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We are all concerned about the decline of our High Streets and town centres. Sometimes, the only businesses that seem to be proliferating are vape shops, betting shops and mini-marts.

The Communities Secretary said she cannot give up smoking e-cigarettes despite trying to quit because her nicotine addiction has led her to a 'lifetime of purgatory'.

Ian Clarke (aka ancient Slashdot reader Sanity), designer of the peer-to-peer communication platform Freenet, is back with an update on the project's progress following the launch of its P2P network in March. He writes: Earlier this year, Slashdot covered the launch of the completely redesigned Freenet. I recently gave a talk about what we've been building since then. Unlike traditional web applications, apps on Freenet have no central server or database; instead application state is distributed across the network. These now include decentralized group chat, publishing, search, and fully decentralized Git hosting. The talk also gets into some of Freenet's internals, including how we use machine learning for network routing.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Chris Rock has been spotted on celebrity dating app Raya, where his profile is being shown to young women in London.

President Donald Trump was secretly smuggled off Air Force One inside a catering truck in a covert operation to foil potential Iranian assassins, new reports claim.

One big caveat, though: You need your contact's phone number

Sysadmins, welcome to your new norm

Draft memo taps AI data analysis biz for help with military production efficiency

The new filing accuses Trump of improperly sidestepping the Supreme Court and its ruling on birthright citizenship two months ago.

Bellway's boss Jason Honeyman said more needed to be done for first-time buyers struggling to afford new homes as the near-term outlook remained 'uncertain'.

Gemini has become Google's fastest-growing product ever, reaching 1 billion monthly active users faster than any of the company's 13 other billion-user services. Ars Technica reports: Gemini has wormed its way into virtually every Google product and service, powering email organization in Gmail, document summary in Drive, and much more. Gemini is also core to Google's flagship search experience, with AI Mode and AI Overviews becoming increasingly hard to avoid. The 1 billion-user metric has nothing to do with any of that, though. These 1 billion users may also be encountering Gemini in all those places, but that's not the MAU metric. Pichai is talking only about people who are opening the Gemini app or visiting the Gemini web interface to enter a prompt or access Gemini Live. If you used Gemini only once in the past month, you are part of this cohort.

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NatWest said it was reaching out to its 42,000 farming customers to offer loan repayment holidays and emergency overdrafts.

The National Association of Probation Officers (NAPO) union said nine in ten of the thousands of workers it represents voted in favour.

The Coronation Street star, 69, was diagnosed with breast cancer earlier this year and has constantly updated followers during her treatment and hospital appointments.

The Daily Mail can reveal that being paired with younger suitors during filming opened the 61-year-old Loose Women star's eyes to a 'different kind of relationship'.

Katie Linin was arrested after officers received reports of an assault at the man's address in Southampton in the early hours of Sunday morning.

The cost comes from paying wind farms in remote areas to turn off when they are generating too much power to be transported - while also paying gas power plants near cities to cover for this.

The Powerball jackpot has soared to an estimated £503million ahead of Thursday morning's draw - the biggest lottery jackpot ever available to UK players.

Former United States Marine Robert Gilman was freed from a Russian prison after serving four years behind bars as his health rapidly deteriorated.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: As AI models gain advanced capabilities to find vulnerabilities in software, develop ways to exploit them, and even carry out autonomous hacking sprees, researchers offered a sobering new example on Tuesday, disclosing vulnerabilities in the video conferencing platform Zoom that could have been exploited to take over targets' devices. Anyone on a call that involved screen sharing, whether participants or the host, would have been vulnerable to a silent attack that could be carried out with no indication and no interaction from the victim. Researchers from the digital defense firm A Security say thebugwas discovered in early June using publicly available AI models, and that it took fewer than 20 prompts to uncover the vulnerabilities and create a working attack. Zoom issued a security advisory on Tuesday, including details about fixes the company has already begun rolling out to address the flaws, which affected devices running all operating systems that Zoom supports -- Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, and Android. The vulnerabilities were specifically in the protocol used to facilitate real-time annotation during screen sharing. The researchers say that their AI bug hunting systems specifically delved into this component because, like human bug hunters, they have been trained that convoluted and obscure functions often contain overlooked vulnerabilities. This is particularly true with proprietary, closed-source software. An established company like Zoom presumably does extensive code review and vetting on all components and functions, but without the benefit of public, open review, esoteric yet complex features like annotation are more likely to contain mistakes. The bugs are now patched, with Zoom issuing both server and client-side fixes—or patches for both Zoom's own servers and the applications that run on customer devices. But the researchers emphasize that it was alarming to contemplate bugs that could have been exploited to take over a target device simply by getting someone onto a Zoom call. "What is interesting for us and what we believe is dangerous is the democratization of these capabilities -- the barrier to entry is dropping rapidly," A Security cofounder Omer Gull told WIRED ahead of the disclosure. "Before it would have taken a team of five people maybe six months with a lot of refining and iteration to find this. Now people can reach the same results with under 20 prompts. And Zoom is an important type of target because people assume trust when using it. They don't see it as a threat."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.