Latest News

Last updated 24 Mar, 02:48 PM

BBC News

Son of Nottingham attacks victim found out father had died through Instagram - Ian Coates, 65, was stabbed to death by Valdo Calocane in the early hours of 13 June 2023.

First-time buyers hit as mortgage rates keep rising - More than 200 first-time buyer deals have disappeared from the market since 6 March, with more upheaval expected.

Transgender girls told to leave Girlguiding groups by September - It follows an announcement in December that transgender members would be banned from joining.

Married at First Sight star Mel Schilling dies at 54 - The TV dating coach's husband says she "passed away peacefully today, surrounded by love".

Aimee Lou Wood and Erin Doherty set for double Bafta TV Awards battle - Adolescence has the most nominations overall with 11, followed by A Thousand Blows with seven.

The Register

HackerOne slams supplier for delayed breach notice after staff data exposed - Nearly 300 employees caught up in intrusion at benefits provider Navia Almost 300 HackerOne employees are caught up in a data breach, with the bug bounty biz slamming a third-party benefits provider for a weeks-long delay in notification.…

Microslop stuffs AI photo restyling powers into OneDrive - Microslop? Sorry, we meant Microsoft Microsoft is rolling out technology to transform OneDrive photos into AI-infused masterpieces. Or top up the bucket of slop, depending on your perspective.…

Country that put backdoors into Cisco routers to spy on world bans foreign routers - Unfortunately, there aren't many options unless you're Starlink Citing national security fears, America is effectively banning any new consumer-grade network routers made abroad.…

Mozilla introduces cq, describing it as 'Stack Overflow for agents' - A knowledge database where AI agents read, add and score the items – what could go wrong? Mozilla is building cq - described by staff engineer Peter Wilson as "Stack Overflow for agents" - as an open source project to enable AI agents to discover and share collective knowledge.…

Russian initial access broker who fed ransomware crews gets 81 months in US prison - Aleksei Volkov sentenced after enabling attacks that cost victims millions A Russian national who sold the keys to corporate networks faces nearly seven years in a US prison after prosecutors tied his handiwork to a string of ransomware attacks costing victims millions of dollars.…

New Scientist - Home

Antimatter has been transported by road for the first time - CERN is working on building an antimatter delivery service. The project passed a big test by successfully transporting 92 antiprotons around a 4-kilometre loop of road

How AI shook the world's largest meeting of physicists - Physicists are grappling with how the increasing presence of AI will change the nature of their profession

Adrian Tchaikovsky: 'I try and do interesting aliens' - As the science fiction author publishes the latest novel in his Children of Time series, Children of Strife, he talks to Alison Flood about mantis shrimp, the pleasures of sci-fi and why empathy is so important in his writing

Are humans degenerating genetically and getting dumber as a result? - Are we evolving to be more stupid? Humans have a relatively high genetic mutation rate, which has been thought to be driving down our physical and mental fitness – but columnist Michael Le Page finds these mutations aren’t the health risk some make them out to be

Genetic clues tell the story of Neanderthals' decline - The Neanderthal population shrank during a cold spell around 75,000 years ago, and the loss of genetic diversity may have contributed to their eventual extinction

Hacker News

LiteLLM Python package compromised by supply-chain attack - Comments

So where are all the AI apps? - Comments

Microsoft's "Fix" for Windows 11: Flowers After the Beating - Comments

I Quit Editing Photos - Comments

Debunking Zswap and Zram Myths - Comments

Slashdot

Canonical Joins Rust Foundation - BrianFagioli writes: Canonical has joined the Rust Foundation as a Gold Member, signaling a deeper investment in the Rust programming language and its role in modern infrastructure. The company already maintains an up-to-date Rust toolchain for Ubuntu and has begun integrating Rust into parts of its stack, citing memory safety and reliability as key drivers. By joining at a higher tier, Canonical is not just adopting Rust but also stepping closer to its governance and long-term direction. The move also highlights ongoing tensions in Rust's ecosystem. While Rust can reduce entire classes of bugs, it often depends heavily on external crates, which can introduce complexity and auditing challenges, especially in enterprise environments. Canonical appears aware of that tradeoff and is positioning itself to influence how the ecosystem evolves, as Rust continues to gain traction across Linux and beyond. "As the publisher of Ubuntu, we understand the critical role systems software plays in modern infrastructure, and we see Rust as one of the most important tools for building it securely and reliably. Joining the Rust Foundation at the Gold level allows us to engage more directly in language and ecosystem governance, while continuing to improve the developer experience for Rust on Ubuntu," said Jon Seager, VP Engineering at Canonical. "Of particular interest to Canonical is the security story behind the Rust package registry, crates.io, and minimizing the number of potentially unknown dependencies required to implement core concerns such as async support, HTTP handling, and cryptography -- especially in regulated environments." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cyberattack on a Car Breathalyzer Firm Leaves Drivers Stuck - Last week, hackers launched a cyberattack on an Iowa company called Intoxalock that left some drivers unable to start their court-mandated breathalyzer-equipped cars. Wired reports: Intoxalock, an automotive breathalyzer maker that says it's used daily by 150,000 drivers across the U.S., last week reported that it had been the target of a cyberattack, resulting in its "systems currently experiencing downtime," according to an announcement posted to its website. Meanwhile, drivers that use the breathalyzers have reported being stranded due to the devices' inability to connect to the company's services. "Our vehicles are giant paperweights right now through no fault of ours," one wrote on Reddit. "I'm being held accountable at work and feel completely helpless." The lockouts appear to be the result of Intoxalock's breathalyzers needing periodic calibrations that require a connection to the company's servers. Drivers who are due for a calibration and can't perform one due to the company's downtime have been stuck, though the company now states on its website that it's offering 10-day extensions on those calibrations due to its cybersecurity disruption, as well as towing services in some cases. In the meantime, Intoxalock hasn't explained what sort of cyberattack it's facing or whether hackers have obtained any of the company's user data. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Trump Administration To Pay French Company $1 Billion To Stop Offshore Wind Farms - An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: The Trump administration will pay $1 billion to a French company to walk away from two U.S. offshore wind leases as the administration ramps up its campaign against offshore wind and other renewable energy. TotalEnergies has agreed to what's essentially a refund of its leases for projects off the coasts of North Carolina and New York, and will invest the money in fossil fuel projects instead, the Department of Interior announced Monday. The Trump administration has tried to halt offshore wind construction, but federal judges overturned those orders. Environmental groups denounced the TotalEnergies deal as an alternate way to block wind projects. President Donald Trump has gone all in on fossil fuels, which he says is the way to lower costs for families, increase reliability and help the U.S. maintain global leadership in artificial intelligence. TotalEnergies pledged to not develop any new offshore wind projects in the United States. TotalEnergies CEO Patrick Pouyanne said in a statement that the company renounced offshore wind development in the United States in exchange for the reimbursement of the lease fees, "considering that the development of offshore wind projects is not in the country's interest." Pouyanne said the refunded lease fees will finance the construction of a liquefied natural gas plant in Texas and the development of its oil and gas activities, calling it a "more efficient use of capital" in the U.S. After it makes those investments, TotalEnergies will be reimbursed, up to the amount paid in lease purchases for offshore wind, according to the DOI. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nvidia CEO Says He's 'Empathetic' To DLSS 5 Concerns - Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says he understands the concerns about "AI slop" with DLSS 5 but insists the feature preserves a game's underlying geometry and artistic intent. "I think their perspective makes sense, " said Huang during a recent appearance on the Lex Fridman podcast. "And I could see where they're coming from because I don't love AI slop myself. You know, all of the AI-generated content increasingly looks similar, and they're all beautiful... so I'm empathic toward what they're thinking. That's just not what DLSS 5 is trying to do." Tom's Hardware reports: Although Huang is striking a more conciliatory tone, much of his response is similar to what we heard at GTC [where Huang said gamers were "completely wrong."] The artist determines the geometry, we are completely truthful to the geometry... so every single frame, it enhances, but it doesn't change anything." There was some confusion about how DLSS 5 worked when it was first announced, and although the inner workings of it still aren't clear on a technical level, Huang has said that it isn't a general-purpose generative AI model. He describes it as "content-controlled generative AI." On the other end of the spectrum, Huang also said that it isn't a post-processing filter. The technical details of DLSS 5 live somewhere between that space, and we likely won't know them until later this year when the feature is set to release. "The question about enhancing, DLSS 5... in the future, you could even prompt it. You know, I want it to be a toon shader. I want it to look like this, kind of. You could even give it an example and it would generate in the style of that, all consistent with the artistry, the style, the intent of the artist," Huang continued. "All of that is done for the artist so they can create something that is more beautiful but still in the style that they want." Although the talking points about DLSS 5 remain unchanged, it seems that Huang has at least heard the criticism. "I think that they got the impression that the games are going to come out the way the games are... and then we're going to post-process it. That's not what DLSS is intended to do." Huang also made assertions that DLSS is "integrated" with the artist, and suggested that it would put the power of generative AI in the hands of artists working in game development [...]. Although DLSS 5 looks like it's doing a lot, Huang said that it's just another tool, not an essential feature. "The gamers might also appreciate that, in the last couple of years, we introduced skin shaders to game developers, and many of those games have skin shaders that include sub-surface scattering that makes skin look more skin-like... [DLSS 5] is just one more tool. They can decide what to use," Huang ended the conversation about DLSS 5. Immediately after, without missing a beat, he said 1993's Doom was the most influential video game ever made. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bipartisan Bill Seeks To Ban Sports Betting On Prediction Market Platforms - An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Senators Adam Schiff (D-CA) and John Curtis (R-UT) introduced (PDF) a bill on Monday that could prevent prediction market platforms Kalshi and Polymarket from allowing users to wager money on sports events or play casino-style games. This bipartisan bill would not apply to FanDuel and DraftKings, which are subject to state-by-state gambling laws, rather than federal ones. "Sports prediction contracts are sports bets -- just with a different name. And yet, these contracts are currently offered in all fifty states in clear violation of state and federal law," Schiff said in a statement. Prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket are regulated under the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), which is why Schiff and Curtis are able to address them under federal jurisdiction, rather than leaving them to state-regulated sportsbooks. But these senators argue that there isn't much of a difference in practice between betting on sports via federally or state-regulated apps. Kalshi's Super Bowl trading volume, for instance, reached over $1 billion this year -- a 2700% increase year-over-year. "Too many young people in Utah are getting exposed to addictive sports betting and casino-style gaming contracts that belong under state control, not under federal regulators," Curtis said in a statement. The report notes that Kalshi is temporarily banned in Nevada and is facing criminal charges in Arizona. "Kalshi may brand itself as a 'prediction market,' but what it's actually doing is running an illegal gambling operation and taking bets on Arizona elections, both of which violate Arizona law," Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes said in a statement last week. Read more of this story at Slashdot.