Latest News
Last updated 26 Feb, 09:19 PM
BBC News
MoD launches review into whether Epstein used RAF bases - Records and emails will be reviewed to determine whether the convicted sex offender used military bases when visiting the UK.
Spain to check Gibraltar arrivals under post-Brexit deal - Arrivals at the Rock's airport would have to show their passport twice under a new UK-EU treaty.
Soham murderer Ian Huntley treated for serious head injuries after prison workshop attack - The 52-year-old is serving a life sentence after being convicted of murdering schoolgirls Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman.
US-Iran talks end after 'significant progress', mediator says - The indirect negotiations in Geneva are seen as a last-ditch effort, but the chances of a nuclear agreement are unclear.
Woman angry at lack of prosecution after she fell from window fleeing triple killer - A former neighbour of Valdo Calocane was told he could have killed her, years before the attacks.
The Register
Burger King turns to AI to flame broil employees who aren't friendly enough - Because nothing says hospitality like a bot counting your pleases The bot’s nagging will continue until morale improves. Burger King is rolling out a new employee-facing AI that, among other things, will listen to employees’ customer interactions to ensure they’re being friendly enough - as if working in fast food weren’t hard enough already.…
AI models still suck at math - Just less than before, according to the ORCA test exclusive Current-day LLMs are prediction engines and, as such, they can only find the most likely solution to problems, which is not necessarily the correct one. Though popular models have mostly become better at math, even top performer Gemini 3 Flash would receive a C if assessed with a letter grade.…
Anthropic launches new marketing blog, pretends it's being 'written' by 'retired' LLM - Pretending the software is sentient makes it sound more powerful As with any piece of obsolete software, you might expect an outdated AI model to just be switched off. Anthropic, however, argues that simply pulling the plug has downsides. After “retirement” interviews, Claude Opus 3 said it wanted to keep sharing its “musings,” so Anthropic suggested a blog.…
Rapid AI-driven development makes security unattainable, warns Veracode - Report claims more vulnerabilities created than fixed as remediation gap widens Veracode has posted its annual State of Software Security report, based on data from 1.6 million applications tested on its cloud platform, finding that more vulnerabilities are being created than are being fixed, and that high-velocity development with AI is making comprehensive security unattainable.…
Top cloud providers to outspend Ireland's GDP on AI in 2026 - TrendForce says eight hyperscalers are set to pour $710B into servers and infrastructure The big cloud operators are ramping up investment in AI servers and infrastructure to meet demand for AI development and deployment, exacerbating the memory shortage caused by their insatiable growth.…
New Scientist - Home
Banning children from VPNs and social media will erode adults' privacy - Legislation working its way through the UK parliament would ban children from using social media and virtual private networks – but the proposals would endanger online privacy and may not make children safer, say legal experts
How to see six planets in the sky at once in rare celestial alignment - Nearly all of the solar system’s planets are about to file across the night sky in a planetary alignment, and it will be visible from anywhere on Earth
Is geothermal energy on the cusp of a worldwide renaissance? - The UK's first geothermal plant in Cornwall is part of a wave of projects aiming to meet growing electricity demand, some of them enabled by technology from oil and gas fracturing
Why I have changed my mind about AI and you should too - Both boosters and sceptics have strongly held opinions on AI tools like ChatGPT, but after an experiment in vibe coding, I have realised that both camps are wrong, says Jacob Aron
AIs can’t stop recommending nuclear strikes in war game simulations - Leading AIs from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google opted to use nuclear weapons in simulated war games in 95 per cent of cases
Hacker News
AirSnitch: Demystifying and breaking client isolation in Wi-Fi networks [pdf] - Comments
Launch HN: Cardboard (YC W26) – Agentic video editor - Comments
Will vibe coding end like the maker movement? - Comments
Palm OS User Interface Guidelines (2003) [pdf] - Comments
What Claude Code Chooses - Comments
Slashdot
iPhone and iPad Are First Consumer Devices Cleared for NATO Classified Data - Apple's iPhone and iPad running iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 have become the first consumer mobile devices cleared for NATO-restricted classified data. No special software or settings are required. MacRumors reports: Apple's devices are the first and only consumer mobile products that have reached this government certification level after security testing and evaluation by the German government. iPhones and iPads running iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 are now certified for use with classified data in all NATO nations. In an announcement of the security clearance, Apple touted its security features: "Apple designs security into all of its products from the start, ensuring the most sophisticated protections are built in across hardware, software, and Apple silicon. This unique approach allows Apple users to benefit from industry-leading security protections such as best-in-class encryption, biometric authentication with Face ID, and groundbreaking features like Memory Integrity Enforcement. These same protections are now recognized as meeting stringent government and international security requirements, even for restricted data." Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Firefox 148 Lets You Kill All AI Features in One Click - Mozilla has released Firefox 148 for Windows, macOS and Linux, bringing a new AI Settings section that lets users disable all of the browser's AI-powered features in one click and then selectively re-enable the ones they actually want, such as the local translation tool that works locally rather than in the cloud. The update also patches more than 50 security vulnerabilities -- none known to be under active exploitation -- over half of which Mozilla classifies as high risk, including five sandbox escape flaws and eight use-after-free bugs in the JavaScript engine that could allow code execution. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Which Piece of Speculative Fiction Had the Greatest Single-Day Stock Market Impact? - Speaking of the Citrini's blog post, which imagines a near-future AI-driven economic collapse, and which ended up help triggering the S&P 500's worst single-day drop in nearly two weeks on Monday, FT Alphaville decided to track how US stock markets have moved on the release days of notable dystopian speculative fiction throughout history. The story adds: You may contend that this is facile. We would agree. You might contend that the comparisons make no sense because it's possible to read a blog post during a single work shift, but it's tricker to complete a whole novel (or sneak out to watch a movie). We would contend: do you really think traders read? Let's begin. The methodology -- tracking S&P 500 daily moves for post-1986 releases and DJIA moves for pre-1986 ones -- crowned The Matrix as the all-time leader, its March 1999 US debut coinciding with a 1.11% drop in the index. Citrini's "The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis" came in a close second at -1.04%. On the positive end, the 2013 release of Her, a film about a man falling in love with an AI agent, coincided with the largest gain in the set at +1.66%. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The Government Just Made it Harder to See What Spy Tech it Buys - An anonymous reader shares a report: It might look like something from the early days of the internet, with its aggressively grey color scheme and rectangles nested inside rectangles, but FPDS.gov is one of the most important resources for keeping tabs on what powerful spying tools U.S. government agencies are buying. It includes everything from phone hacking technology, to masses of location data, to more Palantir installations. Or rather, it was an incredible tool and the basis for countless of my own investigations and others. Because on Wednesday, the government shut it down. Its replacement, another site called SAM.gov with Uncle Sam branding, frankly sucks, and makes it demonstrably harder to reliably find out what agencies, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), are spending tax payers dollars on. "FPDS may have been a little clunky, but its simple, old-school interface made it extremely functional and robust. Every facet of government operations touches on contracting at one point, and this was the first tool that many investigative journalists and researchers would reach for to quickly find out what the government is buying and who is selling it, and how these contracts all fit together," Dave Maass, director of investigations at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told me. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The AI Case Against Indian IT Ignores What Indian IT Actually Does - A fictional memo set in June 2028, published by short seller Citrini Research, wiped roughly $10 billion off Indian IT stocks in a single trading session on February 24 and sent the Nifty IT index down as much as 5.3% -- its worst single-day fall since August 2023 -- on the argument that AI coding agents have collapsed the cost advantage of Indian developers to the price of electricity. The index has shed more than $68 billion in market value in February alone, its worst month since 2003. But the core claim that India's entire $205 billion software export industry rests on cheap labor is roughly 15 years out of date, an analysis argues, custom application maintenance alone accounts for about 35% of a typical Indian IT firm's revenue, per HSBC, and enterprise platforms require deterministic outputs that probabilistic AI systems cannot wholesale replace. HSBC estimates gross AI-led revenue deflation for the sector at 14-16%, a measured headwind rather than an extinction event. The story adds: 24 years of software export data that has never posted a decline, $200 billion in annual revenue, partnerships with the very AI labs whose products are supposed to be the instrument of the sector's destruction, possibly a new $1.5 trillion market category emerging at the intersection of services and software, and the largest U.S. corporates in the middle of mapping their entire workforces into process architectures that require technology partners to modernise. I think India's IT is going to be fine. Read more of this story at Slashdot.