Latest News

Last updated 10 May, 02:41 PM

BBC News

Labour MP challenges ministers to move against Starmer - Catherine West threatens to challenge Keir Starmer herself, as minister Bridget Phillipson backs the embattled PM.

Army parachutes onto remote island to help Briton with suspected hantavirus - The specialist team parachuted onto Tristan da Cunha, a remote British overseas territory, to treat them.

First passengers fly home from virus-hit cruise ship - Spanish passengers are the first to leave the MV Hondius, after an outbreak saw three people die and several infected.

Tories are still biggest party on the right, claims Cleverly - Leading Tory brands Reform a "cult of personality" but Reform deputy leader says its electoral success has shaken up politics.

Iran sends response to US proposals to end war - No details have been released of Iran's response - or the US proposals - designed to bring the war to an end.

www.theregister.com - Articles

Memory godboxes could offer relief from the RAMpocalypse - Amid the AI-fueled memory crunch, will Compute Express Link finally have its moment to shine?

Both Fedora and Ubuntu will get AI support – soon - Furores are fermenting in the forums

HP stuffed a PC into a keyboard. We took it for a spin - It's not much cheaper than an equivalent laptop, so who's this for, exactly?

Google tweaks Chrome AI privacy wording, insists processing stays on-device - Deletion of a longstanding privacy assurance sparks concerns

macOS 27 threatens to bury Time Capsule, FOSS brings a shovel - Apple's old backup boxes only speak AFP and SMB1, but NetBSD under the hood gives them one last shot

New Scientist - Home

Tiny 'metajets' could use light to steer sails for interstellar travel - Minuscule silicon wafers propelled by lasers could be used to steer light sails, helping them travel beyond the solar system

The 50-year quest to create a quantum spin liquid may finally be over - Creating quantum entanglement inside a solid material is tricky in the lab – but crystals buried in the earth could be growing it naturally. Now one scientist says he has proof he’s found them

There has been a sudden increase in the rate of sea level rise - Satellite measurements show that in the early 2010s sea level rise suddenly accelerated to a rate of 4.1 millimetres per year, possibly in response to an increase in the rate of global warming

A vast dam across the Bering Strait could stop the AMOC collapsing - If a key ocean current collapses it could plunge northern Europe into a big freeze. Now researchers are weighing up a drastic intervention – building a 130-kilometre-wide dam between the US and Russia

A lost ancient script reveals how writing as we know it really began - A long-overlooked writing system from 5000 years ago is still largely undeciphered, but could mark the moment humans first represented their speech with written words

Hacker News

Space Cadet Pinball on Linux - Comments

I returned to AWS, and was reminded why I left - Comments

Idempotency Is Easy Until the Second Request Is Different - Comments

What's a Mathematician to Do? - Comments

Bun's experimental Rust rewrite hits 99.8% test compatibility on Linux x64 glibc - Comments

Slashdot

Unemployed Ticked Up in America's IT Sector - IT sector unemployment "increased to 3.8% in April from 3.6% in March," reports the Wall Street Journal. But they add that the increase reflects "an ongoing uncertainty in tech as AI continues to play havoc with hiring. That's according to analysis from consulting firm Janco Associates, which bases its findings on data from the U.S. Labor Department." On Friday, the department said the economy added 115,000 jobs, buoyed by gains in industries including retail, transportation and warehousing and healthcare. The unemployment rate was unchanged at 4.3%. But the information sector lost 13,000 jobs in April. While it's still too early to say exactly how AI is affecting employment overall, some businesses, especially in the tech industry, have said it's part of the reason they're cutting staff. In April, Meta Platforms said it would lay off 10% of its staff, or roughly 8,000 people, as it seeks to streamline operations and pay for its own massive investments in AI. Nike will reduce its workforce by roughly 1,400 workers, or about 2%, mostly in its tech department, as it simplifies global operations. And Snap is planning to eliminate 16% of its workforce, or about 1,000 positions, as it aims to boost efficiency. In other areas of IT, which includes telecommunications and data-processing, employment is now down 11%, or 342,000 jobs, from its most recent peak in November 2022. But there's not just AI to blame. Inflation and economic uncertainty linked to the Iran conflict is giving some chief executives and tech leaders reason to pull back or pause their IT hiring, said Janco Chief Executive Victor Janulaitis. The article even notes that postings for software developer jobs "are up 15% year-over-year on job-search platform Indeed, according to Hannah Calhoon, its vice president of AI". But employers do seem to be looking for experienced developers, which could pose a problem for recent college graduates. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The EU Considers Restricting Use of US Cloud Platforms for Sensitive Government Data - CNBC reports: The European Union is considering rules that would restrict its member governments' use of U.S. cloud providers to handle sensitive data, sources familiar with the talks told CNBC. The European Commission — the EU's executive branch — is expected to present its "Tech Sovereignty Package" on May 27, which will include a range of measures aimed at bolstering the bloc's strategic autonomy in key digital areas. As part of preparations for that package, discussions are taking place within the Commission around limiting the exposure of sensitive public-sector data to cloud platforms provided by companies outside of the EU, two Commission officials, who asked to remain anonymous as they weren't authorized to discuss private talks, told CNBC... "The core idea is defining sectors that have to be hosted on European cloud capacity," one of the officials said. They added that companies providing cloud solutions from third countries, including the U.S., could be impacted. Proposals would not prohibit overseas companies' cloud platforms from government contracts entirely, but limit their use in processing sensitive data at public sector organizations, depending on the level of sensitivity, they added. The officials said that talks are ongoing and yet to be finalized... The officials told CNBC there are discussions around proposing that financial, judicial and health data processed by governments and public-sector organizations require high levels of sovereign cloud infrastructure. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NYT: 'Meta's Embrace of AI Is Making Its Employees Miserable' - "Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable," reports the New York Times. And "After Meta said late last month that it would start tracking employees' computer use, hundreds of workers spoke up." (One employee even told Meta's CTO in an internal post, "Your callousness to the concerns of your own employees is concerning." In an internal post last month, Meta told its U.S. employees that it was making a change that would affect tens of thousands of them. What employees typed into their computer, how they moved their mouse, where they clicked and what they saw on their screen would be tracked, Meta said. The goal, the company said, was to capture employee data so Meta's artificial intelligence models could learn "how people actually complete everyday tasks using computers." Many workers immediately revolted. In online comments, they blasted the tracking as a privacy violation, calling it antisocial and callous... [One engineering manager even asked "How do we opt out?"] "There is no option to opt-out on your corporate laptop," replied Andrew Bosworth, Meta's chief technology officer. Employees reacted by posting more than 100 angry and surprised emoji, according to the messages.... Meta is pushing its 78,000 employees to adopt AI tools and factoring their use of the technology in performance reviews. The company is also tracking employees' computer work to feed and train its AI models. And it is cutting jobs to offset its AI spending, saying last month that it would slash 10% of its workforce. That has led to anger and anxiety as employees await news of whether they are affected by the layoffs, which are slated to be carried out May 20, according to 11 current and former Meta employees. Some said they no longer saw Meta as a place for a long career. Others were looking for new jobs or trying to signal that they wanted to be laid off so they could receive severance pay, the current and former employees said. "It's incredibly demoralizing," an employee who does user research wrote in an internal post, which was reviewed by the Times... Meta also introduced internal dashboards to track employees' consumption of "tokens," a unit of AI use that is roughly equivalent to four characters of text, four people said. Some said the dashboards were a pressure tactic to encourage competition with colleagues. That led some employees to make so many AI agents that others had to introduce agents to find agents, and agents to rate agents, two people said. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

'Changing of the Guard'? AMD, Intel, and Micron Soar While Nvidia Lags - While Nvidia has dominated the "infrastructure boom" since 2022's launch of ChatGPT and "the generative AI craze," CNBC writes that "This week offered the starkest illustration yet of what MIzuho analyst Jordan Klein said could be a 'changing of the guard in AI.'" Chipmakers Advanced Micro Devices and Intel notched gains of about 25%, while memory maker Micron jumped more than 37% and fiber-optic cable maker Corning climbed about 18%. All four of those companies have more than doubled in value this year, with Intel leading the way, up well over 200%. Nvidia, meanwhile, is only slightly ahead of the Nasdaq in 2026, gaining 15% for the year, aided by an 8% rally this week. In spreading the wealth to a wider swath of hardware companies, investors are clearly betting that the bull market in AI has long legs and that data centers are going to need a wider array of advanced components for years to come. Memory has been the biggest theme of late due to a global shortage that's driven up prices and turned Micron, a 47-year-old company tucked in a sleepy corner of the semiconductor market, into one of the hottest trades over the past 12 months. Micron blew past an $800 billion market capitalization for the first time this week, and the stock is now up over 750% in the past year. CEO Sanjay Mehrotra told CNBC in March that key customers are only getting "50% to two-thirds of their requirements" because of supply issues. The memory market is largely dominated by Micron, along with Korea-based Samsung and SK Hynix, which are also both in the midst of historic rallies... Bank of America estimates the data center CPU market could more than double from $27 billion in 2025 to $60 billion in 2030. AMD's quarterly results this week underscored the emerging trend, as earnings, revenue and guidance sailed past estimates on strong data center growth. The company has long led the CPU charge, and CEO Lisa Su said on the earnings call that AMD now expects 35% growth over the next three to five years in the server CPU market, up from a forecast of 18% growth that the company provided in November. The article cites two other big movers: Intel "is in the midst of a revival sparked by a major investment from the U.S. government last year. Intel's stock had its best month on record in April, more than doubling, and has continued notching massive gains, rising 33% in the early days of May." Nvidia still remains the world's most valuable company "and is expected to show revenue growth of 70% this fiscal year," the article points out — adding that companies like Corning are also benefiting from Nvidia partnerships. "Glass maker Corning, which celebrated its 175th anniversary this week, signed a massive deal with Nvidia on Wednesday that involves the development of three new U.S. factories dedicated entirely to optical technologies... likely a major step in Nvidia's move away from copper cables and towards fiber-optic cables as it builds out its rack-scale systems." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Open Source Registries Join Linux Foundation Working Group to Address Machine-Generated Traffic - Under the nonprofit Linux Foundation, "a new Sustaining Package Registries Working Group will seek to identify concrete funding, governance, and security practices," reports ZDNet, "to keep code flowing as download counts grow.... Because software builds, continuous integration pipelines, and AI systems hammer registries at machine speed rather than human speed, the sites can't keep up. "That growth has brought a surge in bot traffic, automated publishing, security reports, and outright abuse, exposing what the working group bluntly calls a 'sustainability gap'." Sonatype CTO Brian Fox, who oversees the Maven Central Java registry, estimates open-source registries saw 10 trillion downloads in 2025. And "The same pattern is appearing across ecosystems. More machine traffic. More automation. More scanning. More expectations around uptime, integrity, provenance, and policy enforcement. More cost. More support burden. More dependency on infrastructure that the industry still talks about as though it runs on goodwill and spare time." ZDNet reports that "To tackle that, Sonatype has teamed up with the Linux Foundation and other package registry leaders, including Alpha-Omega, Eclipse Foundation (OpenVSX), OpenJS Foundation, OpenSSF, Packagist, Python Software Foundation, Ruby Central (RubyGems), and the Rust Foundation (Crates)." The idea is to give operators a neutral forum to discuss money, governance, and shared operational burdens openly. Once that's dealt with, they'll coordinate how to explain those realities back to companies and organizations that have long assumed registries are "free." No, they're not. They never were. As the Linux Foundation pointed out, "Registries today run primarily on two things: (1) infrastructure donations and credits; and (2) heroic efforts from small paid teams (themselves funded by donations and grants) and unpaid volunteers that operate and maintain registry services. The bulk of donations and grants comes from a small set of donors and doesn't scale with demands on the registry." The working group is explicitly positioned as a venue where registry leaders and ecosystem stakeholders can align on "practical, community-minded" ways to sustain that infrastructure, rather than each operator improvising its own survival plan in isolation. ZDNet says the group will also coordinate security practices and information, and craft frameworks "that make it politically and legally possible to introduce sustainable funding models without fracturing communities." And they will also "align messaging and educational content so developers, companies, and policymakers finally understand what it costs to run these services." Read more of this story at Slashdot.