Latest News
Last updated 23 Feb, 08:16 PM
BBC News
Watch: Peter Mandelson led away by police from Camden home - The Metropolitan Police said a 72-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office.
At least 25 National Guard troops killed in violence after death of Mexican drug lord - Violence has erupted across Mexico since a powerful drug cartel boss died after being captured by special forces.
Nottingham killer watched shooting videos online, inquiry hears - Valdo Calocane's phone was analysed after the Nottingham attacks in June 2023.
BBC sorry for airing racial slur shouted by guest with Tourette's at Baftas - Actors Michael B Jordan and Delroy Lindo were on stage at the time during the award ceremony in London.
Three key changes being made to special educational needs - The government has set out broad changes it will make to the SEND system in England in the coming years.
The Register
Nvidia superchip infusion finally coming to Windows PCs, report says - Nv-based integrated graphics for Wintel box also in the works Your next laptop may have Nvidia inside – not in the form of a GPU, but as a system on a chip, complete with CPU. Team Green could be chipping away at Intel's marketshare and giving people Arm-based systems that compete with Apple's MacBook line.…
Infosec community panics as Anthropic rolls out Claude code security checker - Not the first of its kind ai-pocalypse Anthropic sent the infosec community into a tizzy on Friday when it rolled out Claude Code Security, a new feature that scans codebases for vulnerabilities and suggests patches to fix the issues.…
Microsoft execs worry AI will eat entry level coding jobs - Russinovich and Hanselman say firms must train juniors to fix agent mistakes – not replace them with prompts Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich and VP of Developer Community Scott Hanselman have written a paper arguing that senior software engineers must mentor junior developers to prevent AI coding agents from hollowing out the profession's future skills base.…
Indie web browser Ladybird flutters toward Rust with a little help from AI - Project ditches Swift and translates C++ with LLM assistance The independent Ladybird web browser project is changing course on its choice of programming languages, with LLM-based coding assistants helping to evaluate the shift.…
Artemis II headed back to the bay; helium issues force another delay - Sending humans around the Moon in February, er, March - now April 2026, maybe The quest to return to the Moon has hit another snag. NASA is delaying Artemis II again, as interrupted helium flow to the rocket’s upper stage forces a rollback to the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) and wipes out the March launch window.…
New Scientist - Home
Birdwatching may reshape the brain and build its buffer against ageing - Expert birdwatchers have changes in their brain structure compared with novices, which probably help them better identify birds and may even protect against age-related cognitive decline
Brutal Iron Age massacre may have targeted women and children - An examination of bones has revealed one of the largest prehistoric mass killings known in Europe, with women, adolescents and children making up most of the 77 victims
It’s your perception of sleep that’s making you feel tired all day - How we feel about a night’s sleep can have a bigger impact on mood and grogginess than actual hours of rest. Here’s how to change your mindset to feel more energised
Everyone's a queen: The ant species with no males or workers - Temnothorax kinomurai, a parasitic ant species found in Japan, reproduces asexually and all of its young develop into queens that try to take over other ants’ colonies
A horse's whinny is unlike any other sound in nature - Horses use their larynx to make two sounds simultaneously, so they are effectively singing and whistling at the same time
Hacker News
The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection - Comments
Ladybird adopts Rust - Comments
Show HN: PgDog – Scale Postgres without changing the app - Comments
'Viking' was a job description, not a matter of heredity: Ancient DNA study - Comments
Americans are destroying Flock surveillance cameras - Comments
Slashdot
Linus Torvalds: Someone 'More Competent Who Isn't Afraid of Numbers Past the Teens' Will Take Over Linux One Day - Linus Torvalds has pondered his professional mortality in a self-deprecating post to mark the release of the first release candidate for version 7.0 of the Linux kernel. From a report: "You all know the drill by now: two weeks have passed, and the kernel merge window is closed," he wrote in the post announcing Linux 7.0 rc1. "We have a new major number purely because I'm easily confused and not good with big numbers." Torvalds pointed out that the numbers he applies to new kernel releases are essentially meaningless. "We haven't done releases based on features (or on "stable vs unstable") for a long, long time now. So that new major number does *not* mean that we have some big new exciting feature, or that we're somehow leaving old interfaces behind. It's the usual "solid progress" marker, nothing more.â He then reiterated his plan to end each series of kernels to end at x.19, before the next release becomes y.0 -- a process that takes about 3.5 years -- and then pondered what happens when the next version of Linux reaches a number he finds uncomfortable. "I don't have a solid plan for when the major number itself gets big," he admitted, "by that time, I expect that we'll have somebody more competent in charge who isn't afraid of numbers past the teens. So I'm not going to worry about it." Read more of this story at Slashdot.
'How Many AIs Does It Take To Read a PDF?' - Despite AI's progress in building complex software, the ubiquitous PDF remains something of a grand challenge -- a format Adobe developed in the early 1990s to preserve the precise visual appearance of documents. PDFs consist of character codes, coordinates, and rendering instructions rather than logically ordered text, and even state-of-the-art models asked to extract information from them will summarize instead, confuse footnotes with body text, or outright hallucinate contents, The Verge writes. Companies like Reducto are now tackling the problem by segmenting pages into components -- headers, tables, charts -- before routing each to specialized parsing models, an approach borrowed from computer vision techniques used in self-driving vehicles. Researchers at Hugging Face recently found roughly 1.3 billion PDFs sitting in Common Crawl alone, and the Allen Institute for AI has noted that PDFs could provide trillions of novel, high-quality training tokens from government reports, textbooks, and academic papers -- the kind of data AI developers are increasingly desperate for. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Anthropic Accuses Chinese Companies of Siphoning Data From Claude - U.S. artificial-intelligence startup Anthropic said three Chinese AI companies set up more than 24,000 fraudulent accounts with its Claude AI model to help their own systems catch up. From a report: The three companies -- DeepSeek, Moonshot AI and MiniMax -- prompted Claude more than 16 million times, siphoning information from Anthropic's system to train and improve their own products, Anthropic said in a blog post Monday. Earlier this month, an Anthropic rival, OpenAI, sent a memo to House lawmakers accusing DeepSeek of using the same tactic, called distillation, to mimic OpenAI's products. Anthropic said distillation had legitimate uses -- companies use it to build smaller versions of their own products, for example -- but it could also be used to build competitive products "in a fraction of the time, and at a fraction of the cost." The scale of the different companies' distillation activity varied. DeepSeek engaged in 150,000 interactions with Claude, whereas Moonshot and MiniMax had more than 3.4 million and 13 million, respectively, Anthropic said. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Say Goodbye to the Undersea Cable That Made the Global Internet Possible - The first fiber-optic cable ever laid across an ocean -- TAT-8, a nearly 6,000-kilometer line between the United States, United Kingdom, and France that carried its first traffic on December 14, 1988 -- is now being pulled off the Atlantic seabed after more than two decades of sitting dormant, bound for recycling in South Africa. Subsea Environmental Services, one of only three companies in the world whose entire business is cable recovery and recycling, began the operation last year using its new diesel-electric vessel, the MV Maasvliet, and had already brought 1,012 kilometers of the cable to the Portuguese port of Leixoes by August. TAT-8, short for Trans-Atlantic Telephone 8, was built by AT&T, British Telecom, and France Telecom, and hit full capacity within just 18 months of going live. A fault too expensive to repair took it out of service in 2002. The recovered cable is being shipped to Mertech Marine in South Africa, where it will be broken down into steel, copper, and two types of polyethylene -- all commercially valuable, especially the high-quality copper at a time when the International Energy Agency projects global shortages within a decade. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
PayPal Attracts Takeover Interest After Stock Slump - An anonymous reader shares a report: PayPal, the digital payments pioneer, is attracting takeover interest from potential buyers after a stock slide wiped out almost half of its value, according to people familiar with the matter. The San Jose, California-based company has fielded meetings with banks amid unsolicited interest from suitors, the people said. At least one large rival is looking at the whole company, while some other suitors are only interested in certain PayPal assets, the people said, asking not to be identified because the information is private. Buyer interest in PayPal is still at a preliminary stage and may not lead to a transaction, the people cautioned. Founded in the late 1990s, PayPal was an early mover in the world of digital payments. But the company now finds itself in a rut with its customers increasingly turning to alternative ways to pay for things. PayPal's shares have fallen around 46% in New York trading over the last 12 months, giving the company a market value of about $38.4 billion. Read more of this story at Slashdot.