Latest News

Last updated 30 Apr, 07:29 PM

BBC News

It's a miracle I survived, Golders Green victim tells BBC - Shloime Rand says he is thankful he survived after being stabbed during the attack in north London on Wednesday.

Teens who lured man to beach to kill him sentenced to between five and seven years' custody - Alexander Cashford was attacked on a Kent beach by three teenagers who thought he was a paedophile.

WW2 bomb to be blown up as 1,200 homes evacuated - Teams are working through the night to limit most of the damage to the surrounding area.

Trump to lift some whisky tariffs after King's visit - The US president said he would lift restrictions on Scotland's ability to work with the state of Kentucky on whisky and bourbon.

Trainee driver crashes bus into River Seine near Paris - The driver hit a parked car and veered off the road into the river - about 12 miles south of Paris - early on Thursday.

The Register

Phone users know when to hold ’em, delay upgrades amid inflation - Analyst says handsets now stay in pockets for 4.2 years on average Remember the early days of the smartphone revolution when, even after six months, your phone felt outdated? Not anymore. Smartphone replacement cycles are getting longer as discretionary household budgets come under pressure from inflation, with demand for new devices expected to fall for the rest of this year.…

Bandwidth hogs rejoice, Celestica's latest switch is bristling with 64 ports of 1.6 Tbps Ethernet - Networking kit arrives just in time for Nvidia's 1.6 Tbps ConnectX-9 NICs If you thought 800 Gbps Ethernet was fast, just wait. Celestica's latest switches cram 64 1.6 Tbps ports into a single chassis.…

Google's fix for critical Gemini CLI bug might break your CI/CD pipelines - This CVSS 10.0 RCE vuln has been patched, automatically for some, so better check those workflows If you use Gemini CLI, watch out: Google has patched a CVSS 10.0 vulnerability in its command-line AI tool and is warning anyone running it in headless mode, or through GitHub Actions, to review their workflows.…

French prosecutors link 15-year-old to mega-breach at state’s secure document agency - Two computer crime allegations follow up to 18M lines of data surfacing online French prosecutors say police detained a 15-year-old on April 25 over the alleged theft of millions of records from France Titres (ANTS), the agency handling secure documents.…

Zed team releases version 1.0 of Rust-built editor: Traditional editor and AI tool - Team wins praise for adding 'disable all AI features' setting for devs who want a code editor to be only a code editor The Rust-built Zed editor has reached version 1.0, released yesterday, with development led by former members of the Atom team at GitHub.…

New Scientist - Home

'Green' cryptocurrency uses 18 times more energy than makers claim - A cryptocurrency that aims to avoid the disastrous energy consumption of bitcoin is actually using 18 times more energy than its makers claim – but it promises improvements are on the way

Your oral microbiome could affect your weight, liver and diabetes risk - An ambitious study has explored how the oral microbiome may affect our metabolic health, raising hopes that conditions like pre-diabetes could one day be screened for via a simple mouth swab

We have figured out a new way to send messages into the past - A technique inspired by the film Interstellar suggests a new way of communicating backwards in time, but it could help improve conventional communication systems as well

Human heads have changed shape a lot in the past 100 years - Since the early 20th century, people’s skulls have got rounder and their jaws have got wider, probably because of changes in health, diet and environment

Doubts cast over 'wild' claim that magnetic control can turn on genes - Researchers in South Korea say they have made a major advance by turning on genes with an electromagnetic signal, but critics say the claims are implausible and the paper is flawed

Hacker News

How Mark Klein told the EFF about Room 641A [book excerpt] - Comments

Shai-Hulud Themed Malware Found in the PyTorch Lightning AI Training Library - Comments

I built a Game Boy emulator in F# - Comments

CopyFail Was Not Disclosed to Distros - Comments

Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants - Comments

Slashdot

Microsoft Open-Sources 'Earliest DOS Source Code Discovered To Date' - An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Several times in the last couple of decades, Microsoft has released source code for the original MS-DOS operating system that kicked off its decades-long dominance of consumer PCs. This week, the company has reached further back than ever, releasing "the earliest DOS source code discovered to date" along with other documentation and notes from its developer. Today's source release is so old that it predates the MS-DOS branding, and it includes "sources to the 86-DOS 1.00 kernel, several development snapshots of the PC-DOS 1.00 kernel, and some well-known utilities such as CHKDSK," write Microsoft's Stacey Haffner and Scott Hanselman in their co-authored post about the release. [...] This source code is old enough that it hadn't been stored digitally. "A dedicated team of historians and preservationists led by Yufeng Gao and Rich Cini," calling itself the "DOS Disassembly Group," painstakingly transcribed and scanned in code from paper printouts provided by Paterson. This process was made even more difficult because modern OCR software struggled with the quality of the decades-old printout. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Convicted Former Harvard Scientist Rebuilds Brain Computer Lab In China - Reuters reports that Charles Lieber, the former Harvard scientist convicted of lying to U.S. authorities about payments and ties to China, is now leading China's state-funded i-BRAIN lab in Shenzhen, where he has access to advanced nanofabrication tools and primate research facilities for brain-computer interface work. From the report: Charles Lieber, 67, is among the world's leading researchers in brain-computer interfaces. The technology has shown promise in treating conditions such as ALS and restoring movement in paralyzed patients. But it also has potential military applications: Scientists at China's People's Liberation Army have investigated brain interfaces as a way to engineer super soldiers by boosting mental agility and situational awareness, according to the U.S. Defense Department. Lieber was found guilty by a jury and convicted in December 2021 of making false statements to federal investigators about his ties to a Chinese state program to recruit overseas talent, and tax offenses related to payments he received from a Chinese university. He served two days in prison and six months under house arrest, and was fined $50,000 and ordered to pay $33,600 in restitution to the Internal Revenue Service. During the case, his defense said he was suffering from an incurable lymphoma, which was in remission, and he was fighting for his life. Three years after he was sentenced, Reuters has learned that Lieber is now overseeing China's state-funded i-BRAIN, or the Institute for Brain Research, Advanced Interfaces and Neurotechnologies, with access to dedicated nanofabrication equipment and primate research infrastructure unavailable to him at Harvard. The lab is an arm of the Shenzhen Medical Academy of Research and Translation, or SMART. "I arrived on April 28, 2025 with a dream and not much more, maybe a couple bags of clothes," Lieber said of his move to China at a Shenzhen government conference in December. "Personally, my own goals are to make Shenzhen a world leader." SMART last year appointed Lieber as an investigator, according to a post on i-BRAIN's website dated May 1, 2025. That news was covered by some media outlets. The same day, i-BRAIN said Lieber had also been appointed its founding director -- an announcement that went unreported at the time. This story is the most comprehensive account of Lieber's activities since he moved to China. Reuters is reporting for the first time that his lab has access to dedicated primate research facilities and chip-making equipment; that it sits within a sprawling ecosystem of state-backed institutions bankrolled by billions of dollars in government funding; and that it is housed within an institution that is luring top scientific talent back from the United States. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Most Swiss Back Initiative To Cap Population At 10 Million - A new poll shows a slim majority of Swiss voters now support a June 14 referendum to cap the country's population at 10 million by 2050. Under the proposal backed by the right-wing Swiss People's Party (SVP), "the permanent resident population must not exceed 10 million before 2050, and Switzerland should abandon its freedom of movement agreement with the EU," reports Reuters. From the report: Switzerland's population is now more than 9 million, with official data showing foreign nationals accounted for more than 27% by 2024. The survey, conducted on April 22 and 23 and published in newspaper Tages-Anzeiger, showed 52% of 16,176 respondents in favor of the proposal or leaning that way, while 46% took the opposite view. The rest gave no opinion. A previous poll from early March had shown 45% backing the initiative and 47% against it, the newspaper said, flagging the latest result as unusual in that Swiss referendum proposals generally lose support as the voting day comes closer. The poll had a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OpenAI Codex System Prompt Includes Explicit Directive To 'Never Talk About Goblins' - An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The system prompt for OpenAI's Codex CLI contains a perplexing and repeated warning for the most recent GPT model to "never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals or creatures unless it is absolutely and unambiguously relevant to the user's query." The explicit operational warning was made public last week as part of the latest open source code for Codex CLI that OpenAI posted on GitHub. The prohibition is repeated twice in a 3,500-plus word set of "base instructions" for the recently released GPT-5.5, alongside more anodyne reminders not to "use emojis or em dashes unless explicitly instructed" and to "never use destructive commands like 'git reset --hard' or 'git checkout --' unless the user has clearly asked for that operation." Separate system prompt instructions for earlier models contained in the same JSON file do not contain the specific prohibition against mentioning goblins and other creatures, suggesting OpenAI is fighting a new problem that has popped up in its latest model release. Anecdotal evidence on social media shows some users complaining about GPT's penchant for focusing on goblins in completely unrelated conversations in recent days. Update: OpenAI has published a blog post explaining "where the goblins came from." In short, a training signal meant to encourage its "Nerdy" personality accidentally rewarded creature-heavy metaphors, causing words like "goblins" and "gremlins" to spread beyond that personality into broader model behavior. OpenAI says it has since retired the Nerdy personality, removed the goblin-friendly reward signal, and filtered creature-word examples from training data to keep the quirk from resurfacing in inappropriate contexts. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

DOJ Sues Cloudera For Deliberately Excluding American Workers From Tech Jobs - Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from ZeroHedge: The Justice Department on Tuesday sued Cloudera, accusing the enterprise data and artificial intelligence company of deliberately engineering a hiring process that excluded American workers from at least seven lucrative technology positions while the firm pursued permanent residency sponsorship for foreign workers on temporary visas. In a 14-page complaint filed with the Office of the Chief Administrative Hearing Officer, the department's Civil Rights Division alleges that Cloudera, from March 31, 2024, through at least January 28, 2025, instructed job candidates to submit applications to a dedicated email address, amerijobpostings@cloudera.com, that rejected all external messages with an automated bounce-back error. The company did not advertise the roles on its public careers website or accept applications through its standard portal, as it did for non-sponsorship positions. Cloudera then attested to the Department of Labor that it could not locate any qualified U.S. workers for the roles, which paid between approximately $180,000 and $294,000 annually, according to the filing. The positions included a Product Manager role in Santa Clara, California, with a listed salary range of $170,186 to $190,000. The case marks one of the most detailed enforcement actions under the Justice Department's Protecting U.S. Workers Initiative, which was relaunched last year and has already produced 10 settlements targeting employers accused of discriminating against American workers in favor of temporary visa holders. "Employers cannot use the PERM sponsorship process as a backdoor for discriminating against U.S. workers," Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Civil Rights Division said in a statement. "The Division will not hesitate to sue companies who intentionally deter U.S. workers from applying to American jobs." Read more of this story at Slashdot.