Latest News
Last updated 09 Mar, 03:31 PM
BBC News
US missile hit military base near Iran school, video analysis shows - A US Tomahawk missile hit a military base near a primary school in southern Iran where Iranian authorities said 168 people were killed, expert video analysis shows.
Faisal Islam: Oil price spiral may be slowed but not stopped by G7 emergency move - A big intervention is being discussed in the oil markets, but as yet, we do not know how big the problem will be.
Five Iranian footballers 'in Australian safe house' after Asian Cup protest - Concern has grown for team after one critic called them 'wartime traitors' for failing to salute during the Iranian anthem.
How the Iran war may affect your bills and finances - The conflict in the Middle East could raise the cost of petrol, household energy bills and even food.
Watch: Why the Iran war is pushing up oil prices - As turmoil continues in the Middle East, the price of crude oil rose to more than $100 a barrel on Monday.
The Register
MariaDB backs down on Galera removal after community outcry - But questions remain over long-term commitment to clustering tech in open source After a couple of years of relative calm, the relationship between MariaDB and its open source foundation was ruffled in February, leaving observers with a few unanswered questions.…
LibreOffice learns to speak Markdown in version 26.2 - Plain-text fans rejoice as Writer gains native CommonMark import and export Markdown has been around for more than 20 years, but native support in LibreOffice might suddenly help to make it viable for more people.…
Ex-Meta execs pop up on Nscale board as rent-a-GPU firm raises $2B - Former policy boss Nick Clegg joins Cheryl Sandberg and one-time Yahoo prez Susan Decker Former British deputy prime minister Sir Nick Clegg has landed a board seat at UK-based neocloud Nscale, alongside fellow ex-Meta exec Sheryl Sandberg and former president of Yahoo Susan Decker.…
Dutch cops warn 100 alleged scammers: Turn yourselves in or we tell Grandma - Two-week deadline to fraudsters to fess up or have their faces plastered across every screen in the country Dutch national police are taking a novel stand against scammers - 100 suspects now have less than two weeks to hand themselves in or face public shaming.…
Russian cybercrims phish their way into officials' Signal and WhatsApp accounts - Dutch spies flag large-scale campaign to hijack secure messaging accounts Russian-linked hackers are trying to break into the Signal and WhatsApp accounts of government officials, journalists, and military personnel globally – not by cracking encryption, but by simply tricking people into handing over the keys.…
New Scientist - Home
How an intern helped build the AI that shook the world - Chris Maddison was just an intern when he started working on the Go-playing AI that would eventually become AlphaGo. A decade later, he talks about that match against Lee Sedol and what came next
The first apes to walk upright may have evolved in Europe - A single femur found in Bulgaria appears to represent an ape or early hominin that walked on two legs before any known African hominin, but the evidence is far from conclusive
SETI may have missed alien signals because of space weather - SETI has spent decades listening for a sharp, well-defined radio signal that could indicate it was sent by distant intelligent life. Now researchers believe that space weather could distort and blur such signals – meaning SETI has been scanning for the wrong thing
The moment that kicked off the AI revolution - It's been 10 years since Go champion Lee Sedol lost to DeepMind's AlphaGo. Has the technology lived up to its potential?
Why cosmology seems to be caught in a vibe shift - Whether you call it a vibe shift or a paradigm shift, physicists must be ready to challenge their fundamental understanding of the universe without fear or nostalgia
Hacker News
The engine of Germany's wealth is blocking its future - Comments
Fontcrafter: Turn Your Handwriting into a Real Font - Comments
Ireland shuts last coal plant, becomes 15th coal-free country in Europe (2025) - Comments
Reverse-engineering the UniFi inform protocol - Comments
FreeBSD Capsicum vs. Linux Seccomp Process Sandboxing - Comments
Slashdot
Swiss Vote Places Right To Use Cash In Country's Constitution - Swiss voters overwhelmingly approved a constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to use physical cash. "The vote means Switzerland will join the likes of Hungary, Slovakia and Slovenia, which have already written the right to cold, hard cash in their constitutions," reports Politico. From the report: Official results revealed that 73.4 percent of voters backed the legal amendment, which the government proposed as a counter to a similar initiative by a group called the Swiss Freedom Movement. The Swiss Freedom Movement triggered the national referendum after its initiative to protect cash collected more than 100,000 signatures, triggering a national referendum. Its initiative secured only 46 percent of the final vote after the government said some of the group's proposed amendments went too far. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
US Military Tested Device That May Be Tied To Havana Syndrome On Rats, Sheep - An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBS News: Tonight, we have details of a classified U.S. intelligence mission that has obtained a previously unknown weapon that may finally unlock a mystery. Since at least 2016, U.S. diplomats, spies and military officers have suffered crippling brain injuries. They've told of being hit by an overwhelming force, damaging their vision, hearing, sense of balance and cognition. but the government has doubted their stories. They've been called delusional. Well now, 60 Minutes has learned that a weapon that can inflict these injuries was obtained overseas and secretly tested on animals on a U.S. military base. We've investigated this mystery for nine years. This is our fourth story called, "Targeting Americans." Despite official government doubt, we never stopped reporting because of the haunting stories we heard [...]. 60 Minutes interviewed Dr. David Relman, a scientific expert and professor from Stanford University who was tasked by the government to lead two investigations into the Havana Syndrome cases. What he and his panel of doctors, physicists, engineers and others found was that "the most plausible explanation for a subset of these cases was a form of radiofrequency or microwave energy," the report says. According to confidential sources cited in the report, undercover Homeland Security agents bought a miniaturized microwave weapon from a Russian criminal network in 2024 and tested it on animals at a U.S. military lab. The injuries reportedly matched those seen in the human cases. "Our confidential sources tell us the still classified weapon has been tested in a U.S. military lab for more than a year," says Dr. Relman. "Tests on rats and sheep show injuries consistent with those seen in humans." He continues: "Also, as a separate part of the investigation, security camera videos have been collected that show Americans being hit. The videos are classified but they were described to us. In one, a camera in a restaurant in Istanbul captured two FBI agents on vacation sitting at a table with their families. A man with a backpack walks in and suddenly everyone at the table grabs their head as if in pain. Our sources say another video comes from a stairwell in the U.S. embassy in Vienna. The stairs lead to a secure facility. In the video, two people on the stairs suddenly collapse. Those videos and the weapon were among the reasons the Biden administration summoned about half a dozen victims to the White House with about two months left in the president's term." Former intelligence officials and researchers claim elements of the U.S. government downplayed or dismissed the theory for years, possibly to avoid political consequences of accusing a foreign state like Russia of conducting attacks on American personnel. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
New SETI Study: Why We Might Have Been Missing Alien Signals - After decades of searching for extraterrestrial intelligence, the nonprofit SETI Foundation has an announcement. "A new study by researchers at the SETI Institute suggests stellar 'space weather' could make radio signals from extraterrestrial intelligence harder to detect." Stellar activity and plasma turbulence near a transmitting planet can broaden an otherwise ultra-narrow signal, spreading its power across more frequencies and making it more difficult to detect in traditional narrowband searches. For decades, many SETI experiments have focused on identifying spikes in frequency — signals unlikely to be produced by natural astrophysical processes. But the new research highlights an overlooked complication: even if an extraterrestrial transmitter produces a perfectly narrow signal, it may not remain narrow by the time it leaves its home system... "If a signal gets broadened by its own star's environment, it can slip below our detection thresholds, even if it's there, potentially helping explain some of the radio silence we've seen in technosignature searches," said Dr. Vishal Gajjar, Astronomer at the SETI Institute and lead author of the paper. The researchers created "a practical framework for estimating how much broadening could occur for different types of stars" — and accounting for space weather — by "using radio transmissions from spacecraft in our own solar system, then extrapolated to other stellar environments." The study's co-author (a SETI Institute research assistant) suggests this coud lead to better-targetted SETI searches. (M-dwarf stars — about 75% of stars in the Milky Way — actually have the highest likelihood that narrowband signals would get broadened before leaving their system...) Read more of this story at Slashdot.
EFF, Ubuntu and Other Distros Discuss How to Respond to Age-Verification Laws - System76 isn't the only one criticizing new age-verification laws. The blog 9to5Linux published an "informal" look at other discussions in various Linux communities. Earlier this week, Ubuntu developer Aaron Rainbolt proposed on the Ubuntu mailing list an optional D-Bus interface (org.freedesktop.AgeVerification1) that can be implemented by arbitrary applications as a distro sees fit, but Canonical responded that the company does not yet have a solution to announce for age declaration in Ubuntu. "Canonical is aware of the legislation and is reviewing it internally with legal counsel, but there are currently no concrete plans on how, or even whether, Ubuntu will change in response," said Jon Seager, VP Engineering at Canonical. "The recent mailing list post is an informal conversation among Ubuntu community members, not an announcement. While the discussion contains potentially useful ideas, none have been adopted or committed to by Canonical." Similar talks are underway in the Fedora and Linux Mint communities about this issue in case the California Digital Age Assurance Act law and similar laws from other states and countries are to be enforced. At the same time, other OS developers, like MidnightBSD, have decided to exclude California from desktop use entirely. Slashdot contacted Hayley Tsukayama, Director of State Affairs at EFF, who says their organization "has long warned against age-gating the internet. Such mandates strike at the foundation of the free and open internet." And there's another problem. "Many of these mandates imagine technology that does not currently exist." Such poorly thought-out mandates, in truth, cannot achieve the purported goal of age verification. Often, they are easy to circumvent and many also expose consumers to real data breach risk. These burdens fall particularly heavily on developers who aren't at large, well-resourced companies, such as those developing open-source software. Not recognizing the diversity of software development when thinking about liability in these proposals effectively limits software choices — and at a time when computational power is being rapidly concentrated in the hands of the few. That harms users' and developers' right to free expression, their digital liberties, privacy, and ability to create and use open platforms... Rather than creating age gates, a well-crafted privacy law that empowers all of us — young people and adults alike — to control how our data is collected and used would be a crucial step in the right direction. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Scientists Just Doubled Our Catalog of Black Hole and Neutron Star Collisions - Colliding black holes were detected through spacetime ripples for the first time in 2015 by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), notes Space.com: Since then, LIGO and its partner gravitational wave detectors Virgo in Italy and KAGRA (Kamioka Gravitational Wave Detector) in Japan have detected a multitude of gravitational waves from colliding black holes, merging neutron stars, and even the odd "mixed merger" between a black hole and a neutron star... During the first three observing runs of LIGO, Virgo and KAGRA, scientists had only "heard" 90 potential gravitational wave sources. But now they've published new data from the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA (LVK) Collaboration that includes 128 more gravitatational wave sources — some incredibly distant: [Gravitational-Wave Transient Catalog-4.0, or GWTC-4] was collected during the fourth observational run of these gravitational wave detectors, which was conducted between May 2023 and Jan. 2024... Excitingly, GWTC-4 could technically have been even larger, as around 170 other gravitational wave detections made by LIGO, Virgo and KAGRA haven't yet made their way into the catalog. One aspect of GWTC-4 that really stands out is the variety of events that created these signals. Within this catalog are gravitational waves from mergers between the heaviest black hole binaries yet, each about 130 times as massive as the sun, lopsided mergers between black holes with seriously mismatched masses, and black holes that are spinning at incredible speeds of around 40% the speed of light. In these cases, scientists think the extreme characteristics of the black holes involved in these mergers are the result of prior collisions, providing evidence of merger chains that explain how some black holes grow to masses billions of times that of the sun... GWTC-4 also includes two new mixed mergers involving black holes and neutron stars. [LVK member Daniel Williams, of the University of Glasgow in the U.K., said in their statement] "We are really pushing the edges, and are seeing things that are more massive, spinning faster, and are more astrophysically interesting and unusual." The catalog also demonstrates just how sensitive the LVK detectors have become. Some of the neutron star mergers occurred up to 1 billion light-years away, while some of the black hole mergers occurred up to 10 billion light-years away. Einstein's theory of general relativity can be tested with these detections, and "So far, the theory is passing all our tests," says LVK member Aaron Zimmerman, of the University of Texas at Austin. "But we're also learning that we have to make even more accurate predictions to keep up with all the data the universe is giving us." And LVK member Rachel Gray, a lecturer at the University of Glasgow, says "every merging black hole gives us a measurement of the Hubble constant, and by combining all of the gravitational wave sources together, we can vastly improve how accurate this measurement is." In short, says LVK member Lucy Thomas of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), "Each new gravitational-wave detection allows us to unlock another piece of the universe's puzzle in ways we couldn't just a decade ago." Read more of this story at Slashdot.