Latest News
Last updated 23 Apr, 10:20 AM
BBC News
High Street mini-marts selling cocaine, cannabis and prescription drugs, BBC secret filming reveals - Across the UK, shopfronts are being exploited by criminal gangs pushing illegal drugs, experts say.
Watch: BBC goes undercover at mini-mart selling drugs - BBC UK editor Ed Thomas confronts a shopkeeper secretly filmed selling cannabis and cocaine to one of our researchers.
Riot police to deploy on French beaches under new deal to stop illegal Channel migrant crossings - The three-year agreement will see at least 50 riot-trained police officers drafted in to tackle violence and “hostile crowds”.
Lebanon accuses Israel of targeting journalist killed in air strike - Lebanon's prime minister accused Israel of war crimes after IDF attacks on Red Cross vehicles also stopped rescuers from reaching the site.
The furious debate over building houses on golf courses - Are golf courses the right places to build housing, or are they simply a soft target?
The Register
Google Meet or Google Mute? Even CEOs get borked sometimes - Video conferencing has tripped us all up. Now cloud chief Thomas Kurian gets his turn Bork!Bork!Bork! The curse of Bork is no respecter of status or class. It does not differentiate between a high-flying executive and a lowly worker. And so it was that Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian came unstuck due to some all-too-familiar video-conferencing struggles.…
Sharing isn’t caring if it’s an admin password - Keeping it simple for the developers can lead to very complex headaches later PWNED Welcome back to PWNED, the column where we celebrate the people who’ve taught us how not to secure a server. If you’ve ever tied your own shoelaces together, then tripped over them, or attempted to dive into a swimming pool but hit your head on the diving board, we’ll be talking about your cyber equivalent.…
Stale gov.uk pages are feeding AI overviews old data and Brits are believing it - Whitehall content teams play whack-a-mole with zombie pages as Google hoovers up the lot AI overviews from the likes of Google are serving up false summaries of UK government information by drawing on stale GOV.UK pages, according to content designers at the Department for Business and Trade (DBT).…
Pass the key, passwords have passed their sell-by date - NCSC passes judgment: passkeys pass muster, passwords fail The UK's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has officially endorsed passkeys as the default authentication standard, marking the first time the agency has told consumers to move away from passwords entirely.…
Kubernetes explains the release that kills Ingress NGINX with Japanese poetry and art - Release team sets new standard for release notes by linking between Version 1.36 and classic print The Great Wave off Kanagawa Kubernetes issued a new release called “Haru” on Wednesday, and the release notes and logo might be more interesting than the software.…
New Scientist - Home
How many dachshunds would it take to get to the moon? - Feedback, always on the hunt for absurd units of measurement, is delighted by recent attempts to convey the 406,771 kilometres that the Artemis II crew travelled from Earth
Can you slow ageing with your diet? A new book gives it a go - Discovering he is getting old before his time, David Cox tries to lower his biological age by changing his diet in a helpful new book, The Age Code, says Graham Lawton
98 per cent of meat and dairy sustainability pledges are greenwashing - The food industry has made big promises to reduce emissions and become more sustainable, but a review concludes that many of the pledges are not backed up by evidence
We need more radioactive drugs. Can we make them from nuclear waste? - The rise of a new generation of radiotherapies means we will soon need much greater quantities of radioactive atoms. That's why companies are scrambling to refine them from all manner of radioactive waste
Table tennis-playing robot on track to becoming world champion - A robot built by Sony AI is rapidly learning how to beat the world's very best table tennis players
Hacker News
I am building a cloud - Comments
Alberta startup sells no-tech tractors for half price - Comments
Your hex editor should color-code bytes - Comments
Apple fixes bug that cops used to extract deleted chat messages from iPhones - Comments
We found a stable Firefox identifier linking all your private Tor identities - Comments
Slashdot
Your Phone's Next Speed Boost May Come From Magnetic Chips - alternative_right writes: A new technology has been proposed that could fundamentally solve the issue of smartphones overheating during high-spec gaming or extended video streaming. Researchers at KAIST have discovered the principle of processing signals using the minute vibrations of magnets (spin waves) instead of electrons. This method significantly reduces heat generation and power consumption while enabling instantaneous frequency switching within the several GHz range. This breakthrough is expected to pave the way for smart devices with less heat and longer battery life, as well as ultra-low-power, high-speed computing. Professor Kab-Jin Kim from the Department of Physics said: "This study is a case that proves we can implement and control the nonlinear dynamics of magnons -- the principle of information processing using magnetic vibrations -- in actual nano-devices, which had previously only been proposed in theory. It will serve as an important foundation for the development of a new information processing paradigm using spin waves instead of electrons." The findings have been published in the journal Nature Communications. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Nearly Half of US Children Are Breathing Dangerous Levels of Air Pollution - An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: Nearly half of children in the United States are breathing dangerous levels of air pollution, according to a new report, as experts warned Donald Trump's expansive rollback of protections will make the situation worse. The 27th annual air quality report from the American Lung Association (ALA) released on Wednesday evaluates pollution across the country by grading levels of ground-level ozone -- also known as smog -- as well as year-round and short-term spikes in particle pollution, commonly referred to as soot. The report analyzed quality-assured data collected between 2022 and 2024. It found that 33.5 million children in the US -- 46% of those under 18 -- live in areas that received a failing grade for at least one measure of air pollution. The report also found that 7 million children, or 10% of all children in the US, live in communities that failed all three measures. The report further found that communities of color are disproportionately exposed to unhealthy air. As a result, they are more likely to live with one or more chronic health conditions that make them more vulnerable to pollution, including asthma, diabetes, and heart disease. Although people of color make up 42.1% of the US population, they represent 54.2% of those living in counties with at least one failing grade, the report noted. It also found that a person of color is 2.42 times more likely than a white person to live in a community that fails all three pollution measures. Smog remains the most widespread pollutant affecting Americans' health. Between 2022 and 2024, 38% of the US population -- approximately 129.1 million people -- were exposed to ozone levels that put their health at risk. This marks the highest number recorded in the ALA's report in six years, and a 3.9 million increase from the previous year. Several factors contributed to these unhealthy pollution levels, including extreme heat, drought and wildfires which have exposed a growing share of the population to harmful ozone, the report said. The regions most affected by high ozone levels include south-western states from California to Texas, as well as much of the midwest. This is mainly driven by smoke from Canada's 2023 wildfires crossing into the US, along with high temperatures and weather patterns that favored ozone formation in 2023 and 2024 -- particularly in southern states. More broadly, the report found that climate change is intensifying ozone pollution by boosting precursor emissions and creating atmospheric conditions such as higher temperatures and lower wind speeds that allow pollutants to build up and ozone to form. Another growing source of pollution: datacenters. The report notes how they rely on regional electricity grids where fossil fuels like methane gas and coal still account for a large portion of generation. Many datacenters also use dozens of large diesel-powered backup generators, which emit carcinogenic particulate matter. "Children's lungs are still developing," said Will Barrett, assistant vice-president of the ALA's Nationwide Clean Air Policy. "For their body size, they're breathing more air. And also, kids play outdoors, they're more active, they're breathing in more outdoor air [...]. So, air pollution exposure in children can contribute to long-term developmental harm to their lungs, new cases of asthma, increased risks of respiratory illness and other health considerations later in life." Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Billionaire Backer Sues Trump Family's Crypto Firm Over Alleged Extortion - Ancient Slashdot reader Alain Williams shares a report from the BBC: The Trump family's World Liberty crypto venture is being sued by one of its billionaire backers over allegations of extortion. Justin Sun has accused World Liberty of an "illegal scheme" to seize his WLFI tokens, a cryptocurrency issued by the company. Sun alleges the firm, co-founded by U.S. President Donald Trump and his son Eric Trump, has "frozen" all of his tokens and stripped him of his right to vote on governance issues. [...] Sun alleged that those running World Liberty, including another co-founder, Chase Herro, are using it as a "golden opportunity to leverage the Trump brand to profit through fraud." In his complaint, filed on Tuesday in a San Francisco federal court, Sun argues that initial promises to give token-holders the option to trade the currency in future "were false and misleading." While the tokens at large became tradeable, Sun said World Liberty has blocked him from being able to sell a single one, and is now threatening to "burn" his - deleting them entirely. WLFI said in a post on X: "Does anyone still believe @justinsuntron? Justin's favorite move is playing the victim while making baseless allegations to cover up his own misconduct. Same playbook, different target. WLFI isn't the first. We have the contracts. We have the evidence. We have the truth. See you in court pal." Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Ping-Pong Robot Makes History By Beating Top-Level Human Players - Sony AI's autonomous table-tennis robot Ace has become the first robot to compete against top-level human players. Reuters reports: Ace, created by the Japanese company Sony's AI research division, is the first robot to attain expert-level performance in a competitive physical sport, one that requires rapid decisions and precision execution, the project's leader said. Ace did so by employing high-speed perception, AI-based control and a state-of-the-art robotic system. There have been various ping-pong-playing robots since 1983, but until now they were unable to rival highly skilled human competitors. Ace changed that with its performances against human elite-level and professional players in matches following the rules of the International Table Tennis Federation, the sport's governing body, and officiated by licensed umpires. The project's goal was not only to compete at table tennis but to develop insights into how robots can perceive, plan and act with human-like speed and precision in dynamic environments. In matches detailed in the study, Ace in April 2025 won three out of five versus elite players and lost two matches against professional players, the top skill level in the sport. Sony AI said that since then Ace beat professional players in December 2025 and last month. "The success of Ace, with its perception system and learning-based control algorithm, suggests that similar techniques could be applied to other areas requiring fast, real-time control and human interaction -- such as manufacturing and service robotics, as well as applications across sports, entertainment and safety-critical physical domains," said Peter Durr, director of Sony AI Zurich and leader for Sony AI's project Ace. The findings have been published in the journal Nature. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Anthropic's Mythos Model Is Being Accessed by Unauthorized Users - Bloomberg reports that a small group of unauthorized users gained access to Anthropic's restricted Mythos model through a mix of contractor-linked access and online sleuthing. Anthropic says it is investigating and has no evidence the access extended beyond a third-party vendor environment or affected its own systems. From the report: The users relied on a mix of tactics to get into Mythos. These included using access the person had as a worker at a third-party contractor for Anthropic and trying commonly used internet sleuthing tools often employed by cybersecurity researchers, the person said. The users are part of a private Discord channel that focuses on hunting for information about unreleased models, including by using bots to scour for details that Anthropic and others have posted on unsecured websites such as GitHub. [...] To access Mythos, the group of users made an educated guess about the model's online location based on knowledge about the format Anthropic has used for other models, the person said, adding that such details were revealed in a recent data breach from Mercor, an AI training startup that works with a number of top developers. Crucially, the person also has permission to access Anthropic models and software related to evaluating the technology for the startup. They gained this access from a company for which they have performed contract work evaluating Anthropic's AI models. Bloomberg is not naming the company for security reasons. The group is interested in playing around with new models, not wreaking havoc with them, the person said. The group has not run cybersecurity-related prompts on the Mythos model, the person said, preferring instead to try tasks like building simple websites in an attempt to avoid detection by Anthropic. The person said the group also has access to a slew of other unreleased Anthropic AI models. Read more of this story at Slashdot.