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Last updated 22 Mar, 04:45 AM
BBC News
Foreign secretary denounces 'reckless Iran threats' after missiles fired at Diego Garcia - Iran reportedly fired two ballistic missiles at Indian Ocean base, but neither reached the target.
Trump at a crossroads as US weighs tough options in Iran - Statements from President Trump that the war is almost over are not matching up with the reality on the ground.
Sombr stopped a show over safety - but are concerts in the UK really that risky? - Musicians are increasingly interrupting their own shows to help fans - but venues might be safer than you think.
Food prices likely to rise due to Iran war, farmers' union says - The National Farmers' Union says the price of cucumbers, tomatoes and peppers could rise over the next six weeks.
Pop megastars BTS electrify historic centre of Seoul with comeback concert - The world's biggest band returns after more than three years with a huge concert in the South Korean capital.
The Register
Turns out your coffee addiction may be doing your brain a favor - Decades of data suggest people who stick to a couple of brews fare better in terms of gray matter A decades-long study suggests that your daily caffeine fix might be doing more than jolting you through morning meetings – it could also be quietly helping your brain hold it together.…
Payment biz pulls plug on open source charity after KYC spat - Free Software Foundation Europe says it was asked for supporters' passwords; Nexi insists it only wanted test credentials to check cancellation flows The Free Software Foundation Europe says its electronic-payments provider Nexi Group unexpectedly "cancelled" its account – cutting the charity off from around 450 donors.…
Cryptographers engage in war of words over RustSec bug reports and subsequent ban - Rust security maintainers contend Nadim Kobeissi's vulnerability claims are too much Since February, cryptographer Nadim Kobeissi has been trying to get code fixes applied to Rust cryptography libraries to address what he says are critical bugs. For his efforts, he's been dismissed, ignored, and banned from Rust security channels.…
Sorry, Amazon, you couldn't pick a worse time to bring a phone to market: IDC analyst - The market is contracting Right product, wrong time? Amazon is reported to be developing a new smartphone, its first since 2014, and, according to industry tracker IDC, it will face entrenched competition with better products and a market that is expected to contract by double digits.…
Salesforce snaps up the team who built calendar app Clockwise to work on Agentforce - Just the team, not the tech Salesforce's Agentforce team is getting an infusion of new talent by hiring the team behind Clockwise, a calendar scheduling app, but the app itself isn't sticking around.…
New Scientist - Home
A very serious guide to buying your own humanoid robot butler - You can now buy a humanoid robot housekeeper for less than the price of a second-hand car. But before splashing out, there’s something you need to know
You can now buy a DIY quantum computer - Qilimanjaro is selling a relatively cheap kit with everything you need for a quantum computer – you just need to be able to put it together
What to read this week: Katrina Manson's terrifying Project Maven - It is scarily fascinating to read about the US military's journey into AI warfare in this deeply-researched book. But what happens next, asks Matthew Sparkes
Inside the world’s first antimatter delivery service - On Tuesday, CERN will transport antiprotons on a truck for the first time, testing the plan to deliver antimatter by road to research labs across Europe
Forget the multiverse. In the pluriverse, we create reality together - A radical idea that resolves many quantum paradoxes suggests there is no objective view of reality. How can the cosmos be stitched together from interlocking perspectives?
Hacker News
The Three Pillars of JavaScript Bloat - Comments
Tinybox – Offline AI device 120B parameters - Comments
Some things just take time - Comments
Professional video editing, right in the browser with WebGPU and WASM - Comments
Floci – A free, open-source local AWS emulator - Comments
Slashdot
Tesla's Upcoming Electric Big Rig Is Already a Hit with Truckers - "After nearly a decade of delays and industry skepticism, Tesla's electric big rig is finally rolling out of Nevada's Gigafactory for mass production starting summer 2026," writes Gadget Review. And some truckers who tested the vehicles already love them (as reported by the Wall Street Journal): Dakota Shearer and Angel Rodriguez, among other pilot drivers, rave about the centered cab that eliminates blind spots during tight maneuvers. The automatic transmission means no more wrestling with 13-gear diesels, reducing physical stress on long hauls. Most surprisingly, the Semi maintains highway speeds on grades where diesel trucks typically crawl at 30 mph. The 500-mile range enables multiple daily round-trips — think Long Beach to Vegas or Inland Empire runs — without range anxiety... Sure, the Semi costs under $300,000 — roughly double a diesel equivalent — but the math gets interesting quickly. Energy costs drop to $0.17 per mile compared to $0.50-0.70 for diesel fuel. Maintenance requirements shrink dramatically; one fleet reports needing just one mechanic for their electric trucks versus five for 40 diesels... Tesla offers Standard Range (325 miles) and Long Range (500 miles) versions, both handling 82,000-pound gross combined weight at 1.7 kWh per mile efficiency. The tri-motor setup delivers 800 kW — over 1,000 horsepower equivalent — enabling loaded 0-60 mph acceleration in 20 seconds versus 45-60 for diesel. Fast charging hits 60% capacity in 30 minutes [which Tesla says is 4x faster than other battery-electric trucks] using the new MCS 3.2 standard, while 25 kW ePTO power runs refrigerated trailers without diesel auxiliaries. Charging networks remain the biggest hurdle for widespread adoption. Public charging stations lack the Semi's massive power requirements, limiting long-haul routes. Tesla plans dedicated fast-charging corridors starting this summer, but coverage remains spotty. The lack of sleeper cabs also restricts the Semi to regional freight rather than cross-country hauling. Production scales to 5,000-15,000 units by 2026, then 50,000 annually — assuming charging infrastructure keeps pace with demand. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Trivy Supply Chain Attack Spreads, Triggers Self-Spreading CanisterWorm Across 47 npm Packages - "We have removed all malicious artifacts from the affected registries and channels," Trivy maintainer Itay Shakury posted today, noting that all the latest Trivy releases "now point to a safe version." But "On March 19, we observed that a threat actor used a compromised credential..." And today The Hacker News reported the same attackers are now "suspected to be conducting follow-on attacks that have led to the compromise of a large number of npm packages..." (The attackers apparently leveraged a postinstall hook "to execute a loader, which then drops a Python backdoor that's responsible for contacting the ICP canister dead drop to retrieve a URL pointing to the next-stage payload.") The development marks the first publicly documented abuse of an ICP canister for the explicit purpose of fetching the command-and-control (C2) server, Aikido Security researcher Charlie Eriksen said... Persistence is established by means of a systemd user service, which is configured to automatically start the Python backdoor after a 5-second delay if it gets terminated for some reason by using the "Restart=always" directive. The systemd service masquerades as PostgreSQL tooling ("pgmon") in an attempt to fly under the radar... In tandem, the packages come with a "deploy.js" file that the attacker runs manually to spread the malicious payload to every package a stolen npm token provides access to in a programmatic fashion. The worm, assessed to be vibe-coded using an AI tool, makes no attempt to conceal its functionality. "This isn't triggered by npm install," Aikido said. "It's a standalone tool the attacker runs with stolen tokens to maximize blast radius." To make matters worse, a subsequent iteration of CanisterWorm detected in "@teale.io/eslint-config" versions 1.8.11 and 1.8.12 has been found to self-propagate on its own without the need for manual intervention... [Aikido Security researcher Charlie Eriksen said] "Every developer or CI pipeline that installs this package and has an npm token accessible becomes an unwitting propagation vector. Their packages get infected, their downstream users install those, and if any of them have tokens, the cycle repeats." So far affected packages include 28 in the @EmilGroup scope and 16 packages in the @opengov scope, according to the article, blaming the attack on "a cloud-focused cybercriminal operation known as TeamPCP." Ars Technica explains that Trivy had "inadvertently hardcoded authentication secrets in pipelines for developing and deploying software updates," leading to a situation where attacks "compromised virtually all versions" of the widely used Trivy vulnerability scanner: Trivy maintainer Itay Shakury confirmed the compromise on Friday, following rumors and a thread, since deleted by the attackers, discussing the incident. The attack began in the early hours of Thursday. When it was done, the threat actor had used stolen credentials to force-push all but one of the trivy-action tags and seven setup-trivy tags to use malicious dependencies... "If you suspect you were running a compromised version, treat all pipeline secrets as compromised and rotate immediately," Shakury wrote. Security firms Socket and Wiz said that the malware, triggered in 75 compromised trivy-action tags, causes custom malware to thoroughly scour development pipelines, including developer machines, for GitHub tokens, cloud credentials, SSH keys, Kubernetes tokens, and whatever other secrets may live there. Once found, the malware encrypts the data and sends it to an attacker-controlled server. The end result, Socket said, is that any CI/CD pipeline using software that references compromised version tags executes code as soon as the Trivy scan is run... "In our initial analysis the malicious code exfiltrates secrets with a primary and backup mechanism. If it detects it is on a developer machine it additionally writes a base64 encoded python dropper for persistence...." Although the mass compromise began Thursday, it stems from a separate compromise last month of the Aqua Trivy VS Code extension for the Trivy scanner, Shakury said. In the incident, the attackers compromised a credential with write access to the Trivy GitHub account. Shakury said maintainers rotated tokens and other secrets in response, but the process wasn't fully "atomic," meaning it didn't thoroughly remove credential artifacts such as API keys, certificates, and passwords to ensure they couldn't be used maliciously. "This [failure] allowed the threat actor to perform authenticated operations, including force-updating tags, without needing to exploit GitHub itself," Socket researchers wrote. Pushing to a branch or creating a new release would've appeared in the commit history and trigger notifications, Socket pointed out, so "Instead, the attacker force-pushed 75 existing version tags to point to new malicious commits." (Trivy's maintainer says "we've also enabled immutable releases since the last breach.") Ars Technica notes Trivy's vulnerability scanner has 33,200 stars on GitHub, so "the potential fallout could be severe." Read more of this story at Slashdot.
EFF Tells Publishers: Blocking the Internet Archive Won't Stop AI, But It Will Erase The Historical Record - "Imagine a newspaper publisher announcing it will no longer allow libraries to keep copies of its paper," writes EFF senior policy analyst Joe Mullin. "That's effectively what's begun happening online in the last few months." The Internet Archive — the world's largest digital library — has preserved newspapers since it went online in the mid-1990s... But in recent months The New York Times began blocking the Archive from crawling its website, using technical measures that go beyond the web's traditional robots.txt rules. That risks cutting off a record that historians and journalists have relied on for decades. Other newspapers, including The Guardian, seem to be following suit... The Times says the move is driven by concerns about AI companies scraping news content. Publishers seek control over how their work is used, and several — including the Times — are now suing AI companies over whether training models on copyrighted material violates the law. There's a strong case that such training is fair use. Whatever the outcome of those lawsuits, blocking nonprofit archivists is the wrong response. Organizations like the Internet Archive are not building commercial AI systems. They are preserving a record of our history. Turning off that preservation in an effort to control AI access could essentially torch decades of historical documentation over a fight that libraries like the Archive didn't start, and didn't ask for. If publishers shut the Archive out, they aren't just limiting bots. They're erasing the historical record... Even if courts place limits on AI training, the law protecting search and web archiving is already well established... There are real disputes over AI training that must be resolved in courts. But sacrificing the public record to fight those battles would be a profound, and possibly irreversible, mistake. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Millions Face Mobile Internet Outages in Moscow. 'Digital Crackdown' Feared - 13 million people live in Moscow, reports CNN. But since early March the city "has experienced internet and mobile service outages on a level previously unseen." (Though Wi-Fi access to the internet is still available...) Russian social media "is flooded with jokes and memes about sending letters by carrier pigeons or using smartphones as ping-pong paddles..." [Moscow residents] complain they cannot navigate around the center or use their favorite mobile apps. The interruptions appear to have had a knock-on effect of making it more difficult to make voice calls or send an SMS. Some are panic-buying walkie-talkies, paper maps, and even pagers. The latest shutdown builds on similar efforts around the country. For months, mobile internet service interruptions have hit Russia's regions, particularly in provinces bordering Ukraine, which has staged incursions and launched strikes inside Russian territory to counter Russia's full-scale invasion. Some regions have reported not having any mobile internet since summer. But the most recent outages have hit the country's main centers of wealth and power: Moscow and Russia's second city, St. Petersburg. Public officials claim the blackout of mobile internet service in the capital and other regions is part of a security effort to counter "increasingly sophisticated methods" of Ukrainian attack... Speculation centers on whether the authorities are testing their ability to clamp down on public protest in the case there's an effort to reintroduce unpopular mobilization measures to find fresh manpower for the war in Ukraine; whether mobile internet outages may precede a more sweeping digital blackout; or if the new restrictions reflect an atmosphere of heightened fear and paranoia inside the Kremlin as it watches US-led regime- change efforts unfold against Russian allies such as Venezuela and Iran... On Wednesday, Russian mobile providers sent notifications that there would be "temporary restrictions" on mobile internet in parts of Moscow for security reasons, Russian state news agency RIA-Novosti reported. The measures will last "for as long as additional measures are needed to ensure the safety of our citizens," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on March 11... As well as banning many social media platforms, Russia blocks calling features on messenger apps such as WhatsApp and Telegram. Roskomnadzor, the country's communications regulator, has introduced a "white list" of approved apps... Russia has also tested what it calls the "sovereign internet," a network that is effectively firewalled from the rest of the world. The disruptions are fueling broader concerns about tightening state control. In parallel with the internet shutdown, the Kremlin has also been pushing to impose a state-controlled messaging app called Max as the country's main portal for state services, payments and everyday communication. There has been speculation the Kremlin may be planning to ban Telegram, Russia's most widely used messaging app, entirely. Roskomnadzor said that it was restricting Telegram for allegedly failing to comply with Russian laws. "Russia has opened a criminal case against me for 'aiding terrorism,'" Telegram's Russian-born founder Pavel Durov said on X last month. "Each day, the authorities fabricate new pretexts to restrict Russians' access to Telegram as they seek to suppress the right to privacy and free speech...." The article includes this quote from Mikhail Klimarev, head of the Internet Protection Society and an expert on Russian internet freedom. "In any situation when they (the authorities) perceive some kind of danger for themselves and accept the belief that the internet is dangerous for them, even if it may not be true, they will shut it down," he said. "Just like in Iran." Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Juicier Steaks Soon? The UK Approves Testing of Gene-Edited Cow Feed - "Juicier steaks could soon be served up after barley was given the go-ahead to become Britain's first gene-edited crop," reports the Telegraph: In an effort to fatten up cows and get them to market faster, scientists have altered the DNA of Golden Promise barley to increase its fat content... [Regulators have approved the feeding of that barley to cows for further studies.] [T]he small increase reduces the time it takes for farmers to raise animals for slaughter and increases the amount of milk and meat they produce to make the industry more profitable. The gene-edited barley is also able to cut the amount of methane a cow produces, [Rothamsted Research professor/biochemist Peter] Eastmond said... Reducing methane from cattle is a major goal of the industry, and Professor Eastmond estimated his barley could cut the methane output from a single cow by up to 15%. The two genetic tweaks to the barley are believed to alter the gut bacteria in cows' stomachs and reduce the amount of methane-generating microbes, cutting the cows' emissions.... [Eastmond] is also working on applying the same two gene edits to rye grass to create pastures and meadows which are lipid-rich and calorie-dense. This, he said, could lead to entire fields of gene-edited grass which could be grazed by cows, sheep, horses and goats to fatten them up and cut emissions... "It would be better to have this technology in a pasture grass that's grown to supply the livestock and graze it directly." The barley "has been modified to have a single letter of DNA removed from two different genes to switch them off," the article points out. "No genes have been added to its DNA and it is not considered to be genetically modified." The article points out that Britain "has launched a push towards more gene-edited crops as a key post-Brexit freedom since splitting from the European Union," noting that U.K. scientists and private companies "have created products such as bread with fewer cancer-causing chemicals, longer-lasting strawberries and bananas, sweeter-tasting lettuce and disease-resistant potatoes, although these are yet to be granted permission to land on supermarket shelves..." But the EU has so far resisted the sale of any gene-edited crops in the EU. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader fjo3 for sharing the article. Read more of this story at Slashdot.