Latest News

Last updated 21 Mar, 06:45 PM

BBC News

Foreign secretary denounces 'reckless Iran threats' after missiles fired at Diego Garcia - Iran reportedly fired two ballistic missiles at Indian Ocean base, but neither reached the target.

As Starmer faces war overseas, his party can't find peace at home - British politicians tend to stick together during dangerous moments abroad. In 2026? Not so much.

Robert Mueller, ex-FBI chief who led Trump-Russia investigation, dies at 81 - A former FBI director, Mueller led the high-profile inquiry into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 US election

First photos as BTS make live return in front of huge crowd - RM, Jin, Suga, J-Hope, Jimin, V and Jung Kook perform together for the first time since October 2022.

Saturday Night Live UK is here - but can it make you laugh? - The first episode of the British version of the American sketch show hits screens this weekend, and might face a tough crowd.

The Register

Turns out your coffee addiction may be doing your brain a favor - Decades of data suggest people who stick to a couple of brews fare better in terms of gray matter A decades-long study suggests that your daily caffeine fix might be doing more than jolting you through morning meetings – it could also be quietly helping your brain hold it together.…

Payment biz pulls plug on open source charity after KYC spat - Free Software Foundation Europe says it was asked for supporters' passwords; Nexi insists it only wanted test credentials to check cancellation flows The Free Software Foundation Europe says its electronic-payments provider Nexi Group unexpectedly "cancelled" its account – cutting the charity off from around 450 donors.…

Cryptographers engage in war of words over RustSec bug reports and subsequent ban - Rust security maintainers contend Nadim Kobeissi's vulnerability claims are too much Since February, cryptographer Nadim Kobeissi has been trying to get code fixes applied to Rust cryptography libraries to address what he says are critical bugs. For his efforts, he's been dismissed, ignored, and banned from Rust security channels.…

Sorry, Amazon, you couldn't pick a worse time to bring a phone to market: IDC analyst - The market is contracting Right product, wrong time? Amazon is reported to be developing a new smartphone, its first since 2014, and, according to industry tracker IDC, it will face entrenched competition with better products and a market that is expected to contract by double digits.…

Salesforce snaps up the team who built calendar app Clockwise to work on Agentforce - Just the team, not the tech Salesforce's Agentforce team is getting an infusion of new talent by hiring the team behind Clockwise, a calendar scheduling app, but the app itself isn't sticking around.…

New Scientist - Home

A very serious guide to buying your own humanoid robot butler - You can now buy a humanoid robot housekeeper for less than the price of a second-hand car. But before splashing out, there’s something you need to know

You can now buy a DIY quantum computer - Qilimanjaro is selling a relatively cheap kit with everything you need for a quantum computer – you just need to be able to put it together

What to read this week: Katrina Manson's terrifying Project Maven - It is scarily fascinating to read about the US military's journey into AI warfare in this deeply-researched book. But what happens next, asks Matthew Sparkes

Inside the world’s first antimatter delivery service - On Tuesday, CERN will transport antiprotons on a truck for the first time, testing the plan to deliver antimatter by road to research labs across Europe

Forget the multiverse. In the pluriverse, we create reality together - A radical idea that resolves many quantum paradoxes suggests there is no objective view of reality. How can the cosmos be stitched together from interlocking perspectives?

Hacker News

Some Things Just Take Time - Comments

Grafeo – A fast, lean, embeddable graph database built in Rust - Comments

Passengers who refuse to use headphones can now be kicked off United flights - Comments

Invisalign Became the Biggest User of 3D Printers - Comments

OpenCode – Open source AI coding agent - Comments

Slashdot

Intel, NVIDIA, AMD GPU Drivers Finally Play Nice With ReactOS - ReactOS aims to be compatible with programs and drivers developed for Windows Server 2003 and later versions of Microsoft Windows. And Slashdot reader jeditobe reports that the project has now "announced significant progress in achieving compatibility with proprietary graphics drivers." ReactOS now supports roughly 90% of GPU drivers for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, thanks to a series of fixes and the implementation of the KMDF (Kernel-Mode Driver Framework) and WDDM (Windows Display Driver Model) subsystems. Prior to these changes, many proprietary drivers either failed to launch or exhibited unstable behavior. In the latest nightly builds of the 0.4.16 branch, drivers from a variety of manufacturers — including Intel, NVIDIA, and AMD — are running reliably. The project demonstrated ReactOS running on real hardware, including booting with installed drivers for graphics cards such as Intel GMA 945, NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS and GTX 750 Ti, and AMD Radeon HD 7530G. They also highlighted successful operation on mobile GPUs like the NVIDIA Quadro 1000M, with 2D/3D acceleration, audio, and network connectivity all functioning correctly. Further tests confirmed support on less common or older configurations, including a laptop with a Radeon Xpress 1100, as well as high-performance cards like the NVIDIA GTX Titan X. A key contribution came from a patch merged into the main branch for the memory management subsystem, which improved driver stability and reduced crashes during graphics adapter initialization. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

50% of Consumers Prefer Brands That Avoid GenAI Content - Slashdot reader BrianFagioli writes: According to the research firm Gartner, 50% of U.S. consumers say they would prefer to do business with brands that avoid using GenAI in consumer facing content such as advertising and promotional messaging. The survey of 1,539 Americans, conducted in October 2025, also found growing skepticism about the reliability of online information, with 61% saying they frequently question whether information they use for everyday decisions is trustworthy... Gartner found that 68% of consumers often wonder whether the content they see online is real, while fewer people now rely on intuition alone to judge credibility [only 27%]. Instead, more consumers are actively verifying information and checking sources. Gartner's senior principal analyst offered suggests discretion for brands trying to use AI. "The brands that win will be the ones that use AI in ways customers can immediately recognize as helpful, while being transparent about when AI is used, what it's doing, and giving customers a clear choice to opt out." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Firefox Announces Built-In VPN and Other New Features - and Introduces Its New Mascot - A free built-in VPN is coming to Firefox on Tuesday, Mozilla announced this week: Free VPNs can sometimes mean sketchy arrangements that end up compromising your privacy, but ours is built from our data principles and commitment to be the world's most trusted browser. It routes your browser traffic through a proxy to hide your IP address and location while you browse, giving you stronger privacy and protection online with no extra downloads. Users will have 50 gigabytes of data monthly in the U.S., France, Germany and U.K. to start. Available in Firefox 149 starting March 24. We also recently shared that Firefox is the first browser to ship Sanitizer API, a new web security standard that blocks attacks before they reach you [for untrusted HTML XSS vulnerabilities]. "The roadmap for Firefox this year is the most exciting one we've developed in quite a while," says Firefox head Ajit Varma. "We're improving the fundamentals like speed and performance. We're also launching innovative new open standards in Gecko to ensure the future of the web is open, diverse, and not controlled by a single engine. "At the same time we're prioritizing features that give users real power, choice and strong privacy protections, built in a way that only Firefox can. And as always, we'll keep listening, inviting users to help shape what comes next and giving them more reasons to love Firefox." Two new features coming next week: Split View puts two webpages side by side in one window, making it easy to compare, copy and multitask without bouncing between tabs. Rolling out in Firefox 149 on March 24. Tab Notes let you add notes to any tab, another tool to help with multitasking and picking up where you left off. Available in Firefox Labs 149 starting March 24. And Firefox also released a video this week introducing their new mascot Kit. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SystemD Adds Optional 'birthDate' Field for Age Verification to JSON User Records - "The systemd project merged a pull request adding a new birthDate field to the JSON user records managed by userdb in response to the age verification laws of California, Colorado, and Brazil," reports the blog It's FOSS. They note that the field "can only be set by administrators, not by users themselves" — it's the same record that already holds metadata like realName, emailAddress, and location: Lennart Poettering, the creator of systemd, has clarified that this change is "an optional field in the userdb JSON object. It's not a policy engine, not an API for apps. We just define the field, so that it's standardized iff people want to store the date there, but it's entirely optional. " In simple words, this is something that adds a new, optional field that can then be used by other open source projects like xdg-desktop-portal to build age verification compliance on top of, without systemd itself doing anything with the data or making it mandatory to provide. A merge request asking for this change to be repealed was struck down by Lennart, who gave the above-mentioned reasoning behind this, and further noted that people were misunderstanding what systemd is trying to do here. "It enforces zero policy," Poettering said. "It leaves that up for other parts of the system." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jeff Bezos Seeking $100 Billion to Buy Manufacturing Companies, 'Transform' Them With AI - Jeff Bezos "is in early talks to raise $100 billion," reports the Wall Street Journal, "for a new fund that would buy up manufacturing companies and seek to use AI technology to accelerate their path to automation." "The Amazon.com founder is meeting with some of the world's largest asset managers to raise funding for the project." A few months ago, [Bezos] traveled to the Middle East to discuss the new fund with sovereign wealth representatives in the region. More recently, he went to Singapore to raise funding for the effort as well, according to people familiar with the matter. The fund, described in investor documents as a "manufacturing transformation vehicle," is aiming to buy companies in major industrial sectors such as chipmaking, defense and aerospace... Bezos was recently appointed co-CEO of Project Prometheus, a new startup that is building artificial-intelligence models that can understand and simulate the physical world. Bezos plans to use the company's technology to boost the efficiency and profitability of businesses owned by the fund, a playbook that some investment firms are similarly deploying in sectors such as accounting and property management... [Prometheus has also hired employees from OpenAI and Google DeepMind, the article points out.] While much of the AI revolution has been focused on large language models, billions of dollars have begun to flow to companies that are seeking to apply spatially focused AI systems toward industries including robotics and manufacturing... Amazon, one of [America's] largest employers, has closed in on the milestone of having as many robots as humans. Read more of this story at Slashdot.