Latest News
Last updated 10 May, 10:42 PM
BBC News
Starmer to promise bolder action as leadership threats mount - The embattled PM will seek to persuade his MPs not to ditch him as Labour leader in a speech on Monday.
British passengers from hantavirus-hit cruise ship isolating in hospital, says UKHSA - The passengers landed in the UK on Sunday and none have reported symptoms, but they will will be monitored in hospital for 72 hours.
Trump calls Iran response to US proposal to end war 'totally unacceptable' - No details have been released of Iran's response - or the US proposals - designed to bring the war to an end.
Adolescence makes history at Bafta TV Awards - The hit Netflix drama wins a record four Bafta TV Awards, including one for 16-year-old Owen Cooper.
His father had just been buried. Then West Bank settlers forced him to dig up the body - The UN human rights office condemns incident as "'appalling and emblematic of the dehumanisation of Palestinians" in the West Bank.
www.theregister.com - Articles
Memory godboxes could offer relief from the RAMpocalypse - Amid the AI-fueled memory crunch, will Compute Express Link finally have its moment to shine?
Both Fedora and Ubuntu will get AI support – soon - Furores are fermenting in the forums
HP stuffed a PC into a keyboard. We took it for a spin - It's not much cheaper than an equivalent laptop, so who's this for, exactly?
Google tweaks Chrome AI privacy wording, insists processing stays on-device - Deletion of a longstanding privacy assurance sparks concerns
macOS 27 threatens to bury Time Capsule, FOSS brings a shovel - Apple's old backup boxes only speak AFP and SMB1, but NetBSD under the hood gives them one last shot
New Scientist - Home
Tiny 'metajets' could use light to steer sails for interstellar travel - Minuscule silicon wafers propelled by lasers could be used to steer light sails, helping them travel beyond the solar system
The 50-year quest to create a quantum spin liquid may finally be over - Creating quantum entanglement inside a solid material is tricky in the lab – but crystals buried in the earth could be growing it naturally. Now one scientist says he has proof he’s found them
There has been a sudden increase in the rate of sea level rise - Satellite measurements show that in the early 2010s sea level rise suddenly accelerated to a rate of 4.1 millimetres per year, possibly in response to an increase in the rate of global warming
A vast dam across the Bering Strait could stop the AMOC collapsing - If a key ocean current collapses it could plunge northern Europe into a big freeze. Now researchers are weighing up a drastic intervention – building a 130-kilometre-wide dam between the US and Russia
A lost ancient script reveals how writing as we know it really began - A long-overlooked writing system from 5000 years ago is still largely undeciphered, but could mark the moment humans first represented their speech with written words
Hacker News
Hardware Attestation as Monopoly Enabler - Comments
Local AI needs to be the norm - Comments
Incident Report: CVE-2024-YIKES - Comments
Why modern parents feel more sleep deprived than our ancestors did - Comments
Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2026) - Comments
Slashdot
Big Tech is Moving Data Through the Gulf Using Fiber-Optic Cables Alongside Iraq's Oil Pipelines - Major American cloud companies with data centers in the Persian Gulf "are channeling data out of the war zone through fiber-optic cables that an Iraqi telecom has strung alongside crude-oil pipelines," reports RestofWorld.org: The data centers serve customers in more than 190 countries, processing transactions, storing files, and running applications for businesses and individuals from Latin America to South Asia. When Iranian drones struck Amazon's facilities in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain on March 1, the effects spread across the region. Apps of major banks in the UAE, including Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank, stopped working. Payment and delivery platforms went offline. Snowflake, a U.S. enterprise software company used by thousands of businesses globally, reported Middle East service disruptions tied directly to the Amazon Web Services outage. Amazon told its customers to migrate their workloads out of the Middle East... [Data from] banking, payment, and enterprise platforms normally travels to Europe through cables running under the Red Sea and the Strait of Hormuz, then connects onward to users across the world. The war has put those cables at risk. The overland route through Iraq is meant to serve as a backup if the sea cables are disabled. The overland route through Iraq is meant to serve as a backup if the sea cables are disabled... [Martin Frank, strategic adviser for IQ Networks, the company that built the network, told Rest of World this overland route is already carrying live traffic.] The company, based in Iraq's Kurdistan region, runs fiber from the southern tip of Iraq to the Turkish border. It is now extending the network through gas-pipeline corridors across Turkey to the European border, with the first link expected early next year, Frank said. When that extension is complete, cloud providers will — for the first time — have the option of an unbroken land-based fiber path from the Gulf into the European network, connecting onward to Frankfurt, Amsterdam, London, and Marseille, from where their data connects back to U.S. users. The advantage of this alternative route is that oil and gas pipelines come with their own security perimeters, access roads, and maintenance corridors already built around them, allowing a telecom company to lay fiber without digging new trenches through difficult terrain. Iraq avoided the fate of earlier overland routes that collapsed because of a sustained period of stability, and because existing pipeline infrastructure provided ready-made corridors for laying fiber, Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at network intelligence firm Kentik, told Rest of World... IQ Networks' route, called the Silk Route Transit, has been running since November 2023. The network currently carries enough data to stream about 400,000 high-definition videos simultaneously, Frank said. The land route is faster. Data traveling through submarine cables from the Gulf to Europe takes about 150 milliseconds. The Iraqi terrestrial route cuts that to roughly 70 milliseconds — a difference that matters for video calls, financial transactions, and applications that run on artificial intelligence, according to IQ Networks. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Challenging UPS and FedEx, Amazon Opens Its Shipping Network to All Businesses - This week Amazon opened up its parcel shipping, fulfillment, and distribution "to businesses of all types and sizes." Any business can now ship, store, and deliver "using the same supply chain that supports Amazon," according to Monday's announcement of "Amazon Supply Chain Services." The move sent shares of UPS and FedEx "tumbling" Monday writes GeekWire. And though both stocks bounced back as the week went on, GeekWire sees this as the latest example of Amazon "turning its internal capabilities into products and services for sale..." "Amazon had already surpassed both carriers to become the nation's largest parcel shipper by volume, according to parcel-analytics firm ShipMatrix." Initial customers include Procter & Gamble, which is using Amazon's freight network to transport raw materials; 3M, which is using it to move products to distribution centers; Lands' End, which is fulfilling orders across sales channels from Amazon's warehouses; and American Eagle Outfitters, which is using Amazon's parcel service for last-mile delivery. The service can fulfill orders placed through platforms that compete with Amazon's own marketplace, including Walmart, Shopify, TikTok, and others... Peter Larsen, vice president of Amazon Supply Chain Services, compared the launch to the origins of Amazon's cloud business... In addition to putting Amazon in competition with existing players in the logistics industry, the move also raises questions about data privacy. Amazon has faced accusations of using nonpublic seller data to compete against merchants on its marketplace, which it has denied. Larsen told the Wall Street Journal that the company prohibits using supply chain customer data for its own marketplace decisions, noting that hundreds of thousands of Amazon sellers already trust the company to fulfill orders placed on rival platforms. The article notes taht in his annual shareholder letter Amazon's CEO "said the company is also exploring selling its custom AI chips and robotics to outside customers." Read more of this story at Slashdot.
GM Secretly Sold California Drivers' Data, Agrees to Pay $12.75M In Privacy Settlement - "General Motors sold the data of California drivers without their knowledge or consent," says California's attorney general, "and despite numerous statements reassuring drivers that it would not do so." In 2024, The New York Times "reported that automakers including GM were sharing information about their customers' driving behavior with insurance companies," remembers TechCrunch, "and that some customers were concerned that their insurance rates had gone up as a result." Now General Motors "has reached a privacy-related settlement with a group of law enforcement agencies led by California Attorney General Rob Bonta..." The settlement announcement from Bonta's office similarly alleges that GM sold "the names, contact information, geolocation data, and driving behavior data of hundreds of thousands of Californians" to Verisk Analytics and LexisNexis Risk Solutions, which are both data brokers. Bonta's office further alleges that this data was collected through GM's OnStar program, and that the company made roughly $20 million from data sales. However, Bonta's office also said the data did not lead to increased insurance prices in California, "likely because under California's insurance laws, insurers are prohibited from using driving data to set insurance rates." As part of the settlement, GM has agreed to pay $12.75 million in civil penalties and to stop selling driving data to any consumer reporting agencies for five years, Bonta's office said. GM has also agreed to delete any driver data that it still retains within 180 days (unless it obtains consent from customers), and to request that Lexis and Verisk delete that data. "This trove of information included precise and personal location data that could identify the everyday habits and movements of Californians," according to the attorney general's announcement. The settlement "requires General Motors to abandon these illegal practices, and underscores the importance of the data minimization in California's privacy law — companies can't just hold on to data and use it later for another purpose." "Modern cars are rolling data collection machines," said San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins. "Californians must have confidence that they know what data is being collected, how it is being used, and what their opt-out rights are... This case sends a strong message that law enforcement will take action when California privacy laws are not scrupulously followed." Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Amazon Relents, Lets its Programmers Use OpenAI's Codex and Anthropic's Claude - An anonymous reader shared this report from Futurism: In November, Amazon leaders sent an internal memo to employees, pushing them to use its in-house code generating tool, Kiro, over third-party alternatives from competitors. "While we continue to support existing tools in use today, we do not plan to support additional third party, AI development tools," the memo read, as quoted by Reuters at the time. "As part of our builder community, you all play a critical role shaping these products and we use your feedback to aggressively improve them." It was an unusual development, considering the tens of billions of dollars the e-commerce giant has invested in its competitors in the space, including Anthropic and OpenAI... Half a year later, Amazon is singing a dramatically different tune. As Business Insider reports, Amazon is officially throwing in the towel, succumbing to growing calls among employees for access to OpenAI's Codex and Anthropic's Claude... Given the unfortunate optics of opening the floodgates for Codex and Claude Code, an Amazon spokesperson told the publication in a statement that teams are still "primarily using" Kiro, claiming that 83 percent of engineers at the company are leaning on it. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Rocket Lab Reports Growing Demand for Commercial Space Products. Stock Surges 34% - For just the first three months of 2026, Rocket Lab's launch business reports $63.7 million in revenue, reports CNBC — plus another $136.7 million from its space systems business. Besides beating Wall Street's expectations, Rocket Lab also announced that its backlog has more than doubled from a year ago to $2.2 billion, and that it's buying space robotics company Motiv Space Systems. Friday its stock price shot up 34% in one day... Rocket Lab's stock has more than quadrupled over the past year, benefiting from skyrocketing demand for businesses tied to the space economy ahead of SpaceX's hotly anticipated IPO later this year. Demand for space systems and satellites is also escalating as President Donald Trump pursues his ambitious Golden Dome missile defense project and NASA's crewed Artemis missions rev up. Rocket Lab said Thursday that it signed its largest contract ever with a confidential customer for its Neutron and Electron rockets through 2029, weeks after landing a $190 million deal for 20 hypersonic test flights... "The demand signal is clear," CEO Peter Beck said on an earnings call with analysts, calling the pace of new product releases from the company this year "relentless".... Rocket Lab's good news lifted other space companies. Firefly Aeropspace and Intuitive Machines both jumped more than 20, while Redwire gained 19%. Voyager Technologies rose 14%. "The company anticipates revenue between $225 million and $240 million during the second quarter." Read more of this story at Slashdot.