Delhi Students Describe Hostel Conditions as Unsafe and Jail-Like

NDTV visited Old Rajinder Nagar in West Delhi to assess whether living conditions for students had improved since a deadly 2024 incident. Two years ago, the area made national headlines when three UPSC aspirants drowned in a flooded coaching centre basement during the monsoon season. The visit aimed to examine the ground reality of student hostels in the area. Students reported that conditions remain unsafe and squalid, with some comparing hostel life to being imprisoned.

Messi closes in on buying Spanish club Eldense

Four AI frontier models launched in four days as simultaneous API outages expose single-provider risk

Four major AI models — Claude Fable 5.1, Gemini 3.8 Flash, Meta Muse Spark 1.3, and OpenAI GPT-6 Astra — were released within a four-day window in early September, signaling that the frontier model release cycle has compressed from quarters to days. That same week, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Grok services went down simultaneously, sparking a widely discussed thread on Hacker News highlighting how much shared infrastructure underpins the AI API economy. The rapid release cadence imposes a recurring 're-evaluation tax' on developers, who must repeatedly assess whether to migrate as benchmarks, pricing, and tool behavior shift with each new model. Analysts and developers argue that relying on a single AI provider now creates both availability and scheduling risk, not merely a contingency problem. The recommended response is to build abstraction layers — combining a local model for routine requests with a routing layer for frontier tasks — so that switching providers becomes a low-cost, routine decision rather than a disruptive one.

ServiceNow Releases EVA-Bench Data 2.0 with 213 Voice Agent Test Scenarios Across 3 Domains

ServiceNow AI Research has launched EVA-Bench Data 2.0, an open-source benchmark designed to evaluate enterprise voice agents across airline customer service, IT service management, and healthcare HR service delivery. The updated benchmark covers 213 evaluation scenarios and 121 tools — approximately four times the scope of its predecessor. All scenarios were derived from real phone-based customer service workflows and validated for solvability by three leading AI models: OpenAI GPT-4.5, Google Gemini 3.1 Pro, and Anthropic Claude Opus 4.6. The healthcare domain notably incorporates domain-specific regulatory details such as NPI provider identifiers, FMLA regulations, and insurance coverage rules to reflect real-world complexity. The datasets are freely available on Hugging Face, with a multilingual expansion planned for a future release.

South Korea Launches Free Nationwide AI Access for 52 Million, Mandates 80% Domestic Models

South Korea's Ministry of Science and ICT has finalised three consortiums — SK Telecom, KT, and Kakao — to deliver its 'AI for All' programme, offering all 52 million citizens free generative AI access with no declared token limits. A beta rollout is planned for September 2024, with a full national launch by year-end. The government has allocated 512 NVIDIA B200 chips to support the initiative, with national budget funding set to partially cover operating costs from 2027 onward, making South Korea the first G20 nation to undertake such a programme. A key regulatory condition requires operators to route at least 50% of queries through certified Korean sovereign AI models and an additional 30% through other domestic models, setting an 80% floor for homegrown AI usage. Analysts note the policy functions less as a public welfare measure and more as industrial strategy, using mass citizen traffic to build sustained demand for South Korea's domestic AI ecosystem.

Delhi HC raps Centre for outing survivor's name in its POSH handbook

Why RAXXO's Solo Developer Treats Semantic Versioning as a Non-Negotiable Rule

RAXXO, a solo software studio, enforces strict semantic versioning across all its tools, using major, minor, and patch numbers with precise, unchanging definitions. A patch release fixes bugs only, a minor release adds features without breaking existing ones, and a major release signals intentional breaking changes with prior warning. The developer learned this discipline the hard way after a silent breaking change was mislabeled as a patch, triggering avoidable user support issues. Version numbers are paired with changelog entries for every release, as neither is considered useful without the other. Beyond user trust, the system also serves as a personal memory aid when switching between multiple codebases that may not have been touched in weeks.

Why Flask's Dev Server Can Work as a Desktop App Backend If Done Right

Flask's built-in development server carries a warning against production use, but desktop applications operate under fundamentally different conditions that can make it a viable runtime choice. Unlike public web services, a desktop app's Flask server binds only to the local loopback address (127.0.0.1), meaning it is inaccessible from external networks and serves just one user on the same machine. However, developers must explicitly disable Flask's file-watching reloader, which spawns two processes and can break single-instance checks and port management in packaged apps. Enabling threaded mode (threaded=True) is also essential, since the dev server otherwise handles requests sequentially, which can cause stalls when multiple requests — such as a progress stream and a heartbeat ping — run concurrently. Accidentally binding to 0.0.0.0 instead of 127.0.0.1 would expose the server to any device on the local network, undermining the core safety assumption that makes this approach acceptable.

Babar Azam urges Pakistan to play freely in must-watch Edgbaston Test

Pakistan captain Babar Azam has called on his team to play without pressure ahead of the final Test at Edgbaston. The call comes after Pakistan suffered two heavy defeats in the series. The Pakistan Cricket Board responded with a significant mid-series squad shake-up, releasing seven players and bringing in fresh faces. Babar admitted the overhaul came as a surprise but expressed confidence in the newly added players. He believes the new squad members have the ability to make a meaningful contribution in the closing Test.

Netanyahu heads to UN amid calls for his arrest

Meta Develops AI Agent Capable of Sending Emails and Processing Payments

Meta is developing an AI agent internally codenamed Hatch, which is being publicly referred to as Muse. The agent is designed to access third-party applications to perform tasks such as sending emails and making payments on behalf of users. It forms the core of CEO Mark Zuckerberg's broader vision to deliver what he calls 'personal superintelligence' to users. The tool is intended to serve the billions of people who use Meta's platforms on a daily basis.

How Android's Geofencing API Cuts Battery Drain in Location-Based Apps

A developer building Muffle, a location-aware phone-silencing app, found that manually polling for GPS updates via FusedLocationProviderClient drained battery and was frequently killed by Android's background process management. Switching to Android's Geofencing API shifted location monitoring to Google Play Services, allowing the OS to batch events and use Wi-Fi or cell tower triangulation instead of high-power GPS. A key optimization was setting the setNotificationResponsiveness parameter to a five-minute window, letting the system check location at convenient intervals rather than in real time. However, the developer noted that GPS signal drift inside thick-walled buildings like university libraries caused unreliable geofence triggering, revealing a practical limitation of the approach. The project highlights a broader trade-off in mobile development between location accuracy and battery efficiency when building background location features on Android.

Deepika and Ranveer share family maternity photos featuring daughter Dua

Bollywood couple Deepika Padukone and Ranveer Singh are expecting their second child and recently shared maternity and family photographs. The photo series also featured their daughter Dua, who drew significant attention from fans. Many followers pointed out a strong physical resemblance between Dua and her father, Ranveer Singh, dubbing her his tiny lookalike. Despite the upcoming arrival, Deepika continues to fulfill her professional commitments. Ranveer is simultaneously focused on an upcoming film project.

UPI-ng the ante: PM Modi wants desi connect with global pay

US bans Canadian dairy, alcohol and motorcycles

Zampa signs two-year Hurricanes deal, flags overseas player pay imbalance in BBL

Australian leg-spinner Adam Zampa has committed to the Hobart Hurricanes by signing a two-year deal in the Big Bash League. Zampa has voiced concerns that overseas players continue to receive more favourable financial terms compared to local Australian cricketers in the competition. The spinner's comments highlight an ongoing debate about pay equity within the BBL's player payment structure. Zampa's signing nonetheless signals his continued commitment to the domestic T20 tournament alongside his international career.

Developer builds VS Code and terminal theme as a study project, shares full process

A developer created 'Underground', a dark theme for VS Code, Kiro IDE, and multiple terminals, as a personal study project. The goal was a subdued dark interface with comfortable contrast and a warm green accent as the primary attention color. Rather than assigning colors arbitrarily, the author first defined the visual purpose each color needed to serve across the entire interface. The theme uses a minimal palette built on dark grays, white with alpha transparency for text hierarchy, and a few accent colors for syntax roles. The project and its source files are publicly available on GitHub.

Amazon sued over treatment of pregnant workers

Putin meeting PM Modi on Friday; energy, defence high on agenda

Browser-Based Drug Interaction Tool Uses WebGPU to Keep Medical Queries Private

A new developer tutorial demonstrates how to build a drug interaction checker that runs entirely within the user's browser, eliminating the need to send sensitive medical data to remote servers. The tool uses WebLLM and WebGPU to execute large language models such as Llama-3 or Mistral locally, leveraging the device's own GPU for processing. Built with React, TypeScript, and Vite, the application streams AI-generated responses in real time while ensuring complete on-device data residency. WebGPU enables low-level browser access to local graphics hardware, making it possible to run models typically requiring expensive server-side infrastructure. The project is framed as a privacy-first approach to medical AI, where no user input ever leaves the device.