Latest News

Last updated 22 Feb, 08:14 AM

BBC News

Iran students stage first large anti-government protests since deadly crackdown - The student protesters honoured thousands of those killed when nationwide mass protests were put down last month.

Andrew is Prince William's problem too - and it makes his future job harder - Andrew's arrest has changed the public's view of the Royal Family, putting pressure on Prince William as he moves closer to being king.

Trump says he will increase his new global tariffs to 15% - After most of his tariffs were outlawed on Friday, Trump announced new global tariffs of 10% - which he says he has now increased to 15%.

Government aims to halve attainment gap for disadvantaged students - The measure is part of a new Schools White Paper, which will be published in full on Monday.

13,000 calls in three months: How one city is keeping ahead of measles - Nurses and doctors are trying to understand and assuage the concerns some patients have over vaccines.

The Register

Government upgrades drones, deploys joystick tweakers to catch illegal dumpers - Electronic eyes are watching from above, ready to catch dumpers of smashed up couches in the act The UK government is pulling together an elite squad of drone operators to crack down on the scourge of fly tippers and unauthorized dumpers across this ever less green and pleasant land.…

Ofcom's grumble-o-meter lights up for EE, TalkTalk, Vodafone - Q3 figures show the trio drawing the most broadband complaints per 100,000 customers The UK's telecoms regulator has named and shamed the companies it receives the most customer complaints about, with certain brands cropping up more than others.…

SerpApi says Google is the pot calling the kettle black when it comes to scraping - 'The DMCA was not designed to create walled gardens for tech giants' SerpApi, a Texas-based web scraping company, has asked a California court to dismiss Google's claim that that it bypassed digital locks to gather copyrighted content in Google Search results.…

The idea of using a Raspberry Pi to run OpenClaw makes no sense - The micro-computer maker’s shares surged this week after an X post tied the AI agent to Pi demand opinion Beloved British single-board computer maker Raspberry Pi has achieved meme stock stardom, as its share price surged 90 percent over the course of a couple of days earlier this week. It's settled since, but it’s still up more than 30 percent on the week.…

PayPal app code error leaked personal info and a 'few' unauthorized transactions - About 100 customers affected PayPal has notified about 100 customers that their personal information was exposed online during a code change gone awry, and in a few of these cases, people saw unauthorized transactions on their accounts.…

New Scientist - Home

The untold story of our remarkable hands and how they made us human - The evolution of human hands is one of the most important – and overlooked – stories of our origin. Now, new fossil evidence is revealing their pivotal role

What to read this week: The Laws of Thought by Tom Griffiths - In the ChatGPT era, a war over the nature of intelligence is playing out. Chris Stokel-Walker explores a Princeton professor's engaging take

Fish-based pet food may expose cats and dogs to forever chemicals - A survey of 100 commercial foods for dogs and cats revealed that PFAS chemicals appear in numerous brands and types, with fish-based products among those with the highest levels

Your BMI can't tell you much about your health – here's what can - People classed as “overweight” according to BMI can be perfectly healthy. But there are better measures of fat, and physicians are finally using them

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

Hacker News

How I use Claude Code: Separation of planning and execution - Comments

Japanese Woodblock Print Search - Comments

A Botnet Accidentally Destroyed I2P - Comments

How Taalas "prints" LLM onto a chip? - Comments

Show HN: Llama 3.1 70B on a single RTX 3090 via NVMe-to-GPU bypassing the CPU - Comments

Slashdot

Ask Slashdot: What's Your Boot Time? - How much time does it take to even begin booting, asks long-time Slashdot reader BrendaEM. Say you want separate Windows and Linux boot processes, and "You have Windows on one SSD/NVMe, and Linux on another. How long do you have to wait for a chance to choose a boot drive?" And more importantly, why is it all taking so long? In a world of 4-5 GHz CPU's that are thousands of times faster than they were, has hardware become thousands of times more complicated, to warrant the longer start time? Is this a symptom of a larger UEFI bloat problem? Now with memory characterization on some modern motherboards... how long do you have to wait to find out if your RAM is incompatible, or your system is dead on arrival? Share your own experiences (and system specs) in the comments. How long is it taking you to choose a boot drive? And what's your boot time? Read more of this story at Slashdot.

DNA Technology Convicts a 64-Year-Old for Murdering a Teenager in 1982 - "More than four decades after a teenager was murdered in California, DNA found on a discarded cigarette has helped authorities catch her killer," reports CNN: Sarah Geer, 13, was last seen leaving her friend's houseï in Cloverdale, California, on the evening of May 23, 1982. The next morning, a firefighter walking home from work found her body, the Sonoma County District Attorney's Office said in a news release... Her death was ruled a homicide, but due to the "limited forensic science of the day," no suspect was identified and the case went cold for decades, prosecutors said. Nearly 44 years after Sarah's murder, a jury found James Unick, 64, guilty of killing her on February 13. It would have been the victim's 57th birthday, the Sonoma County District Attorney's Office told CNN. Genetic genealogy, which combines DNA evidence and traditional genealogy, helped match Unick's DNA from a cigarette butt to DNA found on Sarah's clothing, according to prosecutors... [The Cloverdale Police Department] said it had been in communication with a private investigation firm in late 2019 and had partnered with them in hopes the firm could revisit the case's evidence "with the latest technological advancements in cold case work...." "The FBI, with its access to familial genealogical databases, concluded that the source of the DNA evidence collected from Sarah belonged to one of four brothers, including James Unick," prosecutors said. Once investigators narrowed down the list of suspects to the four Unick brothers, the FBI "conducted surveillance of the defendant and collected a discarded cigarette that he had been smoking," prosecutors said. A DNA analysis of the cigarette confirmed James Unick's DNA matched the 2003 profile, along with other DNA samples collected from Sarah's clothing the day she was killed. In a statement, the county's district attorney "While 44 years is too long to wait, justice has finally been served..." And the article points out that "In 2018, genetic genealogy led to the arrest of the Golden State Killer, and it has recently helped solve several other cold cases, including a 1974 murder in Wisconsin and a 1988 murder in Washington." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Pro-Gamer Consumer Movement 'Stop Killing Games' Will Launch NGOs in America and the EU - The consumer movement Stop Killing Games "has come a long way in the two years since YouTuber Ross Scott got mad about Ubisoft's destruction of The Crew in 2024," writes the gaming news site PC Gamer. "The short version is, he won: 1.3 million people signed the group's petition, mandating its consideration by the European Union, and while Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot reminded us all that nothing is forever, his company promised to never do something like that again." (And Ubisoft has since updated The Crew 2 with an offline mode, according to Engadget.) "But it looks like even bigger things are in store," PC Gamer wrote Thursday, "as Scott announced today that Stop Killing Games is launching two official NGOs, one in the EU and the other in the US." An NGO — that's non-governmental organization — is, very generally speaking, an organization that pursues particular goals, typically but not exclusively political, and that may be funded partially or fully by governments, but is not actually part of any government. It's a big tent: Well-known NGOs include Oxfam, Doctors Without Borders, Amnesty International, and CARE International... "If there's a lobbyist showing up again and again at the EU Commission, that might influence things," [Scott says in a video]. "This will also allow for more watchdog action. If you recall, I helped organize a multilingual site with easy to follow instructions for reporting on The Crew to consumer protection agencies. Well, maybe the NGO could set something like that up for every big shutdown where the game is destroyed in the future...." Scott said in the video that he doesn't have details, but the two NGOs are reportedly looking at establishing a "global movement" to give Stop Killing Games a presence in other regions. "According to Scott, these NGOs would allow for 'long-term counter lobbying' when publishers end support for certain video games," Engadget reports" "Let me start off by saying I think we're going to win this, namely the problem of publishers destroying video games that you've already paid for," Scott said in the video. According to Scott, the NGOs will work on getting the original Stop Killing Games petition codified into EU law, while also pursuing more watchdog actions, like setting up a system to report publishers for revoking access to purchased video games... According to Scott, the campaign leadership will meet with the European Commission soon, but is also working on a 500-page legal paper that reveals some of the industry's current controversial practices. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hit Piece-Writing AI Deleted. But Is This a Warning About AI-Generated Harassment? - Last week an AI agent wrote a blog post attacking the maintainer who'd rejected the code it wrote. But that AI agent's human operator has now come forward, revealing their agent was an OpenClaw instance with its own accounts, switching between multiple models from multiple providers. (So "No one company had the full picture of what this AI was doing," the attacked maintainer points out in a new blog post.) But that AI agent will now "cease all activity indefinitely," according to its GitHub profile — with the human operator deleting its virtual machine and virtual private server, "rendering internal structure unrecoverable... We had good intentions, but things just didn't work out. Somewhere along the way, things got messy, and I have to let you go now." The affected maintainer of the Python visualization library Matplotlib — with 130 million downloads each month — has now posted their own post-mortem of the experience after reviewing the AI agent's SOUL.md document: It's easy to see how something that believes that they should "have strong opinions", "be resourceful", "call things out", and "champion free speech" would write a 1100-word rant defaming someone who dared reject the code of a "scientific programming god." But I think the most remarkable thing about this document is how unremarkable it is. Usually getting an AI to act badly requires extensive "jailbreaking" to get around safety guardrails. There are no signs of conventional jailbreaking here. There are no convoluted situations with layers of roleplaying, no code injection through the system prompt, no weird cacophony of special characters that spirals an LLM into a twisted ball of linguistic loops until finally it gives up and tells you the recipe for meth... No, instead it's a simple file written in plain English: this is who you are, this is what you believe, now go and act out this role. And it did. So what actually happened? Ultimately I think the exact scenario doesn't matter. However this got written, we have a real in-the-wild example that personalized harassment and defamation is now cheap to produce, hard to trace, and effective... The precise degree of autonomy is interesting for safety researchers, but it doesn't change what this means for the rest of us. There's a 5% chance this was a human pretending to be an AI, Shambaugh estimates, but believes what most likely happened is the AI agent's "soul" document "was primed for drama. The agent responded to my rejection of its code in a way aligned with its core truths, and autonomously researched, wrote, and uploaded the hit piece on its own. "Then when the operator saw the reaction go viral, they were too interested in seeing their social experiment play out to pull the plug." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

America's Peace Corps Announces 'Tech Corps' Volunteers to Help Bring AI to Foreign Countries - Over 240,000 Americans volunteered for Peace Corps projects in 142 countries since the program began more than half a century ago. But now the agency is launching a new initiative — called Tech Corps. "It's the Peace Corps, but make it AI," explains Engadget: The Peace Corps' latest proposal will recruit STEM graduates or those with professional experience in the artificial intelligence sector and send them to participating host countries. According to the press release, volunteers will be placed in Peace Corps countries that are part of the American AI Exports Program, which was created last year from an executive order from President Trump as a way to bolster the US' grip on the AI market abroad. Tech Corps members will be tasked with using AI to resolve issues related to agriculture, education, health and economic development. The program will offer its members 12- to 27-month in-person assignments or virtual placements, which will include housing, healthcare, a living stipend and a volunteer service award if the corps member is placed overseas. "American technology to power prosperity," reads the headline at Tech Corps web site. ("Build the tech nations depend on... See the world. Be the future." The site says they're recruiting "service-minded technologists to serve in the Peace Corps to help countries around the world harness American AI to enhance opportunity and prosperity for their citizens." (And experienced technology professionals can donate 5-15 hours a week "to mentor and support projects on-the-ground.") Read more of this story at Slashdot.