Latest News
Last updated 05 Jul, 04:52 PM
BBC News
Family and Liverpool players gather for funeral of Diogo Jota and André Silva - The community in Gondomar grieves after the deaths of Liverpool star Diogo Jota and his brother, André Silva.
Reform MP loses whip after business Covid loan claims - He has made the decision amid allegations of business propriety during the pandemic.
Labour might be down, but it's not necessarily out - voters reflect on a year in power - What’s gone wrong for Labour? 2024 voters delve into it, writes Laura Kuenssberg.
Arrests after protest in support of Palestine Action, police say - It comes after supporting the group was banned under terrorism legislation.
'Too many shots in dog collars': Booze culture at crisis-hit cathedral revealed - Priests and choristers at a crisis-hit cathedral did a "seven last shots of Christ" drinking game.
The Register
Massive spike in use of .es domains for phishing abuse - ¡Cuidado! Time to double-check before entering your Microsoft creds Cybersecurity experts are reporting a 19x increase in malicious campaigns being launched from .es domains, making it the third most common, behind only .com and .ru.…
iFixit gives new Fairphone 6 top marks for repairability: 10/10 - It's not cheap or high end, but it should last you for years to come The sixth generation of the Fairphone repairable mobile was launched at the end of June. Now spunger-flingers iFixit have got their hands on it, and liked the result.…
Financial 'stretch' for UK to join Europe's Starlink rival, says minister - Possibility of joining IRIS² remote as Britain grapples with fiscal squeeze A UK minister has told Parliament that joining Europe's answer to Starlink — Elon Musk's satellite-based mobile internet service — would be a "stretch" given the nation's current financial challenges.…
Ousted US copyright chief argues Trump did not have power to remove her - Shira Perlmutter lost her job after her office published report on generative AI and fair use limits The former head of the US Copyright Office has pushed back against arguments from President Donald Trump's team that her dismissal was lawful.…
Microsoft finally bids farewell to PowerShell 2.0 - Venerable command line tool to depart Windows Users still clinging on to PowerShell 2.0 just received notice to quit as the command-line tool is officially leaving Windows.…
New Scientist - Home
Ancient mass extinction shows how Earth turned into a super-greenhouse - A study of fossils from the Permian-Triassic extinction event 252 million years ago shows that forests in many parts of the world were wiped out, disrupting the carbon cycle and ensuring that Earth remained hot for millions of years
Cyberattacks could exploit home solar panels to disrupt power grids - The growth of domestic solar installations opens the possibility of hackers targeting their smart inverter devices as a way to cause widespread power-system failures
We finally understand why quasicrystals can exist - Not quite crystals and not quite a glass, quasicrystals are an oddity whose properties are not well understood – but now we know how they can remain stable
Quantum-enhanced supercomputers are starting to do chemistry - Working in tandem, a quantum computer and a supercomputer modelled the behaviour of several molecules, paving the way for useful applications in chemistry and pharmaceutical research
Meteorite causes rethink of how and when our solar system formed - Rocky bodies called protoplanets were thought to have formed slightly earlier in the inner solar system than those beyond the asteroid belt, but now a meteorite from the outer solar system is rewriting that view
Hacker News
Local-first software: You own your data, in spite of the cloud - Comments
ApplePay vs. Alternative Payment Services - Comments
Europe's first geostationary sounder satellite is launched - Comments
Cops in [Spain] think everyone using a Google Pixel must be a drug dealer - Comments
X-Clacks-Overhead - Comments
Slashdot
Will FaceTime In IOS 26 Freeze Your Call If Someone Starts Undressing? - Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shared this report from the Apple news blog 9to5Mac: iOS 26 is a packed update for iPhone users thanks to the new Liquid Glass design and major updates for Messages, Wallet, CarPlay, and more. But another new feature was just discovered in the iOS 26 beta: FaceTime will now freeze your call's video and audio if someone starts undressing. When Apple unveiled iOS 26 last month, it mentioned a variety of new family tools... "Communication Safety expands to intervene when nudity is detected in FaceTime video calls, and to blur out nudity in Shared Albums in Photos." However, at least in the iOS 26 beta, it seems that a similar feature may be in place for all users — adults included. That's the claim of an X.com user named iDeviceHelp, who says FaceTime in iOS 26 swaps in a warning message that says "Audio and video are paused because you may be showing something sensitive," giving users a choice of ending the call or resuming it. 9to5Mac says "It's unclear whether this is an intended behavior, or just a bug in the beta that's applying the feature to adults... [E]verything happens on-device so Apple has no idea about the contents of your call." Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Two Sudo Vulnerabilities Discovered and Patched - In April researchers responsibly disclosed two security flaws found in Sudo "that could enable local attackers to escalate their privileges to root on susceptible machines," reports The Hacker News. "The vulnerabilities have been addressed in Sudo version 1.9.17p1 released late last month." Stratascale researcher Rich Mirch, who is credited with discovering and reporting the flaws, said CVE-2025-32462 has managed to slip through the cracks for over 12 years. It is rooted in the Sudo's "-h" (host) option that makes it possible to list a user's sudo privileges for a different host. The feature was enabled in September 2013. However, the identified bug made it possible to execute any command allowed by the remote host to be run on the local machine as well when running the Sudo command with the host option referencing an unrelated remote host. "This primarily affects sites that use a common sudoers file that is distributed to multiple machines," Sudo project maintainer Todd C. Miller said in an advisory. "Sites that use LDAP-based sudoers (including SSSD) are similarly impacted." CVE-2025-32463, on the other hand, leverages Sudo's "-R" (chroot) option to run arbitrary commands as root, even if they are not listed in the sudoers file. It's also a critical-severity flaw. "The default Sudo configuration is vulnerable," Mirch said. "Although the vulnerability involves the Sudo chroot feature, it does not require any Sudo rules to be defined for the user. As a result, any local unprivileged user could potentially escalate privileges to root if a vulnerable version is installed...." Miller said the chroot option will be removed completely from a future release of Sudo and that supporting a user-specified root directory is "error-prone." Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Nuclear Microreactors Advance as US Picks Two Companies for Fueled Testing - This week America's Energy Department selected two companies to perform the first nuclear microreactor tests in a new facility in Idaho, saying the tests "will fast-track the deployment of American microreactor technologies... The first fueled reactor experiment will start as early as spring 2026." The new facility is named DOME (an acronym for Demonstration of Microreactor Experiments), and it leverages existing "to safely house and test fueled reactor experiments, capable of producing up to 20 megawatts of thermal energy," according to a local newspaper. [T]wo companies were competitively selected in 2023 and are currently working through a multi-phase Energy Department authorization process to support the design, fabrication, construction, and testing of each fueled reactor experiment. Both are expected to meet certain milestones throughout the process to maintain their allotted time in DOME and to ensure efficient use of the test bed, according to the release... The department estimates each DOME reactor experiment will operate up to six months, with the DOME test bed currently under construction and on track to receive its first experiment in early 2026... The next call for applications is anticipated to be in 2026. The site Interesting Engineering calls the lab "a high-stakes proving ground to accelerate the commercialization of advanced microreactors..." Based in Etna, Pennsylvania, Westinghouse will test its eVinci Nuclear Test Reactor, a compact, transportable microreactor that uses advanced heat pipe technology for passive cooling. Designed to deliver 5 megawatts of electricity on sites as small as two acres, eVinci could support applications ranging from remote communities to mining operations and data centers. Meanwhile, Radiant (El Segundo, California) will test its Kaleidos Development Unit, a 1.2 megawatt electric high-temperature gas reactor aimed at replacing diesel generators. Designed to run for five years, Kaleidos is fueled by TRISO fuel particles that could offer reliable backup power for hospitals, military bases, and other critical infrastructure. Radiant's CEO said "In short order, we will fuel, go critical, and operate, leading to the mass production of portable reactors which will jumpstart American nuclear energy dominance." Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Near Antarctica, Saltier Seas Mean Less Ice, Study Finds - Some of the water around Antarctica has been getting saltier. And that has affected the amount of sea ice at the bottom of the planet. From a report: A study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that increases in salinity in seawater near the surface could help explain some of the decrease in Antarctic sea ice that have been observed over the past decade, reversing a previous period of growth. "The impact of Antarctic ice is massive in terms of sea-level rise, in terms of global warming, and therefore, in terms of extremes," said Alessandro Silvano, a senior scientist at the University of Southampton studying the Southern Ocean and lead author of the study. The findings mean "we are entering a new system, a new world," he said. The Times adds: "the Department of Defense announced it would be no longer be providing some of the satellite data that researchers use to monitor changes in sea ice." Read more of this story at Slashdot.
AI Coding Agents Are Already Commoditized - Software engineer Sean Goedecke argues that AI coding agents have already been commoditized because they require no special technical advantages, just better base models. He writes: All of a sudden, it's the year of AI coding agents. Claude released Claude Code, OpenAI released their Codex agent, GitHub released its own autonomous coding agent, and so on. I've done my fair share of writing about whether AI coding agents will replace developers, and in the meantime how best to use them in your work. Instead, I want to make what I think is now a pretty firm observation: AI coding agents have no secret sauce. [...] The reason everyone's doing agents now is the same reason everyone's doing reinforcement learning now -- from one day to the next, the models got good enough. Claude Sonnet 3.7 is the clear frontrunner here. It's not the smartest model (in my opinion), but it is the most agentic: it can stick with a task and make good decisions over time better than other models with more raw brainpower. But other AI labs have more agentic models now as well. There is no moat. There's also no moat to the actual agent code. It turns out that "put the model in a loop with a 'read file' and 'write file' tool" is good enough to do basically anything you want. I don't know for sure that the closed-source options operate like this, but it's an educated guess. In other words, the agent hackers in 2023 were correct, and the only reason they couldn't build Claude Code then was that they were too early to get to use the really good models. Read more of this story at Slashdot.