Latest News

Last updated 25 Mar, 10:49 AM

BBC News

Two men arrested over Jewish charity ambulance arson attacks - Four Hatzola ambulances were set ablaze in Golders Green, London, in the early hours of Monday.

Hospital waited two days before raising alarm about meningitis outbreak, BBC learns - Experts say the wait was indefensible and possibly delayed identification of the outbreak.

'He liked the fear in our eyes,' Epstein survivors tell BBC - In an interview with BBC Newsnight, five women abused by the disgraced financier describe the impact of their shared ordeal.

'I hugged armed man to stop him bombing hospital' - Nathan Newby, who used kindness to persuade the "lone-wolf terrorist" to abandon his plan, is being awarded the George Medal.

Ex-justice minister admits possessing crystal meth and cannabis - Crispin Blunt was found with illegal drugs, including cannabis and crystal meth, at his Surrey home.

The Register

YouTuber lands on Moon using a ZX Spectrum. Conditions apply - BASIC and bit-banging used to guide a simulated lander down to a virtual lunar touchdown Could Sinclair's 48k Sinclair ZX Spectrum land a spacecraft on the Moon? YouTuber Scott Manley decided to find out, and the answer is… kind of.…

Nothing screams casual career pivot like joining the UK Ministry of Defence for a cool £162K - AI and quantum on to-do list for Chief Digital Technology Officer in charge of £140.7M budget. Fancy it? The UK's Ministry of Defence is looking for a new Chief Digital Technology Officer (CDTO) to take responsibility for a budget of £140.7 million ($188 million) and 400 staff.…

Enterprise PCs are unreliable, unpatched, and unloved compared to Macs - Omnissa telemetry suggests business buyers are loving Apple and Google End-user compute vendor Omnissa, the company formed by the spin-out of VMware’s virtual desktops, applications, and device management biz, has dug into the telemetry it collects from customers and painted a picture of the world’s enterprise hardware fleet – and the news is better for Google and Apple than it is for Microsoft.…

Apple pushes Maps ads in free training-wheels business bundle - Apple Business combines corporate device management offerings and a way to buy ads Apple has simplified its business services by combining and rebranding them, and is giving away the reformulated enterprise offering for free.…

Alibaba delivers RISC-V server chip optimized to run China’s top AI models - Claims its set performance records but looks to be years behind western fare Alibaba has revealed a new server chip that it says is the most powerful processor ever to use the RISC-V instruction set.…

New Scientist - Home

Cancer-causing chemical found to be leaking from gas cookers - One in 10 homes tested in the UK, Italy and the Netherlands have dangerous levels of benzene because of slow leaks from gas hobs and ovens

Earth may have formed from two separate rings around the sun - Our solar system’s rocky planets – Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars – may have formed from two rings around the young sun, rather than a single disc

Cystitis or tooth decay could trigger dementia just a few years later - Infections are increasingly being linked to a higher risk of dementia. In the latest research, scientists have found that being treated in hospital for a severe infection seems to raise the risk of developing the condition over the next five to six years

The shocking fossils that show T. rex wasn't the king of the dinosaurs - We've always thought that Tyrannosaurus rex was an unchallenged apex predator during the dying days of the dinosaurs. But a fresh look at controversial fossils has prompted palaeontology’s biggest-ever U-turn

Antimatter has been transported by road for the first time - CERN is working on building an antimatter delivery service. The project passed a big test by successfully transporting 92 antiprotons around a 4-kilometre loop of road

Hacker News

Meta told to pay $375M for misleading users over child safety - Comments

TurboQuant: Redefining AI efficiency with extreme compression - Comments

I tried to prove I'm not AI. My aunt wasn't convinced - Comments

VitruvianOS – Desktop Linux Inspired by the BeOS - Comments

Goodbye to Sora - Comments

Slashdot

NASA Halts Work On Gateway To Develop a Lunar Base - NASA is reportedly halting work on the lunar Gateway in favor of a more direct push to build a lunar base. The new plan would cost tens of billions over the next decade, though the change could face hurdles because Congress previously funded Gateway specifically. SpaceNews reports: "Starting today, we're building humanity's first deep space outpost," said Carlos Garcia-Galan, program executive for NASA's moon base effort. The lunar base will take place in three phases. Phase 1, running from 2026 to 2028, "is all about getting to the moon reliably," he said. That includes a significant increase in the cadence of lander missions through the Commercial Lunar Payload Services and other programs. It will also focus on developing enabling technologies and getting "ground truth" for potential base locations at the lunar south pole. Phase 2, from 2029 through 2031, starts building the base, he said. That would include building out communications, navigation, power and other infrastructure, developing larges CLPS cargo landers and supporting two crewed missions a year. Phase 3, beginning 2032, will enable "long distance and long duration human exploration" on the moon, he said, with routine logistics missions to the moon and uncrewed cargo return missions from the moon. Garcia-Galan said NASA foresees spending $10 billion each on Phases 1 and 2. Phase 3, lasting to at least 2036, would cost an additional $10 billion or more. The base would leverage existing programs, although with some changes. NASA is planning to revamp the Lunar Terrain Vehicle program after concluding the current approach would take too long to get a crew-capable rover to the moon. "We were projecting a delivery on the lunar surface by 2030," he said. The agency is instead issuing a draft request for proposals for simplified rovers that could be quicker and easier to develop but could be upgraded later. The base, though, would include some new capabilities and technologies. One example Garcia-Galan provided was MoonFall, a drone that would be able to hop from one location to another on the lunar surface. The drones will be "built on the legacy" of Ingenuity, the small Mars helicopter. "We're going to take everything that we learned from Ingenuity's systems, the avionics, all of that, to build this." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hong Kong Police Can Demand Passwords Under New National Security Rules - An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Hong Kong police can now demand phone or computer passwords from those who are suspected of breaching the wide-ranging National Security Law (NSL). Those who refuse could face up to a year in jail and a fine of up to $12,700, and individuals who provide "false or misleading information" could face up to three years in jail. It comes as part of new amendments to a bylaw under the NSL that the government gazetted on Monday. The NSL was introduced in Hong Kong in 2020, in wake of massive pro-democracy protests the year before. Authorities say the laws, which target acts like terrorism and secession, are necessary for stability -- but critics say they are tools to quash dissent. The new amendments also give customs officials the power to seize items that they deem to "have seditious intention." Monday's amendments ensure that "activities endangering national security can be effectively prevented, suppressed and punished, and at the same time the lawful rights and interests of individuals and organizations are adequately protected," Hong Kong authorities said on Monday. Changes to the bylaw was announced by the city's leader, John Lee, bypassing the city's legislative council. The NSL also allows for some trials to be heard behind closed doors. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Wine 11 Rewrites How Linux Runs Windows Games At the Kernel Level - Linux gamers are seeing massive performance gains with Wine's new NTSYNC support, "which is a feature that has been years in the making and rewrites how Wine handles one of the most performance-sensitive operations in modern gaming," reports XDA Developers. Not every game will see a night-and-day difference, but for the games that do benefit from these changes, "the improvements range from noticeable to absurd." Combined with improvements to Wayland, graphics, and compatibility, as well as a major WoW64 architecture overhaul, the release looks less like an incremental update and more like one of Wine's most important upgrades in years. From the report: The numbers are wild. In developer benchmarks, Dirt 3 went from 110.6 FPS to 860.7 FPS, which is an impressive 678% improvement. Resident Evil 2 jumped from 26 FPS to 77 FPS. Call of Juarez went from 99.8 FPS to 224.1 FPS. Tiny Tina's Wonderlands saw gains from 130 FPS to 360 FPS. As well, Call of Duty: Black Ops I is now actually playable on Linux, too. Those benchmarks compare Wine NTSYNC against upstream vanilla Wine, which means there's no fsync or esync either. Gamers who use fsync are not going to see such a leap in performance in most games. The games that benefit most from NTSYNC are the ones that were struggling before, such as titles with heavy multi-threaded workloads where the synchronization overhead was a genuine bottleneck. For those games, the difference is night and day. And unlike fsync, NTSYNC is in the mainline kernel, meaning you don't need any custom patches or out-of-tree modules for it work. Any distro shipping kernel 6.14 or later, which at this point includes Fedora 42, Ubuntu 25.04, and more recent releases, will support it. Valve has already added the NTSYNC kernel driver to SteamOS 3.7.20 beta, loading the module by default, and an unofficial Proton fork, Proton GE, already has it enabled. When Valve's official Proton rebases on Wine 11, every Steam Deck owner gets this for free. All of this is what makes NTSYNC such a big deal, as it's not simply a run-of-the-mill performance patch. Instead, it's something much bigger: this is the first time Wine's synchronization has been correct at the kernel level, implemented in the mainline Linux kernel, and available to everyone without jumping through hoops. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google's Android Automotive Is Moving From the Dashboard To the 'Brain' of the Car - Google is expanding Android Automotive from the infotainment screen into the broader non-safety "brain" of software-defined vehicles. With its new Android Automotive OS for Software-Defined Vehicles, the in-car experience will feel "much more cohesive and the latest features will reach your driveway faster," Matt Crowley, Android Automotive's group product manager, writes in a blog post. "From a truly integrated voice experience to proactive maintenance reminders, your car will become a true extension of your digital life," Crowley adds. The Verge reports: With its new software, Google is promising faster over-the-air software updates, better voice assistants, and more proactive vehicle maintenance alerts. Non-driving functions like climate control, lighting, and seating adjustment would fall under Android's control. And the system would move beyond basic infotainment to create a unified ecosystem for features like remote cabin conditioning, digital key management, and personalized driver profiles. For automakers, the new system promises less expensive software development costs and an opportunity to focus on what matters most to them: branding. By providing the "foundational code and a common language for their software," Google says automakers will be free to design cool experiences for their customers. Google says its already working with companies like Renault Group and Qualcomm to bring its new software-defined vehicle version of Android Automotive to more cars. A variety of automakers already use regular Android Automotive, like Volvo, Polestar, General Motors, Nissan, and Honda. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OpenAI Discontinues Sora Video Platform App - OpenAI is shutting down Sora, its generative-AI video creation platform it launched in December 2024. "The move is one of a number of steps OpenAI is taking to refocus on business and coding functions ahead of a potential initial public offering as soon as the fourth quarter of this year," reports the Wall Street Journal. CEO Sam Altman announced the changes to staff on Tuesday. "We're saying goodbye to Sora," the Sora Team said in a post on X. "To everyone who created with Sora, shared it, and built community around it: thank you. What you made with Sora mattered, and we know this news is disappointing. We'll share more soon, including timelines for the app and API and details on preserving your work." Last week, OpenAI announced plans to combine its Atlas web browser, ChatGPT app, and Codex coding app into a singular desktop "superapp." "We realized we were spreading our efforts across too many apps and stacks, and that we need to simplify our efforts," said CEO of Applications, Fidji Simo. "That fragmentation has been slowing us down and making it harder to hit the quality bar we want." This could behind the decision to kill Sora as the company redirects its resources and top talent towards productivity tools that benefit both enterprises and individual users. Read more of this story at Slashdot.