Latest News
Last updated 01 Jan, 09:14 PM
BBC News
'I hid from a wall of heat': Eyewitnesses describe escape from bar inferno - One young man told the BBC he went into the bar to look for his little brother, who he thought was inside.
Video shows fire spreading across bar ceiling - The moment a Swiss bar was set ablaze appears to have been captured on video.
Disbelief in Crans-Montana on New Year's Day - BBC's Silvia Costeloe says the fire happened in the beating heart of lively Crans-Montana.
BBC reports from the scene of Swiss resort bar fire - The BBC's Silvia Costeloe says the bar where the fire broke out has been around for at least 40 years, and is considered an institution in the area.
What we know so far about how the fire broke out - Several dozen people are presumed to have died in the fire at a New Year party in the resort of Crans-Montana.
The Register
Defusing space 'scope photobombs and more: Mitigating pollution from satellite RF transmissions - 'What do we need to do better?' El Reg talks to comms boss about the problem Interview Scientists and engineers have been taken aback by the amount of radio interference generated by satellite constellations, and many are calling on standards bodies to improve operator performance.…
Welcome to Wendy's! Before your order can be taken, you must first reset this kiosk - Do you want bork with that? Bork!Bork!Bork! Today's example of bork-in-the-wild shows that Microsoft is not the only game in town when it comes to screens having an IT moment in public. No, there will be no orders on this Firefox-based drive-thru kiosk at Wendy's.…
How Microsoft gave customers what they wanted: An audience with Bill Gates - Well kinda... Your call will be transferred to the next available assistant Microsoft had a special way of dealing with customers demanding to speak to its CEO. One that kept the customer happy without necessarily bothering His Billness.…
Nvidia DMs TSMC: please sir can I have some more? The Chinese are starved for H200s - GPUzilla has reportedly received orders for more than two million units With the sales ban lifted, Chinese tech giants, including ByteDance, are scrambling to secure orders for Nvidia's H200 graphics accelerators while they can. But will there be enough to satisfy demand?…
US Army seeks human AI officers to manage its battle bots - What, weekend warriors from Silicon Valley not good enough? The US Army has been all-in on becoming an AI-powered outfit for some time, and now it's creating a career path for officers to specialize in making its automation dreams come true. …
New Scientist - Home
World's first subsea desalination facility will start running in 2026 - Flocean, a Norwegian company, is set to open the world’s first commercial-scale subsea desalination plant, an approach that could cut the cost and energy used to make seawater drinkable
2026 Mars mission will set out to solve the mystery of its moons - The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency will be launching the Martian Moons eXploration mission next year, which should finally tell us how Mars acquired the moons Phobos and Deimos
Could James and the Giant Peach inspire the future of food? - In the latest in our imagined history of inventions yet to come, Future Chronicles columnist Rowan Hooper reveals how by the 2030s, botanists had worked out how to grow hybridised superplants to help feed the world
The weight-loss drugs on trial in 2026 may trump Ozempic and Zepbound - Drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy and Zepbound have transformed how we treat obesity, but more effective treatments could be down the road
The 3 things you should do this New Year to foster a positive mindset - Olivia Remes, a mental health researcher at the University of Cambridge, says these are the three things everyone should do this New Year to cultivate a more positive mindset
Hacker News
Cameras and Lenses (2020) - Comments
Show HN: OpenWorkers – Self-hosted Cloudflare workers in Rust - Comments
Dell's version of the DGX Spark fixes pain points - Comments
Linux is good now; to feel like you actually own your PC, put Linux on it - Comments
iOS allows alternative browser engines in Japan - Comments
Slashdot
Iran Offers To Sell Advanced Weapons Systems For Crypto - Iran is offering to sell advanced weapons systems including ballistic missiles, drones and warships to foreign governments for cryptocurrency, in a bid to use digital assets to bypass western financial controls. From a report: Iran's Ministry of Defence Export Center, known as Mindex, says it is prepared to negotiate military contracts that allow payment in digital currencies, as well as through barter arrangements and Iranian rials, according to promotional documents and payment terms analysed by the Financial Times. The offer, introduced during the past year, appears to mark one of the first known instances in which a nation state has publicly indicated its willingness to accept cryptocurrency as payment for the export of strategic military hardware. Mindex, a state-run body responsible for Iran's overseas defence sales, says it has client relationships with 35 countries and advertises a catalogue of weapons that includes Emad ballistic missiles, Shahed drones, Shahid Soleimani-class warships and short-range air defence systems. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
'IPv6 Just Turned 30 and Still Hasn't Taken Over the World, But Don't Call It a Failure' - Three decades after RFC 1883 promised to future-proof the internet by expanding the available pool of IP addresses from around 4.3 billion to over 340 undecillion, IPv6 has yet to achieve the dominance its creators envisioned. Data from Google, APNIC and Cloudflare analyzed by The Register shows less than half of all internet users rely on IPv6 today. "IPv6 was an extremely conservative protocol that changed as little as possible," APNIC chief scientist Geoff Huston told The Register. "It was a classic case of mis-design by committee." The protocol's lack of backward compatibility with IPv4 meant users had to choose one or run both in parallel. Network address translation, which allows thousands of devices to share a single public IPv4 address, gave operators an easier path forward. Huston adds: "These days the Domain Name Service (DNS) is the service selector, not the IP address," Huston told The Register. "The entire security framework of today's Internet is name based and the world of authentication and channel encryption is based on service names, not IP addresses." "So folk use IPv6 these days based on cost: If the cost of obtaining more IPv4 addresses to fuel bigger NATs is too high, then they deploy IPv6. Not because it's better, but if they are confident that they can work around IPv6's weaknesses then in a largely name based world there is no real issue in using one addressing protocol or another as the transport underlay." But calling IPv6 a failure misses the point. "IPv4's continued viability is largely because IPv6 absorbed that growth pressure elsewhere -- particularly in mobile, broadband, and cloud environments," said John Curran, president and CEO of the American Registry for Internet Numbers. "In that sense, IPv6 succeeded where it was needed most." Huawei has sought 2.56 decillion IPv6 addresses and Starlink appears to have acquired 150 sextillion. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
DHS Says REAL ID, Which DHS Certifies, Is Too Unreliable To Confirm US Citizenship - An anonymous reader shares a report: Only the government could spend 20 years creating a national ID that no one wanted and that apparently doesn't even work as a national ID. But that's what the federal government has accomplished with the REAL ID, which the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) now considers unreliable, even though getting one requires providing proof of citizenship or lawful status in the country. In a December 11 court filing [PDF], Philip Lavoie, the acting assistant special agent in charge of DHS' Mobile, Alabama, office, stated that, "REAL ID can be unreliable to confirm U.S. citizenship." Lavoie's declaration was in response to a federal civil rights lawsuit filed in October by the Institute for Justice, a public-interest law firm, on behalf of Leo Garcia Venegas, an Alabama construction worker. Venegas was detained twice in May and June during immigration raids on private construction sites, despite being a U.S. citizen. In both instances, Venegas' lawsuit says, masked federal immigration officers entered the private sites without a warrant and began detaining workers based solely on their apparent ethnicity. And in both instances officers allegedly retrieved Venegas' Alabama-issued REAL ID from his pocket but claimed it could be fake. Venegas was kept handcuffed and detained for an hour the first time and "between 20 and 30 minutes" the second time before officers ran his information and released him. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Public Domain Day 2026 Brings Betty Boop, Nancy Drew and 'I Got Rhythm' Into the Commons - As the calendar flips to January 1, 2026, thousands of copyrighted works from 1930 are entering the US public domain alongside sound recordings from 1925, making them free to copy, share, remix and build upon without permission or licensing fees. The literary haul includes William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, Dashiell Hammett's full novel The Maltese Falcon, Agatha Christie's first Miss Marple mystery The Murder at the Vicarage, and the first four Nancy Drew books. The popular illustrated version of The Little Engine That Could also joins the commons. Betty Boop makes her public domain debut through her first appearance in the Fleischer Studios cartoon Dizzy Dishes. The original iteration of Disney's Pluto -- then named Rover -- enters as well. Nine additional Mickey Mouse cartoons and ten Silly Symphonies from 1930 are now available for reuse. Films entering the public domain include the Academy Award-winning All Quiet on the Western Front, the Marx Brothers' Animal Crackers, and John Wayne's first leading role in The Big Trail. Musical compositions going public include George and Ira Gershwin's "I Got Rhythm," Hoagy Carmichael's "Georgia on My Mind," and "Dream a Little Dream of Me." Sound recordings from 1925 now available include Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong's "The St. Louis Blues" and Marian Anderson's "Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen." Piet Mondrian's Composition with Red, Blue, and Yellow rounds out the artistic entries. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
European Space Agency Acknowledges Another Breach as Criminals Claim 200 GB Data Haul - The European Space Agency has acknowledged yet another security incident after a cybercriminal posted an offer on BreachForums the day after Christmas claiming to have stolen over 20GB of data including source code, confidential documents, API tokens and credentials. The attacker claims they gained access to ESA-linked external servers on December 18 and remained connected for about a week, during which they allegedly exfiltrated private Bitbucket repositories, CI/CD pipelines, Terraform files and hardcoded credentials. ESA said that the breach may have affected only "a very small number of external servers" used for unclassified engineering and scientific collaboration, and that it has initiated a forensic security analysis. Read more of this story at Slashdot.