Latest News

Last updated 26 Feb, 03:18 AM

BBC News

'Fear is everywhere': BBC reports from Mexican city turned into war zone by drug cartel feud - Culiacán in northern Mexico has seen a surge in violence as rival factions of the Sinaloa cartel battle for control.

Watch: BBC on streets of Mexican city gripped by deadly cartel violence - BBC international correspondent Quentin Sommerville travelled to Culiacán in northern Sinaloa state following an explosion in violence.

Racism and 'poor' staff relationships factors in maternity care failings, report finds - The interim report has identified problems "at every stage" of the maternity journey in England.

There's a solution for e-bike parking chaos - but its not problem free - Introducing dedicated parking bays has not completely solved the issue.

Shot in school uniform: BBC reveals police order led to Gen Z protest killings - New evidence reveals what happened when 19 people were shot dead in Kathmandu last September.

The Register

Nvidia hasn't made a cent in China lately - and might not need to given $120 billion profit - GPU giant sees yet more growth coming soon, most of it in the datacenter Nearly three months after the Trump administration allowed Nvidia to sell its H200 accelerator in China, the GPU giant is still waiting for Beijing to allow them in and for any revenue to materialize.…

Claude collaboration tools left the door wide open to remote code execution - Anthropic fixed the flaws - but the AI-enabled attack surfaces remain Security vulnerabilities in Claude Code could have allowed attackers to remotely execute code on users' machines and steal API keys by injecting malicious configurations into repositories, and then waiting for a developer to clone and open an untrustworthy project.…

LLMs killed the privacy star, we can't rewind, we've gone too far - You'll find these days that there's no hiding place Add privacy to the list of potential casualties caused by the proliferation of AI, because researchers have found that large language models (LLMs) can be used to deanonymize internet users – even those who use pseudonyms – more efficiently than human sleuths.…

AIs are happy to launch nukes in simulated combat scenarios - Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini all had different personalities and reasoning tactics, but the endgame was the same Today's hottest bots have yet to learn that, when it comes to global thermonuclear war, the only way to win is not to play. So please don't hand them the codes. …

Google catches Beijing spies using Sheets to spread espionage across 4 continents - UNC2814 historically targets governments and telcos A China-linked crew found a unique formula for attacking telcos and government orgs across the Americas, Asia, and Africa in its latest round of intrusions. Google's threat intelligence, along with unnamed industry partners, disrupted the gang, which used the Chocolate Factory's own spreadsheet tools as part of its exploits.…

New Scientist - Home

SpaceX's 1 million satellites could avoid environmental checks - The environmental impact of SpaceX's planned gargantuan mega-constellation is still being grappled with, but the FCC isn’t required to study it

Tiny predatory dinosaur weighed less than a chicken - The alvarezsaurs were thought to have evolved a smaller stature because of their diet of ants and termites, but a new fossil found in Argentina casts doubt on that theory

Breaking encryption with a quantum computer just got 10 times easier - The commonly used RSA encryption algorithm can now be cracked by a quantum computer with only 100,000 qubits, but the technical challenges to building such a machine remain numerous

The world’s most elusive colour is worth billions – if we can find it - The discovery of bright yet stable pigments is vanishingly rare, making them hugely valuable. Now chemist Mas Subramanian is unpicking the atomic code of colour and homing in on our most-wanted hue

AIs can’t stop recommending nuclear strikes in war game simulations - Leading AIs from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google opted to use nuclear weapons in simulated war games in 95 per cent of cases

Hacker News

Jimi Hendrix was a systems engineer - Comments

Jane Street Hit with Terra $40B Insider Trading Suit - Comments

First Website (1992) - Comments

Artist who "paints" portraits on glass by hitting it with a hammer - Comments

RAM now represents 35 percent of bill of materials for HP PCs - Comments

Slashdot

Prediction Market Platform Kalshi Discloses First Insider Trading Enforcement Action - Kalshi, the prediction market platform regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, has for the first time publicly disclosed the results of an insider trading investigation, naming an editor for YouTube's biggest creator as the offender. The company identified Artem Kaptur, an editor for MrBeast, who it says traded around $4,000 on markets tied to the streamer and achieved "near-perfect trading success" on low-odds bets -- a pattern investigators flagged as suspicious. Kalshi froze Kaptur's account before he could withdraw any profits, fined him $20,000, suspended him for two years, and reported the case to the CFTC. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tech Firms Aren't Just Encouraging Their Workers To Use AI. They're Enforcing It. - Tech companies ranging from 300-person startups to giants like Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft and Salesforce have moved beyond encouraging employees to use AI tools and are now actively tracking adoption and, in several cases, tying it to performance reviews. Google is factoring AI use into some software engineer reviews for the first time this year, and Meta's new performance review system will do the same -- it can track how many lines of code an engineer wrote with AI assistance. Amazon Web Services managers have dashboards showing individual engineer AI-tool usage and consider adoption when evaluating promotions. About 42% of tech-industry workers said their direct manager expects AI use in daily work as of last October, up from 32% eight months earlier, according to AI consulting firm Section. At software maker Autodesk, CEO Andrew Anagnost acknowledged that some employees had been using initially blocked coding tools like Cursor stealthily -- and warned that AI holdouts "probably won't survive long term." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Americans Are Destroying Flock Surveillance Cameras - An anonymous reader shares a report: Brian Merchant, writing for Blood in the Machine, reports that people across the United States are dismantling and destroying Flock surveillance cameras, amid rising public anger that the license plate readers aid U.S. immigration authorities and deportations. Flock is the Atlanta-based surveillance startup valued at $7.5 billion a year ago and a maker of license plate readers. It has faced criticism for allowing federal authorities access to its massive network of nationwide license plate readers and databases at a time when U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is increasingly relying on data to raid communities as part of the Trump administration's immigration crackdown. Flock cameras allow authorities to track where people go and when by taking photos of their license plates from thousands of cameras located across the United States. Flock claims it doesn't share data with ICE directly, but reports show that local police have shared their own access to Flock cameras and its databases with federal authorities. While some communities are calling on their cities to end their contracts with Flock, others are taking matters into their own hands. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Xbox Co-founder Says Microsoft is Quietly Sunsetting the Platform - Seamus Blackley, one of the original founders of Xbox who helped convince Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer to back a console project more than 26 years ago, told GamesBeat in an interview that he believes Microsoft is quietly sunsetting the platform under the guise of an AI-driven leadership transition. Microsoft recently announced that Asha Sharma, whose career has focused on AI and software as a service, will replace Phil Spencer as Xbox CEO, and that COO and president Sarah Bond is leaving the company. Blackley said he expects Sharma's role to be that of "a palliative care doctor who slides Xbox gently into the night," arguing that Satya Nadella's all-consuming bet on generative AI has turned every business unit -- Xbox included -- into a nail for the same hammer. He compared the appointment to putting someone who doesn't like movies in charge of a major motion picture studio, and advised Sharma to either develop a genuine passion for games or find a way to leave the job soon. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hacker Used Anthropic's Claude To Steal Sensitive Mexican Data - A hacker exploited Anthropic's AI chatbot to carry out a series of attacks against Mexican government agencies, resulting in the theft of a huge trove of sensitive tax and voter information, according to cybersecurity researchers. From a report: The unknown Claude user wrote Spanish-language prompts for the chatbot to act as an elite hacker, finding vulnerabilities in government networks, writing computer scripts to exploit them and determining ways to automate data theft, Israeli cybersecurity startup Gambit Security said in research published Wednesday. The activity started in December and continued for roughly a month. In all, 150 gigabytes of Mexican government data was stolen, including documents related to 195 million taxpayer records as well as voter records, government employee credentials and civil registry files, according to the researchers. Read more of this story at Slashdot.