Latest News

Last updated 06 Apr, 05:02 PM

BBC News

The 40 minutes when the Artemis crew loses contact with the Earth - As the astronauts pass behind the Moon they will experience a moment of silence and solitude as communication with the Earth is blocked.

Kanye West's right to enter UK under review after festival outcry - The rapper's appearance in London in July has caused controversy because of his past antisemitic comments.

Benefits and pensions rise as two-child cap ends - Families on some benefits with three or more children will get an average rise of £4,100 a year.

Don't put off treatment during doctors' strike, NHS tells patients - The strike comes at the end of the bank holiday weekend and NHS managers fear demand could be "challenging".

'Really feeling the love' - Savannah Guthrie returns to NBC as search for mother goes on - Nancy Guthrie disappeared from her home in Tucson, Arizona, in what authorities believe was an abduction.

The Register

Patch to end i486 support hits Linux kernel merge queue - After a year of patchwork, maintainers look ready to start retiring 486-class CPUs It's taken nearly a full version number to get the pieces in order, but the long-awaited end of 486 chip support in the Linux kernel appears to be nigh with Linux 7.1's release later this year. …

Windows asks a networking question on a Stratford billboard - Glue and paper wouldn't have cared about discoverability Bork!Bork!Bork! Today's entry in the pantheon of public whoopsies is not so much Windows falling over as someone sticking a network connection where it possibly doesn't belong.…

The developer who came in from the cold and melted a mainframe - It's not just machines that need proper HVAC Who, Me? The world is rapidly becoming a more uncertain place, but The Register tries to offer readers one small point of certainty by always delivering a fresh Monday morning instalment of "Who, Me?" – the reader-contributed column in which you admit to your errors and elucidate your escapes.…

Anthropic sure has a mess on its hands thanks to that Claude Code source leak - Pay no attention to that code behind the curtain, says Anthropic as it scrambles to defend its IPO Kettle When it comes to circling up for this week's Kettle, what is there to discuss but Anthropic's accidental release of Claude Code's source code?…

Researchers didn’t want to glamorize cybercrims. So they roasted them - True-crime tales of criminals making fools of themselves interview Cybercrime crews have become almost mystical entities, with security vendors assigning them names like Wizard Spider and Velvet Tempest.…

New Scientist - Home

Novel approach to clearing brain waste shows promise for Alzheimer's - Boosting the brain's waste-disposal system is increasingly showing promise for Alzheimer's disease, with a study now suggesting that a novel approach eases brain deficits and symptoms associated with the condition

Oceans are darkening all over the planet – what’s going on? - In a shift that is reshaping entire ecosystems, the open oceans are letting less light in. We don't fully understand the consequences yet, but there is still hope, says oceanographer Tim Smyth

A once-fantastical collider could answer physics’ biggest mysteries - The muon collider was once dismissed as impossible, but is now gaining steam as the successor to the Large Hadron Collider. If built, it could offer a new window to reality

Stark photos show quest for profit cutting swathes through the Amazon - Photographer Lalo de Almeida has been documenting the industrialisation taking place in the Amazon rainforest after the Brazilian government relaxed environmental controls

Michael Pollan: 'Consciousness is really under siege' - A psychedelic experience set author Michael Pollan on a quest to understand consciousness in his new book A World Appears. He tells Olivia Goldhill what he learned – and how it changed him

Hacker News

I Won't Download Your App. The Web Version Is A-OK - Comments

Germany Doxes "UNKN," Head of RU Ransomware Gangs REvil, GandCrab - Comments

sc-im Spreadsheets in Your Terminal - Comments

Book Review: There Is No Antimemetics Division - Comments

81yo Dodgers fan can no longer get tickets because he doesn't have a smartphone - Comments

Slashdot

More Americans Are Breaking Into the Upper Middle Class - More Americans have moved into upper-middle-class incomes over the past several decades (source paywalled; alternative source), with new research suggesting that group has grown sharply while the lower and core middle class have shrunk. The Wall Street Journal reports: In 2024, about 31% of Americans were part of the upper middle class, up from about 10% in 1979, according to a report released this year by the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute. There is no single, standard definition of middle class, or upper middle class, and what counts as a hefty income in one city can feel paltry in another. The AEI report, by Stephen Rose and Scott Winship, classified a family of three earning $133,000 to $400,000 in 2024 dollars as upper middle class. Households earning more were categorized as rich. The analysis looked just at incomes, not assets such as stocks or real estate. [...] The gains span generations. Many baby boomers, born to parents who grew up in the Great Depression, are living well on their savings, aided by steady Social Security checks and decades of stock-portfolio gains that they can now tap. Millennials, who everyone worried would be permanently set back by the 2008-09 financial crisis, are earning solid incomes, buying homes and surpassing their parents. Many families are surprised to find that they have moved into this new economic tier, and see themselves as comfortable, not rich. They tend to have jobs that are white collar but not flashy -- think accountants, not tech founders. This doesn't mean that all Americans are climbing the ladder. Entrenched inflation and higher prices on major necessities have pushed many families closer to the financial edge, or locked them out of homeownership. Those costs weigh on high-earning families too, and for many are the reason they don't feel wealthy. The AEI report divided families into five different groups by income. Three groups were in the middle: lower middle class, core middle class and upper middle class. The authors found that more families now fall into the two highest-earning groups -- upper middle class and rich -- and fewer fall into the three lower-earning categories. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Peter Thiel Is Betting Big On Solar-Powered Cow Collars - Halter, a New Zealand agtech startup now valued at $2 billion, has raised $220 million to expand its AI-powered cattle management system. "Halter is now valued at $2 billion following the Series E, which was led by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund with participation from Blackbird, DCVC, Bond, Bessemer, and several others," reports Inc. From the report: alter plans to use the funding to expand its existing footprint in the U.S., Australia, and New Zealand, as well as to grow into new markets such as Ireland, the U.K., and parts of North and South America. The round is one of the biggest to-date in the industry, and comes amid growing adoption of the technology among U.S. ranchers. According to Halter, U.S. ranchers have erected some 60,000 miles of virtual fencing since the company's launch in 2024. Halter's technology works through a system of solar-powered collars and in-pasture towers that collect data -- some 6,000 data points per collar per minute -- from grazing cattle and feed it into a cloud-based platform and app for farmers. The collars are ergonomically designed to be comfortable for the cattle wearing them, and leverage AI to play audio cues or vibrate when it is time to move to a different grazing location or if they step outside of a predetermined zone. The collars can also deliver an electric pulse if an animal does not respond. Halter's app also creates a digital twin of a ranch, which essentially means a digital replica that leverages real-time data to accurately reflect conditions. Farmers can consult the app to check on their herd, or fence, and move cattle with just a few clicks. Halter also has a proprietary algorithm that it calls a "Cowgorithm" trained on seven billion hours of animal behavior. Altogether, this technology is meant to make ranchers' lives easier when herding cattle, help them save money on building physical fencing, and provide insights about pasture management to improve soil health and pasture productivity. Halter says some 2,000 farmers and ranchers currently use its tech worldwide. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Copilot Is 'For Entertainment Purposes Only,' According To Microsoft's ToS - An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: AI skeptics aren't the only ones warning users not to unthinkingly trust models' outputs -- that's what the AI companies say themselves in their terms of service. Take Microsoft, which is currently focused on getting corporate customers to pay for Copilot. But it's also been getting dinged on social media over Copilot's terms of use, which appear to have been last updated on October 24, 2025. "Copilot is for entertainment purposes only," the company warned. "It can make mistakes, and it may not work as intended. Don't rely on Copilot for important advice. Use Copilot at your own risk." Microsoft described the terms of service as "legacy language," saying it will be updated. Tom's Hardware notes that similar AI warnings remain common across the industry, with companies like OpenAI and xAI also cautioning users not to treat chatbot output as "the truth" or as "a sole service of truth or factual information." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Linux Finally Starts Removing Support for Intel's 37-Year-Old i486 Processor - "It's finally time," writes Phoronix — since "no known Linux distribution vendors are still shipping with i486 CPU support." "A patch queued into one of the development branches ahead of the upcoming Linux 7.1 merge window is set to finally begin the process of phasing out and ultimately removing Intel 486 CPU support from the Linux kernel." More details from XDA-Developers: Authored by Ingo Molnar, the change, titled "x86/cpu: Remove M486/M486SX/ELAN support," begins dismantling Linux's built-in support for the i486, which was first released back in 1989. As the changelog notes, even Linus is keen to cut ties with the architecture: "In the x86 architecture we have various complicated hardware emulation facilities on x86-32 to support ancient 32-bit CPUs that very very few people are using with modern kernels. This compatibility glue is sometimes even causing problems that people spend time to resolve, which time could be spent on other things. As Linus recently remarked: 'I really get the feeling that it's time to leave i486 support behind. There's zero real reason for anybody to waste one second of development effort on this kind of issue'..." If you're one of the rare few who still keep the decades-old CPU alive, your best bet will be to grab an LTS Linux distro that keeps the older version of Linux for a few more years. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Russia's VPN Crackdown Caused Bank Outages, Telegram Founder Says - Russia's "great crackdown" on VPNs — and a clampdown on Telegram's messaging platform — had an unintended side effect, reports Bloomberg. It "triggered the widespread banking outage seen across the country this week, Telegram's billionaire founder Pavel Durov said." "Telegram was banned in Russia, yet 65 million Russians still use it daily via VPNs," Durov said Saturday in a post on Telegram. "The government has spent years trying to ban VPNs too. Their blocking attempts just triggered a massive banking failure; cash briefly became the only payment method nationwide yesterday." Attempts on Friday to limit VPN use could have sparked the disruption affecting banking apps, The Bell and other Russian media reported, citing industry sources who weren't identified. The outage may have been caused by an overload in the filtering systems run by Russia's communications watchdog, according to the reports, with experts warning that major restrictions risk undermining network stability... Separately, payments for Apple Inc.'s app store and other services became unavailable in Russia from April 1, the US company said on its website, without saying why. Earlier, RBC newswire reported that the Digital Development Ministry had asked mobile operators to disable top-ups, which could help limit VPN use.... Durov, who's being investigated in Russia for allegedly aiding terrorist activity, compared the situation in his home country to Iran, where similar restrictions prompted widespread adoption of VPNs instead of the intended shift to state-backed messaging apps. "Welcome back to the Digital Resistance, my Russian brothers and sisters," said Durov, who has lived in Dubai and France in recent years. "The entire nation is now mobilized to bypass these absurd restrictions," he wrote, adding that Telegram would continue adapting to make its traffic harder to detect and block. Read more of this story at Slashdot.