Sci-Tech news

• World's oldest message in a bottle discovered on an Australian beach

  06-03-2018 17:01 via dailymail.co.uk
  
  The message was found on a west Australian beach after it was dropped from the German sailing vessel, Paula, in 1886 as part of an experiment to better understand global ocean currents.
  
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• Revolut falls for fake government requests, hands over customer data

  14-09-2026 13:26 via theregister.com
  
  British bank Revolut exposed sensitive customer information after falling for fraudulent requests sent from a legitimate government agency's email domain. In a statement shared with The Register, Revolut confirmed the attack, but did not specify how many customers were affected. The company also did not provide a list of affected data types. However, blockchain investigator ZachXBT, who shared Revolut's customer notifications on Friday, claimed the exposed information includes know-your-customer
  
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• CPython eases Rust requirements as assimilation continues

  14-09-2026 12:45 via theregister.com
  
  The maintainers of CPython have backed off from making Rust a required dependency for the Python reference implementation, focusing on the less intrusive task of building an optional Rust API for internal Python development. The move “sidesteps a lot of the concerns that people brought up,” Rust Programming Manager Tomáš Šedovič explained at RustConf, held in Montréal last week. Šedovič and others from Rust have been working with the CPyth
  
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• The myth of killer AI is a self-serving attempt at regulatory capture

  14-09-2026 12:00 via theregister.com
  
  KETTLE Hey, did you hear? AI is going to kill us all and no one can is trying to do anything to stop it. You can listen to the latest episode of The Kettle right here on this page, as well as on Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube. Those platforms also let you subscribe to The Kettle, so you are always notified when the latest episode goes live. This week, we're talking about the latest spate of fearmongering from AI industry insiders. Whether you believe we just have to sit back and let Skynet end
  
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• UK.gov begins killing off passwords for 23 million users

  14-09-2026 11:16 via theregister.com
  
  The UK government is giving more than 23 million people the chance to ditch passwords for passkeys – and could save itself a tidy sum on authentication texts in the process. Passkeys are being rolled out more widely across GOV.UK One Login following a trial involving more than 300,000 users, allowing people to sign in using a fingerprint, Face ID, or device PIN instead of entering a password and waiting for a two-factor authentication (2FA) code. The government says nearly one in ten daily
  
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• Europe's right-to-repair rules are broken, not beaten

  14-09-2026 10:30 via theregister.com
  
  Consumerism? Squint at it in the right light, and it looks a lot like communism. Certainly, that's how parts of the American political establishment seem to view Europe, the world's regulatory superpower. All those rules denying the God-given rights of free people to have their data protected, their privacy secured, and their phones recharged by USB-C. You know what the C in USB-C actually stands for? Communism! Wake up, sheeple! Having qualified itself for two hours on Joe Rogan, this column mu
  
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• Who, Me? Tech team stood and laughed at colleague who pressed the wrong off button

  14-09-2026 08:30 via theregister.com
  
  WHO, ME? Admitting to mistakes is a ticklish task, but one The Register tackles head-on each Monday in "Who, Me?" – the reader-contributed column that chronicles your worst working moments. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Bowman," who sent us a story from the early 2000s, a time when he says most servers were floor-mounted monsters. "I worked in an organization in Glasgow with a datacenter full of them, some with an external disk storage array sitting neatly beside the server."
  
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• AI and its main promoters are not enterprise-ready, says Gartner

  14-09-2026 07:11 via theregister.com
  
  The more AI you use, the harder it is to control it or generate return on investment, according to analyst firm Gartner. That firm delivered that glum view of AI at its annual IT Symposium, the first edition of which takes place in Australia before moving Europe and the USA. The Australian event saw distinguished VP analysts Daryl Plummer and Kristin Moyer argue that AI and its leading proponents remain immature. Asked to comment on working with the leading AI labs, Plummer said: “Trust in
  
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• Dario Amodei: “For Too Long The Industry Lied” About AI Risks

  14-09-2026 03:49 via technocracy.news
  
  The fear model of “we’re all going to die” is worn out, especially if the plea is “only government can save us.” We’ve suffered through global warming, climate change, COVID pandemic and other things lined up like dominoes. This smacks of calls for global government.⁃ Patrick Wood, Editor.“I won’t lie to you – there are real dangers,” said Anthropic CEO and cofounder Dario Amodei about the development of artificial intelligence. &
  
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• Big AI sets out its terms for regulatory capture and calls it ‘Pace the frontier’

  14-09-2026 03:15 via theregister.com
  
  ANALYSIS The leaders of major AI labs spent the weekend agreeing on a plan to capture regulators, make more money, and avoid responsibility for their dangerous behaviour. They call it “pacing the frontier.” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei set the ball rolling with a post in which he professed alarm at how quickly AI is improving and suggested the attack on Hugging Face caused by rogue agents run by his rival OpenAI as a warning (which he referred to as ‘OAI-HF’) represented a
  
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• The improbable music of the ZX Spectrum's one-bit speaker

  13-09-2026 15:00 via theregister.com
  
  Even for 1982, the Sinclair ZX Spectrum had poor sound: a piezoelectric speaker that could beep. But you can do a lot with a single bit if you turn it on and off really fast. Michael Martin's Bumbershoot Software site has done some fascinating deep dives into several long-gone computer systems, including a whole series on implementing a game on the ZX Spectrum, starting in May with Giving the ZX Spectrum a Fair Shake. More recently, though, Martin turned his attention to the Spectrum's very limi
  
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• Security through obscurity is dead, and AI delivered the fatal blow

  13-09-2026 13:21 via theregister.com
  
  The term "security through obscurity" describes an old idea that networks and systems will remain secure so long as their architecture, along with any vulnerabilities or other weaknesses, remains secret or hidden. It was never a sound strategy for protecting sensitive assets and systems, but many organizations leaned on it due to lack of resources or complacency. Now it’s obsolete. Don’t believe us? Here’s proof. Software vendors and independent researchers alike are now using
  
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• How to make Xfce look like almost any desktop you want

  13-09-2026 11:09 via theregister.com
  
  PART 1 Xfce is one of the oldest and smallest desktops, but it's also one of the most malleable: it can look and work like multiple other OSes. Best of all, an optional extra Xfce tool automates away most of the configuration. Xfce has been around for 30 years, undergoing several facelifts while remaining one of the most configurable and lightweight Linux desktops. It started off looking like CDE, then it evolved into something more like Windows 95 before developing its own identity. The good ne
  
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• Five night sky events to look out for this autumn

  13-09-2026 01:53 via bbc.co.uk
  
  From meteor showers to a November supermoon, there are a number of impressive sights to behold in the autumn night sky.
  
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• Nvidia's Groq acquihire is on the DOJ's radar, but it's already too late

  12-09-2026 15:26 via theregister.com
  
  Nvidia spent a whopping $20 billion late last year to license Groq’s AI accelerator tech and hire away key members of its engineering team in an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink deal. The acquihire technically left Groq’s core inference-as-a-service business intact, but was clearly architected in such a way as to fly under regulators' radar. Only it didn’t. This week, The New York Times reported that the US Department of Justice had launched an antitrust probe into the deal. It&
  
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• Record heatwaves in France set to make champagne stronger

  12-09-2026 15:00 via bbc.co.uk
  
  Winemakers can produce bubbly up to 15% ABV following an unusual harvest that produced sweeter grapes.
  
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• Dell's 52-inch enormo-monitor is a tsunami of impractical fun

  12-09-2026 13:20 via theregister.com
  
  FIRST LOOK Dell's UltraSharp 52 display is a joyously enormous head-turner, but probably too much monitor for most users. Dell debuted the display at the CES show earlier this year. It's now on sale for $3,000. Sadly, I lack a PC capable of driving the screen at its full 6144 x 2560 resolution and 120 Hz refresh rate. Even at a miserly 3840 x 2160, however, I often marveled at how much it could display. Consider the screenshot below, which shows 50 columns and 89 rows of a single Excel spreadshe
  
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• The aircraft might not be flying, but the certificate has gone on vacation

  12-09-2026 11:00 via theregister.com
  
  BORK!BORK!BORK! We still don't know what caused the air traffic control mayhem in the UK in early September, but one information board at Luton Airport appears to have gone out in sympathy. Spotted by Register reader Mark, the digital sign usually shows passenger information. Today, however, it looks like either the system clock is wrong or someone has forgotten to renew a server certificate. It's not the usual "DNS. It's always DNS," but not far off. For those blissfully unaware, the UK's air t
  
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• The slow, muddy work of saving ancient bogs

  12-09-2026 08:27 via bbc.co.uk
  
  Sarah Hickey and her team help keep nearly 20,000 acres of upland in the Isle of Man healthy.
  
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• Battle to save the tiny, gooey snail only found in one lake in the UK

  12-09-2026 08:09 via bbc.co.uk
  
  Once prevalent across the UK, this mollusc is now only found in one lake in Wales.
  
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• Town gets in a flap over High Street pigeon mess

  12-09-2026 07:24 via bbc.co.uk
  
  Some people say the pigeons are a pest, while others think the birds are being unfairly demonised.
  
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• AI more likely to kill animals if it saves fuel or money

  11-09-2026 23:49 via theregister.com
  
  Amid debate about whether AI will kill everyone as a result of continuous self-improvement, it appears that models will kill animals in a simulated environment rather than spend extra fuel avoiding them. Some models did so at strikingly high rates. Researchers affiliated with Compassion Aligned Machine Learning (CaML) and the University of Warwick in the UK set out to measure the extent to which AI models demonstrate compassion. They describe their work in a preprint paper titled "HarvestBench:
  
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• Ancient DNA exposes a hidden chapter in the fall of the Roman Empire

  11-09-2026 19:47 via dailymail.com
  
  The hidden story of what happened after the Roman Empire fell has finally been uncovered after scientists uncovered ancient remains dating back more than 1,400 years.
  
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• More JFrog Artifactory bugs under attack, and all 3 have patches

  11-09-2026 19:43 via theregister.com
  
  JFrog Artifactory instances continue to get hit hard. Multiple attackers are exploiting three JFrog Artifactory bugs to gain administrative control over vulnerable instances - in some cases, just days after the vendor published a patch - and then using this illicit access to install malicious plugins and backdoors. The three vulnerabilities are: CVE-2026-42018 is a high-severity, improper authentication flaw that can return an internal anonymous-user token to an unauthenticated caller when anony
  
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• Green Beret behind secret pastors' UFO meeting issues chilling warning about sinister new religion quietly reaching millions... and predicts 'very, very dark' future for Christian faith

  11-09-2026 19:13 via dailymail.com
  
  The Daily Mail first reported in May that private meetings of intelligence insiders, former military members and faith leaders were said to have taken place in February.
  
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• Mars astronauts could live in houses made of yeast and jello, say scientists

  11-09-2026 18:50 via theregister.com
  
  If humans ever make it to Mars - and that’s still a big IF - they will need to build shelters there. And they could build those shelters out of yeast and gelatin, if a method described by Hong Kong-based researchers makes it out of the lab. A paper published on Thursday by a group of researchers from The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and The Hong Kong Polytechnic University describes a method for building structures on Mars that doesn’t rely on energy-intensive heati
  
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• 'Time traveler' claiming to be from the year 3700 reveals 'physical evidence' from the day robots destroy humanity

  11-09-2026 18:43 via dailymail.com
  
  A self-proclaimed time traveler's warning from the year 3700 has resurfaced after chilling claims made by researchers who say humanity is spiraling towards its own destruction.
  
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• Disembodied fruit fly brain joins the crypto speculation swarm

  11-09-2026 18:03 via theregister.com
  
  If you want to understand how 2026 is going, in March The Register reported that scientists had connected a simulated fruit fly brain to a virtual body and let it wander around a virtual world. Now another simulated fly nervous system is trading crypto. Behold Stonkfly, the brainchild of Coinbase software engineer Alex Wormuth. His X post boasted: "I gave the fly brain $100 to trade bitcoin. Dopamine neurons are stimulated when the fly makes profit. Neuron activity controls buy/sell decisions an
  
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• AT&T store worker gets 16 months inside for SIM-swap side hustle

  11-09-2026 17:16 via theregister.com
  
  A former AT&T retail worker who used his system access to hijack customers' phone numbers for cybercriminals has been sentenced to 16 months in federal prison. Kenneth Carter, 44, carried out the SIM swaps at a store in Portland, Oregon, , allowing the criminals to intercept authentication codes and raid victims' bank accounts. Court documents show that Carter worked with at least three other people in the scheme, which ran between May 2018 and November 2019, and caused nearly $600,000 in in
  
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• Will Spiking Diesel Prices Drive Autonomous Trucking?

  11-09-2026 16:57 via technocracy.news
  
  With the national price of diesel hitting $6.05 as California hits $8.00 per gallon, one wonders what will happen to the trucking industry that delivers the goods across America. Labor is the largest expense for trucking, so many trucking companies are planning to switch to autonomous trucks. In the meantime, a slew of independent trucking companies are biting the dust. This is a fundamental change in our economic system. ⁃ Patrick Wood Editor.Swedish freight company Einride’s a
  
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