Latest News
Last updated 02 Mar, 08:23 PM
BBC News
Starmer criticises Trump, saying UK 'does not believe in regime change from skies' - The PM told MPs that Trump had expressed his disagreement with the decision not to get involved in the initial strikes.
Three days in, we still have no idea where this war is heading - It's hard to predict how the war will end - but those fighting know how they would like it to.
What is behind the strategy to take out Iran's leadership? - Security correspondent Gordon Corera looks at what is likely to happen now that joint US and Israeli attacks have taken out some of the Iran's most senior leadership.
In maps: Strikes across Iran and the Middle East - Iranian strikes on targets across the Middle East and Gulf regions continued on Monday after the US and Israel launched strikes on Iran killing the country's supreme leader.
Trump's Iran endgame unclear after mixed messaging on war aims - The US president laid out some of his objectives on Monday, but made no mention of what Iran's future might look like after the war.
The Register
Popular prayer program becomes propaganda pusher after reported Israeli hack - Iranian worshippers got notifications saying 'help has arrived' Imagine your favorite app encouraging you to surrender during a war. That's happening right now in Iran.…
Motorola partners with GrapheneOS for future phones - Don't expect to see compatible hardware before 2027 GrapheneOS is headed to Motorola smartphones in 2027, pending hardware from the Lenovo-owned brand that satisfies the privacy-focused Android fork's requirements.…
US struck Iran with copies of its own drones - Iran's own technology reverse engineered and used against it. The Pentagon has confirmed that US forces struck Iranian targets using weapons that are copies of Iran's own Shahed 136 suicide drones.…
UK Businesses told to brace cyber defenses amid Iran conflict risk - NCSC urges all to review posture as escalating tensions increase risk of indirect digital spillover The UK's cybersecurity agency is warning British organizations to brace for potential digital blowback as the Middle East conflict spills further into the online world.…
Qualcomm, Nvidia ready for 'AI-native' 6G, if only the world knew what it was - Meanwhile, formal 6G specs are still in the works It seems like just yesterday that the 5G rollout started. Now, at Mobile World Congress, major companies are already talking about commercializing 6G. Never mind that binding 6G standards haven't been nailed down yet.…
New Scientist - Home
A bizarre type of black hole could solve three cosmic mysteries in one - Black holes that turn matter into energy could explain dark energy and answer two other cosmic questions. Now, the challenge is to find them
A crisis in cosmology may mean hidden dimensions really exist - Physicists are scrambling to understand why dark energy is weakening. In a surprising twist, we must now reconsider the possibility that our reality contains extra dimensions
The bombshell results that demand a new theory of the universe - Last year, our most detailed map of the universe yet suggested our understanding of dark energy has been wrong for decades. The shock result is reigniting the search for a better cosmic story
Crisis in cosmology: If we’ve got dark energy wrong, what could it be? - This is a New Scientist special package about shock results that have upended cosmology. What do they mean for our models of the universe, and what are the alternative explanations?
Spreading crushed rock on farms could absorb 1 billion tonnes of CO2 - Putting silicate rocks from mine waste on fields could improve crops and limit global warming, but some researchers question where all that rock is going to come from
Hacker News
Motorola announces a partnership with GrapheneOS Foundation - Comments
Show HN: uBlock filter list to blur all Instagram Reels - Comments
First in-utero stem cell therapy for fetal spina bifida repair is safe: study - Comments
New iPad Air, powered by M4 - Comments
Show HN: Govbase – Follow a bill from source text to news bias to social posts - Comments
Slashdot
Microsoft Bans 'Microslop' On Its Discord, Then Locks the Server - Over the weekend, Windows Latest noticed that Microsoft's official Copilot Discord server began automatically blocking the term "Microslop." As shown in a screenshot, any message containing the word is automatically prevented from posting, and users receive a moderation notice explaining that the message includes language deemed inappropriate under the server's rules. From the report: Windows Latest found that sending a message with the word "Microslop" inside the official Copilot Discord server immediately triggers an automated moderation response. The message does not appear publicly in the channel, and instead, only the sender sees the notice stating that the content is blocked by the server because it contains a phrase deemed inappropriate. Of course, the internet rarely leaves things there. Shortly after Windows Latest posted about Copilot Discord server blocking Microslop on X, users began experimenting in the server with variations such as "Microsl0p" using a zero instead of the letter "o." Predictably, those versions slipped past the filter. Keyword moderation has always been something of a cat-and-mouse game, and this isn't any different. What started as a simple keyword filter quickly snowballed into users deliberately testing the restriction and posting variations of the blocked term. Accounts that included "Microslop" in their messages first got banned from messaging again. Not long after, access to parts of the server was restricted, with message history hidden and posting permissions disabled for many users. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Motorola Partners With GrapheneOS - At MWC 2026, Motorola announced a partnership with the GrapheneOS Foundation to bring the hardened, Google-free Android variant to future devices. Until now, the OS had been designed exclusively for Google Pixel phones. "We are thrilled to be partnering with Motorola to bring GrapheneOS's industry-leading privacy and security-focused mobile operating system to their next-generation smartphone," a GrapheneOS statement reads. "This collaboration marks a significant milestone in expanding the reach of GrapheneOS, and we applaud Motorola for taking this meaningful step towards advancing mobile security." GrapheneOS is a privacy and security focused mobile OS with Android app compatibility developed as a non-profit open source project. It's often referred to as the "de-Googled OS" because Google apps are not available by default. However, users can install them via a sandboxed version of Google Play Services. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Editor At 184-Year-Old Ohio Newspaper Pushes To Let AI Draft News Articles - An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Washington Post: The Plain Dealer, Cleveland's largest newspaper, has begun to feature a new byline. On recent articles about an ice carving festival, a medical research discovery and a roaming pack of chicken-slaying dogs, a reporter's name is paired with the words "Advance Local Express Desk." It means: This article was drafted by artificial intelligence. "This article was produced with assistance from AI tools and reviewed by Cleveland.com staff," reads a note at the bottom of each robot-penned piece, differentiating it from those still written primarily by journalists. The disclosure has done little to stem the backlash that caromed across the news industry after the paper's editor, Chris Quinn, published a Feb. 14 column lamenting that a fresh-out-of-college job applicant withdrew from a reporting fellowship when they found out the position included no writing -- just filing notes to an AI writing tool. "Artificial intelligence is not bad for newsrooms. It's the future of them," Quinn wrote, adding that "by removing writing from reporters' workloads, we've effectively freed up an extra workday for them each week." [...] Quinn, for his part, says his paper's use of AI to find, draft and edit stories is a success story that others must emulate if they want to survive. "It's a tool," he said in a phone interview last week. "If AI can do part of our job, then why not let it -- and have people do the part it can't do?" He added that the paper's embrace of technology -- including using AI to write stories summarizing its reporters' podcasts and its readers' letters to the editor -- is already boosting its bottom line, helping it retain staff at a time when other newspapers are shrinking or even shutting down. Just 130 miles east of Cleveland, the 240-year-old Pittsburgh Post-Gazette said in January that it will close its doors this spring. Quinn, who has led the Plain Dealer's newsroom since 2013, said its newsroom has shrunk from some 400 employees in the late 1990s to just 71 today. Over the past three years, Quinn has implemented a suite of AI tools with various purposes: transcribing local government meetings, scraping municipal websites for story leads, cleaning up typos in story drafts, suggesting headlines and helping reporters draft follow-ups to articles they've already written. He said he is particularly pleased with an AI tool that turns podcasts by the paper's reporters into stories for the website, which he said generated more than 10 million page views last year. He has documented those efforts in letters to readers and sought their feedback. But the paper's latest experiment -- using AI to turn reporters' notes into full story drafts -- has aroused indignation online and anxiety within the paper's ranks. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Apple Introduces iPhone 17e With MagSafe and A19 - Apple today announced the iPhone 17e with support for MagSafe and an upgraded A19 chip. The base model also gets a bump to 256GB of storage at $599, and Apple is equipping the device with its new scratch-resistant Ceramic Shield 2 glass that's supposedly 3x more durable than the 16e. Macworld reports: MagSafe would normally mean significantly faster wireless charging speeds too: the 16e is capped at 7.5W, whereas recent iPhones can wirelessly charge using MagSafe at up to 22W or even 25W. Unfortunately the iPhone 17e has not been given access to the full extent of MagSafe's powers in this regard, and has a limit of 15W. That's the same as MagSafe on the iPhones 12 through 15, and remains an improvement on the 16e, but is still disappointing. [...] It was also expected that the 17e would get a new processor, as this is a standard upgrade for almost every refresh of almost every Apple product. The iPhone 16e came with an A18 chip; the 17 has an A19, which, according to Apple, "delivers exceptional performance for everything users do." Of course that depends on the user and their needs, and it's important to point out that, just like last year, Apple has chosen to use "binned" units of the chip in order to save money. Binned chips have failed manufacturing tests in some minor way and don't have the full complement of cores. [...] And although the cameras are still disappointingly few in number -- one on the front and one on the back -- the wording for the portrait mode has been updated from "Portrait mode with Depth Control" (the same as on the iPhone 12) to "Next-generation portraits with Focus and Depth Control" (same as on the iPhone 17). This appears to highlight the fact that you can change the focus point. The 17e is available in white, black, and soft pink starting at $599. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
South Korean Police Lose Seized Crypto By Posting Password Online - South Korean tax authorities lost millions in seized cryptocurrency after publishing high-res photos of Ledger hardware wallets that clearly displayed the wallets' seed phrases, allowing an unknown party to drain the funds. Gizmodo reports: South Korea's National Tax Service seized crypto assets during recent enforcement actions against 124 high-value tax evaders, but now, a large chunk of that crypto cash has been lost. The operation originally resulted in the confiscation of crypto holdings worth about 8.1 billion won, or roughly $5.6 million. However, officials later issued a press release to showcase these efforts in recovering delinquent taxes, and the release included photographs of Ledger hardware wallets taken into custody along with handwritten notes that displayed the wallet seed phrases. Those images attached to the press release turned out to be the critical error. High-resolution photos clearly showed the mnemonic recovery phrases, which serve as the master key for accessing the wallets. This exposure eliminated any protection provided by the offline cold storage on the Ledger devices. Possession of the seed phrase allows complete control, and anyone who knows the phrase can import it into software or another hardware wallet and initiate transfers without the original device. In this case, an unknown individual who saw the photos published by law enforcement first added a small amount of ether to one of the addresses to cover Ethereum network gas fees necessary for outbound transactions. From there, they executed three transfers to move approximately 4 million Pre-Retogeum, or PRTG, tokens. At the time, those tokens carried a value of $4.8 million, but reporting from The Block indicates liquidating that much value from the holdings would have proven difficult due to market dynamics. Read more of this story at Slashdot.