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Last updated 08 Jun, 09:07 AM
BBC News
Bowen: Israel is accused of the gravest war crimes - how governments respond could haunt them for years - Distinguished lawyers, senior humanitarians and diplomats tell Jeremy Bowen why they are increasingly concerned about the catastrophe inside Gaza.
Government outlines £86bn science and tech package - The government says every corner of the country will benefit, but research backers call for a long-term plan for science.
Colombia presidential hopeful shot in head at rally - The opposition senator was hit three times during rally in Bogota and is in a critical condition in hospital.
Trump-Musk row heightens fears over Nasa budget cuts - The space agency has published its budget request to Congress which would see funding for science projects cut by nearly a half.
EastEnders star suspended over 'unacceptable' language - The BBC said his language was “entirely unacceptable and in no way reflects the values or standards we hold”.
The Register
£127M wasted on failed UK nuclear cleanup plan - Don't worry, only 100 more years of Sellafield nuclear site cleansing to go The center for the UK's nuclear industry wasted £127 million ($172 million) during delays and replanning as it scrambled to find alternatives for facilities which treat and repackage plutonium, a Parliamentary report found.…
Trump lifts US supersonic flight ban, says he's 'Making Aviation Great Again' - It's boom time for the next generation of fast travel On Friday, President Trump signed an executive order telling the FAA to lift its 52-year ban on supersonic flight over the US and told the FAA to devise a scheme to limit noise pollution from such aircraft.…
Schneier tries to rip the rose-colored AI glasses from the eyes of Congress - DOGE moves fast and breaks things, and now our data is at risk, security guru warns in hearing Security guru Bruce Schneier played the skunk at the garden party in a Thursday federal hearing on AI's use in the government, focusing on the risks many are ignoring.…
Linux Foundation tries to play peacemaker in ongoing WordPress scuffle - FAIR Package Manager project aims to prevent political power plays The Linux Foundation on Friday introduced a new method to distribute WordPress updates and plugins that's not controlled by any one party, in a bid to "stabilize the WordPress ecosystem" after months of infighting.…
ChatGPT used for evil: Fake IT worker resumes, misinfo, and cyber-op assist - OpenAI boots accounts linked to 10 malicious campaigns Fake IT workers possibly linked to North Korea, Beijing-backed cyber operatives, and Russian malware slingers are among the baddies using ChatGPT for evil, according to OpenAI's latest threat report.…
New Scientist - Home
TB's extraordinary evolution reveals why the ancient disease lives on - Once thought to have originated in cows and spread through dust, the surprising evolutionary story of tuberculosis reveals why it's so hard to stamp out this ancient disease, writes Carl Zimmer
Life of first US woman in space Sally Ride makes a moving documentary - A new documentary sheds light on the extraordinary story of the US's first woman astronaut, Sally Ride, who defied all expectations in both her career and personal life
US stops endorsing covid-19 shots for kids – are other vaccines next? - When Robert F Kennedy Jr announced that the US would stop recommending covid-19 vaccines for healthy children and pregnancies, he bypassed standard protocols and set the stage for future vaccine rollbacks
Could we build space-time computers that run on gravity? - New mathematical work provides a way to identify when information has been changed by manipulating space-time – and it may form a foundation for future space-time computers
Women find other women’s faces even more attractive than men do - Across many cultures, both men and women rate female faces as more attractive, and women exhibit this preference even more strongly than men
Hacker News
<Blink> and <Marquee> (2020) - Comments
Joining Apple Computer (2018) - Comments
YouTuber claims to have received an offer to buy the Commodore brand - Comments
Convert photos to Atkinson dithering - Comments
Bill Atkinson has died - Comments
Slashdot
Russian Spies Are Analyzing Data From China's WeChat App - An anonymous reader shared this report from The New York Times: Russian counterintelligence agents are analyzing data from the popular Chinese messaging and social media app WeChat to monitor people who might be in contact with Chinese spies, according to a Russian intelligence document obtained by The New York Times. The disclosure highlights the rising level of concern about Chinese influence in Russia as the two countries deepen their relationship. As Russia has become isolated from the West over its war in Ukraine, it has become increasingly reliant on Chinese money, companies and technology. But it has also faced what the document describes as increased Chinese espionage efforts. The document indicates that the Russian domestic security agency, known as the F.S.B., pulls purloined data into an analytical tool known as "Skopishche" (a Russian word for a mob of people). Information from WeChat is among the data being analyzed, according to the document... One Western intelligence agency told The Times that the information in the document was consistent with what it knew about "Russian penetration of Chinese communications...." By design, [WeChat] does not use end-to-end encryption to protect user data. That is because the Chinese government exercises strict control over the app and relies on its weak security to monitor and censor speech. Foreign intelligence agencies can exploit that weakness, too... WeChat was briefly banned in Russia in 2017, but access was restored after Tencent took steps to comply with laws requiring foreign digital platforms above a certain size to register as "organizers of information dissemination." The Times confirmed that WeChat is currently licensed by the government to operate in Russia. That license would require Tencent to store user data on Russian servers and to provide access to security agencies upon request. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
ACLU Accuses California Local Government's Drones of 'Runaway Spying Operation' - An anonymous reader shared this report from SFGate about a lawsuit alleging a "warrantless drone surveillance program" that's "trampling residents' right to privacy": Sonoma County has been accused of deploying hundreds of drone flights over residents in a "runaway spying operation"... according to a lawsuit filed Wednesday by the American Civil Liberties Union. The North Bay county of Sonoma initially started the 6-year-old drone program to track illegal cannabis cultivation, but the lawsuit alleges that officials have since turned it into a widespread program to catch unrelated code violations at residential properties and levy millions of dollars in fines. The program has captured 5,600 images during more than 700 flights, the lawsuit said... Matt Cagle, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU Foundation of Northern California, said in a Wednesday news release that the county "has hidden these unlawful searches from the people they have spied on, the community, and the media...." The lawsuit says the county employees used the drones to spy on private homes without first receiving a warrant, including photographing private areas like hot tubs and outdoor baths, and through curtainless windows. One plaintiff "said the county secretly used the drone program to photograph her Sonoma County horse stable and issue code violations," according to the article. She only discovered the use of the drones after a county employee mentioned they had photos of her property, according to the lawsuit. She then filed a public records request for the images, which left her "stunned" after seeing that the county employees were monitoring her private property including photographing her outdoor bathtub and shower, the lawsuit said. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Bill Atkinson, Hypercard Creator and Original Mac Team Member, Dies at Age 74 - AppleInsider reports: The engineer behind much of the Mac's early graphical user interfaces, QuickDraw, MacPaint, Hypercard and much more, William D. "Bill" Atkinson, died on June 5 of complications from pancreatic cancer... Atkinson, who built a post-Apple career as a noted nature photographer, worked at Apple from 1978 to 1990. Among his lasting contributions to Apple's computers were the invention of the menubar, the selection lasso, the "marching ants" item selection animation, and the discovery of a midpoint circle algorithm that enabled the rapid drawing of circles on-screen. He was Apple Employee No. 51, recruited by Steve Jobs. Atkinson was one of the 30 team members to develop the first Macintosh, but also was principle designer of the Lisa's graphical user interface (GUI), a novelty in computers at the time. He was fascinated by the concept of dithering, by which computers using dots could create nearly photographic images similar to the way newspapers printed photos. He is also credited (alongside Jobs) for the invention of RoundRects, the rounded rectangles still used in Apple's system messages, application windows, and other graphical elements on Apple products. Hypercard was Atkinson's main claim to fame. He built the a hypermedia approach to building applications that he once described as a "software erector set." The Hypercard technology debuted in 1987, and greatly opened up Macintosh software development. In 2012 some video clips of Atkinson appeared in some rediscovered archival footage. (Original Macintosh team developer Andy Hertzfeld uploaded "snippets from interviews with members of the original Macintosh design team, recorded in October 1983 for projected TV commercials that were never used.") Blogger John Gruber calls Atkinson "One of the great heroes in not just Apple history, but computer history." If you want to cheer yourself up, go to Andy Hertzfeld's Folklore.org site and (re-)read all the entries about Atkinson. Here's just one, with Steve Jobs inspiring Atkinson to invent the roundrect. Here's another (surely near and dear to my friend Brent Simmons's heart) with this kicker of a closing line: "I'm not sure how the managers reacted to that, but I do know that after a couple more weeks, they stopped asking Bill to fill out the form, and he gladly complied." Some of his code and algorithms are among the most efficient and elegant ever devised. The original Macintosh team was chock full of geniuses, but Atkinson might have been the most essential to making the impossible possible under the extraordinary technical limitations of that hardware... In addition to his low-level contributions like QuickDraw, Atkinson was also the creator of MacPaint (which to this day stands as the model for bitmap image editorsâ — âPhotoshop, I would argue, was conceptually derived directly from MacPaint) and HyperCard ("inspired by a mind-expanding LSD journey in 1985"), the influence of which cannot be overstated. I say this with no hyperbole: Bill Atkinson may well have been the best computer programmer who ever lived. Without question, he's on the short list. What a man, what a mind, what gifts to the world he left us. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
AI Firms Say They Can't Respect Copyright. But A Nonprofit's Researchers Just Built a Copyright-Respecting Dataset - Is copyrighted material a requirement for training AI? asks the Washington Post. That's what top AI companies are arguing, and "Few AI developers have tried the more ethical route — until now. "A group of more than two dozen AI researchers have found that they could build a massive eight-terabyte dataset using only text that was openly licensed or in public domain. They tested the dataset quality by using it to train a 7 billion parameter language model, which performed about as well as comparable industry efforts, such as Llama 2-7B, which Meta released in 2023." A paper published Thursday detailing their effort also reveals that the process was painstaking, arduous and impossible to fully automate. The group built an AI model that is significantly smaller than the latest offered by OpenAI's ChatGPT or Google's Gemini, but their findings appear to represent the biggest, most transparent and rigorous effort yet to demonstrate a different way of building popular AI tools.... As it turns out, the task involves a lot of humans. That's because of the technical challenges of data not being formatted in a way that's machine readable, as well as the legal challenges of figuring out what license applies to which website, a daunting prospect when the industry is rife with improperly licensed data. "This isn't a thing where you can just scale up the resources that you have available" like access to more computer chips and a fancy web scraper, said Stella Biderman [executive director of the nonprofit research institute Eleuther AI]. "We use automated tools, but all of our stuff was manually annotated at the end of the day and checked by people. And that's just really hard." Still, the group managed to unearth new datasets that can be used ethically. Those include a set of 130,000 English language books in the Library of Congress, which is nearly double the size of the popular-books dataset Project Gutenberg. The group's initiative also builds on recent efforts to develop more ethical, but still useful, datasets, such as FineWeb from Hugging Face, the open-source repository for machine learning... Still, Biderman remained skeptical that this approach could find enough content online to match the size of today's state-of-the-art models... Biderman said she didn't expect companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic to start adopting the same laborious process, but she hoped it would encourage them to at least rewind back to 2021 or 2022, when AI companies still shared a few sentences of information about what their models were trained on. "Even partial transparency has a huge amount of social value and a moderate amount of scientific value," she said. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Nintendo Switch 2 Has Record-Breaking Launch, Selling Over 3 Million Units - TweakTown writes that the Switch 2 "has reportedly beaten the record for the most-sold console within 24 hours and is on track to shatter the two-month record," selling over 3 million units and tripling the PlayStation 4's previous launch day sales. So Nintendo's first console in 8 years becomes "one of the most successful hardware releases of all time," writes Barron's, raising hopes for the future: [2017's original Switch] ultimately sold more than 152 million units... Switch 2's big advantage is its backward compatibility, allowing it to play current-generation Switch games and giving gamers solace that their large investments in software are intact... Many older Switch games also play better on the Switch 2, taking advantage of the extra horsepower. Bloomberg writes that its bigger screen and faster chip "live up to the hype: Despite the hype and a $150 increase over the launch price for the original, the second-generation system manages to impress with faster performance, improved graphics, more comfortable ergonomics and enough tweaks throughout to make this feel like a distinctly new machine... This time, it's capable of outputting 4K resolution and more impactful HDR video to your TV screen... It's a bigger, faster, more polished version of a wildly successful gadget. The "buzzy launch drew long lines" at retailers like Walmart, Target, Best Buy, and Gamestop, according to the article. (See the photos from AOL.com and USA Today.) "The era of spending hours waiting in line for the latest iPhone is long gone, but the debut of a new video game console is still a rare enough event that Nintendo fans didn't think twice about driving to retailers in the middle of the night to secure a Switch 2." The Verge also opines that "the Switch 2's eShop is much better," calling it "way faster... with much less lag browsing through sections and loading up game pages." Or, as Barron's puts it, "Ultimately, Nintendo is winning because it has a different strategy than its competition, the Sony PlayStation and Microsoft Xbox. Instead of trying to appeal to tech snobs like me, who are obsessed with graphics resolution and hardware statistics like teraflops, Nintendo focuses on joy and fun." Read more of this story at Slashdot.