Latest News
Last updated 22 May, 02:47 AM
BBC News
Trump ambushes S African leader with claim of Afrikaners being 'persecuted' - Cyril Ramaphosa rebuts discredited claims of a "white genocide" in South Africa, as US president confronts him in Oval Office.
Ramaphosa keeps cool during Trump's choreographed onslaught - The BBC's Gary O'Donoghue analyses how the South African president reacted in an extraordinary Oval Office meeting.
UK to sign Chagos deal with Mauritius - The US and UK will maintain a key military base on the island for 99 years, under the multi-billion pound deal.
Women with dense breasts should have extra NHS cancer scans, researchers say - Additional scans better tailored to spotting cancer in dense breasts could treble detection rates.
UK sea temperatures soar after exceptionally warm Spring - Sea temperatures in some areas off the UK and Ireland are 4C above average.
The Register
Google's AI vision clouded by business model hallucinations - The agentic era may not be all that it's cracked up to be google i/o At Google I/O this week, the Chocolate Factory argued for its AI supremacy, making the case with benchmark-topping machine learning models, developer tools, and a few promising products.…
Wyden warns telcos still leave Senate in the dark after Trump DOJ snooping scandal - AT&T, Verizon, T-Mo failed to alert lawmakers about surveillance, senator says AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile US failed to set up systems to notify lawmakers when government snoops came calling for their phone records - a contractual obligation that went ignored until recently, according to US Senator Ron Wyden.…
US teen to plead guilty to extortion attack against PowerSchool - The 19-year-old and a partner first tried to extort an unnamed telco, but failed A 19-year-old student has agreed to plead guilty to hacking into the systems of two companies as part of an extortion scheme, and The Register has learned that one of the targets was PowerSchool.…
Microsoft-backed AI out-forecasts hurricane experts without crunching the physics - LLM trained on decades of weather data claimed to be faster, and cheaper Scientists have developed a machine learning model that can outperform official agencies at predicting tropical cyclone tracks, and do it faster and cheaper than traditional physics-based systems.…
Sergey Brin promises next generation of Glassholes will be much less conspicuous - Chocolate Factory comes for Meta's Ray-Bans with Warby Parker pact Google I/O Google and eyeglass maker Warby Parker have partnered to create a more stylish successor to Google Glass, which cofounder Sergey Brin quipped will actually be polished before launch this time.…
New Scientist - Home
Extra cancer screening could help pick up early cases in dense breasts - Dense breast tissue can make tumours hard to spot on mammogram scans, but adding another step to this screening programme could help identify such cases
Why taping your mouth shut at night probably isn't a good idea - Social media is awash with videos claiming that taping your mouth closed will improve your sleep – but the evidence doesn't stack up
Why the climate crown is ready for China to take – if it wants to - With the US in retreat from climate negotiations, China's Xi Jinping could become the next green global leader
Vagus nerve stimulation shows promise for spinal cord injury recovery - People with incomplete cervical spinal cord injuries showed improvements to their hand and arm movements after receiving a targeted form of vagus nerve stimulation
The first teeth were sensory organs on the skin of ancient fish - Teeth are good for chewing and biting, but they are also sensitive – and that may have been their original function hundreds of millions of years ago
Hacker News
Gemini Diffusion - Comments
Show HN: Display any CSV file as a searchable, filterable, pretty HTML table - Comments
For algorithms, a little memory outweighs a lot of time - Comments
ITXPlus: A ITX Sized Macintosh Plus Logicboard Reproduction - Comments
Gemini figured out my nephew’s name - Comments
Slashdot
Phone Companies Failed To Warn Senators About Surveillance, Wyden Says - Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) revealed in a new letter to Senate colleagues Wednesday that AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile failed to create systems for notifying senators about government surveillance on Senate-issued devices -- despite a requirement to do so. From a report: Phone service providers are contractually obligated to inform senators when a law enforcement agency requests their records, thanks to protections enacted in 2020. But in an investigation, Wyden's staff found that none of the three major carriers had created a system to send those notifications. "My staff discovered that, alarmingly, these crucial notifications were not happening, likely in violation of the carriers' contracts with the [Senate Sergeant at Arms], leaving the Senate vulnerable to surveillance," Wyden said in the letter, obtained first by POLITICO, dated May 21. Wyden said that the companies all started providing notification after his office's investigation. But one carrier told Wyden's office it had previously turned over Senate data to law enforcement without notifying lawmakers, according to the letter. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
SEC Sues Crypto Startup Unicoin and Its Executives For Fraud - The SEC on Wednesday said it has charged cryptocurrency startup Unicoin and three of its top executives for false and misleading statements that raised more than $100 million from thousands of investors. "We allege that Unicoin and its executives exploited thousands of investors with fictitious promises that its tokens, when issued, would be backed by real-world assets including an international portfolio of valuable real estate holdings," said Mark Cave, Associate Director in the SEC's Division of Enforcement. "But as we allege, the real estate assets were worth a mere fraction of what the company claimed, and the majority of the company's sales of rights certificates were illusory. Unicoin's most senior executives are alleged to have perpetuated the fraud, and today's action seeks accountability for their conduct." From the release: The SEC alleges that Unicoin broadly marketed rights certificates to the public through extensive promotional efforts, including advertisements in major airports, on thousands of New York City taxis, and on television and social media. Among other things, Unicoin and its executives are alleged to have convinced more than 5,000 investors to purchase rights certificates through false and misleading statements that portrayed them as investments in safe, stable, and profitable "next generation" crypto assets, including claims that: - Unicoin tokens underlying the rights certificates were "asset-backed" by billions of dollars of real estate and equity interests in pre-IPO companies, when Unicoin's assets were never worth more than a small fraction of that amount; - the company had sold more than $3 billion in rights certificates, when it raised no more than $110 million; and - the rights certificates and Unicoin tokens were "SEC-registered" or "U.S. registered" when they were not. According to the SEC's complaint, Unicoin and Konanykhin also violated the federal securities laws by engaging in unregistered offers and sales of rights certificates. Konanykhin offered and sold over 37.9 million of his rights certificates to offer better pricing and target investors the company had prohibited from participating in the offering to avoid jeopardizing its exemption to registration requirements, as alleged. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Quebec To Impose French-Language Quotas On Streaming Giants - Quebec Culture Minister Mathieu Lacombe has introduced Bill 109, which would require streaming platforms like Netflix and Spotify to feature and prioritize French-language content. CBC.ca reports: Bill 109 has been in the works for over a year. It marks the first time that Quebec would set a "visibility quota" for French-language content on major streaming platforms such as Netflix, Disney and Spotify. [...] The legislation, titled An Act to affirm the cultural sovereignty of Quebec and to enact the Act respecting the discoverability of French-language cultural content in the digital environment, would apply to every digital platform that offers a service for watching videos or listening to music and audiobooks online. Those include Canadian platforms such as Illico, Crave and Tou.tv. It would amend the Quebec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms to enshrine "the right to discoverability of and access to original French-language cultural content." If the bill is adopted, streaming platforms and television manufacturers would be forced to present interfaces for screening online videos in French by default. Those interfaces would need to provide access to platforms that offer original French-language cultural content based on the government's pending criteria. Financial penalties would be imposed on companies that don't follow the rules. If the business models of some companies prevent them from keeping to the letter of the proposed law, companies would be allowed to enter into an agreement with the Quebec government to set out "substitute measures" to fulfil Bill 109 obligations differently. "We don't want to exempt them. We're telling them, 'let's negotiate substitute measures,'" Lacombe told reporters. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The Information: Microsoft Engineers Forced To Dig Their Own AI Graves - Longtime Slashdot reader theodp writes: In what reads a bit like a Sopranos plot, The Information suggests some of those in the recent batch of terminated Microsoft engineers may have in effect been forced to dig their own AI graves. The (paywalled) story begins: "Jeff Hulse, a Microsoft vice president who oversees roughly 400 software engineers, told the team in recent months to use the company's artificial intelligence chatbot, powered by OpenAI, to generate half the computer code they write, according to a person who heard the remarks. That would represent an increase from the 20% to 30% of code AI currently produces at the company, and shows how rapidly Microsoft is moving to incorporate such technology. Then on Tuesday, Microsoft laid off more than a dozen engineers on Hulse 's team as part of a broader layoff of 6,000 people across the company that appeared to hit engineers harder than other types of roles, this person said." The report comes as tech company CEOs have taken to boasting in earnings calls, tech conferences, and public statements that their AI is responsible for an ever-increasing share of the code written at their organizations. Microsoft's recent job cuts hit coders the hardest. So how much credence should one place on CEOs' claims of AI programming productivity gains -- which researchers have struggled to measure for 50+ years -- if engineers are forced to increase their use of AI, boosting the numbers their far-removed-from-programming CEOs are presenting to Wall Street? Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Most AI Chatbots Easily Tricked Into Giving Dangerous Responses, Study Finds - An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Hacked AI-powered chatbots threaten to make dangerous knowledge readily available by churning out illicit information the programs absorb during training, researchers say. [...] In a report on the threat, the researchers conclude that it is easy to trick most AI-driven chatbots into generating harmful and illegal information, showing that the risk is "immediate, tangible and deeply concerning." "What was once restricted to state actors or organised crime groups may soon be in the hands of anyone with a laptop or even a mobile phone," the authors warn. The research, led by Prof Lior Rokach and Dr Michael Fire at Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Israel, identified a growing threat from "dark LLMs", AI models that are either deliberately designed without safety controls or modified through jailbreaks. Some are openly advertised online as having "no ethical guardrails" and being willing to assist with illegal activities such as cybercrime and fraud. [...] To demonstrate the problem, the researchers developed a universal jailbreak that compromised multiple leading chatbots, enabling them to answer questions that should normally be refused. Once compromised, the LLMs consistently generated responses to almost any query, the report states. "It was shocking to see what this system of knowledge consists of," Fire said. Examples included how to hack computer networks or make drugs, and step-by-step instructions for other criminal activities. "What sets this threat apart from previous technological risks is its unprecedented combination of accessibility, scalability and adaptability," Rokach added. The researchers contacted leading providers of LLMs to alert them to the universal jailbreak but said the response was "underwhelming." Several companies failed to respond, while others said jailbreak attacks fell outside the scope of bounty programs, which reward ethical hackers for flagging software vulnerabilities. Read more of this story at Slashdot.