Latest News
Last updated 25 Feb, 01:17 AM
BBC News
Mandelson's lawyers say he was arrested over 'baseless' claim he was a flight risk - The peer's lawyers say there is no truth in the suggestion he was planning to leave the UK.
Andrew 'rude and arrogant', minister says as MPs back release of trade role files - The former prince travelled the globe as the UK's trade representative between 2001 and 2011.
One in four councils to miss food waste collection deadline - find out if yours is one - Local authorities blame the delays on a lack of funding and a shortage of bin lorries.
What is the UK's new travel system and how are dual nationals affected? - From 25 February, a new system will come into force which will affect many people, including British dual nationals.
NHS secures bone cement rescue package so joint surgery can resume - Joint operations were postponed after the main supplier suffered a critical incident at its plant.
The Register
Workday CEO's AI talk can't shake off weaker sales forecast - Claims HR company can escape the SaaSpocalypse with its core expertise Workday CEO Aneel Bhusri has used the first quarterly earnings announcement since he returned to the big chair to reassure investors the company is building more capable agentic AI while keeping the fundamentals of the HR platform strong.…
Meta frees React to live in its own foundation - Organizations using the front-end JavaScript framework can expect vendor-neutral governance Meta has turned over control of React, React Native, and associated projects like JSX to the newly formed React Foundation, fulfilling a commitment made last October.…
It's only Tuesday and AI chip startups have already soaked up $1.1B in funding - Fears of an AI bubble haven't tempered vulture capitalists' enthusiasm for silicon AI chip startups collectively walked away with more than a billion dollars of new capital on Tuesday, showing that venture capitalists are still excited about the opportunity to challenge Nvidia's dominance despite all the talk of an AI bubble.…
Amazon would rather blame its own engineers than its AI - Protect the robot, sacrifice the human opinion I've been watching AWS explain away outages for the better part of a decade. And this is hard!…
AI has gotten good at finding bugs, not so good at swatting them - Discovery is getting cheaper. Validation and patching aren’t What good is finding a hole if you can't fix it? Anthropic last week talked up Claude Code's improved ability to find software vulnerabilities and propose patches. But security researchers say that's not enough.…
New Scientist - Home
Cannibalism may explain why some orcas stay in family groups - Fins washing up in the North Pacific suggest that orcas from one subspecies are snacking on other orcas, and researchers think that may explain their different social dynamics
How Ukraine became a drone factory and invented the future of war - Ukraine has responded to a war it didn’t start by creating an industry it doesn’t want, but could the nation's drone expertise help it rebuild? To learn more, New Scientist gained exclusive access to the research labs, factories and military training schools behind Ukraine’s drones
Landmark vitiligo cream targets immune cells that disrupt pigmentation - A cream that directly disrupts the underlying causes of the skin patches seen in the condition vitiligo will be made available on the NHS
Loophole found that makes quantum cloning possible - Duplicating the information held in quantum computers was thought to be impossible thanks to the no-cloning theorem, but researchers have now found a workaround
Stone Age symbols may push back the earliest form of writing - Mysterious signs engraved on objects reveal that a form of proto-writing may have been used in Europe 40,000 years ago, tens of thousands of years before the emergence of a full writing system
Hacker News
I'm helping my dog vibe code games - Comments
Show HN: Moonshine Open-Weights STT models – higher accuracy than WhisperLargev3 - Comments
Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston - Comments
Cell Service for the Fairly Paranoid - Comments
Hacking an old Kindle to display bus arrival times - Comments
Slashdot
Meta AI Security Researcher Said an OpenClaw Agent Ran Amok on Her Inbox - Meta AI security researcher Summer Yue posted a now-viral account on X describing how an OpenClaw agent she had tasked with sorting through her overstuffed email inbox went rogue, deleting messages in what she called a "speed run" while ignoring her repeated commands from her phone to stop. "I had to RUN to my Mac mini like I was defusing a bomb," Yue wrote, sharing screenshots of the ignored stop prompts as proof. Yue said she had previously tested the agent on a smaller "toy" inbox where it performed well enough to earn her trust, so she let it loose on the real thing. She believes the larger volume of data triggered compaction -- a process where the context window grows too large and the agent begins summarizing and compressing its running instructions, potentially dropping ones the user considers critical. The agent may have reverted to its earlier toy-inbox behavior and skipped her last prompt telling it not to act. OpenClaw is an open-source AI agent designed to run as a personal assistant on local hardware. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
New Datacentres Risk Doubling Great Britain's Electricity Use, Regulator Says - The amount of power being sought by new datacentre projects in Great Britain would exceed the national current peak electricity consumption, according to an industry watchdog. From a report: Ofgem said about 140 proposed datacentre schemes, driven by use of artificial intelligence, could require 50 gigawatts of electricity -- 5GW more than the country's current peak demand. The figure was revealed in an Ofgem consultation on demand for new connections to the power grid. It pointed to a "surge in demand" for connection applications between November 2024 and June last year, with a significant number coming from datacentres. This has exceeded even the most ambitious forecasts. Meanwhile, new renewable energy projects are not being connected to the grid at the pace they are being built to help meet the government's clean energy targets by the end of the decade. Ofgem said the work required to connect surging numbers of datacentres could mean delays for other projects that are "critical for decarbonisation and economic growth." Datacentres are the central nervous system of AI tools such as chatbots and image generators, playing a vital role in training and operating products such as ChatGPT and Gemini. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
CrowdStrike Says Attackers Are Moving Through Networks in Under 30 Minutes - An anonymous reader shares a report: Cyberattacks reached victims faster and came from a wider range of threat groups than ever last year, CrowdStrike said in its annual global threat report released Tuesday, adding that cybercriminals and nation-states increasingly relied on predictable tactics to evade detection by exploiting trusted systems. The average breakout time -- how long it took financially-motivated attackers to move from initial intrusion to other network systems -- dropped to 29 minutes in 2025, a 65% increase in speed from the year prior. "The fastest breakout time a year ago was 51 seconds. This year it's 27 seconds," Adam Meyers, head of counter adversary operations at CrowdStrike, told CyberScoop. Defenders are falling behind because attackers are refining their techniques, using social engineering to access high-privilege systems faster and move through victims' cloud infrastructure undetected. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Hegseth Gives Anthropic Until Friday To Back Down on AI Safeguards - Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei until Friday evening to give the military unfettered access to its AI model or face harsh penalties, Axios has learned. Hegseth told Amodei in a tense meeting on Tuesday that the Pentagon will either cut ties and declare Anthropic a "supply chain risk," or invoke the Defense Production Act to force the company to tailor its model to the military's needs. The Pentagon wants to punish Anthropic as the feud over AI safeguards grows increasingly nasty, but officials are also worried about the consequences of losing access to its industry-leading model, Claude. "The only reason we're still talking to these people is we need them and we need them now. The problem for these guys is they are that good," a Defense official told Axios ahead of the meeting. Anthropic has said it is willing to adapt its usage policies for the Pentagon, but not to allow its model to be used for the mass surveillance of Americans or the development of weapons that fire without human involvement. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The US Spent $30 Billion on Classroom Laptops and Got the First Generation Less Capable Than Its Parents - More than two decades after Maine became the first state to hand laptops to middle schoolers -- distributing 17,000 Apple machines across 243 schools in 2002 -- neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath told a U.S. Senate committee earlier this year that Gen Z is the first generation in modern history to score lower on standardized tests than the one before it. The U.S. spent more than $30 billion in 2024 alone putting laptops and tablets in classrooms, and Horvath cited PISA data from 15-year-olds worldwide showing a stark correlation between time on school computers and worse scores. A 2014 study of 3,000 university students found they were off-task on their machines nearly two-thirds of the time. Fortune reported back in 2017 that Maine's own test scores hadn't budged in the 15 years since the program launched, and then-governor Paul LePage called it a "massive failure." Horvath framed the generation's eroding capabilities not as a personal failure but a policy one, calling them victims of a failed pedagogical experiment. Read more of this story at Slashdot.