Latest News

Last updated 06 May, 06:36 AM

BBC News

What is Trump's 'Project Freedom' in the Strait of Hormuz? - The US president said the operation has been paused after starting on Monday.

Cruise ship with hantavirus outbreak to sail to Canary Islands - Spain's health ministry said the MV Hondius is expected to arrive within three to four days.

'Nothing will bring back my son': How 10 minutes of bombing by Israel shattered lives in Lebanon - The bombs started falling at 14:15 in the afternoon - bringing chaos and destruction across the country.

Catherine to return to overseas visits with Italy trip - The Princess of Wales will go to Italy next week on her first official overseas engagement for more than three years.

Campaigning sprint finish ahead of elections around Britain tomorrow - A mesmerising mix of results are expected after candidates make their final pitches, our political editor writes.

The Register

AWS lets agents drive its virtual cloudy desktops - which could cost 500,00 tokens per click - Vendor benchmark finds APIs let you do the job faster and cheaper Amazon Web Services has let AI agents loose in its cloudy WorkSpaces virtual PCs.…

India orders infosec red alert in case Mythos sparks crime spree - Securities regulator urges market players to develop new strategies and nail cyber-basics before AI models fuel mass attacks India’s Securities and Exchange Board has advised participants in the nation’s equities industry to immediately revisit their information security systems and practices, in case Anthropic’s Mythos bug-finding AI sparks a cyberattack spree.…

Anthropic comes for the midmarket software spend - Backed by private equity and banking giants, it will build custom AI systems for business bottlenecks There’s gold in midmarket IT spend, and Anthropic - backed by private equity and banking heavyweights and tapping its Claude Partner Network - is coming for it.…

OpenAI exec says company hopes to burn $50B of somebody else's money on compute this year - If the numbers are large enough, perhaps we won't question the math An executive for ChatGPT maker OpenAI said in court testimony on Tuesday that the AI model developer expects to burn $50 billion on computing power before the end of the year.…

Viva la revolución: LinkedIn profile visitor lists belong to the people, says Noyb - GDPR Article 15 doesn't care if you want to make money by selling users' data back to them A LinkedIn feature the average non-paying user likely only glances past could end up setting a legal precedent in the EU regarding how companies treat customer data that they've processed. …

New Scientist - Home

Extinct relative of koalas discovered in Western Australia - Fossils reveal that there were at least two kinds of koala when humans first arrived in Australia, but one died out about 30,000 years ago when the west of the continent dried out

The 50-year quest to create a quantum spin liquid may finally be over - Creating quantum entanglement inside a solid material is tricky in the lab – but crystals buried in the earth could be growing it naturally. Now one scientist says he has proof he’s found them

Backlash builds over NHS plan to hide source code from AI hacking risk - NHS England is pulling its open-source software from the internet because of fears around computer-hacking AI models like Mythos. Opposition is growing among those who say the move is bad for transparency and efficiency, and will also do nothing to improve security

Hantavirus: Where has the deadly cruise ship outbreak come from? - Three people have died on board the cruise ship MV Hondius due to an outbreak of hantavirus, a rare illness transmitted by rodents

Woman in cancer remission without treatment in highly unusual case - A biopsy of a woman's cancer seems to have triggered an immune response against the tumour, putting her into remission

Hacker News

Agents can now create Cloudflare accounts, buy domains, and deploy - Comments

StarFighter 16-Inch - Comments

.de TLD offline due to DNSSEC? - Comments

Telus Uses AI to Alter Call-Agent Accents - Comments

245TB Micron 6600 ION Data Center SSD Now Shipping - Comments

Slashdot

Brockman Rebuts Musk's Take On Startup's History, Recounts Secret Work For Tesla - An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: OpenAI President Greg Brockman concluded his testimony on Tuesday, where he largely rebutted Elon Musk's account of the early years of the startup and negotiations that occurred at the company. Brockman testified that he never made any commitments to Musk about the company's corporate structure, and he never heard anyone else make them. He emphasized that OpenAI is still governed by a nonprofit. "This entity remains a nonprofit," Brockman said, referring to the OpenAI foundation. "It is the best-resourced nonprofit in the world." [...] Brockman, who spoke from the witness stand in federal court in Oakland, California, over the course of two days, also revealed that Musk had enlisted several OpenAI employees to do months of free work for him at Tesla, Musk's electric vehicle company. That work mainly included efforts to overhaul the company's approach to developing self-driving technology as part of the Autopilot team there in 2017. During his two days on the stand, Brockman answered questions about his personal financial ambitions, his understanding of OpenAI's structure and Musk's involvement at the company, which they co-founded with other executives in 2015. In Musk's testimony last week, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO said that the time, money and resources he poured into OpenAI had been integral to the company's success. He repeatedly said that he helped recruit the company's top talent. Brockman said Tuesday that while Musk was helpful in convincing some employees to take the leap to join OpenAI, he was a polarizing figure for others. "Elon had a reputation of being an extremely hard driver," Brockman said. He added that "certain candidates were very attracted" by Musk's involvement at OpenAI, and that "certain candidates were very turned off." Musk testified last week that a former OpenAI researcher named Andrej Karpathy joined Tesla, but only after he had planned to leave the startup already. Brockman said that Musk, after he hired Karpathy, approached him with "an apology and a confession," about the hire, and that neither Musk nor Karpathy had told him the researcher planned to leave OpenAI before that. Musk was generally not very available for meetings and conversations, Brockman said, so he relied on employees, including Sam Teller and former OpenAI board member Shivon Zilis, as proxies. Brockman testified that open sourcing OpenAI's technology was "not a topic of conversation" during Musk's time with the nonprofit, despite Musk's claims that it was supposed to be central to the organization. He also described tense 2017 negotiations over a possible for-profit arm, saying Musk became angry when equity stakes were discussed. "He said Musk declined the proposal during an in-person meeting, then tore a painting of a Tesla Model 3 car off the wall, and began storming out of the room," reports CNBC. He also demanded to know when the cofounders would leave the company. Brockman further said Musk wanted control of OpenAI because he disliked situations where he lacked control, citing Zip2 and SolarCity as examples Musk had raised. He also testified that Musk partly wanted control to help fund his broader SpaceX ambition of building a "city on Mars." CNBC notes the trial will resume at 8:30 a.m. PT on Wednesday, with Shivon Zilis expected to testify. She is the mother of four of Musk's children and a former OpenAI board member. Recap: OpenAI President Discloses His Stake In the Company Is Worth $30 Billion (Day Five) Musk Concludes Testimony At OpenAI Trial (Day Four) Elon Musk Says OpenAI Betrayed Him, Clashes With Company's Attorney (Day Three) Musk Testifies OpenAI Was Created As Nonprofit To Counter Google (Day Two) Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Head To Court (Day One) Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple Agrees To Pay iPhone Owners $250 Million For Not Delivering AI Siri - Apple has agreed to a proposed $250 million settlement over claims that it misled iPhone buyers about the availability of Apple Intelligence and its upgraded Siri features. The settlement would cover U.S. buyers of the iPhone 16 lineup and iPhone 15 Pro models between June 10, 2024, and March 29, 2025. The Verge reports: The settlement will resolve a 2025 lawsuit, alleging Apple's advertisements created a "clear and reasonable consumer expectation" that Apple Intelligence features would be available with the launch of the iPhone 16. The lawsuit claimed Apple's products "offered a significantly limited or entirely absent version of Apple Intelligence, misleading consumers about its actual utility and performance." Apple brought certain AI-powered features to the iPhone 16 weeks after its release, and delayed the launch of its more personalized Siri, which is now expected to arrive later this year. Last April, the National Advertising Division recommended that Apple "discontinue or modify" its "available now" claim for Apple Intelligence. Apple also pulled an iPhone 16 ad showing actor Bella Ramsey using the AI-upgraded Siri. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Coinbase Lays Off Nearly 700 Workers In 'AI-Native' Restructuring - Coinbase is laying off about 700 workers, or 14% of its workforce, as CEO Brian Armstrong says the company is restructuring to become "lean, fast, and AI-native." Engadget reports: Armstrong claimed he'd seen engineers "use AI to ship in days what used to take a team weeks" and that non-technical teams in the company are "shipping production code," while Coinbase is automating many of its workflows. "All of this has led us to an inflection point, not just for Coinbase, but for every company," Armstrong wrote. "The biggest risk now is not taking action. We are adjusting early and deliberately to rebuild Coinbase to be lean, fast and AI-native. We need to return to the speed and focus of our startup founding, with AI at our core." An AI-driven restructuring is only one half of the equation for Coinbase, though. Armstrong wrote that while the company "is well-capitalized, has diversified revenue streams and is well-positioned to weather any storm," the crypto market is down. As such, Coinbase is attempting to become leaner and faster ahead of the next crypto cycle. The company is eliminating some management layers and organizing the business around "AI-native talent who can manage fleets of agents to drive outsized impact," Armstrong wrote. "We'll also be experimenting with reduced pod sizes, including 'one person teams' with engineers, designers and product managers all in one role." That sure sounds like an attempt to get workers to take on more responsibilities. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google DeepMind Workers Vote To Unionize Over Military AI Deals - An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Employees at Google DeepMind in London have voted to unionize as part of a bid to block the AI lab from providing its technology to the US and Israeli militaries. In a letter addressed to Google's managing director for the UK and Ireland, Debbie Weinstein, the workers asked the company to recognize the Communication Workers Union and Unite the Union as joint representatives for DeepMind employees. "Fundamentally, the push for unionization is about holding Google to its own ethical standards on AI, how they monetize it, what the products do, and who they work with," John Chadfield, national officer for technology at the CWU, tells WIRED. "Through the process of unionization, workers are collectively in a much stronger place to put [demands] to an increasingly deaf management." [...] The DeepMind employee tells WIRED that if the staff succeeds in unionizing in the UK, they will likely demand that Google pulls out of its long-standing contract with the Israeli military, and seek greater transparency over how its AI products will be used, and some sort of assurance relating to layoffs made possible by automation. If Google does not engage, the letter states, the employees will ask an arbitration committee to compel the company to recognize the unions. Since the turn of the year, both Anthropic and OpenAI have announced large-scale expansions of their operations in London. CWU hopes the unionization effort at DeepMind will spur workers at those labs into similar action. "These conversations are happening," claims Chadfield. "The workers at other frontier labs have seen what Google DeepMind workers have done. They've come to us asking for help as well." The unionization push began in February 2025 after Alphabet removed a pledge from its AI ethics guidelines that had barred uses such as weapons development and surveillance. "A lot of people here bought into the Google DeepMind tagline 'to build AI responsibly to benefit humanity,'" the DeepMind employee told WIRED. "The direction of travel is to further militarization of the AI models we're building here." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Moving To Mainframe Can Be Cheaper Than Sticking With VMware - Gartner says some VMware customers may find it cheaper to move certain Linux VM workloads to IBM mainframes than to adopt Broadcom's new VMware licensing, especially for fleets of hundreds of Linux VMs and mission-critical apps needing long-term stability. The Register reports: Speaking to The Register to discuss the analyst firm's mid-April publication, "The State of the IBM Mainframe in 2026," [Gartner Vice President Analyst Alessandro Galimberti] said some buyers in many fields are comparing mainframes to modern environments and deciding Big Blue's big iron comes out ahead. "I can build a multi-region cloud application, but things like data synchronization and high availability are things I need to build into application logic," he said. "The mainframe has that in the platform, which shields developers from complexity." He also thinks mainframes are ideally suited to workloads that need many years of transactional consistency and backward-compatibility. That said, Galimberti doesn't recommend the mainframe for all applications. He said mission-critical applications that are unlikely to change much for a decade are best-suited to the machines, as are Linux applications because the open source OS runs on IBM's hardware. IBM also offers the z/VM hypervisor, which he says can make Linux "even better and more enterprise-ready." Which is why Galimberti thinks IBM's ecosystem is attractive to VMware users, especially those who operate a fleet of 500 to 700 Linux VMs. [...] Committing to mainframes therefore means planning "to spend time negotiating price and renewal protections, rather than prioritizing the business value these solutions can deliver." Another downside is that mainframes pose clear lock-in risk, so users may hold back on useful customizations out of fear they make it harder to extricate themselves from the platform. Access to skills remains an issue, too, as kids these days mostly don't contemplate a career working with big iron. Galimberti sees more service providers investing in their mainframe programs, which might help. So does the availability of Linux. Read more of this story at Slashdot.