Latest News

Last updated 20 Feb, 08:12 PM

BBC News

Government considers removing Andrew from royal line of succession - The former Duke of York is eighth in line to the throne meaning he remains eligible to be King.

Andrew and King Charles, a personal battle of royal brothers - The problems facing the monarchy over Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor is also a family problem between brothers.

Humans to travel further into space than ever before as Nasa confirms March Moon mission - Nasa sets the launch date following a successful "wet dress rehearsal" of the Artemis II mission.

Life sentences for teens after racist murder of stranger delivering food to his mum - Kamran Aman was subjected to further racist abuse as he lay dying on the floor of a neighbour's house.

KFC, Nando's, and others ditch chicken welfare pledge - Wingstop, Burger King, and others have walked away from an industry commitment to avoid using fast-growing chickens

The Register

AI coding assistant Cline compromised to create more OpenClaw chaos - 4K unintended installs in very odd supply chain attack Someone compromised open source AI coding assistant Cline CLI's npm package earlier this week in an odd supply chain attack that secretly installed OpenClaw on developers' machines without their knowledge. …

SpaceX's faulty Falcon spewed massive lithium plume over Europe, say scientists - Good news: Team shows re-entry pollution can be measured. Bad news: There may be more of it coming The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that burned up over Europe last year left a massive lithium plume in its wake, say a group of scientists. They warn the disaster is likely a sign of things to come as Earth's atmosphere continues to become a heavily trafficked superhighway to space. …

Cerebras plans humongous AI supercomputer in India backed by UAE - Up to 8 exaFLOPS of super sparse AI compute Nvidia rival Cerebras Systems' dinner plate-sized accelerators will power a new supercomputing cluster in India capable of 8 exaFLOPS of AI compute.…

ShinyHunters demands $1.5M not to leak Vegas casino and resort chain data - What happens in Vegas… Las Vegas hotel and casino giant Wynn Resorts appears to be the latest victim of data-grabbing and extortion gang ShinyHunters.…

Amazon's vibe-coding tool Kiro reportedly vibed too hard and brought down AWS - Bezos-corp blames user error for outage, 'specifically misconfigured access controls' In a cautionary tale of agentic AI, AWS reportedly suffered service outages caused by its own AI coding tools in December - though the company insists the downtime was ultimately due to human error.…

New Scientist - Home

Fish-based pet food may expose cats and dogs to forever chemicals - A survey of 100 commercial foods for dogs and cats revealed that PFAS chemicals appear in numerous brands and types, with fish-based products among those with the highest levels

Your BMI can't tell you much about your health – here's what can - People classed as “overweight” according to BMI can be perfectly healthy. But there are better measures of fat, and physicians are finally using them

Nobel prizewinner Omar Yaghi says his invention will change the world - Chemist Omar Yaghi invented materials called MOFs, a few grams of which have the surface area of a football field. He explains why he thinks these super-sponges will define the next century

Humans are the only primates with a chin – now we finally know why - Biologists have debated the reason why Homo sapiens evolved a prominent lower jaw, but this unique feature may actually be a by-product of other traits shaped by natural selection

What if the idea of the autism spectrum is completely wrong? - For years, we've thought of autism as lying on a spectrum, but emerging evidence suggests that it comes in several distinct types. The implications for how we support autistic people could be profound

Hacker News

Keep Android Open - Comments

Ggml.ai joins Hugging Face to ensure the long-term progress of Local AI - Comments

I found a useful Git one liner buried in leaked CIA developer docs - Comments

Lil' Fun Langs - Comments

I found a Vulnerability. They found a Lawyer - Comments

Slashdot

Several Meta Employees Have Started Calling Themselves 'AI Builders' - An anonymous reader shares a report: Meta product managers are rebranding. Some are now calling themselves "AI builders," a signal that AI coding tools are changing who gets to build software inside the company. One of them, Jeremie Guedj, announced the change in a LinkedIn post last week. "I still can't believe I'm writing this: as of today, my full-time job at Meta is AI Builder," he wrote. Guedj has spent more than a decade as a traditional product manager, a role that sets the road map and strategy for products then built by engineering teams. He said that while his title in Meta's internal systems still lists him as a product manager, his actual work is now full-time building with AI on what he calls an "AI-native team." Another Meta product manager also lists "AI Builder" on her LinkedIn profile, while at least two other Meta engineers write the term in their bios, Business Insider found. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AMC Theatres Will Refuse To Screen AI Short Film After Online Uproar - An anonymous reader shares a report: When will AI movies start showing up in theaters nationwide? It was supposed to be next month. But when word leaked online that an AI short film contest winner was going to start screening before feature presentations in AMC Theatres, the cinema chain decided not to run the content. The issue began earlier this week with the inaugural Frame Forward AI Animated Film Festival announcing Igor Alferov's short film Thanksgiving Day had won the contest. The prize package for included Thanksgiving Day getting a national two-week run in theaters nationwide. When word of this began hitting social media, however, some were dismayed by the prospect of exhibitors embracing AI content, with many singling out AMC Theatres for criticism. Except the short is not actually programmed by exhibitors, exactly, but by Screenvision Media -- a third-party company which manages the 20-minute, advertising-driven pre-show before a theater's lights go down. Screenvision -- which co-organized the festival along with Modern Uprising Studios -- provides content to multiple theatrical chains, not just AMC. After The Hollywood Reporter reached out to AMC about the brewing controversy, the company issued this statement to THR on Thursday: "This content is an initiative from Screenvision Media, which manages pre-show advertising for several movie theatre chains in the United States and runs in fewer than 30 percent of AMC's U.S. locations. AMC was not involved in the creation of the content or the initiative and has informed Screenvision that AMC locations will not participate." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

How Streaming Became Cable TV's Unlikely Life Raft - Cable TV providers have spent the past decade losing tens of millions of households to streaming services, but companies like Charter Communications are now slowing that exodus by bundling the very apps that once threatened to replace them. Charter added 44,000 net video subscribers in the fourth quarter of 2025, its first growth in that count since 2020, after integrating Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+ directly into Spectrum cable packages -- a deal that grew out of a contentious 2023 contract dispute with Disney. Comcast and Optimum still lost subscribers in the quarter, though both saw those losses narrow. Charter's Q4 numbers also got a lift from a 15-day Disney channel blackout on YouTube TV during football season, which drove more than 14,000 subscribers to Spectrum. Charter has been discounting aggressively -- video revenue fell 10% year over year despite the subscriber gains. Cox Communications launched its first streaming-inclusive cable bundles last month, and Dish Network has yet to integrate streaming apps into its packages at all. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

PayPal Discloses Data Breach That Exposed User Info For 6 Months - PayPal is notifying customers of a data breach after a software error in a loan application exposed their sensitive personal information, including Social Security numbers, for nearly 6 months last year. From a report: The incident affected the PayPal Working Capital (PPWC) loan app, which provides small businesses with quick access to financing. PayPal discovered the breach on December 12, 2025, and determined that customers' names, email addresses, phone numbers, business addresses, Social Security numbers, and dates of birth had been exposed since July 1, 2025. The financial technology company said it has reversed the code change that caused the incident, blocking attackers' access to the data one day after discovering the breach. "On December 12, 2025, PayPal identified that due to an error in its PayPal Working Capital ('PPWC') loan application, the PII of a small number of customers was exposed to unauthorized individuals during the timeframe of July 1, 2025 to December 13, 2025," PayPal said in breach notification letters sent to affected users. "PayPal has since rolled back the code change responsible for this error, which potentially exposed the PII. We have not delayed this notification as a result of any law enforcement investigation." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

HSBC To Investors: If India Couldn't Build an Enterprise Software Challenger, Neither Can AI - India's IT services giants have spent decades deploying, customizing, and maintaining the world's largest enterprise software platforms, putting hundreds of thousands of engineers in daily contact with the business logic and proprietary architectures of vendors like SAP and Oracle. None of them have built a competing product that gained meaningful traction against the U.S. incumbents, HSBC said in a note to clients, using this history to argue AI-generated code faces the same structural barriers. The bank's analysts contend that enterprise software competition turns on factors that have little to do with the ability to write code -- sales teams, cross-licensing agreements, patented IP, first-mover lock-in, brand awareness, and go-to-market infrastructure. If a massive, low-cost, domain-expert workforce couldn't crack the market over several decades, HSBC argues, the idea that AI-generated code will do so is, in the words of Nvidia's Jensen Huang that the report approvingly cites, "illogical." Read more of this story at Slashdot.