Latest News
Last updated 04 May, 02:34 PM
BBC News
The threat to summer holidays looming from jet fuel shortages - What impact might shortages have on our summer holidays - and what could be done about it?
Some Iranians fear the regime is now more entrenched - and ready for revenge - Ordinary Iranians tell of worry about increased repression by authorities after the war is over.
Three dead in suspected virus outbreak on Atlantic cruise ship - The operator of the MV Hondius ship says a Dutch husband and wife, as well as a German national, have died but the cause has not yet been established.
Thousands could benefit from cancer jab that cuts treatment time to minutes - Thousands of patients will be offered a new injectable form of an immunotherapy drug that takes minutes.
What an empty car park tells us about the UK's debt problem - The BBC has been speaking to people living in one of England's poorest communities.
The Register
Moving to mainframe can be cheaper than sticking with VMware: Gartner - Serious Linux VMs will enjoy big iron – if you can learn to love lock-in risks and skills challenges VMware users considering a new home might find it cheaper to move to an IBM mainframe than adopting Broadcom’s new licenses, according to Gartner Vice President Analyst Alessandro Galimberti.…
If the vote you rocked, your personal info can be grokked - Even limited voter rolls can be linked to identify people, research shows Your voter data could be used against you. A foreign intelligence service that wished to identify the family members of deployed military personnel could do so by cross-referencing public voter record data and social media posts.…
Hope your holiday was horrid: You botched the last thing you did before leaving - That box-full-of-old-tech-you-should-probably-have-thrown-out-but-kept-just-in-case got a techie in trouble Who, Me? Monday is upon us once again and The Register hopes that when you arrive at your desk, all is well. We offer that sentiment because we use the first day of the working week to bring you a fresh instalment of "Who, Me?" – the reader-contributed column in which you confess to making mistakes, and explain how you survived them.…
Ask.com, former home of search butler Jeeves, closes just as conversational search comes back - Like actual butlers, this relic of the first dotcom boom has been a quaint anachronism for decades In the mid-1990s, search engine designers settled on the user interface that dominates to this day: a text box into which users enter text, and a resulting list of websites.…
Five Eyes spook shops warn rapid rollouts of agentic AI are too risky - Prioritize resilience over productivity, say CISA, NCSC and their friends from Oz, NZ, Canada Information security agencies from the nations of the Five Eyes security alliance have co-authored guidance on the use of agentic AI that warns the technology will likely misbehave and amplifies organizations’ existing frailties, and therefore recommend slow and careful adoption of the tech.…
New Scientist - Home
The greatest David Attenborough documentaries you really need to watch - To mark David Attenborough turning 100, New Scientist staff have been set a tricky task: pick your favourite of his many amazing documentaries...
Prebiotic chewing gum could be helpful for gum disease - A small trial found that chewing gum containing nitrate can ease the symptoms of gum disease by favouring the growth of beneficial mouth bacteria
Long covid reveals the harm of one-size-fits-all medical treatment - While exercise and diet are frequently recommended as a universal way to improve your health, some conditions require more careful treatment
Smart underwear detects lactose intolerance by tracking your farts - A device you attach to your underwear reveals how often you really break wind – and it’s probably more frequently than you think
Why dinosaurs lived much more complex lives than we thought - A wave of dinosaur discoveries over the past decade has completely reshaped our understanding of these long-extinct animals. Palaeontologist Dave Hone spills the secrets of how dinosaurs lived, from how social they were to how much they really fought
Hacker News
Talking to 35 Strangers at the Gym - Comments
GameStop makes $55.5B takeover offer for eBay - Comments
PyInfra 3.8.0 Is Out - Comments
Newton's law of gravity passes its biggest test - Comments
Someone allegedly used a hairdryer to rig Polymarket weather bets - Comments
Slashdot
16% of Parents Help Their Children Bypass Online Age Checks, Study Finds. One 15-Year-Old Just Uses a Fake Moustache - The Independent reports that "more than a third of children in the UK have found a way around age verification measures" for social media sites and other online platforms. And new research from online safety organisation Internet Matters "suggests one in six parents have helped their child to get past age verification checks, with children reporting 'tricking' platforms into thinking they are older. " Parents also said they had caught their children drawing on facial hair in a bid to evade the technology. One mother said: "I did catch my son using an eyebrow pencil to draw a moustache on his face, and it verified him as 15 years old"... From a sample of 1,000 UK children, 46% said they believed age checks are easy to bypass, while 32% admitted to having done so. 49% of the children surveyed said they'd still encountered harmful content, according to the online safety activists. The group called the figure "unacceptable," and complained that age verification measures "are often ineffective in practice or easy to bypass." Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Can Investors Trust AI Sales Figures? Asks Wall Street Journal Opinion Piece - A Wall Street Journal opinion piece warns of "a troubling trend" in AI's growth. "Rather than selling software, some AI companies are paying their partners to use it." It cites OpenAI's $1.5 billion joint venture with private-equity firms, Anthropic's $200 million contribution to a private-equity firm joint venture, and Google's $750 million subsidization of Gemini's adoption by consulting firms. "These agreements muddy the distinction between a company's sound growth trajectory and artificial financial engineering." [T]he scale and structure of the recent AI deals go beyond standard incentive mechanisms... When a seller pays customers to buy its products, it is unclear if its revenue growth reflects vibrant demand or a willingness to accept subsidies. Slashdot reader destinyland writes: This warning comes from a prominent figure in the investing community. For six years Robert Pozen was chairman of America's oldest mutual fund company, after five years at Fidelity. An advocate for corporate governance, he's currently a lecturer at MIT's business school (and the author of the book Remote Inc.: How to Thrive at Work...Wherever You Are). "As AI companies prepare initial public offerings, investors should scrutinize their numbers closely," Pozner writes, warning about "time-limited financial support". "In evaluating AI sales figures, analysts should consider the distorted incentives that the recent financing deals create," writes Pozner: Private-equity firms, enticed by promised returns, might demand rapid rollouts of AI products, rather than ensuring their orderly and safe development. Portfolio companies of private-equity firms may embrace AI tools not because they are needed but because adoption is mandated by their owners. Consultants may favor one set of AI models based on the subsidy instead of the merits. If guarantees and subsidies are major factors in the rapid adoption of AI tools, investors should be skeptical of AI companies' revenue projections. Many of their customers enticed by consultants will stop paying full price when the financial incentives are gone. Many of the portfolio companies of private-equity firms could back away from selected AI tools once these joint ventures expire. The challenge with evaluating these AI financing deals is the lack of transparency. At present, AI vendors don't separate revenue driven by subsidies or joint ventures from standard sales. The lesson from the telecom debacle is that financial engineering can obscure, for years, the difference between real customer demand and demand driven by incentives. When AI companies begin to finance their own product distribution, guaranteeing returns to investors and subsidizing sales, it's a signal for investors to dig deeper. Investing in an AI company? Ask what percentage of enterprise revenue is coming from subsidized channels or joint ventures, Pozner suggests. And the renewal/retention rate for customers not supported by subsidies or joint ventures... Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Roblox Blames Age-Verification Rollout for Lowered Growth. Stock Tumbles 22% - Age verification became mandatory for chat access on Roblox in January — and Friday morning Quartz reported it's apparently impacted the company's financials: Roblox cut its full-year 2026 bookings forecast by roughly $900 million at the midpoint on Thursday, blaming stronger-than-expected headwinds from its mandatory age-verification rollout on an audience that skews heavily toward children and teenagers. Full-year 2026 bookings are now projected at $7.33 billion to $7.60 billion, a range that sits roughly $900 million below the prior guidance of $8.28 billion to $8.55 billion; analysts had expected $8.38 billion, according to Yahoo Finance. Roblox stock fell almost 22% in premarket trading.... Daily active users rose 35% year over year to 132 million, while hours engaged climbed 43% to 31 billion hours... Daily Active Users and hours engaged fell below forecasts of 143.8 million and 33.68 billion, respectively, according to Yahoo Finance... Users who have not completed age checks have faced restricted communication features, and the process has weighed on the platform's ability to bring in new users. Russia's blocking of the platform, which took effect in December 2025, added further drag on user growth, according to Yahoo Finance. As of the end of the first quarter, 51% of global daily active users had completed age verification, with 65% of U.S. users having done so, Roblox said.... The safety push has come with legal costs. Roblox accrued $57 million in the first quarter for settlements and settlement proposals with certain states over youth-related consumer protection and digital safety matters, with payments structured over multiple years, the company said. Roblox acknowledged in a letter to shareholders that "our aggressive push to enhance safety lowers our expectations for topline growth in 2026." But they argued that it also "makes our platform fundamentally better and amplifies the long-term growth potential of Roblox through more effective content targeting, tailored communication experiences, and improved community sentiment." Read more of this story at Slashdot.
NetHack 5.0 Released - "So yesterday the Devteam (it is always the Devteam) released version 5.0 of legendary and venerable rogueike compuer game NetHack," writes the Rogue-like games column @Play. "It is 39 years old..." MilenCent (Slashdot reader #219,397) writes: In addition to play changes it's left for players to discover, this version updates the code to compile with C99, makes it much easier to cross compile the code for other systems than the one running, and now uses Lua for its dungeon generation. Happy hacking! For new players, "Nethack 5.0 now has an optional tutorial in the early phases of the game that might help you," notes the Rogue-like games column @Play: Three systems binaries are provided: Windows, MS-DOS and Amiga. Yes, Nethack still supports MS-DOS, and yes, it still supports classic Amiga: it explicitly supports AmigaDOS 3.0, meaning it can still run on 68000 machines... That these are the only systems they provide binaries for shouldn't be seen as an indication that these are the "most important" platforms for Nethack, it's more that, since it's entirely open source, building it yourself is entirely possible, and more expected than with most software. Nethack can be built for Linux, Windows 8-11, AmigaDOS, MacOS (I'm not sure if this includes classic Mac too but it might), Windows CE (wow), OS/2 (additional wow), BeOS, VMS and multiple Unixes... Another option is to play through public Nethack servers. The most popular of these are probably alt.org and Hardfought. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
OpenAI Introduces AI-Generated Pets for Its Codex App - "Vibe coding just got a whole lot more adorable," writes Engadget: OpenAI introduced AI-generated pets to the Codex app, its agentic tool that helps with coding. These "optional animated companions" don't do any coding themselves, but serve as a floating overlay that can tell you what Codex is working on, notify you when Codex completes a task or whether it needs your input on something. The new feature lets developers see Codex's active thread, without having to switch away from your current open app. "The feature ships with eight built-in variations — including a cat and dog," reports Mashable. "But the more interesting play is the custom pet creator." Users can prompt Codex directly to generate their own companion, then share it online. A quick scroll through the homepage reveals the community has already gotten to work. Current creations include Goku, Patrick Star, Microsoft's long-retired Clippy, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, and — naturally — a goblin. There's also Grogu, Dobby, a tiny Bob Rossi, and a "Doge-style Shiba Inu dog"... Read more of this story at Slashdot.