Latest News

Last updated 03 Apr, 10:33 AM

BBC News

Global stocks slide as Trump tariffs hit markets - European shares open lower after falls in Asia, while the gold price hits another record high.

The countries hit hardest by new US tariffs - the plan at a glance - A 10% rate of import tax will apply globally - with higher rates for a list of Trump's "worst offenders".

Trump's tariffs are a longtime goal fulfilled, and his biggest gamble yet - The president acknowledged that he will face pushback from some, but he urged Americans to trust his instincts.

Faisal Islam: This is the biggest change to global trade in 100 years - The impact of the tariffs will be huge, with significant changes to long-standing global avenues of trade.

Three ways the move may affect you and your money - The UK has been hit with 10% tariffs by the US, but there is uncertainty as to the impact of them.

The Register

System builders say server prices set to spike as Trump plays customs cowboy - Tariff moves threaten supply chain stability The cost of buying servers for business will inevitably rise as a result of US President Donald Trump's trade policies, at least in the short term, as uncertainty grips the supply chain.…

Heterogeneous stacks, ransomware, and ITaaS: A DR nightmare - Recovery's never been harder in today's tangled, outsourced infrastructure Comment Disaster recovery is getting tougher as IT estates sprawl across on-prem gear, public cloud, SaaS, and third-party ITaaS providers. And it's not floods or fires causing most outages anymore - ransomware now leads the pack, taking down systems faster than any natural disaster.…

UK government told to get a grip on £23B tech spend - Former official also points to processes driving up the cost of IT investment The UK government does not have a clear picture of what it is spending on digital technology, and its approach to buying associated services and products drives up the cost of investment, MPs have heard.…

On the issue of AI copyright, Blair Institute favors tech bros over Cool Britannia - Think tank report backs data mining for machine learning, leaving artists and rights holders behind Opinion Former UK prime minister Tony Blair became famous for standing shoulder to shoulder with allies, even though the fallout from the Iraq war forever sullied his reputation. Nonetheless, the institute that bears his name makes it clear who it stands with when it comes to using copyrighted material to fuel the expansion of machine learning into every human domain.…

Customer info allegedly stolen from Royal Mail, Samsung via compromised supplier - Stamp it out: Infostealer malware at German outfit may be culprit Britain's Royal Mail is investigating after a crew calling itself GHNA claimed it has put 144GB of the delivery giant’s data up for sale, perhaps after acquiring it with the same stolen credentials it used to crack Samsung Germany.…

New Scientist - Home

Our drive for adventure and challenge has ancient origins - Why are some people drawn towards exploration and challenge – even to the point of extreme danger? Alex Hutchinson's bracing new book unpicks the complex reasons

The best retro games console is the one you played at age 10 - Nostalgia for video games seems to be strongest for those played during childhood – at least for Nintendo Switch players

Ice-monitoring drones set for first tests in the Arctic - High-speed drones will be put to the test in the extreme Arctic environment as part of a project to assess how quickly glaciers in Greenland are retreating

It is time to close the autism diagnosis gender gap - For decades, autistic women and girls have had to play "diagnostic bingo" before getting their true diagnosis. As new neuroscience offers a fresh understanding of the condition, the time for change is now

The epic quest to redefine the second using the world's best clocks - A more precise definition of the second is crucial to all sorts of physical measurements – but to get there, scientists have to pack up their extraordinarily fragile optical clocks and take them on tour

Hacker News

I maintain a 17 year old ThinkPad - Comments

Tell HN: Announcing tomhow as a public moderator - Comments

US Administration announces 34% tariffs on China, 20% on EU - Comments

TV Garden - Comments

Web Server for AoE 1, 2 and 3 DE supporting LAN multiplayer 100% offline - Comments

Slashdot

ESA's New Documentary Paints Worrying Picture of Earth's Orbital Junk Problem - The European Space Agency's short film Space Debris: Is it a Crisis? highlights the growing danger of orbital clutter, warning that "70% of the 20,000 satellites ever launched remain in space today, orbiting alongside hundreds of millions of fragments left behind by collisions, explosions and intentional destruction." Inkl reports: The approximately eight-minute-long film "Space Debris: Is it a Crisis?" attempts to answer its conjecture with supportive statistics and orbital projections. [...] The film also mentions that the kind of Earth orbit matters when discussing whether we're in a space junk "crisis" -- though unfortunately, orbits at risk appear to be those with satellites that help with communication and navigation, as well as our fight against another primarily human-driven crisis: global warming. Still, the film emphasizes that solutions ought to be thought of carefully: "True sustainability is complex, and rushed solutions risk creating the problem of burden-shifting." You can watch the film on ESA's website. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon Set To Launch First Operational Satellites For Project Kuiper Network - Amazon and United Launch Alliance will launch 27 full-scale satellites on April 9 as part of Amazon's Project Kuiper, marking the company's first major step toward building a global satellite internet network to rival SpaceX's Starlink. GeekWire reports: ULA said the three-hour window for the Atlas V rocket's liftoff from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station's Space Launch Complex 41 in Florida is scheduled to open at noon ET (9 a.m. PT) that day. ULA is planning a live stream of launch coverage via its website starting about 20 minutes ahead of liftoff. Amazon said next week's mission -- known as Kuiper-1 or KA-1 (for Kuiper Atlas 1) -- will put 27 Kuiper satellites into orbit at an altitude of 280 miles (450 kilometers). ULA launched two prototype Kuiper satellites into orbit for testing in October 2023, but KA-1 will mark Amazon's first full-scale launch of a batch of operational satellites designed to bring high-speed internet access to millions of people around the world. [...] According to Amazon, the Kuiper satellite design has gone through significant upgrades since the prototypes were launched in 2023. Amazon's primary manufacturing facility is in Kirkland, Wash., with some of the components produced at Project Kuiper's headquarters in nearby Redmond. The mission profile for KA-1 calls for deploying the satellites safely in orbit and establishing ground-to-space contact. The satellites would then use their electric propulsion systems to settle into their assigned orbits at an altitude of 392 miles (630 kilometers), under the management of Project Kuiper's mission operations team in Redmond. Under the current terms of its license from the Federal Communications Commission, Amazon is due to launch 3,232 Kuiper satellites by 2029, with half of those satellites going into orbit by mid-2026. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Vibe Coded AI App Generates Recipes With Very Few Guardrails - An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: A "vibe coded" AI app developed by entrepreneur and Y Combinator group partner Tom Blomfield has generated recipes that gave users instruction on how to make "Cyanide Ice Cream," "Thick White Cum Soup," and "Uranium Bomb," using those actual substances as ingredients. Vibe coding, in case you are unfamiliar, is the new practice where people, some with limited coding experience, rapidly develop software with AI assisted coding tools without overthinking how efficient the code is as long as it's functional. This is how Blomfield said he made RecipeNinja.AI. [...] The recipe for Cyanide Ice Cream was still live on RecipeNinja.AI at the time of writing, as are recipes for Platypus Milk Cream Soup, Werewolf Cream Glazing, Cholera-Inspired Chocolate Cake, and other nonsense. Other recipes for things people shouldn't eat have been removed. It also appears that Blomfield has introduced content moderation since users discovered they could generate dangerous or extremely stupid recipes. I wasn't able to generate recipes for asbestos cake, bullet tacos, or glue pizza. I was able to generate a recipe for "very dry tacos," which looks not very good but not dangerous. In a March 20 blog on his personal site, Blomfield explained that he's a startup founder turned investor, and while he has experience with PHP and Ruby on Rails, he has not written a line of code professionally since 2015. "In my day job at Y Combinator, I'm around founders who are building amazing stuff with AI every day and I kept hearing about the advances in tools like Lovable, Cursor and Windsurf," he wrote, referring to AI-assisted coding tools. "I love building stuff and I've always got a list of little apps I want to build if I had more free time." After playing around with them, he wrote, he decided to build RecipeNinja.AI, which can take a prompt as simple as "Lasagna," and generate an image of the finished dish along with a step-by-stape recipe which can use ElevenLabs's AI generated voice to narrate the instruction so the user doesn't have to interact with a device with his tomato sauce-covered fingers. "I was pretty astonished that Windsurf managed to integrate both the OpenAI and Elevenlabs APIs without me doing very much at all," Blomfield wrote. "After we had a couple of problems with the open AI Ruby library, it quickly fell back to a raw ruby HTTP client implementation, but I honestly didn't care. As long as it worked, I didn't really mind if it used 20 lines of code or two lines of code." Having some kind of voice controlled recipe app sounds like a pretty good idea to me, and it's impressive that Blomfield was able to get something up and running so fast given his limited coding experience. But the problem is that he also allowed users to generate their own recipes with seemingly very few guardrails on what kind of recipes are and are not allowed, and that the site kept those results and showed them to other users. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Open-Source Tool Designed To Throttle PC and Server Performance Based On Electricity Pricing - Robotics and machine learning engineer Naveen Kul developed WattWise, a lightweight open-source CLI tool that monitors power usage via smart plugs and throttles system performance based on electricity pricing and peak hours. Tom's Hardware reports: The simple program, called WattWise, came about when Naveen built a dual-socket EPYC workstation with plans to add four GPUs. It's a power-intensive setup, so he wanted a way to monitor its power consumption using a Kasa smart plug. The enthusiast has released the monitoring portion of the project to the public now, but the portion that manages clocks and power will be released later. Unfortunately, the Kasa Smart app and the Home Assistant dashboard was inconvenient and couldn't do everything he desired. He already had a terminal window running monitoring tools like htop, nvtop, and nload, and decided to take matters into his own hands rather than dealing with yet another app. Naveen built a terminal-based UI that shows power consumption data through Home Assistant and the TP-Link integration. The app monitors real-time power use, showing wattage and current, as well as providing historical consumption charts. More importantly, it is designed to automatically throttle CPU and GPU performance. Naveen's power provider uses Time-of-Use (ToU) pricing, so using a lot of power during peak hours can cost significantly more. The workstation can draw as much as 1400 watts at full load, but by reducing the CPU frequency from 3.7 GHz to 1.5 GHz, he's able to reduce consumption by about 225 watts. (No mention is made of GPU throttling, which could potentially allow for even higher power savings with a quad-GPU setup.) Results will vary based on the hardware being used, naturally, and servers can pull far more power than a typical desktop -- even one designed and used for gaming. WattWise optimizes the system's clock speed based on the current system load, power consumption as reported by the smart plug, and the time -- with the latter factoring in peak pricing. From there, it uses a Proportional-Integral (PI) controller to manage the power and adapts system parameters based on the three variables. A blog post with more information is available here. WattWise is also available on GitHub. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NaNoWriMo To Close After 20 Years - NaNoWriMo, the nonprofit behind the annual novel-writing challenge, is shutting down after 20 years but will keep its websites online temporarily so users can retrieve their content. The Guardian reports: A 27-minute YouTube video posted the same day by the organization's interim executive director Kilby Blades explained that it had to close due to ongoing financial problems, which were compounded by reputational damage. In November 2023, several community members complained to the nonprofit's board, Blades said. They believed that staff had mishandled accusations made in May 2023 that a NaNoWriMo forum moderator was grooming children on a different website. The moderator was eventually removed, though this was for unrelated code of conduct violations and occurred "many weeks" after the initial complaints. In the wake of this, community members came forward with other complaints related to child safety on the NaNoWriMo sites. The organization was also widely criticized last year over a statement on the use of artificial intelligence in creative writing. After stating that it did not support or explicitly condemn any approach to writing, including the use of AI, it said that the "categorical condemnation of artificial intelligence has classist and ableist undertones." It went on to say that "not all writers have the financial ability to hire humans to help at certain phases of their writing," and that "not all brains have same abilities ... There is a wealth of reasons why individuals can't 'see' the issues in their writing without help." "We hold no belief that people will stop writing 50,000 words in November," read Monday's email. "Many alternatives to NaNoWriMo popped up this year, and people did find each other. In so many ways, it's easier than it was when NaNoWriMo began in 1999 to find your writing tribe online." Read more of this story at Slashdot.