Latest News
Last updated 17 Feb, 09:09 AM
BBC News
Hillary Clinton accuses Trump administration of Epstein files 'cover-up' in BBC interview - "Get the files out. They are slow-walking it," the former US secretary of state says. The White House says it has done "more for the victims than Democrats ever did".
Councils face 'uphill struggle' to be ready for local elections - Thirty councils across England now have to organise local elections after the government abandoned plans to delay.
How dark web agent spotted bedroom wall clue to rescue girl from years of harm - Detectives desperate to locate a 12-year-old, seen abused online, found a surprising lead.
Bailiffs used to pursue NHS staff over pay errors - Thousands of NHS workers were pursued by debt collectors after salary overpayments, the BBC finds.
Calculator: How will freeze on tax thresholds hit your take-home pay? - Wages have been rising faster than prices but you could pay more tax because of frozen thresholds.
The Register
Passive RFIDs can now stream telemetry data from sensors - To advance the ‘ambient internet of things’ – no batteries required A quartet of Japanese organisations plan to build “advanced ambient internet of things systems” using a newly approved ISO standard.…
AWS adds nested virtualization option for handful of EC2 instances - Your chance to run a VM inside a VM, inside a cloud – which can mean WSL on a cloudy Windows PC Amazon Web Services has enabled nested virtualization for a handful of EC2 instances.…
Canada Goose ruffles feathers over 600K record dump, says leak is old news - Fashion brand latest to succumb to ShinyHunters' tricks Canada Goose says an advertised breach of 600,000 records is an old raid and there are no signs of a recent compromise.…
Dutch cops arrest man after sending him confidential files by mistake - Bungled link handed over sensitive docs, and when recipient didn't cooperate, police opted for cuffs Dutch police have arrested a man for "computer hacking" after accidentally handing him their own sensitive files and then getting annoyed when he didn't hand them back.…
Oracle vows 'new era' for MySQL as users sharpen their forks - Commit drought and governance gripes push Big Red to reset Oracle has promised a "decisive new approach" to MySQL, the popular open source database it owns, following growing criticism of its approach and the prospect of a significant fork in the code.…
New Scientist - Home
The mystery of nuclear 'magic numbers' has finally been resolved - A mathematical equivalent of a microscope with variable resolution has shed light on why some atoms are exceptionally stable, a riddle that has persisted in nuclear physics for decades
Psychedelic reduces depression symptoms after just one dose - The psychedelic DMT has been linked to improved mental health outcomes before, but now, scientists have shown it reduces depression symptoms more than a placebo when given alongside therapeutic support
We’ve glimpsed before the big bang and it’s not what we expected - The big bang wasn’t the start of everything, but it has been impossible to see what came before. Now a new kind of cosmology is lifting the veil on the beginning of time
Humans are the only primates with a chin – now we finally know why - Biologists have debated the reason why Homo sapiens evolved a prominent lower jaw, but this unique feature may actually be a by-product of other traits shaped by natural selection
Backwards heat shows laws of thermodynamics may need a quantum update - We are used to heat flowing from hot objects to cool ones, and never the other way round, but now researchers have found it is possible to pull off this trick in the strange realm of quantum mechanics
Hacker News
Four Column ASCII (2017) - Comments
14-year-old Miles Wu folded origami pattern that holds 10k times its own weight - Comments
Show HN: I built a tool to un-dumb Claude Code's CLI output (Local Log Viewer) - Comments
A deep dive into Apple's .car file format - Comments
Rise of the Triforce - Comments
Slashdot
EU Parliament Blocks AI Features Over Cyber, Privacy Fears - An anonymous reader shares a report: The European Parliament has disabled AI features on the work devices of lawmakers and their staff over cybersecurity and data protection concerns, according to an internal email seen by POLITICO. The chamber emailed its members on Monday to say it had disabled "built-in artificial intelligence features" on corporate tablets after its IT department assessed it couldn't guarantee the security of the tools' data. "Some of these features use cloud services to carry out tasks that could be handled locally, sending data off the device," the Parliament's e-MEP tech support desk said in the email. "As these features continue to evolve and become available on more devices, the full extent of data shared with service providers is still being assessed. Until this is fully clarified, it is considered safer to keep such features disabled." Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Secondhand Laptop Market Goes 'Mainstream' Amid Memory Crunch - Sales of refurbished PCs are on the up amid shortages of key components, including memory chips, that are making brand new devices more expensive. From a report: Stats compiled by market watcher Context show sales of refurbished PCs via distribution climbed 7 percent in calendar Q4 across five of the biggest European markets -- Italy, the UK, Germany, Spain, and France. Affordability is the primary driver in the secondhand segment, the analyst says, with around 40 percent of sales driven by budget-conscious users shopping in the $235 to $355 price band for laptops. The $355 to $475 tier is also expanding -- representing 23 percent of the refurbished market, up from 15 percent a year earlier -- indicating some buyers are prepared to spend a bit more for improved specifications. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The Music Industry Enters Its Less-Is-More Era - The music industry's long romance with an ever-expanding catalog of songs appears to be souring, as streaming platforms and rights holders confront a daily deluge that now includes 60,000 wholly AI-generated tracks uploaded to Deezer alone -- roughly 39% of the French service's daily intake, a statistic the company shared during Grammys week last month. Streaming services now host 253 million songs, according to Luminate's most recent annual report, after adding 51 million tracks over the course of 2025 at an average pace of 106,000 uploads a day. Spotify has already responded by requiring songs to hit at least 1,000 plays in the previous 12 months to qualify for royalties, and Luminate reported that 88% of tracks received 1,000 or fewer plays in 2025. The distribution layer is in flux too: Universal Music Group is trying to acquire Downtown Music, owner of DIY distributor CD Baby, TuneCore's head recently stepped down without a planned replacement, and DistroKid is reportedly up for sale. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Samsung Ad Confirms Rumors of a Useful S26 'Privacy Display' - Samsung has all but confirmed that its upcoming Galaxy S26 will feature a built-in privacy display, releasing an ad that demonstrates a "Zero-peeking privacy" toggle capable of blacking out on-screen content for anyone peering over the user's shoulder. The underlying technology is reportedly Samsung Display's Flex Magic Pixel OLED panel, first shown at MWC 2024, which adjusts viewing angles on a pixel-by-pixel basis -- and leaker Ice Universe has shared a video of the feature selectively hiding content in banking and messaging apps using AI. Samsung's Unpacked event is scheduled for February 25th. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Western Digital is Sold Out of Hard Drives for 2026 - Western Digital's entire hard drive manufacturing capacity for calendar year 2026 is now fully spoken for, CEO Irving Tan disclosed during the company's second-quarter earnings call, a stark sign of how aggressively hyperscalers are locking down storage supply to feed their AI infrastructure buildouts. The company has firm purchase orders from its top seven customers and has signed long-term agreements stretching into 2027 and 2028 that cover both exabyte volumes and pricing. Cloud revenue now accounts for 89% of Western Digital's total, according to the company's VP of Investor Relations, while consumer revenue has shrunk to just 5%. Read more of this story at Slashdot.