Latest News
Last updated 14 Apr, 08:11 PM
BBC News
US Treasury secretary says short-term economic pain worth long-term security - Scott Bessent said a "small bit of economic pain" was worth it to eliminate the threat of Iranian strikes on Western capitals.
UK faces biggest hit to growth from Iran war of major economies, IMF says - The financial body cuts its growth forecast for the UK and warns the war threatens to throw the global economy "off course".
As former Nato chief warns about defence spending, how much has the military shrunk? - BBC Verify looks at the size of the UK military after Lord Robertson criticises the government over defence spending.
Households could get free electricity for doing washing on sunny weekends - Providers can encourage people to use energy when "weather conditions result in excess supply".
Burglars who used Rightmove to target homes and steal £1m of valuables jailed - The gang gloated about their crimes while two of them referred to themselves as Bonnie and Clyde.
The Register
Nvidia slaps forehead: I know what quantum is missing - it's AI! - One error in every thousand operations is one too many Quantum computers promise major speedups for problems in materials science, logistics, and financial modeling, but first they need to be made reliable, something Nvidia believes its AI models can help with. When you've got a GPU hammer, every problem starts to look like an AI nail. …
Oracle taps Bloom for 2.8 GW of fuel cells to keep datacenter binge going - With grid hookups slow and turbines scarce, on-site power is starting to look less optional Bloom Energy says it has an expanded remit from Oracle to provide the energy for its US datacenter buildout plans with up to 2.8 GW of fuel cell systems.…
California ghost-gun bill wants 3D printers to play cop, EFF says - Proposed law could lock down open source tools and give vendors fresh reasons to inspect print files California's proposed legislation to put the burden of blocking 3D-printed firearms onto printer manufacturers could effectively sideline open source tools and create new surveillance concerns, digital rights activists argue.…
GitHub invokes spirit of Phabricator with preview of Stacked PRs - Long-familiar workflow lets developers split big code changes into smaller, easier-to-review chunks GitHub has unveiled Stacked PRs, a new feature aimed at making large pull requests easier to review, manage, and move through the pipeline faster.…
Physicist reckons two-button calculator can do all elementary math - Paper says a single binary operator could replace a lot of scientific heavy lifting Every now and then, a researcher comes up with something that sounds either wrong or unoriginal to outsiders – yet carries just enough of a chance of being correct, novel, and consequential to demand a closer look.…
New Scientist - Home
Antioxidant in mushrooms may target uterus cells to ease period pain - L-ergothioneine, an antioxidant found in certain mushrooms, is thought to neutralise damaging molecules in uterine cells that may contribute to period pain
How autoimmune conditions can unexpectedly drive mental illness - Antibodies mistakenly attacking the brain are linked with conditions including schizophrenia, dementia and OCD, prompting a revolution in how we think about mental health conditions
Quantum computers could usher in a crisis worse than Y2K - The day when a quantum computer manages to break common encryption, or Q-Day, is fast approaching, and the world is not close to being ready
From autism to migraines, birth order may have wide-reaching effects - A study of more than 10 million siblings suggests that firstborns are more likely to be autistic and have allergies, while conditions like migraine and shingles tend to affect their younger sibling
A key solution to climate change isn't happening – and that's good - Removing CO2 from the atmosphere by capturing the carbon from burning biomass is supposed to save the planet, but it looks like the flagship project will never happen
Hacker News
I wrote to Flock's privacy contact to opt out of their domestic spying program - Comments
YouTube now world's largest media company, topping Disney - Comments
Rare concert recordings are landing on the Internet Archive - Comments
Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times - Comments
Claude Code Routines - Comments
Slashdot
Audit Finds Google, Microsoft, and Meta Still Tracking Users After Opt-Out - alternative_right shares a report from 404 Media: An independent privacy audit of Microsoft, Meta, and Google web traffic in California found that the companies may be violating state regulations and racking up billions in fines. According to the audit from privacy search engine webXray, 55 percent of the sites it checked set ad cookies in a user's browser even if they opted out of tracking. Each company disputed or took issue with the research, with Google saying it was based on a "fundamental misunderstanding" of how its product works. The webXray California Privacy Audit viewed web traffic on more than 7,000 popular websites in California in the month of March and found that most tech companies ignore when a user asks to opt-out of cookie tracking. California has stringent and well defined privacy legislation thanks to its California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) which allows users to, among other things, opt out of the sale of their personal information. There's a system called Global Privacy Control (GPC), which includes a browser extension that indicates to a website when a user wants to opt out of tracking. According to the webXray audit, Google failed to let users opt out 87 percent of the time. "Google's failure to honor the GPC opt-out signal is easy to find in network traffic. When a browser using GPC connects to Google's servers it encodes the opt-out signal by sending the code 'sec-gpc: 1.' This means Google should not return cookies," the audit said. "However, when Google's server responds to the network request with the opt-out it explicitly responds with a command to create an advertising cookie named IDE using the 'set-cookie' command. This non-compliance is easy to spot, hiding in plain sight." The audit said that Microsoft fails to opt out users in the same way and has a failure rate of 50 percent in the web traffic webXray viewed. Meta's failure rate was 69 percent and a bit more comprehensive. "Meta instructs publishers to install the following tracking code on their websites. The code contains no check for globally standard opt-out signals -- it loads unconditionally, fires a tracking event, and sets a cookie regardless of the consumer's privacy preferences," the audit said. It showed a copy of Meta's tracking data which contains no GPC check at all. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Chrome Now Lets You Turn AI Prompts Into Repeatable 'Skills' - Google is rolling out a Chrome feature called "Skills" that lets users save Gemini prompts as reusable one-click workflows they can run across multiple tabs. The feature also includes preset Skills from Google. It's launching first for Chrome desktop users set to US English. The Verge reports: Once you have access to the feature, it can be managed by typing a forward slash ( / ) in Gemini and clicking the compass icon. AI prompts can be saved as Skills directly from your Gemini chat history on desktop, where they'll then be available to reuse on any other desktop devices that are signed into the same Google account on Chrome. The aim is to spare Chrome users from having to manually retype frequently used Gemini prompts or having to copy and paste them over from a saved list. Some of the Skills made by early testers include commands for calculating the nutritional information of online recipes and creating a side-by-side comparison of product specifications while shopping across multiple tabs, according to Google. The company is also launching a library of preset Skills that you can save and use instead of making your own. These ready-to-use Skills can also be customized to better suit your needs, providing a starting point without requiring you to create your own from scratch. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Thousands of Rare Concert Recordings Are Landing On the Internet Archive - A Chicago concert superfan Aadam Jacobs who has recorded more than 10,000 shows since the 1980s is working with Internet Archive volunteers to digitize the collection before the cassettes deteriorate. "So far, about 2,500 of these tapes have been posted on the Internet Archive, including some rare gems like a Nirvana performance from 1989," reports TechCrunch. From the report: For many of these recordings, Jacobs was using pretty mediocre equipment, but the volunteer audio engineers working with the Internet Archive have made these tapes sound great. One volunteer, Brian Emerick, drives to Jacobs' house once a month to pick up more boxes of tapes -- he has to use anachronistic cassette decks to play the tapes, which get converted into digital files. From there, other volunteers clean up, organize, and label the recordings, even tracking down song names from forgotten punk bands. The archive is available here. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Social Media Platforms Need To Stop Never-Ending Scrolling, UK's Starmer Says - UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer said social media platforms should remove addictive infinite-scroll features for young users as Britain considers new child-safety measures. "We're consulting on whether there should be a ban for under 16s," Starmer told BBC Radio. "But I think equally important, the addictive scrolling mechanisms are really problematic to my mind. They need to go." Reuters reports: Britain, like other countries, is considering restricting access to social media for children and it is testing bans, curfews and app time limits to see how they impact sleep, family life and schoolwork. Social media companies had designed algorithms that were intended to encourage addictive behavior, and parents were asking the government to intervene, Starmer said. [...] More than 45,000 people had already responded to its consultation on children's online safety, the UK government said, adding that there was still time to contribute before a deadline of May 26. "We want to hear from mums and dads who are worried about the amount of time their children spend online and what they are viewing," Technology Secretary Liz Kendall said on Monday. "We want to hear from teenagers who know better than anyone what it is like to grow up in the age of social media. And we want to hear from families about their views on curfews, AI chatbots and addictive features." Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Google Faces Mass Arbitration By Advertisers Seeking Billions - An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Alphabet's Google is facing billions of dollars in potential damage claims as part of mass arbitration tied to the company's online search and advertising technology businesses, which courts have ruled were illegal monopolies. Advertisers are banding together to seek payouts through mass arbitration proceedings. While many companies that displayed ads purchased through Google -- including USA Today Co. and Advance Publications -- have sued for damages since the rulings in 2024, advertiser contracts with the search giant require mandatory arbitration over legal disputes. In arbitration, legal disputes are handled by a mediator, a process that tends to favor companies in individual claims. Mass arbitration -- where 25 or more claims against the same company are pooled together -- have become more common and provide a greater likelihood of settlement awards for claimants. Ashley Keller, a Chicago lawyer whose firm has handled mass arbitrations against DoorDash, Postmates and TurboTax-maker Intuit, said he's already signed up a "significant number" of advertisers to participate in claims against Google. The first of those are expected to be filed this week. "Two federal judges have already adjudicated Google to be a monopolist," Keller said in an interview with Bloomberg. "It seems sensible to seek redress." Keller, who is also representing Texas and other states in a lawsuit against Google for monopolization of advertising technology, estimates potential claims for online search and display ads could reach $218 billion or more, based on calculations from an economist his firm has hired. Similar mass arbitrations have lasted 12 to 24 months between the filing of claims and resolution, he said. "Given the nature of these matters, we cannot estimate a possible loss," Google said in a recent corporate filing. "We believe we have strong arguments against these open claims and will defend ourselves vigorously." Read more of this story at Slashdot.