Latest News

Last updated 02 Apr, 02:58 AM

BBC News

BBC sacked Scott Mills after learning alleged victim in police investigation was under 16 - It comes as Mills released a statement saying he had "fully cooperated and responded" with the police investigation in 2018.

UK will seek closer ties with EU in light of Iran war, Starmer says - It comes as UK-US relations have been strained by the PM's refusal to be dragged further into the Iran war.

Travelodge boss was sent email by sex assault victim - The victim of a sexual assault in a Travelodge - by a man given the key card to her room - sent an email to the chief executive soon after the attack.

The delicate question of where responsibility lies for safety on our mountains - Who is responsible for safety in our mountains?

Doctors lose new jobs package as strike to go ahead - The offer of 1,000 more training posts has been withdrawn after the union refused to scrap the planned six-day strike.

The Register

AI recruiting biz Mercor says it was 'one of thousands' hit in LiteLLM supply-chain attack - First public downstream victim, but won't be the last AI hiring startup Mercor confirmed it was "one of thousands of companies" affected by the LiteLLM supply-chain attack as the fallout from the Trivy compromise continues to spread.…

Google's TurboQuant saves memory, but won't save us from DRAM-pricing hell - Chocolate Factory’s compression tech clears the way to cheaper AI inference, not more affordable memory When Google unveiled TurboQuant, an AI data compression technology that promises to slash the amount of memory required to serve models, many hoped it would help with a memory shortage that has seen prices triple since last year. Not so much.…

'Uncle Larry’s biggest fan' cut by email in early morning Oracle layoff spree - WARN filings in two states show 1,000+ layoffs, but wider cuts remain unconfirmed By his third failed attempt to log into Oracle’s VPN on Tuesday morning, a decades-long employee of the company started to get a bad feeling.…

Live and Let AI: Former CIA officer says human spies matter more in the LLM age - AI is eroding trust in digital communications and data, giving old-school spycraft fresh relevance for modern agents The bots won't be coming for 007's job anytime soon. According to a former CIA officer, AI may help create false documents, but this fakery will give old-fashioned human intelligence fresh relevance.…

Claude Code bypasses safety rule if given too many commands - A hard-coded limit on deny rules drops automatic enforcement for concatenated commands Claude Code will ignore its deny rules, used to block risky actions, if burdened with a sufficiently long chain of subcommands. This vuln leaves the bot open to prompt injection attacks.…

New Scientist - Home

Astronauts are ready to return to the moon on Artemis II mission - NASA’s Artemis II mission will be the first time humans have been around the moon in half a century, and its next launch window opens on 1 April

Tobacco plant altered to produce five psychedelic drugs - Genetically engineering tobacco plants could enable a more sustainable production method for psychedelic drugs, which are increasingly in demand for research and medical uses

Plug-in solar is coming – how dangerous is it and is it worth it? - Plug-in solar panels are a cheaper, simpler alternative to professionally installed panels. But can they really reduce energy bills and are they safe? Matthew Sparkes investigates

The first quantum computer to break encryption is now shockingly close - Traditional encryption methods have long been vulnerable to quantum computers, but two new analyses suggest a capable enough machine may be built much sooner than previously thought

Oceans are darkening all over the planet – what’s going on? - In a shift that is reshaping entire ecosystems, the open oceans are letting less light in. We don't fully understand the consequences yet, but there is still hope, says oceanographer Tim Smyth

Hacker News

Live: Artemis II Launch Day Updates - Comments

A new C++ back end for ocamlc - Comments

Quantum computing bombshells that are not April Fools - Comments

DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market - Comments

EmDash – A spiritual successor to WordPress that solves plugin security - Comments

Slashdot

NASA Launches Artemis II Astronauts Around the Moon - NASA's Artemis II mission has launched four astronauts around the moon and back, marking humanity's first crewed lunar voyage in 53 years and the first test flight of NASA's Orion capsule and Space Launch System (SLS) with people on board. Five minutes into the flight, Commander Reid Wiseman saw the team's target: "We have a beautiful moonrise, we're headed right at it," he said from the capsule. The Associated Press reports: Artemis II set sail from the same Florida launch site that sent Apollo's explorers to the moon so long ago. The handful still alive cheered this next generation's grand adventure as the Space Launch System rocket thundered into the early evening sky, a nearly full moon beckoning some 248,000 miles (400,000 kilometers) away. Artemis II commander Reid Wiseman led the charge into space with "Let's go to the moon!" accompanied by pilot Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Canada's Jeremy Hansen. It was the most diverse lunar crew ever with the first woman, person of color and non-U.S. citizen riding in NASA's new Orion capsule. Carrying three Americans and one Canadian, the 32-story rocket rose from NASA's Kennedy Space Center where tens of thousands gathered to witness the dawn of this new era. Crowds also jammed the surrounding roads and beaches, reminiscent of the Apollo moonshots in the 1960s and '70s. It is NASA's biggest step yet toward establishing a permanent lunar presence. Visit NASA's Artemis II Launch Day blog for the latest updates. Developing... Read more of this story at Slashdot.

UFC-Que Choisir Takes Ubisoft To French Court Over the Crew Shutdown - Longtime Slashdot reader Elektroschock writes: When Ubisoft pulled the plug on The Crew's servers without warning, players were left with a worthless game they'd already paid for. Now, consumer watchdog UFC-Que Choisir is fighting back, demanding gamers' right to play regardless of publisher whims. Supported by the "Stop Killing Games" movement, this landmark case challenges unfair terms before the Creteil Judicial Court (Val-de-Marne near Paris), and aims to protect players from disappearing games. The lawsuit that UFC-Que Choisir filed against Ubisoft on Tuesday alleges that the video game publisher "misled consumers about the permanence of their purchase and imposed abusive contractual clauses stripping players of ownership rights," reports Reuters. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AI Can Clone Open-Source Software In Minutes - ZipNada writes: Two software researchers recently demonstrated how modern AI tools can reproduce entire open-source projects, creating proprietary versions that appear both functional and legally distinct. The partly-satirical demonstration shows how quickly artificial intelligence can blur long-standing boundaries between coding innovation, copyright law, and the open-source principles that underpin much of the modern internet. In their presentation, Dylan Ayrey, founder of Truffle Security, and Mike Nolan, a software architect with the UN Development Program, introduced a tool they call malus.sh. For a small fee, the service can "recreate any open-source project," generating what its website describes as "legally distinct code with corporate-friendly licensing. No attribution. No copyleft. No problems." It's a test case in how intellectual property law -- still rooted in 19th-century precedent -- collides with 21st-century automation. Since the US Supreme Court's Baker v. Selden ruling, copyright has been understood to guard expression, not ideas. That boundary gave rise to clean-room design, a method by which engineers reverse-engineer systems without accessing the original source code. Phoenix Technologies famously used the technique to build its version of the PC BIOS during the 1980s. Ayrey and Nolan's experiment shows how AI can perform a clean-room process in minutes rather than months. But faster doesn't necessarily mean fair. Traditional clean-room efforts required human teams to document and replicate functionality -- a process that demanded both legal oversight and significant labor. By contrast, an AI-mediated "clean room" can be invoked through a few prompts, raising questions about whether such replication still counts as fair use or independent creation. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cloudflare Announces EmDash As Open-Source 'Spiritual Successor' To WordPress - In classic Cloudflare fashion, the CDN provider used April Fool's Day to unveil an actual, "not a joke" product. Today, the company announced EmDash -- an open-source "spiritual successor" to WordPress that aims to solve plugin security. Phoronix reports: With the help of AI coding agents, Cloudflare engineers have been rebuilding the WordPress open-source project "from the ground up." EmDash is written entirely in TypeScript and is a server-less design. Making plug-ins more secure than the WordPress architecture, EmDash plug-ins are sandboxed and run in their own isolate. EmDash builds upon the Astro web framework. EmDash doesn't rely on any WordPress code but is designed to be compatible with WordPress functionality. EmDash is open-source now under the MIT license. The EmDash code is available on GitHub. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sweden Swaps Screens For Books In the Classroom - An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In 2023, the Swedish government announced that the country's schools would be going back to basics, emphasizing skills such as reading and writing, particularly in early grades. After mostly being sidelined, physical books are now being reintroduced into classrooms, and students are learning to write the old-fashioned way: by hand, with a pencil or pen, on sheets of paper. The Swedish government also plans to make schools cellphone-free throughout the country. Educational authorities have been investing heavily. Last year alone, the education ministry allocated $83 million to purchase textbooks and teachers' guides. In a country with about 11 million people, the aim is for every student to have a physical textbook for each subject. The government also put $54 million towards the purchase of fiction and non-fiction books for students. These moves represent a dramatic pivot from previous decades, during which Sweden -- and many other nations -- moved away from physical books in favor of tablets and digital resources in an effort to prepare students for life in an online world. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Nordic country's efforts have sparked a debate on the role of digital technology in education, one that extends well beyond the country's borders. US parents in districts that have adopted digital technology to a great extent may be wondering if educators will reverse course, too. As for why Sweden is pivoting away from digital devices, researcher Linda Falth said the move was driven by several factors, including concerns over whether the digitization of classrooms had been evidence-based. "There was also a broader cultural reassessment," Falth said. "Sweden had positioned itself as a frontrunner in digital education, but over time concerns emerged about screen time, distraction, reduced deep reading, and the erosion of foundational skills such as sustained attention and handwriting." Falth noted that proponents of reform believe that "basic skills -- especially reading, writing, and numeracy -- must be firmly established first, and that physical textbooks are often better suited for that purpose." Further reading: Digital Platforms Correlate With Cognitive Decline in Young Users Read more of this story at Slashdot.