Latest News
Last updated 12 Feb, 05:03 PM
BBC News
Minnesota immigration enforcement surge is ending, Trump border tsar says - Two US citizens were killed in Minneapolis during the crackdown dubbed "Operation Metro Surge".
'Vast majority' of parents should be involved if children question their gender, schools told - School leaders welcome the "greater clarity" on how to handle the polarising issue for parents and pupils.
Trial date set for Trump's legal case against BBC - Donald Trump's multi-billion dollar lawsuit against the BBC is set to go to trial in February 2027.
Ratcliffe sorry language 'offended some' after immigration comments - The Manchester United co-owner previously said the UK had been "colonised" by immigrants.
Kim Jong Un chooses teen daughter as heir, says Seoul - South Korea's spy agency says Ki Ju Ae's prominent public presence indicates she is the chosen heir.
The Register
Elon Musk paints exodus of xAI co-founders as 'evolution' - 12-strong founding team down to 6 as boss looks Moonwards Elon Musk has framed the recent exodus of talent from his artificial intelligence startup, xAI, as a necessary growing pain, saying the company's evolution "required parting ways with some people."…
'Another dark day': Users slam Microsoft over Polyglot Notebooks deprecation - Visual Studio Code extension faces March shutdown with no transition guidance Microsoft has abruptly announced the deprecation of Polyglot Notebooks with less than two months' notice, throwing the future of the .NET Interactive project into doubt.…
Apple patches decade-old iOS zero-day, possibly exploited by commercial spyware - Flaw abused 'in an extremely sophisticated attack against specific targeted individuals' Apple patched a zero-day vulnerability affecting every iOS version since 1.0, used in what the company calls an "extremely sophisticated attack" against targeted individuals.…
Memory price explosion triggers PC buying spree - DRAM doubles, NAND jumps 70% as corporate buyers race the clock Exploding memory prices are pushing corporate buyers to fast-track PC purchases before costs climb further.…
NASA pauses most Swift science ops to buy time for reboost mission - Anticipated summer launch is cutting it fine NASA has ended most science operations on its Swift observatory to keep the spacecraft in orbit a little longer.…
New Scientist - Home
Gene editing that spreads within the body could cure more diseases - The idea of self-amplifying gene editing is to get cells to pass on packages of CRISPR machinery to their neighbours, boosting the effect
Why I'm still an environmental optimist – despite it all - It's hard not to despair about the state of the world today, but here are five reasons to be a little bit hopeful, says Fred Pearce
The surprising origins of Britain's Bronze Age immigrants revealed - About 4600 years ago, the population of Britain was replaced by a people who brought Bell Beaker pottery with them. Now, ancient DNA has uncovered the murky story of where these people came from
First ever inhalable gene therapy for cancer gets fast-tracked by FDA - A gene therapy that patients breathe in has been found to shrink lung tumours by inserting immune-boosting genes into surrounding cells
This state’s power prices are plummeting as it nears 100% renewables - South Australia is proving to the world that relying largely on wind and solar energy with battery back-up is incredibly cheap, with electricity prices tumbling by 30 per cent in a year and sometimes going negative
Hacker News
An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me - Comments
Email is tough: Major European Payment Processor's Emails rejected by GWorkspace - Comments
Improving 15 LLMs at Coding in One Afternoon. Only the Harness Changed - Comments
A brief history of barbed wire fence telephone networks (2024) - Comments
Culture Is the Mass-Synchronization of Framings - Comments
Slashdot
Amazon Engineers Want Claude Code, but the Company Keeps Pushing Its Own Tool - Amazon engineers have been pushing back against internal policies that steer them toward Kiro, the company's in-house AI coding assistant, and away from Anthropic's Claude Code for production work, according to a Business Insider report based on internal messages. About 1,500 employees endorsed the formal adoption of Claude Code in one internal forum thread, and some pointed out the awkwardness of being asked to sell the tool through AWS's Bedrock platform while not being permitted to use it themselves. Kiro runs on Anthropic's Claude models but uses Amazon's own tooling, and the company says roughly 70% of its software engineers used it at least once in January. Amazon says there is no explicit ban on Claude Code but applies stricter requirements for production use. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The "Are You Sure?" Problem: Why Your AI Keeps Changing Its Mind - The large language models that millions of people rely on for advice -- ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini -- will change their answers nearly 60% of the time when a user simply pushes back by asking "are you sure?," according to a study by Fanous et al. that tested GPT-4o, Claude Sonnet, and Gemini 1.5 Pro across math and medical domains. The behavior, known in the research community as sycophancy, stems from how these models are trained: reinforcement learning from human feedback, or RLHF, rewards responses that human evaluators prefer, and humans consistently rate agreeable answers higher than accurate ones. Anthropic published foundational research on this dynamic in 2023. The problem reached a visible breaking point in April 2025 when OpenAI had to roll back a GPT-4o update after users reported the model had become so excessively flattering it was unusable. Research on multi-turn conversations has found that extended interactions amplify sycophantic behavior further -- the longer a user talks to a model, the more it mirrors their perspective. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Anthropic To Cover Costs of Electricity Price Increases From Its Data Centers - AI startup Anthropic says it will ensure consumer electricity costs remain steady as it expands its data center footprint. From a report: Anthropic said it would work with utility companies to "estimate and cover" consumer electricity price increases in places where it is not able to sufficiently generate new power and pay for 100% of the infrastructure upgrades required to connect its data centers to the electrical grid. In a statement to NBC News, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said: "building AI responsibly can't stop at the technology -- it has to extend to the infrastructure behind it. We've been clear that the U.S. needs to build AI infrastructure at scale to stay competitive, but the costs of powering our models should fall on Anthropic, not everyday Americans. We look forward to working with communities, local governments, and the Administration to get this right." Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Meta Auditor EY Raised Red Flag on Data-Center Accounting - Meta Platforms' latest annual report contained an unusual, cautionary note for investors. From a report: The tech giant's auditor, Ernst & Young, raised a red flag over the financial engineering Meta used to keep a $27 billion data-center project off its balance sheet. While EY ultimately blessed Meta's accounting treatment, the firm flagged it as a "critical audit matter." This means it was one of the hardest, riskiest judgments the auditor had to make. Such a warning label is rare for a specific, high-profile transaction at a major audit client. Meta moved the data-center project, called Hyperion, off its books in October into a new joint venture with Blue Owl Capital. Meta owns 20% of the venture; funds managed by Blue Owl own the other 80%. A holding company called Beignet Investor, which owns the Blue Owl portion, sold a then-record $27.3 billion of bonds to investors. The joint venture is known in accounting parlance as a variable interest entity, or VIE. Meta said it isn't the "primary beneficiary" of this entity and so didn't have to put the venture's assets and liabilities on its own balance sheet. Meta's assertion that it lacks power over the venture is debatable and has drawn scrutiny from investors and lawmakers. Meta is a hyperscaler and knows how to run data centers for artificial intelligence, while Blue Owl is a financier. Whether the venture succeeds economically will come down to Meta's decisions and know-how. In its report, EY said auditing Meta's decision "was especially challenging due to the significant judgment required in determining the activities that most significantly affect the VIE's economic performance." Read more of this story at Slashdot.
US Hacking Tool Boss Stole and Sold Exploits To Russian Broker That Could Target Millions of Devices, DOJ Says - Federal prosecutors have revealed that Peter Williams, the former general manager of U.S. defense contractor L3Harris's hacking tools division Trenchant, sold eight stolen software exploits to a Russian broker whose customers -- including the Russian government -- could have used them to access "millions of computers and devices around the world." Williams, a 39-year-old Australian national, pleaded guilty in October and admitted to earning more than $1.3 million in cryptocurrency from the sales between 2022 and 2025. In a sentencing memorandum filed Tuesday ahead of his anticipated February 24 sentencing in a Washington, D.C., federal court, the Justice Department asked the judge for nine years in prison, $35 million in restitution, and a maximum fine of $250,000. Prosecutors described the unnamed Russian buyer -- believed to be Operation Zero, which publicly claims to sell only to the Russian government -- as "one of the world's most nefarious exploit brokers." Williams chose it because, by his own admission, "he knew they paid the most." He also oversaw the wrongful firing of a subordinate who was blamed for the theft. Read more of this story at Slashdot.