Latest News
Last updated 04 Mar, 08:26 PM
BBC News
US sub sinks Iranian warship in Indian Ocean, Hegseth says - Sri Lanka's navy says around 140 people are feared missing after a military vessel went down off its southern coast.
Video of US torpedo hitting Iranian warship released by Pentagon - US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said the US military has sunk "an Iranian warship" in the Indian Ocean with a torpedo.
Iran postpones Khamenei funeral as US-Israeli bombardment continues - An official says more preparations are needed for the three-day ceremony in Tehran, where the supreme leader will lie in state.
Satellite images show Iranian navy and nuclear sites hit by US-Israeli strikes - US-Israeli strikes have destroyed at least 11 Iranian naval vessels, images reviewed by BBC Verify show.
UK warship HMS Dragon not expected to sail to Cyprus until next week - HMS Dragon is being loaded with ammunition in Portsmouth having just recently come out of maintenance.
The Register
Managers try AI, staff lag behind: HR urged to help - Employees need guidance and support if companies really want to commit to AI adoption If you buy AI, employees will come and take a look, but they won't necessarily change the way they work. For that, you may have to get human resources involved.…
Apple's budget-friendly MacBook Neo is bursting with color and compromise - Cupertino grabs an aging A18 Pro from parts bin to power its latest attempt at an entry-level MacBook You'll soon be able to get a MacBook that's cheaper than many budget PCs. Apple on Wednesday unveiled the MacBook Neo, a $599 exercise in cost cutting powered by the same silicon as an iPhone 16 Pro.…
AI doctor's assistant is easily swayed to change prescriptions, give bad medical advice - Spread false medical info, supersize drug orders, and more! A healthcare AI with the power to manage prescriptions is rather open to mind-altering suggestions, according to security experts. …
AWS-hosted tech providers urge Middle East customers to fail over now - Snowflake, Red Hat, and others warn customers not to wait around for the cloud to recover After aerial strikes damaged AWS datacenters in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, Snowflake, Red Hat, and IoT platform EMQX have told customers to open their disaster recovery playbook and move to new bit barns.…
LexisNexis confirms data breach at Legal & Professional arm, some customer records affected - Crooks claim 2 GB haul from AWS instance via React2Shell exploit Data analytics giant LexisNexis has confirmed its Legal & Professional division suffered a data breach days after the Fulcrumsec cybercrime crew claimed responsibility for the hack.…
New Scientist - Home
Sea levels around the world are much higher than we thought - Most coastal risk assessments have underestimated current sea levels, meaning tens of millions of people face losing their homes to rising waters earlier than expected
Top predators still prowled the seas after the biggest mass extinction - The end-Permian extinction 252 million years ago wiped out over 80 per cent of marine species, but many ecosystems still had complex food webs despite the losses
Claude AI: Why are there so many internet outages? - AI chatbot Claude going down is just one example of a recent IT outage. One of the main vulnerabilities of the modern internet is to blame for the growing number of incidents
How worried should you be about microplastics? - Microplastics have been found accumulating everywhere from our water to our body tissues, but many of the claims have come under fresh scrutiny. Chelsea Whyte cuts through the research to tell you whether you really need to worry
Phantom codes could help quantum computers avoid errors - A method for making quantum computers less error-prone could let them run complex programs such as simulations of materials more efficiently, thus making them more useful
Hacker News
An interactive map of FLock Cams - Comments
MacBook Neo - Comments
Making Firefox's right-click not suck with about:config - Comments
Father claims Google's AI product fuelled son's delusional spiral - Comments
Something is afoot in the land of Qwen - Comments
Slashdot
Vehicle Tire Pressure Sensors Enable Silent Tracking - Longtime Slashdot reader linuxwrangler writes: Dark Reading reports that a team of researchers has determined that signals from tire pressure monitoring systems (TPMSs), required in U.S. cars since 2007, can be used to track the presence, type, weight, and driving pattern of vehicles. The researchers report (PDF) that the TPMS data, which includes unique sensor IDs, is sent in clear text without authentication and can be intercepted 40-50 meters from a vehicle using devices costing $100. "Researchers have discovered that most TPMS sensors transmit a unique identifier in clear text that never changes during the lifetime of the tire," the researchers pointed out. "This unencrypted wireless communication makes the signals susceptible to eavesdropping and potential tracking by any third party in proximity to the car." Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Emails To Outlook.com Rejected By Faulty Or Overzealous Blocking Rules - Microsoft spent much of the past week rejecting legitimate emails sent to Outlook.com, Live, and Hotmail accounts due to what appears to be overly aggressive IP reputation filtering or faulty blocklist rules. According to The Register, many senders received 550 errors claiming their networks were blocked, preventing delivery of invoices, notifications, and authentication emails. From the report: A block list is a good thing. It helps stem the flow of spam from networks or addresses associated with junk email. However, the confusing thing for our reader is that his company was not on Microsoft's naughty step for email. A look at Microsoft's Smart Network Data Service (SNDS) showed no issues with the IP. "We're also a member of their JMRP (Junk Mail Reporting Program)," our reader added, "which is intended to inform us when people are reporting spam sent from our IPs - except, we never get any reports." The problem worsened in February. On Microsoft's support forums, users began to complain about similar issues as the IP net presumably widened. One wrote: "We are currently experiencing a critical and recurring email delivery issue affecting recipients at outlook.com, live.com, hotmail.com, and msn.com," and provided a copy of an error that suggested the mail server has been "temporarily rate limited due to IP reputation." The user drily noted, "Although the error indicates rate limiting, in practice no emails are being delivered." A large number of users, ranging from the administrator of a server sending automated notifications on behalf of Estonian Public Libraries to an email provider for healthcare professionals, chimed in to confirm they too were having delivery problems and Microsoft support was not helpful. [...] Unsurprisingly, our reader spoke on condition of anonymity - nobody wants to be the ISP that has to say, "Yeah, we can deliver your email anywhere but Outlook.com" to customers. We asked Microsoft to comment, but other than acknowledging our questions, the company did not respond further. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
TikTok Says End-To-End Encryption Makes Users Less Safe - An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: TikTok will not introduce end-to-end encryption (E2EE) -- the controversial privacy feature used by nearly all its rivals -- arguing it makes users less safe. E2EE means only the sender and recipient of a direct message can view its contents, making it the most secure form of communication available to the general public. Platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and X have embraced it because they say their priority is maximizing user privacy. But critics have said E2EE makes it harder to stop harmful content spreading online, because it means tech firms and law enforcement have no way of viewing any material sent in direct messages. The situation is made more complex because TikTok has long faced accusations that ties to the Chinese state may put users' data at risk. TikTok has consistently denied this, but earlier this year the social media firm's US operations were separated from its global business on the orders of US lawmakers. TikTok told the BBC it believed end-to-end encryption prevented police and safety teams from being able to read direct messages if they needed to. It confirmed its approach to the BBC in a briefing about security at its London office, saying it wanted to protect users, especially young people from harm. It described this stance as a deliberate decision to set itself apart from rivals. "Grooming and harassment risks are very real in DMs [direct messages] so TikTok now can credibly argue that it's prioritizing 'proactive safety' over 'privacy absolutism' which is a pretty powerful soundbite," said social media industry analyst Matt Navarra. But Navarra said the move also "puts TikTok out of step with global privacy expectations" and might reinforce wariness for some about its ownership. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Apple Announces Low-Cost 'MacBook Neo' With A18 Pro Chip - Continuing its product launches this week, Apple today announced the "MacBook Neo," an all-new, low-cost Mac featuring the A18 Pro chip. It starts at $599 and begins shipping on Wednesday, March 11. MacRumors reports: The MacBook Neo is the first Mac to be powered by an iPhone chip; the A18 Pro debuted in 2024's iPhone 16 Pro models. Apple says it is up to 50% faster for everyday tasks than the bestselling PC with the latest shipping Intel Core Ultra 5, up to 3x faster for on-device AI workloads, and up to 2x faster for tasks like photo editing. The MacBook Neo features a 13-inch Liquid Retina display with a 2408-by-1506 resolution, 500 nits of brightness, and an anti-reflective coating. The display does not have a notch, instead featuring uniform, iPad-style bezels. It is available in Silver, Indigo, Blush, and Citrus color options. The colored finishes extend to the Magic Keyboard in lighter shades and come with matching wallpapers. It weighs 2.7 pounds. There are two USB-C ports. One is a USB-C 2 port with support for speeds up to 480 Mb/s and one is a USB-C 3 port with support for speeds up to 10 Gb/s. There is also a headphone jack. The MacBook Neo also offers a 16-hour battery life, 8GB of unified memory, Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 6 connectivity, a 1080p front-facing camera, dual mics with directional beamforming, and dual side-firing speakers with Spatial Audio. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Intel's Make-Or-Break 18A Process Node Debuts For Data Center With 288-Core Xeon 6+ CPU - Intel has formally unveiled its Xeon 6+ "Clearwater Forest" data-center processor with up to 288 cores, built on the company's new Intel 18A process and using Foveros Direct packaging. The chip targets telecom, cloud, and edge-AI workloads with massive parallelism, large caches, and high-bandwidth DDR5-8000 memory. Tom's Hardware reports: Intel's Xeon 6+ processors with up to 288 cores combine 12 compute chiplets containing 24 energy-efficient Darkmont cores per tile that are produced using 18A manufacturing technology, two I/O tiles made on Intel 7 production node, as well as three active base tiles made on Intel 3 fabrication process. The compute tiles are stacked on top of the base dies using Intel's Foveros Direct 3D technology, whereas lateral connections are enabled by Intel's EMIB bridges. Intel's 'Darkmont' efficiency cores have received rather meaningful microarchitectural upgrades. Each core integrates a 64 KB L1 instruction cache, a broader fetch and decode pipeline, and a deeper out-of-order engine capable of tracking more in-flight operations. The number of execution ports has also been increased in a bid to improve both scalar and vector throughput under heavily threaded server workloads. From a cache hierarchy standpoint, the design groups cores into four-core blocks that share approximately 4 MB of L2 cache per block. As a result, the aggregate last-level cache across the full package surpasses 1 GB, roughly 1,152 MB in total. This unusually large pool is intended to keep data close to hundreds of active cores and reduce dependence on external memory bandwidth, which in turn is meant to both increase performance and lower power consumption. Platform-wise, the processor remains drop-in compatible with the current Xeon server socket, so the CPU has 12 memory channels that support DDR5-8000, 96 PCIe 5.0 lanes with 64 lanes supporting CXL 2.0. Read more of this story at Slashdot.