Latest News
Last updated 24 Feb, 10:17 PM
BBC News
Mandelson's lawyers say he was arrested over 'baseless' claim he was a flight risk - The peer's lawyers say there is no truth in the suggestion he was planning to leave the UK.
Andrew 'rude and arrogant', minister says as MPs back release of trade role files - The former prince travelled the globe as the UK's trade representative between 2001 and 2011.
Russian soldiers tell BBC they saw fellow troops executed on commanders' orders - Four men expose the horror and brutality of conditions in the Ukraine war, with two saying they saw soldiers being shot for refusing orders.
BBC edited a second racial slur out of Bafta ceremony - The BBC's chief content officer Kate Phillips says a slur that aired was the result of a genuine error.
Man 'caused wife's death by controlling her', jury told - Christopher Trybus denies the manslaughter of his wife Tarryn Baird who took her own life in 2017.
The Register
Discord drama delays age verification debut until the second half of 2026 - Cofounder promises transparency and full technical explanation of plans, which aren't actually changing Discord is delaying age verification checks for a little while after its plan inspired a lot of hand-wringing among the community. But it's not backing down. …
Patch these 4 critical, make-me-root SolarWinds bugs ASAP - SolarWinds + file transfer software = what attackers' dreams are made of If you run SolarWinds’ Serv-U, you should patch promptly. Four critical vulnerabilities in the file transfer software can allow attackers to execute code as root.…
'Merica-made Mac Minis marked for manufacturing - iGiant also ramping US chip and AI server production Your next Mac might be made in the US of A. Apple this week revealed plans to manufacture its most affordable Macintosh computer at a new Foxconn facility in Texas.…
Rogue devs of sideloaded Android apps beg for freedom from Google’s verification regime - 37 groups urge the company to drop ID checks for apps distributed outside Play Soon, developers who just want to make Android apps for sideloading will have to register with Google. Thirty-seven technology companies, nonprofits, and civil society groups think that the Chocolate Factory should keep its nose out of third-party app stores and have asked its leadership to reconsider.…
North Korea's Lazarus Group targets healthcare orgs with Medusa ransomware - New ransomware of choice, same critical targets North Korea’s Lazarus Group appears to have added another tool to its kit. It has begun using Medusa ransomware in extortion attacks targeting at least one US healthcare organization and an unnamed victim in the Middle East, according to Symantec and Carbon Black threat hunters.…
New Scientist - Home
Cannibalism may explain why some orcas stay in family groups - Fins washing up in the North Pacific suggest that orcas from one subspecies are snacking on other orcas, and researchers think that may explain their different social dynamics
How Ukraine became a drone factory and invented the future of war - Ukraine has responded to a war it didn’t start by creating an industry it doesn’t want, but could the nation's drone expertise help it rebuild? To learn more, New Scientist gained exclusive access to the research labs, factories and military training schools behind Ukraine’s drones
Landmark vitiligo cream targets immune cells that disrupt pigmentation - A cream that directly disrupts the underlying causes of the skin patches seen in the condition vitiligo will be made available on the NHS
Loophole found that makes quantum cloning possible - Duplicating the information held in quantum computers was thought to be impossible thanks to the no-cloning theorem, but researchers have now found a workaround
Stone Age symbols may push back the earliest form of writing - Mysterious signs engraved on objects reveal that a form of proto-writing may have been used in Europe 40,000 years ago, tens of thousands of years before the emergence of a full writing system
Hacker News
Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston - Comments
Looks like it is happening - Comments
I'm helping my dog vibe code games - Comments
Hacking an old Kindle to display bus arrival times - Comments
Nearby Glasses - Comments
Slashdot
New Datacentres Risk Doubling Great Britain's Electricity Use, Regulator Says - The amount of power being sought by new datacentre projects in Great Britain would exceed the national current peak electricity consumption, according to an industry watchdog. From a report: Ofgem said about 140 proposed datacentre schemes, driven by use of artificial intelligence, could require 50 gigawatts of electricity -- 5GW more than the country's current peak demand. The figure was revealed in an Ofgem consultation on demand for new connections to the power grid. It pointed to a "surge in demand" for connection applications between November 2024 and June last year, with a significant number coming from datacentres. This has exceeded even the most ambitious forecasts. Meanwhile, new renewable energy projects are not being connected to the grid at the pace they are being built to help meet the government's clean energy targets by the end of the decade. Ofgem said the work required to connect surging numbers of datacentres could mean delays for other projects that are "critical for decarbonisation and economic growth." Datacentres are the central nervous system of AI tools such as chatbots and image generators, playing a vital role in training and operating products such as ChatGPT and Gemini. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
CrowdStrike Says Attackers Are Moving Through Networks in Under 30 Minutes - An anonymous reader shares a report: Cyberattacks reached victims faster and came from a wider range of threat groups than ever last year, CrowdStrike said in its annual global threat report released Tuesday, adding that cybercriminals and nation-states increasingly relied on predictable tactics to evade detection by exploiting trusted systems. The average breakout time -- how long it took financially-motivated attackers to move from initial intrusion to other network systems -- dropped to 29 minutes in 2025, a 65% increase in speed from the year prior. "The fastest breakout time a year ago was 51 seconds. This year it's 27 seconds," Adam Meyers, head of counter adversary operations at CrowdStrike, told CyberScoop. Defenders are falling behind because attackers are refining their techniques, using social engineering to access high-privilege systems faster and move through victims' cloud infrastructure undetected. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Hegseth Gives Anthropic Until Friday To Back Down on AI Safeguards - Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei until Friday evening to give the military unfettered access to its AI model or face harsh penalties, Axios has learned. Hegseth told Amodei in a tense meeting on Tuesday that the Pentagon will either cut ties and declare Anthropic a "supply chain risk," or invoke the Defense Production Act to force the company to tailor its model to the military's needs. The Pentagon wants to punish Anthropic as the feud over AI safeguards grows increasingly nasty, but officials are also worried about the consequences of losing access to its industry-leading model, Claude. "The only reason we're still talking to these people is we need them and we need them now. The problem for these guys is they are that good," a Defense official told Axios ahead of the meeting. Anthropic has said it is willing to adapt its usage policies for the Pentagon, but not to allow its model to be used for the mass surveillance of Americans or the development of weapons that fire without human involvement. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The US Spent $30 Billion on Classroom Laptops and Got the First Generation Less Capable Than Its Parents - More than two decades after Maine became the first state to hand laptops to middle schoolers -- distributing 17,000 Apple machines across 243 schools in 2002 -- neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath told a U.S. Senate committee earlier this year that Gen Z is the first generation in modern history to score lower on standardized tests than the one before it. The U.S. spent more than $30 billion in 2024 alone putting laptops and tablets in classrooms, and Horvath cited PISA data from 15-year-olds worldwide showing a stark correlation between time on school computers and worse scores. A 2014 study of 3,000 university students found they were off-task on their machines nearly two-thirds of the time. Fortune reported back in 2017 that Maine's own test scores hadn't budged in the 15 years since the program launched, and then-governor Paul LePage called it a "massive failure." Horvath framed the generation's eroding capabilities not as a personal failure but a policy one, calling them victims of a failed pedagogical experiment. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Microsoft Execs Worry AI Will Eat Entry Level Coding Jobs - An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich and VP of Developer Community Scott Hanselman have written a paper arguing that senior software engineers must mentor junior developers to prevent AI coding agents from hollowing out the profession's future skills base. The paper, Redefining the Engineering Profession for AI, is based on several assumptions, the first of which is that agentic coding assistants "give senior engineers an AI boost... while imposing an AI drag on early-in-career (EiC) developers to steer, verify and integrate AI output." In an earlier podcast on the subject, Russinovich said this basic premise -- that AI is increasing productivity only for senior developers while reducing it for juniors -- is a "hot topic in all our customer engagements... they all say they see it at their companies." [...] The logical outcome is that "if organizations focus only on short-term efficiency -- hiring those who can already direct AI -- they risk hollowing out the next generation of technical leaders," Russinovich and Hanselman state in the paper. Read more of this story at Slashdot.