Latest News
Last updated 04 Mar, 11:25 AM
BBC News
First government flight for UK nationals due to leave Middle East tonight - Some British nationals are being invited to board the flight from the capital of Oman later on Wednesday.
UK stock market calms but oil prices rise over fears Iran war may drag on - UK and other European markets opened a little higher but gas and crude prices remain volatile.
Chris Mason: After Trump's 'no Churchill' jibe can the special relationship recover? - The remarks came amid a row over the refusal to permit the use of UK bases for the initial US-Israel strikes.
'All red lines have been crossed': Gulf states weigh response to Iranian strikes - Retaliatory Iranian strikes on Gulf states have tarnished their image as safe and prosperous, writes the BBC's Barbara Plett-Usher.
'No to war': Pedro Sánchez hits back as Trump threatens full trade embargo on Spain - Spain's prime minister delivers a strong rebuttal to US President Donald Trump's threat to end trade with his country.
The Register
Capita's £370M Whitehall outsourcing deal challenged as 'abnormally low' - Rival bidder Sopra Steria launched legal claim over DWP procurement Capita confirmed today it won a business process outsourcing deal for multiple UK government departments for £370 million over ten years, less than 40 percent of the estimated value outlined during the tender stage.…
Users fume over Outlook.com email 'carnage' - Email flow slowed or stopped by mysterious forces at Microsoft Microsoft spent last week rejecting emails to Outlook recipients after what appears to be either a fault or overzealous blocking rules, a situation a source described as "carnage."…
Cloud inquiry chair quits UK competition watchdog over glacial pace of reform - Kip Meeks walked a year early with the overseer of tech markets yet to take action against AWS and Microsoft The chair of the competition markets authority's cloud inquiry has quit, citing the slow pace of implementing recommendations outlined in a report it published in 2025 to boost market dynamics in Britain's cloud computing market.…
One vendor doesn't mind high RAM prices: VMware - Memory tiering and pooled memory are having a moment because they offer the chance to use less RAM The high price of memory and solid-state storage has almost everyone worried – but not VMware, because the most innovative new feature in the Cloud Foundation 9 (VCF 9) private cloud suite it launched last year is memory tiering tech that allows offload of data from RAM to NVMe drives.…
European Space Agency and China both achieve gigabit links to geostationary satellites - Raises hopes birds 40,000km away can be reprogrammed, for science or military purposes The European Space Agency and the Institute of Optoelectronics at China’s Academy of Sciences both claim they’ve achieved gigabit links to satellites in geostationary orbit.…
New Scientist - Home
Phantom codes could help quantum computers avoid errors - A method for making quantum computers less error-prone could let them run complex programs such as simulations of materials more efficiently, thus making them more useful
Selfish Y chromosome may explain why some families mostly have sons - A family in Utah with a disproportionate number of boys has been traced back over hundreds of years, revealing that its lack of female members is probably due to a selfish Y chromosome
The real reasons birth rates are declining worldwide - From the cost of childcare to the housing crisis, there’s no shortage of explanations for the dramatic global fall in the number of babies being born. These analyses, though, are all missing something, says cognitive and evolutionary anthropologist Paula Sheppard
Your microbiome may determine your risk of a severe allergic reaction - The microbes that live in our mouth and gut may influence whether an allergic reaction to peanuts is mild or life-threatening, and could be harnessed to ward off a severe attack
Why the US is using a cheap Iranian drone against the country itself - The US and Iran are trading blows in the Gulf with a simple drone that costs as little as $50,000 to make. But why is a slow, cheap and relatively primitive drone seeing use in 2026 alongside hypersonic missiles and stealth jets?
Hacker News
Motorola GrapheneOS devices will be bootloader unlockable/relockable - Comments
RFC 9849. TLS Encrypted Client Hello - Comments
Agentic Engineering Patterns - Comments
RE#: how we built the fastest regex engine in F# - Comments
Better JIT for Postgres - Comments
Slashdot
'Game of Thrones' Movie In the Works - Warner Bros. is developing a feature film set in the world of Game of Thrones with writer Beau Willimon of Andor and House of Cards. "That's about all we know right now, and as with everything 'Thrones' things could change, but the film is firmly in development," reports TheWrap. Page Six Hollywood was first to break the news and speculated that the story could revolve around Aegon I, the legendary Targaryen king who spawned a dynasty. From the report: The Targaryens have been at the center of all things "Thrones" on HBO, with "Game of Thrones" following Daenerys Targaryen's (Emilia Clarke) quest to usurp the throne, spinoff "House of the Dragon" set in the midst of the Targaryens' reign and recent spinoff "A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms" following the squire-ship of Aegon "Egg" Targaryen towards the end of the family's run atop the Iron Throne. All, of course, based on George R.R. Martin's expansive book universe. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
NASA Repairs Artemis 2 Rocket, Continues Eyeing April Moon Launch - NASA is eyeing an April launch window for the upcoming Artemis II mission after it repaired a helium-flow issue on the Space Launch System upper stage rocket. "Work on the rocket and spacecraft will continue in the coming weeks as NASA prepares for rolling the rocket out to the launch pad again later this month ahead of a potential launch in April," NASA wrote in an update on Tuesday. Space.com reports: The repair work occurred inside the huge Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) at NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida. Artemis 2's SLS and Orion crew capsule have been in the VAB since Feb. 25, when they rolled back to the hangar from KSC's Launch Pad 39B. Just a few days earlier, the Artemis 2 stack successfully completed a wet dress rehearsal, a two-day-long practice run of the procedures leading up to launch. In the wake of that test, however, NASA noticed an interruption in helium flow in the SLS' upper stage. That was a significant issue, because helium pressurizes the rocket's propellant tanks. Rollback was the only option, as the affected area in the upper stage was not accessible at the pad. The problem took a potential March launch out of play for Artemis 2, which will send four astronauts on a roughly 10-day flight around the moon. It will be the first crewed flight to the lunar neighborhood since Apollo 17 in 1972. The next Artemis 2 launch window opens in April, with liftoff opportunities on April 1, April 3-6 and April 30. And those options apparently remain in play, thanks to recent work in the VAB. That work centered on a seal in an interface through which helium flows from ground equipment into the SLS upper stage. That seal was obstructing the interface, which is known as a quick disconnect. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
A Possible US Government iPhone-Hacking Toolkit Is Now In the Hands of Foreign Spies, Criminals - Security researchers say a highly sophisticated iPhone exploitation toolkit dubbed "Coruna," which possibly originated from a U.S. government contractor, has spread from suspected Russian espionage operations to crypto-stealing criminal campaigns. Apple has patched the exploited vulnerabilities in newer iOS versions, but tens of thousands of devices may have already been compromised. An anonymous reader quotes an excerpt from Wired's report: Security researchers at Google on Tuesday released a report describing what they're calling "Coruna," a highly sophisticated iPhone hacking toolkit that includes five complete hacking techniques capable of bypassing all the defenses of an iPhone to silently install malware on a device when it visits a website containing the exploitation code. In total, Coruna takes advantage of 23 distinct vulnerabilities in iOS, a rare collection of hacking components that suggests it was created by a well-resourced, likely state-sponsored group of hackers. In fact, Google traces components of Coruna to hacking techniques it spotted in use in February of last year and attributed to what it describes only as a "customer of a surveillance company." Then, five months later, Google says a more complete version of Coruna reappeared in what appears to have been an espionage campaign carried out by a suspected Russian spy group, which hid the hacking code in a common visitor-counting component of Ukrainian websites. Finally, Google spotted Coruna in use yet again in what seems to have been a purely profit-focused hacking campaign, infecting Chinese-language crypto and gambling sites to deliver malware that steals victims cryptocurrency. Conspicuously absent from Google's report is any mention of who the original surveillance company "customer" that deployed Coruna may have been. But the mobile security company iVerify, which also analyzed a version of Coruna it obtained from one of the infected Chinese sites, suggests the code may well have started life as a hacking kit built for or purchased by the US government. Google and iVerify both note that Coruna contains multiple components previously used in a hacking operation known as "Triangulation" that was discovered targeting Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky in 2023, which the Russian government claimed was the work of the NSA. (The US government didn't respond to Russia's claim.) Coruna's code also appears to have been originally written by English-speaking coders, notes iVerify's cofounder Rocky Cole. "It's highly sophisticated, took millions of dollars to develop, and it bears the hallmarks of other modules that have been publicly attributed to the US government," Cole tells WIRED. "This is the first example we've seen of very likely US government tools -- based on what the code is telling us -- spinning out of control and being used by both our adversaries and cybercriminal groups." Regardless of Coruna's origin, Google warns that a highly valuable and rare hacking toolkit appears to have traveled through a series of unlikely hands, and now exists in the wild where it could still be adopted -- or adapted -- by any hacker group seeking to target iPhone users. "How this proliferation occurred is unclear, but suggests an active market for 'second hand' zero-day exploits," Google's report reads. "Beyond these identified exploits, multiple threat actors have now acquired advanced exploitation techniques that can be re-used and modified with newly identified vulnerabilities." Read more of this story at Slashdot.
OpenAI Is Developing an Alternative To GitHub - OpenAI is reportedly developing a code-hosting platform that could compete with GitHub, The Information reported on Tuesday. "If OpenAI does sell the product, it would mark a bold move by the creator of ChatGPT to compete directly against Microsoft, which holds a significant stake in the firm," notes Reuters. From the report: Engineers from OpenAI encountered a rise in service disruptions that rendered GitHub unavailable in recent months, which ultimately prompted the decision to develop the new product, the report said. The OpenAI project is in its early stages and likely will not be completed for months, according to The Information. Employees working on it have considered making the code repository available for purchase to OpenAI's customer base. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Google Chrome Is Switching To a Two-Week Release Cycle - Google is accelerating Chrome's major release cadence from four weeks to two starting with version 153 on September 8th. "...our goal is to ensure developers and users have immediate access to the latest performance improvements, fixes and new capabilities," says Google. "Building on our history of adapting our release process to match the demands of a modern web, Chrome is moving to a two-week release cycle." The company says the "smaller scope" of these releases "minimizes disruption and simplifies post-release debugging." They also cite "recent process enhancements" that will "maintain [Chrome's] high standards for stability." 9to5Google reports: There will still be weekly security updates between milestones. This applies to desktop, Android, and iOS, while there are "no changes to the Dev and the Canary channels": "A Chrome Beta for each version will ship three weeks before the stable release. We recommend developers test with the beta to keep up to date with any upcoming changes that might impact your sites and applications." The eight-week Extended Stable release schedule for enterprise customers and Chromium embedders will not change. Chromebooks will also have "extended release options": "Our priority is a seamless experience, so the latest Chrome releases will roll out to Chromebooks after dedicated platform testing. We are adapting these channels for the new two-week browser cycle and we will share more details soon regarding milestone updates for managed devices." Read more of this story at Slashdot.