Latest News

Last updated 18 Nov, 12:57 AM

BBC News

Mahmood defends overhaul of 'out of control' asylum system - Under the plans, refugee status will become temporary and new capped "safe and legal routes" into the UK will be created.

Unprecedented plan for asylum system sees government walk tightrope - Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood's plan is unprecedented and marks an enormous change in policy, writes Dominic Casciani.

Trump's plan for Gaza backed by UN Security Council - Included in the 20-point peace plan is the establishment of an International Stabilisation Force (ISF), which would work to demilitarise the territory.

Shelters plea for Gazans as winter rains raise fears of more disease and death - Displaced Palestinians face life-threatening conditions, as aid agencies appeal for more shelters to be allowed in.

Reselling tickets above face value set to be banned by government - Ministers are expected to announce the plan to tackle touts and resale sites offering tickets at several times face value.

The Register

Oops. VMware admits it over-specced storage servers for years - VCF users wrestling with bill shock may get a little relief VMware has admitted that its guidance about the hardware needed to run its vSAN virtual storage arrays has been wrong for years.…

Scientific computing is about to get a massive injection of AI - Nvidia's Ian Buck on the importance of FP64 to power research, in a world that's hot for inferencing Interview Scientific computing is about to undergo a period of rapid change as workloads inject AI.…

'Largest-ever' cloud DDoS attack pummels Azure with 3.64B packets per second - Aisuru botnet strikes again, bigger and badder Azure was hit by the "largest-ever" cloud-based distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, originating from the Aisuru botnet and measuring 15.72 terabits per second (Tbps), according to Microsoft.…

Pentagon and soldiers let too many secrets slip on social networks, watchdog says - Ready, aim, mire Loose lips sink ships, the classic line goes. Information proliferation in the internet age has government auditors reiterating that loose tweets can sink fleets, and they're concerned that the Defense Department isn't doing enough to stop sensitive info from getting out there. …

AI is actually bad at math, ORCA shows - ORCA benchmark trips up ChatGPT-5, Gemini 2.5 Flash, Claude Sonnet 4.5, Grok 4, and DeepSeek V3.2 In the world of George Orwell's 1984, two and two make five. And large language models are not much better at math.…

New Scientist - Home

Ancient figurine may show sexual encounter between woman and goose - A 12,000-year-old clay sculpture found in Israel depicts a goose on the back of a woman, and archaeologists suggest it may be a depiction of an animistic mythological scene

Neanderthals' hefty noses weren’t well adapted to cold climates - Neanderthals were thought to have structures inside their noses that helped them deal with the cold, but analysis of an exceptionally preserved specimen contradicts that

Parasitic ant tricks workers into killing their queen, then usurps her - Some ants kill the queens of another species and take over their colonies, but we now know at least one species gets workers to do the dirty work for them through a kind of chemical subterfuge

The vital, overlooked role of body fat in shaping your health and mind - The discovery that fat is a communicative organ with a role in everything from bone health to mood is forcing a rethink of how we view our bodies

Rapid melt from Antarctica could help preserve crucial ocean current - Greenland’s melt is expected to slow the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, but research suggests a collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet could in some cases prevent it from shutting down

Hacker News

Compiling Ruby to machine language - Comments

Show HN: I built a synth for my daughter - Comments

Azure hit by 15 Tbps DDoS attack using 500k IP addresses - Comments

“One Student One Chip” Course Homepage - Comments

Run ancient Unix on modern hardware - Comments

Slashdot

Google Is Collecting Troves of Data From Downgraded Nest Thermostats - Even after disabling remote control and officially ending support for early Nest Learning Thermostats, Google is still receiving detailed sensor and activity data from these devices, including temperature changes, motion, and ambient light. The Verge reports: After digging into the backend, security researcher Cody Kociemba found that the first- and second-generation Nest Learning Thermostats are still sending Google information about manual temperature changes, whether a person is present in the room, if sunlight is hitting the device, and more. Kociemba made the discovery while participating in a bounty program created by FULU, a right-to-repair advocacy organization cofounded by electronics repair technician and YouTuber Louis Rossmann. FULU challenged developers to come up with a solution to restore smart functionality to Nest devices no longer supported by Google, and that's exactly what Kociemba did with his open-source No Longer Evil project. But after cloning Google's API to create this custom software, he started receiving a trove of logs from customer devices, which he turned off. "On these devices, while they [Google] turned off access to remotely control them, they did leave in the ability for the devices to upload logs. And the logs are pretty extensive," Kociemba tells The Verge. [...] "I was under the impression that the Google connection would be severed along with the remote functionality, however that connection is not severed, and instead is a one-way street," Kociemba says. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft Mitigated the Largest Cloud DDoS Ever Recorded, 15.7 Tbps - An anonymous reader quotes a report from Security Affairs: On October 24, 2025, Azure DDoS Protection detected and mitigated a massive multi-vector attack peaking at 15.72 Tbps and 3.64 billion pps, the largest cloud DDoS ever recorded, aimed at a single Australian endpoint. Azure's global protection network filtered the traffic, keeping services online. The attack came from the Aisuru botnet, a Turbo Mirai-class IoT botnet using compromised home routers and cameras. The attack used massive UDP floods from more than 500,000 IPs hitting a single public address, with little spoofing and random source ports that made traceback easier. It highlights how attackers are scaling with the internet: faster home fiber and increasingly powerful IoT devices keep pushing DDoS attack sizes higher. "On October 24, 2025, Azure DDOS Protection automatically detected and mitigated a multi-vector DDoS attack measuring 15.72 Tbps and nearly 3.64 billion packets per second (pps). This was the largest DDoS attack ever observed in the cloud and it targeted a single endpoint in Australia," reads a report published by Microsoft. "The attack originated from Aisuru botnet." "Attackers are scaling with the internet itself. As fiber-to-the-home speeds rise and IoT devices get more powerful, the baseline for attack size keeps climbing," concludes the post. "As we approach the upcoming holiday season, it is essential to confirm that all internet-facing applications and workloads are adequately protected against DDOS attacks." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An AI Podcasting Machine Is Churning Out 3,000 Episodes a Week - fjo3 shares a report from TheWrap: There are already at least 175,000 AI-generated podcast episodes on platforms like Spotify and Apple. That's thanks to Inception Point AI, a startup with just eight employees cranking out 3,000 episodes a week covering everything from localized weather reports and pollen trackers to a detailed account of Charlie Kirk's assassination and its cultural impact, to a biography series on Anna Wintour. Its podcasting network Quiet Please has generated 12 million lifetime episode downloads and amassed 400,000 subscribers -- so, yes, people are really listening to AI podcasts. Inception Point CEO Jeanine Wright believes the tool is proof that automation can make podcasting scalable, profitable and accessible without human writers, editors or hosts. "The price is now so inexpensive that you can take a lot of risks,â Wright told TheWrap. âoeYou can make a lot of content and a lot of different genres that were never commercially viable before and serve huge audiences that have really never had content made for them." At a cost of $1 an episode, Wright takes a quantity-over-quality approach. "I think very quickly we get to a place where AI is a default way that content is made, not just across audio, but across television and film and commercials and imagery, and everything. And then we will disclose when things are not made with AI instead of that they were made with AI," Wright said. "But for now, we are perfectly happy leading the way." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NetChoice Sues Virginia To Block Its One-Hour Social Media Limit For Kids - NetChoice is suing Virginia to block a new law that limits kids under 16 to one hour of daily social media use unless parents approve more time, arguing the rule violates the First Amendment and introduces serious privacy risks through mandatory age-verification. The Verge reports: In addition to restricting access to legal speech, NetChoice alleges that Virginia's incoming law (SB 854) will require platforms to verify user ages in ways that would pose privacy and security risks. The law requires platforms to use "commercially reasonable methods," which it says include a screen that prompts the user to enter a birth date. However, NetChoice argues that Virginia could go beyond this requirement, citing a post from Governor Youngkin on X, stating "platforms must verify age," potentially referring to stricter methods, like having users submit a government ID or other personal information. NetChoice, which is backed by tech giants like Meta, Google, Amazon, Reddit, and Discord, alleges that the law puts a burden on minors' ability to engage or consume speech online. "The First Amendment prohibits the government from placing these types of restrictions on accessing lawful and valuable speech, just in the same way that the government can't tell you how long you could spend reading a book, watching a television program, or consuming a documentary," Paul Taske, the co-director of the Netchoice Litigation Center, tells The Verge. "Virginia must leave the parenting decisions where they belong: with parents," Taske says. "By asserting that authority for itself, Virginia not only violates its citizens' rights to free speech but also exposes them to increased risk of privacy and security breaches." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tech Giants' Cloud Power Probed As EU Weighs Inclusion In DMA - An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Amazon Web Services, Microsoft's Azure, and Alphabet's Google Cloud risk being dragged into the scope of the European Union's crackdown on Big Tech as antitrust watchdogs prepare to study the platforms' market power. The European Commission wants to decide if any of the trio should face a raft of new restrictions under the bloc's Digital Markets Act (source paywalled; alternative source), according to people familiar with the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity. The plan for a market probe follows several major outages in the cloud industry that wrought havoc across global services, highlighting the risks of relying on a mere handful of players. To date, the world's largest cloud providers have avoided the DMA because a large part of their business comes via enterprise contracts, making it difficult to count the number of individual users, one of the EU's main benchmarks for earmarking Silicon Valley services for extra oversight. Under the investigation's remit, regulators will asses whether the top cloud operators -- regardless of the challenge of counting user numbers -- should be forced to contend with a raft of fresh obligations including increased interoperability with rival software and better data portability for users, as well as restrictions on tying and bundling. Read more of this story at Slashdot.