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Last updated 10 Apr, 01:06 PM
BBC News
Ceasefire or no ceasefire, the Middle East's reshuffling is not yet done - Both sides have reason to end the war but share no common ground.
Man arrested after baby girl dies from dog bite - Two dogs seized from the same address have been destroyed, police say.
Man jailed for killing abused wife who jumped from bridge - Lee Milne was sentenced to eight years for being responsible for his wife Kimberly's death, in the first case of its kind in Scotland.
Melania Trump denies ties to Jeffrey Epstein and urges hearing for survivors - She called rumours that Epstein introduced her to Donald Trump "mean-spirited attempts to defame my reputation".
Simple guide: How the Iran war is affecting the cost of holidays, food and clothes - Fuel costs have already soared, flights and mortgages are also rising - and food could soon do the same.
The Register
CPUID site hijacked to serve malware instead of HWMonitor downloads - Six-hour breach turned trusted links into a coin toss between legit tools and credential stealers Visitors to the CPUID website were briefly exposed to malware this week after attackers hijacked part of its backend, turning trusted download links into a delivery mechanism for something far less welcome.…
Amazon would rather shareholders did not look too closely at carbon footprint - Investors urged to reject proposal for more disclosure on whether AWS expansion risks climate goals Amazon's board of directors is urging shareholders to reject a proposal that would have the megacorp disclose more information on the impact of datacenters on its climate commitments.…
Suits won't quit AI spending, even if they can't prove it's working - Forget about investment value! Call it a 'strategic enabler for enterprise‑wide transformation,' says KPMG Most UK business leaders will keep AI at the top of their spending priorities, with 65 percent planning to maintain investment whether they see immediate measurable returns or not.…
Project Glasswing and open source software: The good, the bad, and the ugly - Just what FOSS developers need – a flood of AI-discovered vulnerabilities Opinion Anthropic describes Project Glasswing as a coalition of tech giants committing $100 million in AI resources to hunt down and fix long-hidden vulnerabilities in critical open source software that it's finding with its new Mythos AI program. Or as The Reg put it, "an AI model that can generate zero-day vulnerabilities."…
Britain seeks views before it drops the hammer on signal jammers - Four-week call for evidence intended to help shape laws aimed at devices linked to crime The UK government is seeking views on radiofrequency jammers as it prepares legislation to ban the controversial devices.…
New Scientist - Home
Quantum batteries could be charged by reversing time - Physicists have shown how time can effectively be reversed for some quantum systems, which would allow for new ways to harvest energy
New Scientist recommends sampling the Museum of Edible Earth in London - The books, TV, games and more that New Scientist staff have enjoyed this week
The man who ruined mathematics - The incompleteness theorem is accepted as part of the mathematical canon today, but columnist Jacob Aron says it was a bombshell when Kurt Gödel first introduced it. Gödel’s seminal work directly contradicted one of the great minds of mathematics and limited the field forever
Physicists resolve a long-standing puzzle over the size of a proton - Two extremely precise experiments agree with a previously shocking measurement of just how big the proton is, which may help future searches for new particles
Chimpanzee group's violent rupture hints at evolutionary roots of war - Researchers who observed a murderous conflict unfolding in a once-unified group of wild chimpanzees say there are parallels with civil wars in human societies
Hacker News
Microsoft suspends dev accounts for high-profile open source projects - Comments
Intel 486 CPU announced April 10, 1989 - Comments
France Launches Government Linux Desktop Plan as Windows Exit Begins - Comments
How NASA built Artemis II’s fault-tolerant computer - Comments
ETH Zurich demonstrates 17,000 qubit array with 99.91% fidelity - Comments
Slashdot
Meta Removes Ads For Social Media Addiction Litigation - Meta has started removing ads from law firms seeking clients for social media addiction lawsuits, just weeks after a jury found Meta and YouTube negligent in a landmark case involving harm to a young user. "Lawyers across the country now are seeking new plaintiffs, in the hopes of bringing a class action lawsuit that could result in lucrative verdicts," reports Axios. From the report: Axios has identified more than a dozen such ads that were deactivated today, some of which came from large national firms like Morgan & Morgan and Sokolove Law. Almost all of them ran on both Facebook and Instagram. Some also appeared on Threads and Messenger, plus Meta's Audience Network -- which distributes ads to thousands of third-party sites. One such ad read: "Anxiety. Depression. Withdrawal. Self-harm. These aren't just teenage phases -- they're symptoms linked to social media addiction in children. Platforms knew this and kept targeting kids anyway." A few of the ads still remain active, including some that were posted earlier today. "We're actively defending ourselves against these lawsuits and are removing ads that attempt to recruit plaintiffs for them," a Meta spokesperson said in a statement. "We will not allow trial lawyers to profit from our platforms while simultaneously claiming they are harmful." Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Particles Seen Emerging From Empty Space For First Time - Longtime Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot shares a report from NewScientist: According to quantum chromodynamics (QCD) -- widely considered to be our best theory for describing the strong force, which binds quarks inside protons and neutrons -- even a perfect vacuum isn't truly empty. Instead, it is filled with short-lived disturbances in the underlying energy of space that flicker in and out of existence, known as virtual particles. Among them are quark-antiquark pairs. Under normal conditions, these fleeting pairs vanish almost as soon as they appear. But if enough energy is injected into a vacuum, QCD predicts they can be promoted into real, detectable particles with measurable mass. Now, the STAR collaboration -- an international team of physicists working at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider in Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York state -- has observed this process for the first time. The team smashed together high-energy protons in a vacuum, producing a spray of particles. Some of these particles should be quark-antiquark pairs pulled directly from the vacuum itself, but quarks can never exist alone and immediately combine into composite particles. Quarks and antiquarks are born with their spins correlated -- a shared quantum alignment inherited from the vacuum. The researchers found that this link persists even after the quarks and antiquarks become part of larger particles called hyperons, which decay in less than a tenth of a billionth of a second. Spotting these spin-aligned hyperons in the aftermath of the proton collisions allowed the researchers to confirm that the quarks within them came from the vacuum. The findings have been published in the journal Nature. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
US Fertility Rate Falls To All-Time Low - An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Women in the U.S. gave birth to roughly 710,000 fewer children last year compared with the nation's peak in 2007, according to preliminary data released (PDF) this week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Lead researcher Brady Hamilton, a demographer with the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics, said the latest one percent drop in "general fertility" from 2024 to 2025 is part of a long-running downward trend. "Since 2007, there's been a decline in the general fertility rate [in the U.S.] of 23%," Hamilton told NPR. The impact of that change in real numbers is sizable: In 2007, there were 4,316,233 babies born. Last year, even though the nation's population as a whole is larger, there were only 3,606,400 newborns. There's no consensus over why women and couples have shifted their behavior so significantly. Some experts point to economic factors, others say cultural influences, and better access to education and contraception for women are driving the change. "We're seeing big drops in fertility rates for young women, teenagers and women in their 20s," said economist Martha Bailey, head of the California Center for Population Research at the University of California, Los Angeles. "What's not yet clear is whether or not those same women will go on to have children later on." "People are having the number of children they want and that they can afford at a time that makes the most sense for them," she said. "What I don't think anyone is in favor of is a Handmaid's Tale type policy regime, where we're trying to talk families into having children they don't want." One silver lining in the data is the 7% decline in teen pregnancies in 2025. Bianca Allison, pediatrician and associate professor at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, said: "What is actually affecting the birth rates are likely lower rates of teen pregnancy overall, which is in the context of higher use of contraception and lower sexual activity for youth, and then also continued access to abortion care." Read more of this story at Slashdot.
'Negative' Views of Broadcom Driving Thousands of VMware Migrations, Rival Says - "One of VMware's biggest competitors, Nutanix, claims to have swiped tens of thousands of VMware customers," reports Ars Technica. They said higher prices, forced bundling, licensing changes, and more strained partner relationships have frustrated customers and driven them away from the leading virtualization firm. From the report: Speaking at a press briefing at Nutanix's .NEXT conference in Chicago this week, Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami said that "about 30,000 customers" have migrated from VMware to the rival platform, pointing to customer disapproval over Broadcom's VMware strategy, SDxCentral, a London-based IT publication, reported today. "I think there's no doubt that the customer sentiment continues to be negative about Broadcom," Ramaswami said, per SDxCentral. Nutanix hasn't specified how many of the customers that it got from VMware are SMBs or enterprise-sized; although, adoption is said to be strongest among mid-market customers as Nutanix also tries wooing larger customers, often by starting with partial deployments. During this week's press briefing, Ramaswami reportedly said that some of the customers that moved from VMware to Nutanix during the latter's most recent fiscal quarter represented Nutanix's "strongest quarterly new logo additions in eight years." "Most of the logos came from our typical VMware migrations on to the [hyperconverged infrastructure] platform," he said. During the Nutanix conference, Brandon Shaw, Nutanix VP and head of technology services, said that Western Union has been migrating from VMware to Nutanix for six months, The Register reported. The financial services company is moving 900 to 1,200 applications across 3,900 cores. Shaw said that Western Union has been exploring new IT suppliers to help it become more customer-focused. Despite Broadcom's history of "decent lines of communication" with Western Union, Shaw said that Western Union had "challenges partnering with them." Shaw also pointed to Broadcom's efforts to push customers to buy the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), despite the product often having more features than companies need and at high prices. Since moving to Nutanix, the Denver-headquartered financial firm is also benefiting from having more flexibility around workload locations, which is important since Western Union is in over 200 countries, The Register said. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Mozilla Accuses Microsoft of Sabotaging Firefox With Windows and Copilot Tactics - BrianFagioli writes: Mozilla is accusing Microsoft of stacking the deck against Firefox, arguing that design choices in Windows steer users toward Edge even when they explicitly choose another browser. According to Mozilla, parts of Windows still open links in Edge regardless of the default browser setting, including results from the taskbar search and links launched from apps like Outlook and Teams. Mozilla says this means Firefox often never even gets the opportunity to handle those links, which quietly shifts user activity back into Microsoft's ecosystem. The company also points to Microsoft's aggressive rollout of Copilot as another example of platform power being used to push Microsoft services. Copilot appeared pinned to the taskbar, arrived automatically on many systems with Microsoft 365, and even received a dedicated keyboard key on some laptops. Mozilla argues that when the maker of the dominant desktop operating system promotes its own browser and AI tools at the system level, it becomes far harder for independent browsers like Firefox to compete. Read more of this story at Slashdot.