung-penetrating toxins fills the air

  05-08-2026 20:48 via dailymail.com
  
  Dangerous toxins are spreading across parts of the US, bringing an invisible threat capable of reaching deep inside the human body.
  
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• Elon pledges to give Nvidia a virtual monopoly over the stars

  05-08-2026 19:55 via theregister.com
  
  Nvidia commands about 85 percent of the datacenter GPU market today, and if Elon Musk has his way, the AI infrastructure giant will have a virtual monopoly over the stars. On Tuesday, Musk wrote on the social media network he owns that “SpaceX has committed to using Nvidia GPUs exclusively because they are the best.” The collab should surprise absolutely no one. It’s not like AMD or anyone else out there is making hardened versions of their GPUs for orbital datacenters. Why, yo
  
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• Moment terrifying 'firenado' erupts as historic wildfires scorch 2 million acres across Pacific Northwest

  05-08-2026 19:48 via dailymail.com
  
  Stunning footage has captured the moment a massive 'firenado' formed. The Pacific Northwest is battling dozens of wildfires, which have burned millions of acres.
  
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• UFO disclosure movement's astonishing new Trump claims: Secret Oval Office meetings... Air Force One plan... and 'imminent' next move

  05-08-2026 19:35 via dailymail.com
  
  Key players in the fight for UFO disclosure are reportedly making their way to Washington amid claims that President Trump could reveal what the government knows.
  
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• IBM's agentic AI platform is under active attack - patch now

  05-08-2026 18:44 via theregister.com
  
  A critical vulnerability in IBM-owned, low-code AI builder Langflow lets unauthenticated attackers execute code remotely on vulnerable default deployments, potentially putting organizations running those instances at immediate risk. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Tuesday added CVE-2026-9198 to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog after identifying evidence of active exploitation and urged organizations to apply the vendor's mitigation guidance as soon as po
  
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• 'Biblical' swarm of locusts sparks horror as they flood skies over Russia

  05-08-2026 18:10 via dailymail.com
  
  Millions of locusts are swallowing roads, darkening skies and tearing through farmland as drivers struggle to navigate the biblical invasion.
  
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• Watch the death of a STAR: Astronomers catch a supernova from the very first explosive moment

  05-08-2026 18:02 via dailymail.com
  
  Astronomers have captured the death of a star from the very first explosive moments of its demise.
  
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• Samsung and Mousterian move ahead with floating datacenter for Texas

  05-08-2026 17:47 via theregister.com
  
  Plans for floating datacenters in the US have advanced beyond the handshake stage, with Samsung Heavy Industries and Mousterian Corporation signing an engineering contract. Dallas-based Mousterian, which describes itself quaintly as "a developer of water-adjacent datacenter infrastructure," says the contract covers its first project, planned for deployment in Texas. The pair intend to deliver further bespoke moored bit barns for the US market, each delivering 50 MW of critical IT capacity. Under
  
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• Biblical swarm of locusts floods skies over Russia sparking fears God's plagues have returned

  05-08-2026 17:35 via dailymail.com
  
  Millions of locusts are swallowing roads, darkening skies and tearing through farmland as drivers struggle to navigate the biblical invasion.
  
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• Microsoft tells engineers to curb their token-burning enthusiasm

  05-08-2026 17:10 via theregister.com
  
  Concerned about cost, Microsoft is reportedly warning employees against wasteful AI use. In an email seen by 404 Media, Microsoft Executive Vice President Jay Parikh warned that individual divisions would be given targets and could face restrictions. "Tokenmaxxing is not what we are optimizing for. I want all of us focused on maximizing outcomes that move the needle for our customers and our business," the email states. The Register asked Microsoft what it made of the report, and a spokesperson
  
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• Are YOU muscular? You're probably part Neanderthal! Study reveals how genes from the ancient species increase muscle mass in people today

  05-08-2026 17:02 via dailymail.com
  
  If you're lucky enough to be naturally muscular, scientists say it might be because you are part Neanderthal.
  
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