Latest News
Last updated 16 Apr, 06:13 PM
BBC News
Starmer not aware Foreign Office overruled Mandelson vetting decision until this week, government says - A decision to go against the recommendation of the vetting agency was taken by officials in the Foreign Office, spokesperson says.
Home Office investigating after BBC finds migrants making false claims to stay in UK - No 10 says the government is working to ensure "anyone potentially abusing our immigration system is held accountable".
Rollout of Covid vaccines an extraordinary feat, inquiry report finds - Covid vaccines saved hundreds of thousands of lives, but a small minority harmed need better support, says report.
Andrew invited to relinquish Freedom of City - Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor received the historic honour in 2012 "by virtue of patrimony".
Churchwarden jailed for murdering pensioner has conviction quashed - Benjamin Field has been in prison for the murder of Peter Farquhar, 69.
The Register
If you want into Anthropic's Claude club, you may have to show ID - Worse: Anthropic is using Persona, a privacy checker that rings alarm bells for the paranoids on Reddit Anthropic may check your ID before letting you access certain Claude features, and the verification vendor it has picked is the same outfit that sparked controversy when Discord tested similar checks.…
DuckDB uses RDBMS to attack classic 'small changes' problem in lakehouses - Batching teensy changes in chunks creates massive performance boost, DuckDB Labs team claims The team behind in-process OLAP database DuckDB has put forward a solution to the "small changes" problem that they say plagues lakehouse implementations of the kind based on technologies from Databricks, Snowflake, Google, and others.…
Iran has something America can only dream of: cheap broadband - Shame about the internet blackouts and airstrikes North America has some of the world's most expensive broadband, according to a new study, while Iran has the cheapest.…
Americans who masterminded Nork IT worker fraud sentenced to 200 months behind bars - Fortune 500 companies and one US defense contractor got taken for $5m in four-year scam Two Americans have been jailed for a combined 200 months for helping North Korea generate $5 million through fraudulent IT worker schemes.…
Brussels tells Google to hand rivals its search crown jewels as privacy row brews - Includes a to-do list on search data sharing and platform access as DMA enforcement ramps up Brussels has told Google to open up its search data and give rivals equal footing on its own platforms, sketching out how it expects the tech giant to comply with the bloc's competition rulebook.…
New Scientist - Home
Our dreams become more emotive and symbolic as we approach death - Terminally ill people are commonly reunited with lost loved ones in their dreams and have visions of doors, stairways and light, which are said to help them accept the dying process
How to spot the Lyrid meteor shower tonight - The Lyrid meteor shower will soon hit its peak. Here's how to spot it, including by using the New Scientist stargazing companion
Neanderthal infants were enormous compared with modern humans - A detailed analysis of the best-preserved Neanderthal infant skeleton ever found suggests that our ancient relatives grew much faster as young children
Exclusive report: Inside Chernobyl, 40 years after nuclear disaster - New Scientist reporter Matthew Sparkes secured unrivalled access to Chernobyl's most crucial scientific sites, where researchers are fighting to protect the area and ensure it remains safe amid the constant threat of attack from Russia
What to read this week: Emma Chapman's mind-expanding Radio Universe - An imaginative and compelling book reveals how radio waves help us tune in to our universe – and even search for alien civilisations, says Karmela Padavic-Callaghan
Hacker News
Claude Opus 4.7 - Comments
Codex for Almost Everything - Comments
Qwen3.6-35B-A3B: Agentic coding power, now open to all - Comments
Cloudflare's AI Platform: an inference layer designed for agents - Comments
Launch HN: Kampala (YC W26) – Reverse-Engineer Apps into APIs - Comments
Slashdot
IPv6 Usage Reaches Historic 50% Across Google Services - IPv6 usage briefly reached 50% across Google services for the first time, marking a major milestone for a protocol created in 1998 to solve IPv4's address shortage. Tom's Hardware reports: [...] IPv6 was dismissed early on as a headache-inducing, hard-to-implement complication that would hardly ever gain any traction -- despite offering 2^128 possible numbers, solving all network number assignments in one fell swoop. That changed over time by force of necessity, and Google's tracking graph shows that for a brief moment in time on March 28, 50% of worldwide users accessed the service over an IPv6 connection, marking a historic first. APNIC's stats show that the protocol is in use by 43% of the world, with Asia and the Americas inching ever close to those 50%. Cloudflare, meanwhile, shows that 40% of traffic is done in IPv6, an actually impressive figure if you consider it's measuring actual transferred packets rather than just counting addresses. The tried-and-true IPv4 and its well-known 123.456.789.123 format from 1980 offers ~4.3 billion addresses in theory, and around 3.7 billion in practice. That always sounded like a lot, but nobody could have predicted just how rapid the explosion of the Internet would be. IANA, the entity controlling the North-American IPv4 space, ran out of IPv4 addresses around 2011, while its European equivalent RIPE NCC could spare no more four-octet addresses nearly seven years ago in 2019. Asian, African, and Latin-American IP registries equally ran out during that timeframe. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Anthropic Rolls Out Claude Opus 4.7, an AI Model That Is Less Risky Than Mythos - Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.7, calling it its strongest generally available model and an improvement over Opus 4.6 in areas like software engineering, instruction-following, tool use, and agentic coding. But the company says it is "less broadly capable" than the restricted Claude Mythos Preview, "which Anthropic rolled out to a select group of companies as part of a new cybersecurity initiative called Project Glasswing earlier this month," reports CNBC. From the report: The launch of Claude Opus 4.7 on Thursday comes after Anthropic launched Claude Opus 4.6 in February. Anthropic said the new model outperforms Claude Opus 4.6 across many use cases, including industry benchmarks for agentic coding, multidisciplinary reasoning, scaled tool use and agentic computer use, according to a release. Anthropic said it experimented with efforts to "differentially reduce" Claude Opus 4.7's cyber capabilities during training. The company encouraged security professionals who are interested in using the model for "legitimate cybersecurity purposes" to apply through a formal verification program. Claude Opus 4.7 is available across all of Anthropic's Claude products, its application programming interface and through cloud providers Microsoft, Google and Amazon. The new model is the same price as Claude Opus 4.6, Anthropic said. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
EU Age Verification App Announced To Protect Children Online - The EU says a new age-verification app is technically ready and could let users prove they are old enough to access restricted online content without revealing their identity or personal data. Deutsche Welle reports: Once released, users will be able to download the app from an app store and set it up using proof of identity, such as a passport or national ID card. They can then use it to confirm they are above a certain age when accessing restricted content, without revealing their identity. According to the Commission, the system is similar to the digital certificates used during the COVID-19 pandemic, which allowed people to prove their vaccination status. The app is expected to support enforcement of the bloc's Digital Services Act, which aims to better regulate online platforms. This includes restricting access to content such as pornography, gambling and alcohol-related services. Officials say the app will be "completely anonymous" and built on open-source technology, meaning it could also be adopted outside the EU. [...] While there is no binding EU-wide law yet, the European Parliament has called for a minimum age of 16 for social media access. For now, enforcement would largely fall to individual member states, but the new app is intended to help platforms comply with future national and EU rules. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Researchers Induce Smells With Ultrasound, No Chemical Cartridges Required - An anonymous reader quotes a report from UploadVR: A group of independent researchers built a device that can artificially induce smell using ultrasound, with no consumable cartridges required. [...] The team of four are Lev Chizhov, Albert Yan-Huang, Thomas Ribeiro, Aayush Gupta. Chizhov is a neurotech entrepreneur with a background in math and physics, Yan-Huang is a researcher at Caltech with a background in computation and neural systems, and Ribeiro and Gupta are co-researchers on the project with software engineering and AI expertise. Instead of targeting your nose at all, the device directly targets the olfactory bulb in your brain with "focused ultrasound through the skull." The researchers say that as far as they're aware, no one has ever done this before, even in animals. A challenge in targeting the olfactory bulb is that it's buried behind the top of your nose, and your nose doesn't provide a flat surface for an emitter. Ultrasound also doesn't travel well through air. The solution the researchers came up with was to place the emitter on your forehead instead, with a "solid, jello-like pad for stability and general comfort," and the ultrasound directed downward towards the olfactory bulb. To determine the best placement, they say they used an MRI of one of their skulls to "roughly determine where the transducer would point and how the focal region (where ultrasound waves actually concentrate) aligned with the olfactory bulb (the target for stimulation)". [...] According to the researchers, they were able to induce the sensation of fresh air "with a lot of oxygen", the smell of garbage "like few-day-old fruit peels," an ozone-like sensation "like you're next to an air ionizer," and a campfire smell of burning wood. While technically head-mounted, the current device does require being held up with two hands. But as with all such prototypes, it likely could be significantly miniaturized. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Bullet Train Upgrade Brings 5G Windows, Noise-Cancelling Cabins To Japan - Some Japanese bullet trains will soon support premium private suites this October, featuring windows with embedded 5G antennas for steadier onboard Wi-Fi and NTT noise-cancelling cabin tech to reduce train noise. The 5G window antennas are designed to maintain line-of-sight connections as trains race past base stations at up to 285 km/h. The Register reports: Rail operator JR Central announced the new tech late last month and will initially deploy a couple of the suites on six trains. The carrier explained that the antennas come from a Japanese company called AGC that weaves microscopic wires through glass to form an antenna. JR Central will connect the windows to an on-train Wi-Fi router. AGC says rival tech relies on 5G signals reaching a train and then bouncing around inside before reaching the Wi-Fi unit. The company says antennas woven into train windows maintain line of sight to nearby 5G base stations. That matters because JR Central's Shinkansen can achieve speeds of up to 285 km/h, which means they speed past cellular network base stations so quickly that it's frequently necessary to reconnect to another radio. AGC says keeping a line of sight connection means its antennas allow increased 5G signal strength, so Wi-Fi service on board trains should be more stable and speedy. The sound-deadening kit JR Central will deploy is called Personalized Sound Zone (PSZ) and comes from Japan's tech giant NTT. The tech uses the same principles applied to noise-cancelling headphones -- determine the waveform of sound and project an inversion of that waveform that cancels out ambient noise. Read more of this story at Slashdot.