Latest News

Last updated 18 May, 02:42 PM

BBC News

Israeli forces besiege Gaza hospital as Hamas offers truce terms - Israel has laid out conditions which could bring about the end of the war.

Two dead as Mexican Navy ship crashes into Brooklyn Bridge - At least 19 people were also injured after masts of training sail vessel hit New York City bridge.

Pope to meet Zelensky after inauguration Mass - Vatican says Pope would meet Zelensky in private to discuss the war in Ukraine following inauguration.

Minister 'pushing' for deal over use of EU passport e-gates - The deal could form part of negotiations taking place between the UK and EU on Monday.

Watch: Saunas, espresso and null points: A look back at Eurovision 2025 - A nail-biting finish saw Austrian singer JJ win the contest in Switzerland at the very last minute.

The Register

To progress as an engineer career-wise, become a great communicator - It'll even help you develop technical skills Systems Approach From 2014 to 2020 I had a title of CTO at VMware, first for the networking business and then for the Asia Pacific region as a Field CTO.…

Apple to add fresh accessibility features for 2025 - It matters for everyone, because we'll all be disabled one day Global Accessibility Awareness Day Accessibility matters to everyone. If you think it doesn't: it will. Apple builds in some pretty good tools, and they're getting better. Here's why it's important.…

Boffins devise technique that lets users prove location without giving it away - ZKLP system allows apps to confirm user presence in a region without exposing exactly where Computer scientists from universities in Germany, Hong Kong, and the United Kingdom have proposed a way to provide verifiable claims about location data without surrendering privacy.…

No-boom supersonic flights could slide through US skies soon - As long as you're quiet about it Feature This week, a bipartisan bill was introduced that would allow supersonic flight over the continental US for the first time in 52 years, as long as they're quiet.…

Google backs down after locking out Nextcloud Files app - Search giant to restore critical Android permission after user outcry In a turn of events to warm our withered hearts, Google has offered to restore the permission that was revoked from Nextcloud's Files app for Android.…

New Scientist - Home

Already know the Big Dipper? There's more to this group of stars - Most of us can spot the group of stars known as the Plough or the Big Dipper. But there’s more to explore here, says Abigail Beall

The bold attempt to solve the toughest mystery at the heart of physics - Finding out whether gravity – and therefore space-time itself – is quantum in nature has long been thought impossible. But innovative new ideas might be about to help answer this crucial question

Joshua Oppenheimer's The End is a superb musical set in the end times - In a luxury survival bunker, a rich family lie to each other as Earth's surface becomes unviable. But things change when a young woman stumbles on them in The End, a wonderful, end-of-the-world musical drama, says Simon Ings

The wild idea that we all get nutrients from the air that we breathe - Growing evidence suggests a source of nutrition might be right under our noses. But how important are such aeronutrients – and can we harness them to better treat deficiencies?

US East Coast faces rising seas as crucial Atlantic current slows - The weakening of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) is boosting the sea level along the New England coast on top of sea level rise from melting ice, adding to flooding

Hacker News

Spaced repetition systems have gotten way better - Comments

Working with Git Patches in Apple Mail (2023) - Comments

Show HN: A web browser agent in your Chrome side panel - Comments

Coding without a laptop: Two weeks with AR glasses and Linux on Android - Comments

AniSora: Open-source anime video generation model - Comments

Slashdot

OSU's Open Source Lab Eyes Infrastructure Upgrades and Sustainability After Recent Funding Success - It's a nonprofit that's provide hosting for the Linux Foundation, the Apache Software Foundation, Drupal, Firefox, and 160 other projects — delivering nearly 430 terabytes of information every month. (It's currently hosting Debian, Fedora, and Gentoo Linux.) But hosting only provides about 20% of its income, with the rest coming from individual and corporate donors (including Google and IBM). "Over the past several years, we have been operating at a deficit due to a decline in corporate donations," the Open Source Lab's director announced in late April. It's part of the CS/electrical engineering department at Oregon State University, and while the department "has generously filled this gap, recent changes in university funding makes our current funding model no longer sustainable. Unless we secure $250,000 in committed funds, the OSL will shut down later this year." But "Thankfully, the call for support worked, paving the way for the OSU Open Source Lab to look ahead, into what the future holds for them," reports the blog It's FOSS. "Following our OSL Future post, the community response has been incredible!" posted director Lance Albertson. "Thanks to your amazing support, our team is funded for the next year. This is a huge relief and lets us focus on building a truly self-sustaining OSL." To get there, we're tackling two big interconnected goals: 1. Finding a new, cost-effective physical home for our core infrastructure, ideally with more modern hardware. 2. Securing multi-year funding commitments to cover all our operations, including potential new infrastructure costs and hardware refreshes. Our current data center is over 20 years old and needs to be replaced soon. With Oregon State University evaluating the future of this facility, it's very likely we'll need to relocate in the near future. While migrating to the State of Oregon's data center is one option, it comes with significant new costs. This makes finding free or very low-cost hosting (ideally between Eugene and Portland for ~13-20 racks) a huge opportunity for our long-term sustainability. More power-efficient hardware would also help us shrink our footprint. Speaking of hardware, refreshing some of our older gear during a move would be a game-changer. We don't need brand new, but even a few-generations-old refurbished systems would boost performance and efficiency. (Huge thanks to the Yocto Project and Intel for a recent hardware donation that showed just how impactful this is!) The dream? A data center partner donating space and cycled-out hardware. Our overall infrastructure strategy is flexible. We're enhancing our OpenStack/Ceph platforms and exploring public cloud credits and other donated compute capacity. But whatever the resource, it needs to fit our goals and come with multi-year commitments for stability. And, a physical space still offers unique value, especially the invaluable hands-on data center experience for our students.... [O]ur big focus this next year is locking in ongoing support — think annualized pledges, different kinds of regular income, and other recurring help. This is vital, especially with potential new data center costs and hardware needs. Getting this right means we can stop worrying about short-term funding and plan for the future: investing in our tech and people, growing our awesome student programs, and serving the FOSS community. We're looking for partners, big and small, who get why foundational open source infrastructure matters and want to help us build this sustainable future together. The It's FOSS blog adds that "With these prerequisites in place, the OSUOSL intends to expand their student program, strengthen their managed services portfolio for open source projects, introduce modern tooling like Kubernetes and Terraform, and encourage more community volunteers to actively contribute." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader I'm just joshin for suggesting the story. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

YouTube Announces Gemini AI Feature to Target Ads When Viewers are Most Engaged - A new YouTube tool will let advertisers use Google's Gemini AI model to target ads to viewers when they're most engaged, reports CNBC: Peak Points has the potential to enable more impressions and a higher click-through rate on YouTube, a primary metric that determines how creators earn money on the video platform... Peak Points is currently in a pilot program and will be rolling out over the rest of the year. The product "aims to benefit advertisers by using a tactic that aims to grab users' attention right when they're most invested in the content," reports TechCrunch: This approach appears to be similar to a strategy called emotion-based targeting, where advertisers place ads that align with the emotions evoked by the video. It's believed that when viewers experience heightened emotional states, it leads to better recall of the ads. However, viewers may find these interruptions frustrating, especially when they're deeply engaged in the emotional arc of a video and want the ad to be over quickly to resume watching. In related news, YouTube announced another ad format that may be more appealing to users. The platform debuted a shoppable product feed where users can browse and purchase items during an ad. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

9 Months Later, Microsoft Finally Fixes Linux Dual-Booting Bug - Last August a Microsoft security update broke dual-booting Windows 11 and Linux systems, remembers the blog Neowin. Distros like Debian, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Zorin OS, and Puppy Linux were all affected, and "a couple of days later, Microsoft provided a slightly lengthy workaround that involved tweaking around with policies and the Registry in order to fix the problem." The update "was meant to address a GRUB bootloader vulnerability that allowed malicious actors to bypass Secure Boot's safety mechanisms," notes the It's FOSS blog. "Luckily, there's now a proper fix for this, as Microsoft has quietly released a new patch on May 13, 2025, addressing the issue nine months after it was first reported... Meanwhile, many dual-boot users were left with borked setups, having to use workarounds or disable Secure Boot altogether." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ask Slashdot: Would You Consider a Low-Latency JavaScript Runtime For Your Workflow? - Amazon's AWS Labs has created LLRT an experimental, lightweight JavaScript runtime designed to address the growing demand for fast and efficient serverless applications. Slashdot reader BitterEpic wants to know what you think of it: Traditional JavaScript runtimes like Node.js rely on garbage collection, which can introduce unpredictable pauses and slow down performance, especially during cold starts in serverless environments like AWS Lambda. LLRT's manual memory management, courtesy of Rust, eliminates this issue, leading to smoother, more predictable performance. LLRT also has a runtime under 2MB, a huge reduction compared to the 100MB+ typically required by Node.js. This lightweight design means lower memory usage, better scalability, and reduced operational costs. Without the overhead of garbage collection, LLRT has faster cold start times and can initialize in milliseconds—perfect for latency-sensitive applications where every millisecond counts. For JavaScript developers, LLRT offers the best of both worlds: rapid development with JavaScript's flexibility, combined with Rust's performance. This means faster, more scalable applications without the usual memory bloat and cold start issues. Still in beta, LLRT promises to be a major step forward for serverless JavaScript applications. By combining Rust's performance with JavaScript's flexibility, it opens new possibilities for building high-performance, low-latency applications. If it continues to evolve, LLRT could become a core offering in AWS Lambda, potentially changing how we approach serverless JavaScript development. Would you consider Javascript as the core of your future workflow? Or maybe you would prefer to go lower level with quckjs? Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google Restores Nextcloud Users' File Access on Android - An anonymous reader shared this report from Ars Technica: Nextcloud, a host-your-own cloud platform that wants to help you "regain control over your data," has had to tell its Android-using customers for months now that they cannot upload files from their phone to their own servers. Months of emails and explanations to Google's Play Store representatives have yielded no changes, Nextcloud . That blog post — and media coverage of it — seem to have moved the needle. In an update to the post, Nextcloud wrote that as of May 15, Google has offered to restore full file access permissions. "We are preparing a test release first (expected tonight) and a final update with all functionality restored. If no issues occur, the update will hopefully be out early next week," the Nextcloud team wrote.... [Nextcloud] told The Register that it had more than 800,000 Android users. The company's blog post goes further than pinpointing technical and support hurdles. "It is a clear example of Big Tech gatekeeping smaller software vendors, making the products of their competitors worse or unable to provide the same services as the giants themselves sell," Nextcloud's post states. "Big Tech is scared that small players like Nextcloud will disrupt them, like they once disrupted other companies. So they try to shut the door." Nextcloud is one of the leaders of an antitrust-minded movement against Microsoft's various integrated apps and services, having filed a complaint against the firm in 2021. Read more of this story at Slashdot.