Latest News

Last updated 04 May, 08:34 PM

BBC News

UAE accuses Iran of renewed drone and missile attacks - A large fire has broken out at the key Emirati oil port of Fujairah, which lies beyond the largely-blocked Strait of Hormuz.

Two killed and many injured after car driven into crowd in German city of Leipzig - A 33-year-old German citizen was detained following the incident, the authorities say.

Three dead in suspected virus outbreak on Atlantic cruise ship - The operator of the MV Hondius ship says a Dutch husband and wife, as well as a German national, have died but the cause has not yet been established.

Britney Spears pleads guilty to reckless driving after arrest - The 44-year-old will avoid jail time after her arrest in California earlier this year.

Two arrested over arson attack at Golders Green memorial - A memorial wall was damaged by fire on 27 April in north London, with counter-terror police involved in the investigation.

The Register

Hobbyist xenomorphs Raspberry Pi into Alien-themed DIY laptop - Everything you need to build the PS-85 is available from its designer's website, even if you can't get to space We've all been there: You're doing maintenance on a Weyland-Yutani hauler dragging mineral ore back toward Earth, and there’s no terminal handy to tap into the MU/TH/UR AI to check ship systems. Lucky for you, one enterprising maker has created just the machine for the job.…

Hands off my trademark! Notepad++ dev threatens legal action against macOS port - It's not the fork that's the problem, it's the attempt to make it look official, says original Notepad++ dev Don Ho Notepad++ remains a Windows-only app, at least under that name. The beloved developer-focused, open-source text editor recently was ported to macOS by a third party. However, developer Don Ho wants to be perfectly clear that, no matter how convincing the new project might look, it's not official. …

Inside Amazon Web Services' plan to make networking disappear - The Register gets a look inside AWS' networking lab in Cupertino FEATURE In an unassuming three-story office building in Cupertino, California, engineers from Amazon Web Services are busy trying to make networking inconspicuous.…

Shadow IT has given way to shadow AI. Enter AI-BOMs - 'If you don't have visibility, you can't understand what to protect' When it comes to securing enterprise supply chains, now heavily infused with AI applications and agents, a software bill of materials (SBOM) no longer provides a complete inventory of all the components in the environment. Enter AI-BOMs.…

Moving to mainframe can be cheaper than sticking with VMware: Gartner - Serious Linux VMs will enjoy big iron – if you can learn to love lock-in risks and skills challenges VMware users considering a new home might find it cheaper to move to an IBM mainframe than adopting Broadcom’s new licenses, according to Gartner Vice President Analyst Alessandro Galimberti.…

New Scientist - Home

Honey has been used as medicine for centuries – does it really work? - It is appealing to think something as simple as honey could cure a cold or prevent hay fever, but is there evidence to back up honey’s health benefits? Columnist Alice Klein finds that it has legitimate medicinal uses, depending on the type of honey you’ve got

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

Tiny frozen world unexpectedly appears to have an atmosphere - A 500-kilometre-wide object in a similar orbit to Pluto challenges our assumptions about small bodies in the outer solar system

300-year-old experiment could become world's best dark matter detector - An update to an experiment run by Henry Cavendish in 1773 could be a cheaper and faster way to spot a potential dark matter particle – and may be 10,000 times more sensitive

An unorthodox version of quantum theory could reveal what reality is - The implications of quantum mechanics suggest reality isn't as solid as we think it is, but physicist David Bohm had a spin on the theory that restores reality. Columnist Karmela Padavic-Callaghan explores how we could test Bohmian mechanics – and if it will ever become more widely accepted

Hacker News

I am worried about Bun - Comments

Securing a DoD Contractor: Finding a Multi-Tenant Authorization Vulnerability - Comments

Talking to strangers at the gym - Comments

How OpenAI delivers low-latency voice AI at scale - Comments

GameStop makes $55.5B takeover offer for eBay - Comments

Slashdot

Expanded AMD HDMI 2.1 Support Is Coming To Linux - AMD is preparing expanded HDMI 2.1 support for Linux, following earlier delays after the HDMI Forum rejected an open source implementation of HDMI 2.1 as proprietary technology. As GamingOnLinux reports, AMD developer Harry Wentland submitted a patch series to the Linux kernel mailing list, noting that it brings "HDMI FRL support to the amdgpu display driver" and that "DSC is still being tested and will be sent out later." A forum post on Phoronix from an AMD driver developer also said "a full implementation will ultimately be available once the patches are ready and have completed compliance testing." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Audio Industry Is Grappling With the Rise of 'Podslop' - An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg's Ashley Carman: Welcome to the modern era of podcasting in which thousands of new shows are released into the world every day with a sizable portion likely being AI-generated. Figuring out exactly which ones fall into that growing category is becoming more difficult just as the industry is starting to take this issue seriously. In only the past month or so, Amazon launched a feature that explains a product by generating a quasi-podcast, complete with co-hosts talking to each other and taking questions from users. Shout out to Business Insider reporter Katie Notopoulos for spotting this (and, naturally, demoing it with an adult diaper rash-cream). Not long ago, Nicholas Thompson, chief executive officer of the Atlantic, noted "podslop" dominated his Spotify search results when he typed in the word "Sora." This was around the time that OpenAI shut down its user-generated, AI-content-only app. [...] All of which raises some big, difficult questions. For one, what should the listening platforms do about this incursion? As of right now, Apple Podcasts requires creators who generated a "material portion" of their show using AI to disclose it. The platform also bans misleading or deceptive content. Spotify hasn't published any specific guidelines around AI, though it maintains general rules around dangerous and misleading content. Where this conversation gets even trickier is when it comes to money. Many of these podcasts are hosted on at least one free service that allows programs to opt into their ad marketplace with zero barrier to entry, meaning these shows (and the hosting service) profit off every listen or download. Spreaker, a company owned by iHeartMedia, is the primary one to watch here. Though it tells users to disclose when they rely on AI, it still allows those shows to opt into its programmatic ad marketplace, which pays creators 60% of the revenue generated by the ads placed in their shows. It stands to reason that most of these thousands of shows don't reach many people. But in the aggregate, the ears and dollars could add up. Are the advertisers on board with being next to AI-generated content, some of which might be deemed "slop?" There's also the question of how to define "slop." Jackson of the Podcast Index and his co-host Adam Curry treat it as something listeners simply know when they hear it, while Alberto Betella, co-founder of RSS.com, defines it as "fully automated content with no human review." Jeanine Wright, co-founder of Inception Point, rejects the debate altogether: "The people still talking about slop are still making 6-7 jokes," she said. "It's still yesterday's conversation." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Anthropic Nears $1.5 Billion AI Joint Venture With Wall Street Firms - Anthropic is reportedly nearing a roughly $1.5 billion joint venture with Blackstone, Goldman Sachs, Hellman & Friedman, and other Wall Street firms to sell AI tools to private-equity-backed companies. "The investors aim to create a company that acts as a consulting arm for Anthropic and helps teach businesses -- including the private-equity firms' portfolio companies -- how to incorporate AI across their operations," reports the Wall Street Journal. Anthropic, Blackstone, and Hellman & Friedman would each invest about $300 million, while Goldman would contribute around $150 million. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

GameStop Offers to Buy eBay for $56 Billion - GameStop has made an unsolicited $56 billion cash-and-stock offer to buy eBay (paywalled; alternative source), with CEO Ryan Cohen arguing he can turn the marketplace into a far larger Amazon competitor. "EBay should be worth -- and will be worth -- a lot more money," Cohen said in an interview. "I'm thinking about turning eBay into something worth hundreds of billions of dollars." The Wall Street Journal reports: Cohen said GameStop has a commitment letter from TD Bank to provide up to $20 billion in debt financing to help make a deal possible. GameStop delivered an offer letter to eBay on Sunday and released a copy of it following the Journal's report on the details of the bid. Cohen wrote in the letter to eBay Chairman Paul Pressler that GameStop started building its eBay position on Feb. 4. It said its offer consists of 50% cash and 50% GameStop shares. EBay said Monday morning its board and financial advisers would review GameStop's unsolicited proposal. It said there were no discussions with or outreach from GameStop before receiving the offer. Ebay added that it will review the offer "with a focus on the value to be delivered to eBay shareholders, including the value of the GameStop stock consideration and the ability of GameStop to deliver a binding, actionable proposal." If eBay isn't receptive, Cohen said he was prepared to run a proxy fight and take the offer directly to its shareholders. The window for shareholders to nominate director candidates at eBay ahead of an annual meeting scheduled for this June has already closed, according to the company's proxy materials. Cohen told the Journal that putting his videogame retailer and eBay under one roof could create opportunities to cut costs and improve earnings. The two companies have some overlap already, including a focus on selling collectibles such as trading cards. "There is nobody who is more qualified, based on my experience, to run the eBay business," Cohen said, referencing his time at GameStop and previously Chewy, the online pet-products marketplace he co-founded. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Scientists Discover 27 Potential New Planets That Orbit Two Stars - Astronomers have identified 27 potential new circumbinary planets -- worlds that orbit two stars, like Star Wars' Tatooine. "To date, only about 18 circumbinary planets ... had been identified in the universe," reports the Guardian. "More than 6,000 planets have been discovered that orbit single stars, like Earth does around the sun." The Guardian reports: In a timely publication for May 4, also known as Star Wars Day, scientists have identified nearly 30 more candidate planets, whose distances range from 650 to 18,000 light years away from Earth. [...] More than half of the stars in the universe exist in binary or multiple star systems. The researchers instead used a method known as "apsidal precession," searching for a wobble between stars that orbit around and eclipse each other. "If we monitor the exact timing of these eclipses ... that can tell us that there's something else going on in the system," said Margo Thornton, the study's lead author and a PhD candidate at UNSW. After eliminating other factors such as the rotation and gravitational pull of the two stars, the team identified 36 star systems out of 1,590 whose behavior could only be explained by a third body. For "27 of those objects, it is possible that they are planet mass," Thornton said. More research into their spectra -- the light they emit -- was needed to formally confirm them as circumbinary planets, she said. "It's just a matter of: what is the mass of it? Is it a planet? Is it a brown dwarf? Is it a star?" The team discovered the potential planets -- which likely range from Neptune-sized to ten times heavier than Jupiter -- using data from Nasa's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, a planet-hunting space telescope that launched in 2018. The research was published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Read more of this story at Slashdot.