Latest News
Last updated 12 Jan, 11:26 PM
BBC News
'They just kept killing': Eyewitnesses describe deadly crackdown in Iran - The BBC has received eyewitness accounts of security forces attacking anti-government protesters across the country.
Lyse Doucet: Iran's rulers face biggest challenge since 1979 revolution - The authorities are responding to protests with a ferocious security crackdown and near total internet shutdown.
UK to bring into force law to tackle Grok AI deepfakes this week - It is currently illegal to share deepfakes, but the law against creating them has not yet come into force.
Trump to meet Venezuelan opposition leader Machado at the White House - Machado, the winner of 2025 Nobel Peace Prize, had offered to share the honour with Trump, an award the president has long coveted.
Tories say Zahawi peerage request turned down before defection to Reform UK - Zahawi is the latest former Conservative MP to join Nigel Farage's party, as a Tory source claims he had approached Kemi Badenoch seeking a nomination for the Lords.
The Register
No fire sale for firewalls as memory shortages could push prices higher - In SEC filings, Fortinet and Palo Alto show shrinking product margins taking hold. PCs and datacenters aren't the only devices that need DRAM. The global memory shortage is roiling the cybersecurity market, with the cost of firewalls expected to balloon and hit both customers and vendors in the pocketbook in 2026, according to research analysts Wedbush.…
'Violence-as-a-service' suspect arrested in Iraq, extradition underway - Gang members 'systematically exploited children and young people,' cops say A 21-year-old Swedish man accused of being a key organizer of violence-as-a-service linked to the Foxtrot criminal network, which police say has recruited and exploited minors, has been arrested in Iraq.…
Zuck forms Meta Compute to pave the planet with 'hundreds of gigawatts' of AI datacenters - No wonder he's going nuclear Meta has formed a new initiative called “Meta Compute” to oversee the planning, deployment, and operations of its growing fleet of AI datacenters.…
Danish dev delights kid by turning floppy drive into easy TV remote - Just insert a disk and the TV starts playing three-year-old’s favorite shows Smart TV UIs are hard enough for adults to navigate, let alone preschoolers. When his three-year-old couldn't learn to navigate with a remote, one Danish computer scientist did what any enterprising creator would do: He turned an old floppy disk drive into a kid-friendly content controller that starts streams based on what disk you insert. …
Apple hopes to save Siri from laughingstock status with infusion of Google Gemini - Partnership between behemoths raises questions about OpenAI's place at the iTable It may finally be time to take AI on the iPhone siri-ously. Apple and Google on Monday announced a multi-year partnership that will see Apple Foundation Models standing on the shoulders of Google Gemini models, one that will return a small portion of the roughly $20 billion Google pays annually to be Apple's default search provider.…
New Scientist - Home
Pompeii’s public baths were unhygienic until the Romans took over - Before the Romans captured Pompeii, the famous town was run by the Samnite people – and a dip in their public baths might have been an unpleasant experience
Quantum computers could help sharpen images of exoplanets - Combining two kinds of quantum computing devices could be just the trick for taking better images of faint, faraway exoplanets
Our elegant universe: rethinking nature’s deepest principle - For centuries, the principle of symmetry has guided physicists towards more fundamental truths, but now a slew of shocking findings suggest a far stranger idea from quantum theory could be a deeper driving force
Is there an evolutionary reason for same-sex sexual behaviour? - Sexual behaviour among same-sex pairs is common in apes and monkeys, and a wide-ranging analysis suggests it does boost survival
We're about to simulate a human brain on a supercomputer - The world’s most powerful supercomputers can now run simulations of billions of neurons, and researchers hope such models will offer unprecedented insights into how our brains work
Hacker News
Cowork: Claude Code for the rest of your work - Comments
TimeCapsuleLLM: LLM trained only on data from 1800-1875 - Comments
Fabrice Bellard's TS Zip (2024) - Comments
The chess bot on Delta Air Lines will destroy you (2024) [video] - Comments
Postal Arbitrage - Comments
Slashdot
Meta Plans To Cut Around 10% of Employees In Reality Labs Division - Meta plans to cut roughly 10% of staff in its Reality Labs division, with layoffs hitting metaverse-focused teams hardest. Reuters reports: The cuts to Reality Labs, which has roughly 15,000 employees, could be announced as soon as Tuesday and are set to disproportionately affect those in the metaverse unit who work on virtual reality headsets and virtual social networks, the report said. [...] Meta Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth, who oversees Reality Labs, has called a meeting on Wednesday and has urged staff to attend in person, the NYT reported, citing a memo. [...] The metaverse had been a massive project spearheaded by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who prioritized and spent heavily on the venture, only for the business to burn more than $60 billion since 2020. [...] The report comes as the Facebook-parent scrambles to stay relevant in Silicon Valley's artificial intelligence race after its Llama 4 model met with a poor reception. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Supreme Court Takes Case That Could Strip FCC of Authority To Issue Fines - An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Supreme Court will hear a case that could invalidate the Federal Communications Commission's authority to issue fines against companies regulated by the FCC. AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile challenged the FCC's ability to punish them after the commission fined the carriers for selling customer location data without their users' consent. AT&T convinced the US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit to overturn its fine (PDF), while Verizon lost in the 2nd Circuit and T-Mobile lost in the District of Columbia Circuit. Verizon petitioned (PDF) the Supreme Court to reverse its loss, while the FCC and Justice Department petitioned (PDF) the court to overturn AT&T's victory in the 5th Circuit. The Supreme Court granted both petitions to hear the challenges and consolidated the cases in a list of orders (PDF) released Friday. Oral arguments will be held. In 2024, the FCC fined the big three carriers a total of $196 million for location data sales revealed in 2018, saying the companies were punished "for illegally sharing access to customers' location information without consent and without taking reasonable measures to protect that information against unauthorized disclosure." Carriers challenged in three appeals courts, arguing that the fines violated their Seventh Amendment right to a jury trial. [...] While the Supreme Court is only taking up the AT&T and Verizon cases, the T-Mobile case would be affected by whatever ruling the Supreme Court issues. T-Mobile is seeking a rehearing in the District of Columbia Circuit, an effort that could be boosted or rendered moot by whatever the Supreme Court decides. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
How Markdown Took Over the World - 22 years ago, developer and columnist John Gruber released Markdown, a simple plain-text formatting system designed to spare writers the headache of memorizing arcane HTML tags. As technologist Anil Dash writes in a long piece, Markdown has since embedded itself into nearly every corner of modern computing. Aaron Swartz, then seventeen years old, served as the beta tester before its quiet March 2004 debut. Google eventually added Markdown support to Docs after more than a decade of user requests; Microsoft put it in Notepad; Slack, WhatsApp, Discord, and Apple Notes all support it now. Dash writes: The part about not doing this stuff solely for money matters, because even the most advanced LLM systems today, what the big AI companies call their "frontier" models, require complex orchestration that's carefully scripted by people who've tuned their prompts for these systems through countless rounds of trial and error. They've iterated and tested and watched for the results as these systems hallucinated or failed or ran amok, chewing up countless resources along the way. And sometimes, they generated genuinely astonishing outputs, things that are truly amazing to consider that modern technology can achieve. The rate of progress and evolution, even factoring in the mind-boggling amounts of investment that are going into these systems, is rivaled only by the initial development of the personal computer or the Internet, or the early space race. And all of it -- all of it -- is controlled through Markdown files. When you see the brilliant work shown off from somebody who's bragging about what they made ChatGPT generate for them, or someone is understandably proud about the code that they got Claude to create, all of the most advanced work has been prompted in Markdown. Though where the logic of Markdown was originally a very simple version of "use human language to tell the machine what to do", the implications have gotten far more dire when they use a format designed to help expresss "make this **bold**" to tell the computer itself "make this imaginary girlfriend more compliant". Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Microsoft Pulls the Plug On Its Free, Two-Decade-Old Windows Deployment Toolkit - Microsoft has abruptly retired the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit, a free platform that IT administrators have relied on to deploy Windows operating systems and applications for more than two decades. The retirement, reports the Register, came with "immediate" notice, meaning no more fixes, support, security patches, or updates, and the download packages may be removed from official distribution channels. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Norway Reaches 97% EV Sales as EVs Now Outnumber Diesels On Its Roads - Norway has released its December and full year 2025 automotive sales numbers and the world's leading EV haven has broken records once again. The country had previously targeted an end to fossil car sales in 2025, and it basically got there. From a report: In 2017, Norway set a formal non-binding target to end fossil car sales in the country by 2025 -- a target earlier than any other country in the world by several years. Norway was already well ahead of the world in EV adoption, with about a third of new cars being electric at the time -- but it wanted to schedule the final blow for just 8 years later, fairly short as far as automotive timelines go. At the time, many (though not us at Electrek) considered this to be an optimistic goal, and figured that it might get pushed back. But Norway did not budge in its target (unlike more cowardly nations). And it turns out, when you set a realistic goal, craft policy around it, and don't act all wishy-washy or change your mind every few years, you can actually get things done. (In fact, Europe currently has around the same EV sales level as Norway did 10 years ahead of its 100% goal -- which means Europe's former 100% 2035 goal is still eminently achievable) Read more of this story at Slashdot.