Latest News
Last updated 09 Oct, 12:08 PM
BBC News
Lyse Doucet: Gaza deal is a huge moment but this is just the beginning - The BBC's Lyse Doucet reflects on how long-awaited negotiations to move forward, not further back, appear to be succeeding.
What has been agreed - and what happens next - Donald Trump says all hostages will be released and Israel will withdraw troops to an "agreed upon line", but there is no update to other aspects of his 20-point peace plan.
Fireworks and a toast to life: Israelis delight at deal to return hostages - "I can't quite believe this is actually happening, we've been waiting for so long," said Gil Dickman, cousin of hostage Carmel Gat.
'Joy and pain': Palestinians celebrate but fear confronts grief - People in Gaza celebrate a potential end to the war, but know it will mean facing the grief they have put aside.
Water bills to rise further for millions after regulator backs extra price increases - Five water companies win permission for higher bills as they seek more funds to fix outdated infrastructure.
The Register
Nextcloud withdraws European Commission OneDrive bundling complaint - Blames 'lack of interest' from the EU policy enforcer for towel throwing Nextcloud has withdrawn a complaint against Microsoft with the European Commission over OneDrive bundling, citing a lack of progress with the governing body.…
Hundreds of millions of business PCs are still on Windows 10 as D-Day nears - It's the end of support as we know it and users feel fine With days to go before Microsoft finally pulls the plug on Windows 10 support, there are hundreds of millions of computers that have yet to upgrade to Windows 11, despite the best efforts of hardware manufacturers and the operating system's marketers.…
Zero-day lets nation-state spies cross-examine elite US law firm Williams & Connolly - China-linked snoops crack email at DC powerhouse that represented Bill Clinton, Elizabeth Holmes Washington's elite law firm Williams & Connolly has confirmed that attackers exploited a zero-day vulnerability to access a handful of attorney email accounts in what it believes was a nation-state-linked cyberattack.…
McKinsey wonders how to sell AI apps with no measurable benefits - Consultant says software vendors risk hiking prices without cutting costs or boosting productivity Software vendors keen to monetize AI should tread cautiously, since they risk inflating costs for their customers without delivering any promised benefits such as reducing employee head count.…
Hobble your AI agents to prevent them from hurting you too badly - That's the main takeaway from the Zenity AI Agent Security Summit Michael Bargury, CTO of AI security company Zenity, welcomed attendees to the company's AI Agent Security Summit on Wednesday with an unexpected admission.…
New Scientist - Home
We are horrified to discover that not every rose has a thorn - Feedback is shocked to learn that one of our most cherished metaphors involving roses and thorns really needs to be revisited. That's what happens when you invite the botanists to play
Top 250 oil and gas firms own just 1.5% of the world's renewable power - Despite public promises by many fossil fuel firms that they are investing in the green transition, it turns out that they have made little contribution to the growth of renewable energy
Why not all ultra-processed foods are bad for you - Just because a food is ultra-processed doesn’t mean it is unhealthy. Regulation and eating advice must reflect this, say Julia Belluz and Kevin Hall, co-authors of Food Intelligence: The science of how food both nourishes and harms us
How pie-in-the-sky conspiracies distract from climate dangers - The conspiracy theory that bad actors use "chemtrails" from aircraft to poison us sucks energy from legitimate protest against aviation's effects on the climate, says Graham Lawton
Selfish sperm see older fathers pass on more disease-causing mutations - Older men are more likely to pass on disease-causing mutations to their children because of the faster growth of mutant cells in the testes with age
Hacker News
The React Foundation - Comments
Vec<T> - Comments
The Unknotting Number Is Not Additive - Comments
Zippers: Making Functional "Updates" Efficient (2010) - Comments
Two things LLM coding agents are still bad at - Comments
Slashdot
Internet Archive Ordered to Block Books in Belgium - After failed negotiations with publishers, Belgium's copyright enforcement agency has ordered the Internet Archive to block access to specific books in its Open Library within Belgium or face a 500,000-euro fine. TorrentFreak reports: Back in July, the Brussels Business Court issued a sweeping ex parte site-blocking order targeting several "shadow libraries" including Anna's Archive, Libgen, and Z-Library. Unusually, the order also included the Internet Archive's Open Library, a project operated by the well-known U.S. non-profit organization Internet Archive. The order was granted based on a request from publishers and authors who claimed, among other things, that the operators of the targeted sites were difficult to identify. This also applied to the Internet Archive, which was not heard by the court before the order was issued. [...] Over the past several weeks, Internet Archive attempted to reach an agreement with the publishers, but the effort was unsuccessful. It is clear, however, that the Internet Archive believes that its use of copyrighted books for the Open Library qualifies as fair use. The organization is known to purchase physical copies, which it then digitizes to lend out to patrons, one copy at a time. This self-digitizing project was previously contested in a U.S. federal court, where the publishers ultimately came out as the winner. They argued that the Internet Archive project competed with their own licensing business for book lending. The detailed arguments at the center of the Belgian case are not public, but after hearing both sides, the Department for Combating Infringements of Copyright concluded that Internet Archive must take action. In a follow-up decision (PDF) published last week, the government department explicitly states that it can't rule on U.S. fair use or the Belgian equivalent, but concludes that self-blocking measures are warranted. The Internet Archive hosts the contested books and has the ability to render them inaccessible. If it refuses to do so, it may be considered a copyright infringer under local law. The final decision requires the rightsholders to supply the Internet Archive with a list of all books that should be blocked in Belgium. The non-profit then has 20 calendar days to implement the necessary measures. In addition to making the books unavailable, Internet Archive must also prevent these works from being made available for digital lending in the future. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The World's Biggest Citizen Science Project - eBird, now the world's largest citizen science project with over 2 billion bird observations, is transforming ornithology by turning casual birders (and even TikTok-using kids) into vital contributors to global research and conservation. Slashdot reader alternative_right shares a report from Phys.org: The Cornell Lab of Ornithology has been one of the most influential organizations in the world when it comes to encouraging people to engage in natural history projects. While some form of amateur involvement in science projects has been around since 1900, when the Audubon Society organized the first Christmas Bird Count, it was the Cornell Lab that formalized citizen science as a sound and reliable means of collecting data on birds. It didn't take much thought to realize that one of the richest sources of information about birds resided in the notebooks virtually every birder has kept, often from childhood. It's a given that birdwatchers list everything. The problem is that zillions of such notebooks sit forgotten in drawers or in dusty boxes in the attic. If only all of that information could be gathered together, organized in sensible ways and then made available to anyone who wanted to use it. What a resource that would be! After lots of trials and discussion, a small team at the Lab came up with the idea of eBird. It started in a humble way back in 2002, as simply somewhere birders could store their records in a central location. Today, "humble" is no longer an appropriate description. In 2022, its 20th anniversary year, a total of more than 1.3 billion records had been received from more than 820,000 participants. In the month of August this year, reports eBird, 123,000 birders submitted 1.6 million lists of sightings. It has now hit a total of 2 billion bird observations since inception. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
EU Lawmakers Push To Ban Plant-Based Food Terms - An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: MEPs voted on Wednesday by 355 in favor to 247 against to reserve names such as "steak", "burger" and "sausage" exclusively for products derived from meat, a longstanding demand of farm unions. In order to come into effect, the idea would have to be approved by a majority of the EU's 27 member states, which is far from certain. The vote is a victory for the French centre-right MEP Celine Imart, who drafted the amendment to legislation intended to strengthen the position of farmers in the food supply chain. Imart, who is also a cereals farmer in north-west France, said: "A steak, an escalope or a sausage are products from our livestock, not laboratory art nor plant products. There is a need for transparency and clarity for the consumer and recognition for the work of our farmers." She argues the proposal is in line with EU rules that already ban the use of terms such as "milk" and "yoghurt" for non-dairy products. The European parliament rejected a ban on meaty names for plant-based products in 2020, but the 2024 elections shifted the parliament to the right, bringing in more lawmakers who seek close ties with farmers. Opposition was led by Green MEPs, who decried what they saw as a populist move to rename plant-based foods. "Veggie burgers, seitan schnitzel and tofu sausage do not confuse consumers, only rightwing politicians," Thomas Waitz, an Austrian Green MEP, said after the vote. "This tactic is a diversion and a pathetic smokescreen. No farmer will earn more money or secure their future with this ban." Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Germany To Allow Police To Shoot Down Drones - Germany's cabinet has approved a new law allowing police to shoot down or disable rogue drones that threaten airspace security, following recent airport disruptions attributed to Russian reconnaissance. "Other techniques available to down drones include using lasers or jamming signals to sever control and navigation links," notes Reuters. From the report: With the new law, Germany joins European countries that have recently given security forces powers to down drones violating their airspace, including Britain, France, Lithuania and Romania. A dedicated counter-drone unit will be created within the federal police, Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt said, and researchers would consult with Israel and Ukraine as they were more advanced in drone technology. Police would deal with drones flying at around tree-level, whereas more powerful drones should be tackled by the military, Dobrindt said. Germany recorded 172 drone-related disruptions to air traffic between January and the end of September 2025, up from 129 in the same period last year and 121 in 2023, according to data from Deutsche Flugsicherung (DFS). German military drills last month in the northern port city of Hamburg demonstrated how like a spider, a large military drone shot a net at a smaller one in mid-flight, entangling its propellers and forcing it to the ground, where a robotic dog trotted over to seek possible explosives. Shooting down drones could be unsafe in densely populated urban areas, however, and airports do not necessarily have detection systems that can immediately report sightings. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Polymarket Founder Is Youngest Self-Made Billionaire After Deal With NYSE Owner - Shayne Coplan, a 27-year-old NYU dropout who founded Polymarket from his bathroom in 2020, has become the youngest self-made billionaire after Intercontinental Exchange (owner of the NYSE) invested up to $2 billion in his once-controversial prediction market platform. Bloomberg reports: A couple of years after dropping out of New York University with dreams of making it big in crypto, Shayne Coplan was so broke that he took an inventory of his Lower East Side apartment so that he could sell belongings to make rent. Fed up with crypto grifts, in 2019 he started to explore economist Robin Hanson's ideas on prediction markets and their potential for improving society's ability to identify likely outcomes. "This is too good of an idea to just exist in whitepapers," he recalled thinking in a later post on X. Then Covid struck -- the perfect time to develop an app for stuck-at-home folks to bet on real-world outcomes, he reasoned. He began building Polymarket from his bathroom and launched the platform in June 2020. It wasn't a smooth road. The company's move-fast, ask-permission-later approach repeatedly ran afoul of regulators, who forced it to ban US-based users for years because it wasn't a registered exchange. A week after the 2024 presidential election -- one that Polymarket users wagered more than $3 billion on -- Coplan's apartment was raided by FBI agents. But he and his company are now riding high after Intercontinental Exchange Inc., the owner of the New York Stock Exchange, said it would invest as much as $2 billion in Polymarket at an $8 billion pre-money valuation. That deal makes its 27-year-old founder the youngest self-made billionaire tracked by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Read more of this story at Slashdot.