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Last updated 11 May, 06:43 PM

BBC News

Analysis: Has Starmer done enough to save his premiership? - Was the prime minister's speech enough to avert a challenge to his leadership less than two years after he won a landslide general election victory?

British passengers from hantavirus-hit cruise ship isolating in hospital - The passengers landed in the UK on Sunday and none have reported symptoms, but they will will be monitored in hospital for 72 hours.

Watch: Macron interrupts speaker to tell audience to be quiet - The French president stood up during a conference in Kenya to tell the audience to quieten down, saying it was “impossible” for speakers to be heard.

Pupils hopeless and crying after 'poorly worded' Higher Maths exam - More than 11,000 people have signed a petition calling for a review of the exam saying it was "totally unrecognisable" from what they had prepared for.

Trump says Iran ceasefire is on 'massive life support' - The US president criticises an Iranian counteroffer to end the war, and says the month-long ceasefire is "unbelievably weak".

www.theregister.com - Articles

Debian 14 cracks down on unreproducible packages - Dull but important … so, a bit like Debian itself, really

Anthropic’s bug-hunting Mythos was greatest marketing stunt ever, says cURL creator - After all that hype, AI scanner found one low-severity cURL flaw

Gtk2-NG, next generation of Gtk 2, comes back to life - Debian 14 plans to ax Gtk2 – and hard pruning stimulates fresh growth

BWH Hotels guests warned after reservation data checks out with cybercrooks - Customers urged to keep an eye out for phisherfolk

Feature freeze for Python 3.15 as first beta released - JIT compiler much improved, but no reinstatement for leaky incremental garbage collector

New Scientist - Home

Huge study of ancient British DNA reveals only minor Roman influence - Genetic analysis of 1039 people buried in Britain between the Bronze Age and the Norman conquest highlights the impact of the Romans, Anglo-Saxons and Vikings on the island’s ancestry

David Attenborough is one of a kind, for better or worse - People often ask who might replace the nature broadcaster, who turns 100 this week. The truth is that he’s irreplaceable, but a wide range of voices are attempting to fill his shoes.

Red-light therapy does have health benefits but not the ones you think - Red-light therapy promises to treat everything from acne and hair loss to depression and chronic pain. Many of these claims are overhyped, but evidence suggests it can have healing powers

Tiny 'metajets' could use light to steer sails for interstellar travel - Minuscule silicon wafers propelled by lasers could be used to steer light sails, helping them travel beyond the solar system

The 50-year quest to create a quantum spin liquid may finally be over - Creating quantum entanglement inside a solid material is tricky in the lab – but crystals buried in the earth could be growing it naturally. Now one scientist says he has proof he’s found them

Hacker News

CUDA-oxide: Nvidia's official Rust to CUDA compiler - Comments

Nullsoft, 1997-2004 (2004) - Comments

Can Someone Please Explain Whether Cloudflare Blackmailed Canonical? - Comments

Ratty – A terminal emulator with inline 3D graphics - Comments

Show HN: TikTok but for Scientific Papers - Comments

Slashdot

Students Boo Commencement Speaker After She Calls AI the 'Next Industrial Revolution' - An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Speaking to graduates of University of Central Florida's College of Arts and Humanities and Nicholson School of Communication and Media on May 8, commencement speaker Gloria Caulfield, vice president of strategic alliances at Tavistock Group, told graduating humanities students that AI is the "next industrial revolution," and was met with thousands of booing graduates. "And let's face it, change can be daunting. The rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution," Caulfield said. At that point, murmurs rippled through the crowd. Caulfield paused, and the crowd erupted into boos. "Oh, what happened?" Caulfield said, turning around with her hands out. "Okay, I struck a chord. May I finish?" Someone in the crowd yelled, "AI SUCKS!" Her speech begins around the hour and 15 minute mark in the UCF livestream. [...] Before the industrial revolution comment, Caulfield praised Jeff Bezos for his passion and use of Amazon as a "stepping stone" to his real dream: spaceflight. Rattled after the crowd's reaction, she continued her speech: "Only a few years ago, AI was not a factor in our lives." The crowd cheered. "Okay. We've got a bipolar topic here I see," Caulfield said. "And now AI capabilities are in the palm of our hands." The crowd booed again. "I love it, passion, let's go," she said. "AI is beginning to challenge all major sectors to find their highest and best use," she continued. "Okay, I don't want any giggles when I say this. We have been through this before, these industrial revolutions. In my graduation era, we were faced with the launch of the internet." She goes on to talk about how cellphones used to be the size of briefcases. "At that time we had no idea how any of these technologies would impact the world and our lives. [...] These were some of the same trepidations and concerns we are now facing. But ultimately it was a game changer for global economic development and the proliferation of new businesses that never existed like Apple and Google and Meta and so many others, and not to mention countless job opportunities. So being an optimist here, AI alongside human intelligence has the potential to help us solve some of humanity's greatest problems. Many of you in this graduating class will play a role in making this happen." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google Says Hackers Used AI To Create Zero Day Security Flaw For the First Time - Google says it has seen the first evidence of cybercriminals using AI to create a zero-day vulnerability. "Google reported its findings to the unnamed firm affected by the vulnerability before releasing its report," reports Politico. "The company then issued a patch to fix the issue." From the report: Google Threat Intelligence Group researchers detailed the development in a report released Monday. Zero-day exploits are considered the most serious type of security flaw because they are not detected by security companies and have no known fixes. The report noted that this was the first time Google had seen evidence of AI being used to develop these vulnerabilities -- marking a major change in the cybersecurity landscape, as it suggests newer AI models could be used to create major exploits, not just find them. Google concluded that Anthropic's Claude Mythos model -- which has already found thousands of vulnerabilities across every major operating system and web browser -- was most likely not used to create the zero-day exploit. [...] The Google Threat Intelligence Group report also details efforts by Russia-linked hacking groups to use AI models to target Ukrainian networks with malware, while North Korean government hacking group APT45 used AI technologies to refine and scale up its cyber methods. John Hultquist, chief analyst at Google Threat Intelligence Group, said the findings made clear that the race to use AI to find network vulnerabilities has "already begun." "For every zero-day we can trace back to AI, there are probably many more out there," Hultquist said. "Threat actors are using AI to boost the speed, scale, and sophistication of their attacks." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple Now Requires Verification For Education Store - Apple now requires Education Store shoppers in the U.S. and several other countries to verify their student, educator, parent, or homeschool-teacher status through UNiDAYS, ending the previous honor-system approach. 9to5Mac reports: Starting today, Apple requires shoppers in the United States to complete verification when making a purchase via the Education Store. This change also applies to Australia, Hong Kong, Turkey, Canada, and Chile. In many other markets around the world, such as the UK, Apple already required verification. As a refresher, people eligible for Apple's Education Store include current and newly accepted college students and their parents, as well as faculty, staff, and homeschool teachers across all grade levels. Apple is teaming up with UNiDAYS to handle the verification process. Students and educators will be asked to create a UNiDAYS ID and then verify their academic status by logging in to their school's academic portal. Alternatively, users can upload a photo of their student or faculty IDs. Homeschool teachers, meanwhile, will need to provide an identity document such as a driver's license, state ID card, or passport. They'll also need to provide one homeschool document, such as a Letter of Intent (LOI) or Letter of Acknowledgment. Most customers will be verified instantly, and those requiring manual verification should hear back within 24 hours. The same verification process applies both in-store and online for Apple Education Store shoppers. Meanwhile, Apple has added Apple Watch to the Education Store for the first time, offering discounts on the Series 11, SE 3, and Ultra 3. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Anthropic Says 'Evil' Portrayals of AI Were Responsible For Claude's Blackmail Attempts - An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Fictional portrayals of artificial intelligence can have a real effect on AI models, according to Anthropic. Last year, the company said that during pre-release tests involving a fictional company, Claude Opus 4 would often try to blackmail engineers to avoid being replaced by another system. Anthropic later published research suggesting that models from other companies had similar issues with "agentic misalignment." Apparently Anthropic has done more work around that behavior, claiming in a post on X, "We believe the original source of the behavior was internet text that portrays AI as evil and interested in self-preservation." The company went into more detail in a blog post stating that since Claude Haiku 4.5, Anthropic's models "never engage in blackmail [during testing], where previous models would sometimes do so up to 96% of the time." What accounts for the difference? The company said it found that training on "documents about Claude's constitution and fictional stories about AIs behaving admirably improve alignment." Related, Anthropic said that it found training to be more effective when it includes "the principles underlying aligned behavior" and not just "demonstrations of aligned behavior alone." "Doing both together appears to be the most effective strategy," the company said. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Linux Kernel Starts Retiring Support for AMD's 30-Year-Old K5 CPUs - Linux 7.1 started phasing out support for Intel's 37-year-old i486 processor. Linux 7.2 removed drivers for the old AMD Elan 32-bit systems on a chip. And now some i586 and i686 class processors are being removed, reports Phoronix: Supporting those vintage GPUs without the Time Stamp Counter "TSC" instruction are becoming a burden... TSC-capable Intel Pentium processors and the likes will still be supported with this just being for TSC-less i586/i686 CPUs. Among the CPUs impacted by this latest change is the AMD K5 as well as various Cyrix processor models. The K5 was AMD's first entirely in-house designed processor that was first introduced in 1996 to counter the Intel Pentium CPU. TSC "support can now be assumed as a boot requirement for modern Linux," the article points out, which will allow the removal of various non-TSC code paths from the Linux kernel's x86 code. Tom's Hardware remembers the K5 "wasn't a very popular processor as it arrived late, then offered lackluster performance in the competitive environment it joined." Launch SKUs in 1996 were limited to clocks from 75 MHz to 133 MHz, and, due to being late, Intel's Pentium line was already faster. AMD still managed to get an edge on the Cyrix 6x86, though. Read more of this story at Slashdot.