Latest News

Last updated 10 Apr, 01:06 AM

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.

'We should not be at the mercy of events abroad' - Starmer - The prime minister says "shocks" like the conflict in Iran are becoming more frequent.

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".

Watch: Melania Trump's surprise Epstein statement in full - She tells reporters at the White House that any claims linking the two "need to end today".

Ten cases a day - how 'blitz courts' could tackle the Crown Court backlog - The scheme, to fast-track cases and to cut the court backlog, is being expanded in England and Wales.

The Register

Microsoft cuts cloudy desktop prices by 20 percent, warns they’ll wake up slowly - Just in time to get buyers thinking as physical PC prices rise Microsoft has told its channel partners to get ready for a 20 percent price cut for Windows 365 cloud PCs, effective May 1st.…

Chatbots are great at manipulating people to buy stuff, Princeton boffins find - Urge restraints before AdLand does this without appropriate disclosures Large language models can be very persuasive, and researchers say that's a problem when they’re used to create advertising.…

Anthropic will let your agents sleep on its couch - Want to run your business on autopilot? For better or worse, Managed Agents might help with that If you need AI agents to do a lot of ongoing tasks for your business, Anthropic has a new answer for you. The Claude maker has introduced Managed Agents, a service to help organizations create and deploy cloud-hosted knowledge work automations.…

Google wants more Intel inside ... its datacenters, taps Chipzilla for more SmartNICs - Custom ASIC biz now running at a $1B annual pace for Intel Google will continue to work with Intel, buying SmartNICs for its public cloud rather than blazing its own trail as AWS has done with its Nitro NICs.…

Crypto? Huh. Good gawd y'all, what is it good for? $45M in this case - Cops bust latest scam, return $12m to bilked victims US, UK, and Canadian law enforcement Thursday said that they disrupted a $45 million global cryptocurrency scam, freezing $12 million in stolen funds and identifying more than 20,000 cryptocurrency wallet addresses linked to fraud victims across 30 countries.…

New Scientist - Home

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

CAR T-cell therapy takes woman from bedridden to 'perfectly fine' - A woman with three different autoimmune conditions had all of them treated simultaneously by genetically modifying her immune cells to kill off the rogue ones causing problems

Sci-fi show The Miniature Wife underwhelms – despite the big names - Elizabeth Banks stars as an author shrunk by her scientist husband Matthew Macfadyen in this major new series – but it fails to live up to its promise, finds Josh Bell

Mysterious 'compound X' clears toxic Parkinson’s proteins from brain - A drug known only as compound X helped to remove the problematic proteins associated with Parkinson's disease from the brains of mice, and improved their balance and mobility

Emperor penguins added to endangered list after rapid decline - The International Union for Conservation of Nature has updated the Red List status for three of Antarctica’s most famous species after a dire assessment of their prospects under climate change

Hacker News

Many African families spend fortunes burying their dead - Comments

Native Instant Space Switching on macOS - Comments

How NASA Built Artemis II’s Fault-Tolerant Computer - Comments

Charcuterie – Visual similarity Unicode explorer - Comments

PicoZ80 – Drop-In Z80 Replacement - Comments

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.

Amazon May Sell Trainium AI Chips To Third Parties In Shot At Nvidia - Amazon CEO Andy Jassy says the company may eventually sell its Trainium AI chips directly to outside customers, not just through AWS, which would put Amazon in more direct competition with Nvidia. "There's so much demand for our chips that it's quite possible we'll sell racks of them to third parties in the future," Jassy wrote in his annual shareholder letter Thursday. He also revealed the company's chip business is already running at more than $20 billion annually, with demand so strong that current and even future generations are largely spoken for. Quartz reports: Access to Amazon's chips is currently limited to Amazon Web Services, with customers paying for cloud-based usage rather than owning any physical hardware. Selling to AWS and external customers alike, as standalone chipmakers do, would put annual revenue at around $50 billion, up from the $20 billion the company estimates for the year, Jassy said. The $20 billion figure spans three product lines: Trainium, the AI accelerator chip; Graviton, a general-purpose processor; and Nitro, a chip that helps run Amazon's EC2 server instances. All three are growing at triple-digit rates year over year, Jassy claimed in his letter. Jassy said demand for Trainium has outpaced supply at each generation. Trainium2 is essentially unavailable, with its entire allocated capacity spoken for. Trainium3 started reaching customers in early 2026, and reservations have filled nearly all available supply. Even Trainium4 -- which is not expected to reach wide release for another year and a half -- has substantial pre-orders committed. Jassy argued that a full-scale Trainium rollout could shave tens of billions off annual capital costs while meaningfully widening profit margin. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OpenAI To Limit New Model Release On Cybersecurity Fears - OpenAI is reportedly preparing a new cybersecurity product for a small group of partners, out of concern that a broader rollout could wreak havoc if it were released more widely. If that move sounds familiar, it's because Anthropic took a similar limited-release approach with its Mythos model and Project Glasswing initiative. Axios reports: OpenAI introduced its "Trusted Access for Cyber" pilot program in February after rolling out GPT-5.3-Codex, the company's most cyber-capable reasoning model. Organizations in the invite-only program are given access to "even more cyber capable or permissive models to accelerate legitimate defensive work," according to a blog post. At the time, OpenAI committed $10 million in API credits to participants. [...] Restricting the rollout of a new frontier model makes "more sense" if companies are concerned about models' ability to write new exploits -- rather than about their ability to find bugs in the first place, Stanislav Fort, CEO of security firm Aisle, told Axios. Staggering the release of new AI models looks a lot like how cybersecurity vendors currently handle the disclosure of security flaws in software, Lee added. "It's the same debate we've had for decades around responsible vulnerability disclosure," Lee said. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hacker Steals 10 Petabytes of Data From China's Tianjin Supercomputer Center - An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: A hacker has allegedly stolen a massive trove of sensitive data -- including highly classified defense documents and missile schematics -- from a state-run Chinese supercomputer in what could potentially constitute the largest known heist of data from China. The dataset, which allegedly contains more than 10 petabytes of sensitive information, is believed by experts to have been obtained from the National Supercomputing Center (NSCC) in Tianjin -- a centralized hub that provides infrastructure services for more than 6,000 clients across China, including advanced science and defense agencies. Cyber experts who have spoken to the alleged hacker and reviewed samples of the stolen data they posted online say they appeared to gain entry to the massive computer with comparative ease and were able to siphon out huge amounts of data over the course of multiple months without being detected. An account calling itself FlamingChina posted a sample of the alleged dataset on an anonymous Telegram channel on February 6, claiming it contained "research across various fields including aerospace engineering, military research, bioinformatics, fusion simulation and more." The group alleges the information is linked to "top organizations" including the Aviation Industry Corporation of China, the Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China, and the National University of Defense Technology. Cyber security experts who have reviewed the data say the group is offering a limited preview of the alleged dataset, for thousands of dollars, with full access priced at hundreds of thousands of dollars. Payment was requested in cryptocurrency. CNN cannot verify the origins of the alleged dataset and the claims made by FlamingChina, but spoke with multiple experts whose initial assessment of the leak indicated it was genuine. The alleged sample data appeared to include documents marked "secret" in Chinese, along with technical files, animated simulations and renderings of defense equipment including bombs and missiles. Read more of this story at Slashdot.