Latest News

Last updated 27 Apr, 12:18 PM

BBC News

First images released of Pope Francis' tomb adorned with single rose - The late pontiff was laid to rest in a private ceremony on Saturday following a public funeral at the Vatican on Saturday.

UK to see warmest April weather in seven years - BBC Weather's Matt Taylor has the details on how long April's "mini heatwave" will last.

Greens call for single-sex guidance to be withdrawn - Carla Denyer says the equalities watchdog's guidance puts trans people at risk of discrimination.

My ginger Mr Darcy will break barriers, jokes Lowden - The Slow Horses actor recently signed up for a Netflix adaptation of Jane Austen's classic novel.

Counter-terror police investigate attack on two women after crossbow found at scene - A man, 38, who suffered a "self-inflicted injury" is arrested and a crossbow and firearm recovered.

The Register

Trump’s 145% tariffs could KO tabletop game makers, other small biz, lawsuit claims - One eight-person publisher says it'll be forced to pay $1.5M WORLD WAR FEE The Trump administration's tariffs are famously raising the prices of high-ticket products with lots of chips, like iPhones and cars, but they're also hurting small businesses like game makers. In this case, we're not talking video games, but the old-fashioned kind you play at your kitchen table.…

Build your own antisocial writing rig with DOS and a $2 USB key - Reg hack pines for simpler times, then tries to recapture them Sometimes, the size and complexity of modern OSes – even the FOSS ones – is enough to make us miss the days when an entire bootable OS could fit in three files, when configuring a PC for production meant editing two plain-text files, which contained maybe a dozen lines each. DOS couldn't do very much, but the little it did was enough. From the early 1980s for a decade or two, much of the world ran on DOS. Then Windows 3 came along, which is arguably the point where the rot set in.…

UK bans game controller exports to Russia in bid to ground drone attacks - Moscow likely to respawn elsewhere The British government is banning the export of video game controllers to Russia, claiming these can be repurposed for piloting drones on the frontline in Ukraine.…

AI-powered 20 foot robots coming for construction workers' jobs - Er, are we sure we want to outsource the welding? Rise of the machines Construction workers could soon find themselves laboring alongside 20-foot (6 meter) tall AI-powered autonomous robots capable of welding, carpentry, and 3D printing buildings. What could possibly go wrong?…

Signalgate lessons learned: If creating a culture of security is the goal, America is screwed - Infosec is a team sport … unless you're in the White House Opinion Just when it seems they couldn't be that careless, US officials tasked with defending the nation go and do something else that puts American critical infrastructure, national security, and troops' lives in danger.…

New Scientist - Home

Should you water your orchid with ice cubes? - There's a fierce debate raging in the horticulture world over whether adding ice cubes to your orchid is beneficial or damaging for this tropical plant. James Wong investigates

Can a strange state of matter explain what life is – and how it began? - Laboratory experiments have coaxed simple molecules into states that naturally become more complex, hinting at the origins of evolution itself

Chronicling nature activism in a coastal corner of India - Intertidal is Yuvan Aves's extraordinary, personal exploration of the rich wildlife offsetting the urbanity of Chennai, India. While its focus is a small strip of Indian coast, its issues are global

How astonishing observatories could do big physics from the moon - As humanity prepares to return to the moon, scientists also have ideas for huge lunar experiments that could revolutionise astrophysics

US government defunds research on misinformation - The US National Science Foundation cancelled funding for research on misinformation, disinformation and AI-generated deepfakes, even as misleading information runs rampant on social media

Hacker News

CSS Zen Garden (2003–) - Comments

Show HN: Remote-Controlled IKEA Deathstar Lamp - Comments

Open-source interactive C tutorial in the browser - Comments

Watching o3 guess a photo's location is surreal, dystopian and entertaining - Comments

Mesmerizing Interlocking Geometric Patterns Produced with Japanese Woodworking - Comments

Slashdot

Yoda Bloopers Released - and George Lucas Reveals Why Yoda Talks Backwards - 80-year-old George Lucas appeared this week at a 45th anniversary screening of The Empire Strikes Back, reports CNN — and finally gave a good explanation for why Yoda speaks the way he does. "He explained that it came about in order to ensure that the little alien's usually profound messages really landed with audiences." "Because if you speak regular English, people won't listen that much," Lucas said at the 2025 TCM Classic Film Festival, per Variety . "But if he had an accent, or it's really hard to understand what he's saying, they focus on what he's saying." Yoda was "basically the philosopher of the movie," the filmmaker added. "I had to figure out a way to get people to actually listen — especially 12-year-olds." Also this week, the verified Instagram accounts for Disney+, Star Wars and LucasFilm — Lucas' film and television production company — posted clips of Yoda doing bloopers on the set of "Star Wars" films, with [Frank] Oz continuing to do the voice and manipulate the heavy Yoda puppet even on takes that were unusable. Suffice it to say: One for the ages, Yoda is. Lucas also remembered how he'd "mounted a guerilla campaign to generate excitement" for the first Star Wars movie, reports Variety. ("I got the kids walking around Disneyland and the Comic Cons and all that kind of stuff... that's why Fox was so shocked when the first day the lines were all around the block.") And Variety says Lucas described a condition in his contract for Star Wars "that would again be life-changing, both for him and the entertainment industry as a whole." "I said, 'besides that, I'd like licensing.' They went, 'What's licensing?'" Unimpressed by the film, and colored by the history of movie merchandising to that point, the studio capitulated to his demands. "They talked to themselves, and they went, 'He's never going to be able to do that. It takes them a billion dollars and a year to make a toy or make anything. There's no money in that at all.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Linus Torvalds Expresses His Hatred For Case-Insensitive File-Systems - Some patches for Linux 6.15-rc4 (updating the kernel driver for the Bcachefs file system) triggered some "straight-to-the-point wisdom" from Linus Torvalds about case-insensitive filesystems, reports Phoronix. Bcachefs developer Kent Overstreet started the conversation, explaining how some buggy patches for their case-insensitive file and folder support were upstreamed into the Bcachefs kernel driver nearly two years ago: When I was discussing with the developer who did the implementation, I noted that fstests should already have tests. However, it seems I neglected to tell him to make sure the tests actually run... It is _not_ enough to simply rely on the automated tests. You have to have eyes on what your code is doing. Overstreet added "There's a story behind the case insensitive directory fixes, and lessons to be learned." To which Torvalds replied.... "No." "The only lesson to be learned is that filesystem people never learn." Torvalds: Case-insensitive names are horribly wrong, and you shouldn't have done them at all. The problem wasn't the lack of testing, the problem was implementing it in the first place. The problem is then compounded by "trying to do it right", and in the process doing it horrible wrong indeed, because "right" doesn't exist, but trying to will make random bytes have very magical meaning. And btw, the tests are all completely broken anyway. Last I saw, they didn't actually test for all the really interesting cases — the ones that cause security issues in user land. Security issues like "user space checked that the filename didn't match some security-sensitive pattern". And then the shit-for-brains filesystem ends up matching that pattern *anyway*, because the people who do case insensitivity *INVARIABLY* do things like ignore non-printing characters, so now "case insensitive" also means "insensitive to other things too".... Dammit. Case sensitivity is a BUG. The fact that filesystem people *still* think it's a feature, I cannot understand. It's like they revere the old FAT filesystem _so_ much that they have to recreate it — badly. And this led to a very lively back-and-forth discussion. Slashdot's summary of the highlights: Read more of this story at Slashdot.

4chan Returns, Details Breach, Blames Funding Issues, Ends Shockwave Board - "4chan, down for more than a week after hackers got in through an insecure script that handled PDFs, is back online," notes BoingBoing. (They add that Thursday saw 4chan's first blog postin years — just the words "Testing testing 123 123...") But 4chan posted a much longer explanation on Friday," confirming their servers were compromised by a malicious PDF upload from "a hacker using a UK IP address," granting access to their databases and administrative dashboard. The attacker "spent several hours exfiltrating database tables and much of 4chan's source code. When they had finished downloading what they wanted, they began to vandalize 4chan at which point moderators became aware and 4chan's servers were halted, preventing further access." While not all of our servers were breached, the most important one was, and it was due to simply not updating old operating systems and code in a timely fashion. Ultimately this problem was caused by having insufficient skilled man-hours available to update our code and infrastructure, and being starved of money for years by advertisers, payment providers, and service providers who had succumbed to external pressure campaigns. We had begun a process of speccing new servers in late 2023. As many have suspected, until that time 4chan had been running on a set of servers purchased second-hand by moot a few weeks before his final Q&A [in 2015], as prior to then we simply were not in a financial position to consider such a large purchase. Advertisers and payment providers willing to work with 4chan are rare, and are quickly pressured by activists into cancelling their services. Putting together the money for new equipment took nearly a decade... The free time that 4chan's development team had available to dedicate to 4chan was insufficient to update our software and infrastructure fast enough, and our luck ran out. However, we have not been idle during our nearly two weeks of downtime. The server that was breached has been replaced, with the operating system and code updated to the latest versions. PDF uploads have been temporarily disabled on those boards that supported them, but they will be back in the near future. One slow but much beloved board, /f/ — Flash, will not be returning however, as there is no realistic way to prevent similar exploits using .swf files. We are bringing on additional volunteer developers to help keep up with the workload, and our team of volunteer janitors & moderators remains united despite the grievous violations some have suffered to their personal privacy. 4chan is back. No other website can replace it, or this community. No matter how hard it is, we are not giving up. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

iPad Jammed in Seat Forces Emergency Landing of Airplane Carrying 400 Passengers - An anonymous reader shared this report from Business Insider: A Lufthansa flight carrying 461 passengers had to divert after someone's tablet became "jammed" in a business-class seat. The Airbus A380 took off from Los Angeles on Wednesday, bound for Munich, and had been flying for around three hours when the pilots diverted to Boston Logan International Airport. In a statement to Business Insider, an airline spokesperson said the tablet had become "jammed in a Business Class seat" and had "already shown visible signs of deformation due to the seat's movements" when the flight diverted. [The aviation site] Simply Flying, which first reported the news, said the device was an iPad. The decision to divert was taken "to eliminate any potential risk, particularly with regard to possible overheating," the spokesperson added, saying that it was the joint decision of the crew and air traffic control. Lithium batteries pose a safety risk if damaged, punctured, or crushed... In a confined space like an aircraft cabin, a lithium battery fire poses a serious hazard to the passengers onboard. Last year, a Breeze Airways flight from Los Angeles to Pittsburgh had to make an emergency landing in Albuquerque after a passenger's laptop caught fire. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Can Solar Wind Make Water on the Moon? A NASA Experiment Shows Maybe - "Future moon astronauts may find water more accessible than previously thought," writes Space.com, citing a new NASA-led experiment: Because the moon lacks a magnetic field like Earth's, the barren lunar surface is constantly bombarded by energetic particles from the sun... Li Hsia Yeo, a planetary scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, led a lab experiment observing the effects of simulated solar wind on two samples of loose regolith brought to Earth by the Apollo 17 mission... To mimic conditions on the moon, the researchers built a custom apparatus that included a vacuum chamber, where the samples were placed, and a tiny particle accelerator, which the scientists used to bombard the samples with hydrogen ions for several days. "The exciting thing here is that with only lunar soil and a basic ingredient from the sun — which is always spitting out hydrogen — there's a possibility of creating water," Yeo said in a statement. "That's incredible to think about." Supporting this idea, observations from previous moon missions have revealed an abundance of hydrogen gas in the moon's tenuous atmosphere. Scientists suspect that solar-wind-driven heating facilitates the combination of hydrogen atoms on the surface into hydrogen gas, which then escapes into space. This process also has a surprising upside, the new study suggests. Leftover oxygen atoms are free to bond with new hydrogen atoms formed by repeated bombardment of the solar wind, prepping the moon for more water formation on a renewable basis. The findings could help assess how sustainable water on the moon is, as the sought-after resource is crucial for both life support and as propellant for rockets. The team's study was published in March in the journal JGR Planets . NASA created a fascinating animation showing how water is released from the Moon during meteor showers. (In 2016 scientists discovered that when speck of comet debris vaporize on impact, they create shock waves in the lunar soil which can sometimes breach the dry upper layer, releasing water molecules from the hydrated layer below...) Read more of this story at Slashdot.