Latest News

Last updated 28 Feb, 08:21 AM

BBC News

Watch: Smoke rises in Tehran as explosions heard across country - The BBC's Jon Donnison in Jerusalem reports as Trump says "major combat operations" have begun.

Mahmood to press on with immigration reforms despite by-election defeat - The home secretary is to double down on plans for Danish-style restrictions on asylum seekers.

Henry Zeffman: Green victory shows insurgent parties are here to stay - The party's historic win in Gorton and Denton by-election is clearest sign yet of changing political landscape.

Man charged after Churchill statue defaced, police say - Caspar San Giorgio, 38, of no fixed address was arrested on Friday, police say.

Boy assaulted by birth parents wins campaign for UK child cruelty register - Tony Hudgell, who lost both legs after his birth parents assaulted him, has fought to protect children.

The Register

Double whammy: Steaelite RAT bundles data theft, ransomware in one evil tool - Credential and cryptocurrency theft, live surveillance, ransomware - an attacker's Swiss Army knife A new remote access trojan (RAT) being sold on cybercrime networks enables double extortion attacks on Windows machines by bundling ransomware and data theft, along with credential and cryptocurrency stealers, live surveillance, and a whole host of other illicit capabilities, all controllable from a centralized dashboard.…

Trump orders purge of 'woke' Anthropic from government - Without a single 'You're Fired' joke updated President Trump has escalated Anthropic's dispute with the Defense Department with a social media post ordering the entire federal government purge the company's software from its systems. …

PCs and phones to get more boring and expensive in 2026 thanks to memory drought - 'This is perhaps the biggest challenge the industry has faced since its inception' The next wave of smartphones and PCs will have less memory and fewer capabilities, yet are likely to cost consumers 14 percent more as AI ambitions eat all available memory supplies, according to researchers at IDC.…

Amazon and Nvidia open their wallets to lock in OpenAI's business while SoftBank keeps the lights on - ChatGPT maker announces $110B in new investment amid flurry of self-serving deals The headlines say OpenAI on Friday announced $110 billion in new investment from Amazon, Nvidia, and SoftBank at a $730 billion pre-money valuation, though terms and conditions apply.…

Suspected Nork digital intruders caught breaking into US healthcare, education orgs - Who is knocking at the Dohdoor? Digital intruders with possible links to North Korea have been infecting US education and healthcare sectors with a never-before-seen backdoor since at least December, according to security researchers.…

New Scientist - Home

NASA’s Artemis moon exploration programme is getting a major makeover - As it faces yet another set of delays, NASA’s Artemis programme is being shaken up, delaying an actual moon landing in favour of smaller, faster steps forward

Frailty can be eased with an infusion of stem cells from young people - Frailty can typically only be lessened through lifestyle changes, but a stem cell therapy seems to target the underlying causes of the condition, boosting the mobility of frail older people

Human brain cells on a chip learned to play Doom in a week - Neuron-powered computer chips can now be easily programmed to play a first-person shooter game, bringing biological computers a step closer to useful applications

Ocean geoengineering trial finds no evidence of harm to marine life - Pouring 65,000 litres of sodium hydroxide into the Gulf of Maine removed up to 10 tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere without harming wildlife, according to the researchers behind an ocean alkalinity enhancement test

How worried should you be about an asteroid smashing into Earth? - The dinosaurs were wiped out by an asteroid, but does that mean we risk suffering the same fate - and should you be worried about the possibility? Leah Crane sets the matter straight

Hacker News

We Will Not Be Divided - Comments

How do I cancel my ChatGPT subscription? - Comments

Croatia declared free of landmines after 31 years - Comments

Rust Is Just a Tool - Comments

Don't use passkeys for encrypting user data - Comments

Slashdot

Southern California Air Board Rejects Pollution Rules After AI-Generated Flood of Comments - Southern California's air quality board rejected proposed rules to phase out gas-powered appliances after receiving more than 20,000 opposition comments generated through CiviClick, "the first and best AI-powered grassroots advocacy platform." Phys.org reports: A Southern California-based public affairs consultant, Matt Klink, has taken credit for using CiviClick to wage the opposition campaign, including in a sponsored article on the website Campaigns and Elections. The campaign "left the staff of the Southern California Air Quality Management District (SCAQMD) reeling," the article says. It is not clear how AI was deployed in the campaign, and officials at CiviClick did not respond to repeated requests for comment. But their website boasts several tools, including "state of the art technology and artificial intelligence message assistance" that can be used to create custom advocacy letters, as opposed to repetitive form letters or petitions often used in similar campaigns. When staffers at the air district reached out to a small sample of people to verify their comments, at least three said they had not written to the agency and were not aware of any such messages, records show. But the email onslaught almost certainly influenced the board's June decision, according to agency insiders, who noted that the number of public comments typically submitted on agenda items can be counted on one hand. The proposed rules were nearly two years in the making and would have placed a fee on natural gas-powered water heaters and furnaces, favoring electric ones, in an effort to reduce air pollution in the district, which includes Orange County and large swaths of Los Angeles, Riverside and San Bernardino counties. Gas appliances emit nitrogen oxides, or NOx -- key pollutants for forming smog. The implications are troubling, experts said, and go beyond the use of natural gas furnaces and heaters in the second-largest metropolitan area in the country. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OpenAI Fires an Employee For Prediction Market Insider Trading - An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: OpenAI has fired an employee following an investigation into their activity on prediction market platforms including Polymarket, WIRED has learned. OpenAI CEO of Applications, Fidji Simo, disclosed the termination in an internal message to employees earlier this year. The employee, she said, "used confidential OpenAI information in connection with external prediction markets (e.g. Polymarket)." "Our policies prohibit employees from using confidential OpenAI information for personal gain, including in prediction markets," says spokesperson Kayla Wood. OpenAI has not revealed the name of the employee or the specifics of their trades. Evidence suggests that this was not an isolated event. Polymarket runs on the Polygon blockchain network, so its trading ledger is pseudonymous but traceable. According to an analysis by the financial data platform Unusual Whales, there have been clusters of activities, which the service flagged as suspicious, around OpenAI-themed events since March 2023. Unusual Whales flagged 77 positions in 60 wallet addresses as suspected insider trades, looking at the age of the account, trading history, and significance of investment, among other factors. Suspicious trades hinged on the release dates of products like Sora, GPT-5, and the ChatGPT Browser, as well as CEO Sam Altman's employment status. In November 2023, two days after Altman was dramatically ousted from the company, a new wallet placed a significant bet that he would return, netting over $16,000 in profits. The account never placed another bet. The behavior fits into patterns typical of insider trades. "The tell is the clustering. In the 40 hours before OpenAI launched its browser, 13 brand-new wallets with zero trading history appeared on the site for the first time to collectively bet $309,486 on the right outcome," says Unusual Whales CEO Matt Saincome. "When you see that many fresh wallets making the same bet at the same time, it raises a real question about whether the secret is getting out." [...] Though this is the first confirmed case of a large technology company firing an employee over trades in prediction markets, it's almost certainly not the last. Opportunities for tech sector employees to make trades on markets abound. "The data tells me this is happening all over the place," Saincome says. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Human Brain Cells On a Chip Learned To Play Doom In a Week - Researchers at Cortical Labs used living human neurons grown on a chip to learn how to play Doom in about a week. "While its performance is not up to par with humans, experts say it brings biological computers a step closer to useful real-world applications, like controlling robot arms," reports New Scientist. From the report: In 2021, the Australian company Cortical Labs used its neuron-powered computer chips to play Pong. The chips consisted of clumps of more than 800,000 living brain cells grown on top of microelectrode arrays that can both send and receive electrical signals. Researchers had to carefully train the chips to control the paddles on either side of the screen. Now, Cortical Labs has developed an interface that makes it easier to program these chips using the popular programming language Python. An independent developer, Sean Cole, then used Python to teach the chips to play Doom, which he did in around a week. "Unlike the Pong work that we did a few years ago, which represented years of painstaking scientific effort, this demonstration has been done in a matter of days by someone who previously had relatively little expertise working directly with biology," says Brett Kagan of Cortical Labs. "It's this accessibility and this flexibility that makes it truly exciting." The neuronal computer chip, which used about a quarter as many neurons as the Pong demonstration, played Doom better than a randomly firing player, but far below the performance of the best human players. However, it learnt much faster than traditional, silicon-based machine learning systems and should be able to improve its performance with newer learning algorithms, says Kagan. However, it's not useful to compare the chips with human brains, he says. "Yes, it's alive, and yes, it's biological, but really what it is being used as is a material that can process information in very special ways that we can't recreate in silicon." Cortical Labs posted a YouTube video showing its CL1 biological computer running Doom. There's also source code available on GitHub, with additional details in a README file. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hyperion Author Dan Simmons Dies From Stroke At 77 - Author Dan Simmons, best known for the epic sci-fi novel Hyperion and its sequels, has died at 77 following a stroke. Ars Technica's Eric Berger remembers Simmons, writing: Simmons, who worked in elementary education before becoming an author in the 1980s, produced a broad portfolio of writing that spanned several genres, including horror fiction, historical fiction, and science fiction. Often, his books included elements of all of these. This obituary will focus on what is generally considered his greatest work, and what I believe is possibly the greatest science fiction novel of all time, Hyperion. Published in 1989, Hyperion is set in a far-flung future in which human settlement spans hundreds of planets. The novel feels both familiar, in that its structure follows Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and utterly unfamiliar in its strange, far-flung setting. Simmons' Hyperion appeared in an Ask Slashdot story back in 2008, when Slashdot reader willyhill asked for tips on how Slashdotters track down great sci-fi. If you're in the mood for a little nostalgia, or just want to browse the thread for book recommendations, it's well worth revisiting. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CISA Replaces Bumbling Acting Director After a Year - New submitter DeanonymizedCoward shares a report from TechCrunch: The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is reportedly in crisis following major budget cuts, layoffs, and furloughs under the Trump administration, says TechCrunch. The agency has now replaced its acting director, Madhu Gottumukkala, after a turbulent year marked by controversy and internal turmoil. During his tenure, Gottumukkala allegedly mishandled sensitive information by uploading government documents to ChatGPT, oversaw a one-third reduction in staff, and reportedly failed a counterintelligence polygraph needed for classified access. His leadership also saw the suspension of several senior officials, including CISA's chief security officer. Nextgov also reported that CISA lost another top senior official, Bob Costello, the agency's chief information officer tasked with overseeing the agency's IT systems and data policies. "Last month, CISA's acting director Madhu Gottumukkala reportedly took steps to transfer Costello, but other political appointees blocked it," added Nextgov. Read more of this story at Slashdot.