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Last updated 05 Apr, 01:01 PM
BBC News
What we know so far about rescue of US airman in Iran - The US has rescued the missing crew member of the US F-15 fighter jet which was shot down over southern Iran.
'Absolutely spectacular': Artemis II crew see first glimpse of far side of Moon - Astronauts on the Artemis II mission are on the third day of their journey around the far side of the Moon.
Keir Starmer 'concerned' over Kanye West UK festival dates - The festival's main sponsor Pepsi has withdrawn its funding from Wireless, it announced on Sunday.
AI videos fuel rhetoric as Orbán bids for four more years in Hungary - Videos have targeted Viktor Orbán's election rival, who could unseat him after 16 years in office.
Storm Dave hits road and rail travel but conditions easing - Storm Dave will clear northeast on Easter Sunday, bringing "sunshine and showers" to much of the country.
The Register
AI agents promise to 'run the business,' but who is liable if things go wrong? - Vendors tout the potential, but responsibility remains unclear Feature "You can't blame it on the box," says the boss of a UK financial regulator. What about the people who sold you the box? Good luck with that, says a global tech analyst.…
How Nvidia learned to embrace the light in its quest for scale - The GPU king's move to optical scale-up was inevitable If you thought Nvidia's GB200 rack systems were big, CEO Jensen Huang is just getting started. At GTC last month, the world's most valuable company revealed plans to use photonic interconnects to pack more than a thousand GPUs into a single mammoth system by 2028.…
Netflix, Meta, and IBM speakers: AI will make anyone a 10x programmer, but with 10x the cleanup - Agents to check the work of the agents All Things AI AI is easy to use, but not quite as easy as just barking "Alexa! Make me an e-commerce site." And, no, adding "DON'T HALLUCINATE" to the instruction loop won't help.…
Ex-Microsoft engineer believes Azure problems stem from talent exodus - The cloud service's woes reflect a crisis made worse by AI – under-investment in people In 2024, federal cybersecurity evaluators reportedly dismissed Microsoft 365 Government Community Cloud High (GCC High) as garbage, although they used a more colorful term. To understand why, it helps to consider the history of the underlying Azure infrastructure.…
PrismML debuts energy-sipping 1-bit LLM in bid to free AI from the cloud - Bonasi 8B model is competitive with other 8B models but 14x smaller and 5x more energy efficient PrismML, an AI venture out of Caltech, has released a 1-bit large language model that outperforms weightier models, with the expectation that it will improve AI efficiency and viability on mobile devices, among other applications.…
New Scientist - Home
A once-fantastical collider could answer physics’ biggest mysteries - The muon collider was once dismissed as impossible, but is now gaining steam as the successor to the Large Hadron Collider. If built, it could offer a new window to reality
Stark photos show quest for profit cutting swathes through the Amazon - Photographer Lalo de Almeida has been documenting the industrialisation taking place in the Amazon rainforest after the Brazilian government relaxed environmental controls
Michael Pollan: 'Consciousness is really under siege' - A psychedelic experience set author Michael Pollan on a quest to understand consciousness in his new book A World Appears. He tells Olivia Goldhill what he learned – and how it changed him
We may have seen a 'dirty fireball' star explosion for the first time - An incredibly powerful flash of X-rays spotted by the Einstein Probe telescope appears to be a kind of explosion first theorised more than 30 years ago
The profound effect the heart-brain connection has on your health - Cognitive decline, mental health and heart disease are all shaped by the deep links between heart and brain – with major implications for diagnoses and treatment
Hacker News
The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing - Comments
Talk like caveman - Comments
Lisette a little language inspired by Rust that compiles to Go - Comments
Show HN: A game where you build a GPU - Comments
German implementation of eIDAS will require an Apple/Google account to function - Comments
Slashdot
Does Ubuntu Now Require More RAM Than Windows 11? - "Canonical is no longer pretending that 4GB is enough," writes the blog How-to-Geek, noting Ubuntu 26.04 LTS "raises the baseline memory to 6GB, alongside a 2GHz dual-core processor, and 25GB of storage..." Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) set the floor at 1GB — a modest ask when it launched more than a decade ago in 2014. Then came the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) that pushed the number to 4GB, surviving quite well in the era of 16GB being considered standard for mid-range laptops.... Ubuntu's new minimum requirement lands in an interesting spot when compared against Windows 11. Microsoft's operating system requires just 4GB RAM, although real-world usage often tells a different story. Usually, 8GB is considered the sweet spot to handle modern apps and multitasking. The blog OMG Ubuntu argues this change is "not because Ubuntu requires 2GB more memory than it did, but more the way we compute does." it's more of an honesty bump. Components that make up the distro — the GNOME desktop and extensions, modern web browsers (and the sites we load in them) and the kinds of apps we use (and keep running) whilst multitasking are more demanding... The Resolute Raccoon's memory requirements better reflect real-world multitasking. Ubuntu 26.04 LTS can be installed on devices with less than 6GB RAM (but not less than 25GB of disk space). The experience may not be as smooth or as responsive as developers intend (so you don't get to complain), but it will work. I installed Ubuntu 26.04 Beta on a laptop with just 2 GB of memory — slow to the point of frustration in use, but otherwise functional. If you have a device with 4 GB RAM and you can't upgrade (soldered memory is a thing, and e-waste can be avoided), then alternatives exist. Many Ubuntu flavours, like Lubuntu, have lower system requirements than the main edition. Plus, there's always the manual option using the Ubuntu netboot installer to install a base system and then built out a more minimal system from there. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Apple's First 50 Years Celebrated - Including How Steve Jobs Finally Accepted an 'Open' App Store - Apple's 50th anniversary got celebrated in weird and wild ways. CEO Tim Cook posted a special 30-second video rewinding backwards through the years of Apple's products until it reaches the Apple I. Podcaster Lex Fridman noticed if you play the sound in reverse, "It's the Think Different ad music, pitched up." TechRadar played seven 50-year-old Apple I games on an emulator, including Star Trek, Blackjack, Lunar Lander, and of course, Conway's Game of Life. And Macworld ranked Apple's 50 most influential people. (Their top five?) 5. Tony Fadell (iPhone co-creator/"father of the iPod") 4. Sir Jony Ive 3. Steve Wozniak 2. Tim Cook 1. Steve Jobs One of the most thoughtful celebraters was David Pogue, who's spent 42 years of writing about Apple (starting as a MacWorld columnist and the author of Mac for Dummies, one of the first "...For Dummies" books ever published in the early 1990s.) Now 63 years old, Pogue spent the last two years working on a 608-page hardcover book titled Apple: The First 50 Years. But on his Substack Pogue contemplated his own history with the company — including several interactions with Steve Jobs. Pogue remembers how Jobs "hated open systems. He wanted to make self-contained, beautiful machines. He didn't want them polluted by modifications." The tech blog Daring Fireball notes that Pogue actually interviewed Scott Forstall (who'd led the iPhone's software development team) for his new book, "and got this story, about just how far Steve Jobs thought Apple could go to expand the iPhone's software library while not opening it to third-party developers." "I want you to make a list of every app any customer would ever want to use," he told Forstall. "And then the two of us will prioritize that list. And then I'm going to write you a blank check, and you are going to build the largest development team in the history of the world, to build as many apps as you can as quickly as possible." Forstall, dubious, began composing a list. But on the side, he instructed his engineers to build the security foundations of an app store into the iPhone's software-"against Steve's knowledge and wishes," Forstall says. [...] Two weeks after the iPhone's release, someone figured out how to "jailbreak" the iPhone: to hack it so that they could install custom apps. Jobs burst into Forstall's office. "You have to shut this down!" But Forstall didn't see the harm of developers spending their efforts making the iPhone better. "If they add something malicious, we'll ship an update tomorrow to protect against that. But if all they're doing is adding apps that are useful, there's no reason to break that." Jobs, troubled, reluctantly agreed. Week by week, more cool apps arrived, available only to jailbroken phones. One day in October, Jobs read an article about some of the coolest ones. "You know what?" he said. "We should build an app store." Forstall, delighted, revealed his secret plan. He had followed in the footsteps of Burrell Smith (the Mac's memory-expansion circuit) and Bob Belleville (the Sony floppy-drive deal): He'd disobeyed Jobs and wound up saving the project. In fact, the book "includes new interviews with 150 key people who made the journey, including Steve Wozniak, John Sculley, Jony Ive, and many current designers, engineers, and executives" (according to its description on Amazon). Pogue's book even revisits the story of Steve Jobs proving an iPod prototype could be smaller by tossing it into an aquarium, shouting "If there's air bubbles in there, there's still room. Make it smaller!" But Pogue's book "added that there's a caveat to this compelling bit of Apple lore," reports NPR. "It never actually happened. It's just one more Apple myth." Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Top NPM Maintainers Targeted with AI Deepfakes in Massive Supply-Chain Attack, Axios Briefly Compromised - "Hackers briefly turned a widely trusted developer tool into a vehicle for credential-stealing malware that could give attackers ongoing access to infected systems," the news site Axios.com reported Tuesday, citing security researchers at Google. The compromised package — also named axios — simplifies HTTP requests, and reportedly receives millions of downloads each day: The malicious versions were removed within roughly three hours of being published, but Google warned the incident could have "far-reaching impacts" given the package's widespread use, according to John Hultquist, chief analyst at Google Threat Intelligence Group. Wiz estimates Axios is downloaded roughly 100 million times per week and is present in about 80% of cloud and code environments. So far, Wiz has observed the malicious versions in roughly 3% of the environments it has scanned. Friday PCMag notes the maintainer's compromised account had two-factor authentication enabled, with the breach ultimately traced "to an elaborate AI deepfake from suspected North Korean hackers that was convincing enough to trick a developer into installing malware," according to a post-mortem published Thursday by lead developer Jason Saayman: [Saayman] fell for a scheme from a North Korean hacking group, dubbed UNC1069, which involves sending out phishing messages and then hosting virtual meetings that use AI deepfakes to clone the face and voices of real executives. The virtual meetings will then create the impression of an audio problem, which can only be "solved" if the victim installs some software or runs a troubleshooting command. In reality, it's an effort to execute malware. The North Koreans have been using the tactic repeatedly, whether it be to phish cryptocurrency firms or to secure jobs from IT companies. Saayman said he faced a similar playbook. "They reached out masquerading as the founder of a company, they had cloned the company's founders likeness as well as the company itself," he wrote. "They then invited me to a real Slack workspace. This workspace was branded... The Slack was thought out very well, they had channels where they were sharing LinkedIn posts. The LinkedIn posts I presume just went to the real company's account, but it was super convincing etc." The hackers then invited him to a virtual meeting on Microsoft Teams. "The meeting had what seemed to be a group of people that were involved. The meeting said something on my system was out of date. I installed the missing item as I presumed it was something to do with Teams, and this was the remote access Trojan," he added. "Everything was extremely well coordinated, looked legit and was done in a professional manner." Friday developer security platform Socket wrote that several more maintainers in the Node.js ecosystem "have come out of the woodwork to report that they were targeted by the same social engineering campaign." The accounts now span some of the most widely depended-upon packages in the npm registry and Node.js core itself, and together they confirm that axios was not a one-off target. It was part of a coordinated, scalable attack pattern aimed at high-trust, high-impact open source maintainers. Attackers also targeted several Socket engineers, including CEO Feross Aboukhadijeh. Feross is the creator of WebTorrent, StandardJS, buffer, and dozens of widely used npm packages with billions of downloads... Commenting on the axios post-mortem thread, he noted that this type of targeting [against individual maintainers] is no longer unusual... "We're seeing them across the ecosystem and they're only accelerating." Jordan Harband, John-David Dalton, and other Socket engineers also confirmed they were targeted. Harband, a TC39 member, maintains hundreds of ECMAScript polyfills and shims that are foundational to the JavaScript ecosystem. Dalton is the creator of Lodash, which sees more than 137 million weekly downloads on npm. Between them, the packages they maintain are downloaded billions of times each month. Wes Todd, an Express TC member and member of the Node Package Maintenance Working Group, also confirmed he was targeted. Matteo Collina, co-founder and CTO of Platformatic, Node.js Technical Steering Committee Chair, and lead maintainer of Fastify, Pino, and Undici, disclosed on April 2 that he was also targeted. His packages also see billion downloads per year... Scott Motte, creator of dotenv, the package used by virtually every Node.js project that handles environment variables, with more than 114 million weekly downloads, also confirmed he was targeted using the same Openfort persona. Socket reports that another maintainer was targetted with an invitation to appear on a podcast. (During the recording a suspicious technical issue appeared which required a software fix to resolve....) Even just technical implementation, "This is among the most operationally sophisticated supply chain attacks ever documented against a top-10 npm package," the CI/CD security company StepSecurity wrote Tuesday The dropper contacts a live command-and-control server, delivers separate second-stage payloads for macOS, Windows, and Linux, then erases itself and replaces its own package.json with a clean decoy... Three payloads were pre-built for three operating systems. Both release branches were poisoned within 39 minutes of each other. Every artifact was designed to self-destruct. Within two seconds of npm install, the malware was already calling home to the attacker's server before npm had even finished resolving dependencies... Both versions were published using the compromised npm credentials of a lead axios maintainer, bypassing the project's normal GitHub Actions CI/CD pipeline. "As preventive steps, Saayman has now outlined several changes," reports The Hacker News, "including resetting all devices and credentials, setting up immutable releases, adopting OIDC flow for publishing, and updating GitHub Actions to adopt best practices." The Wall Street Journal called it "the latest in a string of incidents exposing risks in the systems that underpin how modern software is built." Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Microsoft Pulls Then Re-Issues Windows 11 Preview Update. Also Begins Force-Updating Windows 11 - Nine days ago Microsoft released a non-security "preview" update for Windows 11 — not mandatory for the average Windows user, notes ZDNet, "but rather as optional, more for IT admins and power users who want to test them." TechRepublic adds that the update "was to bring 'production-ready improvements' and generally ensure system stability by optimizing different Windows services." So it's ironic that some (but not all) users reported instead that the update "blocks users at the door, refusing to install or crashing midway through the process." "It apparently impacted enough people to force Microsoft to take action," writes ZDNet. "Microsoft paused and then pulled the update," and then Tuesday released a new update "designed to replace the glitchy one. This one includes all the new features and improvements from the previous preview update, but also fixes the installation issues that clobbered that update." Meanwhile, as Windows 11 version 24H2 approaches its end of life this October, Microsoft is now force-updating users to the latest version, reports BleepingComputer: "The machine learning-based intelligent rollout has expanded to all devices running Home and Pro editions of Windows 11, version 24H2 that are not managed by IT departments," Microsoft said in a Monday update to the Windows release health dashboard... "No action is required, and you can choose when to restart your device or postpone the update." Neowin reports: The good news is that the update from version 24H2 to 25H2 is a minor enablement package, as the two operating systems share the same codebase. As such, the update won't take long, and you should not encounter any disruptions, compatibility issues, or previously unseen bugs... Microsoft recently promised to implement big changes in how Windows Update works, including the ability to postpone updates for as long as you want. However, Microsoft has yet to clarify if that includes staying on a release beyond its support period. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Ol Olsoc for sharing the news. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
America's CIA Recruited Iran's Nuclear Scientists - By Threatening To Kill Them - A former U.S. spy spoke to The New Yorker about "years of clandestine work for the C.I.A. — which, he said, had 'prevented Iran from getting a nuke'." [Kevin] Chalker told me that, as he understood it, the Pentagon had suggested running commando operations to kill key Iranian scientists, as Israel subsequently did. But the C.I.A. proposed recruiting those scientists to defect, as U.S. spies had once courted Soviet physicists. Chalker paraphrased the agency's pitch: "We can debrief them and learn so much more — and, if they say no, then you can kill them." (A more senior agency official confirmed the broad strokes of his account.) The White House liked the agency's idea, and [president George W.] Bush authorized the C.I.A. to conduct clandestine operations to stop Iran from building a bomb. The C.I.A. program that Chalker described to me became publicly known in 2007, when the Los Angeles Times reported on the existence of an agency project called Brain Drain. But the details of the "invitations" to Iranian scientists have not previously been reported... Chalker typically had about ten minutes to explain, as gently as possible, that he was from the C.I.A., that he had the power to secure the scientist and his family a comfortable new life in the U.S. — and that, if the offer was rejected, the scientist, regrettably, would be assassinated. (Chalker tried to emphasize the happier potential outcome.) Killing a civilian scientist would violate international law. The American government has denied ever doing it, and I found no evidence that the U.S. has carried out any such murders. A former senior agency official familiar with the Brain Drain project told me all that mattered was that Iranian scientists had believed they would be killed, regardless of whether the U.S. actually made good on the threat. And Israel had been conducting a campaign to assassinate Iranian scientists, which made the prospect of lethal reprisal highly plausible. Other former officials with knowledge of the project told me that the C.I.A. sometimes shared intelligence with Mossad which enabled its operatives to locate and kill a scientist. Such information exchanges were kept vague enough to preserve deniability if a more legalistic U.S. Administration later took office... [Chalker] is confident that those who rebuffed him were, in fact, killed — one way or another... One of Chalker's colleagues told me that, against the backdrop of so many Israeli assassinations, Chalker's interactions with Iranian scientists could almost be considered humanitarian — he had been "throwing them a lifeline." Of the many scientists he approached, three-quarters ultimately agreed to coöperate. Their 10,000-word article suggests Chalker may now be resentful the CIA didn't help him in a later unrelated lawsuit, noting it's "nearly unheard of for ex-spies to divulge their past activities." But Chalker also says he "helped obtain pivotal information that laid the groundwork for more than a decade of American efforts to disrupt the Iranian nuclear-weapons program, from the Stuxnet cyberattacks, which occurred around 2010 [destroying 1,000 uranium-enriching centrifuges], to the Obama Administration's nuclear deal, in 2015, to the U.S. air strikes on Iranian atomic-energy facilities in the summer of 2025." Read more of this story at Slashdot.