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The Sentencing Council has so far refused to back down over its proposal to give special treatment to ethnic minorities and transgender people who are convicted of crimes.

Feds warn gang still rampant and now cracked 300+ victims around the world

A crook who distributes the Medusa ransomware tried to make a victim cough up three payments instead of the usual two, according to a government advisory on how to defend against the malware and the gangs who wield it.…

Bodybuilder and performer Choon Tan, 31, from north London , who has dwarfism, told FEMAIL that the movie's reliance on CGI for the seven dwarves is 'absolutely absurd and discriminating in a sense'.

WARNING GRAPHIC CONTENT: Rodents 'the size of cats' have been sighted by Birmingham residents scurrying around mountains of garbage that have built up since the start of the year

Keir Starmer is using a speech to deliver a damning verdict on the performance of the public sector, saying it has become 'bigger but weaker'.

The supermodel, 51, was spotted making her way to the actress' property after celebrating the end of Paris Fashion Week at the Yves Saint Laurent after-party.

In the carefree days of yesteryear, they could be found gently misbehaving on the slopes of Verbier and the streets of Chelsea.

The former TOWIE star, 34, welcomed her son Landon last October, and has made the decision to be open about her motherhood journey over on social media.

A production of The Phantom of the Opera at His Majesty's Theatre has warned fans to expect loud sounds, fire, death and violence in parts of Andrew Lloyd Webber's well-known play.

We've come up with the definitive guide to the desk you don't want to sit at - and it might be the one you're at right now.

Sir David was fatally stabbed in October 2021 and his family have fought for answers since

This is their first child after being married for a decade

Eggheads call for comprehensive rules to govern machine learning in medical settings

The tendency of AI models to hallucinate – aka confidently making stuff up – isn't sufficient to disqualify them from use in healthcare settings. So, researchers have set out to enumerate the risks and formulate a plan to do no harm while still allowing medical professionals to consult with unreliable software assistants.…

Michelle and Mark announced the news they had welcomed a baby daughter with an Instagram post on Wednesday as she shared a first look at her newborn and shared her name.

A major British supermarket is set to give away food for free rather than see items end up in the bin as the retailer pledges to hit targets for slashing food waste and net zero goals.

Shocking official figures showed that an extra 680,000 workers were dragged into the 40 per cent tax bracket compared to a year earlier.

Using the Summit supercomputer at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, researchers have modeled a key component of nucleotide excision repair (NER) called the pre-incision complex (PInC), which plays a crucial role in DNA damage repair. Their study, published in Nature Communications, provides new insights into how the PInC machinery orchestrates precise DNA excision, potentially leading to advancements in treating genetic disorders, preventing premature aging, and understanding conditions like xeroderma pigmentosum and Cockayne syndrome. Phys.Org reports: "Computationally, once you assemble the PInC, molecular dynamics simulations of the complex become relatively straightforward, especially on large supercomputers like Summit," [said lead investigator Ivaylo Ivanov, a chemistry professor at Georgia State University]. Nanoscale Molecular Dynamics, or NAMD, is a molecular dynamics code specifically designed for supercomputers and is used to simulate the movements and interactions of large biomolecular systems that contain millions of atoms. Using NAMD, the research team ran extensive simulations. The number-crunching power of the 200-petaflop Summit supercomputer -- capable of performing 200,000 trillion calculations per second -- was essential in unraveling the functional dynamics of the PInC complex on a timescale of microseconds. "The simulations showed us a lot about the complex nature of the PInC machinery. It showed us how these different components move together as modules and the subdivision of this complex into dynamic communities, which form the moving parts of this machine," Ivanov said. The findings are significant in that mutations in XPF and XPG can lead to severe human genetic disorders. They include xeroderma pigmentosum, which is a condition that makes people more susceptible to skin cancer, and Cockayne syndrome, which can affect human growth and development, lead to impaired hearing and vision, and speed up the aging process. "Simulations allow us to zero in on these important regions because mutations that interfere with the function of the NER complex often occur at community interfaces, which are the most dynamic regions of the machine," Ivanov said. "Now we have a much better understanding of how and from where these disorders manifest."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Expired security cert kerfuffle leaves second-gen, Audio gadgets useless

Google's second-generation Chromecast and its Chromecast Audio are suffering a major ongoing outage, with devices failing to cast due to an expired security certificate authority. The web giant is aware of the breakdown and says a fix is in the works.…

I remember in some intro-level compsci class learning that credit card numbers were checksummed, and writing basic functions to validate those checksums as an exercize. I was young and was still using my "starter" credit card with a whopping limit of $500, so that was all news to me.

Alex's company had a problem processing credit cards: they rejected a lot of credit cards as being invalid. The checksum code seemed to be working fine, so what could the problem be? Well, the problem became more obvious when someone's card worked one day, and stopped working the very next day, and they just so happened to be the first and last day of the month.

protected function validateExpirationCcDate($i_year, $i_month) { return (((int)strftime('%y') <= $i_year) && ((int)strftime ('%m') <= $i_month))? true : false; }

This function is horrible; because it uses strftime (instead of taking the comparison date and time as a parameter) it's not unit-testable. We're (ab)using casts to convert strings into integers so we can do our comparison. We're using a ternary to return a boolean value instead of just returning the result of the boolean expression.

But of course, that's all the amuse bouche: the main course is the complete misunderstanding of basic logic. According to this code, a credit card is valid if the expiration year is less than or equal to the current year and the month is less than or equal to the current month. As this article goes live in March, 2025, this code would allow credit cards from April, 2026, as it should. But it would reject any cards with an expiration of February, 2028.

Per Alex, "This is a credit card date validation that has been in use for ages."

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On Wednesday, US District Judge Tanya Chutkan turned the tables on DOGE three weeks after Musk's 'what did you do last week' email to staffers sparked mass protests.