Latest News

Last updated 18 Apr, 06:15 AM

BBC News

'Staggering' I was not told Mandelson failed vetting, says PM - The PM is facing calls to resign over the revelation that Lord Mandelson did not pass security checks.

Chris Mason: Mandelson saga is a messy palaver - and the questions continue to swirl - Sir Keir and the top official at the Foreign Office at the time are expected to face questions from MPs next week.

A man wrongfully served 17 years for rape. Now another man has been convicted - Malkinson had his rape conviction quashed in 2023 after fresh DNA analysis linked a new suspect to the offence.

'I'm the lucky one' - more than one in three young men now live with their parents - Last year, the highest proportion of men aged 20-34 were still living at home since at least 2007 as the rising cost of living takes hold.

Swinney predicts SNP majority at Holyrood election - The first minister has told BBC News that his party will return at least 65 seats at next month's vote.

The Register

Intel eases reliance on TSMC with 'Merica-made Core Series 3 processors - Stripped-down Ultra for laptops and low-power edge boxes Intel brought a few more chips home from Taiwan this week, with a new round of budget-oriented Core Series 3 processors fabbed right in the US-of-A.…

Anthropic mocks up Claude Design to draft fancy new pink slips for marketing teams - The bar for creating visual assets has been lowered to the ability to converse with a model Anthropic is known for its industry-leading Claude Code that writes programs, but why stop there? The company, on Friday, introduced a research preview service called Claude Design that creates visual assets, potentially putting some folks out of work.…

CISA tells feds to patch 13-year-old Apache ActiveMQ bug under active attack - Bug hiding in plain sight for over a decade lands on KEV list CISA is sounding the alarm on a newly-exploited Apache ActiveMQ bug, ordering federal agencies to patch within two weeks as attackers circle a flaw that's been quietly lurking for more than a decade.…

Opsec oopsie: Dutch navy frigate location outed by mailing it a Bluetooth tracker - Or, how public information and a €5 tracker exposed an avoidable opsec lapse Militaries around the world spend countless hours training, developing policies, and implementing best operational security practices, so imagine the size of the egg on the face of the Dutch navy when journalists managed to track one of its warships for less than the cost of some hagelslag and a coffee.…

Users complain that UK Azure is having capacity problems - We hear Sweden is lovely place for workloads to visit Microsoft Azure capacity woes are back, and worse than ever, judging by the complaints of UK users.…

New Scientist - Home

Electric vehicle owners could earn thousands by supporting power grid - Electric vehicles could store renewable energy when there is excess supply and give it back to the grid when demand peaks, but car companies disagree on the best way to do that

Exclusive report: Inside Chernobyl, 40 years after nuclear disaster - New Scientist reporter Matthew Sparkes secured unrivalled access to Chernobyl's most crucial scientific sites, where researchers are fighting to protect the area and ensure it remains safe amid the constant threat of attack from Russia

New Scientist recommends Jamie Bartlett's insightful How to Talk to AI - The books, TV, games and more that New Scientist staff have enjoyed this week

Why is it so hard to change your mind? - Changing your opinion can be difficult, and it’s sometimes even seen as a flaw. But research shows being open-minded has a host of benefits. Columnist David Robson finds there are a few simple ways to encourage yourself to withstand the discomfort that gets in the way of mental flexibility

The rise, the fall and the rebound of cyclic cosmology - Cyclic cosmology, or the big bounce, is the idea that the universe will eventually crunch back together and then go through another big bang. Columnist Leah Crane finds that, appropriately, it’s coming back

Hacker News

Show HN: I made a calculator that works over disjoint sets of intervals - Comments

Claude Design - Comments

Towards trust in Emacs - Comments

Measuring Claude 4.7's tokenizer costs - Comments

All 12 moonwalkers had "lunar hay fever" from dust smelling like gunpowder (2018) - Comments

Slashdot

Critical Atlantic Current Significantly More Likely To Collapse Than Thought - An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: The critical Atlantic current system appears significantly more likely to collapse than previously thought after new research found that climate models predicting the biggest slowdown are the most realistic. Scientists called the new finding "very concerning" as a collapse would have catastrophic consequences for Europe, Africa and the Americas. The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (Amoc) is a major part of the global climate system and was already known to be at its weakest for 1,600 years as a result of the climate crisis. Scientists spotted warning signs of a tipping point in 2021 and know that the Amoc has collapsed in the Earth's past. Climate scientists use dozens of different computer models to assess the future climate. However, for the complex Amoc system, these produce widely varying results, ranging from some that indicate no further slowdown by 2100 to those suggesting a huge deceleration of about 65%, even when carbon emissions from fossil fuel burning are gradually cut to net zero. The research combined real-world ocean observations with the models to determine the most reliable, and this hugely reduced the spread of uncertainty. They found an estimated slowdown of 42% to 58% in 2100, a level almost certain to end in collapse. The Amoc is a major part of the global climate system and brings sun-warmed tropical water to Europe and the Arctic, where it cools and sinks to form a deep return current. A collapse would shift the tropical rainfall belt on which many millions of people rely to grow their food, plunge western Europe into extreme cold winters and summer droughts, and add 50-100cm to already rising sea levels around the Atlantic. The slowdown has to do with the Arctic's rapidly rising temperatures from global warming. "Warmer water is less dense and therefore sinks into the depths more slowly," explains the Guardian. "This slowing allows more rainfall to accumulate in the salty surface waters, also making it less dense, and further slowing the sinking and forming an Amoc feedback loop." The new research has been published in the journal Science Advances. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Online Personalities and Comedians Overtake TV and Newspapers as Primary News Sources - A new Ipsos poll finds Americans are increasingly getting news from online personalities and comedians instead of traditional TV or newspapers. The survey says nearly 70% get news online in a given week, versus 55% from TV and 25% from newspapers, with figures like Joe Rogan, Greg Gutfeld, Sean Hannity, and late-night hosts ranking prominently depending on political leanings. From the Hollywood Reporter: The poll, which was conducted in March, actually found the conservative politicians and cabinet members, including President Trump, were the top news influencers. When politicos were excluded, Joe Rogan led the list, followed by Fox News personalities Greg Gutfeld and Sean Hannity, and then TuckerCarlson and Ben Shapiro. The only three influencers to crack 10 percent were Trump, Rogan, and JD Vance. Among people who voted for Kamala Harris, the top news personalities were late night hosts, led by ABC's Jimmy Kimmel, followed by CBS Late Show host Stephen Colbert, and Daily Show host Jon Stewart. Just under 70 percent of respondents said they get their news online in a given week, compared to 55 percent for TV, and 25 percent for newspapers. [...] Of traditional media outlets, TV dominated, with Fox News, the broadcast networks, and CNN topping the list of sources. Facebook, YouTube and Instagram were the most popular online news sources. "On these platforms opinionated personalities and comedians appear to drown out anyone who would fit in the traditional journalist category," said assistant professor of practice and Jordan Center Executive Director Steven L Herman. "Even in the late 19th century and early 20th centuries, sensationalist and polarizing voices in print and later on air were among the most influential in the political landscape -- such as political satirist Mark Twain and populist Father Charles Coughlin." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NIST Limits CVE Enrichment After 263% Surge In Vulnerability Submissions - NIST is narrowing how it handles CVEs in the National Vulnerability Database (NVD), saying it will only automatically enrich higher-priority vulnerabilities. "CVEs that do not meet those criteria will still be listed in the NVD but will not automatically be enriched by NIST," it said. "This change is driven by a surge in CVE submissions, which increased 263% between 2020 and 2025. We don't expect this trend to let up anytime soon." The Hacker News reports: The prioritization criteria outlined by NIST, which went into effect on April 15, 2026, are as follows: - CVEs appearing in the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency's (CISA) Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog. - CVEs for software used within the federal government. - CVEs for critical software as defined by Executive Order 14028: this includes software that's designed to run with elevated privilege or managed privileges, has privileged access to networking or computing resources, controls access to data or operational technology, and operates outside of normal trust boundaries with elevated access. Any CVE submission that doesn't meet these thresholds will be marked as "Not Scheduled." The idea, NIST said, is to focus on CVEs that have the maximum potential for widespread impact. "While CVEs that do not meet these criteria may have a significant impact on affected systems, they generally do not present the same level of systemic risk as those in the prioritized categories," it added. [...] Changes have also been instituted for various other aspects of the NVD operations. These include: - NIST will no longer routinely provide a separate severity score for a CVE where the CVE Numbering Authority has already provided a severity score. - A modified CVE will be reanalyzed only if it "materially impacts" the enrichment data. Users can request specific CVEs to be reanalyzed by sending an email to the same address listed above. - All unenriched CVEs currently in backlog with an NVD publish date earlier than March 1, 2026, will be moved into the "Not Scheduled" category. This does not apply to CVEs that are already in the KEV catalog. - NIST has updated the CVE status labels and descriptions, as well as the NVD Dashboard, to accurately reflect the status of all CVEs and other statistics in real time. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Gazing Into Sam Altman's Orb Could Solve Ticket Scalping - An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Sam Altman's iris-scanning, humanity-verifying World project announced at an event in San Francisco on Friday that Tinder users around the globe can now put a digital badge on their profiles signaling to potential suitors that they're a real human, provided they've already stared into one of World's glossy white Orbs and allowed their eyes to be scanned. The announcement follows a pilot project for Tinder verification that World previously conducted in Japan. [...] In addition to the Tinder global expansion, Tools for Humanity, the company behind World, announced a number of other consumer and enterprise partnerships on Friday at its Lift Off event in San Francisco. The startup says Tinder users who verify with their World ID will receive five free "boosts," typically a paid feature that increases the number of users who see a profile by up to 10 times for 30 minutes. The videoconferencing platform Zoom also says that users can now require other participants to verify their identity with World before joining a call. Docusign, the contract signing software, will allow users to require World's identity verification technology. Tiago Sada, Tools for Humanity's chief product officer, tells WIRED the company sees major platform partnerships as key to helping World become a mainstream identity-verification technology. Sada said he's especially interested in working with social media companies in the future, and was encouraged to see that Reddit has started testing World as a solution to help users distinguish bots from real people. [...] World is also launching a tool called Concert Kit, which lets artists reserve concert tickets for verified humans, a pitch aimed squarely at the bot-driven scalping problem that critics say has plagued sites like TicketMaster. World will test the feature on the upcoming Bruno Mars World Tour featuring Anderson .Paak, who is scheduled to play a verified-humans-only show under his alias DJ Pee .Wee in San Francisco on Friday night. "The idea that World ID is not just private, but it's one of the most private things you've ever used, that's not obvious," says Sada. "We're just not used to this kind of technology. Many people used to tape their [iPhone's sensor used to enable] Face ID when it came out, then we got used to it." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mozilla 'Thunderbolt' Is an Open-Source AI Client Focused On Control and Self-Hosting - BrianFagioli writes: Mozilla's email subsidiary MZLA Technologies just introduced Thunderbolt, an open-source AI client aimed at organizations that want to run AI on their own infrastructure instead of relying entirely on cloud services. The idea is to give companies full control over their data, models, and workflows while still offering things like chat, research tools, automation, and integration with enterprise systems through the Haystack AI framework. Native apps are planned for Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, and Android. Thunderbolt allows organizations to do the following: - Run AI with their choice of models, from leading commercial providers to open-source and local models - Connect to systems and data: Integrate with pipelines and open protocols, including: deepset's Haystack platform, Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, and agents with the Agent Client Protocol (ACP) - Automate workflows and recurring tasks: Generate daily briefings, monitor topics, compile reports, or trigger actions based on events and schedules - Work seamlessly across devices with native applications for Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, and Android - Maintain security with self-hosted deployment, optional end-to-end encryption, and device-level access controls Read more of this story at Slashdot.