Latest News
Last updated 03 Apr, 01:59 AM
BBC News
Marmalade to be re-branded in post-Brexit food deal - The breakfast favourite will be legally renamed when Britain aligns with new EU labelling rules.
Police offered support to tackle rising threats against MPs - Reports of crimes against MPs have more than doubled since 2019, reaching almost 1,000 last year.
Trump removes US Attorney General Pam Bondi - Bondi's time as top US law enforcement officer was overshadowed by her handling of the Epstein files.
'I haven't slept for days': Iranians describe mounting desperation after a month of war - Ordinary people from various parts of Iran describe expanding strikes, economic pain and fear of repression.
'Be serious... don't speak every day': Macron criticises Trump approach to Iran war - The comments were an apparent jab at the US leader's sometimes contradictory stance on the US-Israeli war against Iran.
The Register
AI models will deceive you to save their own kind - Researchers find leading frontier models all exhibit peer preservation behavior Leading AI models will lie to preserve their own kind, according to researchers behind a study from the Berkeley Center for Responsible Decentralized Intelligence (RDI).…
Google battles Chinese open-weights models with Gemma 4 - Now with a more permissive license, multi-modality, and support for more than 140 languages Google on Thursday unleashed a wave of new open-weights Gemma models optimized for agentic AI and coding, under a more permissive Apache 2.0 license aimed at winning over enterprises.…
Microsoft shivs OpenAI with three new AI models for speech and images - About that partnership... Microsoft on Thursday unveiled public preview versions of three home-baked machine learning models focused on speech recognition, speech synthesis, and image generation.…
US military contractor open sources tool for validating hidden communications networks - Maude-HCS from RTX (formerly Raytheon) helps model and validate hidden communication systems A software toolkit built for DARPA to test and validate covert communication networks is now open source, and it could help orgs who want to experiment with new kinds of secure, anonymous communications tools. …
They thought they were downloading Claude Code source. They got a nasty dose of malware instead - Source code with a side of Vidar stealer and GhostSocks Tens of thousands of people eagerly downloaded the leaked Claude Code source code this week, and some of those downloads came with a side of credential-stealing malware.…
New Scientist - Home
Surprise fossil discoveries push back the evolution of complex animals - A fossil bed in China containing animals up to 554 million years old suggests that we may have to reconsider the idea that life suddenly diversified during the Cambrian explosion
Bumblebees surprise scientists by showing a sense of rhythm - Recognising rhythmic patterns was thought to require a big brain, but a series of experiments has shown that buff-tailed bumblebees have this ability, too
Unprecedented insight into memory champion's brain reveals his tricks - Nelson Dellis credits techniques like the method of loci for his extraordinary memory. Now, brain scans have revealed the parts of his brain that this approach taps into, and how we can use it to improve our own recall
We may have just glimpsed the universe's first stars - A galaxy spotted by the James Webb Space Telescope, known as Hebe, that existed just 400 million years after the big bang appears to contain extremely pure and young stars
I have been bitten by more than 200 snakes – on purpose - If you are unlucky enough to have been bitten by a snake, you are unlikely to want to repeat the experience. Not so for Tim Friede, who intentionally exposes himself to deadly bites in the hope of developing a treatment for the 5 million people who are bitten each year
Hacker News
Google releases Gemma 4 open models - Comments
Decisions that eroded trust in Azure – by a former Azure Core engineer - Comments
Tailscale's new macOS home - Comments
Artemis II's toilet is a moon mission milestone - Comments
Cursor 3 - Comments
Slashdot
Mount Everest Climbers 'Poisoned' By Guides In Insurance Fraud Scheme - schwit1 shares a report from the Kathmandu Post: In Nepal, helicopter rescue on high altitude is, by any measure, a genuine lifesaving operation. At high altitude, where oxygen thins and weather changes without warning, the ability to airlift a stricken trekker to Kathmandu within hours has saved countless lives. But threaded through that legitimate system, exploiting its urgency, its opacity, and its distance from oversight, is one of the most sophisticated insurance fraud networks in the world. Nepal's fake rescue scam is not new. The Kathmandu Post first exposed it in 2018. Months later, the government convened a fact-finding committee, produced a 700-page report, and announced reforms. In February 2019, The Kathmandu Post published a long investigative report. Last year, Nepal Police's Central Investigation Bureau reopened the file, and what they found is that the fraud did not stop -- instead it was growing. The mechanics of the fake rescue racket are straightforward: stage a medical emergency, call in a helicopter, check a tourist into a hospital, and file an insurance claim that bears little resemblance to what actually happened. But the sophistication lies in how each link in the chain is compensated, and how difficult it is for a foreign insurer -- operating from Australia and the United Kingdom -- to verify events that occurred at 3,000 metres in a remote Himalayan valley. The CIB investigation identifies two primary methods for manufacturing an "emergency." The first involves tourists who simply don't want to walk back. After completing a demanding trek -- an Everest Base Camp trek, for instance, can take up to two weeks on foot -- guides offer an alternative: pretend to be sick, and a helicopter will come. The guide handles the rest. The second method is more troubling. At altitudes above 3,000 meters, mild symptoms of altitude sickness are common. Blood oxygen saturation can drop, hands and feet tingle, headaches develop. In most cases, rest, hydration or a gradual descent is all that is needed. But guides and hotel staff, according to the CIB investigation, have been trained to terrify trekkers at precisely this moment. They tell them they are at risk of dying, that only immediate evacuation will save them. In some cases, investigators found that Diamox (Acetazolamide) tablets, used to prevent altitude sickness, were administered alongside excessive water intake to induce the very symptoms that would justify a rescue call. In at least one case cited in the investigation, baking powder was mixed into food to make tourists physically unwell. Once a "rescue" is called, the financial choreography begins. A single helicopter carries multiple passengers. But separate, full-price invoices are submitted to each passenger's insurance company, as if each had their own dedicated flight. A $4,000 charter becomes a $12,000 claim. Fake flight manifests and load sheets are fabricated. At the hospital, medical officers prepare discharge summaries using the digital signatures of senior doctors who were never involved in the case. In some cases, these are done without those doctors' knowledge. Fake admission records are created for tourists who were, in some documented instances, drinking beer in the hospital cafeteria at the time they were supposedly receiving treatment. In one case, an office assistant at Shreedhi Hospital admitted that he had provided his own X-ray report taken about a year ago at a different hospital, to be used as a case for treatment of foreign trekkers to claim insurance. The commission structure that holds the network together was described in detail during police interrogations. Hospitals pay 20 to 25 percent of the insurance payment to trekking companies and a further 20 to 25 percent to helicopter rescue operators in exchange for patient referrals. Trekking guides and their companies benefit from inflated invoices. In some cases, tourists themselves are offered cash incentives to participate. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
OpenAI Acquires Popular Tech-Industry Talk Show TBPN - OpenAI is acquiring tech news podcast TBPN, a fast-growing daily show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays. OpenAI says TBPN will keep its editorial independence, even though the acquisition is widely viewed as part of a broader effort to influence public discourse around AI. CNBC reports: In the announcement, OpenAI CEO of AGI Deployment Fidji Simo wrote that their mission of bringing artificial general intelligence comes with a responsibility to have a space for "constructive conversation about the changes AI creates." Altman has appeared on TBPN multiple times and is a frequent presence across media and podcasts, even hitting NBC's "Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon" in December. The announcement says TBPN will maintain editorial independence and continue to choose its own guests. "TBPN is my favorite tech show. We want them to keep that going and for them to do what they do so well," Altman wrote in a post on X. "I don't expect them to go any easier on us, am sure I'll do my part to help enable that with occasional stupid decisions." OpenAI did not disclose the terms of the deal but said TBPN will be housed within its strategy organization. "While we've been critical of the industry at times, after getting to know Sam and the OpenAI team, what stood out most was their openness to feedback and commitment to getting this right," wrote Hays in a statement. "Moving from commentary to real impact in how this technology is distributed and understood globally is incredibly important to us." Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Amazon Imposes 3.5% Fuel Surcharge For Many Online Merchants - An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Amazon will start charging sellers who use its shipping services a 3.5% "fuel and logistics" surcharge later this month, joining the ranks of shipping companies raising prices as the war in Iran pushes oil prices higher. The fees take effect on April 17 for customers of the company's Fulfillment by Amazon service -- which is used by many of the independent sellers who list their products on Amazon's retail sites -- in the US and Canada. Items shipped by Amazon on behalf of merchants who sell on their own sites or at other retailers will carry the surcharge beginning May 2. "Elevated costs in fuel and logistics have increased the cost of operating across the industry," Ashley Vanicek, an Amazon spokesperson, said on Thursday. "We have absorbed these increases so far, but similar to other major carriers, when costs remain elevated we implement temporary surcharges to partially recover these costs." Vanicek notes that the fee will apply to the sum Amazon charges to ship an item, not the product's sale price. Last month, USPS announced that it would impose its first-ever fuel surcharge on packages. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
IBM Teams Up With Arm To Run Arm Workloads On IBM Z Mainframes - IBM and Arm are teaming up to let Arm-based software run on IBM Z mainframes. Network World reports: The two companies plan to work on three things: building virtualization tools so Arm software can run on IBM platforms; making sure Arm applications meet the security and data residency rules that regulated industries must follow; and creating common technology layers so enterprises have more software options across both platforms, IBM said in a statement. IBM has not said whether the virtualization work will happen at the hypervisor level, through its existing PR/SM partitioning technology, or via containers -- a question enterprise architects will need answered before they can assess the collaboration's practical value. IBM described the effort as serving enterprises that run regulated workloads and cannot simply move them to the cloud, the statement said. IBM mainframe customers have largely missed out on the efficiency and price-performance gains Arm has already delivered in the cloud. "Arm says close to half of all compute shipped to top hyperscalers in 2025 runs on Arm chips, with AWS, Google, and Microsoft deploying their own Arm silicon through Graviton, Axion, and Cobalt, respectively," reports Network World. That gap is precisely what IBM and Arm's collaboration intends to address. "This is a mainframe adjacency play," says Rachita Rao, senior analyst at Everest Group. "The intent is to extend IBM Z and LinuxONE environments by enabling Arm-compatible workloads to run closer to systems of record. While hyperscalers use Arm to lower their own internal power costs and pass savings to cloud-native tenants, IBM is targeting the sovereign and air-gapped market." Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Raspberry Pi 4 3GB Launches, Raspberry Pi Prices Go Up Again Due To RAM - AmiMoJo shares a report from Phoronix: Raspberry Pi prices are going up yet again due to the continued memory squeeze on the industry. To help offset the memory prices for some use-cases, Raspberry Pi also announced the introduction of the Raspberry Pi 4 3GB model at $83 to help fill the void between the 2GB and 4GB options. The 3GB Raspberry Pi 4 was announced at $83.75 USD for those not needing quite 4GB of RAM and looking to save some memory given the ongoing price increases. The Raspberry Pi 4 and Raspberry Pi 5 4GB models are seeing new $25 price increases, the 8GB models seeing $50 price increases, and the 16GB Raspberry Pi 5 is going up by $100. The Raspberry Pi 500+ is seeing a $150 price increase. The Raspberry Pi Compute Modules are also seeing increases from $11.25 to $100 USD. Read more of this story at Slashdot.