Latest News
Last updated 03 Feb, 10:53 PM
BBC News
Mandelson investigated by police over claims he leaked information to Epstein - The former Labour minister faces allegations of misconduct in public office when he was business secretary.
Police assess allegation Epstein sent second woman to UK for sex with Andrew - The encounter allegedly occurred at the former prince's residence, Royal Lodge, in 2010.
Andrew moves out of Royal Lodge home - The former prince left Royal Lodge on Monday night and is living in a temporary property on the Sandringham Estate.
Watch: BBC joins Colombian commandos fighting 'never-ending battle' against drug gangs - As the US and Colombian presidents meet, Orla Guerin joins a police unit tasked with finding and destroying jungle cocaine labs.
Two men killed in light aircraft crash, police say - A team from the Air Accidents Investigation Branch is at the scene of the crash in Littleborough.
The Register
Sudo maintainer, handling utility for more than 30 years, is looking for support - Many vital open source resources rely on the devotion of a few individuals It's hard to imagine something as fundamental to computing as the sudo command becoming abandonware, yet here we are: its solitary maintainer is asking for help to keep the project alive.…
GitHub ponders kill switch for pull requests to stop AI slop - Code community site begins to see that AI could drive people away GitHub, the Microsoft code-hosting shop that popularized AI-assisted software development, is having some regrets about its Copilot infatuation.…
Amazon's European datacenter buildout blows a breaker as grid connection wait list hits 7 years - E-commerce giant has watts of bit barns to deploy but nowhere to plug them in Amazon Web Services' European expansion has hit the buffers as the American cloud provider grapples with aging grid infrastructure and lengthy interconnect delays.…
'Lethal' and 'magical' Palantir tech is in demand by Pentagon, China, Middle East, CEO says - Less popular in Canada and Northern Europe Palantir is shaping the "under-the-hood" practices of the US Defense Department as demand for its software grows across warfighting, shipbuilding, and weapons procurement, CEO Alex Karp said during the company's fourth-quarter earnings call on Monday.…
Critical React Native Metro dev server bug under attack as researchers scream into the void - Too slow react-ion time Baddies are exploiting a critical bug in React Native's Metro development server to deliver malware to both Windows and Linux machines, and yet the in-the-wild attacks still haven't received the "broad public acknowledgement" that they should, according to security researchers.…
New Scientist - Home
Dutch air force reads pilots' brainwaves to make training harder - While pilots are flying in a VR simulation, their brainwave patterns can be fed into an AI model that assesses how challenging they are finding a task and adjusts the difficulty accordingly
The weird rules of temperature get even stranger in the quantum realm - Can a single particle have a temperature? It may seem impossible with our standard understanding of temperature, but columnist Jacklin Kwan finds that it’s not exactly ruled out in the quantum realm
Nobel laureate says he'll build world’s most powerful quantum computer - John Martinis has already revolutionised quantum computing twice. Now, he is working on another radical rethink of the technology that could deliver machines with unrivalled capabilities
Why did SpaceX just apply to launch 1 million satellites? - SpaceX says it wants to deploy an astronomical number of data centres in orbit to supply power for artificial intelligence, but the proposal might not be entirely serious
Neanderthals and early humans may have interbred over a vast area - We are getting a clearer sense of where and how often Homo sapiens and Neanderthals interbred, and it turns out the behaviour was much more common than we first thought
Hacker News
FlashAttention-T: Towards Tensorized Attention - Comments
Deno Sandbox - Comments
Lessons Learned Shipping 500 Units of My First Hardware Product - Comments
Qwen3-Coder-Next - Comments
AliSQL: Alibaba's open-source MySQL with vector and DuckDB engines - Comments
Slashdot
Ultra-Processed Foods Should Be Treated More Like Cigarettes Than Food, Study Says - Ultra-processed foods (UPFs) have more in common with cigarettes than with fruit or vegetables, and require far tighter regulation, according to a new report. The Guardian: UPFs and cigarettes are engineered to encourage addiction and consumption, researchers from three US universities said, pointing to the parallels in widespread health harms that link both. UPFs, which are widely available worldwide, are food products that have been industrially manufactured, often using emulsifiers or artificial colouring and flavours. The category includes soft drinks and packaged snacks such as crisps and biscuits. There are similarities in the production processes of UPFs and cigarettes, and in manufacturers' efforts to optimise the "doses" of products and how quickly they act on reward pathways in the body, according to the paper from researchers at Harvard, the University of Michigan and Duke University. They draw on data from the fields of addiction science, nutrition and public health history to make their comparisons, published on 3 February in the healthcare journal the Milbank Quarterly. The authors suggest that marketing claims on the products, such as being "low fat" or "sugar free," are "health washing" that can stall regulation, akin to the advertising of cigarette filters in the 1950s as protective innovations that "in practice offered little meaningful benefit." Read more of this story at Slashdot.
NASA Delays Artemis II To March - ClickOnThis writes: NASA has delayed the Artemis II launch to March of this year, after a wet dress-rehearsal uncovered a hydrogen leak. From the NASA article: During tanking, engineers spent several hours troubleshooting a liquid hydrogen leak in an interface used to route the cryogenic propellant into the rocket's core stage, putting them behind in the countdown. Attempts to resolve the issue involved stopping the flow of liquid hydrogen into the core stage, allowing the interface to warm up for the seals to reseat, and adjusting the flow of the propellant. Teams successfully filled all tanks in both the core stage and interim cryogenic propulsion stage before a team of five was sent to the launch pad to finish Orion closeout operations. Engineers conducted a first run at terminal countdown operations during the test, counting down to approximately 5 minutes left in the countdown, before the ground launch sequencer automatically stopped the countdown due to a spike in the liquid hydrogen leak rate. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Google Plots Big Expansion in India as US Restricts Visas - Alphabet is plotting to dramatically expand its presence in India [non-paywalled source], with the possibility of taking millions of square feet in new office space in Bangalore, India's tech hub. From a report: Google's parent company has leased one office tower and purchased options on two others in Alembic City, a development in the Whitefield tech corridor, totaling 2.4 million square feet, according to people familiar with the deal. The first tower is expected to open to employees in the coming months, while construction on the remaining two is set to conclude next year. Options in the real estate industry give would-be tenants the exclusive right to rent, or in some cases buy, a property at a predetermined price within a specific time frame. It's also possible Alphabet will not exercise the option to use the additional towers. If it does take all of the space, the complex could accommodate as many as 20,000 additional staff, which could more than double the company's footprint in India, said the people, asking not to be identified because the plans aren't public. Alphabet currently employs around 14,000 in the country, out of a global workforce of roughly 190,000. [...] US President Donald Trump's visa restrictions have made it harder to bring foreign talent to America, prompting some companies to recruit more staff overseas. India has become an increasingly important place for US companies to hire, particularly in the race to dominate artificial intelligence. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
'Vibe Coding Kills Open Source' - Four economists across Central European University, Bielefeld University and the Kiel Institute have built a general equilibrium model of the open-source software ecosystem and concluded that vibe coding -- the increasingly common practice of letting AI agents select, assemble and modify packages on a developer's behalf -- erodes the very funding mechanism that keeps open-source projects alive. The core problem is a decoupling of usage from engagement. Tailwind CSS's npm downloads have climbed steadily, but its creator says documentation traffic is down about 40% since early 2023 and revenue has dropped close to 80%. Stack Overflow activity fell roughly 25% within six months of ChatGPT's launch. Open-source maintainers monetize through documentation visits, bug reports, and community interaction. AI agents skip all of that. The model finds that feedback loops once responsible for open source's explosive growth now run in reverse. Fewer maintainers can justify sharing code, variety shrinks, and average quality falls -- even as total usage rises. One proposed fix is a "Spotify for open source" model where AI platforms redistribute subscription revenue to maintainers based on package usage. Vibe-coded users need to contribute at least 84% of what direct users generate, or roughly 84% of all revenue must come from sources independent of how users access the software. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
YouTube Kills Background Playback on Third-Party Mobile Browsers - YouTube has confirmed that it is blocking background playback -- the ability to keep a video's audio running after minimizing the browser or locking the screen -- for non-Premium users across third-party mobile browsers including Samsung Internet, Brave, Vivaldi and Microsoft Edge. Users began reporting the issue last week, noting that audio would cut out the moment they left the browser, sometimes after a brief "MediaOngoingActivity" notification flashed before media controls disappeared. A Google spokesperson told Android Authority that the platform "updated the experience to ensure consistency," calling background play a Premium-exclusive feature. Read more of this story at Slashdot.