Latest News

Last updated 13 Jan, 12:26 AM

BBC News

'They just kept killing': Eyewitnesses describe deadly crackdown in Iran - The BBC has received eyewitness accounts of security forces attacking anti-government protesters across the country.

Trump announces 25% tariff on countries doing business with Iran - Trump says the new levy is "effective immediately" as anti-government protests in Iran enter a third week.

UK to bring into force law to tackle Grok AI deepfakes this week - It is currently illegal to share deepfakes, but the law against creating them has not yet come into force.

Trump to meet Venezuelan opposition leader Machado at the White House - Machado, the winner of 2025 Nobel Peace Prize, had offered to share the honour with Trump, an award the president has long coveted.

Tories say Zahawi peerage request turned down before defection to Reform UK - Zahawi is the latest former Conservative MP to join Nigel Farage's party, as a Tory source claims he had approached Kemi Badenoch seeking a nomination for the Lords.

The Register

No fire sale for firewalls as memory shortages could push prices higher - In SEC filings, Fortinet and Palo Alto show shrinking product margins taking hold. PCs and datacenters aren't the only devices that need DRAM. The global memory shortage is roiling the cybersecurity market, with the cost of firewalls expected to balloon and hit both customers and vendors in the pocketbook in 2026, according to research analysts Wedbush.…

'Violence-as-a-service' suspect arrested in Iraq, extradition underway - Gang members 'systematically exploited children and young people,' cops say A 21-year-old Swedish man accused of being a key organizer of violence-as-a-service linked to the Foxtrot criminal network, which police say has recruited and exploited minors, has been arrested in Iraq.…

Zuck forms Meta Compute to pave the planet with 'hundreds of gigawatts' of AI datacenters - No wonder he's going nuclear Meta has formed a new initiative called “Meta Compute” to oversee the planning, deployment, and operations of its growing fleet of AI datacenters.…

Danish dev delights kid by turning floppy drive into easy TV remote - Just insert a disk and the TV starts playing three-year-old’s favorite shows Smart TV UIs are hard enough for adults to navigate, let alone preschoolers. When his three-year-old couldn't learn to navigate with a remote, one Danish computer scientist did what any enterprising creator would do: He turned an old floppy disk drive into a kid-friendly content controller that starts streams based on what disk you insert. …

Apple hopes to save Siri from laughingstock status with infusion of Google Gemini - Partnership between behemoths raises questions about OpenAI's place at the iTable It may finally be time to take AI on the iPhone siri-ously. Apple and Google on Monday announced a multi-year partnership that will see Apple Foundation Models standing on the shoulders of Google Gemini models, one that will return a small portion of the roughly $20 billion Google pays annually to be Apple's default search provider.…

New Scientist - Home

Pompeii’s public baths were unhygienic until the Romans took over - Before the Romans captured Pompeii, the famous town was run by the Samnite people – and a dip in their public baths might have been an unpleasant experience

Quantum computers could help sharpen images of exoplanets - Combining two kinds of quantum computing devices could be just the trick for taking better images of faint, faraway exoplanets

Our elegant universe: rethinking nature’s deepest principle - For centuries, the principle of symmetry has guided physicists towards more fundamental truths, but now a slew of shocking findings suggest a far stranger idea from quantum theory could be a deeper driving force

Is there an evolutionary reason for same-sex sexual behaviour? - Sexual behaviour among same-sex pairs is common in apes and monkeys, and a wide-ranging analysis suggests it does boost survival

We're about to simulate a human brain on a supercomputer - The world’s most powerful supercomputers can now run simulations of billions of neurons, and researchers hope such models will offer unprecedented insights into how our brains work

Hacker News

Cowork: Claude Code for the rest of your work - Comments

TimeCapsuleLLM: LLM trained only on data from 1800-1875 - Comments

Fabrice Bellard's TS Zip (2024) - Comments

Postal Arbitrage - Comments

Unauthenticated remote code execution in OpenCode - Comments

Slashdot

Fintech Firm Betterment Confirms Data Breach After Hackers Send Fake $10,000 Crypto Scam Messages - An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Betterment, a financial app, sent a sketchy-looking notification on Friday asking users to send $10,000 to Bitcoin and Ethereum crypto wallets and promising to "triple your crypto," according to a thread on Reddit. The Betterment account says in an X thread that this was an "unauthorized message" that was sent via a "third-party system." TechCrunch has since confirmed that an undisclosed number of Betterment's customers have had their personal information accessed. "The company said customer names, email and postal addresses, phone numbers, and dates of birth were compromised in the attack," reports TechCrunch. Betterment said it detected the attack on the same day and "immediately revoked the unauthorized access and launched a comprehensive investigation, which is ongoing." The fintech firm also said it has reached out to the customers targeted by the hackers and "advised them to disregard the message." "Our ongoing investigation has continued to demonstrate that no customer accounts were accessed and that no passwords or other log-in credentials were compromised," Betterment wrote in the email. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Should AI Agents Be Classified As People? - New submitter sziring writes: Harvard Business Review's IdeaCast podcast interviewed McKinsey CEO Bob Sternfels, where he classified AI agents as people. "I often get asked, 'How big is McKinsey? How many people do you employ?' I now update this almost every month, but my latest answer to you would be 60,000, but it's 40,000 humans and 20,000 agents." This statement looks to be the opening shots of how we as a society need to classify AI agents and whether they will replace human jobs. Did those agents take roles that previously would have been filled by a full-time human? By classifying them as people, did the company break protocols or laws by not interviewing candidates for those jobs, not providing benefits or breaks, and so on? Yes, it all sounds silly but words matter. What happens when a job report comes out claiming we just added 20,000 jobs in Q1? That line of thinking leads directly to Bill Gates' point that agents taking on human roles might need to be taxed. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Meta Plans To Cut Around 10% of Employees In Reality Labs Division - Meta plans to cut roughly 10% of staff in its Reality Labs division, with layoffs hitting metaverse-focused teams hardest. Reuters reports: The cuts to Reality Labs, which has roughly 15,000 employees, could be announced as soon as Tuesday and are set to disproportionately affect those in the metaverse unit who work on virtual reality headsets and virtual social networks, the report said. [...] Meta Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth, who oversees Reality Labs, has called a meeting on Wednesday and has urged staff to attend in person, the NYT reported, citing a memo. [...] The metaverse had been a massive project spearheaded by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who prioritized and spent heavily on the venture, only for the business to burn more than $60 billion since 2020. [...] The report comes as the Facebook-parent scrambles to stay relevant in Silicon Valley's artificial intelligence race after its Llama 4 model met with a poor reception. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Supreme Court Takes Case That Could Strip FCC of Authority To Issue Fines - An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Supreme Court will hear a case that could invalidate the Federal Communications Commission's authority to issue fines against companies regulated by the FCC. AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile challenged the FCC's ability to punish them after the commission fined the carriers for selling customer location data without their users' consent. AT&T convinced the US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit to overturn its fine (PDF), while Verizon lost in the 2nd Circuit and T-Mobile lost in the District of Columbia Circuit. Verizon petitioned (PDF) the Supreme Court to reverse its loss, while the FCC and Justice Department petitioned (PDF) the court to overturn AT&T's victory in the 5th Circuit. The Supreme Court granted both petitions to hear the challenges and consolidated the cases in a list of orders (PDF) released Friday. Oral arguments will be held. In 2024, the FCC fined the big three carriers a total of $196 million for location data sales revealed in 2018, saying the companies were punished "for illegally sharing access to customers' location information without consent and without taking reasonable measures to protect that information against unauthorized disclosure." Carriers challenged in three appeals courts, arguing that the fines violated their Seventh Amendment right to a jury trial. [...] While the Supreme Court is only taking up the AT&T and Verizon cases, the T-Mobile case would be affected by whatever ruling the Supreme Court issues. T-Mobile is seeking a rehearing in the District of Columbia Circuit, an effort that could be boosted or rendered moot by whatever the Supreme Court decides. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

How Markdown Took Over the World - 22 years ago, developer and columnist John Gruber released Markdown, a simple plain-text formatting system designed to spare writers the headache of memorizing arcane HTML tags. As technologist Anil Dash writes in a long piece, Markdown has since embedded itself into nearly every corner of modern computing. Aaron Swartz, then seventeen years old, served as the beta tester before its quiet March 2004 debut. Google eventually added Markdown support to Docs after more than a decade of user requests; Microsoft put it in Notepad; Slack, WhatsApp, Discord, and Apple Notes all support it now. Dash writes: The part about not doing this stuff solely for money matters, because even the most advanced LLM systems today, what the big AI companies call their "frontier" models, require complex orchestration that's carefully scripted by people who've tuned their prompts for these systems through countless rounds of trial and error. They've iterated and tested and watched for the results as these systems hallucinated or failed or ran amok, chewing up countless resources along the way. And sometimes, they generated genuinely astonishing outputs, things that are truly amazing to consider that modern technology can achieve. The rate of progress and evolution, even factoring in the mind-boggling amounts of investment that are going into these systems, is rivaled only by the initial development of the personal computer or the Internet, or the early space race. And all of it -- all of it -- is controlled through Markdown files. When you see the brilliant work shown off from somebody who's bragging about what they made ChatGPT generate for them, or someone is understandably proud about the code that they got Claude to create, all of the most advanced work has been prompted in Markdown. Though where the logic of Markdown was originally a very simple version of "use human language to tell the machine what to do", the implications have gotten far more dire when they use a format designed to help expresss "make this **bold**" to tell the computer itself "make this imaginary girlfriend more compliant". Read more of this story at Slashdot.