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Last updated 09 May, 07:40 PM

BBC News

How Reform won votes from Swansea to Sunderland - Many voters have turned to Reform UK with devastating consequences for the main two parties, Labour and the Conservatives.

Labour MPs have put Starmer on notice after election battering. Can he turn it around? - Even the prime minister's most loyal ministers are pushing him to change, writes Laura Kuenssberg.

SNP leader John Swinney rules out Holyrood talks with Reform UK - The nationalists secured 58 seats in their fifth consecutive election win, but that is short of an overall majority.

PM turns to old Labour hands after election losses but some MPs left baffled - Sir Keir Starmer is attempting to shore up his position after his party suffered heavy election losses.

Plaid Cymru wants to run Welsh government on its own, leader says - Rhun ap Iorwerth said he will try to run a minority government after his party's Senedd election triumph.

www.theregister.com - Articles

Google tweaks Chrome AI privacy wording, insists processing stays on-device - Deletion of a longstanding privacy assurance sparks concerns

macOS 27 threatens to bury Time Capsule, FOSS brings a shovel - Apple's old backup boxes only speak AFP and SMB1, but NetBSD under the hood gives them one last shot

London’s BT Tower to get rooftop swimming pool - Imagine taking a dip 177m above the streets of London’s West End

UK wants fresh fingerprints on £300M biometrics platform - Home Office probes supplier interest as core police and immigration system heads for support shake-up

Akamai surges on big LLM deal as Cloudflare dims - Good times, bad times

New Scientist - Home

There has been a sudden increase in the rate of sea level rise - Satellite measurements show that in the early 2010s sea level rise suddenly accelerated to a rate of 4.1 millimetres per year, possibly in response to an increase in the rate of global warming

A vast dam across the Bering Strait could stop the AMOC collapsing - If a key ocean current collapses it could plunge northern Europe into a big freeze. Now researchers are weighing up a drastic intervention – building a 130-kilometre-wide dam between the US and Russia

A lost ancient script reveals how writing as we know it really began - A long-overlooked writing system from 5000 years ago is still largely undeciphered, but could mark the moment humans first represented their speech with written words

Neanderthal 'kneeprint' found next to mysterious stalagmite circle - An impression made in clay around 175,000 years ago could be a kneeprint left by one of the builders of a strange stalagmite circle found deep inside Bruniquel cave in south-west France

US government releases huge batch of UFO files - The US Department of Defense has released hundreds of documents and photographs related to UFOs, some of which have been declassified, in the first of many drops to come

Hacker News

Bun ported to Rust in 6 days - Comments

Internet Archive Switzerland - Comments

CPanel's Black Week: 3 New Vulnerabilities Patched After Attack on 44k Servers - Comments

I Will Not Add Query Strings to Your URLs - Comments

Show HN: I wrote a flight simulator in my own programming language - Comments

Slashdot

Plant Seeds Do Something Incredible When the Sound of Rain Strikes - "Plant seeds can sense the vibrations generated by falling raindrops," reports ScienceAlert, "and respond by waking from their state of dormancy to welcome the water, new research shows.... to germinate in 'anticipation' of the coming deluge." The finding, discovered by MIT mechanical engineers Nicholas Makris and Cadine Navarro, offers the first direct evidence that seeds and seedlings can sense and respond to sounds in nature... "The energy of the rain sound is enough to accelerate a seed's growth," [explains Markis]. Plants don't have the same aural equipment we do to actually hear sounds, of course. But the study suggests that seeds respond to the same vibrations that can produce a sound experience in our human ears. Across a series of experiments, the researchers submerged nearly 8,000 rice seeds in shallow tubs of water, at a depth of around 3 centimeters (1 inch), and exposed some of them to falling water drops over periods of six days... A hydrophone recorded the acoustic vibrations produced by the drops, confirming that the experiment mimicked the vibrations produced by actual raindrops falling in nature — such as the driving downpours that can sometimes pelt Massachusetts' puddles, ponds, and wetlands... In their study, the researchers observed that seeds exposed to the falling drops germinated up to around 37% faster, compared with seeds that did not receive the simulated rainstorm treatment but were housed in otherwise identical conditions. More information in Scientific American and Scientific Reports. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cisco Releases Open-Source 'DNA Test for AI Models' - Cisco has released an open-source tool "to trace the origins of AI models," reports SC World, "and compare model similarities for great visibility into the AI supply chain." [Cisco's Model Provenance Kit] is a Python toolkit and command-line interface (CLI) that looks at signals such as metadata and weights to create a "fingerprint" for AI models that can then be compared to other model fingerprints to determine potential shared origins. "Think of Model Provenance Kit as a DNA test for AI models," Cisco researchers wrote. "[...] Much like a DNA test reveals biological origins, the Model Provenance Kit examines both metadata and the actual learned parameters of a model (like a unique genome that comprises a model), to assess whether models share a common origin and identify signs of modification." The tool aims to address gaps in visibility into the AI model supply chain. For example, many organizations utilize open-source models from repositories like HuggingFace, where models could potentially be uploaded with incomplete or deceptive documentation. The Model Provenance Kit provides a way for organizations to verify claims about a model's origins, such as claims that a model is trained from scratch, when in reality it may be copied from another model, Cisco said. This may put organizations at risk of using models with unknown biases, vulnerabilities or manipulations and make it more difficult to resolve any incidents that arise from these risks. Thanks to Slashdot reader spatwei for sharing the news. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Social Media Sites Got Information from Ad Trackers on US State Health Insurance Sites - All 20 of America's state-run healthcare marketplace sites "include advertising trackers that share information with Big Tech companies," reports Gizmodo, citing a report from Bloomberg: Per the report, seven million Americans bought their health insurance through state exchanges in 2026, and many of them may have had personal information shared with companies, including Meta, TikTok, Snap, Google, Nextdoor, and LinkedIn, among others. Some of the data collected and shared with those companies included ZIP codes, a person's sex and citizenship status, and race. In addition to potentially sensitive biographical details about a person, the trackers also may reveal additional details about their life based on the sites they visit. For instance, Bloomberg found trackers on Medicaid-related web pages in Rhode Island, which could reveal information about a person's financial status and need for assistance. In Maryland, a Spanish-language page titled "Good News for Noncitizen Pregnant Marylanders" and a page designed to help DACA recipients navigate their healthcare options were found to be transmitting data to Big Tech firms... Per Bloomberg, several states have already removed some trackers from their exchange websites following the report. Thanks to Slashdot reader JoeyRox for sharing the news. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

10 People Called Police to Report Bigfoot Sighting in Ohio - CNN reports on a "sudden surge of claimed sightings" of "unidentified figures averaging 8 feet tall in wooded areas" along Ohio's Mahoning River. "And it stopped just as quickly as it started," says Jeremiah Byron, host of the Bigfoot Society Podcast, which collected and mapped the reports .... Byron doesn't take every report at face value, making sure he talks to people directly before publicizing their claims. Once word got out about the reports in Ohio, so did the obvious fakes. "I started to get a lot of AI-generated reports in my email. It got up to the point where I was probably getting about 1,000 emails a day," he says. But when Byron spoke by phone with people who made the initial reports, they convinced him they weren't making anything up. "It was obvious they weren't just wanting to get their name out there," says Byron. "They were just freaked out by what they experienced, and they didn't want anything else to do with it." [...] Local law enforcement in Ohio also seem to be enjoying the publicity. Portage County Sheriff Bruce D. Zuchowski made a series of gag posts purporting to show the arrest of Bigfoot and his detention by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, only for the creature to escape from custody at the Canadian border... Despite the levity, the sheriff's office really did get some calls from concerned residents, Zuchowski says. "Ten individual people were like, 'Yeah I was walking my dog at 4 a.m. and I saw this hairy figure and I smelled this musty odor and there was this big thing and all of a sudden it ran,'" the sheriff told CNN affiliate WOIO in March. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Newspaper Chain's Reporters Withhold Their Bylines to Protest 'AI-Assisted' Articles - A chain of 30 U.S. newspapers including the Sacramento Bee, the Miami Herald and the Idaho Statesman "has started to use a new AI tool that can summarize traditional articles and spit out different versions for different audiences," reports the New York Times. And the chain's reporters "are not happy about it." Journalists in many of the company's newsrooms are now withholding their bylines from articles created by the new tool, meaning that those articles will run with a generic credit rather than a reporter's name, as is customary. They are also labeled AI-assisted. "We don't want to put our bylines on stories we did not actually write even if they're based on our work," said Ariane Lange, an investigative reporter at the Sacramento Bee and the vice chair of the Sacramento Bee News Guild. "That in itself feels like a lie." The reporters' byline strike is one of the sharpest conflicts yet between journalists and their companies over the use of AI. Related debates are playing out in newsrooms across the country, as publishers experiment with new AI tools to streamline work that used to take hours, and some even use it to write full articles... [E]xecutives have promoted the tool internally as a way to increase the number of articles published and ultimately gain new subscribers... [Eric Nelson, the vice president of local news] said using reporters' bylines on the AI-generated articles was a way to show "authority" on Google so the search engine would rank the articles higher in the results. He also said the company was experimenting with feeding in reporters' notes to create articles. "Journalists who embrace and experiment with this tool are going to win," Nelson said in the meeting. "Journalists who are defiant will fall behind".... McClatchy's public AI policy states that the company uses AI tools to summarize articles to "help readers quickly understand the main points of a single story or catch up on multiple stories about a larger topic," and that editors review the output before publication. Read more of this story at Slashdot.