Bizarre story of disabled bear that walks like a human and bends over like an old man
Shocking images have emerged of a predator that typically four legs roaming in the mountains of West Virginia on just its hind legs. The frightening sight was captured by an experienced outdoorsman.
I'm a scientist who was clinically dead for six minutes - then I was shown the afterlife and know God is real
A neuroscientist who described herself as 'a loser' has revealed how an out-of-body experience while she was clinically dead changed her life forever.
NASA Seeks Proposals for Two More Private Astronaut Space Station Visits
This week NASA "issued a solicitation for the next two private astronaut missions to the International Space Station," reports Space News. Scheduled after May of 2026 and then mid-2027, "These will be the fifth and sixth such missions to the ISS, part of a broader low Earth orbit commercialization effort by NASA with the ultimate goal of replacing the International Space Station with one or more commercial stations."
NASA's Space Station program manager calls the missions "a key part" of helping industry partners "gain the experience needed to train and manage crews, conduct research, and develop future destinations." In short, they see the missions "providing companies with hands-on opportunities to refine their capabilities and build partnerships that will shape the future of low Earth orbit."
[NASA's call for proposals] offers an opportunity to have future missions commanded by someone other than a former NASA astronaut. While companies must propose a commander who meets current requirements, it can also propose an alternate commander who is a former astronaut from the Canadian Space Agency, European Space Agency or Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency with similar ISS experience requirements... ["Broadening of this requirement is not guaranteed," NASA warns.]
That could allow some former astronauts already working with commercial spaceflight companies an opportunity to command private astronaut missions. Axiom Space, for example, announced in July 2024 that former ESA astronaut Tim Peake had joined its astronaut team. That came after Axiom and the U.K. Space Agency signed a memorandum of understanding in October 2023 to study the feasibility of a private astronaut mission crewed exclusively by U.K. astronauts.
So far Axiom Space has been awarded all four private astronaut missions, according to the article, "flying one mission each in 2022, 2023 and 2024. Its next mission, Ax-4, is scheduled for no earlier than May."
But "While Axiom has little or no competition for previous PAM awards, it will likely face stiffer competition this time. Vast, a company also planning to develop commercial space stations, has previously stated its intent to submit proposals..."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Sir Alex Ferguson pockets £80,000 after successful day at Aintree... but how did Man United legend's horse get on in the Grand National?
Legendary former Man United manager Sir Alex Ferguson made over £80,000 on a winning bet at Aintree, which saw him celebrate a remarkable 1-3 finish on Grand National day.
People are only just realizing what Google really means after 27 years
Internet users are finally realizing what Google really means 27 years after it was developed.
Gladiators final thrown into chaos after contestant is forced to quit following serious injury as bosses scramble to find a replacement
The Gladiators final has been thrown into chaos one contestant was forced to pull out at the last minute.
Celebrity Big Brother house hit by massive shake-up as first look at the brand new garden is revealed… and there's one huge difference
While first look images of the house were revealed on Friday, now fans have been treated to a glimpse of the garden.
Elon Musk takes a rare swipe at high-up Trump advisor over tariffs
Elon Musk took a rare swipe at one of President Donald Trump's closest advisors amid the fallout from the White House 's tariff plan, which has personally cost the mogul billions in recent days.
Man knifed to death in west London street in daylight double stabbing - as second casualty is arrested on suspicion of murder
A man was brutally stabbed to death during a broad daylight fight on Erconwald Street, East Acton, west London - as a second man, who was also stabbed, was arrested on suspicion of murder.
Truth about this photograph of Virginia Roberts: Toxic split with husband and violence restraining order revealed, as family speak out and Virginia remains under medical supervision
The most famous photograph of Virginia Giuffre was taken of her as a 17-year-old girl standing alongside a grinning Prince Andrew in Ghislaine Maxwell's Belgravia mews house.
David Beckham rejoins 'long-lost twin' Matt Damon in another Stella Artois ad as fans call for their 'hysterical' adventures to be made into a 'feature length film'
The 'David and Dave' commercial features Stella Artois' global ambassador Beckham, 49, and the brand's longtime poster boy Damon, 54, as the 'Other David'.
Microsoft Uses AI To Find Flaws In GRUB2, U-Boot, Barebox Bootloaders
Slashdot reader zlives shared this report from BleepingComputer:
Microsoft used its AI-powered Security Copilot to discover 20 previously unknown vulnerabilities in the GRUB2, U-Boot, and Barebox open-source bootloaders.
GRUB2 (GRand Unified Bootloader) is the default boot loader for most Linux distributions, including Ubuntu, while U-Boot and Barebox are commonly used in embedded and IoT devices. Microsoft discovered eleven vulnerabilities in GRUB2, including integer and buffer overflows in filesystem parsers, command flaws, and a side-channel in cryptographic comparison. Additionally, 9 buffer overflows in parsing SquashFS, EXT4, CramFS, JFFS2, and symlinks were discovered in U-Boot and Barebox, which require physical access to exploit.
The newly discovered flaws impact devices relying on UEFI Secure Boot, and if the right conditions are met, attackers can bypass security protections to execute arbitrary code on the device. While exploiting these flaws would likely need local access to devices, previous bootkit attacks like BlackLotus achieved this through malware infections.
Miccrosoft titled its blog post "Analyzing open-source bootloaders: Finding vulnerabilities faster with AI." (And they do note that Micxrosoft disclosed the discovered vulnerabilities to the GRUB2, U-boot, and Barebox maintainers and "worked with the GRUB2 maintainers to contribute fixes... GRUB2 maintainers released security updates on February 18, 2025, and both the U-boot and Barebox maintainers released updates on February 19, 2025.")
They add that performing their initial research, using Security Copilot "saved our team approximately a week's worth of time," Microsoft writes, "that would have otherwise been spent manually reviewing the content."
Through a series of prompts, we identified and refined security issues, ultimately uncovering an exploitable integer overflow vulnerability. Copilot also assisted in finding similar patterns in other files, ensuring comprehensive coverage and validation of our findings...
As AI continues to emerge as a key tool in the cybersecurity community, Microsoft emphasizes the importance of vendors and researchers maintaining their focus on information sharing. This approach ensures that AI's advantages in rapid vulnerability discovery, remediation, and accelerated security operations can effectively counter malicious actors' attempts to use AI to scale common attack tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs).
This week Google also announced Sec-Gemini v1, "a new experimental AI model focused on advancing cybersecurity AI frontiers."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Sunworshippers risk their lives to catch some rays on the crumbling cliffs as weather experts say it is going to heat up even MORE next week
With the high today of 20.8C in Hurn, Dorset, people across the UK flocked to the beach and parks to soak in the unusually warm spring weather.
Open Source Coalition Announces 'Model-Signing' with Sigstore to Strengthen the ML Supply Chain
The advent of LLMs and machine learning-based applications "opened the door to a new wave of security threats," argues Google's security blog. (Including model and data poisoning, prompt injection, prompt leaking and prompt evasion.)
So as part of the Linux Foundation's nonprofit Open Source Security Foundation, and in partnership with NVIDIA and HiddenLayer, Google's Open Source Security Team on Friday announced the first stable model-signing library (hosted at PyPI.org), with digital signatures letting users verify that the model used by their application "is exactly the model that was created by the developers," according to a post on Google's security blog.
[S]ince models are an uninspectable collection of weights (sometimes also with arbitrary code), an attacker can tamper with them and achieve significant impact to those using the models. Users, developers, and practitioners need to examine an important question during their risk assessment process: "can I trust this model?"
Since its launch, Google's Secure AI Framework (SAIF) has created guidance and technical solutions for creating AI applications that users can trust. A first step in achieving trust in the model is to permit users to verify its integrity and provenance, to prevent tampering across all processes from training to usage, via cryptographic signing... [T]he signature would have to be verified when the model gets uploaded to a model hub, when the model gets selected to be deployed into an application (embedded or via remote APIs) and when the model is used as an intermediary during another training run. Assuming the training infrastructure is trustworthy and not compromised, this approach guarantees that each model user can trust the model...
The average developer, however, would not want to manage keys and rotate them on compromise. These challenges are addressed by using Sigstore, a collection of tools and services that make code signing secure and easy. By binding an OpenID Connect token to a workload or developer identity, Sigstore alleviates the need to manage or rotate long-lived secrets. Furthermore, signing is made transparent so signatures over malicious artifacts could be audited in a public transparency log, by anyone. This ensures that split-view attacks are not possible, so any user would get the exact same model. These features are why we recommend Sigstore's signing mechanism as the default approach for signing ML models.
Today the OSS community is releasing the v1.0 stable version of our model signing library as a Python package supporting Sigstore and traditional signing methods. This model signing library is specialized to handle the sheer scale of ML models (which are usually much larger than traditional software components), and handles signing models represented as a directory tree. The package provides CLI utilities so that users can sign and verify model signatures for individual models. The package can also be used as a library which we plan to incorporate directly into model hub upload flows as well as into ML frameworks.
"We can view model signing as establishing the foundation of trust in the ML ecosystem..." the post concludes (adding "We envision extending this approach to also include datasets and other ML-related artifacts.")
Then, we plan to build on top of signatures, towards fully tamper-proof metadata records, that can be read by both humans and machines. This has the potential to automate a significant fraction of the work needed to perform incident response in case of a compromise in the ML world...
To shape the future of building tamper-proof ML, join the Coalition for Secure AI, where we are planning to work on building the entire trust ecosystem together with the open source community. In collaboration with multiple industry partners, we are starting up a special interest group under CoSAI for defining the future of ML signing and including tamper-proof ML metadata, such as model cards and evaluation results.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Woman suffers life-changing injuries and man fights for life after car crashes in police chase and watchdog launches investigation
The collision took place at approximately 4.20am on Saturday in Paddington, west London, after the driver of a white SUV failed to stop for a marked Met Police vehicle.
Body is found by rescue teams searching for 15-year-old boy who got into difficulty swimming in lake
Rescue teams searching for a missing 15 year old boy who got into difficulty swimming in a lake have found a body.
'Mutiny' at Versace: Staff horrified as workers are sacked weeks after Donatella was 'dethroned' as creative director by new boss
EXCLUSIVE: MailOnline can reveal that there has been yet more drama at the company as they got rid of a number of long-serving and loyal staff in a round of cuts.
Python's PyPI Finally Gets Closer to Adding 'Organization Accounts' and SBOMs
Back in 2023 Python's infrastructure director called it "the first step in our plan to build financial support and long-term sustainability of PyPI" while giving users "one of our most requested features: organization accounts." (That is, "self-managed teams with their own exclusive branded web addresses" to make their massive Python Package Index repository "easier to use for large community projects, organizations, or companies who manage multiple sub-teams and multiple packages.")
Nearly two years later, they've announced that they're "making progress" on its rollout...
Over the last month, we have taken some more baby steps to onboard new Organizations, welcoming 61 new Community Organizations and our first 18 Company Organizations. We're still working to improve the review and approval process and hope to improve our processing speed over time. To date, we have 3,562 Community and 6,424 Company Organization requests to process in our backlog.
They've also onboarded a PyPI Support Specialist to provide "critical bandwidth to review the backlog of requests" and "free up staff engineering time to develop features to assist in that review." (And "we were finally able to finalize our Terms of Service document for PyPI," build the tooling necessary to notify users, and initiate the Terms of Service rollout. [Since launching 20 years ago PyPi's terms of service have only been updated twice.]
In other news the security developer-in-residence at the Python Software Foundation has been continuing work on a Software Bill-of-Materials (SBOM) as described in Python Enhancement Proposal #770. The feature "would designate a specific directory inside of Python package metadata (".dist-info/sboms") as a directory where build backends and other tools can store SBOM documents that describe components within the package beyond the top-level component."
The goal of this project is to make bundled dependencies measurable by software analysis tools like vulnerability scanning, license compliance, and static analysis tools. Bundled dependencies are common for scientific computing and AI packages, but also generally in packages that use multiple programming languages like C, C++, Rust, and JavaScript. The PEP has been moved to Provisional Status, meaning the PEP sponsor is doing a final review before tools can begin implementing the PEP ahead of its final acceptance into changing Python packaging standards. Seth has begun implementing code that tools can use when adopting the PEP, such as a project which abstracts different Linux system package managers functionality to reverse a file path into the providing package metadata.
Security developer-in-residence Seth Larson will be speaking about this project at PyCon US 2025 in Pittsburgh, PA in a talk titled "Phantom Dependencies: is your requirements.txt haunted?"
Meanwhile InfoWorld reports that newly approved Python Enhancement Proposal 751 will also give Python a standard lock file format.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Taxpayers are shelling out £688 a night for every prisoner being kept in a police cell because of jail overcrowding - that's more than a night at the five-star Savoy
A one-night stay for two in the plush accommodation - ranked the 'number one best value' five-star hotel on TripAdvisor - will set the lucky guests back a cool £665 tonight.
Taylor Swift 'is talking to Blake Lively again as actress apologises' amid singer being dragged into the Justin Baldoni scandal
Taylor Swift is reportedly talking to Blake Lively again after the pals fell out amid the Justin Baldoni scandal.