Latest News
Last updated 18 Apr, 11:15 PM
BBC News
Strait of Hormuz closed again, Iran says, as ships attacked - Iran is blaming a US blockade for the closure, saying it breaches the ceasefire reached between the two countries.
Senior official ousted over Mandelson security row to face MPs - Former Foreign Office chief Sir Olly Robbins is expected to be grilled by the Foreign Affairs Committee on Tuesday.
Why Starmer still can't move on from the Mandelson mess - The decision to send Peter Mandelson to Washington has become a scandal that just won't go away for Labour.
New charity to remember Queen Elizabeth 100 years since her birth - The Royal Family will be remembering the late monarch at events on Tuesday - on what would have been her birthday.
Scammers are becoming ever more sophisticated - this is what the fightback looks like - Scams have exploded over the last few years. Can countries and companies come together to turn the tables on the scammers?
The Register
Cloudflare can remember it for you wholesale - Agent Memory stores AI chat scraps off to the side and recalls them when needed Not only is hardware memory scarce these days, but context memory, the conversational data exchanged with AI models, can be an issue too.…
Atlassian’s new data collection policy protects rich customers while AI eats the rest - From August 17, the outfit will collect customer metadata by default unless you pay for the top tier Unless a customer pays for the most expensive enterprise license, or the law forbids it, Atlassian is going to collect their data to train its AI models. And you can't fully opt out.…
Intel eases reliance on TSMC with 'Merica-made Core Series 3 processors - Stripped-down Ultra for laptops and low-power edge boxes Intel brought a few more chips home from Taiwan this week, with a new round of budget-oriented Core Series 3 processors fabbed right in the US-of-A.…
Anthropic mocks up Claude Design to draft fancy new pink slips for marketing teams - The bar for creating visual assets has been lowered to the ability to converse with a model Anthropic is known for its industry-leading Claude Code that writes programs, but why stop there? The company, on Friday, introduced a research preview service called Claude Design that creates visual assets, potentially putting some folks out of work.…
CISA tells feds to patch 13-year-old Apache ActiveMQ bug under active attack - Bug hiding in plain sight for over a decade lands on KEV list CISA is sounding the alarm on a newly-exploited Apache ActiveMQ bug, ordering federal agencies to patch within two weeks as attackers circle a flaw that's been quietly lurking for more than a decade.…
New Scientist - Home
How autoimmune conditions can unexpectedly drive mental illness - Antibodies mistakenly attacking the brain are linked with conditions including schizophrenia, dementia and OCD, prompting a revolution in how we think about mental health conditions
Werner Herzog searches for ghost elephants in stunning new documentary - A film about the quest for “ghost elephants” is as much about not knowing and asking the right questions as about exploration, finds Davide Abbatescianni
Electric vehicle owners could earn thousands by supporting power grid - Electric vehicles could store renewable energy when there is excess supply and give it back to the grid when demand peaks, but car companies disagree on the best way to do that
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
New Scientist recommends Jamie Bartlett's insightful How to Talk to AI - The books, TV, games and more that New Scientist staff have enjoyed this week
Hacker News
Any Color You Like: NIST Scientists Create 'Any Wavelength' Lasers - Comments
The electromechanical angle computer inside the B-52 bomber's star tracker - Comments
Thoughts and feelings around Claude Design - Comments
Dad brains: How fatherhood rewires the male mind - Comments
Optimizing Ruby Path Methods - Comments
Slashdot
New Movie Trailer Shows First AI-Generated Performance By a Major Star: the Late Val Kilmer - "A trailer has been released for the first film to star an authorised generative AI version of a major Hollywood actor," writes The Guardian: Val Kilmer was cast in western As Deep As the Grave before his death in April 2025. Production delays meant he never shot any scenes, but the creative team worked with UK-based company Sonantic to create an AI speaking voice based on his old recordings. His estate and daughter Mercedes collaborated with the film-makers on the visual deepfake of the actor. Kilmer, who was diagnosed with throat cancer, was also assisted by technology for his cameo in 2022's Top Gun: Maverick... Writer-director Coerte Voorhees confirmed that Kilmer is seen for around an hour of the film's running time... Voorhees has said that the production followed Sag-Aftra [union] guidelines, and that Kilmer's estate — which provided archival material for them to use — was compensated financially. "Kilmer's likeness can be seen portraying Father Fintan, a Catholic priest and Native American spiritualist," adds The Hollywood Reporter. But the AV Club calls it "ghoulish puppet show time." "Having your AI Val Kilmer puppet whisper 'Don't fear the dead, and don't fear me' in a movie trailer is a bold choice..." He is accompanied (per Variety) by a whole host of disclaimers, caveats, and explanations offered by writer-director Coerte Voorhees and his associates: Kilmer deeply wanted to be in the movie, but was too sick to do so. His family endorses and supports his inclusion. He was a big fan of technology, including, presumably, its use in turning his own image into a digital avatar to then shove into movies... The fact is, of course, that nobody would be paying a fraction of this attention to As Deep As The Grave — about early female archeologist Ann Axtell Morris — if it weren't now being used as the stage on which Voorhees was very publicly accepting the dare to go full-on ghoulish with AI tech. "The filmmakers said they hoped they were showing Hollywood how to use the technology in a positive way..." notes Australia's ABC News. But their articles add that "Some have called the trailer 'terrifying' and 'disgusting' on social media." Mashable writes: "Very fitting that this trailer includes a scene where a corpse is unceremoniously yanked out of the ground," read one of the top comments on As Deep as the Grave's trailer at time of writing... [O]nline commenters have labelled it disgusting and disrespectful, not only for digitally reanimating Kilmer but also for the damaging precedent As Deep as the Grave's use of AI could set for the film industry as a whole. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Old Cars 'Tell Tales' by Storing Data That's Never Wiped - Slashdot reader Bismillah shared this report from ITNews: Research and development engineer Romain Marchand of Paris headquartered Quarkslab obtained a telematic control unit (TCU) from a salvage yard in Poland... Marchand tore down the TCU, which is based on a Qualcomm system on a chip, and extracted the Linux-based file system from the Micron multi-chip package (MCP) which contained NAND-based non-volatile storage memory. The non-volatile storage contained sensitive information, including system configuration data and more importantly, logs that revealed the vehicle's GPS positions over time. None of that information was encrypted, Marchand told iTnews, which made it possible to collect and retrieve sensitive data of interest. What's more, the global navigation satellite system (GNSS) logs with GPS positions covered the BYD's full journey from the factory in China to its operational life in the United Kingdom, and to its final wrecking in Poland, Marchand explained in an analysis... The issue is not restricted to BYD, and Marchand added that the hardware architecture of the Chinese car maker's TCU is broadly similar to what can be found in other brands. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Fewer US College Students Major in CS. More Choose Data Science, Engineering - "From 2008 to 2024, the number of four-year computer science degrees granted rose about fivefold..." reports the Washington Post. Then in 2025 CS suddenly dropped from the fourth-largest undergraduate major to sixth, they report (citing data from the nonprofit National Student Clearinghouse, which compiles numbers from 97% of U.S. universities. The 54,000-student drop was "the biggest one-year drop of any major discipline going back to at least 2020." But what major are they choosing instead? Sarah Karamarkovich, a research associate with the National Student Clearinghouse, pointed to an explanation from the data that we had overlooked. Enrollments in two interdisciplinary majors, data analytics and data science, topped a combined 35,000 in the fall of 2025. That was up from a few hundred when those disciplines were broken out into their own majors in 2020. Those relatively new categories reflect colleges' zeal to create specialized majors, including in AI, data science, robotics and cybersecurity. Some of those disciplines may be counted in the national enrollment data as computer science. Others are not. The numbers suggest that some of the disappearing computer science majors didn't flee so much as they splintered into related disciplines.... The 8 percent decline in computer science majors last fall was nearly mirrored by a 7.3 percent increase in engineering majors, according to the National Student Clearinghouse data. Within engineering, mechanical and electrical engineering major enrollments increased by the largest absolute amounts — a jump of 11 percent and 14 percent, respectively. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
US Congress Fails to Pass Long-Term FISA Extension, Authorizes It Through April 30 - Yesterday the U.S. Congress approved "a short-term extension" of a FISA law that allows wiretaps without a warrant for surveilling foreign targets, reports CNN — but only until April 30. Republican congressional leaders had sought an 18-month extension, but "failed to secure" the votes after "clamoring from some of their members for reforms to protect Americans' privacy." The warrantless surveillance law, known as Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, was set to expire on Monday night. Members are hoping the additional time will allow them to come to agreement without ending authorization for the intelligence gathering program, which permits US officials to monitor phone calls and text messages from foreign targets... There was an hour of suspense in the Senate Friday morning when it appeared possible that Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden, a longtime critic of FISA 702, might block the House-passed extension. But ultimately, he said his House colleagues had assured him "this short-term extension makes reform more likely, and expiration makes reform less likely," and so he chose not to object.... House Republican leaders believed Thursday night they had struck a deal with conservative holdouts who harbor deep and longstanding concerns that a key piece of the law infringes on Americans' privacy rights. But in a pair of after-midnight votes, more than a dozen rank-and-file Republicans rejected the long-term reauthorization plan on the floor, which was the result of days of tense negotiations among leadership, lawmakers and the White House. The law allows authorized US officials to gather phone calls and text messages of foreign targets, but they can also incidentally collect the data of Americans in the process. Senior national security officials have for years said the law is critical for thwarting terror attacks, stemming the flow of fentanyl into the US and stopping ransomware attacks on critical infrastructure. Civil liberties groups on the left and the right, meanwhile, argue the surveillance authority risks infringing on Americans' privacy. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
30 WordPress Plugins Turned Into Malware After Ownership Change - Wednesday BleepingComputer reported that more than 30 WordPress plugins "have been compromised with malicious code that allows unauthorized access to websites running them." A malicious actor planted the backdoor code last year but only recently started pushing it to users via updates, generating spam pages and causing redirects, as per the instructions received from the command-and-control (C2) server. The compromise affects plugins with hundreds of thousands of active installations and was spotted by Austin Ginder, the founder of managed WordPress hosting provider Anchor Hosting, after receiving a tip about one add-on containing code that allowed third-party access. Further investigation by Ginder revealed that a backdoor had been present in all plugins within the EssentialPlugin package since August 2025, after the project was acquired in a six-figure deal by a new owner.... "The injected code was sophisticated. It fetched spam links, redirects, and fake pages from a command-and-control server. It only showed the spam to Googlebot, making it invisible to site owners," explained Ginder. "WordPress.org's v2.6.9.1 update neutralized the phone-home mechanism in the plugin," Ginder writes in a blog post. "But it did not touch wp-config.php. The SEO spam injection was still actively serving hidden content to Googlebot. "And here is the wildest part. It resolved its C2 domain through an Ethereum smart contract, querying public blockchain RPC endpoints. Traditional domain takedowns would not work because the attacker could update the smart contract to point to a new domain at any time." This has happened before. In 2017, a buyer using the alias "Daley Tias" purchased the Display Widgets plugin (200,000 installs) for $15,000 and injected payday loan spam. That buyer went on to compromise at least 9 plugins the same way.... The WordPress plugin marketplace has a trust problem... The Flippa listing for Essential Plugin was public. The buyer's background in SEO and gambling marketing was public. And yet the acquisition sailed through without any review from WordPress.org. WordPress.org has no mechanism to flag or review plugin ownership transfers. There is no "change of control" notification to users. No additional code review triggered by a new committer. The Plugins Team responded quickly once the attack was discovered. But 8 months passed between the backdoor being planted and being caught. Thanks to Slashdot reader axettone for sharing the news. Read more of this story at Slashdot.