Latest News

Last updated 04 Mar, 04:25 AM

BBC News

UK announces first Middle East repatriation flight - The chartered flight is currently scheduled to leave Muscat International Airport in Oman on Wednesday evening.

Trump says Starmer is 'no Winston Churchill' over Iran strikes - Sir Keir Starmer had refused to grant the US permission to use the Diego Garcia military base.

Funerals held for students and staff after Iran school strike - Iranian authorities say they were killed in a US-Israeli strike in the city of Minab on Saturday.

UK to send Royal Navy warship HMS Dragon to Cyprus - The prime minister said the "UK is fully committed to the security of Cyprus and British military personnel based" on RAF Akrotiri.

US and Israel bomb Iran for fourth day as Trump says air defences 'gone' - Iran is responding to the strikes by launching missile and drone attacks on Israel and Gulf states hosting US bases.

The Register

Google feels the need for security speed, so will ship Chrome updates every two weeks - Retains eight-weekly Extended Stable releases but warns fortnightly updates are the best way to stay safe Google will halve the time between releases of its Chrome browser to two weeks, across versions of the software for desktop operating systems, Android, and iOS.…

OpenAI says its latest model is less likely to beat around the bush - The AI giant is also trying to walk back some terms of its deal with the Defense Department OpenAI says GPT‑5.3 Instant, the latest addition to its GPT-5.3 family of models, is less inclined to moralize.…

Nvidia-backed photonics startup Ayar Labs fills its wallet to mass-produce CPO chiplets - Company aims to stitch tens of thousands of GPUs together for more efficient training and inference It's a good time to be an AI chip startup, especially if you happen to specialize in silicon photonics.…

Dev stunned by $82K Gemini bill after unknown API key thief goes to town - Probably not an isolated incident only as researchers have already found 2,863 live API keys exposed A developer says their company is on the hook for more than $82,000 in unauthorized charges after a stolen Google Gemini API key racked massive usage costs up in just 48 hours.…

Facebook went down for about three hours, interrupting your poking and Meta's ads business - Go outside and smell some flowers Updated Meta’s flagship service, Facebook, is experiencing an outage.…

New Scientist - Home

Phantom codes could help quantum computers avoid errors - A method for making quantum computers less error-prone could let them run complex programs such as simulations of materials more efficiently, thus making them more useful

Selfish Y chromosome may explain why some families mostly have sons - A family in Utah with a disproportionate number of boys has been traced back over hundreds of years, revealing that its lack of female members is probably due to a selfish Y chromosome

The real reasons birth rates are declining worldwide - From the cost of childcare to the housing crisis, there’s no shortage of explanations for the dramatic global fall in the number of babies being born. These analyses, though, are all missing something, says cognitive and evolutionary anthropologist Paula Sheppard

Your microbiome may determine your risk of a severe allergic reaction - The microbes that live in our mouth and gut may influence whether an allergic reaction to peanuts is mild or life-threatening, and could be harnessed to ward off a severe attack

Why the US is using a cheap Iranian drone against the country itself - The US and Iran are trading blows in the Gulf with a simple drone that costs as little as $50,000 to make. But why is a slow, cheap and relatively primitive drone seeing use in 2026 alongside hypersonic missiles and stealth jets?

Hacker News

Motorola GrapheneOS devices will be bootloader unlockable/relockable - Comments

California's Digital Age Assurance Act, and FOSS - Comments

Graphics Programming Resources - Comments

Weave – A language aware merge algorithm based on entities - Comments

TikTok will not introduce end-to-end encryption, saying it makes users less safe - Comments

Slashdot

A Possible US Government iPhone-Hacking Toolkit Is Now In the Hands of Foreign Spies, Criminals - Security researchers say a highly sophisticated iPhone exploitation toolkit dubbed "Coruna," which possibly originated from a U.S. government contractor, has spread from suspected Russian espionage operations to crypto-stealing criminal campaigns. Apple has patched the exploited vulnerabilities in newer iOS versions, but tens of thousands of devices may have already been compromised. An anonymous reader quotes an excerpt from Wired's report: Security researchers at Google on Tuesday released a report describing what they're calling "Coruna," a highly sophisticated iPhone hacking toolkit that includes five complete hacking techniques capable of bypassing all the defenses of an iPhone to silently install malware on a device when it visits a website containing the exploitation code. In total, Coruna takes advantage of 23 distinct vulnerabilities in iOS, a rare collection of hacking components that suggests it was created by a well-resourced, likely state-sponsored group of hackers. In fact, Google traces components of Coruna to hacking techniques it spotted in use in February of last year and attributed to what it describes only as a "customer of a surveillance company." Then, five months later, Google says a more complete version of Coruna reappeared in what appears to have been an espionage campaign carried out by a suspected Russian spy group, which hid the hacking code in a common visitor-counting component of Ukrainian websites. Finally, Google spotted Coruna in use yet again in what seems to have been a purely profit-focused hacking campaign, infecting Chinese-language crypto and gambling sites to deliver malware that steals victims cryptocurrency. Conspicuously absent from Google's report is any mention of who the original surveillance company "customer" that deployed Coruna may have been. But the mobile security company iVerify, which also analyzed a version of Coruna it obtained from one of the infected Chinese sites, suggests the code may well have started life as a hacking kit built for or purchased by the US government. Google and iVerify both note that Coruna contains multiple components previously used in a hacking operation known as "Triangulation" that was discovered targeting Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky in 2023, which the Russian government claimed was the work of the NSA. (The US government didn't respond to Russia's claim.) Coruna's code also appears to have been originally written by English-speaking coders, notes iVerify's cofounder Rocky Cole. "It's highly sophisticated, took millions of dollars to develop, and it bears the hallmarks of other modules that have been publicly attributed to the US government," Cole tells WIRED. "This is the first example we've seen of very likely US government tools -- based on what the code is telling us -- spinning out of control and being used by both our adversaries and cybercriminal groups." Regardless of Coruna's origin, Google warns that a highly valuable and rare hacking toolkit appears to have traveled through a series of unlikely hands, and now exists in the wild where it could still be adopted -- or adapted -- by any hacker group seeking to target iPhone users. "How this proliferation occurred is unclear, but suggests an active market for 'second hand' zero-day exploits," Google's report reads. "Beyond these identified exploits, multiple threat actors have now acquired advanced exploitation techniques that can be re-used and modified with newly identified vulnerabilities." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OpenAI Is Developing an Alternative To GitHub - OpenAI is reportedly developing a code-hosting platform that could compete with GitHub, The Information reported on Tuesday. "If OpenAI does sell the product, it would mark a bold move by the creator of ChatGPT to compete directly against Microsoft, which holds a significant stake in the firm," notes Reuters. From the report: Engineers from OpenAI encountered a rise in service disruptions that rendered GitHub unavailable in recent months, which ultimately prompted the decision to develop the new product, the report said. The OpenAI project is in its early stages and likely will not be completed for months, according to The Information. Employees working on it have considered making the code repository available for purchase to OpenAI's customer base. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google Chrome Is Switching To a Two-Week Release Cycle - Google is accelerating Chrome's major release cadence from four weeks to two starting with version 153 on September 8th. "...our goal is to ensure developers and users have immediate access to the latest performance improvements, fixes and new capabilities," says Google. "Building on our history of adapting our release process to match the demands of a modern web, Chrome is moving to a two-week release cycle." The company says the "smaller scope" of these releases "minimizes disruption and simplifies post-release debugging." They also cite "recent process enhancements" that will "maintain [Chrome's] high standards for stability." 9to5Google reports: There will still be weekly security updates between milestones. This applies to desktop, Android, and iOS, while there are "no changes to the Dev and the Canary channels": "A Chrome Beta for each version will ship three weeks before the stable release. We recommend developers test with the beta to keep up to date with any upcoming changes that might impact your sites and applications." The eight-week Extended Stable release schedule for enterprise customers and Chromium embedders will not change. Chromebooks will also have "extended release options": "Our priority is a seamless experience, so the latest Chrome releases will roll out to Chromebooks after dedicated platform testing. We are adapting these channels for the new two-week browser cycle and we will share more details soon regarding milestone updates for managed devices." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

LibreOffice Says Its UI Is Way Better Than Microsoft Office's - darwinmac writes: While many users choose Microsoft Office over LibreOffice because of its support for the proprietary formats (.docx, .xlsx, and .pptx), others prefer Office for its "better" ribbon interface. These users often criticize LibreOffice for having a "clunky" UI instead of the "standard" ribbon interface you would find in Word, Excel, and other Office apps. Now, Neowin reports that LibreOffice is fighting back, arguing that its UI is actually superior because it is customizable, with several modes such as the classic toolbar interface, an Office-inspired ribbon layout, a sidebar-focused design, and more. Furthermore, it argues that there is no evidence that the ribbon offers "superior usability" over other interface modes. LibreOffice says in a blog post: Incidentally, the characterization of ribbon-style interfaces as "modern" or "standard," used by several users, is not based on any objective usability parameter or design principle, but is the result of Microsoft's dominance in the market and the huge investments made when the ribbon was introduced in Office 2007 as a new paradigm for productivity software. The idea that "modern" equals "similar to a ribbon" is a normalization effect: the Microsoft interface has become a benchmark because of its ubiquity, not because of its proven advantages in terms of usability. Added to this is the fact that many users evaluate office software through the lens of familiarity with Microsoft Office and consider deviation from it as a problem rather than a design choice. Before this, LibreOffice had also criticized its competitor OnlyOffice, accusing it of being "fake open source" because it believes OnlyOffice is working with Microsoft to lock users into the Office ecosystem by prioritizing the formats mentioned earlier instead of LibreOffice's own OpenDocument Format (ODF). Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Meta's AI Display Glasses Reportedly Share Intimate Videos With Human Moderators - An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: Users of Meta's AI smart glasses in Europe may be unknowingly sharing intimate video and sensitive financial information with moderators outside of the bloc, according to a report from Sweden's Svenska Dagbladet released last week. Employees in Kenya doing AI "annotation" told the journalists that they've seen people nude, using the toilet and engaging in sexual activity, along with credit card numbers and other sensitive information. With Meta's Ray-Ban Display and other glasses with AI capabilities, users can record what they're looking at or get answers to questions via a Meta AI assistant. If a wearer wants to make use of that AI, though, they must agree to Meta's terms of service that allow any data captured to be reviewed by humans. That's because Meta's large language models (LLMs) often require people to annotate visual data so that the AI can understand it and build its training models. This data can end up in places like Nairobi, Kenya, often moderated by underpaid workers. Such actions are subject to Europe's GDPR rules that require transparency about how personal data is processed, according to a data protection lawyer cited in the report. However, Svenska Dagbladet's reporters said they needed to jump through some hoops to see Meta's privacy policy for its wearable products. That policy states that either humans or automated systems may review sensitive data, and puts the onus on the user to not share sensitive information. Read more of this story at Slashdot.