Latest News

Last updated 11 Dec, 07:24 PM

BBC News

'Super flu' wave hits hospitals in England with no peak yet - Numbers in hospital rise by more than 50% in a week as NHS faces 'worst-case scenario'.

Four charts that show how flu outbreak is different this winter - NHS England says it's facing a "worst-case scenario" after flu hospital cases jump 55% in a week.

From Iran to China to Venezuela - how tanker seized by US hid true location - A seized tanker accused of smuggling sanctioned oil has long hidden its true location. BBC Verify examines how.

Huge undersea wall dating from 5000 BC found in France - The 120 metre wall was either a fish-trap or a dyke for protection against rising sea-levels, archeologists believe.

'Monumental betrayal' - cheapest World Cup final ticket to cost £3,119 - Fans' group Football Supporters Europe says it is "astonished" by Fifa's "extortionate" pricing strategy for World Cup tickets.

The Register

European cloud trade group says EU should have blocked VMware-Broadcom merger - Org argues that the approval process was flawed and regulators should have known better A trade group of European cloud providers has laid into the European Commission’s decision to allow the VMware-Broadcom merger to go ahead, alleging that it failed to assess the infrastructure and semiconductor company’s incentives to massively raise prices on customers.…

Space-power startup claims it can beam energy to solar farms - So far, Overview Energy says it has only beamed power from a moving aircraft to standard solar panels You can't generate solar power at night unless your panels are in space. A startup that wants to beam orbital sunlight straight into existing solar farms has just emerged from stealth, claiming a world-first power-beaming demo, but with a lot of critical information left unreported. …

Google fixes super-secret 8th Chrome 0-day - No details, no CVE, update your browser now Google issued an emergency fix for a Chrome vulnerability already under exploitation, which marks the world's most popular browser's eighth zero-day bug of 2025.…

LastPass hammered with £1.2M fine for 2022 breach fiasco - UK data regulator says failures were unacceptable for a company managing the world's passwords The UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) says LastPass must cough up £1.2 million ($1.6 million) after its two-part 2022 data breach compromised information from up to 1.6 million UK users.…

Legacy Update expands archive of vanished Microsoft downloads - Preserving not just updates, but also lots of the now-deleted optional extras Legacy Update was already extremely useful if you chose to disembark from Microsoft's upgrade railroad. Now it's even more so.…

New Scientist - Home

Killer whales and dolphins are ‘being friends’ to hunt salmon together - White-sided dolphins seem to help killer whales "scout" and catch Chinook salmon near Vancouver Island, then eat the leftovers

How 3 imaginary physics demons tore up the laws of nature - Three thought experiments involving “demons” have haunted physics for centuries. What should we make of them today?

Roman occupation of Britain damaged the population’s health - Urban populations in southern Britain experienced a decline in health that lasted for generations after the Romans arrived

This year we were drowning in a sea of slick, nonsensical AI slop - This Changes Everything columnist Annalee Newitz on how AI-generated content went mainstream in 2025

How I learned to keep my brain in better repair this year - Neuroscience columnist Helen Thomson on how she discovered a host of evidence-based ways to keep her brain healthier in 2026

Hacker News

Litestream VFS - Comments

Going Through Snowden Documents, Part 1 - Comments

GPT-5.2 - Comments

Show HN: SIM – Apache-2.0 n8n alternative - Comments

Craft software that makes people feel something - Comments

Slashdot

GPT-5.2 Arrives as OpenAI Scrambles To Respond To Gemini 3's Gains - OpenAI on Thursday released GPT-5.2, its latest and what the company calls its "best model yet for everyday professional use," just days after CEO Sam Altman declared a "code red" internally to marshal resources toward improving ChatGPT amid intensifying competition from Google's well-received Gemini 3 model. The GPT-5.2 series ships in three tiers: Instant, designed for faster responses and information retrieval; Thinking, optimized for coding, math, and planning; and Pro, the most powerful tier targeting difficult questions requiring high accuracy. OpenAI says the Thinking model hallucinated 38% less than GPT-5.1 on benchmarks measuring factual accuracy. Fidji Simo, OpenAI's CEO of applications, denied that the launch was moved up in response to the code red, saying the company has been working on GPT-5.2 for "many, many months." She described the internal directive as a way to "really signal to the company that we want to marshal resources in this one particular area." The competitive pressure is real. Google's Gemini app now has more than 650 million monthly active users, compared to OpenAI's 800 million weekly active users. In October, OpenAI's head of ChatGPT Nick Turley sent an internal memo declaring the company was facing "the greatest competitive pressure we've ever seen," setting a goal to increase daily active users by 5 percent before 2026. GPT-5.2 is rolling out to paid ChatGPT users starting Thursday, and GPT-5.1 will remain available under "legacy models" for three months before being sunset. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

College Campuses Have Become a Front Line in America's Sports-Betting Boom - Since the Supreme Court struck down the federal prohibition on sports betting in 2018, 39 states have legalized the activity, and college campuses have emerged as ground zero for what appears to be a generational gambling problem among young men. A 2023 NCAA survey found that 60% of college students have gambled on sports, and 16% of 18-to-22-year-olds engage in what the organization classifies as problematic gambling. A Siena University poll from January found that 28% of men aged 18-to-34 who use sports-betting apps have had trouble meeting a financial obligation because of a lost bet. Timothy Fong, a psychiatry professor at UCLA, says every one of his recent clients has been an 18-to-24-year-old man seeking help for a sports-betting or cryptocurrency addiction. John Simonian, a personal-bankruptcy lawyer in Rhode Island, says he never used to see young men filing for bankruptcy -- now it's common. On November 7th, the NCAA announced it had uncovered three separate betting scandals in men's basketball where athletes intentionally played poorly in games on which they or a friend had placed wagers. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Game Awards Are Losing Their Luster - The Game Awards, which broadcasts tonight on Twitch, YouTube, and Prime Video, has become the biggest night on the video game calendar since launching in 2014, but the show's treatment of developers has drawn increasing criticism. At the 2023 ceremony, acceptance speeches were often cut off after roughly 30 seconds while Hideo Kojima received five minutes to discuss his upcoming game OD -- enough time for 13 acceptance speeches, Aftermath calculated. That year's show also ignored the industry's mass layoffs entirely; host Geoff Keighley acknowledged the labor crisis only at the 2024 ceremony. The show's Future Class program, launched in 2020 to celebrate game makers representing an inclusive future for the industry, has quietly ended. No new class has been named for two years. "At this time, we are not planning a new Future Class for this year," organizer Emily Weir told Game Developer. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Why Switzerland Is Weighing a 10 Million Population Limit - An anonymous reader shares a report: Growing support for far-right parties is pressuring European governments to introduce stricter controls on immigration. Switzerland is set to vote on a proposal that would take the idea to the next level -- imposing a cap on its population [non-paywalled link]. The initiative could lead eventually to a blanket ban on new arrivals if the number of residents rises from around 9 million currently to above 10 million, with little distinction made between refugees, skilled workers and top managers on six-figure salaries. Citizens will likely vote on the proposal next year under the country's unique system of plebiscites on constitutional amendments and policy, and polls suggest there's a chance they'll approve it. The risk is it could lead to shortages of critical skills that end up harming Switzerland's competitiveness. The outcome will show how far citizens are willing to go to preserve some of the traits that made their country such an appealing destination. [...] The right-wing Swiss People's Party, or SVP, won 28% of the vote in the last election with a campaign that presented Swiss citizenship as a privilege, not a right. It came up with the idea of a population limit in 2023, presenting it as a way to preserve the Swiss lifestyle and protect its environment from excessive human activity. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AI Hackers Are Coming Dangerously Close to Beating Humans - Stanford researchers spent much of the past year building an AI bot called Artemis that scans networks for software vulnerabilities, and when they pitted it against ten professional penetration testers on the university's own engineering network, the bot outperformed nine of them. The experiment offers a window into how rapidly AI hacking tools have improved after years of underwhelming performance. "We thought it would probably be below average," said Justin Lin, a Stanford cybersecurity researcher. Artemis found bugs at a fraction of human cost -- just under $60 per hour compared to the $2,000 to $2,500 per day that professional pen testers typically charge. But its performance wasn't flawless. About 18% of its bug reports were false positives, and it completely missed an obvious vulnerability on a webpage that most human testers caught. In one case, Artemis found a bug on an outdated page that didn't render in standard browsers; it used a command-line tool called Curl instead of Chrome or Firefox. Dan Boneh, a Stanford computer science professor who advised the researchers, noted that vast amounts of software shipped without being vetted by LLMs could now be at risk. "We're in this moment of time where many actors can increase their productivity to find bugs at an extreme scale," said Jacob Klein, head of threat intelligence at Anthropic. Read more of this story at Slashdot.