Latest News

Last updated 30 Jan, 10:48 AM

BBC News

Trump says 'dangerous' for UK to do business with China as Starmer lands in Shanghai - The US president's comments come as Sir Keir Starmer arrives in Shanghai on the third day of his visit to China.

What did UK and China get out of Starmer's reset visit? - Sir Keir Starmer's visit to China brought agreements on visas, services, healthcare, green tech and finance.

Two officers to face court martial over handling of Jaysley Beck sexual assault case - Gunner Beck, 19, was found dead at her barracks at Larkhill camp in Wiltshire in 2021. She had complained she had been sexually assaulted.

Arrests made over supersized illegal rubbish dump - The Environment Agency says the arrests are a "vital step" into the Kidlington dump investigation.

Could weight-loss jabs be behind rising gallbladder removals? - Last year, there was a 15% annual increase in the operations and surgeons want more research.

The Register

Mechanical mutts make it official: Now full-time at Sellafield's hot zones - Spot's new cleanup gig involves gamma rays, alpha particles, and considerably less PPE than fleshy colleagues Bark!Bark!Bark! Sellafield Ltd is to use Boston Dynamics' Spot robot dogs in "routine, business-as-usual operations" amid the ongoing cleanup and decommissioning of the notorious UK nuclear site.…

NS&I's IT car crash considers cutting legacy links to stop the bleeding - £1.3B over budget and four years late, bank searches for a way to not to bust new timetable and funding pot A British state-owned bank is reconfiguring its modernization project, including considering reducing connections with legacy systems, as it tries to claw back schedule and budget overruns that are far beyond early plans.…

In-house techies fixed faults before outsourced help even noticed they'd happened - 60-minute SLA was effectively useless and the contractor admitted it On Call Welcome to another instalment of On Call, The Register's weekly reader-contributed column that shares your stories of weird and wonderful tech support jobs.…

Deciphering the alphabet soup of agentic AI protocols - Tools, agents, UI, and e-commerce - of course each one needs its own set of competing protocols MCP, A2A, ACP, or UTCP? It seems like every other day, orgs add yet another AI protocol to the agentic alphabet soup, making it all the more confusing. Below, we'll share what all these abbreviations actually mean and share why they are important for the future of AI.…

Java developers want container security, just not the job that comes with it - BellSoft survey finds 48% prefer pre‑hardened images over managing vulnerabilities themselves Java developers still struggle to secure containers, with nearly half (48 percent) saying they'd rather delegate security to providers of hardened containers than worry about making their own container security decisions.…

New Scientist - Home

This doctor is on the hunt for people with first-rate faeces - Elizabeth Hohmann is very interested in faeces, and spends her days sifting through stools to find those that could make the biggest difference to other people's health

Fascinating but flawed book explores how sickness shapes our lives - Susan Wise Bauer's The Great Shadow investigates the effects of illness on individual lives and collective beliefs. It's a mixed bag, says Peter Hoskin

AI-assisted mammograms cut risk of developing aggressive breast cancer - Interval cancers are aggressive tumours that grow during the interval after someone has been screened for cancer and before they are screened again, and AI seems to be able to identify them at an early stage

Our lifespans may be half down to genes and half to the environment - A reanalysis of twin data from Denmark and Sweden suggests that how long we live now depends roughly equally on the genes we inherit, and on where we live and what we do

Polar bears are getting fatter in the fastest-warming place on Earth - Shrinking sea ice has made life harder for polar bears in many parts of the Arctic, but the population in Svalbard seems to be thriving

Hacker News

Moltbook - Comments

OpenClaw – Moltbot Renamed Again - Comments

Software Pump and Dump - Comments

GOG: Linux "the next major frontier" for gaming as it works on a native client - Comments

Grid: Free, local-first, browser-based 3D printing/CNC/laser slicer - Comments

Slashdot

Former Google Engineer Found Guilty of Stealing AI Secrets For Chinese Firms - Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from CBS News: A former Google engineer has been found guilty on multiple federal charges for stealing the tech giant's trade secrets on artificial intelligence to benefit Chinese companies he secretly worked for, federal prosecutors said. According to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of California, a jury on Thursday convicted Linwei Ding on seven counts of economic espionage and seven counts of theft of trade secrets, following an 11-day trial. The 38-year-old, also known as Leon Ding, was hired by Google in 2019 and was a resident of Newark. According to evidence presented at trial, Ding stole more than 2,000 pages of confidential information containing Google AI trade secrets between May 2022 and April 2023. He uploaded the information to his personal Google Cloud account. Around the same time, Ding secretly affiliated himself with two Chinese-based technology companies. Around June 2022, prosecutors said Ding was in discussions to be the chief technology officer for an early-stage tech company. Several months later, he was in the process of founding his own AI and machine learning company in China, acting as the company's CEO. Prosecutors said Ding told investors that he could build an AI supercomputer by copying and modifying Google's technology. In late 2023, prosecutors said Ding downloaded the trade secrets to his own personal computer before resigning from Google. According to the superseding indictment, Google uncovered the uploads after finding out that Ding presented himself as CEO of one of the companies during an Beijing investor conference. Around the same time, Ding told his manager he was leaving the company and booked a one-way flight to Beijing. "Silicon Valley is at the forefront of artificial intelligence innovation, pioneering transformative work that drives economic growth and strengthens our national security. The jury delivered a clear message today that the theft of this valuable technology will not go unpunished," U.S. Attorney Craig Missakian said in a statement. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Radiologists Catch More Aggressive Breast Cancers By Using AI To Help Read Mammograms, Study Finds - A large Swedish study of 100,000 women found that using AI to assist radiologists reading mammograms reduced the rate of aggressive "interval" breast cancers by 12%. CBC News reports: For the study -- published in Thursday's issue of the medical journal The Lancet -- more than 100,000 women had mammography screenings. Half were supported by AI and the rest had their mammograms reviewed by two different radiologists, a standard practice in much of Europe known as double reading. It is not typically used in Canada, where usually one radiologist checks mammograms. The study looked at the rates of interval cancer, the term doctors use for invasive tumors that appear between routine mammograms. They can be harder to detect and studies have shown that they are more likely to be aggressive with a poorer prognosis. The rate of interval cancers decreased by 12 percent in the groups where the AI screening was implemented, the study showed. [...] Throughout the two-year study, the mammograms that were supported by AI were triaged into two different groups. Those that were determined to be low risk needed only one radiologist to examine them, while those that were considered high risk required two. The researchers reported that numerically, the AI-supported screening resulted in 11 fewer interval cancers than standard screening (82 versus 93, or 12 per cent). "This is really a way to improve an overall screening test," [said lead author, Dr. Kristina Lang]. She acknowledged that while the study found a decrease in interval cancer, longer-term studies are needed to find out how AI-supported screening might impact mortality rates. The screenings for the study all took place at one centre in Sweden, which the researchers acknowledged is a limitation. Another is that the race and ethnicity of the participants were not recorded. The next step, Lang said, will be for Swedish researchers to determine cost-effectiveness. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Universal Basic Income Could Be Used To Soften Hit From AI Job Losses In UK, Minister Says - An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: The UK could introduce a universal basic income (UBI) to protect workers in industries that are being disrupted by AI, the investment minister Jason Stockwood has said. "Bumpy" changes to society caused by the introduction of the technology would mean there would have to be "some sort of concessionary arrangement with jobs that go immediately", Lord Stockwood said. The Labour peer told the Financial Times: "Undoubtedly we're going to have to think really carefully about how we soft-land those industries that go away, so some sort of [universal basic income], some sort of lifelong mechanism as well so people can retrain." A universal basic income is not part of official government policy, but when asked whether people in government were considering the need for UBI, Stockwood told the FT: "People are definitely talking about it." [...] While he has previously been a vocal proponent of a wealth tax in the UK, Stockwood told the FT he had not repeated his calls for the government to go further on taxing the rich. However, he added: "If you make your money and the first thing you do is you speak to a tax adviser to ask: 'Where can we pay the lowest tax?' we don't want those people in this country, I'd suggest, because you're not committed to your communities and the long-term success in this country." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Comcast Keeps Losing Customers Despite Price Guarantee, Unlimited Data - Comcast's attempt to slow broadband customer losses still isn't stopping the bleeding as fiber and fixed wireless competition intensifies. In Q4 2025 alone, Comcast lost 181,000 broadband subscribers, even as it leans harder into wireless bundling and other business lines like Peacock and theme parks. Ars Technica reports: The Q4 net loss is more than the 176,000 loss predicted by analysts, although not as bad as the 199,000-customer loss that spurred [Comcast President Mike Cavanagh's] comment about Comcast "not winning in the marketplace" nine months ago. The Q4 2025 loss reported today is also worse than the 139,000-customer loss in Q4 2024 and the 34,000-customer loss in Q4 2023. "Subscriber losses were 181,000, as the early traction we are seeing from our new initiatives was more than offset by continued competitive intensity," Comcast CFO Jason Armstrong said during an earnings call today, according to a Motley Fool transcript. Comcast's residential broadband customers dropped to 28.72 million, while business broadband customers dropped to 2.54 million, for a total of 31.26 million. Armstrong said that average revenue per user grew 1.1 percent, "consistent with the deceleration that we had previewed reflecting our new go-to-market pricing, including lower everyday pricing and strong adoption of free wireless lines." Armstrong expects average revenue per user to continue growing slowly "for the next couple of quarters, driven by the absence of a rate increase, the impact from free wireless lines, and the ongoing migration of our base to simplified pricing." Comcast Connectivity & Platforms chief Steve Croney said the firm is facing "a more competitive environment from fiber" and continued competition from fixed wireless. "The market is going to remain intensely competitive," he said. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cory Doctorow On Tariffs and the DMCA In Canada - Longtime Slashdot reader devnulljapan writes: In 2012, Canada passed anti-circumvention law Bill C-11, cut-and-pasted from the U.S. DMCA, in return for access to U.S. markets without tariffs. Trump has tariffed Canada anyway, so Cory Doctorow suggests it sounds like like a good idea to ditch Bill C-11 and turn Canada into a "Disenshittification Nation" and go into the business of "disenshittify[ing] America's defective tech exports." Some of the specific ways Canada could respond include legalize jailbreaking, allow alternative app stores/clients, force companies to offer repair tools, and open firmware that break monopoly lock-ins. Cory's pitch is equal parts economic strategy (capture the rents Big Tech extracts) and national security (reduce dependence on U.S. tech stacks that can be switched off or weaponized). Read more of this story at Slashdot.