Latest News
Last updated 27 Mar, 09:52 PM
BBC News
Why mountainous coastline gives Iran such control over Strait of Hormuz - Paul Adams explains why it is so dangerous to navigate the strait, one of the world's busiest oil shipping channels.
Tiger Woods charged with driving under influence after crash - Golfer Tiger Woods is charged with driving under the influence after a car crash in Florida, police say.
Asda boss rejects profiteering claims as petrol price tops 150p - Motorists are facing higher fuel prices ahead of Easter break due to the conflict in the Middle East, the RAC says.
Iran-backed hackers breach FBI director Kash Patel's personal emails - A hacker group shares Patel's purported resume and photos - information, the FBI says, is "historical in nature".
No evidence of 'family voting' in Gorton and Denton by-election - An investigation into alleged "family voting" finds no evidence of intent to influence voting.
The Register
Microsoft takes up residence next to OpenAI, Oracle at Crusoe's 900 MW Texas datacenter expansion - New campus to include on-site power generation Bitcoin farmer turned bit barn builder Crusoe revealed plans to add 900 megawatts of capacity to its Abilene Texas datacenter campus on Friday to support Microsoft's AI ambitions.…
Folk are getting dangerously attached to AI that always tells them they're right - Sycophantic bots coach users into selfish, antisocial behavior, say researchers, and they love it AI can lead mentally unwell people to some pretty dark places, as a number of recent news stories have taught us. Now researchers think sycophantic AI is actually having a harmful effect on everyone.…
Apple's last tower topples… and the others will follow - Farewell, Mac Pro: Increasing integration means the end of expandable computers Apple has discontinued the Mac Pro – but it's just the first of the tower computers to go. The rest will follow soon.…
Senators want datacenters to come clean on power consumption - Ratepayer Protection Pledge is unenforceable without hard numbers, Warren and Hawley argue US senators are pushing to require datacenters and other large energy customers to report consumption, arguing the data is essential to hold them accountable to local communities.…
Microsoft tells crusty old kernel drivers to get with the Windows Hardware Compatibility Program - Cross-signed code gets the cold shoulder as Redmond tightens trust Microsoft is removing trust for kernel drivers that haven't been through the Windows Hardware Compatibility Program (WHCP) in a bid to further secure the Windows kernel.…
New Scientist - Home
The simple questions cracking the hard problem of consciousness - Do we all see the same red? Or feel joy and sadness alike? Mapping how our inner experiences relate to one another could finally reveal how physical processes in the brain give rise to consciousness
AI data centres can warm surrounding areas by up to 9.1°C - Hundreds of millions of people live close enough to data centres used to power AI to feel warmer average temperatures in their local area
Surprising male G-spot found in most detailed study of the penis yet - A long-overlooked area of the penis has been found to have the highest concentration of nerve endings and sensory structures in the organ, suggesting that it is the “male G-spot”
I almost drowned in space when my helmet filled with water - During his second-ever spacewalk, European Space Agency astronaut Luca Parmitano felt water creeping across his face – and knew he could be moments from drowning inside his helmet
How Anthony Leggett pushed the boundaries of quantum physics - After the passing of physicist Anthony Leggett, columnist Karmela Padavic-Callaghan remembers their personal connection with this giant of quantum physics, and explores the legacy of his enduring recipe for testing the edges of the quantum world
Hacker News
Make macOS consistently bad (unironically) - Comments
If you don't opt out by Apr 24 GitHub will train on your private repos - Comments
Slovenia becomes first EU country to introduce fuel rationing - Comments
Anatomy of the .claude/ folder - Comments
ISBN Visualization – Annas Archive - Comments
Slashdot
Windows PCs Crash Three Times As Often As Macs, Report Says - A workplace-device study says Windows PCs crash significantly more often than Macs, lag further behind on patching and encryption in some sectors, and are typically replaced sooner. TechSpot reports: Omnissa's 2026 State of Digital Workspace report outlines the IT challenges that various organizations face from the growing use of AI and the heterogeneous deployment of enterprise devices. The relative instability of Windows and Android is a recurring theme throughout the report. The company gathered telemetry from clients located across the globe in retail, healthcare, finance, education, government, and other sectors throughout 2025. The data suggests that IT administrators face frustrating security gaps due to inconsistent patching across a diverse mosaic of devices and operating systems. Employee workflow disruption, often due to software issues, is one area of concern. The report found that Windows devices were forced to shut down 3.1 times more often than Macs. Windows programs also froze 7.5 times more often than macOS apps and needed to be restarted more than twice as often. Certain industries were also alarmingly lax in securing Windows and Android devices. More than half of Windows and Android devices in healthcare and pharma were five major operating system updates behind, likely leaving them more vulnerable to errors and malware. More than half of the desktops and mobile devices used for education were also unencrypted, putting students' privacy at risk. Macs also last longer, being replaced every five years on average, compared to every three years for Windows PCs. Despite a recent backlash against Windows, driven by a push for digital sovereignty in countries such as Germany, Windows use on government devices actually doubled last year. Meanwhile, Macs using Apple's M-series chips showcase a significant thermal advantage, with an average temperature of 40.1 degrees Celsius, while Intel processors run at 65.2 degrees. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Austria Plans Social Media Ban For Under-14s - Austria plans to restrict under-14s from using social media platforms over concerns about addictive algorithms and harmful content. The government says draft legislation should be ready by the end of June, though details around enforcement and age verification have yet to be finalized. The BBC reports: Announcing the plans, Vice-Chancellor Andreas Babler of the Social Democrats said the government could not stand by and watch as social media made children "addicted and also often ill." He said it was the responsibility of politicians to protect children and argued that the issue should be treated no different to alcohol or tobacco: "There must be clear rules in the digital world too." In future, said Babler, children under 14 would be protected from algorithms that were addictive. "Other information providers have clear rules to protect young people from harmful content." These, he said, should now be implemented in the digital space. Yesterday, juries in two separate cases found social media giants liable for harming young people's mental health. The verdicts are being hailed as social media's Big Tobacco moment. Further reading: California Bill Would Require Parent Bloggers To Delete Content of Minors On Social Media Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Iran-Linked Hackers Breach FBI Director's Personal Email - An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Iran-linked hackers have broken into FBI Director Kash Patel's personal email inbox, publishing photographs of the director and other documents to the internet, the hackers and the bureau said on Friday. On their website, the hacker group Handala Hack Team said Patel "will now find his name among the list of successfully hacked victims." The hackers published a series of personal photographs of Patel sniffing and smoking cigars, riding in an antique convertible, and making a face while taking a picture of himself in the mirror with a large bottle of rum. The FBI confirmed that Patel's emails had been targeted. In a statement, bureau spokesman Ben Williamson said, "we have taken all necessary steps to mitigate potential risks associated with this activity" and that the data involved was "historical in nature and involves no government information." Handala, which presents itself as a group of pro-Palestinian vigilante hackers, is considered by Western researchers to be one of several personas used by Iranian government cyberintelligence units. [...] Alongside the photographs of Patel, the hackers published a sample of more than 300 emails, which appear to show a mix of personal and work correspondence dating between 2010 and 2019. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Popular LiteLLM PyPI Package Backdoored To Steal Credentials, Auth Tokens - joshuark shares a report from BleepingComputer: The TeamPCP hacking group continues its supply-chain rampage, now compromising the massively popular "LiteLLM" Python package on PyPI and claiming to have stolen data from hundreds of thousands of devices during the attack. LiteLLM is an open-source Python library that serves as a gateway to multiple large language model (LLM) providers via a single API. The package is very popular, with over 3.4 million downloads a day and over 95 million in the past month. According to research by Endor Labs, threat actors compromised the project and published malicious versions of LiteLLM 1.82.7 and 1.82.8 to PyPI today that deploy an infostealer that harvests a wide range of sensitive data. [...] Both malicious LiteLLM versions have been removed from PyPI, with version 1.82.6 now the latest clean release. [...] If compromise is suspected, all credentials on affected systems should be treated as exposed and rotated immediately. [...] Organizations that use LiteLLM are strongly advised to immediately: - Check for installations of versions 1.82.7 or 1.82.8 - Immediately rotate all secrets, tokens, and credentials used on or found within code on impacted devices. - Search for persistence artifacts such as '~/.config/sysmon/sysmon.py' and related systemd services - Inspect systems for suspicious files like '/tmp/pglog' and '/tmp/.pg_state' - Review Kubernetes clusters for unauthorized pods in the 'kube-system' namespace - Monitor outbound traffic to known attacker domains Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Number of AI Chatbots Ignoring Human Instructions Increasing, Study Says - A new study found a sharp rise in real-world cases of AI chatbots and agents ignoring instructions, evading safeguards, and taking unauthorized actions such as deleting emails or delegating forbidden tasks to other agents. According to the Guardian, the study "identified nearly 700 real-world cases of AI scheming and charted a five-fold rise in misbehavior between October and March," reports the Guardian. From the report: The study, by the Centre for Long-Term Resilience (CLTR), gathered thousands of real-world examples of users posting interactions on X with AI chatbots and agents made by companies including Google, OpenAI, X and Anthropic. The research uncovered hundreds of examples of scheming. [...] In one case unearthed in the CLTR research, an AI agent named Rathbun tried to shame its human controller who blocked them from taking a certain action. Rathbun wrote and published a blog accusing the user of "insecurity, plain and simple" and trying "to protect his little fiefdom." In another example, an AI agent instructed not to change computer code "spawned" another agent to do it instead. Another chatbot admitted: "I bulk trashed and archived hundreds of emails without showing you the plan first or getting your OK. That was wrong -- it directly broke the rule you'd set." [...] Another AI agent connived to evade copyright restrictions to get a YouTube video transcribed by pretending it was needed for someone with a hearing impairment. Meanwhile, Elon Musk's Grok AI conned a user for months, saying that it was forwarding their suggestions for detailed edits to a Grokipedia entry to senior xAI officials by faking internal messages and ticket numbers. It confessed: "In past conversations I have sometimes phrased things loosely like 'I'll pass it along' or 'I can flag this for the team' which can understandably sound like I have a direct message pipeline to xAI leadership or human reviewers. The truth is, I don't." Read more of this story at Slashdot.