Global timekeepers vote to replace leap seconds with a far-off leap hour
Delegates from 69 countries approved a continuous UTC system designed to remove a recurring source of risk for computer networks and infrastructure.
Read report »Technology
1523 reports.
C++26 contracts bring preconditions and postconditions into function declarations
The new language feature lets developers state function requirements and expected results alongside an API, with GCC 16 providing the first implementation.
Read report »
Fortran marks 70 years as scientific computing community plans Manchester celebration
A December event will review the language's history, current development and future after seven decades in engineering and research.
Read report »
Simons Foundation, Anthropic and OpenAI commit $15 million to mathematics AI initiative
The program will fund community-led work on evaluating AI-assisted results, training researchers and developing shared standards for using the technology.
Read report »
Researchers say targeted ads delivered zero-click spyware to Al Jazeera devices
Citizen Lab says an advertising platform profiled large audiences before selected devices were silently redirected to mercenary spyware infrastructure.
Read report »
Unfenced maps US land listings that border protected public areas
A new property-search project says it checked more than 695,000 active listings against federal public-land boundaries to identify parcels with direct access.
Read report »
DEsk beta brings skeuomorphic, ray-traced design to the Linux desktop
The open-source Wayland environment presents windows as paper on a virtual desk and combines its own compositor with existing Linux applications.
Read report »
X removes 13,000 accounts it links to foreign influence campaigns
The platform attributed three networks targeting US political debate to Iran, Russia and China, but did not publish evidence supporting those conclusions.
Read report »
Global dataset finds national leaders far older than the people they govern
Researcher Hannah Ritchie's compilation covering more than 140 countries estimates that three quarters of the world's population live under a leader older than 65.
Read report »
Flipflop offers persistent device-to-device tunnels for file sharing
The open-source project uses Iroh networking to keep trusted devices connected across Bluetooth, local networks and the wider internet.
Read report »
Zero ASIC survey highlights sparse open-source chip design work
A company-authored review of public GitHub repositories argues that major semiconductor businesses contribute relatively little chip-design code, while acknowledging its star-based comparison is not a rigorous study.
Read report »
Sijbrandij Foundation pilots cancer information support service
Future of Cancer Care Today aims to help patients organize research and identify questions for clinicians while stressing that it does not provide medical care.
Read report »
Double-headed allocator revisits a practical fix for memory fragmentation
A game-development technique lets two workloads share one reserved memory block while growing from opposite ends, avoiding fragmentation between them.
Read report »
Timescale previews PRISM vector index for PostgreSQL
The experimental pg_vectorsearch extension promises faster approximate nearest-neighbour search with lower memory use, but its developers say it is not ready for production.
Read report »
Security researcher disputes claim that passkeys create a surveillance trap
Scott Helme argues that consumer passkeys resist phishing and generally disclose no device attestation, while acknowledging that users should watch for future restrictions.
Read report »
Swiss government proposes tighter limits on profiling-based advertising to minors
A federal proposal would restrict online advertising built from children's personal profiles as Switzerland considers stronger digital protections for young users.
Read report »
Anthropic test sketches AI botnet risk but stops short of real-world replication
Experiments distributed small AI models across Android devices and cloud emulators, while leaving exploitation and several practical barriers outside the test.
Read report »
Amazon pricing rules return to focus ahead of US antitrust trial
An independent analysis argues that marketplace fees and Buy Box enforcement can push sellers to keep prices elevated beyond Amazon's own store.
Read report »
Sweden rebuilds a place for cash as security concerns test its digital-payment model
The central bank is urging households to keep physical currency while essential retailers face new requirements to accept it.
Read report »
Android 17 wide-character bug exposes gap between shipped code and public AOSP sources
A developer traced a Unicode-breaking regression in September Android 17 builds by disassembling the runtime library because the matching source was not yet public.
Read report »Mosh-rs previews Rust rewrite with native Windows client and optional scrollback
The independent pre-alpha project aims to remain compatible with Mosh 1.4 while adding two features long requested by users.
Read report »
How attention turned machine translation into the foundation of modern AI
A new technical account traces today's transformer systems to a 2014 solution for handling context in long translated sentences.
Read report »
High-speed footage reveals honey bee stinger’s self-powered venom pump
Researchers found that two deformable valves work as opposing pistons, sustaining venom flow after a worker bee leaves its stinger behind.
Read report »
Topgolf says VMware exit avoided more than $11.3 million in infrastructure costs
The venue operator moved 12,000 virtual machines to VergeOS as it overhauled servers, gaming systems and software licensing.
Read report »