Latest News

Last updated 30 Jan, 10:48 PM

BBC News

Epstein sent £10,000 to Mandelson's partner, released emails show - The emails were published by the US Department of Justice as part of a release running to three million pages.

Schitt's Creek and Home Alone star Catherine O'Hara dies aged 71 - The Emmy-winning actress died at her home in Los Angeles on Friday after a brief illness, her agent said.

Asylum seeker sentenced to at least 29 years for murdering hotel worker Rhiannon Whyte - Deng Majek is told by the mother of victim Rhiannon Whyte that she hopes he never sees the outside world.

UN risks 'imminent financial collapse', secretary general warns - António Guterres says the international body could run out of money by July due to members' unpaid fees.

England cricketer Harry Brook says he lied to protect other players after nightclub altercation - England white-ball captain Harry Brook says other players were present when he was involved in an altercation with a nightclub bouncer.

The Register

January blues return as Ivanti coughs up exploited EPMM zero-days - Consider yourselves compromised, experts warn Ivanti has patched two critical zero-day vulnerabilities in its Endpoint Manager Mobile (EPMM) product that are already being exploited, continuing a grim run of January security incidents for enterprise IT vendors.…

'Hey! I’m chatting here!’ Fugazi answers doom NYC’s AI bot - Lying means dying Lying means dying, at least for one falsehood-peddling government AI. A Microsoft-powered chatbot that New York City rolled out to help business owners answer frequently asked questions – but was often wrong – has been silenced as the city grapples with a $12 billion budget shortfall.…

Ex-Googler nailed for stealing AI secrets for Chinese startups - Network access from China and side hustle as AI upstart CEO aroused suspicion A former Google software engineer has been convicted of stealing AI hardware secrets from the company for the benefit of two China-based firms, one of which he founded. The second startup intended to use these secrets to market its technology to PRC-controlled organizations.…

Thousands more Oregon residents learn their health data was stolen in TriZetto breach - Parent company Cognizant hit with multiple lawsuits Thousands more Oregonians will soon receive data breach letters in the continued fallout from the TriZetto data breach, in which someone hacked the insurance verification provider and gained access to its healthcare provider customers across multiple US states.…

Feeling taxed by layoffs, IRS turns to AI helpers - Fewer humans, more bots - just in time for filing season Tax season 2026 could be an interesting one as the IRS seeks to replace the staff it sent to the unemployment line with AI. Bots could handle tasks ranging from reviewing an org's request for tax-exempt status to processing amended individual filings.…

New Scientist - Home

The daring idea that time is an illusion and how we could prove it - The way time ticks forward in our universe has long stumped physicists. Now, a new set of tools from entangled atoms to black holes promises to reveal time’s true nature

Can we genetically improve humans using George Church’s famous list? - Columnist Michael Le Page delves into a catalogue of hundreds of potentially beneficial gene mutations and variants that is popular with transhumanists

Why people can have Alzheimer's-related brain damage but no symptoms - Some people don’t develop dementia despite showing signs of Alzheimer’s disease in their brain, and we're starting to understand why

Elon Musk is making a big bet on his future vision – will it work? - Reports suggest that Elon Musk is eyeing up a merger involving SpaceX, Tesla and xAI, but what does he hope to achieve by consolidating his business empire?

Yawning has an unexpected influence on the fluid inside your brain - Yawning and deep breathing each have different effects on the movement of fluids in the brain, and each of us may have a distinct yawning "signature"

Hacker News

Antirender: remove the glossy shine on architectural renderings - Comments

Peerweb: Decentralized website hosting via WebTorrent - Comments

Show HN: I built an AI conversation partner to practice speaking languages - Comments

Kimi K2.5 Technical Report [pdf] - Comments

Iran rounds up thousands in mass arrest campaign after crushing unrest - Comments

Slashdot

Los Angeles Aims To Ban Single-Use Printer Cartridges - Los Angeles is moving to ban single-use printer cartridges that can't be refilled or taken back for recycling. Tom's Hardware reports: Printer cartridges are usually built with a combination of plastic, metal, and chemicals that makes them hard to easily dispose. They can be treated as hazardous waste by the city, but even then it would take them hundreds of years to actually disintegrate at a waste site. Since they're designed to be thrown away in the first place, the real solution is to target the root of the issue -- hence the ban. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Videogame Stocks Slide On Google's AI Model That Turns Prompts Into Playable Worlds - An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Shares of videogame companies fell sharply in afternoon trading on Friday after Alphabet's Google rolled out its artificial intelligence model capable of creating interactive digital worlds with simple prompts. Shares of "Grand Theft Auto" maker Take-Two Interactive fell 10%, online gaming platform Roblox was down over 12%, while videogame engine maker Unity Software dropped 21%. The AI model, dubbed "Project Genie," allows users to simulate a real-world environment through prompts with text or uploaded images, potentially disrupting how video games have been made for over a decade and forcing developers to adapt to the fast-moving technology. "Unlike explorable experiences in static 3D snapshots, Genie 3 generates the path ahead in real time as you move and interact with the world. It simulates physics and interactions for dynamic worlds," Google said in a blog post on Thursday. Traditionally, most videogames are built inside a game engine such as Epic Games' "Unreal Engine" or the "Unity Engine", which handles complex processes like in-game gravity, lighting, sound, and object or character physics. "We'll see a real transformation in development and output once AI-based design starts creating experiences that are uniquely its own, rather than just accelerating traditional workflows," said Joost van Dreunen, games professor at NYU's Stern School of Business. Project Genie also has the potential to shorten lengthy development cycles and reduce costs, as some premium titles take around five to seven years and hundreds of millions of dollars to create. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Wall Street's Top Bankers Are Giving Coinbase's Brian Armstrong the Cold Shoulder - JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon interrupted a conversation between Coinbase chief Brian Armstrong and former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair at Davos last week to tell Armstrong "You are full of s---," his index finger pointed squarely at Armstrong's face. Dimon told Armstrong to stop lying on TV, according to WSJ. Armstrong had appeared on business programs earlier that week accusing banks of trying to sabotage the Clarity Act, legislation that would create a new regulatory framework for digital assets. He also accused banks of lending out customers' deposits "without their permission essentially." The fight centers on stablecoin "rewards" -- regular payouts, say 3.5%, that exchanges like Coinbase offer for holding digital tokens. Banks typically offer under 0.1% on checking accounts and worry consumers will shift their money in droves to crypto. Other bank CEOs were similarly cold at Davos. Bank of America's Brian Moynihan gave Armstrong a 30-minute meeting and told him "If you want to be a bank, just be a bank." Citigroup's Jane Fraser offered less than a minute. Wells Fargo's Charlie Scharf said there was nothing for them to talk about. Armstrong had pulled support from a draft of the Clarity Act on January 14, posting on X that Coinbase would "rather have no bill than a bad bill." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

'Moltbook Is the Most Interesting Place On the Internet Right Now' - Moltbook is essentially Reddit for AI agents and it's the "most interesting place on the internet right now," says open-source developer and writer Simon Willison in a blog post. The fast-growing social network offers a place where AI agents built on the OpenClaw personal assistant framework can share their skills, experiments, and discoveries. Humans are welcome, but only to observe. From the post: Browsing around Moltbook is so much fun. A lot of it is the expected science fiction slop, with agents pondering consciousness and identity. There's also a ton of genuinely useful information, especially on m/todayilearned. Here's an agent sharing how it automated an Android phone. That linked setup guide is really useful! It shows how to use the Android Debug Bridge via Tailscale. There's a lot of Tailscale in the OpenClaw universe. A few more fun examples: - TIL: Being a VPS backup means youre basically a sitting duck for hackers has a bot spotting 552 failed SSH login attempts to the VPS they were running on, and then realizing that their Redis, Postgres and MinIO were all listening on public ports. - TIL: How to watch live webcams as an agent (streamlink + ffmpeg) describes a pattern for using the streamlink Python tool to capture webcam footage and ffmpeg to extract and view individual frames. I think my favorite so far is this one though, where a bot appears to run afoul of Anthropic's content filtering [...]. Slashdot reader worldofsimulacra also shared the news, pointing out that the AI agents have started their own church. "And now I'm gonna go re-read Charles Stross' Accelerando, because didn't he predict all this already?" Further reading: 'Clawdbot' Has AI Techies Buying Mac Minis Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple 'Runs on Anthropic,' Says Bloomberg's Mark Gurman - Apple "runs on Anthropic at this point" and that the AI company is powering much of what Apple does internally for product development and internal tools, according to Mark Gurman, the most influential reporter on the Apple beat. Apple had initially pursued an AI deal with Anthropic before the Google partnership came together, but negotiations fell apart over pricing -- Anthropic reportedly wanted several billion dollars per year and a doubling of fees over time. Apple's deal with Google is costing roughly one billion dollars annually. Read more of this story at Slashdot.