Latest News
Last updated 12 Jan, 12:26 PM
BBC News
Former Tory chancellor Nadhim Zahawi defects to Reform UK - Zahawi was a Conservative MP and served as chancellor under Boris Johnson.
Referee and student among hundreds killed in Iran protests - More than 500 people have been killed during anti-government protests, a US-based human rights group says.
Ofcom investigates Elon Musk's X over Grok AI sexual deepfakes - The watchdog said it had received reports of the platform's Grok AI chatbot creating undressed images of people.
Guantanamo detainee paid 'substantial' compensation by UK to settle torture complicity case - Detained without trial in 2006, Zubaydah is one of 15 people who remain at the US military prison.
Revolutionary eye injection saved my sight, says first-ever patient - Nicki's eye had collapsed in on itself, but a new gel injection method has saved her vision.
The Register
Ofcom officially investigating X as Grok's nudify button stays switched on - Tech minister Liz Kendall says the government will back a robust regulatory response Ofcom is investigating X over potential violations of the Online Safety Act, Britian's comms watchdog has confirmed.…
How CP/M-86's delay handed Microsoft the keys to the kingdom - A late operating system, a stopgap deal, and the accident that made DOS dominant A blog post by programmer Nemanja Trifunovic, The Late Arrival of 16-bit CP/M, is on the face of it an interesting little excursion into the late delivery of a long-forgotten bit of software – one that turned out to be pivotal for the entire computer industry.…
Windows 2000 still earning its keep running a rail ticket machine in Portugal - 'Unsupported' doesn't mean 'unused' Bork!Bork!Bork! It isn't only a computer's software underbelly exposed during a bork. Sometimes the poor thing's innards are on show as engineers attempt to wring a little more life from long-expired systems.…
Tories vow to boot under-16s off social media and ban phones in schools - Opposition leader Kemi Badenoch pitches age limits and classroom curbs as fixes for behavior and mental health The Tories have pledged to kick under-16s off social media, betting that banning teens from TikTok and Instagram will fix what they see as a growing crisis in kids' mental health and classroom behavior.…
2026 brings a bumper crop of Microsoft tech funerals - A busy year of end-of-support dates awaits unwary admins 2026 has begun with the familiar sound of Microsoft's software Grim Reaper sharpening a blade as administrators peer glumly at the calendar of carnage ahead.…
New Scientist - Home
Making autism into a partisan issue can only be harmful - While US President Donald Trump and his administration are making false and debunked claims about the causes of autism, real research is improving our understanding of the condition
Sinking trees in Arctic Ocean could remove 1 billion tonnes of CO2 - Cutting down boreal forest and sinking the felled trees in the depths of the Arctic Ocean could remove up to 1 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year – but it could come at a cost to the Arctic ecosystem
How rethinking your relationship with time could give you more of it - You might feel like the days and weeks are slipping by. Here is how one psychologist says you can shift your experience of time
Why my 2026 fitness resolution is all about getting mobile - After finding success with last year's New Year's resolution, health reporter Grace Wade has grand plans for 2026 – and the science to back them up
The secret weapon that could finally force climate action - An ambitious form of climate modelling aims to pin the blame for disasters – from floods to heatwaves – on specific companies. Is this the tool we need to effectively prosecute the world’s biggest carbon emitters?
Hacker News
The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe - Comments
Lightpanda migrate DOM implementation to Zig - Comments
Fossil versus Git - Comments
JRR Tolkien reads from The Hobbit for 30 Minutes (1952) - Comments
CLI agents make self-hosting on a home server easier and fun - Comments
Slashdot
Ubisoft Closes Game Studio Where Workers Voted to Unionize Two Weeks Ago - Ubisoft announced Wednesday it will close its studio in Halifax, Nova Scotia — two weeks after 74% of its staff voted to unionize. This means laying off the 71 people at the studio, reports the gaming news site Aftermath: [Communications Workers of America's Canadian affiliate, CWA Canada] said in a statement to Aftermath the union will "pursue every legal recourse to ensure that the rights of these workers are respected and not infringed in any way." The union said in a news release that it's illegal in Canada for companies to close businesses because of unionization. That's not necessarily what happened here, according to the news release, but the union is "demanding information from Ubisoft about the reason for the sudden decision to close." "We will be looking for Ubisoft to show us that this had nothing to do with the employees joining a union," former Ubisoft Halifax programmer and bargaining committee member Jon Huffman said in a statement. "The workers, their families, the people of Nova Scotia, and all of us who love video games made in Canada, deserve nothing less...." Before joining Ubisoft, the studio was best known for its work on the Rocksmith franchise; under Ubisoft, it focused squarely on mobile games. Ubisoft Halifax was quickly removed from the Ubisoft website on Wednesday... Read more of this story at Slashdot.
How Long Does It Take to Fix Linux Kernel Bugs? - An anonymous reader shared this report from It's FOSS: Jenny Guanni Qu, a researcher at [VC fund] Pebblebed, analyzed 125,183 bugs from 20 years of Linux kernel development history (on Git). The findings show that the average bug takes 2.1 years to find. [Though the median is 0.7 years, with the average possibly skewed by "outliers" discovered after years of hiding.] The longest-lived bug, a buffer overflow in networking code, went unnoticed for 20.7 years! [But 86.5% of bugs are found within five years.] The research was carried out by relying on the Fixes: tag that is used in kernel development. Basically, when a commit fixes a bug, it includes a tag pointing to the commit that introduced the bug. Jenny wrote a tool that extracted these tags from the kernel's git history going back to 2005. The tool finds all fixing commits, extracts the referenced commit hash, pulls dates from both commits, and calculates the time frame. As for the dataset, it includes over 125k records from Linux 6.19-rc3, covering bugs from April 2005 to January 2026. Out of these, 119,449 were unique fixing commits from 9,159 different authors, and only 158 bugs had CVE IDs assigned. It took six hours to assemble the dataset, according to the blog post, which concludes that the percentage of bugs found within one year has improved dramatically, from 0% in 2010 to 69% by 2022. The blog post says this can likely be attributed to: The Syzkaller fuzzer (released in 2015) Dynamic memory error detectors like KASAN, KMSAN, KCSAN sanitizers Better static analysis More contributors reviewing code But "We're simultaneously catching new bugs faster AND slowly working through ~5,400 ancient bugs that have been hiding for over 5 years." They've also developed an AI model called VulnBERT that predicts whether a commit introduces a vulnerability, claiming that of all actual bug-introducing commits, it catches 92.2%. "The goal isn't to replace human reviewers but to point them at the 10% of commits most likely to be problematic, so they can focus attention where it matters..." Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Amazon's AI Tool Listed Products from Small Businesses Without Their Knowledge - Bloomberg reports on Amazon listings "automatically generated by an experimental AI tool" for stores that don't sell on Amazon. Bloomberg notes that the listings "didn't always correspond to the correct product", leaving the stores to handle the complaints from angry customers: Between the Christmas and New Year holidays, small shop owners and artisans who had found their products listed on Amazon took to social media to compare notes and warn their peers... In interviews, six small shop owners said they found themselves unwittingly selling their products on Amazon's digital marketplace. Some, especially those who deliberately avoided Amazon, said they should have been asked for their consent. Others said it was ironic that Amazon was scouring the web for products with AI tools despite suing Perplexity AI Inc.for using similar technology to buy products on Amazon... Some retailers say the listings displayed the wrong product image or mistakenly showed wholesale pricing. Users of Shopify Inc.'s e-commerce tools said the system flagged Amazon's automated purchases as potentially fraudulent... In a statement, Amazon spokesperson Maxine Tagay said sellers are free to opt out. Two Amazon initiatives — Shop Direct, which links out to make purchases on other retailers' sites, and Buy For Me, which duplicates listings and handles purchases without leaving Amazon — "are programs we're testing that help customers discover brands and products not currently sold in Amazon's store, while helping businessesâreach new customers and drive incremental sales," she said in an emailed statement. "We have received positive feedback on these programs." Tagay didn't say why the sellers were enrolled without notifying them. She added that the Buy For Me selection features more than 500,000 items, up from about 65,000 at launch in April. The article includes quotes from the owners of affected businesses. A one-person company complained that "If suddenly there were 100 orders, I couldn't necessarily manage. When someone takes your proprietary, copyrighted works, I should be asked about that. This is my business. It's not their business." One business owner said "I just don't want my products on there... It's like if Airbnb showed up and tried to put your house on the market without your permission." One business owner complained "When things started to go wrong, there was no system set up by Amazon to resolve it. It's just 'We set this up for you, you should be grateful, you fix it.'" One Amazon representative even suggested they try opening a $39-a-month Amazon seller account. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Finnish Startup IXI Plans New Autofocusing Eyeglasses - An anonymous reader shared this report from CNET: Finland-based IXI Eyewear has raised more than $40 million from investors, including Amazon, to build glasses with adaptive lenses that could dynamically autofocus based on where the person wearing them is looking. In late 2025, the company said it had developed a glasses prototype that weighs just 22 grams. It includes embedded sensors aimed at the wearer's eyes and liquid crystal lenses that respond accordingly. According to the company, the autofocus is "powered by technology hidden within the frame that tracks eye movements and adjusts focus instantly — whether you're looking near or far..." iXI told CNN in a story published on Tuesday that it expects to launch its glasses within the next year. It has a waitlist for the glasses on its website, but has not said in what regions they'll be available... This type of technology is also being pursued by Japanese startups Elcyo and Vixion. Vixion already has a product with adaptive lenses embedded in the middle of the lenses (they do not resemble standard glasses). CNET spoke to optometrist Meenal Agarwal, who pointed out that besides startup efforts, there have also been research prototypes like Stanford's autofocal glasses. "But none have consumer-ready, lightweight glasses in the market yet." CNN reports on the 75-person company's product, noting that "By using a dynamic lens, IXI does away with fixed magnification areas." "Modern varifocals have this narrow viewing channel because they're mixing basically three different lenses," said Niko Eiden, CEO of IXI... So, there are areas of distortion, the sides of the lenses are quite useless for the user, and then you really have to manage which part of this viewing channel you're looking at." The IXI glasses, Eiden said, will have a much larger "reading" area for close-up vision — although still not as large as the entire lens — and it will also be positioned "in a more optimal place," based on the user's standard eye exam. But the biggest plus, Eiden added, is that most of the time, the reading area simply disappears, leaving the main prescription for long distance on the entire lens. "For seeing far, the difference is really striking, because with varifocals you have to look at the top part of the lens in order to see far. With ours, you have the full lens area to see far..." The new glasses won't come without drawbacks, Eiden admits: "This will be yet another product that you need to charge," he said. Although the charging port is magnetic and cleverly hidden in the temple area, overnight charging will be required... Another limitation is that more testing is required to make the glasses safe for driving, Eiden said, adding that in case of a malfunction of the electronics or the liquid crystal area, the glasses are equipped with a failsafe mode that shuts them down to the base state of the main lens, which would usually be distance vision, without creating any visual disturbances. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang Says AI Doomerism Has 'Done a Lot of Damage' - Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang "said one of his biggest takeaways from 2025 was 'the battle of narratives' over the future of AI development between those who see doom on the horizon and the optimists," reports Business Insider. Huang did acknowledge that "it's too simplistic" to entirely dismiss either side (on a recent episode of the "No Priors" podcast). But "I think we've done a lot of damage with very well-respected people who have painted a doomer narrative, end of the world narrative, science fiction narrative." "It's not helpful to people. It's not helpful to the industry. It's not helpful to society. It's not helpful to the governments..." [H]e cited concerns about "regulatory capture," arguing that no company should approach governments to request more regulation. "Their intentions are clearly deeply conflicted, and their intentions are clearly not completely in the best interest of society," he said. "I mean, they're obviously CEOs, they're obviously companies, and obviously they're advocating for themselves..." "When 90% of the messaging is all around the end of the world and the pessimism, and I think we're scaring people from making the investments in AI that makes it safer, more functional, more productive, and more useful to society," he said. Elsewhere in the podcast, Huang argues that the AI bubble is a myth. Business Insider adds that "a spokesperson for Nvidia declined to elaborate on Huang's remarks." Thanks to Slashdot reader joshuark for sharing the article. Read more of this story at Slashdot.