Latest News

Last updated 12 Apr, 06:09 PM

BBC News

After Iran talks falter, the big question is what happens next? - Twenty-one hours was not enough to end 47 years of hostility between Iran and the US, writes the BBC's Lyse Doucet.

Woman killed in dog attack at house named - Police say the seized dog - a family pet - is believed to be a Lurcher cross.

Evita actress Rachel Zegler among stars on red carpet for Olivier Awards - Stage stars posed for pictures ahead of a night of celebration for UK theatre at the Royal Albert Hall.

Dan Walker to appear at tribunal as ex co-host brings bullying claim - ITN, which is also named as a respondent to Claudia-Liza Vanderpuije' case, said it is "denied in full".

At least 30 feared dead in crush at Haitian tourist site - The incident occurred at a "tourist event attended by many young people", Haiti's prime minister says.

The Register

I vibe coded a feed reading web app. It was enlightening and uncomfortable - AI-assisted software development is transforming the industry, but you already knew that Vibe coding works. I wish it didn't. But it does, well enough. And barring some revolution that overturns the new world disorder, machine learning cannot be undone.…

Growing void between enterprise and frontier AI puts open weights models in the spotlight - Most customers don't need the biggest baddest models, just ones that work, are cheap, and won't pirate their proprietary data FEATURE Spring has sprung and that means another wave of open weights AI models from the likes of Google, Microsoft, Alibaba, and Nvidia. But this time feels a bit different.…

Apple update looks like Czech mate for locked-out iPhone user - Lock-screen keyboard no longer accepts háček in student's alphanumeric passcode A university student in the US is in data limbo after Apple removed a character from its Czech keyboard, preventing him from entering his iPhone passcode.…

How Salesforce and ServiceNow are squaring off in the battle for the helpdesk - Benioff banks on user engagement while McDermott wants to govern AI agents FEATURE Salesforce CEO and chief “SaaSquatch” Mark Benioff boasted about the wins his company's ITSM product had last quarter in the terms a proud dad uses to talk about the art work his kids taped to the refrigerator.…

Two different attackers poisoned popular open source tools - and showed us the future of supply chain compromise - Time to start dropping SBOMs FEATURE Two supply chain attacks in March infected open source tools with malware and used this access to steal secrets from tens of thousands – if not more – organizations. We won't know the full blast radius for months.…

New Scientist - Home

We're solving the fundamental mystery of how reality is glued together - For decades, scientists have tried and failed to explain how the force that binds the heart of atoms together really works. But new mathematical tools are finally prising the problem open

The invisibility cloak inventor now has better tricks up his sleeve - John Pendry is known for creating an invisibility cloak. Twenty years on, he has used the same principles to fashion an even more powerful kind of metamaterial that can teach us about the wild frontiers of physics

Two excellent new sci-fi novels tackle robots in very different ways - Luminous by Silvia Park and Ode to the Half-Broken by Suzanne Palmer are both thoughtful and well-written science fiction novels, featuring robots in richly realised worlds. But there the similarities end, says Emily H. Wilson

I don’t see images in my head. Can training give me a mind’s eye? - Training programmes for people with aphantasia – the inability to create mental images – are challenging neuroscientists' understanding of how we create thoughts

NASA’s Artemis II mission was a historic success - The astronauts of the Artemis II mission around the moon have made it home safely to Earth, marking the end of a triumphant mission and the beginning of a longer road to stay on the moon

Hacker News

Bring Back Idiomatic Design - Comments

Show HN: boringBar – a taskbar-style dock replacement for macOS - Comments

I gave every train in New York an instrument - Comments

Show HN: Oberon System 3 runs natively on Raspberry Pi 3 (with ready SD card) - Comments

Seven countries now generate 100% of their electricity from renewable energy - Comments

Slashdot

Botched IT Upgrade Ended Liquor Sales for the Entire State of Mississippi - Mississippi has one warehouse — run by a contractor — that sells all the liquor for the entire state of 2.9 million people. "If a restaurant or store anywhere in Mississippi wanted a bottle of Jim Beam, they had to order it from the wholesale warehouse," reports the Washington Post. But then Mississippi's warehouse-managing contractor implemented a new computer system that wasn't compatible with the state's delivery system (like they'd promised it would be back in 2023). And then things got even worse... "The problem, business owners allege, is that the company tore out the conveyor belts but didn't hire humans to replace them." In February a state Revenue Department commissioner told lawmakers the state was hiring temporary replacement workers, but in the five weeks through March 29th they'd only managed to reduce "pending" orders by 21.7%, from 218,851 down to 171,190, according to stats from Mississippi Today. At least four Mississippi businesses are now suing the warehouse operator "claiming breach of contract and harm to their business." So what's it like in a state suddenly running dry? The Washington Post reports: Willie the one-eyed skeleton is dressed for Cinco de Mayo, but the liquor store where Willie sits ran out of Jose Cuervo months ago. Arrow Wine and Spirits is also out of Tito's and Burnett's vodka, Franzia boxed wine, Jack Daniels, and every kind of premixed margarita... Restaurants in Jackson had no wine on Valentine's Day, and bars on the Gulf Coast ran dry before Mardi Gras. At least five liquor shops have closed, and if cheap pints don't hit the corner stores soon, many of them will, too... [A]s both the state and its businesses lose millions in revenue, many say they see no real end to the crisis. Nearly 174,000 cases of alcohol are sitting in a warehouse north of Jackson, but no one seems to know how to get them out the door... Even the shops that have received deliveries say they often get the wrong thing — Jell-O shots, for instance, that should have been small-batch Norwegian gin... At Willie the one-eyed skeleton's liquor store they'd previously made 300 to 400 sales a day, according to the article, but last week had 34 customers. And Mississippi is one of 17 U.S. states requiring liquor stores to buy their liquor from distribution centers controlled by the state's Department of Revenue... Mississippi Today points out that while some want the state to finally privatize liquor distribution, "The state collects around $120 million a year in taxes on alcohol." Plus the state has already authorized "borrowing $95 million to construct a new warehouse, set to begin operations in 2027..." Thanks to Slashdot reader jrnvk for sharing the news. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Neuroscientist' AI-Powered Startup AIms To Transform Human Cognition With Perfect, Infinite Memory - Bloomberg describes him as a "former Harvard Medical School professor whose research has focused on the intersection of AI and neuroscience." "For the past 20 years, I studied how the human brain stores and retrieves memories," Kreiman writes on LinkedIn. And now "My co-founder Spandan Madan and I built a new algorithm to endow humans with perfect and infinite memory." Engramme connects to your **memorome**, i.e., entire digital life. Large Memory Models work in the same way that your brain encodes and retrieves information. Then memories are recalled automatically — no searching, no prompting, no hallucinations. [The startup's web site promises "omniscient AI to augment human cognition."] We have built the memory layer for EVERY app. Read our manifesto about augmenting human cognition. ["We are not just building software; we are enabling a complete transformation of human cognition. When the friction disappears between needing a piece of information and recalling it, the nature of thought itself changes. This synergy between biological intuition and digital precision will be the most disruptive force in modern history, fundamentally reshaping every profession... We are dedicated to creating a world where everyone has the power to remember everything they have ever learned, seen, or felt "] Welcome to a new future where you can remember everything. This is the MEMORY SINGULARITY: after 300,000 years, this is the moment that humans stop forgetting. Bloomberg reports that the startup (spun out of a lab at Harvard) is "in talks with investors to raise about $100 million, according to people familiar with the matter." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

DNA-Level Encryption Developed by Researchers to Protect the Secrets of Bioengineered Cells - The biotech industry's engineered cells could become an $8 trillion market by 2035, notes Phys.org. But how do you keep them from being stolen? Their article notes "an uptick in the theft and smuggling of high-value biological materials, including specially engineered cells." In Science Advances, a team of U.S. researchers present a new approach to genetically securing precious biological material. They created a genetic combination lock in which the locking or encryption process scrambled the DNA of a cell so that its important instructions were non-functional and couldn't be easily read or used. The unlocking, or decryption, process involves adding a series of chemicals in a precise order over time — like entering a password — to activate recombinases, which then unscramble the DNA to their original, functional form... They created a biological keypad with nine distinct chemicals, each acting as a one-digit input. By using the same chemicals in pairs to form two-digit inputs, where two chemicals must be present simultaneously to activate a sensor, they expanded the keypad to 45 possible chemical inputs without introducing any new chemicals. They also added safety penalties — if someone tampers with the system, toxins are released — making it extremely unlikely for an unauthorized person to access the cells. "The researchers conducted an ethical hacking exercise on the test lock and found that random guessing yielded a 0.2% success rate, remarkably close to the theoretical target of 0.1%." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Greg Kroah-Hartman Tests New 'Clanker T1000' Fuzzing Tool for Linux Patches - The word clanker — a disparaging term for AI and robots — "has made its way into the Linux kernel," reports the blog It's FOSS "thanks to Greg Kroah-Hartman, the Linux stable kernel maintainer and the closest thing the project has to a second-in-command." He's been quietly running what looks like an AI-assisted fuzzing tool on the kernel that lives in a branch called "clanker" on his working kernel tree. It began with the ksmbd and SMB code. Kroah-Hartman filed a three-patch series after running his new tooling against it, describing the motivation quite simply. ["They pass my very limited testing here," he wrote, "but please don't trust them at all and verify that I'm not just making this all up before accepting them."] Kroah-Hartman picked that code because it was easy to set up and test locally with virtual machines. "Beyond those initial SMB/KSMBD patches, there have been a flow of other Linux kernel patches touching USB, HID, F2FS, LoongArch, WiFi, LEDs, and more," Phoronix wrote Tuesday, "that were done by Greg Kroah-Hartman in the past 48 hours.... Those patches in the "Clanker" branch all note as part of the Git tag: "Assisted-by: gregkh_clanker_t1000" The T1000 presumably in reference to the Terminator T-1000. It's FOSS emphasizes that "What Kroah-Hartman appears to be doing here is not having AI write kernel code. The fuzzer surfaces potential bugs; a human with decades of kernel experience reviews them, writes the actual fixes, and takes responsibility for what gets submitted." Linus has been thinking about this too. Speaking at Open Source Summit Japan last year, Linus Torvalds said the upcoming Linux Kernel Maintainer Summit will address "expanding our tooling and our policies when it comes to using AI for tooling." He also mentioned running an internal AI experiment where the tool reviewed a merge he had objected to. The AI not only agreed with his objections but found additional issues to fix. Linus called that a good sign, while asserting that he is "much less interested in AI for writing code" and more interested in AI as a tool for maintenance, patch checking, and code review. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Crypto Billionaire Pardoned In Prison By Trump Just Wrote a Memoir - Forbes estimates he's worth roughly $110 billion, "placing him ahead of Bill Gates." And now Changpeng Zhao, the 49-year-old billionaire founder of Binance, "has written a memoir..." It arrives with the unmistakable timing of a man determined to tell the world his version of his meteoric crypto rise and fall, and foreshadow his comeback. The book, Freedom of Money: A Memoir of Protecting Users, Resilience, and the Founding of Binance, runs 364 pages, self-published in English and Chinese.... Zhao also recounts Binance's long battle with U.S. regulators, the company's record $4.3 billion settlement for fostering unscrupulous money launderers, his four-month prison sentence in California, where he says he began writing the book, and his recent pardon by President Trump... In Zhao's telling, the case brought by multiple U.S. agencies was less about what Binance had done than about what it had become... "It didn't make sense to me, or any of my lawyers. Other than the fact that we were the biggest in the industry." The U.S. government alleged something more specific: that Binance failed to implement programs to prevent or report suspicious transactions — including those tied to Hamas's Al-Qassam Brigades, Al Qaeda, and ISIS — while also processing trades between U.S. users and those in sanctioned jurisdictions like Iran, North Korea, and Syria. In total, regulators alleged the exchange willfully failed to report more than 100,000 suspicious transactions, including those involving terrorist organizations, ransomware attackers, child sexual exploitation material, frauds and scams... The final settlement amount — $4.3 billion, split across the Department of Justice, the Department of the Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, the Office of Foreign Assets Control and the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission — was the largest corporate penalty in the history of nearly each agency involved. Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said at the time of the announcement: "Binance became the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange in part because of the crimes it committed." The prison passages are among the most vivid in the book. Zhao says he was worried about extortion because the media had reported he was the richest person in U.S. prison history, but then realized no one read the WSJ or Bloomberg or recognized him. Zhao also writes about the food, the routines and the specific indignity of confinement, including sharing a cell with a man serving 30 years for killing two people... Writes Zhao of his cellmate, "Soon, I discovered that the most lethal thing about him wasn't his murder conviction, it was his snoring. He snored more loudly than thunder strikes, the sound of which rose even above the constant toilet flushings." Binance at one point held a roughly 20% stake in Sam Bankman-Fried's FTX and about $580 million in FTT tokens, the article points out. "As FTX neared collapse in late 2022, Zhao writes, Sam Bankman-Fried called to ask for a couple of billion dollars 'nonchalantly, as if he was asking for a bologna sandwich.' "Some believe that Binance's brief show of interest in acquiring FTX, followed by its abrupt withdrawal from the deal, hastened FTX's spiral into bankruptcy..." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader destinyland for sharing the article. Read more of this story at Slashdot.