Latest News

Last updated 13 Feb, 09:04 PM

BBC News

Two jailed over plot to attack Jewish community - Walid Saadaoui and Amar Hussein planned to carry out an "Isis-inspired plot", a court hears.

Watch: How Andrew's BBC interview compares to what Epstein emails tell us now - Following the latest release of the Epstein files, claims made by the then Prince Andrew in 2019 are under fresh scrutiny.

Palestine Action ban ruled unlawful but group remains proscribed for now - Three judges rule against the Home Office in a massive blow to the government, but say the ban must remain until a further hearing.

Boxers, dancers and weightlifters - the war dead pictured on banned Ukrainian slider's helmet - Vladyslav Heraskevych's helmet depicts fellow athletes who have been killed since Russia's full-scale invasion of his country.

US politicians urge Mandelson to give evidence over Epstein - Lord Mandelson has previously expressed his regret for his continued association with Jeffrey Epstein.

The Register

Attackers finally get around to exploiting critical Microsoft bug from 2024 - As if admins haven't had enough to do this week Ignore patches at your own risk. According to Uncle Sam, a SQL injection flaw in Microsoft Configuration Manager patched in October 2024 is now being actively exploited, exposing unpatched businesses and government agencies to attack.…

Trump's Genesis Mission gets its first set of 26 sure-to-succeed objectives - DoE bets AI can speed fusion, unlock decades of nuclear data, and probe fundamental physics The Trump administration has outlined the first 26 goals for its project to inject AI into the government's scientific research, and everything from securing critical minerals to discovering a unified theory of physics is on the table. …

AMD climbs in desktop and server CPUs while Intel battles supply squeeze - Q4 figures reveal shifting market share across PCs and cloud infrastructure Intel continues to lose market share to rival AMD across server, desktop, and mobile processors, and this has been noticeable in PCs thanks to supply constraints on Chipzilla's processors.…

Broadband rollouts feel the burn from AI memory frenzy - Prices for router and set-top boxes up nearly sevenfold, squeezing telcos and raising deployment costs Prices for memory used in routers and set-top boxes are surging nearly sevenfold thanks to AI, raising fresh fears that the industry's silicon binge could leave telcos scrambling to get customers online.…

Misconfigured AI could trigger the next national infrastructure meltdown - Rapid rollout into cyber-physical systems raises outage risk, Gartner warns The next blackout to plunge a G20 nation into chaos might not come courtesy of cybercriminals or bad weather, but from an AI system tripping over its own shoelaces.…

New Scientist - Home

These 5 diets could add years to your life even if you have bad genes - Five dietary patterns that involve eating lots of plants have been linked with living up to three years longer, even among people who are genetically predisposed to have a shorter life

World’s oldest cold virus found in 18th-century woman's lungs - Finding rhinoviruses, which cause the common cold, in preserved medical specimens and analysing their RNA genome could let us trace the evolution of human illness

Huge hot blobs inside Earth may have made its magnetic field wonky - Simulations suggest that two enormous masses of hot rock have been involved in generating Earth’s magnetic field and giving it an irregular shape

Accidental discovery hints at mystery structures within our brain - Scientists may have stumbled across a network of vessels in the brain that helps clear out waste fluid – a discovery that could "represent a paradigm shift in our understanding of all neurodegenerative diseases"

First ever inhalable gene therapy for cancer gets fast-tracked by FDA - A gene therapy that patients breathe in has been found to shrink lung tumours by inserting immune-boosting genes into surrounding cells

Hacker News

GPT-5.2 derives a new result in theoretical physics - Comments

Apple, fix my keyboard before the timer ends or I'm leaving iPhone - Comments

Monosketch - Comments

Sandwich Bill of Materials - Comments

Show HN: Skill that lets Claude Code/Codex spin up VMs and GPUs - Comments

Slashdot

Google Warns EU Risks Undermining Own Competitiveness With Tech Sovereignty Push - Europe risks undermining its own competitiveness drive by restricting access to foreign technology, Google's president of global affairs and chief legal officer Kent Walker told the Financial Times, as Brussels accelerates efforts to reduce reliance on U.S. tech giants. Walker said the EU faces a "competitive paradox" as it seeks to spur growth while restricting the technologies needed to achieve that goal. He warned against erecting walls that make it harder to use some of the best technology in the world, especially as it advances quickly. EU leaders gathered Thursday for a summit in Belgium focused on increasing European competitiveness in a more volatile global economy. Europe's digital sovereignty push gained momentum in recent months, driven by fears that President Donald Trump's foreign policy could force a tech decoupling. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Spotify Says Its Best Developers Haven't Written a Line of Code Since December, Thanks To AI - Spotify's best developers have stopped writing code manually since December and now rely on an internal AI system called Honk that enables remote, real-time code deployment through Claude Code, the company's co-CEO Gustav Soderstrom said during a fourth-quarter earnings call this week. Engineers can fix bugs or add features to the iOS app from Slack on their phones during their morning commute and receive a new version of the app pushed to Slack before arriving at the office. The system has helped Spotify ship more than 50 new features throughout 2025, including AI-powered Prompted Playlists, Page Match for audiobooks, and About This Song. Soderstrom credited the system with speeding up coding and deployment tremendously and called it "just the beginning" for AI development at Spotify. The company is building a unique music dataset that differs from factual resources like Wikipedia because music-related questions often lack single correct answers -- workout music preferences vary from American hip-hop to Scandinavian heavy metal. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

FTC Ratchets Up Microsoft Probe, Queries Rivals on Cloud, AI - The US Federal Trade Commission is accelerating scrutiny of Microsoft as part of an ongoing probe into whether the company illegally monopolizes large swaths of the enterprise computing market with its cloud software and AI offerings, including Copilot. From a report: The agency has issued civil investigative demands in recent weeks to companies that compete with Microsoft in the business software and cloud computing markets, according to people familiar with the matter. The demands feature an array of questions on Microsoft's licensing and other business practices, according to the people, who were granted anonymity to discuss a confidential investigation. With the demands, which are effectively like civil subpoenas, the FTC is seeking evidence that Microsoft makes it harder for customers to use Windows, Office and other products on rival cloud services. The agency is also requesting information on Microsoft's bundling of artificial intelligence, security and identity software into other products, including Windows and Office, some of the people said. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

EPA Reverses Long-Standing Climate Change Finding, Stripping Its Own Ability To Regulate Emissions - President Donald Trump announced Thursday that the Environmental Protection Agency is rescinding the legal finding that it has relied on for nearly two decades to limit the heat-trapping pollution that spews from vehicle tailpipes, oil refineries and factories. From a report: The repeal of that landmark determination, known as the endangerment finding, will upend most U.S. policies aimed at curbing climate change. The finding -- which the EPA issued in 2009 -- said the global warming caused by greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane endangers the health and welfare of current and future generations. "We are officially terminating the so-called endangerment finding, a disastrous Obama-era policy," Trump said at a news conference. "This determination had no basis in fact -- none whatsoever. And it had no basis in law. On the contrary, over the generations, fossil fuels have saved millions of lives and lifted billions of people out of poverty all over the world." Major environmental groups have disputed the administration's stance on the endangerment finding and have been preparing to sue in response to its repeal. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OpenAI Claims DeepSeek Distilled US Models To Gain an Edge - An anonymous reader shares a report: OpenAI has warned US lawmakers that its Chinese rival DeepSeek is using unfair and increasingly sophisticated methods to extract results from leading US AI models to train the next generation of its breakthrough R1 chatbot, according to a memo reviewed by Bloomberg News. In the memo, sent Thursday to the House Select Committee on China, OpenAI said that DeepSeek had used so-called distillation techniques as part of "ongoing efforts to free-ride on the capabilities developed by OpenAI and other US frontier labs." The company said it had detected "new, obfuscated methods" designed to evade OpenAI's defenses against misuse of its models' output. OpenAI began privately raising concerns about the practice shortly after the R1 model's release last year, when it opened a probe with partner Microsoft Corp. into whether DeepSeek had obtained its data in an unauthorized manner, Bloomberg previously reported. In distillation, one AI model relies on the output of another for training purposes to develop similar capabilities. Distillation, largely tied to China and occasionally Russia, has persisted and become more sophisticated despite attempts to crack down on users who violate OpenAI's terms of service, the company said in its memo, citing activity it has observed on its platform. Read more of this story at Slashdot.