Latest News

Last updated 12 Feb, 06:03 PM

BBC News

'Utterly wicked' nursery abuser jailed for 18 years - Judge John Dodd KC says "perverse and depraved" Vincent Chan had "lost all sense of moral compass."

Sir Chris Wormald forced out as head of Civil Service - The Cabinet Office says the move is "by mutual agreement" but it follows months of negative media reports about his performance.

'Vast majority' of parents should be involved if children question their gender, schools told - School leaders welcome the "greater clarity" on how to handle the polarising issue for parents and pupils.

Ratcliffe sorry language 'offended some' after immigration comments - The Manchester United co-owner previously said the UK had been "colonised" by immigrants.

Aberdeen finally sees sunshine after 21 days of gloom - The last reported sunshine had been on 21 January - the longest sunless period since records began in 1957.

The Register

Oracle suits up for Air Force Cloud One program with $88M contract - Big Red joins AWS on a multi-cloud defense platform Oracle has picked up an $88 million contract with the US Air Force to provide cloud infrastructure services for the department's Cloud One program.…

$8K laundry bot knows when to hold ’em, knows when to fold ’em, and knows it has help standing by - Not-onamous by a long shot Nobody likes folding laundry, but you really have to hate it to spend $7,999 on a robot that'll fold it for you with a whole heap of limitations – including company employees getting the occasional peep at your tough-to-fold unmentionables.…

Elon Musk paints exodus of xAI co-founders as 'evolution' - 12-strong founding team down to 6 as boss looks Moonwards Elon Musk has framed the recent exodus of talent from his artificial intelligence startup, xAI, as a necessary growing pain, saying the company's evolution "required parting ways with some people."…

'Another dark day': Users slam Microsoft over Polyglot Notebooks deprecation - Visual Studio Code extension faces March shutdown with no transition guidance Microsoft has abruptly announced the deprecation of Polyglot Notebooks with less than two months' notice, throwing the future of the .NET Interactive project into doubt.…

Apple patches decade-old iOS zero-day, possibly exploited by commercial spyware - Flaw abused 'in an extremely sophisticated attack against specific targeted individuals' Apple patched a zero-day vulnerability affecting every iOS version since 1.0, used in what the company calls an "extremely sophisticated attack" against targeted individuals.…

New Scientist - Home

Gene editing that spreads within the body could cure more diseases - The idea of self-amplifying gene editing is to get cells to pass on packages of CRISPR machinery to their neighbours, boosting the effect

Why I'm still an environmental optimist – despite it all - It's hard not to despair about the state of the world today, but here are five reasons to be a little bit hopeful, says Fred Pearce

The surprising origins of Britain's Bronze Age immigrants revealed - About 4600 years ago, the population of Britain was replaced by a people who brought Bell Beaker pottery with them. Now, ancient DNA has uncovered the murky story of where these people came from

First ever inhalable gene therapy for cancer gets fast-tracked by FDA - A gene therapy that patients breathe in has been found to shrink lung tumours by inserting immune-boosting genes into surrounding cells

This state’s power prices are plummeting as it nears 100% renewables - South Australia is proving to the world that relying largely on wind and solar energy with battery back-up is incredibly cheap, with electricity prices tumbling by 30 per cent in a year and sometimes going negative

Hacker News

An AI agent published a hit piece on me - Comments

ai;dr - Comments

Email is tough: Major European Payment Processor's Emails rejected by GWorkspace - Comments

Launch HN: Omnara (YC S25) – Run Claude Code and Codex from Anywhere - Comments

Shut Up: Comment Blocker - Comments

Slashdot

Border Officials Are Said To Have Caused El Paso Closure by Firing Anti-Drone Laser - An anonymous reader shares a report: The abrupt closure of El Paso's airspace late Tuesday was precipitated when Customs and Border Protection officials deployed an anti-drone laser on loan from the Department of Defense without giving aviation officials enough time to assess the risks to commercial aircraft, according to multiple people briefed on the situation. The episode led the Federal Aviation Administration to abruptly declare that the nearby airspace would be shut down for 10 days, an extraordinary pause that was quickly lifted Wednesday morning at the direction of the White House. Top administration officials quickly claimed that the closure was in response to a sudden incursion of drones from Mexican drug cartels that required a military response, with Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy declaring in a social media post that "the threat has been neutralized." But that assertion was undercut by multiple people familiar with the situation, who said that the F.A.A.'s extreme move came after immigration officials earlier this week used an anti-drone laser shared by the Pentagon without coordination with the F.A.A. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. C.B.P. officials thought they were firing on a cartel drone, the people said, but it turned out to be a party balloon. Defense Department officials were present during the incident, one person said. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon Engineers Want Claude Code, but the Company Keeps Pushing Its Own Tool - Amazon engineers have been pushing back against internal policies that steer them toward Kiro, the company's in-house AI coding assistant, and away from Anthropic's Claude Code for production work, according to a Business Insider report based on internal messages. About 1,500 employees endorsed the formal adoption of Claude Code in one internal forum thread, and some pointed out the awkwardness of being asked to sell the tool through AWS's Bedrock platform while not being permitted to use it themselves. Kiro runs on Anthropic's Claude models but uses Amazon's own tooling, and the company says roughly 70% of its software engineers used it at least once in January. Amazon says there is no explicit ban on Claude Code but applies stricter requirements for production use. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The "Are You Sure?" Problem: Why Your AI Keeps Changing Its Mind - The large language models that millions of people rely on for advice -- ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini -- will change their answers nearly 60% of the time when a user simply pushes back by asking "are you sure?," according to a study by Fanous et al. that tested GPT-4o, Claude Sonnet, and Gemini 1.5 Pro across math and medical domains. The behavior, known in the research community as sycophancy, stems from how these models are trained: reinforcement learning from human feedback, or RLHF, rewards responses that human evaluators prefer, and humans consistently rate agreeable answers higher than accurate ones. Anthropic published foundational research on this dynamic in 2023. The problem reached a visible breaking point in April 2025 when OpenAI had to roll back a GPT-4o update after users reported the model had become so excessively flattering it was unusable. Research on multi-turn conversations has found that extended interactions amplify sycophantic behavior further -- the longer a user talks to a model, the more it mirrors their perspective. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Anthropic To Cover Costs of Electricity Price Increases From Its Data Centers - AI startup Anthropic says it will ensure consumer electricity costs remain steady as it expands its data center footprint. From a report: Anthropic said it would work with utility companies to "estimate and cover" consumer electricity price increases in places where it is not able to sufficiently generate new power and pay for 100% of the infrastructure upgrades required to connect its data centers to the electrical grid. In a statement to NBC News, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said: "building AI responsibly can't stop at the technology -- it has to extend to the infrastructure behind it. We've been clear that the U.S. needs to build AI infrastructure at scale to stay competitive, but the costs of powering our models should fall on Anthropic, not everyday Americans. We look forward to working with communities, local governments, and the Administration to get this right." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Meta Auditor EY Raised Red Flag on Data-Center Accounting - Meta Platforms' latest annual report contained an unusual, cautionary note for investors. From a report: The tech giant's auditor, Ernst & Young, raised a red flag over the financial engineering Meta used to keep a $27 billion data-center project off its balance sheet. While EY ultimately blessed Meta's accounting treatment, the firm flagged it as a "critical audit matter." This means it was one of the hardest, riskiest judgments the auditor had to make. Such a warning label is rare for a specific, high-profile transaction at a major audit client. Meta moved the data-center project, called Hyperion, off its books in October into a new joint venture with Blue Owl Capital. Meta owns 20% of the venture; funds managed by Blue Owl own the other 80%. A holding company called Beignet Investor, which owns the Blue Owl portion, sold a then-record $27.3 billion of bonds to investors. The joint venture is known in accounting parlance as a variable interest entity, or VIE. Meta said it isn't the "primary beneficiary" of this entity and so didn't have to put the venture's assets and liabilities on its own balance sheet. Meta's assertion that it lacks power over the venture is debatable and has drawn scrutiny from investors and lawmakers. Meta is a hyperscaler and knows how to run data centers for artificial intelligence, while Blue Owl is a financier. Whether the venture succeeds economically will come down to Meta's decisions and know-how. In its report, EY said auditing Meta's decision "was especially challenging due to the significant judgment required in determining the activities that most significantly affect the VIE's economic performance." Read more of this story at Slashdot.