Latest News
Last updated 20 Feb, 04:12 PM
BBC News
A tip-off and 'more luck than judgement': The story behind Andrew car snap - After the former prince's arrest, Reuters photographer Phil Noble began a six-hour drive to Norfolk.
Life sentences for teens after racist murder of stranger delivering food to his mum - Kamran Aman was subjected to further racist abuse as he lay dying on the floor of a neighbour's house.
KFC, Nando's, and others ditch chicken welfare pledge - Wingstop, Burger King, and others have walked away from an industry commitment to avoid using fast-growing chickens
UK Athletics pleads guilty to corporate manslaughter of Paralympian - UK Athletics plead guilty to the corporate manslaughter of UAE Paralympian Abdullah Hayayei who died in 2017 after a metal cage fell on him while training in London.
Higher tax helped UK government reach record January surplus - The government took in more from tax receipts than expected, official data suggests.
The Register
Quebec vehicles agency spent C$245M over budget on SAP ERP it wasn't sure it needed - Probe says SAAQ misled government and botched rollout caused province-wide disruption A judge-led commission in Quebec has found that the state agency responsible for driver's licenses and license plates misled the Canadian government about a troubled SAP ERP project that ran more than C$245 million ($179 million/ £132.6 million) over budget.…
Ukrainian gets five years for helping North Koreans secure US tech jobs - Polish arrest leads to extradition and federal prison sentence Ukrainian national Oleksandr Didenko will spend the next five years behind bars in the US for his involvement in helping North Korean IT workers secure fraudulent employment.…
Accenture tells staffers: If you want a promotion, use AI at work - Consultancy to monitor usage by meatbags with corporate aspirations Accenture staff must demonstrate they have fully bought into the consultancy's AI vision if they want to get on.…
Founder ditches AWS for Euro stack, finds sovereignty isn't plug-and-play - Attempt to go 'Made in EU' offers big tech escapees a reality check where lower cloud bills come with higher effort Building a startup entirely on European infrastructure sounds like a nice sovereignty flex right up until you actually try it and realize the real price gets paid in time, tinkering, and slowly unlearning a decade of GitHub muscle memory.…
Hard drives already sold out for this year – AI to blame - Oh snap! The hyperscalers bought all the HDDs Hard drive manufacturers have already sold all the units they will make this year, and it looks like the AI infrastructure boom is to blame, with hyperscalers soaking up all the high-capacity storage.…
New Scientist - Home
We've spotted the strongest microwave laser in the known universe - Colliding galaxies can create a beam of focused microwave radiation known as a maser, and astronomers have discovered the brightest one ever seen
Fresh understanding of the causes of migraine reveals new drug targets - New insights into the causes of migraine are prompting a fresh look at a drug target that was sidelined 25 years ago
New Scientist recommends The Big Oyster: History on the half shell - The books, TV, games and more that New Scientist staff have enjoyed this week
Paediatricians’ blood used to make new treatments for RSV and colds - Antibodies harvested from the blood of paediatricians are up to 25 times better at protecting against the common respiratory infection RSV than existing antibody therapies, and are now being developed as preventative treatments
Search for radio signals finds no hint of alien civilisation on K2-18b - Planet K2-18b, an apparent water world 124 light years away, has been seen as a promising location in the search for aliens, but telescopes on Earth failed to pick up any radio transmissions
Hacker News
Ggml.ai joins Hugging Face to ensure the long-term progress of Local AI - Comments
I found a useful Git one liner buried in leaked CIA developer docs - Comments
Child's Play: Tech's new generation and the end of thinking - Comments
Show HN: A native macOS client for Hacker News, built with SwiftUI - Comments
Trump's global tariffs struck down by US Supreme Court - Comments
Slashdot
Email Blunder Exposes $90 Billion Russian Oil Smuggling Ring - schwit1 writes: An IT blunder has revealed an apparent smuggling ring that has moved at least $90bn of Russian oil and is playing a central role in funding the Kremlin's war in Ukraine. Financial Times has identified 48 seemingly independent companies working from different physical addresses that appear to be operating together to disguise the origin of Russian oil, particularly from Kremlin-controlled Rosneft. The network was discovered because they all share a single private email server. The report adds: The FT was able to identify 442 web domains whose public registrations show they all use a single private server for their email, "mx.phoenixtrading.ltd," showing that they share back-office functions. The FT was then able to identify companies by comparing the names in the domain to those of entities that appear in Russian and Indian customs records as involved in carrying Russian oil. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
US Supreme Court Rejects Trump's Global Tariffs - The U.S. Supreme Court struck down on Friday President Donald Trump's sweeping tariffs that he pursued under a law meant for use in national emergencies, rejecting one of his most contentious assertions of his authority in a ruling with major implications for the global economy. From a report: The justices, in a 6-3 ruling authored by conservative Chief Justice John Roberts, upheld a lower court's decision that the Republican president's use of this 1977 law exceeded his authority. The court ruled that the Trump administration's interpretation that the law at issue - the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA - grants Trump the power he claims to impose tariffs would intrude on the powers of Congress and violate a legal principle called the "major questions" doctrine. The doctrine, embraced by the conservative justices, requires actions by the government's executive branch of "vast economic and political significance" to be clearly authorized by Congress. The court used the doctrine to stymie some of Democratic former President Joe Biden's key executive actions. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Amazon Service Was Taken Down By AI Coding Bot - An anonymous reader shares a report: Amazon's cloud unit has suffered at least two outages due to errors involving its own AI tools [non-paywalled source], leading some employees to raise doubts about the US tech giant's push to roll out these coding assistants. Amazon Web Services experienced a 13-hour interruption to one system used by its customers in mid-December after engineers allowed its Kiro AI coding tool to make certain changes, according to four people familiar with the matter. The people said the agentic tool, which can take autonomous actions on behalf of users, determined that the best course of action was to "delete and recreate the environment." Amazon posted an internal postmortem about the "outage" of the AWS system, which lets customers explore the costs of its services. Multiple Amazon employees told the FT that this was the second occasion in recent months in which one of the group's AI tools had been at the centre of a service disruption. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Trump Directs US Government To Prepare Release of Files on Aliens and UFOs - US President Donald Trump says he will direct US agencies, including the defence department, to "begin the process of identifying and releasing" government files on aliens and extraterrestrial life. From a report: Trump made the declaration in a post on Truth Social, after he accused Barack Obama earlier in the day of revealing classified information when the former president said "aliens are real" on a podcast last week. "He's not supposed to be doing that," Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One, adding: "He made a big mistake." Asked if he also thinks aliens are real, Trump answered: "Well, I don't know if they're real or not." Former US President Obama told podcast host Brian Tyler Cohen that he thinks aliens are real in an interview released last Saturday. "They're real, but I haven't seen them, and they're not being kept in Area 51," Obama said. "There's no underground facility unless there's this enormous conspiracy and they hid it from the president of the United States." Read more of this story at Slashdot.
How Private Equity Debt Left a Leading VPN Open To Chinese Hackers - An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: In early 2024, the agency that oversees cybersecurity for much of the US government issued a rare emergency order -- disconnect your Connect Secure virtual private network software immediately. Chinese spies had hacked the code and infiltrated nearly two dozen organizations. The directive applied to all civilian federal agencies, but given the product's customer base, its impact was more widely felt. The software, which is made by Ivanti Inc., was something of an industry standard across government and much of the corporate world. Clients included the US Air Force, Army, Navy and other parts of the Defense Department, the Department of State, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Federal Reserve, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, thousands of companies and more than 2,000 banks including Wells Fargo & Co. and Deutsche Bank AG, according to federal procurement records, internal documents, interviews and the accounts of former Ivanti employees who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to disclose customer information. Soon after sending out their order, which instructed agencies to install an Ivanti-issued fix, staffers at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency discovered that the threat was also inside their own house. Two sensitive CISA databases -- one containing information about personnel at chemical facilities, another assessing the vulnerabilities of critical infrastructure operators -- had been compromised via the agency's own Connect Secure software. CISA had followed all its own guidance. Ivanti's fix had failed. This was a breaking point for some American national security officials, who had long expressed concerns about Connect Secure VPNs. CISA subsequently published a letter with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the national cybersecurity agencies of the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand warning customers of the "significant risk" associated with continuing to use the software. According to Laura Galante, then the top cyber official in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the government came to a simple conclusion about the technology. "You should not be using it," she said. "There really is no other way to put it." That attack, along with several others that successfully targeted the Ivanti software, illustrate how private equity's push into the cybersecurity market ended up compromising the quality and safety of some critical VPN products, Bloomberg has found. Last year, Bloomberg reported that Citrix Systems Inc., another top VPN maker, experienced several major hacks after its private equity owners, Elliott Investment Management and Vista Equity Partners, cut most of the company's 70-member product security team following their acquisition of the company in 2022. Some government officials and private-sector executives are now reconsidering their approach to evaluating cybersecurity software. In addition to excising private equity-owned VPNs from their networks, some factor private equity ownership into their risk assessments of key technologies. Read more of this story at Slashdot.