Sci-Tech news

• Waiting for the sea

  25-02-2015 01:03 via bbc.co.uk
  
  The desert that may one day become water again
  
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• KPMG tells staff facing the axe: Here's £100, now zip it

  06-10-2026 10:30 via theregister.com
  
  KPMG has offered staff facing redundancy £100 to waive their legal rights to appeal or to bring claims over the loss of their job, according to sources. As The Register revealed last month, the consultancy is laying off around 4 percent of the workforce in the UK, equating to some 200 humans being forced to look for new employment in an uncertain job market before Christmas.Staff within the AI, Cyber, SAP, and Testing teams are at the sharp end of the corporate job cutting exercise.On Octo
  
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• Only the finest Swedish Bork will do for Stockholm station

  06-10-2026 09:15 via theregister.com
  
  Sweden is the home of bork, and what better way to mark it than with a huge example of digital signage that shows a GRUB message instead of an ad? Spotted by eagle-eyed Register reader Alexander, the GRUB in question is sadly not the delicious meatballs for which a well-known Swedish furniture maker is famed, but rather the bootloader familiar to Linux fans, usually when something is working as it should (since we can't imagine much call for selecting from multiple operating systems in the world
  
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• OpenAI rolls out weak sauce watermarking for AI text

  06-10-2026 08:02 via theregister.com
  
  OpenAI is now offering API customers the option to watermark the output of certain models in order to comply with the letter of Europe's AI Act. And within a few weeks, the biz plans to apply a form of digital watermarking – like it or not – to eligible ChatGPT and Codex text output in the European Union. But unlike rival Anthropic, it isn't applying its watermarking technique to content generated outside of Europe, though API customers can choose to have the marks applied to content
  
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• Scientists find planet made on new matter recipe, and it formed after a Red Giant ate a solar system

  06-10-2026 07:25 via theregister.com
  
  When yellow dwarf stars like our sun die, they swell to an enormous size and destroy their inner planets by either crushing them with massive gravity or evaporating them with astounding heat. While these suns later settle down to become a white dwarf, the process is nearly always game over for planets in an inner solar system. Or maybe not, according to a paper published on Monday titled “Discovery of a second-generation planet candidate accreting onto a white dwarf.” As explained by
  
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• Atlassian warns of critical file access flaw in its datacenter products

  06-10-2026 06:20 via theregister.com
  
  Atlassian has told its users to patch its datacenter products, pronto, to prevent attackers accessing their files. The Australian collaborationware company on Monday sent users an email that opens with the words “Action required” and points to a security bulletin that explains CVE-2026-21589. The 9.3-rated arbitrary file access vulnerability is present in the datacenter versions of its Bitbucket, Confluence, Jira Service Management, Jira Software, Bamboo, Crowd, Crucible, and Fisheye
  
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• AI Is Creating “Doom Loops” All Over the Economy

  06-10-2026 05:07 via technocracy.news
  
  Technocrats are stealing the world’s data for their own AI training advantage, while killing the golden goose in the process, as this article makes clear. That lack of ethics and morality is seen everywhere in the world of Technocracy. For instance, read the Crucible of Tokens to learn about the biggest heist of private property in world history. They have no conscience about doing anything wrong, and that is the problem. Read up on psychopathy! ⁃ Patrick Wood, Editor.Recently unreda
  
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• Security researcher claims to they found KVM guest-host escape flaw

  06-10-2026 04:06 via theregister.com
  
  Linux KVM, the hypervisor favoured by hyperscale clouds, apparently has a full VM escape bug. That nasty news came from security researcher Paulos Yibelo, who on X shared a screenshot of a bug bounty award he won for discovering what he described as “Full VM escape zeroday (guest>host root in industry standard hypervisors)!” The bug bounty Yibelo participated in is run by Vercel, a company that provides MicroVMs as sandboxes for AI agents to work inside. The company’s Sandbo
  
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• Security researcher claims they found KVM guest-host escape flaw

  06-10-2026 04:06 via theregister.com
  
  Linux KVM, the hypervisor favoured by hyperscale clouds, apparently has a full VM escape bug. That nasty news came from security researcher Paulos Yibelo, who on X shared a screenshot of a bug bounty award he won for discovering what he described as “Full VM escape zeroday (guest>host root in industry standard hypervisors)!” The bug bounty Yibelo participated in is run by Vercel, a company that provides MicroVMs as sandboxes for AI agents to work inside. The company’s Sandbo
  
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• Schneider Electric drops $22.6B on PTC as datacenter boom rains money on infra companies

  06-10-2026 00:48 via theregister.com
  
  Schneider Electric's market cap has more than doubled in the past four years as the AI boom has driven unprecedented demand for datacenter power and cooling infrastructure. Now the French multinational is cashing in on its good fortunes to cement its place as a key provider of industrial power and datacenter infrastructure with the $22.6 billion acquisition of American industrial software company PTC. Founded in 1985, PTC made a name for itself developing software for computer-aided design, plus
  
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• Citrix NetScaler security snafus get even worse amid more 0-day reports

  05-10-2026 23:18 via theregister.com
  
  The attackers just keep coming after Citrix NetScaler appliances, as both the feds and private security researchers warn that someone found - and has already exploited - yet another Citrix bug before it had a patch. This latest vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-88779, is a memory overflow bug that leads to denial of service attacks. It only affects NetScaler ADC and Gateway appliances configured as a SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language) service provider or identity provider, used for singl
  
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• Self-proclaimed 'Prophet of Doom' warned of 'future pandemic' just days before Russian lab worker died of the plague

  05-10-2026 23:12 via dailymail.com
  
  A self-proclaimed psychic has been thrust back into the spotlight over his warning about a future pandemic just days before reports of a suspected plague case in Russia surfaced.
  
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• Cohere offers to put agents in lockdown mode with strict ACLs

  05-10-2026 21:47 via theregister.com
  
  While OpenAI and Anthropic stoke fears over rogue agents, Canadian model dev Cohere promises enterprises a safer and more consistent experience. On Monday, the company said it revamped its North agent harness, which launched early last year, to improve collaboration, access control, token spend, and overall security of the platform. As you'd expect from an enterprise focused agent framework, Cohere's North 2 is designed to tie into existing knowledge bases and SaaS apps in order to automate vari
  
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• Get rid of Apple's AI bloatware and reclaim 12 GB of storage with this open source tool

  05-10-2026 21:24 via theregister.com
  
  Apple’s attempt to integrate AI into its various operating systems hasn’t been entirely well received, nor has the decision to make Apple Intelligence increasingly difficult to disable completely. Thankfully, the open source community has come to the rescue. A recently released open source tool called RemoveMacAI does pretty much exactly what it says on the GitHub-hosted tin: Aggressively rips Apple Intelligence out of macOS, disabling most of its AI features and removing downloaded
  
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• FBI confirms 'multiple' arrests related to ShinyHunters hack

  05-10-2026 19:46 via theregister.com
  
  The FBI and law enforcement partners have arrested “multiple” suspects as part of an investigation into a September hack allegedly involving data-theft-and-extortion group ShinyHunters, the bureau told The Register. “The bureau continues to aggressively investigate the recent cyber incident allegedly involving ShinyHunters, having already worked with partners to arrest multiple subjects and we will spare no resource in bringing each of the responsible individuals to justice,&rd
  
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• Windows 11 26H2 blighted by new audio issue

  05-10-2026 19:24 via theregister.com
  
  Microsoft Windows 11 26H2 has arrived, and, unfortunately, it's already picked up a known audio issue within weeks of release. The glitch also affects Windows 11 25H2 and 24H2, which share the same code branch. It relates to decoding AC-3 (Dolby Digital) audio and can cause the application using the decoder to crash abruptly or fail to start at all. Identified after the September 22 Windows update, the issue mostly impacts older applications, according to Microsoft. "Many modern applications do
  
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• Hurricane trackers eyeing storm in the Gulf with possible US impacts in just DAYS

  05-10-2026 19:08 via dailymail.com
  
  Alerts have already been issued to millions as a potential flood-causing tropical storm forms right off the Gulf Coast.
  
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• Altman-backed Volantis reveals plan to vault the memory wall by baking photonics into AI accelerators

  05-10-2026 18:32 via theregister.com
  
  Sam Altman-backed AI chip startup Volantis has a plan to break through the memory wall using light, and this time it's not just an IP play. Founded in 2022, the San Francisco-based startup is developing an AI accelerator that will use a photonic interposer to dramatically increase memory bandwidth without compromising on capacity. Volantis believes it can pack upwards of 10 TB of memory at speeds up to 240 TB/s onto a single massive package. This, it claims, should be enough to serve a 20 trilli
  
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• James Acaster could be the last person standing on Celebrity Traitors, psychologist says - because we're hardwired to trust funny people

  05-10-2026 18:04 via dailymail.com
  
  Comedians have a habit of making people laugh - but they may also have a knack for getting away with murder.
  
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• OpenAI to flood your eyeballs with visual ads

  05-10-2026 17:54 via theregister.com
  
  After adding text-based ads to its chatbot earlier this year, OpenAI announced on Monday that it was adding a new “visual ad format” to ChatGPT, which is precisely what it sounds like: Visual ads, like so much of the advertising content online, will now be part of the ChatGPT experience. OpenAI will initially test these ads during image generation. “Through images showing product inspiration, product usage, or the experiences they make possible, people can discover a new brand,
  
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• Debian's latest kernel security update has 1,313 reasons to patch

  05-10-2026 17:35 via theregister.com
  
  The age of LLM-assisted security vulnerability discovery is really starting to bite. Debian's latest Linux kernel security update comes with a formidable reading list of 1,313 CVE identifiers. The DSA-6528-1 Linux security advisory, published on September 29, covers kernel package version 6.12.111-1 for Debian 13, codenamed Trixie. Debian 13.7 was released on September 12, before upstream kernel 6.12.111 arrived nine days later. The Debian security tracker links to descriptions of the individual
  
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• The question you would ask HPE and NVIDIA if nobody was recording

  05-10-2026 17:00 via theregister.com
  
  There is a question about AI data sovereignty you would ask HPE or NVIDIA if nobody was recording. It is usually specific to your own workload and your own regulator, and it usually ends with whether the sovereign option on the slide survives contact with a procurement team. On Thursday 29 October you can ask it. The Register is hosting a dinner in Washington with HPE and NVIDIA, our editor-in-chief Matt Rosoff in the chair, and nothing said on the record. HPE sends Thierry Pienaar, HPE Fellow a
  
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• FBI warns of new scam using real agents' names and spoofed government phone numbers

  05-10-2026 16:45 via dailymail.com
  
  The FBI has issued an urgent warning to Americans with a phone about scams that have tricked victims into handing over more than $1.6 billion.
  
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• The dark secret of Egypt's ancient kings: 5,000-year-old skulls suggest royal servants were bludgeoned to death so they could follow their ruler into the afterlife

  05-10-2026 16:38 via dailymail.com
  
  Archaeologists examining the remains of people buried around royal tombs have discovered many had suffered devastating blows to the head.
  
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• Plaque unveiled to honour Beagle 2 mission leader

  05-10-2026 16:36 via bbc.co.uk
  
  The plaque, unveiled at the M Shed in Bristol, recognises Colin Pillinger who led the 2003 probe mission to Mars.
  
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• Musk follows Trump's lead, swaps AI for SI in SpaceX rebrand

  05-10-2026 16:29 via theregister.com
  
  Elon Musk says SpaceXAI, the company formed by merging SpaceX and xAI, will be renamed SpaceXSI after President Donald Trump ordered US federal agencies to replace "Artificial Intelligence" with "Super Intelligence" in all comms. Trump's September 29 executive order directs federal agencies to switch from AI to SI in official communications and other non-statutory documents. Musk endorsed the change, posting "No more AI. SI. It's better," and confirmed plans to rename SpaceXAI: "Yes, we will mak
  
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• Creosote found in beach pollution investigation

  05-10-2026 16:26 via bbc.co.uk
  
  Restrictions remain in place on Blyth Beach after a pollution incident was reported in August.
  
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• Games Workshop seeks IT leader to summon the legions in epic saga battling the forces of ERP

  05-10-2026 15:30 via theregister.com
  
  Games Workshop is on the hunt for a head of IT to guide the organization through its technological saga for the next two years. The UK-based tabletop games retailer and manufacturer of the globally popular Warhammer figures said that under the fixed-term contract, the heroic individual would take overall responsibility for its global IT and customer technology capability, and report to the Chief Operating Officer. “The role has a broad remit spanning our core technology estate, information
  
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• Anthropic says its IPO could herald the end of the world as we know it

  05-10-2026 14:27 via theregister.com
  
  Anthropic's IPO prospectus leaked this week, and boy was it filled with interesting details. You can listen to the latest episode of The Kettle on this page, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube. You can also subscribe on those platforms to be notified when a new episode goes live For starters there's the fact a third of it is all about existential AI risks, then there's the fact that, despite some impressive revenue growth the company still has yet to turn a profit. Combine that with massive cap
  
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• Now that's what you call fast food! Watch the moment a great white shark snatches a fish from a line off Cape Cod

  05-10-2026 14:23 via dailymail.com
  
  A stunning video has captured the moment a great white shark snatches a fish from a line off the coast of Cape Cod.
  
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