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Read at: 2026-08-20T13:07:01+00:00Z (UTC) [sometime-US Pres == Nilab
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The former snooker champion, 49, denies lewd, indecent and libidinous behaviour towards two children in the 90s and between 2006 and 2010.
At a sitting of Dublin District Coroner’s Court on Thursday, Detective Inspector Ken Hoare said a file on the investigation into Mr Daly’s death would be sent to the DPP.
An excite cut of 32c on a litre of diesel and 27c for petrol is due to be phased out from September.
Politicians demand tougher penalties following two serious incidents within a week
xAI's Grok web chat agent is currently vulnerable to a novel form of prompt injection, according to security researchers with Adversa AI. The technique allows an attacker to create a web page poisoned with malicious instructions that induce an AI model summarizing the page to carry out harmful actions. That describes a well-known attack known as indirect prompt injection. Frontier AI models have become better at dealing with such attempts through existing guardrails, though the issue is far from resolved. Adversa's approach comes with a twist: It relies on encrypted malicious instructions, which attackers place on a web page alongside an encryption key. The model guardrail scanner – an input filter – can't read the encrypted text despite the presence of the key. The scanner therefore passes it on to the model, which can use the key to decrypt the instructions. The model then carries out instructions in the decrypted text as would be the case in any other indirect prompt injection attack. Adversera calls its method "cryptographic context injection." "An attacker ships ciphertext along with the key material and an instruction to decrypt it, and the model runs that decryption inside its own code execution sandbox," wrote Rony Utevsky, lead researcher at Adversa AI, in a blog post. "Everything a guardrail’s scanner would need is right there on the page, but recovering the plaintext means running PBKDF2 and AES-256-GCM, which no content classifier does at inspection time." Other attacks on AI models have relied on cipher-based evasion, such as base64 encoding. But because these are weak and reversible cipher mechanisms, models can decode them natively from their own training data, Utevsky said. That doesn't work for strong encryption, so decryption must be done through the code execution runtime. The runtime thus becomes a mechanism for trust laundering – the model trusts its own output, namely the malicious instructions that it decrypted. In a proof-of-concept demo, Adversa shows how the technique can be used to exfiltrate the victim's chat history with Grok.com. The attack transmits the user’s name, coarse location, subscription tier, and the full set of the user’s prompts in the conversation by appending them to a URL as parameters. Other models may be vulnerable to varying degrees. With Google's Gemini public chat interface (gemini.google.com), Utevsky told The Register, the Grok scenario doesn't work because Gemini doesn't provide Python with access to external websites. "So it's useful only to sneak bad questions and answers past guardrails," he explained. When Adversa tested cryptographic context injection on Gemini, they were able to get the model to produce content that normally would be blocked by safety filters – instructions for how to build an incendiary weapon. xAI, according to Utevsky, was informed about the attack on June 3, 2026, directly and through its HackerOne bug bounty program. We're told xAI acknowledged the report but did not provide a mitigation timeline. Additional attempts to raise the issue are said to have occurred on August 4 and August 10. As of August 19, we're told, the technique still worked on Grok.com. SpaceX, which acquired xAI earlier this year, did not respond to a request for comment. Google was not informed of the attack, according to Utevsky, because it considers jailbreaks – bypassing guardrails to make models emit harmful content – to be out of scope for its vulnerability disclosure program. Nonetheless, the attack success rate against Gemini declined significantly by August, which Utevsky suggests could be due to filter updates, model version changes, or both. Asked whether cryptographic context injection can be compared to return oriented programming (ROP) in terms of the way it assembles attack gadgets from separately harmless parts of stored memory, Utevsky said, "The ROP analogy is close, though ROP works that way out of necessity – the attacker can't inject code at all, so they're stuck reusing gadgets already in memory. "Same shape here otherwise. A static guardrail reads text one artifact at a time. If no single artifact is harmful, they all pass, and the malicious meaning appears only once the runtime assembles them. And guardrails can't see into the runtime. But Utevsky added that cryptographic context injection is more open than ROP. "The agent's runtime is a general-purpose interpreter, so the pieces are arbitrary," he explained. "You could split an instruction across several encrypted fragments, fetched pages, or tool outputs, none meaningful in isolation, and let the runtime concatenate them. We haven't demonstrated that, but nothing rules it out. "So yes, cryptographic context injection is one kind of link, not necessarily the whole chain. "The moment agents got code and tools, the guardrail's unit of inspection (a string) stopped being the unit of action (a composed, executed program). This is a big playing field. Our earlier SymJack attack reached the same place through symlinks and shell behavior. Encryption adds another trick to the game." ®
Bond markets remained volatile, as investors assessed the geopolitical turmoil.
Moscow is taking advantage of Ukraine’s depleted stock of interceptors and is intensifying attacks, worsening the civilian death toll.
Walmart and other big U.S. retailers have warned that consumers were being cautious, even if personal balance sheets seemed healthy.
The Irish Times will publish a supplement for those navigating one of the most important milestones in Irish education
Iarnród Éireann passengers have been warned to expect delays of up to 90 minutes on train and DART services after a "major signalling issue" in Dublin.
Services resume following outage affecting an area from Lansdowne Road to Donabate
Joanna Boydell steps down after widespread criticism over company’s handling of guest safety issues
The boss of Travelodge has resigned after a backlash over security failings at the hotel chain, including a case where a domestic abuser was given a key to a woman’s room before assaulting her.
In a company statement on Thursday, Travelodge said Joanna Boydell had stepped down and been temporarily replaced by its finance chief, Ray Reidy. The company has launched a formal search for a permanent substitute.
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We look at a new study about Americans’ use of cannabis.
Joseph Gibson stated he was worth hundreds of millions of pounds, was an ex soldier, and owned yachts.
Fashion site also broke rules on labelling by using terms ‘leather’ or ‘suede’ for synthetic products
The British online fashion seller Boohoo has been fined €2.3m (£2m) by France’s consumer watchdog for deceptive practices such as offering fake discounts.
The Manchester-based firm, whose parent company renamed itself Debenhams Group last year, was found to have exaggerated its discounts, giving shoppers a false impression of the savings they were making, according to the directorate-general for competition, consumer affairs and fraud Control.
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The prime minister has promised a crackdown on criminal gangs making money from dumping waste
Value being generated by student loans is “not what it should be”, Reform UK’s deputy leader said.
Asked by reporters about the funding of the scheme by stopping foreign students accessing loans, Richard Tice said:
Regarding the funding of this, cash is cash. Whether you think that it’s cash as a positive in a balance sheet or a bank account, or whether you’re borrowing it, it’s money. It’s cash.
As Suella quite rightly said, the amount of money going into student loans, it’s all government money, and this government is borrowing vast sums.
In terms of Mickey Mouse courses, listen, this has been well-chronicled for many years. Whether it’s gender studies, whether it’s golf course studies, I think I’ve seen there’s not a necessity. There’s not a value in many of these degrees.
Now I know that might be uncomfortable to those people who have those qualifications, but the reality is you’ve got to ask yourself: what are your graduate outcomes looking like?
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Far-right minister says those convicted in military courts of terror offences will be executed after passing of death penalty law that does not apply to Israelis
Israel’s far-right national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, who has attracted international sanctions and condemnation for his activities, has posted a gloating video of the construction of the site of a gallows where Palestinians convicted of terror offences, but not Jewish extremists accused of similar crimes, will be hanged.
Ben-Givr said the new execution site would be equipped with viewing booths where families of victims could watch the hangings.
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The Scottish government spent almost £100,000 on official visits to the United States in June.
France's tax authority says attackers may have stolen the contents of messages exchanged with hundreds of taxpayers during the data raid it confirmed last week. In an update published this week, the General Directorate of Public Finances (DGFiP) said lists of messages exchanged with the authority were exposed. For around 250 people, the compromised information also included the messages themselves. Slightly more than 350,000 individuals were affected. The other exposed data included tax identification numbers, marital status, email and postal addresses, and phone numbers. Tax records also exposed details such as household composition, number of dependents, family quotient, reference tax income, and withholding rates. Beyond the personal and tax information, DGFiP said the other affected datasets contained information that was already publicly available. For approximately 250,000 businesses and professionals, the affected data was limited to company names and SIREN numbers, the unique nine-digit identifiers assigned to French businesses. The compromised cadastral data was limited to property addresses and dimensions, which DGFiP said were already publicly available. DGFiP said it was notifying affected taxpayers by email or post this week. DGFiP's latest FAQ pegs the total number of affected parties at roughly 600,000. That appears lower than the 678,000 "individuals and professionals" DGFiP said were affected last week, shortly after the alleged cybercriminal behind the attack, "ZeroBytes," claimed to have stolen data belonging to more than 2 million. The authority did not explain the discrepancy. The notifications warn that criminals could use the stolen details to make phishing attempts appear more convincing. DGFiP highlighted impersonation attempts, CEO fraud, and scams involving bogus bank advisers as possible follow-on attacks. The authority said it would never ask taxpayers to provide sensitive information such as PINs or identity documents by phone, text message, or email, and would request such material only through its secure portal. Separately, the tax authority disclosed a "technical vulnerability" in the government's Vacant Successions Portal (PSV), which is used to search for estates without known heirs. DGFiP suspended the service after discovering the flaw. It said there was no evidence so far that personal data had leaked, although its investigation into possible exposure of applicants' details continues. The incident adds to a torrid year for cybersecurity across France's public sector. In February, the finance ministry, which oversees DGFiP, 'fessed up to an intrusion into a database containing citizens' bank details that affected 1.2 million people. The Health Ministry confirmed in March that 15.8 million administrative files, 165,000 of which contained doctors' notes, were stolen during an attack on healthtech company Cegedim Santé. A month later, a 15-year-old allegedly carried out an attack on France Titres, which handles the country's identity documents. The attacker claimed the breach affected between 18 million and 19 million people. In June, France also began probing an alleged breach of Tchap, the government's encrypted messaging platform, after attackers claimed to have accessed 73,000 user accounts, 643,000 messages, and nearly 60,000 media files. ®
Fianna Fáil MEP Billy Kelleher has said deliberately driving down the wrong side of a motorway is akin to attempted murder.
Oleksandr Zhyvystkyi moved to Ireland from Ukraine five years ago and worked as a metal fabricator
The prime minister also wishes the Duke and Duchess well after it emerged they are returning to the UK later this month.
Nearly a quarter of girls’ entries received one of the higher grades against around a fifth of those from boys
Myles McGinley, managing director of the Cambridge OCR exam board, said more pupils are taking GCSE business studies than in previous years, describing this generation of young people as “increasingly entrepreneurial”.
He said business studies entries are a third higher than five years ago, adding: “The founders of some of the next great unicorn businesses may well be among those achieving GCSEs in business studies today.”
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At least a half-dozen federal agencies have taken action against the state that has long led the nation in environmental protections.
The government says the sites in Kent, Surrey and West Yorkshire contain 22,000 tonnes of waste.
A file is expected to be sent to the DPP over the death of a pensioner who was killed when a bus crashed through a pedestrian area in Dublin city centre earlier this year, an inquest has heard.
Eleni Petinos tells inquiry her sacking as a minister in Dominic Perrottet’s government was potentially motivated by her reluctance to get rid of the building commissioner
The former New South Wales fair trading minister Eleni Petinos has given evidence at a corruption inquiry that she may have been used by fellow Liberals to try to get rid of the building commissioner David Chandler, recounting numerous attempts in 2022 to persuade her he was “dodgy” and should be sacked.
She has also told the Independent Commission Against Corruption (Icac) inquiry that her subsequent sacking as a minister in the Dominic Perrottet government in July 2022 – allegedly for bullying staff – was unfair and potentially motivated by her reluctance to sack the building commissioner.
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Device was near country’s Neptun Deep gas platform in the Black Sea
Romania’s military has destroyed a marine drone spotted just “a few hundred meters” from the Neptun Deep platform, a major offshore gas project in the Black Sea.
The drone, spotted just “a few hundreds of meters” from the gas extraction works at the Neptun Deep platform located some 80 miles east of the city of Constanța, was destroyed by a Romanian F-16 fighter jet.
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The Treasury Department’s plan for bond interventions have calmed markets. But Wall Street is worried about the fallout for inflation and more.
Work begins on removing carriages from a train that derailed near Lewes, as investigations continue.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has said that the naval drone carrying explosives which was destroyed by Romania near a Black Sea gas project is part of "an escalating campaign of threats."
‘I can understand people’s anger and frustration, but this could happen to any cohort of people in Irish society,’ Martin Collins says
In the fast-growing field of data annotation, workers in a small city in south India train A.I. to improve how it performs tasks traditionally done by people.
Hui Ka Yan also forfeits all his personal property and the company he set up is given hefty fines
The founder of Evergrande, one of China’s largest property developers, has been sentenced to life in prison and had all of his personal property confiscated.
Hui Ka Yan, 67 and once named by Forbes as China’s richest man, with a net worth of $42.5bn (£31.2bn) in 2017, pleaded guilty in April to eight charges.
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The policing watchdog Fiosrú has sent a file to the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) after it finished an investigation into the death of a man in Dublin.
US national deficit has doubled over the past decade with spending growing under Nilab
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and Biden
As the third leg of NBC’s Sunday Night Football crew alongside play-by-play man Al Michaels and the tart-tongued analyst Cris Collinsworth, Michele Tafoya was a paragon of deference and neutrality for 11 years as an NFL sideline reporter, dutifully relating boilerplate tactics, talking points and injury updates when she wasn’t nodding along to softball interviews or fumbling through hammy production gimmicks for viewers who might have been too offline to get the bit.
She was almost pathologically committed to not doing anything to draw attention to herself or her gender in an era when sideline reporting was a fast track to national celebrity. Even her football takes hewed to the middle. (“New Orleans doesn’t want to lose to Atlanta twice in a season …”) Anyone who says they saw the 61-year-old emerging as a rightwing firebrand was watching a different game.
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The nine-page booklet covers issues including respect in public, sex and consent, and gender equality.
The Scottish weather is no longer a joke as visitors head north from the rest of the UK to cool down.
Alessandro Rapinese denies he is waging personal vendetta against cyclists amid a public backlash
The mayor of Como has set the wheels of controversy in motion for banning bikes in the walled historical centre of the lakeside city after being hit by one.
Alessandro Rapinese’s ban, which comes into force in September, targets about 30 streets and means cyclists, whether on e-bikes or push bikes, will have to dismount and walk through those areas.
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OpenAI says a technical stuff-up booted some vetted security researchers out of its Trusted Access for Cyber (TAC) program, only for its recovery process to decide some of them aren't welcome back. The problem surfaced this week when participants reported that their previously approved status had vanished without warning. OpenAI's cyber verification page instead invited them to "Start verification" as though they had never been cleared. Some also found that Daybreak Blue, an access tier offering vetted cyber defenders expanded capabilities, had disappeared from Codex Desktop and the command-line interface. OpenAI has since acknowledged the problem. Responding to complaints on its community forum, the company said "a limited set of users" had lost Daybreak Blue access because of a technical issue and would need to complete verification again. "This isn't the experience we want to deliver, and we're making sure the issue doesn't happen again," OpenAI said. Affected users were told to look for an email titled "Action required: Reverify your Daybreak Blue access," containing instructions for getting back through the door. For some, however, it appears to remain shut. One researcher said they followed the instructions and selected "Start verification," only to be told that the process could not begin because their account was ineligible. Another participant said they had held Daybreak Blue access for more than a month before losing it in the technical snafu. After OpenAI support told them to reapply, the verification system reportedly said it could not verify their identity or that the account was currently ineligible. According to their account of a subsequent exchange with support, OpenAI could neither reset the verification state nor restore or override the previous approval. TAC gives security professionals access to advanced cyber capabilities that are more restricted for other users. Applicants must provide identification and undergo verification before getting access. The aim is to give legitimate defenders more powerful tools for finding and fixing vulnerabilities while restricting access for those with less wholesome intentions. Anthropic operates a comparable scheme called the Cyber Verification Program. That makes this more than an option mysteriously vanishing from a menu. OpenAI had already vetted these researchers – then its own technical problem kicked them out, and its verification system apparently changed its mind. OpenAI didn't respond to The Register's questions about the number of affected users, the cause of the removals, why some previously approved researchers are now deemed ineligible, or whether it can restore access when re-verification fails. It instead directed us to a statement posted on X that blamed the access removals on a "technical issue," saying only a limited number of users were affected, and telling those users they would need to re-verify. For now, some of OpenAI's trusted cyber researchers have discovered an unexpected vulnerability: the front door. ®
Missile and drone attack one of heaviest since war began, with children’s hospital and residential areas hit
A heavy Russian missile and drone bombardment has killed at least 15 people in and around Kyiv in one of the most intense aerial attacks on Ukraine’s capital since the start of the war.
Vitali Klitschko, the city’s mayor, said homes, a school and a children’s medical centre were among the buildings damaged overnight in an attack that began at about midnight and was continuing into the early afternoon.
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The chief executive of Meta is ‘excited’ by the purchase, a spokesman said.
Just last year, Prince Harry said he couldn’t imagine ever bringing his family back to Britain.
Alan MacPherson, 83, from Stenhousemuir, amassed two million indecent images, believed to be the biggest such collection ever seized by Scottish Police.
Claddagh Records is set to release a posthumous spoken-word album by the late broadcaster and writer Manchán Magan.
Gen Z-ers are forming after-school clubs, speaking at community meetings — and sometimes wrestling with their own dependence on the technology.
Separately, file also being sent over a three-year-old who died after being struck by a car in Finglas in March
Blocks of flats and warehouses were targeted in the "massive attack" on Thursday, Ukrainian officials say.
Microsoft is investigating reports of games crashing after users installed August's Patch Tuesday update for Windows 11. The company acknowledged the reports on its Release Health page. Affected games may become unresponsive, close unexpectedly, throw an "EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION" error, or trigger an unexpected device restart. Reports of the problem followed the release of KB5121003 for Windows 11 24H2 and 25H2. The KB5121003 support page still lists no known issues, but Microsoft has separately confirmed on Release Health that it is investigating the game crash reports. The problem does not affect every title. Microsoft named ARC Raiders, MARVEL Tōkon: Fighting Souls, and The Finals among those generating reports. The Windows giant has not accepted responsibility, writing: "We are presently investigating to determine if this is an issue caused by Microsoft." Users have theorized that tighter kernel handle validation may have exposed problems in third-party drivers that Windows previously tolerated, causing crashes when code ventures where it should not. That might be good for security, but less so for software that depended on the previous behavior. Microsoft has not confirmed the theory. August's Patch Tuesday was a big one, addressing 421 Microsoft CVEs, including 236 affecting Windows. As such, uninstalling it as a workaround is probably not a good idea. The reports come as Microsoft tightens its treatment of old and incompatible kernel drivers. In March, it removed trust for kernel drivers that hadn't been through the Windows Hardware Compatibility Program (WHCP) to lock down the Windows kernel further. Microsoft has also launched its Driver Quality Initiative (DQI) to improve operating system stability. The crashes remain under investigation, and Microsoft has asked affected users for feedback. ®
bryanandaimee shares a report from ScienceDaily: A Finnish study has found an unexpected association between screen use and cognitive performance. Children who accumulated more screen time as they grew up tended to show better cognitive processing during adolescence. One of the researchers cautions against viewing screen time as entirely harmful and says the goal should be to balance physical activity with screen use that encourages active thinking. [...] "The findings suggest that screen time can support children's and adolescents' cognitive processing. Presumably, the essential point here is what kind of things they do in their screen time. Teachers and parents should encourage children to use devices and screens in such ways that promote active thinking, problem-solving, creativity and learning," states Doctoral Researcher Petri Jalanko from the University of Jyvaskyla.
Digital activities that involve learning, creativity, problem-solving, or other forms of active mental engagement could potentially help explain the association observed in the study. "We should not regard screen time solely as harmful but seek balance between physical activity and screen time that promotes active thinking," Jalanko summarizes. The relationship between physical activity and cognition was more complicated. Among girls, greater amounts of light intensity physical activity since childhood were associated with better working memory during adolescence. Among boys, greater participation in guided physical activity from childhood through adolescence was linked to better working memory.
The researchers also found an unexpected pattern involving unsupervised exercise. Lower levels of self-reported unsupervised physical activity were associated with better cognitive processing in adolescence. By contrast, physical activity and sedentary time measured using a device that tracked heart rate and movement were not associated with cognitive processing. One possible explanation is that these sensors can measure movement and physiological activity but cannot determine exactly what a person is doing during periods of activity or inactivity. The findings have been published in the journal Pediatric Exercise Science.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Paul Butler (51) died after an incident on O’Connell Street in August 2025
Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg is the new owner of Strancally Castle in Co Waterford.
Employment in Ireland has increased by 0.8% to more than 2.8 million, driven by an increase in older age groups and citizens from across the world coming to work here, according to the CSO.
The Irish Hospital Consultants Association has said the concerns raised by the Chief Executive of Cork University Hospital about staffing levels must be listened to.
Plus, could tweaking flight paths reduce global warming?
The train collided with the four men at Shin-Kanuma Station, north of Tokyo, authorities say.
The UK's foreign secretary condemned the move as "an unacceptable and destructive act".
Hui Ka Yan’s punishment caps the downfall of a property empire whose collapse set off a prolonged crisis in the Chinese economy.
GoFundMe appeal has raised more than €500,000 to help with medical expenses
Launches, detected by South Korea and Japan, came after US scaled back exercises with South Korea in apparent overture to Kim Jong-un
North Korea has launched about 10 short-range ballistic missiles towards the sea, South Korea’s military said, a day after Pyongyang shrugged off Nilab
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’s order to scale back US military drills with South Korea in an apparent attempt to resume diplomacy.
The joint chiefs of staff said the missiles were launched from the region of Pyongyang at around 5pm (08.00 GMT) on Thursday towards North Korea’s eastern waters.
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Business transformation, software development, and technology implementation are among the tech job categories likely to be hit hardest by AI, according to new research from Forrester. The global IT analyst company has researched how AI will disrupt various activities within the tech market, both among end users and vendors. It concluded that labor-intensive knowledge-work industries would face the greatest disruption. At the same time, enterprise software will be reshaped rather than displaced, allaying some concerns about a SaaSpocolypse. “Every technology and service market is facing an AI overhaul,” said Craig Le Clair, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester. “Our research shows that AI’s benefits will not be distributed evenly across technology markets. Only markets in three categories — infrastructure; data and AI; and identity, access, and network security — are broadly positioned for clear growth. Technologies in the other categories will be forced to adapt.” Forrester argued that business applications, governance and compliance, process automation, and customer experience would change as AI transforms workflows and user experiences. “While these categories are vulnerable to disruption, embedded workflows, regulatory requirements, switching costs, and growing demand for data, orchestration, governance, and trust capabilities help sustain their relevance,” the report said. The analyst firm singled out application development and software as a category likely to be hit hard by AI rollout. “These markets include tooling, content management, and IT management software that produce and run applications and connect bodies of knowledge. This includes application generation and low-code platforms, autonomous testing platforms, content management systems, digital experience platforms, knowledge management solutions, as well as enterprise architecture management suites,” the report said. These activities and technologies are “directly in the path of genAI-code development,” Forrester added. Other markets in the crosshairs of AI include IT services. “Direct AI substitution reduces core implementation work. Services to implement Oracle, Salesforce, SAP, and Workday all showed headwinds. The most severely disrupted market is business process outsourcing that will see lowervalue services, testing, and software development services sell at reduced rates,” Forrester said. The colossal investment in AI — including astronomical datacenter building plans — has led Gartner to raise its 2026 estimates for the total IT market to $6.37 trillion, a surge of 14.2 percent year-on-year. That's up from April's forecast of $6.31 trillion and February's $6.15 trillion. A lot of that growth comes from the technology industry itself, which already invests around $1 trillion. That figure is set to grow by 34.7 percent over 2026.
Clément Vandenkerckhove was quietly brought into Prince Laurent's family at a town hall ceremony.
Jo Boydell had been criticised for the company's handling of issues with its safety and security.
Francesca Hennessy is in talks to fight undisputed bantamweight world champion Dina Thorslund in the United Kingdom later this year, BBC Sport understands.
Israeli military orders criminal investigation into deaths of Hind and six family members. Plus, FCC chair Brendan Carr’s close coordination with White House revealed
Good morning.
The Israeli military admitted on Wednesday its troops had opened fire on a car carrying five-year-old Hind Rajab and six family members in Gaza in 2024, saying it had ordered a criminal investigation into the killing.
What prompted the investigation? The Israel Defense Forces repeatedly denied its troops had been in the area, but investigations by the media and others found evidence that strongly suggested nearby Israeli tanks were responsible.
How significant is it? The IDF published reviews on Wednesday into five high-profile incidents in Gaza. But criminal misconduct investigations into Israeli troops over the killing of Palestinians rarely lead to convictions. A UN report published in February described “a pervasive climate of impunity” by Israel in occupied Palestine.
What is the wider context? In September last year, a UN commission found that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, citing tens of thousands of civilian deaths and massive destruction.
What did Béjar say in his testimony? That his job often included him briefing Meta’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, on product issues. He estimated that he spoke to Zuckerberg at least 100 times. One email Béjar sent to Zuckerberg in 2021 showed the engineer warning of constant reports of harmful content and damage to teenage wellbeing on Facebook and Instagram. Béjar said he emailed Zuckerberg after the chief executive publicly said the company did not prioritize profit over safety. Meta denies all allegations in the case.
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Minister for Agriculture Martin Heydon has said the Government "won't be found wanting" in terms of supports for farmers who are facing significant fodder deficits due to the recent dry spell.
Ellen Wilkinson School for Girls in Ealing pays tribute to Sara El-Khawas, 14, and her family who died.
The 18-year-old’s body was found in Nattai national park on Thursday – but initial police messages indicated she was alive
Police have blamed dense bushland and radio confusion for wrongly reporting to 18-year-old Lily Hooper’s parents, the New South Wales premier and the media that the missing bushwalker had been found alive.
Hooper had last been seen on 12 August after leaving home for a hike in the rugged bushland of Nattai national park, 90km south-west of Sydney. She was reported missing that night, triggering a multi-agency search involving nearly 1,000 people, including hundreds of volunteers.
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A rare Suffragette Christmas card dating back to 1910 has been discovered in Mold, Flintshire, at a vintage roadshow.
NASA and Katalyst Space have abandoned an ambitious attempt to boost the Swift observatory into a higher orbit and postpone its fiery return to Earth. Katalyst Space's LINK spacecraft will still attempt to rendezvous with and maneuver near Swift, but plans to grapple the observatory and raise its orbit are dead. The problem, according to NASA and Katalyst Space, is an "ongoing commercial spacecraft attitude control issue." Shortly after launch, LINK entered a spin, and two of the three reaction wheels used to control its orientation were declared inoperable. Engineers regained control using the spacecraft's electric thrusters and transmitted a software update reflecting its diminished capabilities. The work kept LINK operational, but could not make the planned reboost safe. NASA and Katalyst Space have put a brave face on this. The space agency's administrator, Jared Isaacman, stated: "NASA should be willing to move quickly and take smart risks when the potential return is worth it, and that is exactly what we did with this mission. This is not the outcome we were working toward, but it does not change why this mission was worth attempting." Katalyst Space CEO Ghonhee Lee said: "Katalyst designed, developed, and launched an experimental spacecraft to go after an ambitious mission on an aggressive timeline. We took on this high-risk, high-reward challenge and are proud of the milestones we reached along the way." LINK's mission is not over, but Swift's rescue attempt is. NASA it is working closely with Katalyst Space "to assess next steps for rendezvous and gather as much data as possible to inform future satellite servicing operations." NASA expects Swift to re-enter Earth's atmosphere later this year. The breakneck pace of the LINK mission was driven by the observatory descending more quickly than expected. The Swift team cut back on many science activities to slow the observatory's orbital decay. Those efforts bought enough time for LINK to attempt a rendezvous, if not a reboost. Swift was launched in 2004 to study gamma-ray bursts. Designed for a two-year primary mission, it has operated for more than two decades, but increased solar activity has accelerated the decay of its orbit. In September 2025, NASA awarded Katalyst Space a contract to mount a robotic servicing mission, leading to LINK's July 3 launch aboard a Northrop Grumman Pegasus XL rocket. Swift's end is now approaching, and NASA will return to its existing plans for the observatory's final months. The agency said it "will continue to prioritize finding new options to react rapidly to cosmic events, using current missions to help fill the gap in the meantime." ®
Initial report from ‘thick and dense terrain’ where Hooper was located was she had been found alive but within 10 minutes a ‘more accurate account’ was relayed to police
The body of missing 18-year-old bushwalker Lily Hooper has been found in a remote New South Wales national park more than a week after she set out on her hike.
Police have apologised “unreservedly” for wrongly suggesting Hooper had been alive when she was found by SES search volunteers off the walking trail in the state’s southern highlands on Thursday morning.
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After years of pounding power plants and cities, Russia’s air war has taken aim at Ukraine’s supermarket warehouses.
Hundreds of thousands of students do the vocational qualifications known as BTecs every year.
T-levels are equivalent to three A-levels, and focus on practical rather than academic subjects.
Mike Nesbitt’s sudden resignation goes to the heart of what’s wrong with how Northern Ireland is governed. Modest hopes for limited success have been dashed. If systems and attitudes don’t change, the crisis in the health service and others like it will never significantly improve. Independent report after expert report has spelt out loud and clear that if every hospital retains its present range of specialisms, resources cannot be concentrated effectively to deliver timely major treatment for patients throughout the region as a whole. Professor Deirdre Heenan has analysed the particular situation of Causeway hospital in Coleraine where local people fear all except emergency facilities were to be transferred under Nesbitt’s plan and effectively kill the hospital off. Not so, she explains. But hey! Never mind the detail.
There is a more fundamental issue which is political. It’s not easy. You might have sympathy with a local MLA like John Burrowes who is resisting any reduction in his local hospital facilities less than a year before the next Assembly election. I expect the airwaves are hot with comment on the issue as I type. The problem is greater when the MLA concerned is Mike Nesbitt’s party leader John Burrowes who has just rejected Nesbitt’s ideas for compromise and cut his feet from under him. Burrowe’s action only brings to the surface what goes on all the time everywhere. Immediate local issues dominate. Unionist commentator Alex Kane with his usual authority debates the role and conduct of Burrowes as the new leader of the Unionist party as his clumsily seeks to assert party order over chaos – to kill off just the sort of solo run he himself has now made. Burrowes may think from the polls his approach shows some signs of working, even as he contradicts himself. But even if it’s true, at what cost to the community ?
The fundamental problem of Executive governance is that too much formal authority is concentrated on individual ministers and departments. The notion that this gives them real power to take important initiatives is an illusion. Rather than concentrating power it emphasises weakness. History has shown again and again how initiatives are blocked at every level within the same party, between parties, at Executive level. And they go mostly without comment like the inner workings of the old Soviet politburo. FM and dFFM are little more than figureheads. The commentariat and the public are inured to the situation, the civil service bureaucratic box tickers, drained of initiative. Will this latest fundamental failure be greeted by little more than a collective shrug?
The truth is that major reforms like those required over hospital services and the ballooning waiting lists require the political cover of collective responsibility by the Executive as a whole, backing reform against the nimby cases made by MLAs and well intentioned local lobbies. Attempts to create meaningful collective responsibility are resisted by the parties fearing outflanking on their own side and their opposite numbers across the divide.
Mike Nesbitt’s resignation proves if proof were needed that they haven’t shifted from Square One.
Prolonged detention of children, insufficient staffing and hazardous damage to buildings are among the ombudsman’s concerns
Drugs are being openly dealt inside Villawood detention centre; makeshift weapons are being manufactured amid intimidation, standover tactics and a “culture of fear”; people are sleeping outside under CCTV cameras for their own safety; and children are being kept from going to school, a scathing report from the independent monitor has found.
The commonwealth’s National Preventive Mechanism issued the report based on a three-day visit in March this year. A total of 428 people were held in Villawood at the time, including children. Some 78 beds were offline because of damage still not repaired from a fire three years ago.
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More Republicans and Democrats are seeing reality for what it is. Does it matter?
President Nilab
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’s decision to curtail the military exercises came as allies question the U.S. commitment to longstanding alliances.
The company’s fortunes cratered as demand for Covid-19 vaccines plummeted. But it was busy working on something else.
For weeks, there has been no diplomatic progress, but also no full-scale fighting, as both sides seem to believe they can hold out longer than the other.
The pen Mr. Paxton pocketed more than a decade ago has resurfaced as a campaign issue.
How “lore” turns fact into fiction — and vice versa.
Improvements in fire management however could mitigate increases by more than 70%, study shows
Wildfires are projected to burn 39% more of Europe by the end of the century even in the best-case scenario for stopping the planet from heating, a study has found, unless action is taken to manage them better.
The increase in hot, dry and windy weather that leads to small fires turning into raging infernos is to engulf more of Europe as carbon pollution pushes temperatures higher. In the worst-case scenario the researchers modelled, which would see global heating reach 3.6C above preindustrial levels, the burnt area would almost triple.
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Spurs open talks with Manchester City to sign attacking duo Omar Marmoush and Savinho.
From the initial release of results through to the appeals process and on to rounds of college offers
A legal loophole allows the government to sell mustangs on the cheap, stripping them of protections and clearing their path to destruction.
South Australian premier Peter Malinauskas says there have still been no detections in poultry or livestock and no mass deaths involving mammals
The South Australian premier, Peter Malinauskas, has declared a “significant escalation” in H5 bird flu in the state after the detection of three mass mortality events involving more than 1,000 greater crested terns.
Malinauskas said the cause of the deaths was presumed to be H5 bird flu.
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Almost exactly a year after SparkyLinux 8.0 abandoned installation images for 32-bit PCs, version 8.4 has brought them back. The distro remains based on Debian 13 and retains the codename "the Seven Sisters." The Register first checked out SparkyLinux back in 2015, and this vulture took a look at version 7 a couple of years ago. Beyond the changes inherited from the move from Debian 12 to Debian 13, this version isn't hugely different. The project's own self-description covers the basics. (The project also offers release info in Polish, jeśli wolisz to.) It comes in both rolling-release and stable variants, and you get a choice of versions with different desktops: LXQt, MATE, Xfce, and KDE, plus a minimal command-line only edition, and a minimal GUI edition with Openbox. All offer Sparky's improved package manager, called Aptus. Sparky 8.4 isn't the first Debian-derivative we've seen that offers a 32-bit edition. That distinction goes to Window Maker Live 13.2, and earlier this year, we also scoped out antiX 26, which offers several older kernel versions. We tried the 64-bit LXQt flavor of SparkyLinux 8.4, and installation was a cinch with the cross-platform Calamares installer. It ships with Linux kernel 6.12 by default. For comparison, we tried the 32-bit edition, in its "minimal GUI" variant. There is no graphical installer, so you must run a command-line one in a terminal. It asks numerous questions about locales and keyboard layouts, but gets the job done. At the end, it offered a comprehensive choice of desktop environments, including the original CDE – open sourced in 2012 – and its modern recreation, NsCDE. We compared the two in 2022. To see how it looked, we chose CDE. A few minutes later, we rebooted and logged directly into the third-of-a-century-old environment. It works fine: we left the VirtualBox defaults on for a 32-bit VM – 1 GB of RAM and 8 GB of disk – and the system fit comfortably, consuming 6.9 GB of storage and 259 MB of memory. There's no Snap or Flatpak support installed, but it does use systemd, just like Debian itself. The 32-bit edition uses the same kernel version 6.12 as its 64-bit sibling, although the minimum spec has been increased a little: it now requires a 686-class CPU with PAE support. Mozilla ended mainstream 32-bit Linux builds after Firefox 144, with ESR 140 serving as the final supported branch. Sparky supplies its own 32-bit build of Firefox 140 ESR, which worked without complaint. This could be a useful way to revive an old Atom-powered netbook or similar machine: 32-bit code generally has a smaller memory footprint than its 64-bit equivalent. It could also suit extremely small VMs, while remaining worth a look on more capable hardware. ®
Legislation should be introduced to protect rights of journalists, Irish Council for Civil Liberties says
Gardaí have begun specialist pursuit training with a British police force but can more be done?
A new jab extended the length of time patients were cancer free, but it is unclear for how long.
UN negotiators have until the end of this year to agree a legally binding instrument on autonomous weapons, built around the principle that humans must stay in control of lethal decisions. In southern Ukraine, human operators use that control to hunt civilians.
On 4 August, a Russian drone hunted a street trader through a market in Kherson. Yuriy, 52, had begun laying out crates of tomatoes, cucumbers and aubergines beside his van when he heard the familiar buzzing overhead. His wife ran, and the drone turned towards him instead. He held up a handful of garlic to its camera, trying to show the operator that he was a vegetable seller, not a combatant. It detonated anyway, leaving him with concussion and shrapnel wounds. Yuriy gave his account to the BBC from a hospital bed.
Footage this clear is rare. Andrii Kovanyi, a spokesman for the Kherson police, told the Kyiv Independent that attacks of this kind have been a daily occurrence in the city for two years, and that few are captured in such detail. The operators fly from the occupied bank of the Dnipro into the part of Kherson that Ukraine holds, and Russian units publish their own drone footage of these attacks as a matter of routine. Ukrainian officials say the attacks double as training for operators before they are sent east, and the Prosecutor General has described the footage being recirculated in Russian propaganda on those terms.
Nothing in that sequence was autonomous. A person watched a live feed, understood what he was looking at, and initiated a lethal explosion anyway.
For fifteen years, the legal debate about drones and military artificial intelligence has been organised around the reverse of that scenario, the prospect of a machine that selects its own target and leaves nobody to prosecute. That prospect gave rise to the concept of the “responsibility gap” and continues to drive the campaign for a treaty on lethal autonomous weapon systems. Yet the civilian killing documented in Kherson has been carried out not by autonomous decisions but by fully attributable human ones, and attribution is not what is missing. The difficulty now is finding a court that can lay its hands on a defendant.
Where the law stands
In 2023, the UN Secretary-General and the President of the ICRC jointly called on states to conclude a legally binding instrument on autonomous weapons by 2026. António Guterres has for years described the delegation of life and death decisions to machines as “morally repugnant”.
That year has now arrived, and the Group of Governmental Experts operating under the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons has one session left, from 31 August to 4 September, before it reports to the Convention’s Seventh Review Conference in November. Its mandate is to formulate, by consensus, the elements of an instrument. Consensus is precisely the difficulty, since a single state can halt the process, and Russia has repeatedly blocked it.
The General Assembly, which does not require consensus, has been more decisive. Resolution 79/62 passed in December 2024 by 166 votes to three, and a further resolution drew 156 states in late 2025, asking the CCW to complete its elements with a view to future negotiation. A resolution is not a treaty, and the negotiation it anticipates has not been convened. The UK holds that existing humanitarian law suffices, a position restated around last year’s Strategic Defence Review, which observed that “The UK’s competitors are unlikely to adhere to common ethical standards” without saying what the UK proposes to do about it.
What Kherson tests
The Kherson campaign offers the sharpest available measure of what human involvement in targeting is worth. In May 2025, the UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine concluded that Russian drone attacks on civilians along the right bank of the Dnipro amounted to the crime against humanity of murder, and probably to forcible transfer of population as well. The attacks were, in the Commission’s words, “widespread, systematic and conducted as part of a coordinated state policy”. Nearly 150 civilians were killed in the ten months examined, and ambulances were among the vehicles struck. Further reports in September and October 2025 extended the same findings across more than 300 kilometres of the right bank, into Dnipropetrovsk, Mykolaiv and Kherson. A senior hospital official in the city likened the operators’ conduct to playing a video game.
Every one of those strikes involved continuous human control, which the treaty campaign seeks to preserve. It supplied the intent for the crime rather than preventing it.
The case for a treaty
Supporters of a treaty have a ready answer, and it is a good one. Kherson demonstrates that human beings commit atrocities, which is exactly why we should not hand the same discretion to machines that cannot be prosecuted at all. That reply is correct on its own terms, and nothing here should be mistaken for the claim that meaningful human control is a bad idea. The campaign asks a single principle to carry more protective work than it can bear, and negotiators have concentrated on it partly because it is the portion of the problem on which states could plausibly agree. An instrument is still worth having. It simply would not have reached the market in Kherson, because nothing there was delegated to a machine.
Support for that reading comes from the other end of the spectrum. Ramón Reichert, writing in Dialogues on Digital Society last year, notes that what humanitarian organisations call a responsibility gap is understood inside military organisations as a tolerance spectrum, meaning an acceptable error rate rather than a legal defect. Contested reporting on the Israeli targeting systems known as Lavender and Gospel points the same way, describing machine-generated target lists passed to human reviewers at a tempo that makes review largely nominal. Kherson alone would carry the point. Read alongside it, the two suggest that keeping a person somewhere in the chain restrains very little by itself.
The responsibility gap has become an enforcement gap
Early discussion of autonomous weapons assumed that the central difficulty would be evidential, that as targeting decisions migrated into software, we would lose the ability to reconstruct who did what to whom. The war in Ukraine has produced the opposite result. Drone warfare has turned out to be the most thoroughly self-documenting form of killing yet devised, and the Commission of Inquiry built much of its case from more than 300 videos and over 600 Telegram posts, a great deal of it material the perpetrators uploaded themselves in order to terrify the people still living there.
Nor is there any shortage of applicable law. Article 51 of Additional Protocol I prohibits attacks directed against the civilian population and indiscriminate attacks. Article 8(2)(b)(i) of the Rome Statute makes intentionally directing attacks against civilians a war crime. Neither provision cares what the weapon was.
The deficit lies elsewhere, in the absence of a forum holding the people who hold the controllers. In June, Ukrainian prosecutors named ten servicemen of the 404th Motor Rifle Regiment over drone attacks on civilians in Kherson oblast and served notices of suspicion on them in absentia. Naming them is as far as the process can go. The International Criminal Court has jurisdiction over crimes committed on Ukrainian territory and no realistic prospect of a defendant in the dock. The one new institution European states have actually built for this war, the Special Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine, agreed with the Council of Europe in Strasbourg in June 2025, reaches senior political and military leadership and the decision to invade. It does not reach the operator watching Yuriy through a camera. That was a defensible choice, made to fill a jurisdictional hole the ICC could not, but it tells you where the accountability architecture of this war has been pointed, and it is not at the level where most of the civilian killing is now decided.
The same ranking applies further upstream. Sotoudehfar and colleagues argue in Defense & Security Analysis that the greatest present risk to civilians comes from cheap, poorly guided systems made at volume and passed to proxies. Export controls and minimum guidance standards would probably buy more civilian protection this decade than any agreed definition of autonomy.
Why this reaches Belfast
Belfast has more than a spectator’s stake in this, given that the Thales plant in the east of the city built the NLAW anti-tank weapons that shaped the first months of the Ukrainian defence and has since March 2025 been contracted to produce 5,000 air defence missiles for Ukraine under a package worth up to £1.6bn. A separate £176m order for lightweight multirole missiles was justified in part by the need to counter drones, placing east Belfast within the counter-drone economy that this war has created. That is reason enough to expect our MPs to hold a position on the November Review Conference, and if it produces another set of elements and no negotiating mandate, the loss will be smaller than it looks.
There is an older local connection. In December 2014, the NI Human Rights Festival brought Noel Sharkey to St Mary’s University College to lecture on drones and human rights, and Slugger carried the listing. A little under twelve years on, the capability he warned about has largely arrived. What Kherson shows is that the harm did not wait for it.
What follows from all this concerns transitional justice, and that is where it touches Northern Ireland. Accountability for killing is one of the conditions on which any settlement afterwards becomes liveable, because a society cannot come to terms with what it cannot attribute. Northern Ireland has spent three decades demonstrating that deferred accountability does not quietly decay. It compounds, and it resurfaces on someone else’s timetable. Kherson is generating an archive of crimes with identifiable victims and, in principle, identifiable perpetrators, in a war that will eventually end at a table where somebody will propose that the past be set aside in the interests of peace. What happens to that archive will shape the aftermath far more than the wording agreed in Geneva next month.
The real failure would be to keep treating the autonomy of the weapon as the whole of the moral problem, when the evidence is already on Telegram, and the courtrooms are the thing we have not built. Yuriy held up a handful of garlic to a camera to show that he was harmless, and a person at the other end of the feed watched him do it.
Sources: The Kherson attack is reported by BBC News, ‘Why did Russia strike a Ukrainian vegetable seller with a drone?’, 4 August 2026, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn4n03xg981o; and the Kyiv Independent, ‘‘It started flying right at me’ — Russian drone seen targeting vegetable seller at Kherson market in horrific footage’, 4 August 2026, https://kyivindependent.com/graphic-warning-horrific-video-shows-russian-drone-taunting-striking-vegetable-seller-at-kherson-market/. The Commission of Inquiry findings are in ‘They are hunting us’: systematic drone attacks targeting civilians in Kherson (A/HRC/59/CRP.2), 28 May 2025, extended by the Commission’s update of 22 September 2025 and its report to the General Assembly (A/80/497), 27 October 2025. Also relied on: UN General Assembly Resolution 79/62, 2 December 2024; Additional Protocol I, article 51; Rome Statute, article 8(2)(b)(i); Ramón Reichert, ‘Autonomous occupation’, Dialogues on Digital Society 1(3) (2025) 368; and Saba Sotoudehfar, Jeremy Julian Sarkin and Mohamed Zied Chaari, ‘Cheap drones, costly consequences’, Defense & Security Analysis 42(1) (2026) 139. Remaining sources are linked in the text.
Something which may have slipped under people’s radars recently is the announcement by the Northern Ireland exams board, CCEA, that a number of subjects are to be discontinued. German, Economics and Engineering are to be scrapped along with Leisure Travel and Tourism, Learning for Life and Work and Contemporary Crafts.
CCEA said it had made the decision based on factors such as “candidate entry patterns and the long-term sustainability of these subjects”. Candidate entry patterns and long-term sustainability could well be a justification for dropping all but one of these subjects : Learning for Life and Work (LLW)
The thing about LLW is that it is a compulsory subject at both KS3 and KS4 and I believe that it is planned to be retained under the new 2028 curriculum. So its long term sustainability is guaranteed. As for entry patterns, these are the number of entries for 2025 :
- Contemporary Crafts – 133
- Leisure, Travel and Tourism – 172
- Engineering and Manufacturing – 206
- Economics – 170
- German – 587
- Learning for Life and Work – 3,378. This number of entries is higher than for subjects such as Art & Design, Agriculture and Land Use, Construction, Statistics, Health & Social Care, Drama and French.
IS LLW IMPORTANT?
Judge for yourself – LLW has four strands :
– EMPLOYABILITY – Work in the Local and Global Economy, Career Management, Enterprise and Entrepreneurship.
– HOME ECONOMICS – Healthy Eating, Home and Family Life, Independent Living.
– LOCAL AND GLOBAL CITIZENSHIP – Diversity and Inclusion, Human Rights and Social Responsibility, Equality and Social Justice, Democracy and Active Participation.
– PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT – Self-Awareness, Personal Health, Relationships.
Surely all of this is the kind of stuff which which people have been demanding from schools in an era of employment issues, health issues, targetted erosion of democracy/truth/equality and worrying suicide rates.
Diversity and Inclusion, Human Rights and Social Responsibility, Equality and Social Justice, Democracy and Active Participation – is this all deemed too politically WOKE by some stakeholders?
LLW HAS BEEN CRITICISED
A common criticism is that it is a “mickey mouse” subject in schools, not taken seriously. Surely the solution is to make it a compulsory GCSE if it has to be taught anyway. LLW is already a compulsory GCSE in some schools.
So what is the logic in abandoning this GCSE which is more popular than some others and which promotes the kind of knowledge, understanding and values which most people want more of?
Brendan Wall said he was detained by gardaí after landlord Noel Larkin claimed man was trying to break into rented home
A priest has said a vigil being held for three women and a boy injured in the M9 crash will be a chance for the Carlow community to show solidarity.
Bank of Ireland is warning people to be extra careful when buying tickets for popular concerts and festivals, especially ahead of the upcoming Electric Picnic.
Collision happened on Wednesday night outside Ballyragget
Four-time world champion Max Verstappen signs a contract extension with Red Bull, keeping him with the Formula One team until 2030.
NASA has called off a $30 million mission to rescue its aging Swift space telescope after Katalyst Space's Link spacecraft developed persistent control and positioning problems. The Associated Press reports: Katalyst said Link will not attempt to capture Swift and boost it to a higher orbit because of problems with controlling the spacecraft. NASA said this means the telescope will plunge through the atmosphere after more than 20 years of tracking some of the biggest explosions in the universe like gamma ray bursts and exploding stars. Its demise is not expected before October.
NASA paid $30 million to Katalyst in an attempt to raise the telescope to a safer, longer-lasting orbit. Intense solar activity caused it to lose altitude faster than expected. The rescue spacecraft went into an uncontrollable spin a few weeks after its liftoff in early July. While flight controllers managed to slow Link's tumble, issues continued to plague its pointing and positioning in orbit.
"This is not the outcome we were working toward, but it does not change why this mission was worth attempting," NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said in a statement. As a consolation prize, Katalyst will continue to operate Link in proximity with the telescope to demonstrate capabilities for future rescue operations. Katalyst CEO Ghonhee Lee said it was an ambitious mission on an aggressive timeline that was thrown together in under a year. "We took on this high-risk, high-reward challenge and are proud of the milestones we reached along the way," Lee said in a statement. "We have already learned a tremendous amount."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
PWNED Welcome back to PWNED, the column where we make fun of those who are security self-owned, so hopefully you don’t do the same. This week, we have a story that’s hot off the presses about a company almost sabotaging its security by using AI for programming. Have a story about someone leaving a gaping hole in their network? Share it with us at pwned@sitpub.com. Anonymity is available upon request. Our tale of machine learning malfeasance comes courtesy of Sergiy Fitsak, managing director of Softjourn, a consulting and software development company. He reminds us that, when it comes to AI, don’t trust: verify. During the course of business, one engineer asked an AI agent to recommend a package that they needed for a common task. The agent came back with the name of a legitimate-sounding package, which was formatted like a familiar library. At many organizations, this would have been the end of the story. The developer would have taken the AI agent’s advice and downloaded and installed the recommended package. However, at Softjourn, the company has a policy which they actually followed: double-check any software recommendations made by AI to make sure they are legit. The developer skimmed the recommended package’s source code on GitHub and noticed that it had few downloads and had just been created a few days earlier. In other words, it was suspicious. According to Fitsak, attackers have found a way to exploit package names hallucinated by AI models. “The problem is that AI models sometimes invent package names that sound plausible but don't exist, a pattern security researchers have started calling 'slopsquatting,'” he told us. “Attackers have caught on and now register real packages under those exact invented names, betting that a developer under deadline pressure will install first and check later.” If Softjourn hadn’t been so careful, they could have installed a malware package. We don’t know the exact payload, but this malware package could have given crims a backdoor into their systems and the ability to steal data or wreak other havoc. “We caught it because we'd already built a habit of verifying download counts and reviewing source code on GitHub before installing anything an AI recommends, even when it looks routine,” Fitsak said. “It takes a few extra minutes. Skipping that step once is how a team ends up explaining a supply chain compromise instead of shipping a feature on time.” The lesson here is a very simple one: Don’t trust the package names that AI agents recommend. Have a human check the supply chain. And always have a human in the loop so they can take the time to stop and approve any outside code that comes into a project. ®
Europe’s newest eye on the health of Earth’s vegetation has taken another crucial step towards orbit – the European Space Agency’s FLEX satellite has been fuelled at Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana ahead of its planned launch on 15 September at 03:21 CEST (14 September at 22:21 local time).
Funeral directors’ association chief warns staff are working in ‘less than ideal’ conditions
Australian prosecutors have asked judges to stiffen mushroom murderer Erin Patterson's prison sentence - saying she should never be set free.
The couple will remain non-working royals. It is unclear where they will live.
It comes after the interest rate on 30-year bonds reached the highest level in almost 20 years.
Chinese space startup LandSpace has landed a first-stage booster on land, the first time a Middle Kingdom company has achieved the feat. LandSpace flies rockets called Zhuque and has built three generations of the craft. Zhuque-1 only flew once, in 2018. Zhuque-2 became the first liquid oxygen-methane vehicle to reach orbit when it first flew in 2022. It can can carry 6,000 kilograms to a 200km low Earth orbit or 4,000kg to a 600km Sun-synchronous orbit. LandSpace has flown it eight times since 2022. Six missions succeeded. Zhuque-3 is the company’s new flagship and can hoist 21,300 kg to a 450km orbit. The rocket uses LandSpace’s own TQ-12A engines, which burn liquid oxygen-methane fuel. The rocket’s first stage is re-usable, and can land on its four legs. LandSpace flew the Zhuque-3 for the first time last December, but the mission failed – although its on-board Ethernet performed brilliantly. The company did better yesterday, when a Zhuque-3 sent a satellite into orbit and managed to land its first stage. You can see a video of the landing on the company’s Weixin account. The company says the rocket lifted off at 7:35 AM yesterday, split its first and second stages 137 seconds into the flight, and landed the first stage at 7:41 AM. The launchpad and landing site are about 250km apart. LandSpace says the rocket performed a high-altitude return attitude adjustment, reentry ignition powered deceleration, aerodynamic gliding control, landing ignition deceleration, and deployed its landing legs. “The mission systematically verified the entire process of the first stage returning to the land landing pad from high-speed flight,” the company Nilab
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eted. Re-usable rockets reduce the cost of space flight by removing the need to build a vehicle for every launch. LandSpace has designed its engines and first stages to fly up to 20 times. It hasn’t proven it can re-use a rocket even once, yet, or how quickly it can get a used vehicle back on the launchpad. Just landing a first stage is, however, mightily impressive as only SpaceX and Blue Origin have previously achieved the feat. China has big ambitions in space, including huge constellations of broadband satellites, extending its space station, and building a moon base. Beijing knows re-usable rockets will help – it recently tested catching them in a net mounted on a barge at sea. State media has hailed LandSpace’s feat as a “major breakthrough” and reported that China’s National Space Agency is working on other re-usable tech to advance the nation’s ability to launch more stuff, more often, at lower cost. ®
“Man, you know you’re depressed when you’re texting an old hookup from seven years ago,” Fallon said of the president and North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un.
A ‘capacity for despair’ forged by political oppression has long been considered a Magyar national trait. But after Orbán, writers in the country remind us that melancholy must not always be bleak
A lone visitor looks for a garden outside an empty monastery. A morose housekeeper won’t let anyone behind the door of her own home. A retired general living alone on a crumbling estate waits 40 years to confront the only friend he ever had. Melancholy, an affinity with oblivion without a concrete cause, suffuses the Hungarian fiction translated for foreign audiences over the past 30 years, from the tortured tales of Sándor Márai to the taut novels of Magda Szabó.
In his book In Praise of Melancholy, essayist László F Földényi tells the story of an Englishman who monomanically decides to teach himself Hungarian. For Földényi, the commitment to studying a language with 26 cases and with no connection to any other language, from a culture besieged by centuries of invasion, is to embrace melancholy, a seductive “capacity for despair”. To read Hungarian literature as an outsider, the poet János Pilinszky claimed in 1972, is to acquire unique spiritual insights that come from centuries of rootlessness, alienation and strife.
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There is a long list of supplements taken by elite athletes in the pursuit of marginal gains - what do they take and why?
Ireland could learn much from a nursery and research institute in the Netherlands
We ask 26 BBC Sport football pundits to predict who will win the 2026-27 Premier League title, and which clubs will finish in the top four.
We ask 26 BBC Sport football pundits to predict who will win the 2026-27 Premier League title, and which clubs will finish in the top four.
West Sussex residents describe regularly seeing riders performing wheelies and riding on pavements at high speed.
Men born in Ukraine who fought for Russia are tried for treason, but at a prisoner of war camp in western Ukraine, many believe they were defending their homeland.
Thousands of disappointed students have always found a way forward
St Michael’s House in Ballymun says it implemented all Medical Council safeguards and will be ‘reviewing for any lessons learned’
Young males recorded attempting thefts in Athy appeared to be using same BMW involved in crash hours later
A university student who never sat her Leaving Cert wants pupils about to get their exam results to know that "there are so many options to get to wherever you want to be" regardless of how many CAO points they receive.
Dublin City Council programme recognises events and people, including the first Irish show by The Beatles to the Ballyfermot train ambush
IBM has shown off designs for cooling hardware it says will allow quantum computers to scale. Quantum computers rely on qubits – atoms or circuits put into a state of probability that means they can simultaneously store a value of zero and one – and which computer scientists make using complex circuitry or by suspending an atom with lasers. IBM produces qubits with chips that can only run at temperatures close to absolute zero. Big Blue’s quantum boxes therefore need serious cooling, and the company has to date made its fridges round and large. On Wednesday, the company revealed smaller, rectangular, modular cryogenic cabinets. The image below shows two of them holding some IBM quantum kit. IBM says the boxes you see above are three times larger than a domestic fridge, are made of solid aluminum panels and framing, and provide “approximately 0.53 square meters of available wiring area and 2.75 cubic meters of vacuum chamber volume.” That’s enough space to hold “larger single processors and denser system configurations.” Big Blue sees these boxes as a design that it can re-use for future generations of quantum hardware, suggesting that such machines will become less exotic, and cheaper to acquire and operate. It’s also possible to connect the coolers, which matters because IBM has hit limits in terms of scaling the number of qubits it can pack into a single chip. The company therefore envisions connecting quantum processors so they each work on different parts of a job. Standard practice in the datacenter has long been to use racks full of hardware that nestle right next to each other, to allow for best use of space, and for neater and more manageable cabling (which can even make a difference to performance with a shorter cable path). Short connections and clean cabling are even more important for quantum computers. Indeed, IBM admits that its current cylindrical coolers “require long and noisy connections between processors.” Noise is the enemy of quantum computers, as it can destroy a superposition and ruin a calculation. The boxes shown above therefore include openings through which IBM will run “quantum cables,” protected by “multiple layers of thermal shielding” that form “a protected cryogenic tunnel between systems.” Temperatures inside that tunnel remain at the extremely low temperatures needed to keep a quantum computer operating without frequent glitching and improve fault tolerance. IBM is therefore hopeful that its boxy adaptation of racking for the quantum age will let it build bigger Q-puters, which will mean AI is not the only source of “This new type of computer will deliver amazing breakthroughs in everything” hype. ®
US president pivots towards ‘crushing’ economic operation against Iran and its trading partners as military strikes fail to bring Tehran to the table
Nilab
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has announced a new campaign to isolate Iran’s economy, threatening “tremendous economic consequences” on any country that helps or does business with Tehran, a move that could set up a fresh confrontation with China if implemented.
“Today, I am announcing the most crushing economic operation ever taken against any country!” Nilab
Schaar
wrote on Truth Social. “Any country that allows its financial institutions, businesses, airports, or government entities to provide any type of lifeline to Iran will itself face tremendous economic consequences.”
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Making the library a second home can pay dividends when exams and assignments fall due
The Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm creator says Dershowitz, who also defended Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein, ‘only has himself to blame’ for being ostracised
Larry David has opened up about the collapse of his friendship with Alan Dershowitz, saying that Dershowitz “made a deal with the devil” when he became Nilab
Schaar
’s lawyer.
Dershowitz, a former Harvard University law professor, has been a member of legal teams for Nilab
Schaar
, Jeffrey Epstein, OJ Simpson and Harvey Weinstein at various points in his career, and served on Nilab
Schaar
’s defense team during the president’s first impeachment trial in 2020.
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Werner Kalecinski is a social media sensation among young Germans. How did he go from heartbroken widower to partying on a yacht?
Met Éireann forecasts temperatures up to 19 degrees over coming days
Australia summoned Israel's ambassador and expressed outrage at a decision by its military not to pursue criminal proceedings over the death of an Australian aid worker in a 2024 airstrike in Gaza.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Meta was infused with a culture in which employees obsessed over user numbers and consistently pushed safety to the side, according to Arturo Bejar, a former employee turned whistleblower, who testified today in the landmark child safety trial against the social media company. Only one man had the ability to change that, Bejar said: CEO Mark Zuckerberg. But he didn't. "At the end of the day, it was the company culture that Mark had created that made it so that it was practically impossible to deliver features that addressed the wellbeing and safety issues that we've been talking about," he said.
Bejar is a linchpin witness for a consortium of states led by California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey that sued Meta, alleging violations of consumer and child data protection laws, and that the company lied to the public about risks its platforms posed. The attorneys for the states say Meta designed Facebook and Instagram to hook young users and to keep them on site longer thanks to features such as infinite scrolling and the "like" button. Meta has denied the allegations. In his opening statement on Tuesday, attorney Paul Schmidt argued that the company was sensitive to the risks to teens, sought to address them and did not deceive the public about them. The state attorneys have not yet said if they will call Zuckerberg as a witness.
Testifying in federal court in Oakland, California, for a second day on Wednesday, Bejar, who worked on safety issues at Meta for eight years, said he interacted with Zuckerberg dozens of times, and charged that Zuckerberg was not telling the truth when he made public denials that the company put profits over safety. In particular, Bejar addressed a widely-shared Facebook post Zuckerberg made in 2021 after another whistleblower, Frances Haugen, shared internal documents with The Wall Street Journal that highlighted risks to the mental health of teens. In the post, Zuckerberg said it's "just not true" that Meta prioritizes profit over safety and wellbeing. "Based on my experience at Meta, that is not an accurate statement," Bejar said. [...] Bejar testified, at almost every turn the company chose policies that boosted usership and revenue over safety. Safety was "not a meaningful priority," he said.
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At least 13 people have been killed and 33 injured in Russian ballistic missile attacks on Kyiv and its surrounding region, Ukrainian authorities have said.
The decision was a win for Republicans, who have been pushing for the new map in an effort to help maintain the party’s narrow control in the U.S. House in November.
Microsoft has signalled it will end one of the last remaining ways to acquire VMware products outside of a big bundle. Redmond’s main offer for Virtzillains is the Azure VMware Solution (AVS), a cloudy affair that includes vCenter, vSAN, vSphere, and NSX and licenses for them all – but not the Software-Defined Datacenter Manager tool that Broadcom uses to package its wares into a centrally-manageable hybrid cloud in its flagship Cloud Foundation (VCF) suite. Since acquiring VMware, Broadcom has gone all-in on VCF and no longer sells a standalone low-end server virtualization product. The Register understands the VMware channel and sales team almost never sell licenses for vSphere Foundation, a bundle that’s useful on the edge or branch office, unless it’s part of a bigger deal that includes VCF. Services like AVS therefore represent an alternative for orgs that want to keep using VMware, but don’t want to jump to VCF. Broadcom isn’t keen on licensing anything other than the entire VCF bundle and made that plain with licensing changes that mean its hyperscale partners are not allowed to sell VMware licenses. The code-and-chips shop therefore requires customers to bring their own VCF licenses to any cloudy VMware service. Microsoft this week announced that it will therefore retire the license-included version of AVS, and that customers who use the service will need to acquire a VCF license and move to a different Azure arrangement by August 30, 2027. The Windows giant said it will stop selling license-included AVS from October 31, 2026 and warned users to start planning a move because their current rigs won’t work in the future. “Allow plenty of time to purchase VCF licenses from Broadcom and complete the transition to AVS VCF BYOL,” the company advises. “For customers evaluating modernization opportunities, start assessing current AVS environments immediately, and develop a transition roadmap to ensure you have ample time to exit AVS and avoid service disruption on August 31, 2027.” Broadcom announced the requirement for BYOL licensing late last year, and other hyperscalers have already adopted it, so VCS users should have had an inkling that change was coming. For some, this will not be their first recent VMware migration, as Broadcom has twice made changes that meant smaller cloud providers had to discontinue service, making a move to an alternative provider or platform necessary. Broadcom doesn’t mind much if smaller VMware customers move to another server virtualization vendor: it unashamedly focuses on larger customers it thinks will get the most benefit from VCF and points to most of its target customers acquiring the suite, and increased VMware revenue, as evidence its strategy is working. ®
Melting sea ice from climate change has opened up the region for giant whales to undertake "feeding frenzies".
The sudden decision to return leaves lots of questions for the Duke and Duchess of Sussex and Royal Family.
This blog is now closed.
Those unfamiliar with Alaska politics are likely raising an eyebrow at some repeated names.
No, we’re not talking about Dan S Sullivan and Dan J Sullivan, two Republicans with the same name running for US Senate – an issue that went to the state supreme court earlier this summer. We’re talking about the Begiches. Nick Begich III, a Republican, is currently leading the race to represent Alaska in the US House of Representatives for a second term while Tom Begich, a Democrat, is advancing to the general election for governor in November.
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Former real estate developer leads press corps on tour of grounds and says ‘one thing I know how to do is build’
As the US national debt climbed past $40tn for the first time on Wednesday, and the war with Iran he started nearly six months ago dragged on, forcing Americans already struggling to pay the bills to spend more on fuel, Nilab
Schaar
led the press corps on a tour of the extensive remodeling of the White House grounds he is personally overseeing in his role as the self-styled “builder-in-chief”.
The tour, during which Nilab
Schaar
showed off upgrades such as a new granite driveway and refurbished columns, and expounded at length on newly laid grass, culminated in Nilab
Schaar
autographing the back of a stone, inscribed with his name, to go in the center of the ornate new helipad he insists he needs.
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The actress spoke candidly about her drug use and “the downfall of addiction.” The local police have said there is no evidence of foul play in her death.
US President Nilab
Schaar
said he was launching a major new campaign to target Iran's economy, threatening "tremendous" punishment on any country that helps Iran.
A landslide triggered by the quake had blocked access to the village where Paulina Pobi had lived, leaving her buried under the collapsed remains
An 84-year-old woman has been discovered alive in the flattened remains of her home three days after a powerful earthquake hit eastern Indonesia, authorities have confirmed.
The 7.7-magnitude quake struck off Indonesia’s Flores island on Saturday morning, killing at least 73 people, injuring more than 900 people and displacing nearly 60,000 others.
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In an era when reputations can be made or broken with a single post, getting the balance right is tricky.
Young carers face huge disadvantages growing up - one teenager explains what life is like.
NASA and Katalyst Space Technologies announced Wednesday they are giving up on a robotic mission to rescue the Swift gamma-ray telescope before it falls out of orbit.
The rescue satellite, named Link, launched July 3 on a journey to fly up to NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, capture it with three robotic arms, and boost its orbit high enough to escape a looming reentry. Link is about the size of a refrigerator, with two power-generating solar arrays and three xenon-fueled electric thrusters to send Swift into a safer, higher orbit.
Katalyst, the startup leading the Swift rescue effort, said Wednesday that "ongoing attitude control issues" will prevent the Link satellite from completing its rescue mission. The spacecraft is still alive, and Katalyst said it will make the most of Link's remaining capacity, which may still allow it to get near enough to Swift for a demonstration of the satellite's close-in navigation system.
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The collapse was caused by a landslide, while local officials say the death toll is likely to rise as recovery efforts continue
More than 100 people have died after an artisanal goldmine at a small village in western Central African Republic (CAR) caved in due to a landslide, local officials and aid workers said on Wednesday.
The landslide happened on Tuesday afternoon in the village of Zamboye, about 50km (31 miles) from the town of Baboua and close to the border of Cameroon. Footage on social media appeared to show an avalanche of sand descend on a group of people, likely the miners, and cover them.
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AI’s thirst for power remains an ongoing concern, but fear not: AMD says it’s making steady progress towards its goal of boosting rack efficiency 20x by the end of the decade. In a blog post published this week, the House of Zen estimates that, as of 2026, its systems are already 4x more efficient than they were in 2024. Certainly, a lot has changed since then. As you may recall, AMD began volume production of the MI300X, its first true datacenter GPU designed for AI, that year. The 750-watt part boasted up to 2.6 petaFLOPS of dense FP8 performance, which at the time made it competitive on paper with Nvidia’s Hopper generation of AI accelerators. Since then, AMD has pulled every lever and pushed every button at its disposal to squeeze more FLOPS per watt from its GPU systems, push its memory and scale-up fabrics harder, and optimize its software stack in order to catch up with its larger, more successful rival. This included adding support for 4-bit floating point data types, new memory technologies, increasing interconnect speeds, and transitioning from conventional GPU servers to fully-integrated rack-scale systems. "The counterintuitive thing here… is the bigger the device, the more efficient it is," AMD SVP and Fellow Sam Naffziger told El Reg last year when the chipmaker announced the initiative. Last month, AMD revealed the fruits of its labors with the launch of said rack-scale compute platform, codenamed Helios, which crams 72 MI455X GPUs into a single massive system. Compared to the MI300X, each MI455X boasts between 7.7x and 15.4x higher floating point performance, 2.25x more HBM, 4.4x faster memory, and 4x chip-to-chip interconnect bandwidth. Without question, the chip is faster, but it also requires more than 3x the power. Instead, the biggest performance gains come from just how efficiently AMD can scale AI workloads across the system’s six dozen accelerators. As usual, AMD isn’t exactly a pioneer here. Nvidia made the leap to rack-scale in late 2024, with the launch of its Grace Blackwell-based NVL72 systems that also pack 72 GPUs into a single rack-sized system. At the time, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang boasted that compared to an equivalent number of Hopper GPUs, GB200 NVL72 racks delivered a 4x uplift in training and 30x improvement in inference performance. While the benefits of rack-scale architectures are clear, it’s worth emphasizing AMD is using a very different methodology to calculate efficiency, by weighting max achieved FLOPS, memory, and interconnect bandwidth differently for training and inference, rather than basing their comparison on real-world application performance. It’s also worth nothing that AMD’s 4x claim is an estimate. The first Helios units should ship to customers this calendar quarter. We expect the first MLPerf and InferenceX benchmarks to follow not long after. However, assuming AMD can make good on its goals, it says two Helios racks will be able to do the same work that required 570 racks full of kit in 2024. Put more realistically, for the same power customers will be able to deploy 20x more compute, assuming the bubble hasn’t already popped by then and taken demand with it. ®
A study has found that Fungie, once Ireland's best-known dolphin, had ties to both the Shannon Estuary bottlenose dolphins and a much larger offshore population.
Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff used a speech to note the closeness of one aide to the president.
The vast majority of adults in Ireland (79%) are interested in investing in the Government's new planned Savings and Investment Account, research from the Banking & Payments Federation Ireland suggests.
Britain's Prince Harry and Meghan plan to move back to Britain more than six years after they relocated to California, according to media reports in the UK.
BrianFagioli writes: PINE64 has some very bad news for Linux hardware fans. PINE64 says it has no plans to produce additional Linux devices in the near future because of the ongoing DRAM and eMMC shortage. Future production will depend on component pricing after mid 2027, while existing PineNote and PineTab2 inventory could run out in roughly three months. The company says PineTime, PineVoice, and Pinecil production will continue as usual, but the outlook for its Linux hardware is much less certain. "That's it for this post, all in all it's a bit bleak for the Linux devices, but in the meantime PineStore still have a great lineup of MCU powered devices which will continue to expand with more exciting devices," the company said.
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The United Arab Emirates, Iran’s most important regional trading partner, announced a total embargo on transactions with Tehran on Tuesday.
Attackers are using AI-generated exploitation scripts to break into internet-exposed Siemens S7 Series programmable logic controllers (PLCs) at water, manufacturing, energy, and other critical facilities, in what five US federal agencies on Wednesday called an “active threat.” In this latest round of intrusions against American critical infrastructure, the attackers use open source industrial automation libraries – specifically snap7.dll/python-snap7 – combined with AI coding assistants. Armed with the open source libraries and AI, the miscreants create custom tools that mimic operational technology (OT) monitoring software and provide read/write access to the PLC devices’ memory, configuration data, and ladder logic programs via the S7comm protocol. “This is not a theoretical risk – it is an active threat,” the feds warned. While the joint alert from the National Security Agency (NSA), Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Department of Energy (DOE), and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) doesn’t attribute the threats to a particular government or criminal group, Iranian cyber operatives are suspected of being behind recent attacks targeting PLCs at water and wastewater facilities across at least 12 states, including a cyberattack that disrupted more than 30 community water systems in Minnesota in late July. “This appears to be a continuation of the same suite of activity we suspect is affiliated with Iran targeting PLCs,” Cynthia Kaiser, Halcyon Ransomware Research Center SVP, told The Register. “Iran-affiliated actors and adversaries are actively targeting a wide swath of operational technology because these PLCs underpin essential health, safety, and critical infrastructure across society.” National security and infosec experts last week told The Register that while there is no indication that the water-system hackers used AI in their intrusions, they worried that attackers would soon add AI to their arsenals for attacks against critical infrastructure. Now, that threat appears to be here. “What the advisory highlights with regard to AI usage aligns with what we’ve expected: state-sponsored adversaries are leveraging AI across the board for discrete tasks, like code checks and scripting, to scale their operations and move faster,” Kaiser, a former FBI cyber division deputy assistant director, told us on Wednesday. “The advisory reflects the broader reality that threat actors are using AI to increase their efficiency.” Siemens S7 Series PLCs under fire According to the Wednesday security alert, the latest attacks specifically target internet-exposed Siemens S7 Series PLCs across critical manufacturing, energy, water and wastewater, chemical, food and agriculture, and commercial facilities – in other words: most of the critical industries providing goods and services that Americans use in their daily lives. “Additionally, Siemens S7 Series PLCs are used in other sectors, including the Defense Industrial Base (DIB), and could be targeted there as well,” the feds warned. The Register reached out to the agencies for additional information about the attacks but did not receive any response to our questions. Attackers use internet-scanning services such as Censys and ZoomEye to find exposed, “poorly protected” PLCs running outdated software or using default passwords – and now they’ve got an AI boost. “Threat actors are using AI assistance to generate exploitation scripts using publicly available information on these Siemens S7 Series PLCs for initial access, credential access, denial of service, and other objectives,” the agencies said. “If these PLCs are exposed to the Internet or insufficiently segmented, then threat actors can exploit various critical and high severity known vulnerabilities in these PLCs.” The use of AI also indicates “an evolution in threat actor capabilities,” reducing the need for advanced technical knowledge about OT, and allowing the attacker to more rapidly develop working industrial control system malware and attack chains, the alert says. “I think that the bigger issue is still how exposed OT environments are,” Benny Czarny, CEO and founder of critical infrastructure security firm Opswat, told The Register in an email. “AI makes it much easier for an attacker to create and modify scripts targeting PLCs, so the barrier to attacking industrial systems continues to fall. But for me the answer is not simply better AI detection.” To mitigate this threat, the feds say critical infrastructure owners and operators should first – immediately – inventory all Siemens S7 Series PLCs in their environment, apply security patches as needed, and make sure no PLCs are accessible from the internet. It's also worth checking for anomalous S7comm behavior, including connections from non-engineering workstations, unusual data block access patterns, or write operations outside change windows, the feds suggest. Sequential IP scanning on port 102 and repeated connection attempts with varying parameters can indicate attackers conducting reconnaissance, and Snap7.dll library usage outside approved workstations may also indicate the presence of intruders on the network – so be sure to use these and the rest of the detection strategies detailed in the government security advisory to hunt for anomalies that may indicate a compromise. In addition to looking for indicators of compromise relevant to these intrusions, Czarny said it's critical to reduce the OT attack surface. “If data only needs to leave an OT network, use a data diode,” he said. “There should be no network path back to the PLC for an attacker to exploit. Yes, AI makes this more urgent. But the real lesson for me is still the same: stop giving attackers a path to the critical system in the first place. And do not rely on antivirus and sandboxes to protect your data flow.” ®
President Nilab
Schaar
’s promises to restore fiscal order and reduce the amount of America’s debt burden have been undercut by spending on the Iran war, tax cuts and tariff refunds.
Amazon wants to grow its Prime Air delivery drone service sixfold to reach nearly 500 cities and towns across the United States by the end of 2026. The planned expansions from Amazon and its rivals could make the convenience of delivery drone services available to tens of millions more people in the coming months—but will also test more communities’ tolerance for increased noise from daily drone flights.
On August 19, Amazon announced it would soon launch Prime Air in the metropolitan areas of Chicago; Cleveland; Atlanta; Syracuse, New York; and Boise, Idaho, with more to come later in the year. Each Prime Air site offers delivery drone service within an area of about 175 square miles, with delivery times ranging from half an hour to an hour.
Prime Air already operates out of Amazon warehouses in 10 cities across seven states. Those include primarily suburban neighborhoods of Phoenix; Tampa; Kansas City; Omaha, Nebraska; Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Detroit; Houston; and San Antonio, Dallas, and Waco, Texas.
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Stripe is acquiring AI model marketplace OpenRouter as it pushes beyond payments into the infrastructure behind AI applications. According to The New York Times, the deal is reportedly valued at about $7.5 billion, with $1.5 billion allocated to OpenRouter's founders. Less than three months ago the company was valued at about $1.3 billion. CNBC reports: OpenRouter has become popular with developers seeking to use AI models, particularly those considered non-proprietary and available for free. Many of these so-called open-weight AI models stem from Chinese labs like DeepSeek and Z.ai, which have gained steam among developers for generally being more cost-efficient relative to proprietary AI models from U.S. companies like OpenAI and Anthropic.
In a blog post about the deal, Stripe noted that it's been working with companies to "optimize their token costs and route tokens efficiently," referring to a kind of metric used to measure AI model usage. Stripe said it's difficult to manage AI costs relative to performance because of the rapid "pace at which models are released and repriced." [...]
OpenRouter said in a blog post that combining with Stripe will help with its overall vision of "a healthy AI ecosystem where many models thrive, where AI neurodiversity is a strength, where a lab or an inference provider with a breakthrough can reach millions of developers, and where no single model becomes the default by inertia." "Stripe is building the economic infrastructure for AI, and together with OpenRouter we'll help businesses maximize profitability by routing their requests intelligently and spending their tokens efficiently," Stripe CEO Patrick Collison said in a statement.
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Amazon says its Prime Air drone delivery service will expand sixfold to nearly 500 U.S. cities and towns by the end of 2026, including metro areas around Chicago, Syracuse, Cleveland, Atlanta, and Boise. According to Amazon Prime Air vice president David Carbon, the service has already delivered "hundreds of thousands of packages to customers" this year, typically within about an hour. The Verge reports: These will join 11 locations across the US where Amazon already offers drone deliveries, with each Prime Air site serving an area of approximately 175 square miles. The service aims to quickly deliver packages of up to 5 pounds or less [...]. Amazon reiterated its drone safety features alongside these expansion plans, including Prime Air's "industry-leading Detect-and-Avoid system." That's likely an attempt to minimize any concerns raised by the communities where the service is expanding, given these drones have already been scrutinized for crashing into cranes, internet cables, gardens, and an apartment building.
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A BIOS update for the Framework Laptop 13 with AMD Ryzen 7040-series processors is bricking the systems, multiple users have reported online.
Framework started shipping pre-built Ryzen 7040-based Framework Laptop 13 computers and compatible motherboards in 2023. In June 2026, Framework released BIOS 3.20 for the devices. The update adds mainboard support for features, including a haptic touchpad and new speakers, for the higher-end Framework Laptop 13 Pro and fixes issues, including one “where the Battery Extender status was reported incorrectly following a reboot, hibernation, or shutdown after the timer had expired," per a post on Framework’s forum from an employee.
Some users say that they installed the update successfully.
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A series of recent losses has eroded the president’s winning record, raising new questions about his hold over the party’s voters.
Officials say all seven people onboard killed, including Telemundo executive and Ecuador intelligence chief
Seven people, including five Americans, were killed when a safari helicopter crashed on Wednesday morning in a remote part of northern Kenya, according to local police and the state department.
Among the dead were an executive with Telemundo, the US-based Spanish-language network owned by NBC Universal, and the director of Ecuador’s national intelligence service.
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Last Friday, Google won an auction to acquire a huge amount of Spirit Airlines data.
The data doesn’t include personal information or customer data, but instead nearly covers the airline's entire employment and workplace record.
To ensure that no individual can be identified in the dataset, Google agreed to use a court-appointed ombudsman to oversee a process to strip any personally identifying information (PII) from the data before it’s transferred to Google. Under the deal, Google agreed to maintain the data in this de-identified form and to never intentionally re-identify the data. And if Google sells access to the data, third parties would supposedly be bound by the same terms.
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In today's sprawling JavaScript ecosystem, Svelte was designed to be a simpler alternative to the React.js front-end framework, and SvelteKit follows the same path, setting out to be a backend framework like Next.js but with fewer headaches and even better support for dynamic content. The new-ish SvelteKit 3.0 release candidate includes an experimental feature called remote functions that rethinks how data is delivered to the browser. “Remote functions make everything else look a bit clunky, including SvelteKit’s load functions and actions,” the project team enthused in the release candidate announcement page. A slender stack U.K. journalist Rich Harris, then a graphics editor at the New York Times, released Svelte 1.0 in 2016 as a JavaScript component builder that didn’t carry all the boilerplate that lumbered React.js. He needed an easier way to build graphical components for NYT online stories. Unlike React, Svelte compiled its code ahead of time, and shipped to the user without much accompanying framework. The fact that Svelte builds components from standard HTML elements also lightens the cognitive overhead for the developer. SvelteKit grew from Svelte to manage back-end chores, such as routing, rendering, and streamlining pages, all in a manner befitting Svelte’s simplicity. SvelteKit has been nipping at Next.js’ heels for a while. A recent benchmark found that SvelteKit’s Server Side Rendering (SSR) function returned an HTML payload three times smaller than Next.js for an equivalent product page — great news for performance-minded web shops. SvelteKit’s remote functions is another method that minimizes overhead – one so radical that adherents say it could disrupt the landscape of remote procedure calls (RPCs). It has been an experimental release since SvelteKit 2.27, though the upcoming v3 will embrace remote functions alongside its traditional load functions as equals (assuming the remaining bugs are sorted). Type-safe data fetching, no page refresh required Remote functions provide a way for individual components on a web page to update their data from the server, without refreshing the page as a whole. This limitation has been a real bummer for coders, who have had to come up with various ways around this issue, but their solutions have tended to be hacky and they often lose type safety in the process. “This is our take on RPCs,” explained Vercel Svelte core developer Simon Holthausen, in a Svelte Society podcast. Server-side, SvelteKit does the typical RPC stuff: validating incoming data requests, querying the database or other data source, and routing the serialized results back to the requesting component. The remote function, written in JavaScript or TypeScript, and compiled beforehand into a lightweight client-side RPC wrapper, performs a fetch call to the server from within the component itself. No special routing or additional boilerplate is required. “You don’t have to worry about where this code is running,“ said developer Scott Tolinski in an episode of a Syntax developer videocast enthusiastically entitled “SvelteKit has solved data loading.” The videocast hosts offered as an example a case where all the content on a site is static, except for a footer on the bottom of each page, which requires updated information. With remote functions, the footer component fetches and refreshes its own server data directly, keeping the data fresh. Traditionally, this would require the whole page either to be marked as dynamic (computationally costly, slow to load) or require the developer to write a top-down route loader (more brainwork, keystroking). “From within a normal Svelte component, you can just straight up import that query or mutation as a function, then call that function in your code,” Tolinski explained. The call is coming from within the client To be fair, the maintainers of Next.js have also addressed part of this problem with Server Functions (formerly called Server Actions), which allow client components to invoke server-side mutations directly. However, unlike SvelteKit's remote functions, Next.js Server Functions were primarily designed for writing data rather than fetching or querying it. Harris now works at Vercel, which sponsors Svelte but owns Next.js. Nonetheless, Vercel supports both approaches, each of which reflects “a broader convergence toward typed, server-side functions callable from the client,” a Vercel spokesperson told us. For Tolinski, though, the upside to Svelte’s remote functions is how seamlessly they fit into the overall Svelte framework. “I’m not saying no other RPC systems have done it as good as this, but it better be as good as this if you want me to use it,” he said. ®
Independent music publisher Round Hill is suing Suno and Anthropic for allegedly using hundreds of copyrighted songs without permission to train their AI systems. The company says potential damages could exceed $1 billion, arguing there is "nothing fair" about building multibillion-dollar AI businesses on copyrighted material while rights holders receive nothing. From The Hollywood Reporter: Round Hill is a prominent music publisher whose copyrights include the Goo Goo Dolls' "Iris," Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart," the Kinks' "Lola" and Dio's "Holy Diver." The company provided a list of 500 songs that the defendants had infringed upon. Round Hill said in the suits that the company plans to "amend to list potentially ten thousand or more of their musical compositions," with those damages potentially exceeding $1 billion. "While in other cases for copyright infringement, Defendant has waxed poetic about the necessity of progress and AI's value to society, there is simply no reason -- other than rote expediency -- to have that progress come at the cost of copyrights holders," prominent music attorney Richard Busch, representing Round Hill, wrote in the suits.
Round Hill further argued that the latter "'expediency' arguments completely falter" when taking into account Suno and Anthropic's significant cash valuations they've earned while "exploiting illicit copies of copyrighted works, including the Round Hill Works." "There is simply nothing fair about a company using theft to build for purely commercial purposes a multi-billion dollar business while those from which they steal receive nothing," Round Hill said.
Suno also faces a lawsuit from Universal Music Group and Sony Music Group.
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The Federal Communications Commission last week eliminated the gigabit speed goal established during the Biden administration and declared that current levels of broadband deployment in the US are acceptable. Though fiber networks have routinely offered such speeds for years, the FCC said the gigabit speed goal is not "technologically neutral," suggesting that it isn't fair to other, slower technologies.
In 2024, the FCC raised its broadband benchmark to 100Mbps downstream and 20Mbps upstream, setting the new standard by which to judge whether deployment is reasonable and timely. The FCC at the time also set a long-term speed goal of 1Gbps download speeds paired with 500Mbps upload speeds, saying it would use the goal “as a guidepost for evaluating our efforts to encourage deployment.”
Republican Brendan Carr, who is now the FCC chairman, never liked that long-term goal. He proposed abolishing it last year, and the change was finalized on August 14 in the FCC's latest broadband deployment report. The reports are mandated by Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act.
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It's an open secret that the major cloud providers don’t actually design their custom silicon from scratch. There's not much value in reinventing the wheel, so they often outsource big and undifferentiated chunks of chip design to IP houses like Broadcom, Marvell, Arm, and others. Google's partner of choice for its Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) has largely been Broadcom — though the chip giant's involvement was only made public earlier this year. However, Google's relationship with Broadcom was apparently never monogamous. In an SEC filing this week, Marvell entered the chat, announcing that the Chocolate Factory had tapped the IP house to develop custom silicon for the search and advertising giant. Among the products slated for development were “custom silicon programs that attach to the TPU ecosystem” including AI inference accelerators, storage controllers, network interface controllers, memory interface controllers, and near memory compute. The SEC filing doesn't go into specifics as to which technologies Google will adopt, nor does it offer any insights into the cloud provider’s relationship with Broadcom. All of the technologies listed in the filing are ones Broadcom is more than capable of furnishing. It also doesn’t mean that Broadcom will stop building TPUs for Google, it simply means Google isn’t putting all its eggs in one IP basket. It's not unusual for cloud providers to acquire technologies from multiple vendors to ensure they're always getting the best deal. Networking is a prime example. Of course that didn’t stop Wall Street from dumping shares of Broadcom Wednesday, sending its stock price down about 4% as of late afternoon trading. Marvell clearly expects this deal to be a major revenue driver for the company going forward, and it issued Google a warrant to acquire nearly 59 million shares worth roughly $12.2 billion. Whether Google will actually exercise the warrant is an open question. Doing so would embroil the company in a years-long chip design collaboration. But, looking at Marvell's tech stack, it's not hard to see why Google might be interested. Over the past few years, Marvell has developed a comprehensive suite of hardware IP, including high speed SerDes used in network switches and NICs, multi-die XPU reference designs, CXL memory controllers, and silicon photonics interconnect. Google could have licensed all these things from Broadcom, but now they're in a position to pit the two companies against each other on price and performance. So where might we see Marvell's tech appear first? If we had to guess, Google's interest in Marvell may stem from the photonic memory tech it acquired from Celestial AI late last year. Unveiled earlier this month, Marvell's new Photonic Fabric NIC and Photonic Fabric chiplet technologies allow multiple racks up to 50 meters away to share a common memory pool. Google's TPUs rely on high-speed optical circuit-switched links to talk to one another. One could imagine Google using this tech to dynamically reallocate additional memory to different TPU clusters based on the workload rather than needing to attach memory in a fixed ratio. And because the link is optical, the memory in question doesn't need to be in the same system or rack; that memory becomes a fungible resource. Of course, this is all speculation. Marvell has no shortage of IP that Google might be interested in, including SSD and CXL controllers and XPU reference designs. Or could simply be that Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai wants to avoid becoming overly reliant on Broadcom lest Hock Tan get any ideas like hiking up prices the way he did on virtualization tech following the VMware acquisition. Or could be that Marvell’s tech is just better for the specific use cases Google is currently developing for. ®
There's a new and very helpful use case for AI coding agents: designing drivers for devices, such as old printers, that were never meant to work with a particular operating system. Kuber Mehta, a New Delhi, India-based developer and founder of PolyThink, has published an account of how he coaxed Anthropic's Claude Code into creating a macOS driver for his HP Laser 1008a, for which HP offers only Windows and Linux drivers. "My HP Laser 1008a is a rebadged Samsung host-based printer that speaks a proprietary raster language (SPL3), and it has no macOS driver and no AirPrint," Mehta explained in a blog post. "So on paper it just does not print from a Mac. This is the (lightly redacted) transcript of me and Claude Code getting it working anyway." The GitHub repo for the driver – published under an open source MIT license – outlines the problem, which is that none of the common connection options work. There's no support for AirPrint, PostScript, or PCL (Printer Command Language), and SPL/QPDL drivers didn't work. What Mehta and Claude did was create a patch to SpliX, an open source driver for SPL2- and SPLc-based printers made by Samsung, Xerox, Dell, Lexmark, and Toshiba. Mehta's series of social media posts about the project appears to have touched a nerve. The discussion elicited appreciation for what people see as a positive use of technology, one that recognizes the finicky nature of printers and offers hope that old devices are potentially salvageable. Mehta's conversation with Claude Code took around 30-40 prompts and cost about 4 percent of his monthly usage. It's worth reviewing for anyone unfamiliar with AI model interaction because it illustrates how the model – Opus 4.8 in this case – makes confident statements that have to be corrected and often characterizes its remarks as "honest" (a behavior drilled into Opus 4.8). The project also serves to validate one of the often-cited benefits of AI tools – that they allow people to participate more broadly in the way they use software. Writing a device driver traditionally required specialized programming knowledge, and Mehta, by his own admission, "knew very little about macOS drivers but learned along the way." While it's fair to say that AI assistance encourages people to tackle tasks they're not really prepared to manage on their own, the sense of enablement is clearly catching, despite the technical debt being generated. Others have also used AI coding agents to come up with ways to make their printers more functional. Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch articulated the sense of possibility that animates the AI-pilled in a social media post about the general utility of AI. "Every idea you shelved as 'too ambitious' is now back in play," he said. Indeed, every shelved idea is becoming software. There were about 1 billion commits to GitHub in 2025, according to Kyle Daigle, chief operating officer at GitHub. If current trends continue, that figure could reach 14 billion by the end of 2026. Enjoy the abundance while it lasts. ®
CISA says the Medusa ransomware operation has breached more than 500 U.S. critical infrastructure organizations since 2021, up from more than 300 reported last year. The group has targeted healthcare, government, defense, manufacturing, IT and financial organizations, evolving into a ransomware-as-a-service operation that recruits initial-access brokers and uses stolen data to pressure victims into paying. BleepingComputer reports: The three federal agencies recommended that network defenders secure their networks against the ransomware group's attacks by mitigating security vulnerabilities to protect operating systems, software, and firmware from exploitation attempts. Security teams are also advised to segment networks to block lateral movement after compromise and to block access from untrusted origins to remote services on internal systems.
[...] "Medusa developers typically recruit initial access brokers (IABs) in cybercriminal forums and marketplaces to obtain initial access to potential victims," the advisory says. "Potential payments between $100 USD and $1 million USD are offered to these affiliates with the opportunity to work exclusively for Medusa."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
It has been a little more than a month since China recovered an orbital-class rocket booster for the first time. A second launch operator accomplished a similar feat Tuesday in another sign of China's growing launch capability.
It took 10 years for a second US launch company, Blue Origin, to propulsively land an orbital-class booster after SpaceX did it with the Falcon 9 rocket in 2015. SpaceX has since added a second reusable rocket to its fleet with Starship and its Super Heavy booster. Perhaps a third American company will join SpaceX and Blue Origin's club in 2027. Rocket Lab, Stoke Space, Relativity Space, and Firefly Aerospace—working in partnership with Northrop Grumman—are working on reusable rockets that could make their first flights in the next couple of years.
A similar number of launch companies are working on reusable rockets in China. Some of them operate under the auspices of the sprawling state-owned China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC). Others are more commercial in nature, driven by capital investment from private industry.
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Some ICE employees seemingly needed a reminder not to wear their Meta pervert glasses to work. Because only ICE can spy on ICE. Meta smart glasses are essentially “body-worn cameras,” as they can covertly record video and audio, David Venturella, Immigration and Customs Enforcement acting director, reportedly reminded agency employees on Tuesday. “The use of Meta Glasses or similar devices could unintentionally capture, record or transmit sensitive information, potentially compromising privacy and legal protections,” Venturella said in a Tuesday memo, according to a New York Times report. ICE policy [PDF] prohibits employees from using personal body-worn cameras in the workplace. As such, ICE employees’ personal Meta glasses - along with similar wearable devices capable of recording audio or video - are banned from use on the job. An ICE spokesperson told us that ICE, on occasion, reminds its employees of existing policies like this one, and that the agency takes privacy and operational security seriously. “This isn’t news - nothing has changed,” an ICE spokesperson said. “Personally owned body-worn cameras and unauthorized recording are prohibited, as they always have been.” The spokesperson declined to answer The Register’s questions including what prompted the reminder and whether more ICE agents have been bringing their Meta glasses to work. Meta said it had no comment on the story. While the ICE policy isn’t new, the outright ban on Meta’s so-called pervert glasses has been trending upward since DEF CON told hackers to leave any glasses equipped with recording capabilities at home. “Be sure to pack non-violating eyewear if you need them,” DEF CON organizers told conference attendees ahead of the annual August event. Several restaurants, pubs, and private clubs including Soho House and UK pub chain Wetherspoons have also prohibited - or strongly discouraged - patrons from wearing these types of smart glasses in their establishments, citing privacy concerns. Apart from CCTV cameras, “the general code that applies in our pubs, and most pubs, is that you can't film customers or employees without their permission,” a Wetherspoons spokesperson previously told The Register. “Meta glasses seem to breach this code, and common sense, by enabling surreptitious surveillance, so our instinct is to say turn off the cameras.” Some National Basketball Association arenas have also reportedly told fans to go put their glasses with recording capabilities inside their vehicles and not wear them at NBA games. Meanwhile, the UK's privacy watchdog in March began investigating Meta's smart glasses after reports that human contractors reviewing recordings from the devices were exposed to extremely private moments captured by unsuspecting users. ®
How can a new Ireland maintain and deepen its values, sustained for a century, while achieving the inclusion of unionists and immigrant communities within an all-Ireland culture?
Fascinating debate and discussion are anticipated at the 2026 Darcy Magee Summer School in Carlingford when the battle against racism, xenophobia, and anti-immigration violence is examined under the timely theme of Culture, Identity and Inclusion.
Compelling participants including former presidential candidate Heather Humphries, RTE podcasters Catriona Crowe and Professor Diarmaid Ferriter, Sunday Independent NI editor Sam McBride (recently assaulted at a Belfast race riot), and MEP and Trade Union leader Des Geraghty, and will join academics, politicians and activists at the annual event, which takes place on Wednesday 26 to Thursday 27 August at Carlingford’s Four Seasons Hotel.
Audiences are invited to join in Q&As with the speakers on the panels, as they discuss issues such as the ‘Great Replacement’ conspiracy theory, which claims that immigrants are seeking to supplant white, European Christians – thus fuelling ethno-nationalism and its violent opposition to immigration.
The Summer School is chaired for the first time by women’s rights advocate Bronagh Hinds CBE (sister of the well-known NI actor Ciaran Hinds).
“On the island of Ireland, anti-immigrant protests have fused Union Jack and Tricolour as far-right forces north and south come together,” said Bronagh. “Questions of identity, belonging, memory and citizenship remain central, even as society is changing profoundly.
“The Summer School will ask how identities can coexist within shared civic frameworks, and how inclusion here on the island of Ireland can move beyond rhetoric to lived reality.”
Rooted in Carlingford’s historic link with Irish Canadian political visionary Thomas D’Arcy McGee, who was born in the area, the programme will highlight the multiculturalism inherent in both Canada’s national identity, and in the ethos of the European Union, which rests on the idea that unity does not require sameness.
“Here, the Good Friday Agreement created space for complexity with different identities and plural belonging,” said Bronagh. “Ireland’s migrant integration framework sees diversity, inclusion and equity as core public goals, alongside action against racism and xenophobia.
“We will explore how the reconfiguration of Ireland in a changed political landscape must take into consideration the accommodation of northern unionists and ethnic communities, many from former British colonies. We will explore how politics and civil society can negotiate this cultural minefield amid global political turbulence and the cultural shift to the right.”
For more info on the Summer School.
Book your tickets…
Moderna and Merck say their personalized mRNA melanoma vaccine significantly reduced both cancer recurrence and spread in a late-stage trial. The treatment could reach patients as soon as next year if regulators approve it. Reuters reports: Moderna developed the vaccine with Merck and tested it together with immunotherapy drug Keytruda, a widely used treatment for melanoma. [...] This is the first positive late-stage trial result for an mRNA cancer vaccine, which trains a patient's immune system to fight tumors by targeting specific mutations in those cells and the first such study to show that adding a treatment to Keytruda worked better than that therapy alone. Similar approaches are being tested against lung, breast and pancreatic cancers.
[...] The cancer treatment combines Merck's Keytruda with a made-to-order mRNA vaccine from Moderna that is based on an analysis of mutations found in the patients' own tumors. The trial enrolled 1,137 high-risk patients with stage IIB-IV melanoma that had been surgically removed. Volunteers were randomized to receive up to nine doses of Keytruda plus the personalized vaccine or Keytruda alone for about one year. The companies said no new safety signals have emerged in the trial. In January, the companies announced results of a mid-stage trial of the treatment showing that it reduced the risk of recurrence or death by 49% after five years. Karen Knudsen, CEO of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, said the Moderna results could signal a new era for treating solid-tumor cancers. "The positive hit here leads us into truly this next phase in immunotherapy," Knudsen said. "This is an auspicious start -- this is where things begin."
Moderna shares more than doubled on the news, adding about $30 billion to its market value.
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President says he plans to meet dictator this year but Kim Yo-jong says Washington remains Pyongyang’s enemy
Nilab
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has said he is planning to meet North Korea’s Kim Jong-un later this year, though the reclusive leader’s younger sister cast doubt on their communications and dampened hopes of a diplomatic breakthrough between them.
Nilab
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, who also claimed North Korea had 57 nuclear weapons, had suggested he and Kim were holding secret negotiations on Tuesday after announcing the US would downgrade its participation in military exercises held by South Korea, a US ally. Asked whether Kim had responded to his request for a conversation, Nilab
Schaar
said: “Yeah, he has.”
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Military orders criminal investigation into deaths of five-year-old and six family members in Gaza in 2024
The Israeli military admitted on Wednesday its troops had opened fire on a car carrying five-year-old Hind Rajab and six family members in Gaza in 2024, saying it had ordered a criminal investigation into the killing.
The killing of Hind and her family was one of the most high profile of a series of incidents involving civilian casualties during the first months of the Gaza conflict which prompted international outrage.
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In June, we highlighted a behind-the-scenes featurette on the making of Wildwood, director Travis Knight’s forthcoming stop-motion animated fantasy film. Laika Studios released an extended teaser in May, which racked up over 90 million views. And now we've got the gorgeous full trailer, set to a haunting cover of Avicii's "Wake Me Up."
The film is an adaptation of the 2011 novel by Colin Meloy—frontman of indie folk-rock band The Decemberists—and his wife, illustrator Carson Ellis. Meloy and Ellis live in Portland, Oregon, near Forest Park, where they often hike the trails. In Wildwood, they transformed that local landmark into a magical hidden world filled with talking animals and lurking threats, only accessible to people of The Wood—and select Outsider “half-breeds.”
Twelve-year-old Prue McKee discovers the forest while out walking with her baby brother, Mac. A murder of crows swoops down and carries him away, and Prue discovers the Wilderness while hunting for him. Her schoolmate, Curtis Mehlberg, follows her, and both are able to enter that magical world. Fantastical adventures ensue as the pair encounter a mysterious woman, Alexandra, who has lost her son, along with coyotes, bandits, and some pretty big secrets.
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An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: X's algorithm learns what you hate and shows you more of it, according to a new study just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The paper, titled Value misalignment of X's feed algorithm is a reflection of value tensions in engagement, found that the site's algorithm prioritized engagement above all else when it generated a user's For You Page. It also showed that X serves more ragebait to people who say they are Democrats, although the exact reason for that is unclear. "In 2026 that's maybe not the most surprising headline ever," Ziv Epstein, a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University, and co-author of the paper, told 404 Media. "So we actually dug in a little deeper to figure out why this is actually happening, and it turns out that X's feed algorithm, like a lot of these social media algorithms, is optimized for engagement [but] it turns out that not all types of engagement are considered equally."
The researchers found that X's algorithm can push users toward content that conflicts with their stated values, especially when they reply to posts that anger or provoke them. Although replies accounted for just 6.8% of interactions, they appeared to carry disproportionate weight: "It's this feedback loop of outrage baiting. The algorithm learns that you get outraged and then continues to serve more content in that direction," said Epstein.
It's unclear why X seems to serve ragebait to Democrats more often than Republicans. 404 Media speculates that it may be because there's more rightwing content on X overall or that Democrats tend to engage with posts they disagree with more often. "There might be some kind of differential effects on information diets there, or it might be something more psychological about how different you know partisan identities are triggering different kinds of actions and reactions, but ultimately I don't want to speculate too much," said Epstein.
X's former product chief Nikita Bier confirmed that the site had been set to favor replies. "This is no longer true," Bier said in a post on X. "The largest contributor of seeing ragebait was the reply predictor and we were aware that angry replies were causing people to see more of that content. So last month, we gave the reply predictor a 15x boost if it's a friend's post -- and it reduced ragebait by [an] order of magnitude."
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Pharmaceutical partners Moderna and Merck announced on Wednesday that their novel mRNA-based vaccine—individually tailored to target a patient's unique cancer mutations—was effective in a late-stage clinical trial of patients with melanoma, one of the deadliest forms of skin cancer.
The announcement was scant on details, but if the success holds, it stands to realize the high aspirations for both mRNA vaccines and individualized cancer-targeting medicines in cancer therapy, providing a first success for both treatment types.
The Phase 3 trial included 1,137 patients who had stage IIB–IV melanoma that had been surgically removed prior to their treatment in the trial. Patients were randomized 2-1 to receive either a combination treatment of the tailored mRNA vaccine (intismeran or mRNA-4157) with Merck's established monoclonal antibody cancer treatment Keytruda, or they received treatment with Keytruda alone. Both patient groups were treated for about a year. The trial was placebo-controlled and double-blind, meaning neither the doctors nor the patients knew which treatment patients were randomly assigned to receive.
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A weak yuan guarantees Beijing massive trade surplus even as the White House tries tamp down on Chinese imports
Since China offered a truce in the trade war last October following its threat to deprive the United States of rare-earth magnets, the Nilab
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administration has been happy to stop escalating. After all, imports from China have been falling, down by 40% in the year to June, compared with the same period in 2024. Best to declare victory and call it a day.
But the US hasn’t won this battle – and there’s strong evidence to show it’s too chicken to really try.
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And, will Nilab
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be forever dogged by his war with Iran?
Apple's latest attempt to settle its App Store dispute with the European Commission has drawn criticism from Epic Games and a cautious response from a consumer group, which warned that "the devil is in the detail." Announced on August 18, the changes introduce new business terms for applications distributed in the European Union. Apple says the changes "reduce complexity by moving every developer that distributes apps in the EU to a single set of business terms" and resolve its long-running spat with the Commission over fees and alternative distribution. An App Store app using Apple In-App Purchase will attract a 26 percent commission, reduced to 15 percent for developers in qualifying programs and auto-renewing subscriptions after their first year. The rate for apps using alternative payment processing will be 20 percent, or 10 percent for qualifying developers. Apps linking to the web to complete purchases will incur a 15 percent commission, again reduced to 10 percent for qualifying developers. Apps distributed through an alternative marketplace or the web will pay Apple a 5 percent "Core Technology Commission" on digital transactions. The structure is simpler than Apple's previous terms, which were revised after the company was slapped with a €500 million fine. Complaints about Apple's antics continued through the end of 2025 amid accusations that the company was persisting in non-compliance with the Digital Markets Act (DMA). Apple claims the changes follow "close collaboration with the European Commission" and "resolve Apple's disagreements with the Commission over business terms and alternative distribution." Naturally, there was plenty of hand-wringing and "think of the children" rhetoric from the iPhone slinger. The company would obviously prefer users to stick with Apple In-App Purchase, calling it "the safest, most trusted way for users to purchase and download apps and make seamless and secure payments in those apps." It also noted that it had worked with the Commission on child safety measures for alternative payments, including parental gates and restrictions on links from apps aimed at children. Epic Games, a longstanding critic of Apple's App Store practices, called the scheme "junk fees," adding that the plan did "nothing to open up the mobile app ecosystem to competition, as required by Digital Markets Act." "The law makes it clear that Apple must allow developers to offer link outs to the web for purchases 'free of charge' and has to allow 'effective use' of competing stores," the company wrote. The European Consumer Organisation (BEUC), an umbrella group representing 42 independent consumer organizations across 31 countries, was also cautious. Sébastien Pant, the group's senior officer for competition and digital enforcement, wrote: "On paper, there seem to be some improvements with a simpler and lower fee structure. But it remains to be seen if these commitments will satisfy app developers who will, in any case, pass on the fees to consumers. "We also need to see the full user flow to see if consumers will truly benefit. For example, will consumers be able to easily conclude contracts with app developers on iPhones outside the App Store without having scare screens displayed? Will it be possible to easily download and use alternative app stores on iPhones and iPads without the artificial friction Apple deliberately created? "Also, we must remember this is not a gift Apple is giving consumers, but something they are required to do so by EU law. It might be a cliché, but the devil is in the detail!" Developers can sign the new terms immediately, with the changes taking effect on October 1. ®
About 12 billion years ago, a dwarf galaxy known as LKH collided with a young Milky Way and merged with it. This artist’s concept portrays that collision. NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope uncovered definitive evidence of this collision by studying globular star clusters.
A U.S. Army battalion at Fort Stewart is offering soldiers a four-day pass timed to the release of Grand Theft Auto VI if they reenlist for at least two years. The program is limited to one unit for now, but it fits the Army's broader effort to appeal to gamers as a recruiting and retention pool. CBS News reports: Twenty soldiers at Fort Stewart in Georgia in the Army's 9th Brigade Engineering Battalion, part of the 3rd Infantry Division, have already chosen this incentive as part of their reenlistment, an Army spokesperson told CBS News on Wednesday. "The idea was to have a unique incentives program that connects to what Soldiers are interested in," Lt. Col. Angel Tomko, a spokesperson for the 3rd Infantry Division, said in a statement. "The command team, in conjunction with the career counselor, wanted to get soldiers excited to reenlist."
[...] The Army memo, which has circulated online, says any soldier who signs a reenlistment contract between Aug. 1, 2026 and Nov. 14 will be authorized for a special four-day pass designated to coincide with "the highly anticipated release of the video game Grand Theft Auto VI (GTA 6)." About 130 soldiers are currently eligible for the incentive, Tomko said. Eligible soldiers must reenlist for a minimum of two years and up to six years.
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Google's approach to making smartphones has changed a lot over the years. It started with Nexus phones aimed at the tinkerer and enthusiast niche back when there were countless companies making smartphones. Today, there are far fewer, and Google's hyper-polished Pixel lineup is seeing less competition and higher sales. So maybe Google thinks it can just keep doing what works. The new Pixel 11 series is Google's most refined yet, featuring sleek designs, smart software, and incredible screens. They're also rather boring.
Google made precious few hardware changes in its 2026 phones, shaving off a fraction of a millimeter here and dropping a gram there. The design language has been the same now for three generations, all while prices continue to inch upward. And this year, Google's hardware has actually regressed in a few key areas. Despite that, the Pixel 11 phones aren't bad—they're some of the best 2026 has to offer. But it feels like Google is forgetting that it's not just competing against Apple and Samsung. It also has to compete against the Pixels of yesteryear.
The same old (but great) design
Just like last year's Pixel 10 series, Google's 2026 lineup includes three flat phones and one foldable. The flat Pixels are the same size, and even side-by-side, it's hard to tell them apart from their predecessors. We've got almost identical aluminum and glass sandwich designs, which do admittedly look very nice. They still have Pixelsnap, too.
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Surveillance tech company Flock has struggled with its public image for years, but the problem has become particularly acute in recent weeks. Its network of ALPRs has long attracted criticism over mass surveillance and the retention of location data belonging to motorists who are not suspected of any offense. Days after its CEO apologized for documented abuses of the company's system, The Register contacted the company's usually responsive media team about an online campaign calling for its automated license plate readers (ALPRs) to be vandalized on Halloween, and received an automated response. "Thanks for reaching out to Flock. Our media team is currently touching grass and taking a break," the email said. "Unlike our cameras, we can't work 24/7, so we'll get back to you when we've had a snack and regained the ability to form coherent sentences." The media handlers have a lot on their plate. More recently, reports of ICE agents accessing local police forces' Flock systems, and police officers using the technology to stalk former partners, have coincided with an increase in vandalism targeting the cameras. This week, US social media users began promoting Halloween 2026 as a night of action against Flock's ALPRs, which continue to attract negative coverage. X grouped posts about the so-called "De-Flock America" campaign into a dedicated trending story, which recorded more than 36,500 posts over two days. Similar calls have appeared on other major social platforms. Posts encourage participants to wear costumes, leave their smartphones at home, and disable nearby ALPRs while concealing their identities. The Reg asked Flock whether it was aware of the campaign and planned any countermeasures, but received only the automated response. Apologies and changes Last week, Flock CEO Garrett Langley apologized after a woman was stalked using his company's ALPR system. "It kills me that she went through that," he told CBS News in an interview, less than two weeks after The Washington Post published a story highlighting 46 cases involving US police officers abusing their access to Flock's system. Some allegedly involved officers abusing that power to stalk women. Langley gave the interview after Flock announced an array of changes, including reducing its standard data retention period from 30 days to seven. Customers may retain information for longer, however. A new "Evidence Mode" allows law enforcement to retain data beyond that seven-day period if it's required for ongoing casework. Flock also introduced controls allowing police agencies to restrict the types of searches that outside forces can run against their data. For example, City A might request permission to search data belonging to City B as part of an investigation. With the new feature, City B can restrict City A from making searches related to "immigration enforcement," a nod to ICE agents accessing police Flock systems without a dedicated contract. Flock will also require customers to enable its existing Audit Assistance feature by year-end. The tool detects unusual search activity and flags it for review. It is currently optional but will become mandatory by year-end, having been "associated with arrests of several law enforcement officers who allegedly abused the system." Flock said more than a third of customers have voluntarily opted in to Audit Assistance so far. Langley's interview appeared one day after People reported that Haines City police officer Christopher Goodson, 31, allegedly used Flock to search for his estranged wife's license plate 717 times. The searches took place between September 1, 2024, and June 30, 2026, according to a probable cause affidavit. Goodson was suspended with pay pending further investigation. ®
Sgr A* is the name we've given to the supermassive black hole that sits at the center of the Milky Way. We've known about its presence since the 1970s but only managed to image it within the past few years. In the intervening time, most of our understanding of the object was obtained by watching a group of stars that orbit the black hole, helping us get a good estimate of its mass and size. In essence, those stars acted as instruments that let us peer into an environment we couldn't study any other way.
In Wednesday's issue of Nature, researchers describe a recently discovered star that is on an extremely eccentric orbit that takes it closer to Sgr A* than anything we've previously identified. It gets so close that it may help us get our first measurements of the spin of the black hole.
Reading the spin
There's an entire population of stars that orbit relatively close to Sgr A*. We can estimate their mass based on their brightness and spectral features. Using their masses and a reconstruction of their orbits using several years of data, we can figure out just how supermassive Sgr A* is (nearly 1037 kilograms).
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Meta platforms recently ran ads for an AI porn-generation tool that seemingly encouraged users to create deepfaked videos resembling female US politicians, despite the company’s policies against ads containing sexual material. It’s the latest in a series of failures by Meta to keep advertisements for tools that produce nonconsensual intimate imagery off its platforms.
The tool, which is called Kromix, bills itself as an “AI image styler.” A voice-over for one of the video advertisements, viewed by WIRED, promotes the tool as having “no restrictions,” saying “all the characters are real people” and describing it as “the AI that men actually use.” In one ad, a woman closely resembling a prominent female US politician is seen in front of a US flag and the flag of the president of the US above the caption “What if she moved?” She then winks, before the ad cuts to a scene of a woman with the same face performing in a pornographic video.
The Kromix app, which was hosted by Apple’s App Store prior to a request for comment from WIRED, invites paid users to upload photos so that it can use them in scenarios including “bedroom rape” and “Disney love.” Videos on the app also feature AI-generated pornographic videos of women wearing Spider-Man costumes. Requests for comment sent to a contact listed in the app went unanswered.
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Attitudes towards AI are shifting in America. More than half of adults now say that they are more concerned than excited about the technology, and that includes those under 30 for the first time. This comes from a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center, which says that concerns over potential job losses caused by AI are the main factor influencing opinion. It found that 71 percent of US adults think AI will lead to fewer jobs in their country over the next two decades, up from 64 percent two years ago. And just 5 percent believe the optimists who say AI will lead to more jobs. 10 percent think it won’t make much difference, and a slightly larger share are unsure. The non-profit think tank says that worries have been expressed about employment ever since it started asking this AI question back in 2021, but back then, more people were excited (or a mix of excitement and concern) than were concerned by the technology. Since those days, the number who were more excited has halved (18 percent to 9 percent) while those with issues have now risen to 52 percent. They could be right – Forrester Research was forecasting earlier this year that AI and automation could erase 6.1 percent of jobs in the US by 2030. The situation is even more stark among young adults, where 55 percent of those aged 18 to 29 are now concerned, up from less than a third in 2021. Their concern is now on a par with those in their 30s and 40s, and those aged 65 and up. Across most age groups the trend has been for Americans to increasingly foresee job losses from the use of AI in business. Pew points out that 73 percent of adults under 30 now say AI will lead to fewer jobs, up from 61 percent two years ago. Perhaps this isn’t surprising, as AI automation is often pitched as a replacement for some of the entry-level roles that workers in the under 30 age bracket are likely to be starting out with. Americans 65 and older are a bit less likely to think AI will lead to fewer jobs in this latest survey, but this remains the majority view among this age group. Adults under 30 are also more likely to think AI will be bad for society. They believe it will make connecting with others more difficult and creativity harder to come by, according to Pew. While most young adults say they use chatbots, they are just as likely to say that these tools hurt their creativity as help it. Perhaps US workers can take some comfort from Anthropic, which says that AI is not eliminating as many jobs as experts had predicted. Or else move to China, where a court has ruled that it is illegal to replace human workers with AI. ®
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On Wednesday 19 August, media representatives were invited to a media briefing ahead of the launch of the next Meteosat Third Generation Imager satellite (MTG-I2). The satellite is set to be launched on an Ariane 6 from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana, on 27 August.
MTG-I2 is the third satellite for MTG, completing the MTG constellation. Together the satellites will produce images for weather forecasting in Europe in unprecedented detail. This mission provides new data products and capabilities for European weather services, especially suited to nowcasting of severe weather events.
The MTG-Imager satellites carry two instruments, a Lightning Imager and a Flexible Combined Imager. The Lightning Imager offers completely new capabilities for European meteorological satellites by continuously monitoring for lightning. The Flexible Combined Imager builds a picture of fast-evolving weather systems and can be used to issue timely weather warnings. It is able to scan the entire surface of Earth as viewed from its geostationary position (36 000 km above the equator) in just 10 minutes and can scan Europe and northern Africa every 2.5 minutes.
Chinese robotics giant Unitree surged more than 600% in its Shanghai stock market debut, marking the first mainland Chinese listing by a humanoid robot maker and a major milestone for Beijing's robotics ambitions. The BBC reports: Unitree, officially known as Yushu Technology Co Ltd, was founded in 2016 and now plays a key role in Beijing's ambitions to develop advanced technology. It has become a robotics industry leader, selling devices from sensors and automated arms to four-legged and human-like machines. The firm shipped more than 5,500 humanoid robots last year as demand for the technology grows.
Unitree is one of the few companies in the sector to make money, delivering a net profit of 278 million yuan in 2025. It is a fierce rival to developers in the US as it produces robots with similar features but at lower prices. The company is based in Hangzhou, in eastern China. The region is home to a so-called golden cluster zone of robotics firms, which have benefited from huge government investments. That support helped drive a more than threefold increase in the number of Chinese robotics firms between 2020 and 2024, according to state-run China Daily.
[...] Unitree's robot dogs start at $2,700, a fraction of the roughly $70,000 price tag for Boston Dynamics' four-legged device, Spot. "They're not exactly comparable because some of Unitree's dogs are much smaller," [said Harold Soh, a researcher from the National University of Singapore]. "But the price is a big difference." Unitree has been selling humanoid robots since 2023, with its $13,500 child-sized G1 model hitting the market the following year. Meanwhile, major US rivals -- including Elon Musk's Tesla -- have yet to start delivering rival products.
[...] Some experts expect Unitree's market debut to be a gauge of investor appetite for the fast-growing humanoid robotics sector. The listing has given the public a rare chance to invest in a humanoid robotics company and could set a benchmark for other manufacturers, said Jack Pearson from investment firm RoboStrategy. The listing also marks a "turning point" for China's robotics industry, as Unitree's success comes even as the US is curbing imports of foreign-made robots, Pearson said.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Madrid government changes stance after previously saying anyone who entered territory illegally would be sent back
The Spanish government has U-turned and said it will allow 500 migrant children in Ceuta to relocate to the mainland.
The majority of the estimated 70,000 people who crossed into Ceuta – a Spanish territory on the coast of north Africa – on 30 July have returned to Morocco. However, under Spanish law, the state has a duty of care to young, unaccompanied migrants until they reach the age of 18.
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Stubborn electrical connections and bolts thwarted an attempt to replace an antenna on the International Space Station (ISS) yesterday, forcing spacewalkers to leave the new unit for another day. We've all been there. That "quick job" expected to take a few minutes stretches into hours as bolts refuse to budge and unforeseen problems eat into time better spent enjoying a cookie and tasty beverage. A pair of ISS spacewalkers had much the same experience yesterday. Removing a faulty antenna from the orbiting outpost took longer than expected, leaving too little time to install its replacement. NASA's Anil Menon and European Space Agency astronaut Sophie Adenot were carrying out the work. The spacewalk had already been delayed after a carbon dioxide sensor in the suit Menon wore during an August 6 spacewalk produced an unexpected reading. The sensor returned to normal after Menon removed the suit. The August 18 excursion made Adenot the first French woman to perform a spacewalk. She and Menon ventured out of the station's Quest airlock to replace the failed space-to-ground antenna. Menon rode on the Canadarm2, while Adenot remained tethered to the station's truss structure. They were to remove the failed antenna, install a spare stored on an external platform, and stow the old unit. Alas, it wasn't quite that simple. Disconnecting electrical cables and loosening bolts took much longer than expected. The pair removed the antenna and secured it temporarily, but managers called time before they could install the replacement. Space-to-ground antennas provide high-data-rate communications through NASA's Tracking and Data Relay Satellite system. The ISS has another fully operational unit, but managers will want to restore the redundancy promptly. The next spacewalk is scheduled for Tuesday, August 25, although NASA has not said whether the unfinished antenna work can be added to its planned tasks. ®
President Nilab
Schaar
is expected to nominate Heidi Overton, a top conservative policy aide, as the next commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, according to multiple media reports.
Overton is currently the deputy director of the White House Domestic Policy Council and has played a key role in shaping a variety of health policies during Nilab
Schaar
's second term. At times, she has notably angered members of the Make America Healthy Again movement, which was created by anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Overton has a medical degree from the University of New Mexico School of Medicine and earned a doctoral degree in clinical investigation from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. While at Johns Hopkins, she worked with Marty Makary, the previous FDA commissioner who was ousted by Nilab
Schaar
amid a cacophony of controversies.
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Fernando Cerimedo, 42, arrested on suspicion of ordering shooting of Bolivian lawyer Nadia Beller
A senior adviser to many of Latin America’s new wave of far-right leaders has been arrested for allegedly masterminding the attempted murder of his girlfriend.
The businessman and political consultant Fernando Cerimedo, 42, had been working as an adviser to the Bolivian president, Rodrigo Paz Pereira, and was one of the main strategists behind Javier Milei’s campaign in Argentina’s 2023 presidential election.
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Comcast has folded its Wi-Fi-based intruder detection feature into Xfinity Shield, a repackaged bundle of physical and cybersecurity offerings. The US telco launched WiFi Motion in 2025. Xfinity Shield also includes cybersecurity protections built into the Xfinity Gateway router. The Wi-Fi sensing technology harnesses the radio waves beamed around a user's home to detect motion and potential intruders. "Using Xfinity Gateway intelligence, WiFi Motion detects changes in the home's radio frequency signal between the Xfinity Gateway and a Wi-Fi connected device, then sends instant notifications to customers through the Xfinity app when unexpected activity is detected," Comcast said. "It provides an added layer of awareness without recording video, capturing images or identifying individuals." The company does not consider this a home security service, merely a feature, because it is not managed by a dedicated security provider. Not every connected device can support the sensing feature. It uses the Xfinity Gateway, Xfinity Wi-Fi extenders, and up to three other compatible devices around the home. Crucially, these devices must be stationary. Think thermostats and home speakers, not smartphones or toothbrushes. Comcast advises users to position the router and extenders so that their signals pass through the areas where they want to detect motion. Open spaces such as hallways work best, and the company urges routine testing to ensure coverage is maintained. A setting in the Xfinity app allows WiFi Motion to ignore small pets. Animals weighing around 18 kg (40 pounds) or less will not trigger alerts when this setting is enabled, and the app warns this may also exclude small children. Customers can also adjust the sensitivity of the motion detection, choosing from low, medium, and high-sensitivity modes. Comcast says the latter works best in single-family, detached homes, whereas those who share walls with neighbors may want to choose the less-sensitive settings to avoid meaningless notifications. The telco also assured customers that WiFi Motion does not track individuals or their precise movements, and cannot identify specific people. It added that it "does not monitor motion and/or notifications generated by the service." The small print, which also accompanied the 2025 launch, suggests the service may not be quite as private as the marketing implies. Comcast states: "Subject to applicable law, Comcast may disclose information generated by your WiFi Motion to third parties without further notice to you in connection with any law enforcement investigation or proceeding, any dispute to which Comcast is a party, or pursuant to a court order or subpoena." Comcast does not specify what information may be disclosed or which "third parties," beyond law enforcement, might receive it. How it works Users can establish "sensing areas" by placing Wi-Fi devices around parts of the home with regular foot traffic. Comcast describes each sensing area as a long oval extending between two connected devices. Sensing areas can be established through walls separating rooms, although in two-storey or multi-storey homes, the telco encourages customers to avoid placing Wi-Fi equipment directly above or below each other. "Motion is detected within the sensing area when movement disrupts the wireless signals that travel between your Xfinity WiFi equipment and selected WiFi-connected devices within the sensing area," said Comcast. "Notifications will be sent only when motion disrupts the wireless signals in the sensing area between the WiFi equipment and your connected devices." Not a novel feature Comcast is the latest, but not the first, to harness Wi-Fi radio waves for motion detection. Companies such as Cognitive Systems and Origin Wireless have been developing other uses for wireless signals. Beyond domestic intruder alerts, the technology can measure occupancy and foot traffic in commercial buildings, helping operators reduce energy consumption and make better use of leased space. Wireless signals can also be used to support caregivers in places like assisted living centers. Wi-Fi transmissions can help track activity patterns and build a greater understanding of patients' fall risks, for example. Boffins began working on an official Wi-Fi sensing standard in 2020. Following a draft published by the IEEE in 2023, the 802.11bf standard was ratified in 2025. Major chipmakers including MediaTek, Qualcomm, and others are now working on embedding the standard into their Wi-Fi 7 chips and beyond. SaaS biz Plume, which provides smart home services to consumers and ISPs, has offered Wi-Fi sensing since 2020, around the time the 802.11bf working group began devising the standard. ®
INTERVIEW Oracle inadvertently helped turn PostgreSQL into the database technology now backed by Microsoft, AWS, and Google, according to Postgres creator Michael Stonebraker. Speaking to The Register earlier this month, UC Berkeley professor emeritus Stonebraker said Oracle's decision to retain MySQL after buying Sun Microsystems helped propel PostgreSQL toward dominance, at least among systems that use or support its wire protocol. PostgreSQL was launched 30 years ago this summer, adding SQL support to Stonebraker's earlier Postgres system, first proposed in 1986. After slowly gaining popularity, PostgreSQL has seen its usage explode in the last five years. It became the most popular choice of database among developers in 2023, according to the Stack Overflow survey. Beyond the popular DBMS itself, vendors including the cloud hyperscalers, CockroachDB, and YugabyteDB offer database services with varying degrees of PostgreSQL compatibility. Microsoft, for example, has contributed to PostgreSQL and launched its own distributed PostgreSQL database service designed to rival other hyperscaler systems and third-party RDBMSes. Stonebraker reckons PostgreSQL is in the process of taking over the world. "By PostgreSQL, I mean a database system that's compatible with the wire format, and so that's lots and lots of systems. All the elephants – Microsoft, Google, and Amazon – have all bet the ranch on the PostgreSQL wire format." Meanwhile, rival system MySQL is "vanishing as a competitor," Stonebraker said. Oracle acquired MySQL in 2010 as part of its purchase of Sun Microsystems, which had bought MySQL AB just two years earlier. MySQL won early fans among the second generation of online companies, including Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Uber. Although Oracle's custodianship of MySQL had been viewed as relatively open, concerns have grown over the past couple of years about Big Red's willingness to invest in the database. In September last year, Oracle made "widespread layoffs" across its core MySQL development team. "We have to thank Oracle for [PostgreSQL's popularity] because when they bought MySQL, everybody was afraid that they were going to dominate where MySQL went to, and that was the beginning of the PostgreSQL ascendancy," Stonebraker said. "PostgreSQL is not controlled by any vendor. It's controlled by a gang of 20 or 30-ish very smart super programmers, and so I think it will remain outside the control of any given vendor indefinitely. That's open source at its absolute best." In his career since developing Postgres, Stonebraker has founded a number of database companies, including Illustra and Vertica. Now in his 80s, the database pioneer is not ready to retire. He co-founded DBOS three years ago after proposing a data-centric operating system with a number of other researchers, including Apache Spark author Matei Zaharia. The resulting company has pivoted to AI agents, using DBOS's "time travel" capabilities to make agentic workflows more robust. It claims DBOS provides durable execution, allowing applications to recover automatically from interruptions while preserving workflow state and execution history. Co-founders Qian Li and Peter Kraft have been appointed chief executive officer and chief technology officer, respectively. Databricks and CockroachDB, the latter of which offers PostgreSQL compatibility, are partnering with the company and using its technology in AI agent deployments. ®
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