Latest News

Last updated 26 Feb, 07:19 PM

BBC News

Spain to check Gibraltar arrivals under post-Brexit deal - Arrivals at the Rock's airport would have to show their passport twice under a new UK-EU treaty.

Soham murderer Ian Huntley treated for serious head injuries after prison workshop attack - The 52-year-old is serving a life sentence after being convicted of murdering schoolgirls Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman.

No 10 will have no say on which Mandelson papers are released - A committee of MPs and peers says the government has confirmed it will not overrule any decision to disclose files.

Tracey Emin says her artwork My Bed would be 'tidy, clean and boring' if she made it today - Her Turner Prize-nominated messy bed caused a stir in the late 1990s and is now going back on display.

Woman angry at lack of prosecution after she fell from window fleeing triple killer - A former neighbour of Valdo Calocane was told he could have killed her, years before the attacks.

The Register

Anthropic launches new marketing blog, pretends it's being 'written' by 'retired' LLM - Pretending the software is sentient makes it sound more powerful As with any piece of obsolete software, you might expect an outdated AI model to just be switched off. Anthropic, however, argues that simply pulling the plug has downsides. After “retirement” interviews, Claude Opus 3 said it wanted to keep sharing its “musings,” so Anthropic suggested a blog.…

Rapid AI-driven development makes security unattainable, warns Veracode - Report claims more vulnerabilities created than fixed as remediation gap widens Veracode has posted its annual State of Software Security report, based on data from 1.6 million applications tested on its cloud platform, finding that more vulnerabilities are being created than are being fixed, and that high-velocity development with AI is making comprehensive security unattainable.…

Top cloud providers to outspend Ireland's GDP on AI in 2026 - TrendForce says eight hyperscalers are set to pour $710B into servers and infrastructure The big cloud operators are ramping up investment in AI servers and infrastructure to meet demand for AI development and deployment, exacerbating the memory shortage caused by their insatiable growth.…

Microsoft to auto-launch Copilot in Edge whenever you click a link from Outlook - Whac-A-Mole season continues as Redmond finds yet another corner to stuff its 21st century Clippy Microsoft has announced that its Edge browser will automatically open the Copilot side pane when users open links from Outlook.…

Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters auditioning female voices to sharpen social engineering - Telegram posts promise up to $1,000 per call as gang refines IT helpdesk ruse Prolific cybercrime crew Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters (SLSH) is reportedly recruiting women in the hope of improving its social engineering success.…

New Scientist - Home

Banning children from VPNs and social media will erode adults' privacy - Legislation working its way through the UK parliament would ban children from using social media and virtual private networks – but the proposals would endanger online privacy and may not make children safer, say legal experts

How to see six planets in the sky at once in rare celestial alignment - Nearly all of the solar system’s planets are about to file across the night sky in a planetary alignment, and it will be visible from anywhere on Earth

Is geothermal energy on the cusp of a worldwide renaissance? - The UK's first geothermal plant in Cornwall is part of a wave of projects aiming to meet growing electricity demand, some of them enabled by technology from oil and gas fracturing

Why I have changed my mind about AI and you should too - Both boosters and sceptics have strongly held opinions on AI tools like ChatGPT, but after an experiment in vibe coding, I have realised that both camps are wrong, says Jacob Aron

AIs can’t stop recommending nuclear strikes in war game simulations - Leading AIs from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google opted to use nuclear weapons in simulated war games in 95 per cent of cases

Hacker News

AirSnitch: Demystifying and breaking client isolation in Wi-Fi networks [pdf] - Comments

Palm OS User Interface Guidelines (2003) [pdf] - Comments

SynthID - Comments

Google Street View in 2026 - Comments

I baked a pie every day for a year and it changed my life - Comments

Slashdot

Which Piece of Speculative Fiction Had the Greatest Single-Day Stock Market Impact? - Speaking of the Citrini's blog post, which imagines a near-future AI-driven economic collapse, and which ended up help triggering the S&P 500's worst single-day drop in nearly two weeks on Monday, FT Alphaville decided to track how US stock markets have moved on the release days of notable dystopian speculative fiction throughout history. The story adds: You may contend that this is facile. We would agree. You might contend that the comparisons make no sense because it's possible to read a blog post during a single work shift, but it's tricker to complete a whole novel (or sneak out to watch a movie). We would contend: do you really think traders read? Let's begin. The methodology -- tracking S&P 500 daily moves for post-1986 releases and DJIA moves for pre-1986 ones -- crowned The Matrix as the all-time leader, its March 1999 US debut coinciding with a 1.11% drop in the index. Citrini's "The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis" came in a close second at -1.04%. On the positive end, the 2013 release of Her, a film about a man falling in love with an AI agent, coincided with the largest gain in the set at +1.66%. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Government Just Made it Harder to See What Spy Tech it Buys - An anonymous reader shares a report: It might look like something from the early days of the internet, with its aggressively grey color scheme and rectangles nested inside rectangles, but FPDS.gov is one of the most important resources for keeping tabs on what powerful spying tools U.S. government agencies are buying. It includes everything from phone hacking technology, to masses of location data, to more Palantir installations. Or rather, it was an incredible tool and the basis for countless of my own investigations and others. Because on Wednesday, the government shut it down. Its replacement, another site called SAM.gov with Uncle Sam branding, frankly sucks, and makes it demonstrably harder to reliably find out what agencies, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), are spending tax payers dollars on. "FPDS may have been a little clunky, but its simple, old-school interface made it extremely functional and robust. Every facet of government operations touches on contracting at one point, and this was the first tool that many investigative journalists and researchers would reach for to quickly find out what the government is buying and who is selling it, and how these contracts all fit together," Dave Maass, director of investigations at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told me. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The AI Case Against Indian IT Ignores What Indian IT Actually Does - A fictional memo set in June 2028, published by short seller Citrini Research, wiped roughly $10 billion off Indian IT stocks in a single trading session on February 24 and sent the Nifty IT index down as much as 5.3% -- its worst single-day fall since August 2023 -- on the argument that AI coding agents have collapsed the cost advantage of Indian developers to the price of electricity. The index has shed more than $68 billion in market value in February alone, its worst month since 2003. But the core claim that India's entire $205 billion software export industry rests on cheap labor is roughly 15 years out of date, an analysis argues, custom application maintenance alone accounts for about 35% of a typical Indian IT firm's revenue, per HSBC, and enterprise platforms require deterministic outputs that probabilistic AI systems cannot wholesale replace. HSBC estimates gross AI-led revenue deflation for the sector at 14-16%, a measured headwind rather than an extinction event. The story adds: 24 years of software export data that has never posted a decline, $200 billion in annual revenue, partnerships with the very AI labs whose products are supposed to be the instrument of the sector's destruction, possibly a new $1.5 trillion market category emerging at the intersection of services and software, and the largest U.S. corporates in the middle of mapping their entire workforces into process architectures that require technology partners to modernise. I think India's IT is going to be fine. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

New York Sues Valve For Enabling 'Illegal Gambling' With Loot Boxes - New York state has filed a lawsuit against Valve alleging that randomized loot boxes in games like Counter-Strike 2, Team Fortress 2, and Dota 2 amount to a form of unregulated gambling, letting users "pay for the chance to win a rare virtual item of significant monetary value." From a report: While many randomized video game loot boxes have drawn attention and regulation from various government bodies in recent years, the New York suit calls out Valve's system specifically for "enabl[ing] users to sell the virtual items they have won, either through its own virtual marketplace, the Steam Community Market, or through third-party marketplaces." The vast majority of Valve's in-game loot boxes contain skins that can only be resold for a few cents, the suit notes, while the rarest skins can be worth thousands of dollars through marketplaces on and off of Steam. That fits the statutory definition of gambling as "charging an individual for a chance to win something of value based on luck alone," according to the suit. The Steam Wallet funds that users get through directly reselling skins "have the equivalent purchasing power on the Steam platform as cash," the suit notes. But if a user wants to convert those Steam funds to real cash, they can do so relatively easily by purchasing a Steam Deck and reselling it to any interested party, as an investigator did while preparing the lawsuit. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Burger King Will Use AI To Check If Employees Say 'Please' and 'Thank You' - An anonymous reader shares a report: Burger King is launching an AI chatbot that will live in the headsets used by employees. The voice-enabled chatbot, called "Patty," is part of an overarching BK Assistant platform that will not only assist employees with meal preparation but also evaluate their interactions with customers for "friendliness." Thibault Roux, Burger King's chief digital officer, tells The Verge that the company compiled information from franchisees and guests on how to measure friendliness, resulting in the fast food chain training its AI system to recognize certain words and phrases, such as "welcome to Burger King," "please," and "thank you." Managers can then ask the AI assistant how their location is performing on friendliness. "This is all meant to be a coaching tool," Roux says, adding that the company is "iterating" on capturing the tone of conversations as well. Read more of this story at Slashdot.