Sci-Tech news

• Winter in the US will end 3 WEEKS sooner over the next century

  14-10-2015 01:18 via dailymail.co.uk
  
  The shift, caused by climate change, will be particularly obvious in the Pacific Northwest and Mountainous regions of the western US, according to the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
  
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• Everyone hates frontier AI labs, says Palantir boss

  11-06-2026 22:54 via theregister.com
  
  Palantir CEO Alex Karp doesn’t think frontier AI labs prepping for IPOs really understand what their customers need, and that ignorance is making Palantir a success. Karp had a wide-ranging, often rambling and self-interrupting sit-down (coherent compared to some of his other interviews, to be fair) with CNBC’s Sara Eisen on Wednesday in which he said that every single enterprise customer Palantir has is unhappy with frontier AI labs like Anthropic and OpenAI. Those companies, says K
  
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• Anthropic recruits army to sell Claude to nonprofits

  11-06-2026 21:29 via theregister.com
  
  AI may or may not be pushing lots of people out of the workforce, but Anthropic has good news as the Claude creator is creating temporary positions to promote the adoption of AI, even as CEO Dario Amodei ponders policy interventions to counter "job displacement." The AI biz has announced the launch of Claude Corps, a $150 million program that will pay 1,000 Claude Corps Fellows $85,000 (plus benefits and a token budget) for one year to help advance the missions of nonprofit organizations using g
  
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• ShinyHunters hacked 100+ orgs by exploiting an Oracle PeopleSoft 0-day

  11-06-2026 21:01 via theregister.com
  
  Data theft and extortion group ShinyHunters has exploited a critical Oracle PeopleSoft bug as a zero-day to compromise more than 100 organizations, including the University of Nottingham, across 300 vulnerable instances. A spokesperson for the cybercrime crew on Thursday told The Register that they exploited CVE-2026-35273 to break into the university’s PeopleSoft system and steal 40 GB of personal data and billing records belonging to hundreds of thousands of current and former students.
  
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• ShinyHunters hacked 100 orgs by exploiting an Oracle PeopleSoft 0-day

  11-06-2026 21:01 via theregister.com
  
  Data theft and extortion group ShinyHunters has exploited a critical Oracle PeopleSoft bug as a zero-day to compromise more than 100 organizations, including the University of Nottingham, across 300 vulnerable instances. A spokesperson for the cybercrime crew on Thursday told The Register that they exploited CVE-2026-35273 to break into the university’s PeopleSoft system and steal 40 GB of personal data and billing records belonging to hundreds of thousands of current and former students.
  
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• ShinyHunters claims it hacked 100 orgs by exploiting an Oracle PeopleSoft 0-day

  11-06-2026 21:01 via theregister.com
  
  Data theft and extortion group ShinyHunters claims to have exploited a critical Oracle PeopleSoft bug as a zero-day to compromise more than 100 organizations, including the University of Nottingham, across 300 vulnerable instances. A spokesperson for the cybercrime crew on Thursday told The Register that they exploited CVE-2026-35273 to break into the university’s PeopleSoft system and steal 40 GB of personal data and billing records belonging to hundreds of thousands of current and former
  
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• Rare tornado outbreak threatens millions across three states TODAY

  11-06-2026 20:45 via dailymail.com
  
  Millions of Americans are urged to have a tornado safety plan ready as powerful storms sweep across the nation.
  
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• Google's new open-weights model brings image-generation tricks to AI text generation

  11-06-2026 20:31 via theregister.com
  
  The boffins on Google’s DeepMind team unveiled an experimental new language model this week that uses techniques originally developed for AI image generators to boost text output performance by as much as 4x when running on resource-constrained consumer hardware. It's free to download and you can run it with just 18 GB of DRAM or VRAM. The model, codenamed DiffusionGemma, is the latest addition to Google’s open weights model family. But unlike Gemma 4, which launched this spring, the
  
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• Meteorologist reveals America's most dangerous cities in super El Niño's 'corridor of chaos'... and warns this is only the beginning: 'It may haunt you'

  11-06-2026 20:17 via dailymail.com
  
  El Niño is back and scientists are comparing it to a disaster that led to the deaths of 50 million people. Now AccuWeather meteorologist Paul Pastelok reveals exactly where it will hit hardest.
  
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• Microsoft's worst 'Nightmare' unleashes BitLocker bypass 0-day

  11-06-2026 19:51 via theregister.com
  
  Nightmare Eclipse, the prolific zero-day vulnerability hunter with an axe to grind against Microsoft, released yet another exploit late Wednesday that the researcher claims will spawn a command prompt that provides total access to the BitLocker volume. This bug, called GreatXML, was “an accidental discovery,” according to the researcher, who said it only took four hours to find. They claim this exploit (published on GitHub and Git-based code-hosting platforms) can bypass BitLocker on
  
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• Hand-cranked AI box lets you get a workout while you wait for answers

  11-06-2026 19:21 via theregister.com
  
  Datacenters got you down? Worried that even the most innocuous questions will spin up AI models running in water-guzzling, energy-sucking, planet-destroying hyperscalers? You need CrankGPT. No, we’re not talking about surrendering to AI psychosis: we’re talking about a literal hand-cranked machine loaded with a voice agent that can respond to questions and even translate speech into other languages, provided someone keeps the power flowing. There’s an onboard custom-built capac
  
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• Graviton 5 impresses, but please, for the love of all that's holy, stop calling them 'AI chips'

  11-06-2026 18:54 via theregister.com
  
  Amazon, along with the rest of the industry, has gotten so used to framing everything that happens through the context of AI that it has lost the plot on their Graviton chip lineup, and along with it their own credibility. Which is a shame, because it's actually a triumph of a chip. First, the Wall Street Journal breathlessly reported that Snowflake's $6 billion AWS commitment was "for agentic computing chips." Then AWS's own press release heralded the release of their latest chips "for the Agen
  
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• ZTE wins three Selular Award 2026 honors for AI-powered network innovation

  11-06-2026 18:45 via theregister.com
  
  ZTE has won three prestigious awards at Selular Award 2026, held on June 8, 2026, at Menara Peninsula Hotel, Jakarta. The awards recognize ZTE's contributions and innovations in advancing artificial intelligence (AI)-powered network technologies amid the acceleration of digital transformation and 5G development in Indonesia. ZTE's contributions to advancing AI-powered network innovation have been recognized by Selular Media Network (SMN), a leading telecommunications and technology media organiz
  
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• Trump phone has HTC guts. Tremendous guts. The best guts

  11-06-2026 18:13 via theregister.com
  
  It won't be making smartphones great again. The long-awaited Trump-branded smartphone has finally arrived, and it appears to be exactly what many suspected: an existing handset in gold drag. Repair biz iFixit got its hands on the Trump Mobile T1 after the device became available in May, and its teardown found the model is essentially an HTC U24 Pro with cosmetic tweaks and a Trump-friendly gold finish. It was almost exactly a year ago that the Trump Organization unveiled the Trump Mobile cellula
  
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• VRChat says somebody faked a breach notice with the Maine AG's office

  11-06-2026 18:01 via theregister.com
  
  UPDATED Following notes from several readers, we followed up directly with VRChat on Thursday at 1945 GMT and they told us that the Maine Attorney General's office apparently posted a fake breach report. According to an email from VRChat's head of community, Charles Tupper, "VRChat did not submit this Notice of Data Incident, and the employee/email cited does not exist. We have no reason to believe that our data or systems have been compromised. We are in the process of contacting the Maine Atto
  
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• 2.4M+ VRChat users’ data accessed following cloud breach

  11-06-2026 18:01 via theregister.com
  
  Online chat platform VRChat says a recent cyberattack compromised the data belonging to nearly 2.5 million users. It confirmed the “data security incident” in a report filed with Maine’s attorney general, but has not disclosed it via public channels. The company’s report confirmed that its cloud environment was accessed between May 10-12, with the unauthorized intruder making off with information concerning 2,436,782 users. This included VRChat usernames, email addresses,
  
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• Argentina Moves To Legalize “Non-Human Corporations” Run By AI

  11-06-2026 17:59 via technocracy.news
  
  Javier Milei is a Libertarian in the anarcho-capitalist vein, who promotes Technocracy. He is the first to break the dam, granting AI rights comparable to humans. This is a slippery road. If he succeeds, it will open the door to outright personhood. As an unabashed champion of AI, Milei is exhibiting symptoms of AI psychosis. ⁃ Patrick Wood, Editor.You could already make the case that corporations are faceless monoliths geared purely towards maximizing profits with only a peripheral c
  
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• Cost per sample? Try cost per attempt

  11-06-2026 17:53 via theregister.com
  
  This article is aimed at bioinformatics platform leads, ML infrastructure engineers, and genomics budget owners who are now running GPU-accelerated workflows in the cloud. It's about a hidden cost problem that almost every genomics infrastructure team is paying for — and very few are actively measuring. The observations here are specific to short-read sequencing workflows, which remain the dominant data type in production genomics environments. Short-read sequencing pipelines, standard in
  
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• Apple gives Mac devs a WSL-ish thing to call their own

  11-06-2026 17:46 via theregister.com
  
  HANDS ON At WWDC this week, Apple introduced container machines, which are persistent virtual machines running Linux, bearing some resemblance to Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) on Microsoft's operating system. Developers using macOS, as with those on Windows, face the problem that most applications are deployed to Linux, creating a mismatch between the development machine and the deployment target. The friction is less for macOS, which, like Linux, is Unix-like, but still exists. Apple's solu
  
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• El Nino has arrived: Scientists warn global phenomenon is primed to match catastrophic event that killed 50 million

  11-06-2026 17:40 via dailymail.com
  
  The global weather event long feared to arrive this year is now active in the Pacific, sparking fears of its impact on the climate across the US.
  
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• Race against re-entry: Swift's would-be saviour straps itself to a rocket

  11-06-2026 17:28 via theregister.com
  
  NASA's sprint to save the Swift observatory has reached another milestone: Katalyst Space's LINK robotic servicing spacecraft is now installed atop its Pegasus XL launcher. The milestone came less than a year after the space agency awarded the rescue contract. The next step will be to attach the Pegasus XL to the Stargazer carrier aircraft (the last airworthy Lockheed L-1011 TriStar), which will carry it from NASA's Wallops facility to the Kwajalein Atoll in the South Pacific Ocean for launch. L
  
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• Why English football chants are so much catchier than the rest of the world's, according to science

  11-06-2026 17:10 via dailymail.com
  
  Football and chanting go hand in hand - but why are England's anthems so much catchier than the rest of the world's?
  
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• Working from home linked to rising mental health problems - especially for those living alone, study finds

  11-06-2026 16:38 via dailymail.com
  
  A new study suggests the shift to working from home is linked to rising levels of psychological distress - with those living alone hit hardest.
  
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• Is your air fryer spying on you? Experts reveal just how much information your smart gadgets have been harvesting

  11-06-2026 16:37 via dailymail.com
  
  Your air fryer might be the most useful gadget in the kitchen, but experts warn that it might be getting up to a lot more than cooking your chips.
  
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• Apple version of Office 2019 becomes useless in a month

  11-06-2026 16:32 via theregister.com
  
  If you use Office 2019 on a Mac, your software will soon stop working properly and there's nothing you can do but buy an upgrade. From July 13, 2026, Office applications on the Apple platform could lose the ability to edit, save, or create new files. Opening and printing will still work, but otherwise it's "reduced functionality mode" time, as Microsoft puts it. The problem is due to the expiration of the certificate used to validate the user's Office license, and it will affect both Microsoft 3
  
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• El Niño has arrived: Scientists warn global phenomenon is primed to match catastrophic event that killed 50 million

  11-06-2026 15:52 via dailymail.com
  
  The global weather event long feared to arrive this year is now active in the Pacific, sparking fears of its impact on the climate across the US.
  
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• Dutch chip startup claims all-European fab flow – with help from a very American friend

  11-06-2026 15:26 via theregister.com
  
  Dutch semiconductor startup Qualinx is claiming a breakthrough of sorts in European sovereign manufacturing thanks to an end-to-end semiconductor fabrication flow it is using for its new satnav chips. The firm, a spin-off from Delft University of Technology, says it has demonstrated that security-critical chips for aerospace, defense, and critical infrastructure can be designed, manufactured, and delivered entirely within Europe. Tape-out of the Qualinx QLX3xx, a family of ultra-low-power Global
  
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• OpenAI could go from AI pioneer to AI's BlackBerry, says Forrester

  11-06-2026 14:57 via theregister.com
  
  OpenAI may be headed for Wall Street, but one analyst firm is already warning enterprise customers not to get too attached. In a note published alongside OpenAI's confidential IPO filing, Forrester urged companies to keep their AI options open, arguing that today's market leader could easily become tomorrow's cautionary tale. "Don't lock into long-term contracts; keep your architectures flexible," the firm advised. "In fact, OpenAI could become AI's BlackBerry FIFO (First In, First Out). The com
  
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• Americans told to cut head off of land-walking 'Frankenfish' invading new parts of the US

  11-06-2026 14:43 via dailymail.com
  
  A land-walking fish that can breathe air for several days is invading parts of the US, prompting wildlife officials to ask Americans to take matters into their own hands.
  
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• Oracle's AI datacenter splurge gives investors the capex jitters

  11-06-2026 14:40 via theregister.com
  
  Oracle has lifted capital spending plans above analyst estimates and expanded borrowing to chase the opportunity it says exists in building datacenters for AI workloads. Despite revenue for Q4 (ended May 31) rising 21 percent year-on-year to $19.2 billion, Oracle's share price fell as markets reacted to its increasing capex, as analysts raised concerns about how Big Red would fund the investments in datacenters. Capex for fiscal 2026 reached $55.7 billion, up from $21.2 billion a year earlier. S
  
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