Aggregator

Rolls-Royce has already announced agreements to supply the Czech Republic and most recently Sweden, as well as the UK itself, with small modular reactors (SMRs).

The Wall Street Journal reports on internet-connected devices — and how every year millions of them "can contain a secret digital backdoor that opens up access to your home internet, so that anyone... can surf the web as if they were you." (And this is especially true for "knockoffs that you buy online"...) In a video report this week they tested two digital picture frames from Amazon and three streaming devices from Walmart "because we heard that they often ship with backdoor software used in cyberattacks. Security experts believe manufacturers are being paid to add this malware, but many people also get tricked into downloading the software onto their phones or computers... Within minutes of turning the devices on, there was a surge of internet traffic... Visits to gambling, porn, cryptocurrency and loads of other sketchy web sites started pouring in from users around the world." (And remote visitors also tried to access Outlook and Gmail accounts...) Residential proxy companies even rent out access to "tens of millions of home networks around the world," according to the report. "But the problem is actually worse than that. Hackers figured out a way to seize control of these backdoors, and they started taking over these residential networks. Last month authorities arrested a 23-year-old Ottawa man, saying he'd taken control of more than a million devices to launch some of the largest cyberattacks anyone had ever seen.." After a couple months the Journal's reporter collected logs of all the traffic, and sent it to an investigator at Comcast, who said both were conducting DDoS attacks. But estimate for the number of infected devices are as low as tens of millions or as high 500 million-plus. "We've seen nation state attacks launched through these kind of endpoints, which means your device sitting in your house is part of a nation state attack against another nation state... We've seen ad fraud, we've seen ticket scalping, we've seen financial fraud." But more importantly, "We have seen some of the largest computer attacks — meaning computers attacking other computers at human request — ever recorded in our digital history in the last several months." At cybersecurity conferences, some are warning "there are much larger ones on the horizon if we don't get a hold of this problem." The company making the picture frame "couldn't be reached for comment," while Amazon said it's been out of stock since last year. Both Amazon and Walmart said they take action when they confirm malware on a third-party product.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The news that King Charles has agreed to disclose his personal income tax is a sign that the message is finally getting through.

Eight goals was not a bad return from his 30 appearances for Brighton in 2022/23, but Undav was gone after one season, returning to Germany where he has excelled since at Stuttgart.

Pennon's chief executive saw her annual bonus of £270,000 reinstated after it was blocked when its South West Water unit poisoned more than 500 customers with parasite-infected tap water.

Jeremy Clarkson has avoided the potentially life-changing side effects of prostate cancer surgery after getting the same state-of-the-art treatment as former prime minister David Cameron.

The former TOWIE star, 45, has been incredibly open about her journey on Mounjaro weight loss jabs.

The Earl of Derby has submitted plans for three giant warehouses in the area, prompting fury from the King's racehorse trainers.

Vanessa Feltz has broken her silence after being 'blindsided' by Channel 5 bosses' decision to axe her daytime chat show after just one year on air.

Jeremy Clarkson has said that he is now in remission after revealing last week that he had been battling 'aggressive' prostate cancer. 

Megan has travelled to Boston ahead of England's second group match against Ghana on Tuesday.

Frequent rowing with directors over a delay in filming the third series of the Paramount+ drama had led to the actor, who plays fixer Harry Da Souza, walking away.

This week OpenAI announced a 750-task test to to measure "whether AI systems can support realistic life science research tasks, not just answer biology questions." But while OpenAI's top-performing GPT-Rosalind model led the rankings, Slashdot reader BrianFagioli notes that "it achieved a pass rate of just 36.1 percent, failing nearly two-thirds of benchmark tasks." Nerds.xyz points out that means "the best-performing model failed nearly two-thirds of the benchmark's tasks." The benchmark also revealed a familiar weakness. AI systems generally perform better when everything is presented as text. Once they are forced to work with supporting documents, figures, or complex datasets, performance drops noticeably. GPT-Rosalind's pass rate fell from 45.1 percent on text-only tasks to 28.1 percent on tasks involving artifacts or URLs. To be fair, the benchmark is not intended to suggest AI is useless in research. Quite the opposite. OpenAI found that models are becoming increasingly capable of scientific communication, evidence synthesis, and translating research findings into practical explanations. Those are valuable skills, particularly for researchers drowning in information. But LifeSciBench serves as a useful reminder that today's AI systems are still far from autonomous scientists. They can help. They can assist. They can sometimes provide surprisingly useful insights. What they cannot reliably do, however, is replace the expertise, judgment, and skepticism that real scientific research requires.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The threats to Britain are legion. Were the country to experience another crisis or any of these doom-laden scenarios, how prepared would we be?

Having made a fortune over two decades with one firm, Melrose, Simon Peckham wants to do it all over again.

Tributes have been paid to a 'beautiful' young woman allegedly killed by a stolen digger that was driven by teenagers at a seaside park.

A teenager has been arrested on suspicion of murder after an 18-year-old man was stabbed, bundled into a car and abandoned outside a hospital in Poole, Dorset, on Friday morning.

The historic pool was drained and refinished in a no-bid contract this year as part of ​the president's sweeping plans to beautify Washington DC.

As Russia's foreign recruits rush to get in formation and prepare for another gruelling day of drills, a distinct English accent cuts through the military training base.

Long-time Slashdot reader smooth wombat writes: Alan Turing, one of the more famous people who worked at Bletchley Park to decipher the German Enigma coding machine, was also working on a separate project. His private papers, known as the Bayley papers for his assistant Donald Bayley who held onto the papers until his death in 2020, reveal Turning had produced a working model of a portable voice encryption device. He even demonstrated it by using a Winston Churchill speech recording. "Weighing just 39 kg, including its power pack," Jack Copeland wrote in an article for IEEE Spectrum, "Delilah would be at home in a truck, a trench, or a large backpack." More from Popular Mechanics: Turingâ(TM)s work at Bletchley Park actually informed the Delilah experimentation he was doing at Hanslope Park, and not just because he used Red Forms, the Army-issue sheets Hanslope staffers were meant to use to alert Bletchley staffers to enemy signals, as his personal scrap paper for Delilah experiments. He drew inspiration from one of the German cipher machines they had decoded at Bletchley; not the famed Enigma machine, but rather the SZ42. While the former relied on Morse Code, the latter utilized a 5-bit telegraph code, which Copeland notes âoewas a forerunner of ASCII and Unicode and is still used by some ham radio operators.â The SZ42 produced an obscuring key of telegraph characters, with an identical key produced to both the sender and receiver. If it could be done for text, Turing reasoned it could be done for sound as well... [T]he reason Delilah fell to the wayside of history isnâ(TM)t because it was a failure, but rather because it simply wasnâ(TM)t needed anymore. By the time Turing had built and demonstrated his device, the war was over. What good was a portable voice encryptor if you had no major enemies trying to intercept your calls, the government reasoned. So funding for the project stopped, and Turingâ(TM)s two-year experiment ended with a whimper. Turingâ(TM)s time as an electrical engineer at Hanslope Park became a footnote in his story, if even that.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.