Latest News

Last updated 20 Nov, 10:32 PM

BBC News

Ukraine fires UK-supplied Storm Shadow missiles at Russia for first time - The BBC understands the long-range missiles have been fired into Russian territory by Ukraine.

Russia and US battle for advantage in Ukraine war ahead of Trump's return - Moscow appears to be maximising its gains while Joe Biden abandons long-held red lines at the end of his presidency.

Al Fayed abuse could be on scale of Savile, survivors’ advocate tells BBC - Speaking about her new role, Dame Jasvinder Sanghera says Al Fayed's "tentacles went far and wide".

Cheryl and One Direction stars mourn Liam Payne at funeral - The band's members including Harry Styles join family and friends to remember the late star.

Top footballer took thousands of pounds, claim teammates and parents - Natasha Harding, now Allen-Wyatt, is accused of taking money for coaching that she did not deliver.

The Register

Dell settles with Uncle Sam over Army bid-rigging claims - DoJ alleges merely overpriced offers from reseller followed inflated deals from IT giant The US Department of Justice has reached a $4.35 million settlement with Dell and its reseller Iron Bow over claims that the two businesses colluded to rig bids for business with the US Army.…

We'll answer any questions DoJ has, HPE CEO tells us as Feds probe $14B Juniper buy - Takeover still expected to close late 2024 or early next year HPE CEO Antonio Neri told The Register today his corporation is working with the US Department of Justice to “answer any questions” officials may have about the IT infrastructure giant's $14 billion acquisition of Juniper Networks.…

Job seekers call BS on the workplace AI revolution - Survey respondents doubt it boosts performance or even lightens the load Despite all the top-down buzz around enterprise AI, most job seekers are unconvinced that it is making their work lives easier.…

Mega US healthcare payments network restores system 9 months after ransomware attack - Change Healthcare’s $2 billion recovery is still a work in progress Still reeling from its February ransomware attack, Change Healthcare confirms its clearinghouse services are back up and running, almost exactly nine months since the digital disruption began.…

Google's AI bug hunters sniff out two dozen-plus code gremlins that humans missed - OSS-Fuzz is making a strong argument for LLMs in security research Google's OSS-Fuzz project, which uses large language models (LLMs) to help find bugs in code repositories, has now helped identify 26 vulnerabilities, including a critical flaw in the widely used OpenSSL library.…

New Scientist - News

Robotic pigeon reveals how birds fly without a vertical tail fin - A flying robot uses its bird-like tail to maintain stability in flight – a technique that could enable more aerodynamic aircraft designs that use less fuel

AI simulations of 1000 people accurately replicate their behaviour - Using GPT-4o, the model behind ChatGPT, researchers have replicated the personality and behaviour of more than 1000 people, in an effort to create an alternative to focus groups and polling

Planet 10 times the size of Earth is one of the youngest ever found - A large planet has been spotted orbiting a dwarf star that is just 3 million years old, offering possible clues to how the worlds in our solar system came into being

IBM entangled two quantum chips to work together for the first time - IBM has bet big on a modular approach to building quantum computers, and now it has successfully linked two quantum chips together to operate as a single device, a key step towards that goal

Google DeepMind AI can expertly fix errors in quantum computers - Quantum computers could get a boost from artificial intelligence, thanks to a model created by Google DeepMind that cleans up quantum errors

Hacker News

What is the origin of the lake tank image that has become a meme? (2021) - Comments

AlphaQubit: AI to identify errors in Quantum Computers - Comments

Niantic announces "Large Geospatial Model" trained on Pokémon Go player data - Comments

AAA – Analytical Anti-Aliasing - Comments

SQL, Homomorphisms and Constraint Satisfaction Problems - Comments

Slashdot

Strava Closes the Gates To Sharing Fitness Data With Other Apps - The Verge's Richard Lawler reports: Strava recently informed its users and partners that new terms for its API restrict the data that third-party apps can show, refrain from replicating Strava's look, and place a ban on using data "for any model training related to artificial intelligence, machine learning or similar applications." The policy is effective as of November 11th, even though Strava's own post about the change is dated November 15th. There are plenty of posts on social media complaining about the sudden shift, but one place where dissent won't be tolerated is Strava's own forums. The company says, "...posts requesting or attempting to have Strava revert business decisions will not be permitted." Brian Bell, Strava's VP of Communications and Social Impact, said in a statement: "We anticipate that these changes will affect only a small fraction (less than .1 percent) of the applications on the Strava platform -- the overwhelming majority of existing use cases are still allowed, including coaching platforms focused on providing feedback to users and tools that help users understand their data and performance." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

DeepSeek's First Reasoning Model R1-Lite-Preview Beats OpenAI o1 Performance - An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: DeepSeek, an AI offshoot of Chinese quantitative hedge fund High-Flyer Capital Management focused on releasing high performance open source tech, has unveiled the R1-Lite-Preview, its latest reasoning-focused large language model, available for now exclusively through DeepSeek Chat, its web-based AI chatbot. Known for its innovative contributions to the open-source AI ecosystem, DeepSeek's new release aims to bring high-level reasoning capabilities to the public while maintaining its commitment to accessible and transparent AI. And the R1-Lite-Preview, despite only being available through the chat application for now, is already turning heads by offering performance nearing and in some cases exceeding OpenAI's vaunted o1-preview model. Like that model released in September 2024, DeepSeek-R1-Lite-Preview exhibits "chain-of-thought" reasoning, showing the user the different chains or trains of "thought" it goes down to respond to their queries and inputs, documenting the process by explaining what it is doing and why. While some of the chains/trains of thoughts may appear nonsensical or even erroneous to humans, DeepSeek-R1-Lite-Preview appears on the whole to be strikingly accurate, even answering "trick" questions that have tripped up other, older, yet powerful AI models such as GPT-4o and Claude's Anthropic family, including "how many letter Rs are in the word Strawberry?" and "which is larger, 9.11 or 9.9?" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Resentment is Building As More Workers Feel Stuck - Workers in the U.S. are running in place -- feeling stuck in jobs with dimmed prospects of advancement and seeing fewer opportunities to jump ship for something better. From a report: It's a sharp contrast to the heady days of 2022 -- when employees were quitting their jobs at record high rates, open roles proliferated and the possibility of a higher paycheck always seemed just around the corner. Employers are sitting tight, says Daniel Zhao, lead economist at job site Glassdoor. Companies aren't making big changes to hiring strategy. That means "fewer opportunities for workers to climb the career ladder," he says. They're still plugging away at the same role they've had for years without the opportunity to move up internally or at a new company. 65% of the 3,400 professionals surveyed by Glassdoor last month said they feel stuck in their current role. "As workers feel stuck, pent-up resentment boils under the surface," Zhao writes in a report out yesterday. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sony's New A1 II Pairs Updated Design With Largely Familiar Performance - Sony has announced the a1 II flagship mirrorless camera, retaining its predecessor's 50.1-megapixel stacked sensor while adding AI capabilities and improved stabilization. The camera features a new dedicated AI processor, enhancing autofocus performance with claimed improvements of 50% for bird eye detection and 30% for both animal and human subjects. Its in-body stabilization system now offers 8.5 stops of correction. The a1 II maintains the original's 30 frames-per-second shooting speed and 759-point autofocus system. New features include pre-capture shooting with a one-second buffer and a multi-angle LCD screen borrowed from the a9 III. Connectivity upgrades include a 2.5Gbps Ethernet port, while dual card slots support both CFexpress Type A and UHS-II SD cards. The Sony a1 II will be available mid-December for $6,499. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

D-Link Tells Users To Trash Old VPN Routers Over Bug Too Dangerous To Identify - Owners of older models of D-Link VPN routers are being told to retire and replace their devices following the disclosure of a serious remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability. From a report: Most of the details about the bug are being kept under wraps given the potential for wide exploitation. The vendor hasn't assigned it a CVE identifier or really said much about it at all other than that it's a buffer overflow bug that leads to unauthenticated RCE. Unauthenticated RCE issues are essentially as bad as vulnerabilities get, and D-Link warned that if customers continued to use the affected products, the devices connected to them would also be put at risk. Previous bugs in similar products from other vendors have carried warnings that attackers could exploit them to install rootkits and use that persistent access to surveil an organization's web traffic, potentially stealing data such as credentials. Further reading: D-Link Won't Fix Critical Flaw Affecting 60,000 Older NAS Devices. Read more of this story at Slashdot.