Latest News

Last updated 30 Mar, 08:55 PM

BBC News

Millions of drivers mis-sold car finance to receive average £829 in compensation - The City regulator says 12.1 million mis-sold motor finance deals will be eligible for redress.

Scott Mills sacked from BBC Radio 2 after allegations over 'historic relationship' - He has not hosted his show since Tuesday and the BBC said he is "no longer contracted to work" there.

Mills' abrupt sacking creates another headache for the BBC - Radio 2 DJ Scott Mills was sacked from the BBC on Monday following allegations over his conduct.

What was the 1970s oil crisis, and are we heading for something worse? - While both crises involve oil, experts say there are some important differences between what happened in the 1970s and today.

Céline Dion announces comeback shows four years after Stiff Person Syndrome diagnosis - The star was diagnosed with a rare condition that affects her singing voice and her ability to walk.

The Register

GitHub backs down, kills Copilot pull-request ads after backlash - Letting Copilot alter others' PRs was the wrong judgment call, says product manager Microsoft has done a 360. Following backlash from developers, GitHub has removed Copilot's ability to stick ads - what it calls "tips" - into any pull request that invokes its name. …

OpenAI patches ChatGPT flaw that smuggled data over DNS - Check Point says outbound controls blocked web traffic but overlooked DNS OpenAI talks up data security for its AI services, yet Check Point says that ChatGPT allowed data to leak through a DNS side channel before the flaw was fixed.…

US PC shipments to fall 13% as memory and storage crunch hits budget systems - Omdia says education, consumer, commercial, and public sector demand will weaken through 2026 US PC shipments are set to fall by 13 percent this year thanks to the ongoing memory and storage crisis, and things are not expected to get better until next year at the earliest, with budget PCs hardest hit.…

Telnyx joins LiteLLM in latest PyPI package poisoning tied to Trivy breach - Also, EU probes Snapchat, RedLine suspect extradited, AstraZeneca leak claim surfaces, and more infosec in brief The cybercrime crew linked to the Trivy supply-chain attack has struck again, this time pushing malicious Telnyx package versions to PyPI in an effort to plant credential-stealing malware on developers’ systems.…

FCC says it's making it easier for US telcos to ditch legacy lines - But critics say stopping some engineering tests is not the sort of corner you want to cut America's telecoms regulator has unveiled new measures to speed the transition to modern high-speed networks, but critics argue the move could leave behind those in rural areas or with special needs.…

New Scientist - Home

The profound effect the heart-brain connection has on your health - Cognitive decline, mental health and heart disease are all shaped by the deep links between heart and brain – with major implications for diagnoses and treatment

Food shock is inevitable due to the Iran war – and it could get bad - Even if the conflict in the Middle East ends today, higher fuel, fertiliser and pesticide prices will lead to a food shock in the coming months. There is no easy way out, but accelerating the net-zero transition will help prevent future shocks

AI data centres can warm surrounding areas by up to 9.1°C - Hundreds of millions of people live close enough to data centres used to power AI to feel warmer average temperatures in their local area

The Shroud of Turin bears DNA from many people, plants and animals - Researchers have identified genetic material from a vast range of organisms contaminating the shroud, said to have wrapped Jesus's body, further complicating the question of the cloth's true origin

The weird physics of plant-based milks is only just coming to light - Experiments on different kinds of milk have revealed that many plant-based milks are non-Newtonian fluids

Hacker News

Fedware: Government apps that spy harder than the apps they ban - Comments

Do your own writing - Comments

How to turn anything into a router - Comments

Turning a MacBook into a touchscreen with $1 of hardware (2018) - Comments

Bird brains (2023) - Comments

Slashdot

OkCupid Settles FTC Case On Alleged Misuse of Its Users' Personal Data - OkCupid and parent company Match Group settled an FTC case dating back to 2014 over allegations that the dating app shared users' photos and other personal data with a third party without proper disclosure or opt-out rights. Engadget reports: According to the FTC, OkCupid's privacy policy at the time noted that the company wouldn't share a user's personal information with others, except for some cases including "service providers, business partners, other entities within its family of businesses." However, the lawsuit accused OkCupid of sharing three million photos of its users to Clarifai, which the FTC claims is a "unrelated third party" that didn't fall under the allowed entities. On top of that, the lawsuit alleged that OkCupid didn't inform its users of this data sharing, nor give them a chance to opt out. Moving forward, the settlement would "permanently prohibit" Match Group, which owns OkCupid, and Humor Rainbow, which operates OkCupid, from misrepresenting what kind of personal information it collects, the purpose for collecting the data and any consumer choices to prevent data collection. Even after the 2014 incident, OkCupid was found with security flaws that could've exposed user account info but, which were quickly patched in 2020. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Life With AI Causing Human Brain 'Fry' - fjo3 shares a report from France 24: Too many lines of code to analyze, armies of AI assistants to wrangle, and lengthy prompts to draft are among the laments by hard-core AI adopters. Consultants at Boston Consulting Group (BCG) have dubbed the phenomenon "AI brain fry," a state of mental exhaustion stemming "from the excessive use or supervision of artificial intelligence tools, pushed beyond our cognitive limits." The rise of AI agents that tend to computer tasks on demand has put users in the position of managing smart, fast digital workers rather than having to grind through jobs themselves. "It's a brand-new kind of cognitive load," said Ben Wigler, co-founder of the start-up LoveMind AI. "You have to really babysit these models." [...] "There is a unique kind of reward hacking that can go on when you have productivity at the scale that encourages even later hours," Wigler said. [Adam Mackintosh, a programmer for a Canadian company] recalled spending 15 consecutive hours fine-tuning around 25,000 lines of code in an application. "At the end, I felt like I couldn't code anymore," he recalled. "I could tell my dopamine was shot because I was irritable and didn't want to answer basic questions about my day." BCG recommends in a recently published study that company leaders establish clear limits regarding employee use and supervision of AI. However, "That self-care piece is not really an America workplace value," Wigler said. "So, I am very skeptical as to whether or not its going to be healthy or even high quality in the long term." Notably, the report says everyone interviewed for the article "expressed overall positive views of AI despite the downsides." In fact, a recent BCG study actually found a decline in burnout rates when AI took over repetitive work tasks. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Judge Allows BitTorrent Seeding Claims Against Meta, Despite Lawyers 'Lame Excuses' - An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: In an effort to gather material for its LLM training, Meta used BitTorrent to download pirated books from Anna's Archive and other shadow libraries. According to several authors, Meta facilitated the infringement of others by "seeding" these torrents. This week, the court granted the authors permission to add these claims to their complaint, despite openly scolding their counsel for "lame excuses" and "Meta bashing." [...] The judge acknowledged that the contributory infringement claim could and should have been added back in November 2024, when the authors amended their complaint to include the distribution claim. After all, both claims arise from the same factual allegations about Meta's torrenting activity. "The lawyers for the named plaintiffs have no excuse for neglecting to add a contributory infringement claim based on these allegations back in November 2024," Judge Chhabria wrote. The lawyers of the book authors claimed that the delay was the result of newly produced evidence that had "crystallized" their understanding of Meta's uploading activity. However, that did not impress the judge. He called it a "lame excuse" and "a bunch of doubletalk," noting that if the missing discovery truly prevented the contributory claim from being added in November 2024, the same logic would have prevented the distribution claim from being added at that time as well. "Rather than blaming Meta for producing discovery late, the plaintiffs' lawyers should have been candid with the Court, explaining that they missed an issue in a case of first impression..," the order reads. Judge Chhabria went further, noting that the authors' law firm, Boies Schiller, showed "an ongoing pattern" of distracting from its own mistakes by attacking Meta. He pointed specifically to the dispute over when Meta disclosed its fair use defense to the distribution claim, which we covered here recently, characterizing it as a false distraction. "The lawyers for the plaintiffs seem so intent on bashing Meta that they are unable to exercise proper judgment about how to represent the interests of their clients and the proposed class members," the order reads. Despite the criticism, Chhabria granted the motion. [...] For now, the case moves forward with a fourth amended complaint, three new loan-out companies added as named plaintiffs, and a growing list of BitTorrent-related claims for Judge Chhabria to resolve. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft Copilot Is Now Injecting Ads Into Pull Requests On GitHub - Microsoft Copilot is reportedly injecting promotional "tips" into GitHub pull requests, with Neowin claiming more than 1.5 million PRs have been affected by messages advertising integrations like Raycast, Slack, Teams, and various IDEs. From the report: According to Melbourne-based software developer Zach Manson, a team member used the AI to fix a simple typo in a pull request. Copilot did the job, but it also took the liberty of editing the PR's description to include this message: "Quickly spin up Copilot coding agent tasks from anywhere on your macOS or Windows machine with Raycast." A quick search of that phrase on GitHub shows that the same promotional text appears in over 11,000 pull requests across thousands of repositories. Even merge requests on GitLab aren't safe from the injection. So what's happening? Well, Raycast has a Copilot extension that can do things like create pull requests from a natural language command. The ad directly names Raycast, so you might think that Raycast is injecting the promo into the PRs to market its own app. But it is more likely that Microsoft is the one doing the injecting. If you look at the raw markdown of the affected pull requests, there is a hidden HTML comment, "START COPILOT CODING AGENT TIPS" placed right just before the ad tip. This suggests Microsoft is using the comment to insert a "tip" that points back to its own developer ecosystem or partner integrations. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sony Shuts Down Nearly Its Entire Memory Card Business Due To SSD Shortage - For the "foreseeable future," Sony says it has stopped accepting new orders for most of its CFexpress and SD memory card lines due to the an ongoing memory supply shortage. "Due to the global shortage of semiconductors (memory) and other factors, it is anticipated that supply will not be able to meet demand for CFexpress memory cards and SD memory cards for the foreseeable future," the company said in a notice. "Therefore, we have decided to temporarily suspend the acceptance of orders from our authorized dealers and from customers at the Sony Store from March 27, 2026 onwards. PetaPixel reports: The suspension includes all of Sony's memory card lines, including CFexpress Type A, CFexpress Type B, and SD cards. The 240GB, 480GB, 960GB, and 1920GB capacity Type A cards have been suspended, as have the 480GB and 240GB Type B cards. The full gamut of Sony's high-end SD cards has also been suspended, including the 256GB, 128GB, and 64GB TOUGH-branded cards and the lower-end 512GB, 256GB, 128GB, and 256GB plainly-branded Sony cards, which cap out at V60 speeds. Even Sony's lower-end, V30 128GB and 64GB SD cards have been suspended, showcasing that the SSD shortage affects all types of solid state, not just the high-end ones. It appears that only the 960GB CFexpress Type B card and the lowest-end SF-UZ series SD cards remain in production. However, those UHS-I SD cards are discontinued in the United States outside of a scant few retailers and resellers. "We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may cause our customers," Sony concludes. Read more of this story at Slashdot.