An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Uber has begun a trial of autonomous vehicles on the streets of Manchester as it looks to bring robotaxis to cities around the UK. The first self-driving cars are operating, using the technology of its partner firms Pony and Verne, with whom Uber recently launched Europe's first autonomous taxi service in the Croatian capital, Zagreb. Uber said it was "excited to take this first step toward making this technology accessible to people across the UK."

In social media posts, Verne said it had "started our autonomous vehicle testing in Manchester," while Pony said there were "plans to bring robotaxis to the city" and that testing was under way. The tests involve the company mapping the streets of the city in north-west England with a safety driver behind the wheel and no passengers. Limited passenger services started last month in London, but with a safety driver in the front seat of cars supplied by Wayve under Transport for London's licensing rules for private hire vehicles.

The next steps are unclear. Opposition from Uber drivers, their unions and the capital's politicians to the rollout of robotaxis is mounting. The GMB and ADCU unions have both said thousands of drivers jobs will be lost and have called for help for those affected. A critical report from London assembly's transport committee this week called for the government to devolve authority over autonomous taxi services. It said there was "considerable uncertainty about many of the claimed benefits of autonomous passenger vehicles", and fears over the impact on public transport and congestion, as well as safeguarding and accessibility for disabled passengers. There has been no official application to launch passenger services in Manchester so far.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Williams have outlined plans for their 50th anniversary year in 2027, with a milestone chassis designation, an immersive experience in London and a fan-picked Silverstone car livery all set to feature throughout a calendar of special events.

Rafael Camara has secured a full-time seat in Formula 1 with Haas.

Lawrence Barretto assesses the reasons behind Haas' decision to sign rookie Rafael Camara to the team for the 2027 season.

F1.com looks at the qualities Rafael Camara has displayed so far that appear to make him the ideal candidate for Haas following news that he will join the team in 2027.

Smartphone shipments fell by at least a fifth in the third calendar quarter as the AI-driven memory crunch battered another consumer hardware market. Preliminary estimates from IDC and Omdia put the year-on-year decline at 22 percent and 20 percent respectively. Memory costs have surged by approximately 350 percent since last year, according to IDC, and are still rising. This continues to place substantial pressure on vendor margins, prompting them to hike price tags and scale back on devices at the value end of the market. IDC estimates that vendors shipped 255.3 million smartphones into distribution channels and warns that the downturn is far from over. "The sharp downturn the industry has been bracing for finally materialized in the third quarter this year. However, the worst is yet to come," said Nabila Popal, IDC's senior research director for worldwide devices. "Current indicators suggest that the market has not yet reached the bottom. While memory inflation is beginning to slow down, with a low double-digit sequential increase in Q3 compared to a 50 to 100 percent jump in prior quarters, costs remain elevated across other critical components as well, compounding the crunch." Omdia puts shipments at roughly 255 million, close to IDC's estimate despite the different annual decline. It says that the shrinking market has further polarized the competitive landscape, with Samsung and Apple now accounting for about 45 percent of global shipments, up approximately 8 percentage points from a year ago, while rising costs hit more price-sensitive segments particularly hard. Omdia still expects global smartphone shipments to fall 12 percent across 2026, followed by another 6 percent decline next year. It previously forecast that devices priced above $400 would prove more resilient and could record shipment growth. "We don't anticipate any relief to the current memory crisis before 2028 at the earliest as we expect there to remain a considerable gap between demand and supply. The first signs of improvement we're looking for is when the memory pricing will stabilize (basically stopping to grow), and we're still not there yet," Omdia principal analyst Runar Bjorhovde told The Register. Omdia says investment in distribution partnerships and premium devices could determine which vendors emerge stronger when costs ease. New flagship launches, promotions, and festive demand in Q4 are unlikely to fully offset persistent supply-side pressures. Omdia reckons buyers may get used to paying more, potentially creating greater opportunities for higher-value devices. The firm previously outlined the measures some phone makers are taking to offset the rising cost of memory parts, including switching to cheaper display panels, sensors, or radio frequency (RF) modules. IDC also sees little prospect of recovery before 2028 and expects a lasting shift toward higher costs. It says vendors that adapt their products and pricing will be best placed to gain market share. ®

Workday wants customers to fund its AI agents from staffing and outsourcing budgets, not just IT spending, as it opens more HR and finance functions to automation. Speaking to investors at its annual conference in Las Vegas, the SaaS slinger said AI productivity gains could allow it to grow with fewer new hires. Customers could face a different cost calculation, however. Workday expects agent charges to grow with usage rather than simply the number of employees licensed to use its software. Chief AI Officer Joel Hellermark told financial analysts that automating work such as HR tasks could expand Workday's market "beyond the software budgets into the labor and services spend," where "customers are spending tens of millions of dollars on outsourcing." Hellermark claimed self-service AI agents had increased resolution rates for common tasks by 25 percent. "We're only getting started there," Hellermark said, arguing that Workday could significantly reduce customers' outsourcing spending. Aneel Bhusri, Workday co-founder and CEO, said using AI internally was helping the company grow without a corresponding increase in headcount. "We're looking at the products across all of our software providers [to show] how we can use AI to drive margin," he said. "It may not be in terms of more reductions in workforce… but there's also the opportunity to just not hire in areas we were hiring in the past and just leverage AI instead." This week, Workday announced broader "headless" access to its HR and finance systems, allowing AI agents to read data and perform tasks without users navigating its application interface. Its Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools provide access subject to Workday's permissions, approvals, and audit trails. Workday Data Cloud supports access to operational and historical data, including sharing with platforms such as Snowflake, Databricks, and Salesforce. Its architecture includes a data lake using the Apache Iceberg open table format. Bhusri expects customers to pay for AI agents based on consumption, with bills increasing as usage grows. "It's a flywheel. Once it gets going, it really gets going. It's a far better model than a people-based subscription-based model, which will continue for a long time. I see the bills we have to pay to Google Cloud and AWS and Azure, and I think why I'd like to be in that business," he said. In August, Reuters reported that private equity firm Silver Lake was in talks to buy Workday. The software company did not comment at the time. In February, Bhusri returned as CEO, replacing Carl Eschenbach, who stepped down with a lump-sum cash payment of $3.6 million. Speaking to investors this week, Bhusri said he wanted to centralize responsibility for AI. "When I came back, it was very diffuse. AI was owned by all the application teams; APIs were owned by all the application teams. And frankly, we're moving too slowly." ®

A website that was dedicated to the human endeavor of reverse engineering, “decompiling,” and modifying video games is shutting down because people using AI to clone and decompile games have fully overrun the community and are far outpacing what human software engineers alone can do. The news comes as AI-coded “clones” of popular enterprise software like the Adobe creative suite and Microsoft Office have gone viral and are seemingly popping up every day. 

The website decomp.dev said Thursday that it is shutting down because “the community aspect of decompilation has been broken” by AI, and that projects that once required intense collaboration between people with different skills can now be done trivially with AI. The administrator of the website said that it has become impossible to keep track of which projects are primarily human-led and which ones are done by AI.

“Historically, matching decompilation has been a brutally difficult, time consuming task, on the scale of years for any moderately-sized game with a number of active contributors,” the pseudonymous admin of decomp.dev, who goes by Encounter, wrote on the site. 

AI Made Cloning Games Easier Than Ever

Vibecoding has made it possible to create a cheap rip off of a video game in just a few hours.

But recent frontier AI models like GPT-6-Astra have made it trivially easy to decompile a game: “They are significantly better at following complex directions, cross-referencing resources for symbols or debug information, and writing natural code with enough guidance,” Encounter wrote. “It is now clear that, with the right guidance, human input, and code reviews, AI can expedite the decompilation process in a significant way. What is also now clear is that the community aspect of decompilation has been broken.”

Decomp.dev was a collaborative website that hosted file libraries and tools for reverse engineering, re-coding, and decompiling existing video games, meaning taking an existing game and recreating its source code. Decompiling a video game can be done for a variety of reasons and is popular in a few different niches of video game fandom. Speed runners decompile video games to find potential glitches or advantages they can use to beat a game faster; hobbyists decompile video games to port them to new platforms or to emulate them (for example, making Super Mario 64 run natively on PC); modders decompile games so they can more easily modify them; archivists decompile games to recreate code that may be lost; and some people decompile games just for the challenge.

Encounter wrote that the use of AI in the community has sped things up to the point where it has become overwhelming to track human-led projects, and people using AI have taken existing, human-led AI projects and have created “hostile forks” of them, where open-source code written by humans is taken and “finished” by AI: “These kinds of hostile forks put little to no effort into meaningfully contributing to existing projects, tearing apart our community fabric.” Encounter added, “anyone with an AI subscription can manage to create a port or static recompilation that functions at a basic level […] While community members put in the effort to decompile a game, opportunists have frequently raced to release a half-baked, barely-functional port from it.”

“decomp.dev was originally designed to gamify decompilation: watching the progress go up was a fun way to stay motivated when every fraction of a percent took real human effort,” they added. “Today, that same idea has warped decompilation into a hollow numbers game, exacerbated by folks who just want to burn tokens to make number go up.”

The end of decomp.dev is symptomatic of a broader, potentially destabilizing trend in AI. It has become trivially easy for people to use AI to make functional clones of software that live in a copyright grey zone. The explosion of decomp projects on Reddit, for example, highlights how easy it has become to reverse engineer, clone, and mod software with AI.

Over the last few days, we have seen various mostly-functional AI-coded clones of Adobe’s Creative Cloud products and the Microsoft Office suite, both of which ordinarily cost hundreds of dollars a year. Software developers and small businesses that sell software as a service — the dominant business model of Silicon Valley for the last decade — are seeing job opportunities dry up and say they feel malaise watching the speed of AI progress. And small video game developers say their projects are regularly getting stolen by “clean room” AI clones of their games, in which the original code of a piece of software is never looked at.

“All I am hearing from software engineers is that software-as-a-service is dying as a business model,” Mike Nolan, who studies the politics of open source software, told 404 Media about the recent spate of AI-driven clones. “It’s becoming so easy to recreate the functionality that you want [with AI.]”

Earlier this year, Nolan launched Malus.sh, a working piece of software that is designed to “recreate” open-source software from scratch without violating copyright. As we reported back in April, Malus was designed to highlight the gaps in copyright law and open source licenses that do not protect software developers, and to “satirize” the process by which people using AI are profiting off of those gaps.

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Vet cool, maar ook gaaf. 19 november is het zover maar voor die tijd dropt Rockstar nog één trailer en wel deze. Bij deze laatste sniekpiek van GTA VI krijgen we ook meteen de officiële soundtrack, gekleid door Justice, SZA, Tame Impala en King Gizzard & The Lizzard Wizard, "Flower In A Hurricane". Heerlijke Miami Vice City-vibes, een stukje moderne yacht rock, maar wij gaan gedurende het hele spel luisteren naar de in-game countryzender gepresenteerd door Lana del Rey. Minpuntje aan de trailer, de (vermeend) onbesneden tampeloeres van hoofdpersonage Jason die ons beloofd is laat nog op zich wachten. Jammer maar helaas.

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Eerdere beeld0n

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Matthew Green has a new site that tries to estimate the number of cryptanalyst-hours that have been spent analyzing different public-key algorithms:

Abstract: We estimate how much public cryptanalysis each public-key assumption has received, using the literature itself as the instrument. From roughly sixteen thousand candidate papers we classify cryptanalytic work on ECDLP, structured and plain lattices, syndrome decoding and their comparators, then convert papers into estimated research-allocation years through a person-level author map. These publication-based estimates may substantially overstate actual time spent. Lattices have overtaken elliptic curves in this cumulative measure only recently; we express that history as inference budgets under stated productivity assumptions. The study was conducted by AI models: Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Opus 5.5 built the pipeline, ran the analysis and wrote this page, with contributions from GPT-6 Astra. Matthew Green set the questions, made the key methodological decisions and oversaw the work.

There are a lot of caveats to this analysis. It relies on published work, so anything unpublished does not count. This includes both academic cryptanalysis that didn’t result in a paper, and intelligence agency cryptanalysis done in secret. But it’s a good first stab at a metric of this sort.

Stephen brook art. has added a photo to the pool:

Lino cut print.

Bordeaux No 8 takes on Gloucester in Champions Cup to underline hole he will leave Borthwick for the World Cup

Swines are swirling above Twickenham, the cows have returned to their roots and hell is an icy sub-zero. Steve Borthwick has been given a free pass to pick one player based outside England. The consensus is that Jack Willis – Toulouse captain and two-time Top 14 player of the season – would be the obvious choice. The smart money, however, would be on Borthwick picking brother Tom in a flash.

For clarity, this is not going to happen. It is not World Cup season without a cause celebre but the reality is that you, dear reader, have more chance of selection. Still, the story of the younger Willis warrants re-examining. Firstly because his decision to head for France after receiving an enhanced contract was unprecedented. Secondly because for Bordeaux he is pulling up trees, forests and anything else in his way this season. England’s No 8 depth is shallow and Willis is the type of player Borthwick would give his right arm for. After Bordeaux have begun their Champions Cup defence at Gloucester tonight, chances are his left too.

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Exclusive: Chancellor to target sector in his first budget to help offset damage caused by Iran war on public finances

John Healey is poised to tax Britain’s banks in his 28 October budget to help offset the damage inflicted on the public finances by war in the Middle East, the Guardian understands.

The chancellor is in Bangkok, where the International Monetary Fund has praised the UK’s progress towards balancing the books, urging him to “stay the course”.

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Delegates from 69 countries approve clock changeover after decades of debate – but switch may not take effect for thousands of years

After decades of discussion, quibbling and worrying about clocks in computer systems, the world’s official timekeepers have voted to replace what many viewed as a tiresome correction: the leap second. It’s time, they say, for the leap hour.

Delegates from 69 countries cast their votes on Thursday at a conference in France of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures, which ensures the world sticks to the same standards of time, weight, distance and more.

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Graham Brougham, 74, was one of a number of men invited to sexually assault victim while she was unconscious

A man from Cheshire has pleaded guilty to the rape of a woman whose husband drugged her and invited other men to sexually assault her while she was unconscious.

Graham Brougham, 74, pleaded guilty to rape at a hearing at Manchester Minshull Street crown court on Thursday afternoon.

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Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo: