In April researchers responsibly disclosed two security flaws found in Sudo “that could enable local attackers to escalate their privileges to root on susceptible machines,” reports The Hacker News. “The vulnerabilities have been addressed in Sudo version 1.9.17p1 released late last month.”Stratascale researcher Rich Mirch, who is credited with discovering and reporting the flaws, said...

This week America’s Energy Department selected two companies to perform the first nuclear microreactor tests in a new facility in Idaho, saying the tests “will fast-track the deployment of American microreactor technologies… The first fueled reactor experiment will start as early as spring 2026.” The new facility is named DOME (an acronym for Demonstration of Microreactor Experiments), and it...

Some of the water around Antarctica has been getting saltier. And that has affected the amount of sea ice at the bottom of the planet. From a report: A study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that increases in salinity in seawater near the surface could help explain some of the decrease in Antarctic sea ice that have been observed over the past...

Software engineer Sean Goedecke argues that AI coding agents have already been commoditized because they require no special technical advantages, just better base models. He writes: All of a sudden, it’s the year of AI coding agents. Claude released Claude Code, OpenAI released their Codex agent, GitHub released its own autonomous coding agent, and so on. I’ve done my fair share of writing...

More than a decade after the platform cracked down on copyright infringement, thousands of unlicensed movies, TV shows and live sports are available.

Reuters: The European Union’s landmark rules on AI will be rolled out according to the legal timeline in the legislation, the European Commission said on Friday, dismissing calls from some companies and countries for a pause. Google owner Alphabet, Facebook owner Meta and other U.S. companies as well as European businesses such as Mistral and ASML have in recent days urged the Commission to...

President Donald Trump’s administration plans to restrict shipments of AI chips from the likes of Nvidia to Malaysia and Thailand, part of an effort to crack down on suspected semiconductor smuggling into China. Bloomberg: A draft rule from the Commerce Department seeks to prevent China — to which the US has effectively banned sales of Nvidia’s advanced AI processors — from obtaining those...

A new study analyzing data from more than 60 previous research projects has found evidence that there is “no safe amount” of processed meat consumption — so much so that even small daily portions are being linked to increased disease risk. The research, published Monday in the journal Nature Medicine, examined connections between processed meats, sugar-sweetened beverages and trans fatty acids...

Moderna’s mRNA-based seasonal flu vaccine proved 27% more effective at preventing influenza infections than standard flu shots in a Phase 3 trial involving nearly 41,000 people aged 50 and above, the firm said this week. The company announced that mRNA-1010 had an overall vaccine efficacy that was 26.6% higher than conventional shots, rising to 27.4% higher in participants aged 65 and older...