Latest News
Last updated 22 Apr, 10:20 PM
BBC News
US and Iran in blockade standoff as Pakistan pushes for talks - The mood in the Strait of Hormuz remains combustible despite Trump's ceasefire extension.
China weathered Trump's tariffs - but the Iran war is taking a toll - The Middle East conflict is putting pressure on factory orders, costs and jobs in China's export-driven economy.
UK and France strike new £662m small boats deal - The three-year agreement will see at least 50 riot-trained police officers drafted in to tackle violence and “hostile crowds”.
PM's ex-chief of staff to give evidence on Mandelson vetting - The prime minister's former chief of staff will face questions about his role in the appointment of Lord Mandelson.
Analysis: Unhappy Labour MPs aren't ready to oust Starmer yet - Labour MPs say that while the prime minister is unpopular, a contest is unlikely as there isn't a candidate ready to replace him.
The Register
Anthropic's super-scary bug hunting model Mythos is shaping up to be a nothingburger - Hackpocalypse deferred Anthropic's Mythos model is purportedly so good at finding vulnerabilities that the Claude-maker is afraid to make it available to the general public for fear that criminals will take advantage. But early analysis shows that Mythos may not be as dangerous as some would have you believe.…
SK Hynix’s aspirations for ’Merica-made HBM inch closer to reality - New site set to begin manufacturing and testing HBM memory just in time for Nvidia's Rubin-Ultra GPUs in 2028 SK Hynix has reportedly broken ground on a new advanced memory packaging facility in West Lafayette, Indiana, that should boost the supply of US-made high-bandwidth memory (HBM), a key component in high-end AI accelerators from the likes of Nvidia and AMD.…
OpenAI now lets you screenshot your privacy in the foot - Make your model smarter through self-surveillance Those who cannot remember Microsoft Recall are condemned to repeat it. …
GitHub opts all CLI users into telemetry collection whether they want it or not - Opt-out instructions included if you're not keen on GitHub watching you in the name of product improvement Users of GitHub's command-line interface (CLI) who value privacy, beware. The Microsoft-owned code-hosting platform has quietly begun collecting pseudonymous client-side telemetry from CLI users and enabled it by default.…
Linux may get a hall pass from one state age-check bill, but Congress plays hall monitor - Colorado amendments could exempt open source OSes, code repos, and containers The prospect of OS-level age checks applying to open source systems is a serious concern for FOSS advocates. Campaigners appear to have secured proposed exemptions for open source operating systems, code repositories, and containers in one US state, but stricter federal legislation has already been introduced in Congress.…
New Scientist - Home
98 per cent of meat and dairy sustainability pledges are greenwashing - The food industry has made big promises to reduce emissions and become more sustainable, but a review concludes that many of the pledges are not backed up by evidence
We need more radioactive drugs. Can we make them from nuclear waste? - The rise of a new generation of radiotherapies means we will soon need much greater quantities of radioactive atoms. That's why companies are scrambling to refine them from all manner of radioactive waste
Table tennis-playing robot on track to becoming world champion - A robot built by Sony AI is rapidly learning how to beat the world's very best table tennis players
Exercise advice for long covid may be doing more harm than good - Exercise has been touted as a tool for managing and treating long covid, but much of the evidence has neglected one of its most debilitating symptoms: post-exertional malaise
Fermat's Last Theorem: still a must-read about a 350-year maths secret - Simon Singh's exploration of mathematical proof – in particular Pierre de Fermat's last theorem – remains an absolute treasure, almost three decades after it was first published
Hacker News
Alberta startup sells no-tech tractors for half price - Comments
Apple fixes bug that cops used to extract deleted chat messages from iPhones - Comments
We found a stable Firefox identifier linking all your private Tor identities - Comments
Over-editing refers to a model modifying code beyond what is necessary - Comments
5x5 Pixel font for tiny screens - Comments
Slashdot
Ping-Pong Robot Makes History By Beating Top-Level Human Players - Sony AI's autonomous table-tennis robot Ace has become the first robot to compete against top-level human players. Reuters reports: Ace, created by the Japanese company Sony's AI research division, is the first robot to attain expert-level performance in a competitive physical sport, one that requires rapid decisions and precision execution, the project's leader said. Ace did so by employing high-speed perception, AI-based control and a state-of-the-art robotic system. There have been various ping-pong-playing robots since 1983, but until now they were unable to rival highly skilled human competitors. Ace changed that with its performances against human elite-level and professional players in matches following the rules of the International Table Tennis Federation, the sport's governing body, and officiated by licensed umpires. The project's goal was not only to compete at table tennis but to develop insights into how robots can perceive, plan and act with human-like speed and precision in dynamic environments. In matches detailed in the study, Ace in April 2025 won three out of five versus elite players and lost two matches against professional players, the top skill level in the sport. Sony AI said that since then Ace beat professional players in December 2025 and last month. "The success of Ace, with its perception system and learning-based control algorithm, suggests that similar techniques could be applied to other areas requiring fast, real-time control and human interaction -- such as manufacturing and service robotics, as well as applications across sports, entertainment and safety-critical physical domains," said Peter Durr, director of Sony AI Zurich and leader for Sony AI's project Ace. The findings have been published in the journal Nature. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Anthropic's Mythos Model Is Being Accessed by Unauthorized Users - Bloomberg reports that a small group of unauthorized users gained access to Anthropic's restricted Mythos model through a mix of contractor-linked access and online sleuthing. Anthropic says it is investigating and has no evidence the access extended beyond a third-party vendor environment or affected its own systems. From the report: The users relied on a mix of tactics to get into Mythos. These included using access the person had as a worker at a third-party contractor for Anthropic and trying commonly used internet sleuthing tools often employed by cybersecurity researchers, the person said. The users are part of a private Discord channel that focuses on hunting for information about unreleased models, including by using bots to scour for details that Anthropic and others have posted on unsecured websites such as GitHub. [...] To access Mythos, the group of users made an educated guess about the model's online location based on knowledge about the format Anthropic has used for other models, the person said, adding that such details were revealed in a recent data breach from Mercor, an AI training startup that works with a number of top developers. Crucially, the person also has permission to access Anthropic models and software related to evaluating the technology for the startup. They gained this access from a company for which they have performed contract work evaluating Anthropic's AI models. Bloomberg is not naming the company for security reasons. The group is interested in playing around with new models, not wreaking havoc with them, the person said. The group has not run cybersecurity-related prompts on the Mythos model, the person said, preferring instead to try tasks like building simple websites in an attempt to avoid detection by Anthropic. The person said the group also has access to a slew of other unreleased Anthropic AI models. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The 'Missing-Scientist' Story Is Unbelievably Dumb - Longtime Slashdot reader mmarlett writes: The Atlantic has a long article on the story of missing scientists recently featured here on Slashdot. In short, it is an incoherent conspiracy theory that spreads wide and far, not paying any attention to boundaries of time, space, or area of expertise. "Which is all to say that another piece of flagrant nonsense has ascended to the highest levels of U.S. politics and media," writes the Atlantic's Daniel Engber. "To call it a conspiracy theory would be far too kind, because no comprehensive theory has been floated to explain the pattern of events. But then, even the phrase pattern of events is imprecise, because there is no pattern here at all. Given all the people who could have been roped into this narrative but weren't, any hope of finding meaning falls away. Barring any dramatic new disclosures, the mystery of the missing scientists has the dubious honor of being a sham in every way at once." Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Gates Foundation To Cut 20% of Staff, Review Epstein Ties - An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The Gates Foundation opened an external review earlier this year into its engagement with the late financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, the philanthropic group said on Tuesday. The foundation has been mired in controversy due to Chairman Bill Gates' association with Epstein. A release of emails in January by the U.S. Justice Department also showed communication between Epstein and the Gates Foundation's staff. "Early this year, Gates Foundation CEO Mark Suzman commissioned an external review to assess past foundation engagement with Epstein, and our current policies for vetting and developing new philanthropic partnerships," the foundation said in a statement. "That review is underway, and we expect the board and management will receive an update this summer," it added. The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the news earlier on Tuesday, said Suzman told staff in a memo, "this is a challenging time for our organization in many ways, but it also highlights the critical importance of taking the tough actions now." The WSJ also reports that the Gates Foundation will eliminate up to 500 jobs, or about 20% of its staff, by 2030. It said the foundation has a 2026 budget of about $9 billion, but plans to cap operating expenses at $1.25 billion. Further reading: The Bill Gates-Epstein Bombshell - and What Most People Get Wrong Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Google Unveils Two New AI Chips For the 'Agentic Era' - Google announced two new tensor processing units (TPUs) for the "agentic era," with separate processors dedicated to training and inference. "With the rise of AI agents, we determined the community would benefit from chips individually specialized to the needs of training and serving," Amin Vahdat, a Google senior vice president and chief technologist for AI and infrastructure, said in a blog post. Both chips will become available later this year. CNBC reports: After years of producing chips that can both train artificial intelligence models and handle inference work, Google is separating those tasks into distinct processors, its latest effort to take on Nvidia in AI hardware. [...] None of the tech giants are displacing Nvidia, and Google isn't even comparing the performance of its new chips with those from the AI chip leader. Google did say the training chip enables 2.8 times the performance of the seventh-generation Ironwood TPU, announced in November, for the same price, while performance is 80% better for the inference processor. Nvidia said its upcoming Groq 3 LPU hardware will draw on large quantities of static random-access memory, or SRAM, which is used by Cerebras, an AI chipmaker that filed to go public earlier this month. Google's new inference chip, dubbed TPU 8i, also relies on SRAM. Each chip contains 384 megabytes of SRAM, triple the amount in Ironwood. The architecture is designed "to deliver the massive throughput and low latency needed to concurrently run millions of agents cost-effectively," Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google parent Alphabet, wrote in a blog post. Read more of this story at Slashdot.