Latest News
Last updated 18 Feb, 09:10 PM
BBC News
Do not give away Diego Garcia, Trump tells UK in fresh attack on Chagos deal - The president's comments come just a day after the US gave its official backing to the UK's Chagos deal.
Teenage girls lured into forced sex by gangs in London, BBC finds - Our investigation reveals gangs from a range of ethnic backgrounds are operating widely in the capital, exploiting girls and young women.
Vinicius: Eight years at Real Madrid, 20 cases of alleged racist abuse - Spanish football expert Guillem Balague details how Vincius Jr has become a global symbol of resistance against discrimination.
Billionaire Lex Wexner tells US lawmakers he was 'naive' and 'conned' by Epstein - Testifying before Congress, the former CEO of Victoria's Secret lingerie brand accused Epstein of stealing "vast sums" of money from his family.
Letter by young Queen Elizabeth II to be auctioned - The letter from Queen Elizabeth II asks if "the birds are well, and the goldfish haven't died".
The Register
ShinyHunters allegedly drove off with 1.7M CarGurus records - Latest in a rash of grab-and-leak data incidents CarGurus allegedly suffered a data breach with 1.7 million corporate records stolen, according to a notorious cybercrime crew that posted the online vehicle marketplace on its leak site on Wednesday.…
Google digs deep to power AI expansion with 150 MW geothermal deal - Plants expected to begin operations as early as 2028 pending approval by state government Datacenter power consumption has surged amid the AI boom, forcing builders to get creative in order to prevent their capex-heavy bit barns from running out of steam. But at least in some parts of the world, the answer to abundant clean energy may be hiding just a few thousand feet below the surface of the earth.…
Copilot spills the beans, summarizing emails it's not supposed to read - Data Loss Prevention? Yeah, about that... The bot couldn't keep its prying eyes away. Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat has been summarizing emails labeled “confidential” even when data loss prevention policies were configured to prevent it.…
DARPA's autonomous missile-firing missile advances toward flight tests - Yo dawg, we heard you like missiles, so we put some missiles in your missile so you can boom while you zoom It's taken about five years, but DARPA's missile-launching missile has become the government's latest experimental X-plane and is advancing toward flight testing.…
Fraudster hacked hotel system, paid 1 cent for luxury rooms, Spanish cops say - 'First time we have detected a crime using this method,' cops say Spanish police arrested a hacker who allegedly manipulated a hotel booking website, allowing him to pay one cent for luxury hotel stays. He also raided the mini-bars and didn't settle some of those tabs, police say.…
New Scientist - Home
More dog breeds found to have high risk of breathing condition - An assessment of nearly 900 dogs has identified 12 breeds prone to brachycephalic obstructive airway syndrome, which can affect dogs' ability to sleep and exercise
Paediatricians’ blood used to make new treatments for RSV and colds - Antibodies harvested from the blood of paediatricians are up to 25 times better at protecting against the common respiratory infection RSV than existing antibody therapies, and are now being developed as preventative treatments
Why some people cannot move on from the death of a loved one - Prolonged grief disorder affects around 1 in 20 people, and we're starting to understand the neuroscience behind it
Data centres could store information in glass for thousands of years - Microsoft researchers have developed a technology that writes data into glass with lasers, raising the prospect of robotic libraries full of glass tablets packed with data
Postpartum depression in dads is common – we can now spot and treat it - Fathers may get postpartum depression at a similar rate to mothers, but it’s often overlooked. At last, the way we diagnose and treat it is improving, for the good of the whole family
Hacker News
Cosmologically Unique IDs - Comments
The political effects of X's feed algorithm - Comments
Tailscale Peer Relays is now generally available - Comments
DNS-Persist-01: A New Model for DNS-Based Challenge Validation - Comments
Zero-day CSS: CVE-2026-2441 exists in the wild - Comments
Slashdot
Study of 12,000 EU Firms Finds AI's Productivity Gains Are Real - A study of more than 12,000 European firms found that AI adoption causally increases labour productivity by 4% on average across the EU, and that it does so without reducing employment in the short run. Researchers from the Bank for International Settlements and the European Investment Bank used an instrumental variable strategy that matched EU firms to comparable US firms by sector, size, investment intensity and other characteristics, then used the AI adoption rates of those US counterparts as a proxy for exogenous AI exposure among European firms. The productivity gains, however, skewed heavily toward medium and large companies. Among large firms, 45% had deployed AI, compared to just 24% of small firms. The study also found that complementary investments mattered enormously: an extra percentage point of spending on workforce training amplified AI's productivity effect by 5.9%, and an extra point on software and data infrastructure added 2.4%. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Ohio Newspaper Removes Writing From Reporters' Jobs, Hands It To an 'AI Rewrite Specialist' - Cleveland.com, the digital arm of Ohio's Plain Dealer newspaper, has removed writing from the workloads of certain reporters and handed that job to what editor Chris Quinn calls an "AI rewrite specialist" who turns reporter-gathered material into article drafts. The reporters on these beats -- covering Lorain, Lake, Geauga, and most recently Medina County -- are assigned entirely to reporting, spending their time on in-person interviews and meeting sources for coffee. Editors review the AI-produced drafts and reporters get the final say before publication. Quinn says the arrangement has effectively freed up an extra workday per week for each reporter. The newsroom adopted this model last year to expand local coverage into counties it could no longer staff with full teams, and Quinn described the setup in a February 14 letter after a college journalism student withdrew from a reporting role over the newsroom's use of AI. Quinn blamed journalism schools for the student's reaction, saying professors have repeatedly told students that AI is bad. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Andrew Yang Warns AI Will Displace Millions of White-Collar Workers Within 18 Months - Andrew Yang, the former presidential candidate and longtime Universal Basic Income advocate, published a blog post this week warning that AI is about to displace millions of white-collar workers in the U.S. over the next 12 to 18 months, a wave he has taken to calling "the Fuckening." Yang cited a conversation with the CEO of a publicly traded tech company who said the firm is cutting 15% of its workforce now and plans another 20% cut in two years, followed by yet another 20% two years after that. The U.S. currently has about 70 million white-collar workers, and Yang expects that number to fall by 20 to 50% over the next several years. Underemployment among recent college graduates has already hit 52%, and only 30% of graduating seniors have landed a job in their field. Yang's proposed remedy remains the same one he ran on in 2020: Universal Basic Income. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Linus Torvalds on How Linux Went From One-Man Show To Group Effort - Linus Torvalds has told The Register how Linux went from a solo hobby project on a single 386 PC in Helsinki to a genuinely collaborative effort, and the path involved crowdsourced checks, an FTP mirror at MIT, and a licensing decision that opened the floodgates. Torvalds released the first public snapshot, Linux 0.02, on October 5, 1991, on a Finnish FTP server -- about 10,000 lines of code that he had cross-compiled under Minix. He originally wanted to call it "Freax," but his friend Ari Lemmke, who set up the server, named the directory "Linux" instead. Early contributor Theodore Ts'o set up the first North American mirror on his VAXstation at MIT, since the sole 64 kbps link between Finland and the US made downloads painful. That mirror gave developers on this side of the Atlantic their first practical access to the kernel. Another early developer, Dirk Hohndel, recalled that Torvalds initially threw away incoming patches and reimplemented them from scratch -- a habit he eventually dropped because it did not scale. When Torvalds could not afford to upgrade his underpowered 386, developer H. Peter Anvin collected checks from contributors through his university mailbox and wired the funds to Finland, covering the international banking fees himself. Torvalds got a 486DX/2. In 1992, he moved the kernel to the GPL, and the first full distributions appeared in 1992-1993, turning Linux from a kernel into installable systems. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Vermont EV Buses Prove Unreliable For Transportation This Winter - An anonymous reader writes: Electric buses are proving unreliable this winter for Vermont's Green Mountain Transit, as it needs to be over 41 degrees for the buses to charge, but due to a battery recall the buses are a fire hazard and can't be charged in a garage. Spokesman for energy workers advocacy group Power the Future Larry Behrens told the Center Square: "Taxpayers were sold an $8 million 'solution' that can't operate in cold weather when the home for these buses is in New England." "We're beyond the point where this looks like incompetence and starts to smell like fraud," Behrens said. "When government rushes money out the door to satisfy green mandates, basic questions about performance, safety, and value for taxpayers are always pushed aside," Behrens said. "Americans deserve to know who approved this purchase and why the red flags were ignored." General manager at Green Mountain Transit (GMT) Clayton Clark told The Center Square that "the federal government provides public transit agencies with new buses through a competitive grant application process, and success is not a given." Read more of this story at Slashdot.