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Last updated 28 Jan, 01:45 AM

BBC News

Starmer says 'China matters' as he heads to Beijing with business leaders - Sir Keir Starmer is the first British prime minister to travel to Beijing since Theresa May in 2018.

Who is Tom Homan, Trump's 'border tsar' deployed to Minneapolis? - The US border tsar has long been a ferocious defender of Donald Trump's immigration policies.

Storm Chandra brings heavy rain, flooding and travel disruption to UK - Weather warnings for heavy rain and strong winds are in place during the third major storm to hit to the UK this month.

Vulnerable missing out on benefits due to online tool - Benefits calculators can leave some people confused and in a dire financial state, say campaigners.

EasyJet warned over 'misleading' £5.99 cabin bag fee - The airline said the fact there were no bags available for less than £5.99 meant the claim was not misleading.

The Register

Paranoid WhatsApp users rejoice: Encrypted app gets one-click privacy toggle - Meta also replaces a legacy C++ media-handling security library with Rust Users of Meta's WhatsApp messenger looking to simplify the process of protecting themselves are in luck, as the company is rolling out a new feature that combines multiple security settings under a single, toggleable option. …

ICE knocks on ad tech’s data door to see what it knows about you - Agency looks to understand the extent of identifying information available to its masked agents It's not enough to have its agents in streets and schools; ICE now wants to see what data online ads already collect about you. The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement last week issued a Request for Information (RFI) asking data and ad tech brokers how they could help in its mission.…

Nudify app proliferation shows naked ambition of Apple and Google - Researchers with the Tech Transparency Project found all sorts of apps that let users create fake non-consensual nudes of real people The mobile app emperors have no clothes. Apple and Google have made millions of dollars from AI apps that let users undress people even as both companies claim to ban such software from their stores, according to a new study.…

Let them eat sourdough: ShinyHunters claims Panera Bread as stolen credentials victim - Plus, the gang says it got in via Microsoft Entra SSO ShinyHunters says it stole several slices of data from Panera Bread, but that's just the yeast of everyone's problems. The extortionist gang also claims to have stolen data from CarMax and Edmunds, in addition to three other organizations it posted to its blog last week.…

Penguin in your pocket: Nexphone dual boots into Linux, Windows 11 - An expandable tablet, and a phone that reboots into desktop Windows For most mobile devices, the OS is either Android or iOS, but a pair of new systems promises a host of additional OS options you can dual boot into. The Android phone can run Linux and boot into Windows 11 where it functions as a PC while the tablet runs a smorgasbord of Google-free OSes.…

New Scientist - Home

Amazon is getting drier as deforestation shuts down atmospheric rivers - The amount of rainfall in the southern Amazon basin has declined by 8 to 11 per cent since 1980, largely due to the impact of deforestation

To halt measles' resurgence we must fight the plague of misinformation - The measles vaccine has prevented 60 million deaths since 2000. So why are so many children around the world missing out on it?

Our brains play a surprising role in recovering from a heart attack - A newly discovered collection of neurons suggests the brain and heart communicate to trigger a neuroimmune response after a heart attack, which may pave the way for new therapies

Nobel prizewinner Omar Yaghi says his invention will change the world - Chemist Omar Yaghi invented materials called MOFs, a few grams of which have the surface area of a football field. He explains why he thinks these super-sponges will define the next century

We have a new way to explain why we agree on the nature of reality - An evolution-inspired framework for how quantum fuzziness gives rise to our classical world shows that even imperfect observers can eventually agree on an objective reality

Hacker News

Prism - Comments

430k-year-old well-preserved wooden tools are the oldest ever found - Comments

Rust’s Standard Library on the GPU - Comments

A few random notes from Claude coding quite a bit last few weeks - Comments

Time Station Emulator - Comments

Slashdot

Scientists Launch AI DinoTracker App That Identifies Dinosaur Footprints - Scientists have released DinoTracker, a free AI-powered app that identifies dinosaur footprints by analyzing shape patterns rather than relying on potentially flawed historical labels. "When we find a dinosaur footprint, we try to do the Cinderella thing and find the foot that matches the slipper," said Prof Steve Brusatte, a co-author of the work. "But it's not so simple, because the shape of a dinosaur footprint depends not only on the shape of the dinosaur's foot but also the type of sand or mud it was walking through, and the motion of its foot." The Guardian reports: [...] Brusatte, [Dr Gregor Hartmann, the first author of the new research from Helmholtz-Zentrum in Germany] and colleagues fed their AI system with 2,000 unlabelled footprint silhouettes. The system then determined how similar or different the imprints were from each other by analysing a range of features it identified as meaningful. The researchers discovered these eight features reflected variations in the imprints' shapes, such as the spread of the toes, amount of ground contact and heel position. The team have turned the system into a free app called DinoTracker that allows users to upload the silhouette of a footprint, explore the seven other footprints most similar to it and manipulate the footprint to see how varying the eight features can affect which other footprints are deemed most similar. Hartmann said that at present experts had to double check if factors such as the material the footprints were made in, and their age, matched the scientific hypothesis, but the system clustered prints with those expected from classifications made by human experts about 90% of the time. The findings have been published in the journal PNAS. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SoundCloud Data Breach Impacts 29.8 Million Accounts - A data breach at SoundCloud exposed information tied to 29.8 million user accounts, according to Have I Been Pwned. While SoundCloud says no passwords or financial data were accessed, attackers mapped email addresses to public profile data and later attempted extortion. BleepingComputer reports: The company confirmed the breach on December 15, following widespread reports from users who were unable to access SoundCloud and saw 403 "Forbidden" errors when connecting via VPN. SoundCloud told BleepingComputer at the time that it had activated its incident response procedures after detecting unauthorized activity involving an ancillary service dashboard. "We understand that a purported threat actor group accessed certain limited data that we hold," SoundCloud said. "We have completed an investigation into the data that was impacted, and no sensitive data (such as financial or password data) has been accessed. The data involved consisted only of email addresses and information already visible on public SoundCloud profiles." While SoundCloud didn't provide further details regarding the incident, BleepingComputer learned that the breach affected 20% of all SoundCloud users, roughly 28 million accounts based on publicly reported user figures (SoundCloud later published a security notice confirming the information provided by BleepingComputer's sources). After the breach, BleepingComputer also learned that the ShinyHunters extortion gang was responsible for the attack, with sources saying that the threat group was also attempting to extort SoundCloud. This was confirmed by SoundCloud in a January 15 update, which said the threat actors had "made demands and deployed email flooding tactics to harass users, employees, and partners." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Supreme Court To Decide How 1988 Videotape Privacy Law Applies To Online Video - An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Supreme Court is taking up a case on whether Paramount violated the 1988 Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA) by disclosing a user's viewing history to Facebook. The case, Michael Salazar v. Paramount Global, hinges on the law's definition of the word "consumer." Salazar filed a class action against Paramount in 2022, alleging that it "violated the VPPA by disclosing his personally identifiable information to Facebook without consent," Salazar's petition to the Supreme Court said. Salazar had signed up for an online newsletter through 247Sports.com, a site owned by Paramount, and had to provide his email address in the process. Salazar then used 247Sports.com to view videos while logged in to his Facebook account. "As a result, Paramount disclosed his personally identifiable information -- including his Facebook ID and which videos he watched—to Facebook," the petition (PDF) said. "The disclosures occurred automatically because of the Facebook Pixel Paramount installed on its website. Facebook and Paramount then used this information to create and display targeted advertising, which increased their revenues." The 1988 law (PDF) defines consumer as "any renter, purchaser, or subscriber of goods or services from a video tape service provider." The phrase "video tape service provider" is defined to include providers of "prerecorded video cassette tapes or similar audio visual materials," and thus arguably applies to more than just sellers of tapes. The legal question for the Supreme Court "is whether the phrase 'goods or services from a video tape service provider,' as used in the VPPA's definition of 'consumer,' refers to all of a video tape service provider's goods or services or only to its audiovisual goods or services," Salazar's petition said. The Supreme Court granted his petition (PDF) to hear the case in a list of orders released yesterday. [...] SCOTUSblog says that "the case will likely be scheduled for oral argument in the court's 2026-27 term," which begins in October 2026. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OpenAI Releases Prism, a Claude Code-Like App For Scientific Research - OpenAI has launched Prism, a free scientific research app that aims to do for scientific writing what coding agents did for programming. Engadget reports: Prism builds on Crixet, a cloud-based LaTeX platform the company is announcing it acquired today. For the uninitiated, LaTeX is a typesetting system for formatting scientific documents and journals. Nearly the entire scientific community relies on LaTeX, but it can make some tasks, such as drawing diagrams through TikZ commands, time-consuming to do. Beyond that, LaTeX is just one of the software tools a scientist might turn to when preparing to publish their research. That's where Prism comes into the picture. Like Crixet before it, the app offers robust LaTeX editing and a built-in AI assistant. Where previously it was Crixet's own Chirp agent, now it's GPT-5.2 Thinking. OpenAI's model can help with more than just formatting journals -- in a press demo, an OpenAI employee used it to find and incorporate scientific literature that was relevant to the paper they were working on, with GPT-5.2 automating the process of writing the bibliography. [...] Later in the same demo, the OpenAI employee used Prism to generate a lesson plan for a graduate course on general relativity, as well as a set of problems for students to solve. OpenAI envisions these features helping scientists and professors spend less time on the more tedious tasks in their professions. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon To Pay $309 Million To US Shoppers In Settlement Over Returns - Amazon has agreed to pay $309 million and provide additional remedies in a class-action settlement over claims that customers were wrongly denied refunds after returning items. Plaintiffs say (PDF) the deal delivers over $1 billion in total value, including more than $600 million in refunds and operational changes. Reuters reports: Amazon denied any wrongdoing in agreeing to the settlement. "Following an internal review in 2025, we identified a small subset of returns where we issued a refund without the payment completing, or where we could not verify that the correct item had been sent back to us, so no refund had been issued," an Amazon spokesperson said, adding that the company had taken steps to resolve the issue. The lawsuit, filed in 2023, said Amazon caused "substantial unjustified monetary losses" for consumers who in some instances properly returned an item but were still charged for it. In a court filing, Amazon said customers accepted the terms of the company's return policies, including the possibility they would be recharged for failing to return the product within a specified time frame. The proposed settlement class covers U.S. purchasers of goods on Amazon from September 2017 who allegedly did not receive timely or correct refunds, or who were later charged despite returning items. Class members are expected to recover the full amount of any incorrectly denied refund or retrocharge, plus interest, the plaintiffs told the court. Read more of this story at Slashdot.