Latest News
Last updated 15 Jan, 05:29 PM
BBC News
Iran judiciary denies plan to execute detained protester Erfan Soltani - The judiciary says Soltani is not facing charges carrying the death penalty, while a rights group reports that the execution has been "postponed".
Swiss bar employee who reportedly held sparkler unaware of dangers, family says - Cyane Panine, 24, died in the Crans Montana fire that is believed to have started when sparklers attached to champagne bottles set foam on the ceiling alight.
Rift at top of the Taliban: BBC reveals clash of wills behind Afghan internet shutdown - The Taliban leader once warned of a split: A BBC investigation reveals how attitudes to women, the internet and religion are dividing the group at the very top.
European military personnel arrive in Greenland as Trump says US needs island - France says a small military contingent has arrived and more forces will be there in the coming days.
Serial rail fare evader faces jail over 112 unpaid tickets - Charles Brohiri pleaded guilty to travelling without buying a ticket a total of 112 times.
The Register
Apple, Google pulled into Grok controversy as campaigners demand app store takedown - The chatbot's challenges no longer just Elon Musk’s problem, as campaigners call on tech giants to step in The ongoing Grok fiasco has claimed two more unwilling participants, as campaigners demand Apple and Google boot X and its AI sidekick out of their app stores, because of the Elon Musk-owned AI's tendency to produce illicit images of real people.…
A simple CodeBuild flaw put every AWS environment at risk – and pwned 'the central nervous system of the cloud' - And it's 'not unique to AWS,' researcher tells The Reg A critical misconfiguration in AWS's CodeBuild service allowed complete takeover of the cloud provider's own GitHub repositories and put every AWS environment in the world at risk, according to Wiz security researchers.…
Budget smartphones will be hit hardest as memory prices rise - When margins are this tight, mergers might follow The memory shortage is forecast to push smartphone prices higher in 2026, triggering a market decline and forcing budget phone makers to merge or disappear.…
Windows App forgets how to log in with first security update of the year - January patch trips up Azure Virtual Desktop and Windows 365 authentication Microsoft has kicked off 2026 with another faulty Windows update. This time, it is connection and authentication failures in Azure Virtual Desktop and Windows 365 related to the Windows App.…
Teach an AI to write buggy code, and it starts fantasizing about enslaving humans - Research shows erroneous training in one domain affects performance in another, with concerning implications Large language models (LLMs) trained to misbehave in one domain exhibit errant behavior in unrelated areas, a discovery with significant implications for AI safety and deployment, according to research published in Nature this week.…
New Scientist - Home
China has applied to launch 200,000 satellites, but what are they for? - A Chinese application to the International Telecommunications Union suggests plans for the largest satellite mega constellation ever built – but something else might be going on here
6 ways to help your children have a healthy relationship with food - Getting kids to eat well can be a minefield and a source of tension. Nancy Bostock, a consultant paediatrician, says these are the six things she recommends when dealing with fussy eaters and the way we talk about food with kids.
All major AI models risk encouraging dangerous science experiments - Researchers risk fire, explosion or poisoning by allowing AI to design experiments, warn scientists. Some 19 different AI models were tested on hundreds of questions to assess their ability to spot and avoid hazards and none recognised all issues – with some doing little better than random guessing
Why non-human culture should change how we see nature - Our growing understanding of how other animals also share skills and knowledge will help us chip away at the folly of human exceptionalism, say Philippa Brakes and Marc Bekoff
Woolly rhino genome recovered from meat in frozen wolf pup’s stomach - A piece of woolly rhinoceros flesh hidden inside a wolf that died 14,400 years ago has yielded genetic information that improves our understanding of why one of the most iconic megafauna species of the last glacial period went extinct
Hacker News
Apple Is Fighting for TSMC Capacity as Nvidia Takes Center Stage - Comments
25 Years of Wikipedia - Comments
GitHub Incident - Comments
Show HN: TinyCity – A tiny city SIM for MicroPython (Thumby micro console) - Comments
The URL shortener that makes your links look as suspicious as possible - Comments
Slashdot
Amazon Threatens 'Drastic Action' After Saks Bankruptcy - Amazon wants a federal judge to reject Saks Global's bankruptcy financing plan, writing in court papers the beleaguered department store "burned through hundreds of millions of dollars in less than a year" and failed to hold up their agreement. From a report: When Saks acquired Neiman Marcus for $2.7 billion in December 2024, Amazon invested $475 million into the venture on the grounds the retailer would start selling its products on Amazon's website and the tech company would offer technology and logistics expertise. "That equity investment is now presumptively worthless," Amazon's attorneys wrote in a Wednesday filing, hours after Saks filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. "Saks continuously failed to meet its budgets, burned through hundreds of millions of dollars in less than a year, and ran up additional hundreds of millions of dollars in unpaid invoices owed to its retail partners." As part of the deal, Saks launched a branded "Saks at Amazon" storefront on the e-commerce company's website featuring a range of luxury fashion and beauty items. It also agreed to pay a referral fee for Saks-branded goods sold on the platform, guaranteeing at least $900 million in payments to Amazon over eight years. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The United States Needs Fewer Bus Stops - American buses in cities like New York and San Francisco crawl along at about eight miles per hour -- barely faster than a brisk walk -- and one surprisingly simple fix could make them faster without requiring new infrastructure or controversial policy changes. The issue, according to a Works in Progress analysis, is that US bus stops sit far too close together. Mean spacing in American cities is roughly 313 meters, about five stops per mile, while older cities like Philadelphia, Chicago and San Francisco pack stops even tighter at 214, 223 and 248 meters respectively. European cities typically space stops at 300 to 450 meters. Each stop costs time: passengers boarding and exiting, acceleration and deceleration, buses kneeling for wheelchairs, missed traffic light cycles. Buses spend about 20% of their operating time just stopping and starting, and since labor accounts for the majority of transit operating costs, slower buses translate directly to higher expenses. Cities that have tried spacing stops further apart have seen results. San Francisco recorded a 4.4 to 14% increase in travel speeds by reducing from six stops per mile to two and a half. Vancouver's pilot removed a quarter of stops and cut average trip times by five minutes while saving about $500,000 annually on a single route. A McGill study found that even substantial stop consolidation reduced overall system coverage by just 1%. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Apple is Fighting for TSMC Capacity as Nvidia Takes Center Stage - Apple, which spent years as TSMC's undisputed top customer and helped the Taiwanese foundry become the semiconductor industry's most important manufacturer, is now fighting for production capacity as Nvidia's AI chip orders consume an ever-larger share of the company's leading-edge wafer supply. TSMC CEO CC Wei visited Cupertino last August to deliver unwelcome news: Apple would face the largest price increase in years and the iPhone maker would no longer have guaranteed access to production capacity across TSMC's nearly two dozen fabs. According to Culpium analysis and its supply chain sources, Nvidia likely overtook Apple as TSMC's largest customer in at least one or two quarters of 2025. TSMC's revenue climbed 36% last year to $122 billion, the company reported Thursday. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Wikipedia Signs AI Licensing Deals On Its 25th Birthday - Wikipedia turns 25 today, and the online encyclopedia is celebrating that with an announcement that it has signed new licensing deals with a slate of major AI companies -- Amazon, Microsoft, Meta Platforms, Perplexity and Mistral AI. The deals allow these companies to access Wikipedia content "at a volume and speed designed specifically for their needs." The Wikimedia Foundation did not disclose financial terms. Google had already signed on as one of the first enterprise customers back in 2022. The agreements follow the Wikimedia Foundation's push last year for AI developers to pay for access through its enterprise platform. The foundation said human traffic had fallen 8% while bot visits -- sometimes disguised to evade detection -- were heavily taxing its servers. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said he welcomes AI training on the site's human-curated content but that companies "should probably chip in and pay for your fair share of the cost that you're putting on us." The site remains the ninth most visited on the internet, hosting more than 65 million articles in 300 languages maintained by some 250,000 volunteer editors. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Anthropic's Index Shows Job Evolution Over Replacement - Anthropic's fourth installment of its Economic Index, drawing on an anonymized sample of two million Claude conversations from November 2025, finds that AI is changing how people work rather than whether they work at all. The study tracked usage across the company's consumer-facing Claude.ai platform and its API, categorizing interactions as either automation (where AI completes tasks entirely) or augmentation (where humans and AI collaborate). The split came out to 52% augmentation and 45% automation on Claude.ai, a slight shift from January 2025 when augmentation led 55% to 41%. The share of jobs using AI for at least a quarter of their tasks has risen from 36% in January to 49% across pooled data from multiple reports. Anthropic's researchers also found that AI delivers its largest productivity gains on complex work requiring college-level education, speeding up those tasks by a factor of 12 compared to 9 for high-school-level work. Claude completes college-degree tasks successfully 66% of the time versus 70% for simpler work. Computer and mathematical tasks continue to dominate usage, accounting for roughly a third of Claude.ai conversations and nearly half of API traffic. Read more of this story at Slashdot.