Latest News
Last updated 20 Apr, 06:17 PM
BBC News
Officials deliberately withheld Mandelson vetting result from me, Starmer says - The PM tells the Commons that if he had known the peer failed security vetting he would not have been appointed.
Key points from Starmer's Mandelson statement - The prime minister has been back in the Commons after it emerged the Labour peer failed vetting.
Phones to be banned in schools by law in England, government says - Education minister Jacqui Smith said the move would create "a clear legal requirement for schools".
Attempted murder charge after car hit pedestrians - A 29-year-old woman is charged with attempted murder, GBH, dangerous driving and drink driving.
Spat at, threatened and kidnapped: British Jews tell of rising antisemitism - British Jews have described to BBC Panorama how they are experiencing a rise in antisemitism.
The Register
Scot becomes second Scattered Spider-linked crook to plead guilty in US - Tyler Buchanan admits role in scheme that stole at least $8 million in virtual currency A Scottish man linked to the Scattered Spider cybercrime crew has pleaded guilty in the US to a phishing and SIM-swap scheme that stole at least $8 million in cryptocurrency.…
You too can build a nuclear battery from junk you have lying around the house - It won't provide much juice, but its creator calls it a 'nanowatt nuclear power plant' It's illegal and impractical to construct a nuclear power plant in your backyard. But a DIY tritium nuclear battery is far less dramatic - just don't expect any appreciable amount of energy from it.…
Schmoozebots: study finds flattery will get AI everywhere - Excessive friendliness may cause users to forget they're talking to a very confident autocomplete A study into how humans interact with chatbots suggests the fastest way to make an LLM feel human isn't making it smarter – it's making it seem nicer.…
One of Europe's sovereign cloud picks may not be so-sovereign after all - US-based cloud providers could have to disclose certain data under American legal orders The European Commission has awarded four contracts designed to advance cloud sovereignty in the EU, but one uses services from S3NS, a joint venture between Thales and Google Cloud, raising questions about its real independence.…
New Android development tool designed for robots, not humans - Google previews Android CLI as agentic development continues to snowball Google has introduced a new Android command-line interface built specifically for AI agents, claiming a 70 percent cut in token usage and three times reduction in task completion time.…
New Scientist - Home
Parrot uses his broken beak to become a dominant male - An injured kea with just half a beak has used what's left as a weapon that gives him dominance over a captive colony of the birds
Can you determine your personalised stress score? - “I’m stressed” is a phrase that many of us use, but now there are ways to shed light on how stressed you actually are
Why the right kind of stress is crucial for your health and happiness - Stress is linked to many of our biggest killers, but a growing body of research suggests that certain types can sharpen the mind and strengthen the body. Here’s how to find your perfect dose
We might finally know how to use quantum computers to boost AI - Pushing against years of scepticism, an analysis suggests quantum computers may offer real advantages for running machine learning and similar algorithms in the near future
The biggest threat to Chernobyl is no longer radiation - Forty years after the world’s biggest nuclear disaster, the safety of Chernobyl hangs in the balance – though not because of the radiation risk
Hacker News
Qwen3.6-Max-Preview: Smarter, Sharper, Still Evolving - Comments
ggsql: A Grammar of Graphics for SQL - Comments
At long last, InfoWars is ours - Comments
GitHub's Fake Star Economy - Comments
The Theory of Interstellar Trade [pdf] - Comments
Slashdot
Palantir Posts Bond Villain Manifesto On X - DeanonymizedCoward writes: Engadget reports that Palantir has posted to X a summary of CEO Alex Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska's 2025 book, The Technological Republic, which reads like a utopian idealist doodled on a Bond villain's whiteboard. While the post makes some decent points, it also highlights the Big-AI attitude that the AI surveillance state is in fact a good thing, and strongly implies that the Good Guys need to do war crimes before the Bad Guys get around to it. "The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal," one of the 22 points states. "It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software." The book is billed as "a passionate call for the West to wake up to our new reality," and other excerpts in the social media post include assertions such as: "Free email is not enough. The decadence of a culture or civilization, and indeed its ruling class, will be forgiven only if that culture is capable of delivering economic growth and security for the public"; "National service should be a universal duty"; "The postwar neutering of Germany and Japan must be undone"; and "Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive." The statement criticizes the West's resistance to "defining national cultures in the name of inclusivity," as well as the treatment of billionaires and the "ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures." Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Allbirds' Move To AI Has Echoes of the Dot-Com Frenzy - An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg, written by writer Austin Carr: Allbirds is pivoting to artificial intelligence. The San Francisco brand, whose wool running shoes were once the sneaker du jour among the tech crowd, announced last week that it was expanding into AI computing infrastructure. The bizarre strategic shift was immediately greeted with a surprising frenzy on Wall Street, where shares of Allbirds soared 582% last Wednesday before dropping the next day. [...] Of course, the absurdity of Allbirds' situation echoed familiar Silicon Valley tropes -- from the endless startup pivots of the 2010s to the more recent boom-and-bust cycles of arbitrarily valued crypto coins. But it immediately reminded me of the marketing ploys of the dot-com crash. After all, some of the more iconic fails ended up being retailers such as Pets.com, Webvan, etc., riding the web wave with little to show for it beyond terrible margins. One particular comparison from that period stands out as relevant to Allbirds: Zap.com. The holding company behind it, Zapata Corp., had a long and convoluted history, but was essentially selling fish-oil products by the time it decided to reinvent itself as an internet portal. It amassed a variety of web properties -- in media, e-commerce, gaming and so on -- and even once tried to acquire the search engine Excite. Spoiler alert: Zap flopped. Jen Heck, then a young employee at one of Zap's up-and-coming portfolio entities, remembers how quickly the hype of that web 1.0 turned to hell. As absurd as Zapata's pivot sounds today, it seemed feasible during the excitement of the internet revolution. "We went from like, 'Wow, this life thing is just so easy,' to it all ending so suddenly," Heck recalls. The ones who survived that tech bubble, she says, actually had differentiated products and the right creative thinkers building them -- and weren't just cynically jumping on the latest hot trend. "'Internet' was the magic word then, and 'AI' is the magic word now," Heck says. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
NSA Using Anthropic's Mythos Despite Blacklist - Axios reports that the NSA is using Anthropic's restricted Mythos Preview model despite the Pentagon insisting the company poses a "supply chain risk." Axios reports: The government's cybersecurity needs appear to be outweighing the Pentagon's feud with Anthropic. The department moved in February to cut off Anthropic and force its vendors to follow suit. That case is ongoing. The military is now broadening its use of Anthropic's tools while simultaneously arguing in court that using those tools threatens U.S. national security. Two sources said the NSA was using Mythos, while one said the model was also being used more widely within the department. It's unclear how the NSA is currently using Mythos, but other organizations with access to the model are using it predominantly to scan their own environments for exploitable security vulnerabilities. Anthropic restricted access to Mythos to around 40 organizations, contending that its offensive cyber capabilities were too dangerous to allow for a wider release. Anthropic only announced 12 of those organizations. One source said the NSA was among the unnamed agencies with access. The NSA's counterparts in the U.K. have said they have access to the model through the country's AI Security Institute. Anthropic's CEO met with top U.S. officials on Friday to discuss "opportunities for collaboration," according to a White House spokesperson, "as well as shared approaches and protocols to address the challenges associated with scaling this technology." Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Robots Beat Human Records At Beijing Half-Marathon - An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The winning runner at a Beijing half-marathon for humanoid robots finished the race today in 50 minutes and 26 seconds -- significantly faster than the human world record of 57 minutes recently set by Jacob Kiplimo. [...] [T]he winning time is a massive improvement over last year's race, when the fastest robot finished in two hours and 40 minutes. The Associated Press reports that this year's winner was built by Chinese smartphone maker Honor. It seems the winning robot wasn't actually the fastest, as a different Honor robot finished in 48 minutes and 19 seconds. But that one was remote controlled -- the 50:26 robot was autonomous and won due to weighted scoring. About 40% of participating robots competed autonomously, while the remaining 60% were remote controlled, according to Beijing's E-Town tech hub. Not all of them did as well as Honor's robots, with one robot falling at the starting line and another hitting a barrier. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Videos Catch Amazon Delivery Drones Dropping Packages From 10 Feet in the Air - There's been a few complaints about Amazon's drone delivery service. "The automated mailmen are dropping off packages from 10 feet in the air," reports the New York Post, "rendering the contents of each box susceptible to crashing and smashing." One example? Tamara Hancock filmed a drone delivering a bottle of Torani flavoring syrup to her home in Arizona (as a test of how Amazon handled fragile items). It was delivered it in a plastic bottle — not glass — but the massive drone drops the drone from so high that the impact cracked the bottle's cap. (In the video Hancock opens her delivery to find leaked flavoring syrup "everywhere.") The delivery was hard to film, Hancock says, because "If the drone sees me in the back yard, it will not drop, because it is worried about hurting humans or animals." The Post notes Amazon's "AI-charged fleet" of drones are "Outfitted with industry-leading 'sense and avoid' technology, the aerodynamic machines are equipped to drop off eligible items, weighing a maximum of five pounds, at designated areas in 60 minutes or less." The high-tech, however, apparently does not ensure gentle landings. Collisions, including a recent crash-and-burn into a Texas building, as well as several mid-flight malfunctions in rainy weather, have abounded since the drones' inaugural launch.... Tasha, a separate Amazon user, spotted the drone plunging a package near the paved driveway of a neighbor's yard. Unfortunately, its propellers caused other, previously delivered parcels to blow away, sending one into the street... In a statement to The Post, Amazon said it apologized for one of the "rare instances when products don't arrive as expected." Amazon's drone fleet has been running since late 2024, the Post adds, and are now offering "ultra-fast" shipping in U.S. states including Arizona, Florida, Michigan, Kansas and Texas. The machines do seem massive. I'm surprised neighbors aren't complaining about the noise... Read more of this story at Slashdot.