Latest News

Last updated 03 Mar, 11:25 PM

BBC News

Trump says Starmer is 'no Winston Churchill' over Iran strikes - Sir Keir Starmer had refused to grant the US permission to use the Diego Garcia military base.

Funerals held for students and staff after Iran school strike - Iranian authorities say they were killed in a US-Israeli strike in the city of Minab on Saturday.

UK to send Royal Navy warship HMS Dragon to Cyprus - The prime minister said the "UK is fully committed to the security of Cyprus and British military personnel based" on RAF Akrotiri.

Fears over food shortages in Tehran as residents worry about length of war - Locals tell BBC Persian they are worried about the availability of groceries and price increases as strikes continue to hit the capital.

We need more updates, say British nationals stuck in Middle East - Air travel in the Middle East has been severely disrupted since Saturday, with thousands of flights cancelled.

The Register

Nvidia-backed photonics startup Ayar Labs fills its wallet to mass-produce CPO chiplets - Company aims to stitch tens of thousands of GPUs together for more efficient training and inference It's a good time to be an AI chip startup, especially if you happen to specialize in silicon photonics.…

Dev stunned by $82K Gemini bill after unknown API key thief goes to town - Probably not an isolated incident only as researchers have already found 2,863 live API keys exposed A developer says their company is on the hook for more than $82,000 in unauthorized charges after a stolen Google Gemini API key racked massive usage costs up in just 48 hours.…

Facebook is down, interrupting your poking and Meta's ads business - Go outside and smell some flowers Meta’s flagship service, Facebook, is experiencing an outage.…

MIT boffins aim to build injectable mini-organs that can fill in for a damaged liver - Injected liver cells stayed viable and functional for eight weeks in mice Can’t keep waiting on the transplant list? How about an injectable “satellite liver” instead? After an MIT research project showed early success, the idea of a mini organ that could be injected into the body to take over for a failing liver doesn’t sound so far-fetched.…

Chat at your own risk! Data brokers are selling deeply personal bot transcripts - AI conversations for sale include sensitive health and legal details Your latest chat transcript could be bought and sold. Data brokers are selling access to sensitive personal data captured during chatbot conversations, despite claims that the data is anonymized and obtained with consent.…

New Scientist - Home

Phantom codes could help quantum computers avoid errors - A method for making quantum computers less error-prone could let them run complex programs such as simulations of materials more efficiently, thus making them more useful

Selfish Y chromosome may explain why some families mostly have sons - A family in Utah with a disproportionate number of boys has been traced back over hundreds of years, revealing that its lack of female members is probably due to a selfish Y chromosome

The real reasons birth rates are declining worldwide - From the cost of childcare to the housing crisis, there’s no shortage of explanations for the dramatic global fall in the number of babies being born. These analyses, though, are all missing something, says cognitive and evolutionary anthropologist Paula Sheppard

Your microbiome may determine your risk of a severe allergic reaction - The microbes that live in our mouth and gut may influence whether an allergic reaction to peanuts is mild or life-threatening, and could be harnessed to ward off a severe attack

Why the US is using a cheap Iranian drone against the country itself - The US and Iran are trading blows in the Gulf with a simple drone that costs as little as $50,000 to make. But why is a slow, cheap and relatively primitive drone seeing use in 2026 alongside hypersonic missiles and stealth jets?

Hacker News

Don't Make Me Talk to Your Chatbot - Comments

MacBook Pro with new M5 Pro and M5 Max - Comments

Intel's make-or-break 18A process node debuts for data center with 288-core Xeon - Comments

GPT‑5.3 Instant - Comments

Textadept - Comments

Slashdot

Google Chrome Is Switching To a Two-Week Release Cycle - Google is accelerating Chrome's major release cadence from four weeks to two starting with version 153 on September 8th. "...our goal is to ensure developers and users have immediate access to the latest performance improvements, fixes and new capabilities," says Google. "Building on our history of adapting our release process to match the demands of a modern web, Chrome is moving to a two-week release cycle." The company says the "smaller scope" of these releases "minimizes disruption and simplifies post-release debugging." They also cite "recent process enhancements" that will "maintain [Chrome's] high standards for stability." 9to5Google reports: There will still be weekly security updates between milestones. This applies to desktop, Android, and iOS, while there are "no changes to the Dev and the Canary channels": "A Chrome Beta for each version will ship three weeks before the stable release. We recommend developers test with the beta to keep up to date with any upcoming changes that might impact your sites and applications." The eight-week Extended Stable release schedule for enterprise customers and Chromium embedders will not change. Chromebooks will also have "extended release options": "Our priority is a seamless experience, so the latest Chrome releases will roll out to Chromebooks after dedicated platform testing. We are adapting these channels for the new two-week browser cycle and we will share more details soon regarding milestone updates for managed devices." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

LibreOffice Says Its UI Is Way Better Than Microsoft Office's - darwinmac writes: While many users choose Microsoft Office over LibreOffice because of its support for the proprietary formats (.docx, .xlsx, and .pptx), others prefer Office for its "better" ribbon interface. These users often criticize LibreOffice for having a "clunky" UI instead of the "standard" ribbon interface you would find in Word, Excel, and other Office apps. Now, Neowin reports that LibreOffice is fighting back, arguing that its UI is actually superior because it is customizable, with several modes such as the classic toolbar interface, an Office-inspired ribbon layout, a sidebar-focused design, and more. Furthermore, it argues that there is no evidence that the ribbon offers "superior usability" over other interface modes. LibreOffice says in a blog post: Incidentally, the characterization of ribbon-style interfaces as "modern" or "standard," used by several users, is not based on any objective usability parameter or design principle, but is the result of Microsoft's dominance in the market and the huge investments made when the ribbon was introduced in Office 2007 as a new paradigm for productivity software. The idea that "modern" equals "similar to a ribbon" is a normalization effect: the Microsoft interface has become a benchmark because of its ubiquity, not because of its proven advantages in terms of usability. Added to this is the fact that many users evaluate office software through the lens of familiarity with Microsoft Office and consider deviation from it as a problem rather than a design choice. Before this, LibreOffice had also criticized its competitor OnlyOffice, accusing it of being "fake open source" because it believes OnlyOffice is working with Microsoft to lock users into the Office ecosystem by prioritizing the formats mentioned earlier instead of LibreOffice's own OpenDocument Format (ODF). Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Meta's AI Display Glasses Reportedly Share Intimate Videos With Human Moderators - An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: Users of Meta's AI smart glasses in Europe may be unknowingly sharing intimate video and sensitive financial information with moderators outside of the bloc, according to a report from Sweden's Svenska Dagbladet released last week. Employees in Kenya doing AI "annotation" told the journalists that they've seen people nude, using the toilet and engaging in sexual activity, along with credit card numbers and other sensitive information. With Meta's Ray-Ban Display and other glasses with AI capabilities, users can record what they're looking at or get answers to questions via a Meta AI assistant. If a wearer wants to make use of that AI, though, they must agree to Meta's terms of service that allow any data captured to be reviewed by humans. That's because Meta's large language models (LLMs) often require people to annotate visual data so that the AI can understand it and build its training models. This data can end up in places like Nairobi, Kenya, often moderated by underpaid workers. Such actions are subject to Europe's GDPR rules that require transparency about how personal data is processed, according to a data protection lawyer cited in the report. However, Svenska Dagbladet's reporters said they needed to jump through some hoops to see Meta's privacy policy for its wearable products. That policy states that either humans or automated systems may review sensitive data, and puts the onus on the user to not share sensitive information. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OpenAI Amends Pentagon Deal As Sam Altman Admits It Looks 'Sloppy' - OpenAI is amending its Pentagon contract after CEO Sam Altman acknowledged it appeared "opportunistic and sloppy." On Monday night, Altman said the company would explicitly restrict its technology from being used by intelligence agencies and for mass domestic surveillance. The Guardian reports: OpenAI, which has more than 900 million users of ChatGPT, made the deal almost immediately after the Pentagon's existing AI contractor, Anthropic, was dropped. [...] The deal prompted an online backlash against OpenAI, with users of X and Reddit encouraging a "delete ChatGPT" campaign. One post read: "You're now training a war machine. Let's see proof of cancellation." In a message to employees reposted on X, the OpenAI CEO said the original deal announced on Friday had been struck too quickly after Anthropic was dropped. "We shouldn't have rushed to get this out on Friday," Altman wrote. "The issues are super complex, and demand clear communication. We were genuinely trying to de-escalate things and avoid a much worse outcome, but I think it just looked opportunistic and sloppy." Upon announcing the deal, OpenAI had said the contract had "more guardrails than any previous agreement for classified AI deployments, including Anthropic's." [...] However, observers including OpenAI's former head of policy research, Miles Brundage, have queried how OpenAI has managed to secure a deal that assuages ethical concerns Anthropic believed were insurmountable. Posting on X, he wrote: "OpenAI employees' default assumption here should unfortunately be that OpenAI caved + framed it as not caving, and screwed Anthropic while framing it as helping them." Brundage added: "To be clear, OAI is a complex org, and I think many people involved in this worked hard for what they consider a fair outcome. Some others I do not trust at all, particularly as it relates to dealings with government and politics." In his X post, he also wrote that he would "rather go to jail" than follow an unconstitutional order from the government. "We want to work through democratic processes," Brundage wrote. "It should be the government making the key decisions about society. We want to have a voice, and a seat at the table where we can share our expertise, and to fight for principles of liberty." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Accenture Acquires Ookla, Downdetector As Part of $1.2 Billion Deal - Accenture is acquiring Downdetector parent company Ookla from Ziff Davis in a $1.2 billion deal to bolster its network analytics and visibility tools for telecoms, hyperscalers, and enterprises. "The deal, which will transfer all of Ziff Davis's Connectivity division to Accenture, includes Ookla's Speedtest, Ekahau, and RootMetrics," notes The Register reports: "Modern networks have evolved from simple infrastructure into business-critical platforms," said Accenture CEO Julie Sweet in a canned statement. "Without the ability to measure performance, organizations cannot optimize experience, revenue, or security." Ookla is meant to let them do just that. Data captured at the network and device layer are used to enhance fraud prevention in banking, smart homes monitoring, and traffic optimization in retail, Accenture said. Ookla's platform, which lets user's test their own connectivity speed, captures more than 1,000 attributes per test, and provides the foundation for those analytics, Accenture said. Read more of this story at Slashdot.