Latest News
Last updated 25 Feb, 09:18 PM
BBC News
'Fear is everywhere': BBC reports from Mexican city turned into war zone by drug cartel feud - Culiacán in northern Mexico has seen a surge in violence as rival factions of the Sinaloa cartel battle for control.
Met apologises to Commons Speaker for sharing Mandelson tip-off - Sir Lindsay Hoyle tells MPs he was acting "in good faith as is my duty and responsibility" as he felt information was "relevant".
'Jekyll and Hyde' killer guilty of shooting ex-colleague on remote country path - Former gamekeeper David Campbell murdered Brian Low in Aberfeldy two years ago then tried to cover his tracks.
UK government denies Chagos Islands deal is paused, after minister said it was - It come after a minister said the UK is discussing "concerns" with the US, after President Trump criticised the deal.
Man accused of driving wife to suicide claims she lied about abuse, jury told - Christopher Trybus, 43, is charged with manslaughter, coercive control and two counts of rape.
The Register
Google catches Beijing spies using Sheets to spread espionage across 4 continents - UNC2814 historically targets governments and telcos A China-linked crew found a unique formula for attacking telcos and government orgs across the Americas, Asia, and Africa in its latest round of intrusions. Google's threat intelligence, along with unnamed industry partners, disrupted the gang, which used the Chocolate Factory's own spreadsheet tools as part of its exploits.…
Hide from Meta's spyglasses with this new Android app - Academic urges users not to harass those suspected of snooping with (sp)eyewear Worried that someone wearing Meta's snooping spyware goggles could be creeping up on you? Android users now have access to an app that can warn them if someone is wearing such smart glasses in their vicinity by using Bluetooth.…
AMD challenges Intel with an 84-core Epyc processor aimed at telcos, edge - Chips are likely Zen 5's last hurrah before Venice makes its debut later this year AMD's edgiest Epyc chips are officially getting a Zen 5 refresh with the introduction of its 8005-series processors codenamed Sorano.…
OpenAI asks its friends to tell their friends about Frontier - Agent-making tool that mimics human workers is about to get its enterprise close up. OpenAI has managed to make a name for itself with ChatGPT. But if it wants its new enterprise AI product Frontier to succeed, it's going to need help. According to an analyst, the company is smart to partner with the world's biggest consultants to push Frontier, which can create and control role-based AI agents throughout an organization.…
All your bots are belong to US if you don't play ball, DoD tells Anthropic - AI firm drops key safety pledge as Pentagon dispute drags on US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has made Anthropic an offer it may not be able to refuse. The Defense Department and the AI firm held a meeting at the Pentagon on Tuesday, where the government tried to compel the house of Claude to lift some restrictions on military use of its tech. However, recent changes to the company's safety policy suggest it may be willing to be more flexible than it's letting on. …
New Scientist - Home
Tiny predatory dinosaur weighed less than a chicken - The alvarezsaurs were thought to have evolved a smaller stature because of their diet of ants and termites, but a new fossil found in Argentina casts doubt on that theory
Breaking encryption with a quantum computer just got 10 times easier - The commonly used RSA encryption algorithm can now be cracked by a quantum computer with only 100,000 qubits, but the technical challenges to building such a machine remain numerous
The world’s most elusive colour is worth billions – if we can find it - The discovery of bright yet stable pigments is vanishingly rare, making them hugely valuable. Now chemist Mas Subramanian is unpicking the atomic code of colour and homing in on our most-wanted hue
AIs can’t stop recommending nuclear strikes in war game simulations - Leading AIs from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google opted to use nuclear weapons in simulated war games in 95 per cent of cases
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
Hacker News
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Slashdot
Americans Are Destroying Flock Surveillance Cameras - An anonymous reader shares a report: Brian Merchant, writing for Blood in the Machine, reports that people across the United States are dismantling and destroying Flock surveillance cameras, amid rising public anger that the license plate readers aid U.S. immigration authorities and deportations. Flock is the Atlanta-based surveillance startup valued at $7.5 billion a year ago and a maker of license plate readers. It has faced criticism for allowing federal authorities access to its massive network of nationwide license plate readers and databases at a time when U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is increasingly relying on data to raid communities as part of the Trump administration's immigration crackdown. Flock cameras allow authorities to track where people go and when by taking photos of their license plates from thousands of cameras located across the United States. Flock claims it doesn't share data with ICE directly, but reports show that local police have shared their own access to Flock cameras and its databases with federal authorities. While some communities are calling on their cities to end their contracts with Flock, others are taking matters into their own hands. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Xbox Co-founder Says Microsoft is Quietly Sunsetting the Platform - Seamus Blackley, one of the original founders of Xbox who helped convince Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer to back a console project more than 26 years ago, told GamesBeat in an interview that he believes Microsoft is quietly sunsetting the platform under the guise of an AI-driven leadership transition. Microsoft recently announced that Asha Sharma, whose career has focused on AI and software as a service, will replace Phil Spencer as Xbox CEO, and that COO and president Sarah Bond is leaving the company. Blackley said he expects Sharma's role to be that of "a palliative care doctor who slides Xbox gently into the night," arguing that Satya Nadella's all-consuming bet on generative AI has turned every business unit -- Xbox included -- into a nail for the same hammer. He compared the appointment to putting someone who doesn't like movies in charge of a major motion picture studio, and advised Sharma to either develop a genuine passion for games or find a way to leave the job soon. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Hacker Used Anthropic's Claude To Steal Sensitive Mexican Data - A hacker exploited Anthropic's AI chatbot to carry out a series of attacks against Mexican government agencies, resulting in the theft of a huge trove of sensitive tax and voter information, according to cybersecurity researchers. From a report: The unknown Claude user wrote Spanish-language prompts for the chatbot to act as an elite hacker, finding vulnerabilities in government networks, writing computer scripts to exploit them and determining ways to automate data theft, Israeli cybersecurity startup Gambit Security said in research published Wednesday. The activity started in December and continued for roughly a month. In all, 150 gigabytes of Mexican government data was stolen, including documents related to 195 million taxpayer records as well as voter records, government employee credentials and civil registry files, according to the researchers. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
DVD Sales Decline Slows Sharply as Gen Z Discovers the Appeal of Physical Media - DVD and Blu-ray sales have been in freefall for years, but the decline is slowing considerably as Gen Z buyers turn to physical media and drive a measurable uptick at video rental stores and retailers across the U.S. Overall disc sales fell just 9% last year after dropping more than 20% in both 2023 and 2024, according to the Digital Entertainment Group, and U.S. consumers spent 12% more on 4K UHD Blu-rays in 2025 than the prior year. The Criterion Collection, a leading boutique Blu-ray label, confirmed significant year-over-year sales increases that its president credits to younger customers. Vidiots, a video store in Los Angeles, averaged 170 rentals a day in January 2026 -- its biggest month ever -- after loaning about 22,000 discs total in 2023 and roughly 50,000 in 2024. Barnes & Noble reported DVD and Blu-ray sales growth of "mid-double digits" over the past year. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Scientists Crack the Case of 'Screeching' Scotch Tape - The screeching sound that Scotch tape makes when you rip it off a surface -- that fingernails-on-a-chalkboard noise most people try not to think about -- is produced by shock waves from micro-cracks that travel across the peeling tape at supersonic speeds, according to a new paper published in Physical Review E. Researchers led by Sigurdur Thoroddsen of King Abdullah University in Saudi Arabia used simultaneous high-speed imaging and synchronized microphones to capture both the propagating fractures and the sound waves they generate in the surrounding air. The team's earlier work, in 2010, had identified a sequence of transverse cracks racing across the width of the adhesive during peeling, and a 2024 follow-up established a direct correspondence between those cracks and the screeching sound, but neither study pinpointed a mechanism. The new findings show that a partial vacuum forms between the tape and the surface as each crack opens, and because the crack moves faster than air can rush in to fill the void, the vacuum travels along until it reaches the tape's edge and collapses into the stationary air outside, producing a discrete sound pulse. Read more of this story at Slashdot.