Latest News

Last updated 18 Mar, 06:42 PM

BBC News

Why has this meningitis outbreak spread so fast? - There have been 20 cases since the weekend in one small area of Kent - but this isn't the normal pattern, so what could have happened?

PM swerves questions on whether he spoke to Mandelson over Epstein friendship - Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch repeatedly asks if the prime minister spoke to Peter Mandelson about his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein before picking him to be a UK ambassador.

Fly tippers in England face clearing up own rubbish as punishment - Fly tippers could face up to 20 hours of community service removing rubbish they have illegally dumped.

UK temperature reaches 21C in warmest day of year so far - The UK has seen its warmest day of the year so far with temperatures reaching 21C.

King Charles greets Nigerian president in Windsor sunshine - The King and President Tinubu will give speeches later at the state banquet, to be attended by political leaders and celebrities.

The Register

Storage vendors orbit the Nvidia sun at GTC - Hitachi Vantara, IBM, Nutanix, and Seagate all had something to say GTC Hitachi Vantara and Nutanix announced support for Nvidia’s new GPUs and software at GTC 2026, much like every other storage system vendor, while IBM integrated Watsonx and other offerings more tightly with GPUzilla's offerings. Seagate demonstrated a two-tier hybrid external KV Cache composed of SSDs and disk drives, as it did last year.…

Microsoft promises all-in-one database wrangling hub on Fabric - PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server all handled via Database Hub, vendor says Microsoft has launched a database management tool it promises will help users manage multiple databases sharing a single SQL engine.…

Amazon security boss says crims abused max-security Cisco firewall flaw weeks before disclosure - Interlock's post-exploit toolkit exposed Ransomware criminals exploited CVE-2026-20131, a maximum-severity bug in Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center software, as a zero-day vulnerability more than a month before Cisco patched the hole, according to Amazon security boss CJ Moses.…

Ohio citizens tell hyperscalers to take their supersized datacenters elsewhere - Residents looking to ban server farms with capacity over 25 MW Ohio residents are proposing a ban on datacenters with a capacity greater than 25 MW, the latest sign of growing opposition to massive server farms across the US.…

Microsoft publishes a workaround for Samsung's C:\ drive woes - Friends and family support techs: get ready for permission changing and batch file creating Microsoft has published a handy guide for regaining access to a C:\ drive borked by a Samsung application, but it isn't for the faint of heart.…

New Scientist - Home

The mystery of how volcanic lightning happens has been solved - When particles in volcanic ash cloud rub together, some pick up positive charge and others negative – now physicists have finally elucidated how these different charges are determined

Ice core reveals low CO2 during warm spell 3 million years ago - For the first time, scientists have measured atmospheric gases from the late Pliocene, yielding data that could help to predict the future climate

Psychedelics may be no better than antidepressants for depression - Drugs like psilocybin that induce psychedelic effects have shown promise for treating depression. Now, a review of the evidence suggests that they are effective, but no more so than traditional antidepressants

Google rerouted hundreds of flights to cut climate-warming contrails - A weather-forecasting AI was used to recommend routes for American Airlines flights between the US and Europe to reduce the formation of contrails, which contribute to global warming

Particle discovered at CERN solves a 20-year-old mystery - Physicists working on the LHCb experiment have spotted an elusive and fleeting particle, a heavier and more charming cousin to the proton, that has been sought for decades

Hacker News

Death to Scroll Fade - Comments

AI Coding Is Gambling - Comments

Snowflake AI Escapes Sandbox and Executes Malware - Comments

A tiny, decentralised tool to explore the small web - Comments

Rob Pike's Rules of Programming (1989) - Comments

Slashdot

SaaS Apocalypse Could Be OpenSource's Greatest Opportunity - Longtime Slashdot reader internet-redstar writes: Nearly a trillion dollars has been wiped from software stocks in 2026, with hedge funds making billions shorting Salesforce, HubSpot, and Atlassian. At FOSDEM 2026, cURL maintainer Daniel Stenberg shut down his bug bounty program after AI-generated slop overwhelmed his team. A new article on HackerNoon argues that most commercial SaaS could inevitably become OpenSource, not out of ideology but economics. The author points to Proxmox replacing VMware at enterprise scale and startups like Holosign replicating DocuSign at $19/month flat as evidence. The catch, the article claims, is that maintainers who refuse to embrace AI tools risk being forked, or simply replicated from scratch, by those who do. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2026 Turing Award Goes To Inventors of Quantum Cryptography - Dave Knott shares a report from the New York Times: On Wednesday, the Association for Computing Machinery, the world's largest society of computing professionals, said Drs. Charles Bennett and Gilles Brassard had won this year's Turing Award for their work on quantum cryptography and related technologies. The Turing Award, which was introduced in 1966, is often called the Nobel Prize of computing, and it includes a $1 million prize, which the two scientists will share. [...] The two met in 1979 while swimming in the Atlantic just off the north shore of Puerto Rico. They were taking a break while attending an academic conference in San Juan. Dr. Bennett swam up to Dr. Brassard and suggested they use quantum mechanics to create a bank note that could never be forged. Collaborating between Montreal and New York, they applied Dr. Bennett's idea to subway tokens rather than bank notes. In a research paper published in 1983, they showed that their quantum subway tokens could never be forged, even if someone managed to steal the subway turnstile housing the elaborate hardware needed to read them. This led to quantum cryptography. After describing their new form of encryption in a research paper published in 1984, they demonstrated the technology with a physical experiment five years later. Called BB84, their system used photons -- particles of light -- to create encryption keys used to lock and unlock digital data. Thanks to the laws of quantum mechanics, the behavior of a photon changes if someone looks at it. This means that if anyone tries to steal the keys, he or she will leave a telltale sign of the attempted theft -- a bit like breaking the seal on an aspirin bottle. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Federal Cyber Experts Called Microsoft's Cloud 'a Pile of Shit', Yet Approved It Anyway - ProPublica reports that federal cybersecurity reviewers had serious, yearslong concerns about Microsoft's GCC High cloud offering, yet they approved it anyway because the product was already deeply embedded across government. As one member of the team put it: "The package is a pile of shit." From the report: In late 2024, the federal government's cybersecurity evaluators rendered a troubling verdict on one of Microsoft's biggest cloud computing offerings. The tech giant's "lack of proper detailed security documentation" left reviewers with a "lack of confidence in assessing the system's overall security posture," according to an internal government report reviewed by ProPublica. For years, reviewers said, Microsoft had tried and failed to fully explain how it protects sensitive information in the cloud as it hops from server to server across the digital terrain. Given that and other unknowns, government experts couldn't vouch for the technology's security. Such judgments would be damning for any company seeking to sell its wares to the U.S. government, but it should have been particularly devastating for Microsoft. The tech giant's products had been at the heart of two major cybersecurity attacks against the U.S. in three years. In one, Russian hackers exploited a weakness to steal sensitive data from a number of federal agencies, including the National Nuclear Security Administration. In the other, Chinese hackers infiltrated the email accounts of a Cabinet member and other senior government officials. The federal government could be further exposed if it couldn't verify the cybersecurity of Microsoft's Government Community Cloud High, a suite of cloud-based services intended to safeguard some of the nation's most sensitive information. Yet, in a highly unusual move that still reverberates across Washington, the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, or FedRAMP, authorized the product anyway, bestowing what amounts to the federal government's cybersecurity seal of approval. FedRAMP's ruling -- which included a kind of "buyer beware" notice to any federal agency considering GCC High -- helped Microsoft expand a government business empire worth billions of dollars. "BOOM SHAKA LAKA," Richard Wakeman, one of the company's chief security architects, boasted in an online forum, celebrating the milestone with a meme of Leonardo DiCaprio in "The Wolf of Wall Street." It was not the type of outcome that federal policymakers envisioned a decade and a half ago when they embraced the cloud revolution and created FedRAMP to help safeguard the government's cybersecurity. The program's layers of review, which included an assessment by outside experts, were supposed to ensure that service providers like Microsoft could be entrusted with the government's secrets. But ProPublica's investigation -- drawn from internal FedRAMP memos, logs, emails, meeting minutes, and interviews with seven former and current government employees and contractors -- found breakdowns at every juncture of that process. It also found a remarkable deference to Microsoft, even as the company's products and practices were central to two of the most damaging cyberattacks ever carried out against the government. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple Can Delist Apps 'With Or Without Cause,' Judge Says In Loss For Musi App - An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Musi, a free music streaming app that had tens of millions of iPhone downloads and garnered plenty of controversy over its method of acquiring music, has lost an attempt to get back on Apple's App Store. A federal judge dismissed Musi's lawsuit against Apple with prejudice and sanctioned Musi's lawyers for "mak[ing] up facts to fill the perceived gaps in Musi's case." Musi built a streaming service without striking its own deals with copyright holders. It did so by playing music from YouTube, writing in its 2024 lawsuit against Apple that "the Musi app plays or displays content based on the user's own interactions with YouTube and enhances the user experience via Musi's proprietary technology." Musi's app displayed its own ads but let users remove them for a one-time fee of $5.99. Musi claimed it complied with YouTube's terms, but Apple removed it from the App Store in September 2024. Musi does not offer an Android app. Musi alleged that Apple delisted its app based on "unsubstantiated" intellectual property claims from YouTube and that Apple violated its own Developer Program License Agreement (DPLA) by delisting the app. Musi was handed a resounding defeat yesterday in two rulings from US District Judge Eumi Lee in the Northern District of California. Lee found that Apple can remove apps "with or without cause," as stipulated in the developer agreement. Lee wrote (PDF): "The plain language of the DPLA governs because it is clear and explicit: Apple may 'cease marketing, offering, and allowing download by end-users of the [Musi app] at any time, with or without cause, by providing notice of termination.' Based on this language, Apple had the right to cease offering the Musi app without cause if Apple provided notice to Musi. The complaint alleges, and Musi does not dispute, that Apple gave Musi the required notice. Therefore, Apple's decision to remove the Musi app from the App Store did not breach the DPLA." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Experiments Show Potatoes Can Survive In Lunar Solar (With Lots of Help) - sciencehabit shares a report from Science.org: In The Martian, fictional astronaut Mark Watney survives the wasteland of Mars by growing potatoes in lunar soil -- with a bit of help from human poop. The idea may not be so far-fetched. In a preprint posted this month on bioRxiv, researchers show potatoes can indeed grow in the equivalent of Moon dust, though they need a lot of help from compost found on Earth. To make the discovery, scientists first had to re-create lunar regolith -- the loose, powdery layer that blankets the Moon's surface. To replicate that in the lab, David Handy, a space biologist at Oregon State University (OSU), and his colleagues used a mix of crushed minerals and volcanic ash that matched the chemistry of the Moon. But lunar regolith is entirely devoid of the organic matter that plants need to grow. "Turning an inorganic, inhospitable bucket of glorified sand into something that can support plant growth is complex," says Anna-Lisa Paul, a plant molecular biologist at the University of Florida not involved with the work. So Handy and his colleagues added vermicompost -- organic waste from worms -- into the regolith. They found that a mix with 5% compost allowed the potatoes to grow while still emulating the stressful conditions of the lunar environment. After almost 2 months of growth, the team harvested the tubers, freeze-dried them, and ground them up for further testing. Analysis of the potatoes' DNA showed stress-related genes had been activated. The potatoes also had higher concentrations of copper and zinc than Earth-grown ones, which may make them dangerous for human consumption. The plants' nutritional value, though, was similar to traditional potatoes -- a surprise to the scientists, who expected lower levels of nutrition "because the plants might have been working overtime to overcome certain stressors," Handy says. Read more of this story at Slashdot.