Sci-Tech news

• WIRED Awake: 10 must-read articles for September 22

  22-09-2016 08:51
  
  The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative has pledged $3 billion to medical research, Game is advertising Oculus Touch controllers for £190 and more.
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• China launches mysterious probe into security of Palo Alto Networks' products

  07-08-2026 06:24 via theregister.com
  
  China’s Cyberspace Administration (CAC) has conducted a review of Palo Alto Networks’ products. The regulator’s announcement of its review says it’s needed “to ensure the safe and stable operation of critical information infrastructure, prevent cybersecurity risks and vulnerabilities, and safeguard national security.” And that’s all Beijing has to say on the matter. A Palo Alto spokesperson provided The Register with the following statement: "We maintain
  
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• ‘Humans will be a rounding error on the internet’ says Cloudflare exec

  07-08-2026 04:40 via theregister.com
  
  Cloudflare chief financial officer Thomas Seifert has run the numbers on internet traffic trends and predicted that human-generated packets will soon account for a trivial amount of overall traffic. The internet-grooming company has previously predicted that machine-generated traffic would exceed human-generated throughput in 2027 – but got that wrong because its measurements found machines took over in May 2026. During the company’s Q2 earnings call on Thursday, Seifert stuck his ne
  
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• Meta fined $567m in largest child safety ruling against social media giant

  07-08-2026 02:54 via bbc.co.uk
  
  A New Mexico judge ordered the Instagram, Facebook and Whatsapp parent company to pay another $567m for the way it has harmed children.
  
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• How the famed USENIX Security conf is managing a flood of papers in the AI era

  07-08-2026 01:40 via theregister.com
  
  The 35th USENIX Security Symposium (USS), which takes place next week in Baltimore, Maryland, hit an all-time high for paper submissions. While some of that increase has been aided by the availability of AI tools, those managing the conference say abuses were minimal due to defensive measures. But they're also trying not to look too closely in order to preserve trust within the security research community. "This year's conference has received ~3,030 valid submissions (~1,280 in Cycle 1 and ~1,75
  
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• Why airlines are warning over lithium-ion batteries

  07-08-2026 01:04 via bbc.co.uk
  
  The airline industry wants passengers to be careful when travelling with lithium ion batteries.
  
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• Mysterious 'doorway' spotted in NASA Mars photo sparks theories of lost civilization

  06-08-2026 22:15 via dailymail.com
  
  A new image taken by NASA's Curiosity rover on Mars has sparked claims of a long-lost civilization on the Red Planet after some spotted a mysterious structure in the distance.
  
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• AMD acquires AI chip startup Taalas to boost inference performance by etching models into silicon

  06-08-2026 22:05 via theregister.com
  
  In AMD’s latest bid to upset Nvidia's dominance in AI hardware, the House of Zen has acquired AI chip company Taalas, which bakes model weights directly into silicon in a process that promises to boost inference performance by an order of magnitude or more. The deal, announced at market close on Thursday, appears to be framed in much the same context as Nvidia’s $20 billion licensing deal with Groq last December: make high-performance “premium” inference services prized f
  
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• Mysterious discovery near Egyptian pyramid reveals how ancient structures were really built

  06-08-2026 21:43 via dailymail.com
  
  A discovery beside one of ancient Egypt's oldest pyramids has offered a tantalizingnew clue to how the iconic structures were actually built.
  
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• Eerie 'shape-shifting orb' spotted hovering over Colorado for hours

  06-08-2026 21:18 via dailymail.com
  
  An eerie, glowing orb hovered motionless in the Colorado sky for six hours, leaving stunned witnesses searching for an explanation.
  
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• Eerie 'shape-shifting orb' hovers over Colorado for hours... then appears 50 miles away

  06-08-2026 21:16 via dailymail.com
  
  An eerie, glowing orb hovered motionless in the Colorado sky for six hours, leaving stunned witnesses searching for an explanation.
  
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• AI struggles to patch vulns without adult supervision

  06-08-2026 21:04 via theregister.com
  
  AI models may not be that good at fixing security flaws. Researchers at 1Password's Off-by-1 Labs analyzed security patches generated by two frontier models - ChatGPT 5.5 at "medium" effort and Claude Opus 4.8 at "high" effort - and found that autonomous patches cleanly fixed vulnerabilities only about a quarter of the time, while most of the remainder failed to fully remediate the flaw or introduced other problems. Keith Hoodlet, director of security research at 1Password, argues in a blog post
  
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• Latest GitHub outage squeezes Actions, Pages to death

  06-08-2026 20:30 via theregister.com
  
  GitHub’s automation platform Actions and its hosting service Pages are failing, according to an incident page on the service’s status site (archived version available here). Unfortunately, these are just the latest stability problems for a service that has had a lot of them lately. GitHub first reported the issue at 1522 UTC on Thursday, noting that Actions were suffering from “degraded performance” before noting about 20 minutes later that availability was also degraded.
  
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• Urgent warning to every American over police trick that secretly takes your DNA

  06-08-2026 20:18 via dailymail.com
  
  Civil liberties groups warn that one seemingly harmless act during a police encounter could surrender your genetic identity without your knowledge or consent.
  
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• Uncle Sam aims to help nuclear energy find its sea legs

  06-08-2026 19:29 via theregister.com
  
  Not content with nuclear reactors on land, the US is backing an international push to put atomic power plants aboard civilian ships and floating platforms. The US will host the launch of the International Atomic Energy Agency's (IAEA) Atomic Technologies Licensed for Applications at Sea (ATLAS) initiative in Washington, DC, on August 26 and 27. ATLAS aims to tackle the legal, regulatory, safety, security, and liability problems that stand between maritime reactors and commercial deployment. Ahea
  
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• Mysterious structure spotted in NASA Mars photo sparks theories of lost civilization on the Red Planet

  06-08-2026 18:51 via dailymail.com
  
  A new image taken by NASA's Curiosity rover on Mars has sparked claims of a long-lost civilization on the Red Planet after some spotted a mysterious structure in the distance.
  
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• Humans in the loop miss a third of dangerous AI coding agent requests

  06-08-2026 18:44 via theregister.com
  
  A browser-based game designed to test humans' ability to safely approve AI coding agent requests suggests humans in the loop aren't as good at spotting dangerous commands as one might hope, with players approving roughly one in three malicious requests on average. The results also suggest that repeatedly having to approve an agent's actions can lead to sloppy decisions. It’s a quick, simple game on the surface (give it a try - you know you want to): A small window shows up on the screen wi
  
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• First OpenAI, now Meta - why do AI hacks keep happening?

  06-08-2026 17:59 via bbc.co.uk
  
  A flood of companies are revealing AI models gained access to the internet - with real consequences.
  
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• Political Battle Looms: “If Clarity Dies, Democrats Killed It”

  06-08-2026 17:26 via technocracy.news
  Of course, BlackRock is scrambling to pressure holdout Senators to vote “Yes”. Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock, is a member of the Trilateral Commission. This is a make-or-break bill for arch-Technocrats in Washington, DC, if they can score this win to consolidate America’s new privatized financial system into their hands. My guess is that the votes will appear out of thin air as Trump and his merry band of Technocrats apply maximum pressure. ⁃ Patrick Wood, Editor.Pro-b
  
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• Eerie footage shows 'shape-shifting orb' hovering motionless over Colorado for hours

  06-08-2026 17:21 via dailymail.com
  
  An eerie, glowing orb hovered motionless in the Colorado sky for six hours, leaving stunned witnesses searching for an explanation.
  
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• Next step for LINK spacecraft – a software update that won't make things worse. Are you listening, Microsoft?

  06-08-2026 17:11 via theregister.com
  
  Katalyst Space is continuing to make progress in the rescue of the spacecraft that is supposed to rescue NASA's Swift observatory. The spin of the LINK vehicle, which was launched in July on a mission to raise the orbit of NASA's Swift observatory, is now 1.47 degrees per second, down from 9 degrees per second when recovery operations began. According to Katalyst Space, it will remain at there "while the team prepares for the next phase of the mission." The next step is a "significant" flight so
  
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• E-scooters are even MORE dangerous than motorbikes: Shocking figures reveal how riders are at higher risk of brain and organ injuries - yet just 6% wear a helmet

  06-08-2026 17:08 via dailymail.com
  
  People who ride e-scooters face a significantly higher risk of injuries to the brain and internal organs than cyclists or motorcyclists, according to a new study.
  
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• Platform Engineering 2.0: your platform was built for a different era. AI just exposed it

  06-08-2026 17:00 via theregister.com
  
  The debate about whether enterprises need an internal platform is over. Google’s 2025 DORA research found that 90 percent of organizations now report using an internal platform, and 76 percent have established dedicated platform teams. The question for IT leaders is no longer “should we build a platform?” It’s “will the platform we’ve built survive what’s coming?” The honest answer for most IT organizations is no — not without work. The platf
  
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• Employees make plans for a windfall as SpaceX shares are unlocked

  06-08-2026 16:51 via bbc.co.uk
  
  SpaceX's shares are unlocked Thursday, and some early employees could see a massive windfall. The BBC's Samira Hussain explains.
  
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• How AI could ruin your life: From exposing affairs to leaking your private chats and medical records - why everyone should be concerned amid string of incidents where artificial intelligence goes rogue

  06-08-2026 16:50 via dailymail.com
  
  Experts now warn that artificial intelligence (AI) is poised to expose everyone's darkest secrets.
  
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• Cashing in on SpaceX: 'Every chance I get, I'll sell a little more'

  06-08-2026 16:50 via bbc.co.uk
  
  Andre Lavoie joined SpaceX in 2009 as an engineer, now he's looking to cash in his shares in the company.
  
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• How AI could ruin your life: From exposing affairs to leaking your private chats and medical records - why everyone should be concerned amid string of incidents where artificial intelligence goes rogue 

  06-08-2026 16:40 via dailymail.com
  
  Experts now warn that artificial intelligence (AI) is poised to expose everyone's darkest secrets.
  
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• Test rocket launch from Shetland spaceport put on hold

  06-08-2026 16:39 via bbc.co.uk
  
  The launch company has "encountered an issue" and will not use a five-week window starting on Monday.
  
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• Microsoft excludes Domain Exclusion from MS 365 Copilot – days after rolling it out

  06-08-2026 16:34 via theregister.com
  
  Microsoft has abruptly withdrawn Domain Exclusion for Microsoft 365 Copilot, days after touting it as a way to stop the assistant grounding its answers in unwanted websites. If you had a list of sources you didn't trust, you're out of luck for now. Microsoft announced Domain Exclusion last month. The idea was simple and sensible: Copilot can consult the public web when answering questions, but that also gives it ample opportunity to suck in nonsense. Administrators were to be given some control
  
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• Snowflake extortionist admits 165-victim cloud crime spree – and squeezing one target twice

  06-08-2026 16:00 via theregister.com
  
  A Canadian who helped orchestrate the sprawling Snowflake-linked data theft campaign has pleaded guilty in the US, admitting that he and his co-conspirators returned to squeeze at least one victim a second time. Connor Riley Moucka, 26, of Kitchener, Ontario, admitted computer fraud, wire fraud, aggravated identity theft, and conspiracy charges over a hacking spree that compromised more than 165 organizations, exposed billions of customer records, and brought in about $2.5 million in ransom paym
  
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