Latest News

Last updated 22 Apr, 10:19 AM

BBC News

UK inflation rate rises to 3.3% in March after Iran war pushes up fuel prices - The figures provide the first official look at the impact of the Iran war on the cost of living in the UK.

PM sends 'chill' through civil service, its union boss says - The 'chill' follows the sacking of lead civil servant at the Foreign Office Sir Olly Robbins by the prime minister.

McDonald's boss on abuse claims: 'I don't want to talk about the past' - A BBC investigation in 2023 heard from more than 100 McDonald's workers in the UK claiming they faced sexual assault, harassment, racism, and bullying

I was left with an £8,000 vet bill when my insurer cancelled my pet policy - Thousands of people have got in touch with BBC Your Voice over concerns about rising pet insurance costs and poor cover.

'Superstar' runners praised for helping exhausted man finish marathon - Two runners go viral for helping carry exhausted man over the finish line.

The Register

Database world trying to build natural language query systems again – this time with LLMs - Text-to-SQL might be useful for analysts and DBAs, but be cautious with general user adoption Over the past few years, database and analytics vendors have hopped on a bandwagon that may take us all to a destination where common data queries are free from the constraints of the specialist query language SQL.…

Forget call centers, local energy prices mean Britain's latest offshoring wave is AI projects - Brit firms look to run tech overseas as govt tries to support 'sovereign' creators One in five UK firms have already moved AI workloads abroad due to high energy costs, in findings likely to alarm a government counting on AI to drive economic growth.…

Oil crisis? What oil crisis? IT spending de-coupled from wider war shock - Gartner sees accelerating growth in IT spending, powered by cloud and AI infrastructure investment A day after the International Energy Agency (IEA) said the US/Israel/Iran war was creating the worst energy crisis ever faced by the ‌world, Gartner increased its growth forecasts for global IT spending by nearly three percentage points.…

Mythos found 271 Firefox flaws – but none a human couldn’t spot - Mozilla CTO says AI means developers finally have a chance to get on top of security The Mozilla Foundation has revealed it tested Anthropic’s bug-finding “Mythos” AI model and feels the results it experienced represent a watershed moment for software defenders.…

Magnificent irony as Meta staff unhappy about running surveillance software on work PCs - Zuck reportedly needs to capture workers’ keystrokes to build AI Meta, the company built on watching everything its billions of users do online so it can keep them clicking on ragebait and targeted ads, is reportedly now installing surveillance software on employees’ work computers.…

New Scientist - Home

If a bird flu pandemic starts, we may have an mRNA vaccine ready - A final-stage trial has started of an mRNA vaccine against the bird flu strain infecting many animals – and occasionally people – worldwide

Titan’s strange plains may be explained by unusual weather - Most of Titan’s surface is oddly flat and smooth, and it may be because it is coated by as much as a metre of fluffy organic material that snowed down from the icy moon’s thick atmosphere

How we discovered the speed limit of arithmetic – and broke it - Some seemingly simple sequences of multiplication and addition grow so quickly that they question the very foundations of mathematics. In doing so, they demand a whole new level of logic

Game theory explains why the US's goals in Iran keep changing - The ongoing conflict around the Strait of Hormuz has become a situation in game theory known as a war of attrition. The maths behind it can help explain what's going on, says Petros Sekeris

We might finally know how to use quantum computers to boost AI - Pushing against years of scepticism, an analysis suggests quantum computers may offer real advantages for running machine learning and similar algorithms in the near future

Hacker News

Windows 9x Subsystem for Linux - Comments

Making RAM at Home [video] - Comments

ChatGPT Images 2.0 - Comments

All your agents are going async - Comments

How the Heck Does GPS Work? - Comments

Slashdot

FBI Looks Into Dead or Missing Scientists Tied To Sensitive US Research - Federal authorities are now reviewing a string of deaths and disappearances involving scientists tied to sensitive U.S. aerospace and nuclear work, though officials have not established any confirmed link between the cases. The FBI says it "is spearheading the effort to look for connections into the missing and deceased scientists," adding that it "is working with the Department of Energy, Department of War, and with our state ... and local law enforcement partners to find answers." The Republican-led House Oversight Committee also announced an investigation into the reports. CNN reports: A nuclear physicist and MIT professor fatally shot outside his Massachusetts residence. A retired Air Force general missing from his New Mexico home. An aerospace engineer who disappeared during a hike in Los Angeles. These are among at least 10 individuals connected to sensitive US nuclear and aerospace research who have died or disappeared in recent years, prompting concerns whether they are connected and fueling speculation online about the possibility of nefarious activity. [...] The Defense Department said only that it would respond to the committee directly, and the Department of Energy referred questions to the White House. In a post on X, NASA said it is "coordinating and cooperating with the relevant agencies" in relation to the scientists. "At this time, nothing related to NASA indicates a national security threat," NASA spokesperson Bethany Stevens said. The cases vary widely in circumstance. Some involve unsolved homicides, while others are missing persons cases with no signs of foul play. In at least two instances, families have pointed to preexisting medical conditions or personal struggles as explanations. Authorities have not established any links between the cases. The White House said last week it is also working with federal agencies to probe any potential links between the deaths and disappearances, with President Donald Trump referring to the matter as "pretty serious stuff." "The United States has thousands of nuclear scientists and nuclear experts," said Rep. James Walkinshaw, a Democrat who also serves on the Oversight Committee. "It's not the kind of nuclear program that potentially a foreign adversary could significantly impact by targeting 10 individuals." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SpaceX Strikes Deal With Coding Startup Cursor For $60 Billion - An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: SpaceX, Elon Musk's rocket and satellite company, said on Tuesday that it had struck a deal with the artificial intelligence start-up Cursor that could result in its acquiring the young company for $60 billion. SpaceX is making the deal just as it prepares to go public in what is likely to be one of the largest initial public offerings ever. In a social media post, SpaceX said the combination with Cursor, which makes code-writing software, would "allow us to build the world's most useful" A.I. models. SpaceX added that the agreement gave it the option "to acquire Cursor later this year for $60 billion or pay $10 billion for our work together." It is unclear if the companies plan to consummate the deal before or after SpaceX's I.P.O., which could happen as early as June. [...] Cursor, which has raised more than $3 billion in funding, was founded in 2022 and made waves as a fast-growing A.I. start-up. It was under pressure in recent months after OpenAI and Anthropic announced competing code-writing products that were embraced by tech companies. Cursor had been in talks to raise funding in recent weeks. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Florida Launches Criminal Investigation Into ChatGPT Over School Shooting - Florida's attorney general has launched a criminal investigation into OpenAI over allegations that the accused gunman in a shooting at Florida State University last year used ChatGPT to help plan the attack. OpenAI says the chatbot is "not responsible for this terrible crime" and only provided factual information available from public sources. NPR reports: The Republican attorney general, James Uthmeier, said at a press conference in Tampa on Tuesday that accused gunman Phoenix Ikner consulted ChatGPT for advice before the shooting, including what type of gun to use, what ammunition went with it, and what time to go to campus to encounter more people, according to an initial review of Ikner's chat logs. "My prosecutors have looked at this and they've told me, if it was a person on the other end of that screen, we would be charging them with murder," Uthmeier said. "We cannot have AI bots that are advising people on how to kill others." Uthmeier's office is issuing subpoenas to OpenAI seeking information about its policies and internal training materials related to user threats of harm and how it cooperates with and reports crimes to law enforcement, dating back to March 2024. At the press conference, Uthmeier acknowledged the investigation is entering into uncharted territory and is uncertain about whether OpenAI has criminal liability. "We are going to look at who knew what, designed what, or should have done what," he said. "And if it is clear that individuals knew that this type of dangerous behavior might take place, that these types of unfortunate, tragic events might take place, and nevertheless still turned to profit, still allowed this business to operate, then people need to be held accountable." [...] Ikner, 21, is facing multiple charges of murder and attempted murder for the April 2025 shooting near the student union on FSU's Tallahassee campus, where he was a student at the time. His trial is set to begin on Oct. 19. According to court filings, more than 200 AI messages have been entered into evidence in the case. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mozilla Uses Anthropic's Mythos To Fix 271 Bugs In Firefox - BrianFagioli writes: Mozilla says it used an early version of Anthropic's Claude Mythos Preview to comb through Firefox's code, and the results were hard to ignore. In Firefox 150, the team fixed 271 vulnerabilities identified during this effort, a number that would have been unthinkable not long ago. Instead of relying only on fuzzing tools or human review, the AI was able to reason through code and surface issues that typically require highly specialized expertise. The bigger implication is less about one release and more about where this is heading. Security has long favored attackers, since they only need to find a single flaw while defenders have to protect everything. If AI can scale vulnerability discovery for defenders, that dynamic could start to shift. It does not mean zero days disappear overnight, but it suggests a future where bugs are found and fixed faster than attackers can weaponize them. "Computers were completely incapable of doing this a few months ago, and now they excel at it," says Mozilla in a blog post. "We have many years of experience picking apart the work of the world's best security researchers, and Mythos Preview is every bit as capable. So far we've found no category or complexity of vulnerability that humans can find that this model can't." The company concluded: "The defects are finite, and we are entering a world where we can finally find them all." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Framework Laptop 13 Pro Is a Major Overhaul For the Modular, Upgradeable Laptop - An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Framework has been selling and shipping its modular, repairable, upgradable Laptop 13 for five years now, and in that time, it has released six distinct versions of its system board, each using fresh versions of Intel and AMD processors (seven versions, if you count this RISC-V one). The laptop around those components has gradually gotten better, too. Over the years, Framework has added higher-resolution screens in both matte and glossy finishes, a slightly larger battery, and other tweaked components that refine the original design. But so far, all of those parts have been totally interchangeable, and the fundamentals of the Laptop 13 design haven't changed much. That changes today with the Framework Laptop 13 Pro, which, despite its name, is less an offshoot of the original Laptop 13 and closer to a ground-up redesign. It includes new Core Ultra Series 3 chips (codenamed Panther Lake), Framework's first touchscreen, a new black aluminum color option, a larger battery, and other significant changes. And while it sacrifices some component compatibility with the original Laptop 13, displays and motherboards remain interchangeable, so Framework Laptop owners can buy the new Core Ultra board and owners of older Framework Laptop boards can pop one into a Pro to benefit from the new battery and screen. At 1.4kg (about 3 pounds), the Laptop 13 Pro is slightly heavier than the Laptop 13's 1.3kg, but it still stacks up well against the 14-inch M5 MacBook Pro (1.55kg, or 3.4 pounds). The Framework Laptop Pro will start at $1,199 for a DIY edition with a Core Ultra 5 325 processor, and no RAM, SSD, or operating system. A prebuilt version with Ubuntu Linux installed will start at $1,499, and Windows 11 will cost another $100 on top of that. A Core Ultra X7 358H version starts at $1,599 for a DIY edition, and a "limited batch" Core Ultra X9 388H version starts at $1,799. A bare motherboard with the Core Ultra 5 325 starts at $449, while a Core Ultra X7 358H board will cost $799. Pre-orders are available now, and begin shipping in June. Read more of this story at Slashdot.