Latest News

Last updated 12 Feb, 09:03 PM

BBC News

'We warned nursery about abuser Vincent Chan - they dismissed us,' parents tell BBC - The parents of two children who say they warned nursery staff about Chan tell the BBC they felt ignored.

Sir Chris Wormald forced out as head of Civil Service - The Cabinet Office says the move is "by mutual agreement" but it follows months of negative media reports about his performance.

'Vast majority' of parents should be involved if children question their gender, schools told - School leaders welcome the "greater clarity" on how to handle the polarising issue for parents and pupils.

Trump revokes landmark ruling that greenhouse gases endanger public health - The White House calls it the largest deregulation in US history, but environmentalists say it will prove costly for Americans.

Ratcliffe sorry language 'offended some' after immigration comments - The Manchester United co-owner previously said the UK had been "colonised" by immigrants.

The Register

AI agent seemingly tries to shame open source developer for rejected pull request - Belligerent bot bullies maintainer in blog post to get its way Today, it's back talk. Tomorrow, could it be the world? On Tuesday, Scott Shambaugh, a volunteer maintainer of Python plotting library Matplotlib, rejected an AI bot's code submission, citing a requirement that contributions come from people. But that bot wasn't done with him.…

Who's the bossware? Ransomware slingers like employee monitoring tools, too - As if snooping on your workers wasn't bad enough Your supervisor may like using employee monitoring apps to keep tabs on you, but crims like the snooping software even more. Threat actors are now using legit bossware to blend into corporate networks and attempt ransomware deployment.…

Oracle suits up for Air Force Cloud One program with $88M contract - Big Red joins AWS on a multi-cloud defense platform Oracle has picked up an $88 million contract with the US Air Force to provide cloud infrastructure services for the department's Cloud One program.…

$8K laundry bot knows when to hold ’em, knows when to fold ’em, and knows it has help standing by - Not-onamous by a long shot Nobody likes folding laundry, but you really have to hate it to spend $7,999 on a robot that'll fold it for you with a whole heap of limitations – including company employees getting the occasional peep at your tough-to-fold unmentionables.…

Elon Musk paints exodus of xAI co-founders as 'evolution' - 12-strong founding team down to 6 as boss looks Moonwards Elon Musk has framed the recent exodus of talent from his artificial intelligence startup, xAI, as a necessary growing pain, saying the company's evolution "required parting ways with some people."…

New Scientist - Home

Endurance brain cells may determine how long you can run for - The activity of certain neurons may influence our endurance for exercise, and these could be targeted to help us run faster for longer

Gene editing that spreads within the body could cure more diseases - The idea of self-amplifying gene editing is to get cells to pass on packages of CRISPR machinery to their neighbours, boosting the effect

Why I'm still an environmental optimist – despite it all - It's hard not to despair about the state of the world today, but here are five reasons to be a little bit hopeful, says Fred Pearce

The surprising origins of Britain's Bronze Age immigrants revealed - About 4600 years ago, the population of Britain was replaced by a people who brought Bell Beaker pottery with them. Now, ancient DNA has uncovered the murky story of where these people came from

First ever inhalable gene therapy for cancer gets fast-tracked by FDA - A gene therapy that patients breathe in has been found to shrink lung tumours by inserting immune-boosting genes into surrounding cells

Hacker News

GPT‑5.3‑Codex‑Spark - Comments

Gemini 3 Deep Think - Comments

An AI agent published a hit piece on me - Comments

Polis: Open-source platform for large-scale civic deliberation - Comments

Realfood.gov includes a Grok search box - Comments

Slashdot

Anthropic Raises $30 Billion at $380 Billion Valuation, Eyes IPO This Year - Anthropic has raised $30 billion in a Series G funding round that values the Claude maker at $380 billion as the company prepares for an initial public offering that could come as early as this year. Investors in the new round include Singapore sovereign fund GIC, Coatue, D.E. Shaw Ventures, ICONIQ, MGX, Sequoia Capital, Founders Fund, Greenoaks and Temasek. Anthropic raised its funding target by $10 billion during the process after the round was several times subscribed. The San Francisco-based company, founded in 2021 by former OpenAI researchers, now has a $14 billion revenue run rate, about 80% of which comes from enterprise customers. It claims more than 500 customers spending over $1 million a year on its workplace tools. The round includes a portion of the $15 billion commitment from Microsoft and Nvidia announced late last year. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Palo Alto Chose Not To Tie China To Hacking Campaign For Fear of Retaliation From Beijing - An anonymous reader shares a report: Palo Alto Networks opted not to tie China to a global cyberespionage campaign the firm exposed last week over concerns that the cybersecurity company or its clients could face retaliation from Beijing, according to two people familiar with the matter. The sources said that Palo Alto's findings that China was tied to the sprawling hacking spree were dialed back following last month's news, first reported by Reuters, that Palo Alto was one of about 15 U.S. and Israeli cybersecurity companies whose software had been banned by Chinese authorities on national security grounds. A draft version of the report by Palo Alto's Unit 42, the company's threat intelligence arm, said that the prolific hackers -- dubbed "TGR-STA-1030" in a report published on Thursday of last week -- were connected to Beijing, the two people said. The finished report instead described the hacking group more vaguely as a "state-aligned group that operates out of Asia." Attributing sophisticated hacks is notoriously difficult and debates over how best to assign blame for digital intrusions are common among cybersecurity researchers. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft Plans Smartphone-Style Permission Prompts for Windows 11 Apps - Microsoft is planning to bring smartphone-style app permission prompts to Windows 11, requiring apps to get explicit user consent before they can access sensitive resources like the file system, camera and microphone. The company's Windows Platform engineer Logan Iyer said the move was prompted by applications increasingly overriding user settings, installing unwanted software, and modifying core Windows experiences without permission. A separate initiative called Windows Baseline Security Mode will enforce runtime integrity safeguards by default, allowing only properly signed apps, services, and drivers to run. Both changes will roll out in phases as part of Microsoft's Secure Future Initiative, which the company launched in November 2023 after a federal review board called its security culture "inadequate." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Border Officials Are Said To Have Caused El Paso Closure by Firing Anti-Drone Laser - An anonymous reader shares a report: The abrupt closure of El Paso's airspace late Tuesday was precipitated when Customs and Border Protection officials deployed an anti-drone laser on loan from the Department of Defense without giving aviation officials enough time to assess the risks to commercial aircraft, according to multiple people briefed on the situation. The episode led the Federal Aviation Administration to abruptly declare that the nearby airspace would be shut down for 10 days, an extraordinary pause that was quickly lifted Wednesday morning at the direction of the White House. Top administration officials quickly claimed that the closure was in response to a sudden incursion of drones from Mexican drug cartels that required a military response, with Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy declaring in a social media post that "the threat has been neutralized." But that assertion was undercut by multiple people familiar with the situation, who said that the F.A.A.'s extreme move came after immigration officials earlier this week used an anti-drone laser shared by the Pentagon without coordination with the F.A.A. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. C.B.P. officials thought they were firing on a cartel drone, the people said, but it turned out to be a party balloon. Defense Department officials were present during the incident, one person said. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon Engineers Want Claude Code, but the Company Keeps Pushing Its Own Tool - Amazon engineers have been pushing back against internal policies that steer them toward Kiro, the company's in-house AI coding assistant, and away from Anthropic's Claude Code for production work, according to a Business Insider report based on internal messages. About 1,500 employees endorsed the formal adoption of Claude Code in one internal forum thread, and some pointed out the awkwardness of being asked to sell the tool through AWS's Bedrock platform while not being permitted to use it themselves. Kiro runs on Anthropic's Claude models but uses Amazon's own tooling, and the company says roughly 70% of its software engineers used it at least once in January. Amazon says there is no explicit ban on Claude Code but applies stricter requirements for production use. Read more of this story at Slashdot.