Adam Hlozek raced on to a throw-in down the right and cut the ball back to the edge of box where Alexandr Sojka fed Michal Sadilek to clip his finish past South Africa keeper Ronwen Williams for the quickest goal of the tournament so far.
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had urged Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to “stop blowing up buildings” during a phone call about Israel’s military campaign in Lebanon, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.
The newspaper cited sources who overheard the phone conversation between the two leaders, whose relationship has grown increasingly hostile as the war raged on.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: As artificial intelligence companies reshape the economy and race toward trillion-dollar valuations, Sen. Bernie Sanders is proposing a sweeping transfer of wealth and power from the industry to the American public. The legislation, shown first to The Associated Press, would create a sovereign wealth fund overseen by an independent commission and financed through a one-time 50% tax on the stock of the largest AI companies. Sanders estimates that the tax would create a nearly $7 trillion fund that would generate hundreds of billions of dollars annually in direct payments to Americans and programs such as health care, education and housing.
[...] The 50% tax would apply to AI companies that reach $200 million in annual AI sales. Any new AI company that reaches that benchmark would also be subject to the tax. It would create a sovereign wealth fund -- similar to those used by countries around the world and some U.S. states -- that Sanders estimates would be worth around $7 trillion. Unlike a traditional tax, the proposal would require companies to transfer stock rather than cash, effectively making the American public a major shareholder in the country's largest AI firms.
A seven-person independent commission -- nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate -- would manage the fund and use its voting shares "to block decisions that hurt the American people and to push for policies that help them," the bill summary says. Sanders proposes that a 5% annual dividend from the fund would provide direct payments of more than $1,000 to every American. If companies grow, the gains would be used for public goods such as education, housing and health care. Sanders argues taxpayers would not bear the losses if AI company valuations decline. "We're not going to lose any money, even if there is a bust in the bubble," Sanders said. The commission would be directed to "to block decisions that hurt the American people and to push for policies that help them," according to the summary. "The benefits cannot simply go to the handful of wealthy corporations. They will be shared by the American people," the independent Vermont senator said in an interview Wednesday. "The public has got to have a significant seat at the table to make sure that terrible things do not happen to ordinary people, and that in fact, AI benefits ordinary people, not hurts them," Sanders said.
Donaldson, wearing a dark grey suit and a pink tie, sat in the dock at the back of the court with his arms folded while the judge delivered his final remarks to the jury earlier in the day.
The average price of US gasoline fell to just under $4 a gallon on Thursday for the first time since March, following the announcement of a preliminary agreement between the US and Iran to end the war and reopen the strait of Hormuz.
The development has provided some relief to drivers who have seen soaring costs amid Washington’s war with Iran. But filling up still remains more expensive than it was before the conflict began.
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’s peace deal with Iran “is already bearing real fruits for the American people”, with 12.5m barrels going through the strait of Hormuz last night and gas prices dropping below $4 today for the first time since the conflict began.
On Thursday, the National Science Foundation announced that it would halt plans to dismantle the Ocean Observatories Initiative, stating: “effective immediately, [it] will not proceed with further removal or descoping of equipment from the remaining arrays and will continue operations including planned maintenance”.
Thursday’s opening drew four former presidents, as well as Bruce Springsteen, Bono and Jennifer Hudson. Chicago has seen years of planning and legal fights.
City councillor who ran on expanding childcare, education and housing slated for office after opponent concedes
Democratic socialist Janeese Lewis George is slated to be the next mayor of Washington DC after her opponent conceded on Thursday.
Lewis George, a city council member, ran on a platform of expanding childcare, education and housing, and revoking the district’s cooperation with federal immigration enforcement.
Apple is allowing iPhone developers in Brazil to distribute apps through authorized alternative marketplaces and use third-party payment systems following action by the country's competition regulator. "In other words, developers in Brazil will be able to circumvent the App Store and Apple's in-app purchase system, but there are still fees," reports MacRumors. Apple will collect commissions ranging from 5% on externally distributed apps to as much as 26% for some App Store transactions using its payment system. From the report: Alternative app marketplaces will have to be authorized by Apple and will need to meet ongoing requirements. For apps that are still distributed through the App Store, developers will be able to include an alternative payment processing method in their app and/or link users to a website to complete a transaction. These changes are available on iOS 26.5 and later, and they are the result of regulatory action from Brazil's competition regulator. Apple has added a new page on its website with additional details for developers in Brazil.
Apple said these changes introduce privacy and security risks for users, including children. The company has introduced safeguards to mitigate these risks, including a notarization process for iOS apps, an authorization process for app marketplaces, and limitations on external links and alternative payments for users under the age of 18. Apple has already allowed alternative app stores and/or third-party payment systems on iOS in the EU, Japan, and South Korea, and it will likely be forced to do so in the UK and Australia too, due to similar regulations in those countries.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) will tap $107m in emergency funding for Ebola outbreak response in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Uganda, officials said on Thursday.
The continued Ebola outbreak in the DRC comes as Canada, Mexico and the US jointly host the Fifa World Cup, attracting visitors from around the world. The officials said the outbreak, now the third largest on record, required “strong immediate support”, but that the global risk remained low.
Supermodel ‘completely abdicated’ her trustee responsibilities at Fashion for Relief, Charity Commission tells hearing
Naomi Campbell showed herself to be unfit to run a charity after the supermodel “completely abdicated” her responsibilities as a trustee of her now defunct Fashion for Relief project, according to the charity watchdog.
The Charity Commission told a tribunal that Campbell, who is trying to overturn a five-year ban on running a charity, was “highly culpable” for mismanagement and misuse of funds at Fashion for Relief, the former charity she founded in 2015.
A former schoolteacher who indecently and sexually assaulted 19 victims over 25 years has been jailed for six and a half years at Donegal Circuit Criminal Court.
BBC says vetting process ‘clearly failed’ after Guardian reveals presenter’s past comments about women
Warning: this article contains sexually explicit, offensive language
The BBC has pulled a documentary series with its controversial presenter Ashley Cain after revelations over his history of abusive and misogynistic comments about women.
In a statement late on Thursday, the BBC said its vetting requirements had “clearly failed” in the case of Cain, who was lauded by executives at the corporation for his ability to connect with young men. It added the BBC had “no plans” to broadcast a new series of Ashley Cain: Into the Danger Zone, a BBC programme that was filmed earlier this year at various locations across the world.
The book by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan of The New York Times, “Regime Change,” reveals a host of details and surprising exchanges as President Anne-lotte
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pushed to drastically expand his power.
Daryl McLune was 16 when he was held for 23 hours on suspicion of attempting to murder his mother after she tried to take her own life
A teenager who was wrongly arrested for the attempted murder of his mother minutes after she had tried to kill herself has won a race discrimination claim against the Metropolitan police.
A jury found that the Met discriminated against Daryl McLune, who was 16 at the time, because he was black.
US defence secretary addresses allies in latest attempt to get Europe to raise military budgets
Pete Hegseth has announced a review of the US military presence across Europe, in a combative address to Nato allies where he threatened to cut force numbers in countries spending the least on defence.
The US defence secretary, speaking at a meeting of Nato defence ministers in Brussels, accused some countries of “free riding” and others of being shameful for not allowing their airbases to be used by US jets bombing Iran in the spring.
In May, the federal government announced without warning that it would take apart a network of ocean monitoring systems that it had spent over $350 million to build. No reason was given for the decision to shut down the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI), but suspicion immediately focused on the network's role in tracking climate change.
But the OOI also provides data that's useful for weather forecasting and fisheries management, leading to widespread opposition. Today, it appears that the opposition has won, as the government will announce that it's reversing the decision. The big remaining question is how much damage the OOI took during the intervening month.
As of now, there is no formal statement available from the federal government. However, The New York Times reports that the decision will be announced later today, and Ars received a statement from Zoe Lofgren, the ranking Democrat on the House Science Committee, indicating that the decision has been made.
A San Francisco startup best known for its AI-generation software is making a bizarre leap into medical imaging, and trying to says it hopes draw curiosity-seekers into its new spa to get scanned. On Wednesday, Midjourney announced the establishment of Midjourney Medical, which it admitted was a bit out of left field. To promote the tech, it claims to be opening a spa in San Francisco where guests will be able to step “into a shallow pool of golden light,” before being lowered into a tank where ultrasound sensors bombard their bodies in order to take a scan that AI pieces together into MRI-like images. This sounds like the plot of a cheap sci-fi movie, but there is some real science behind it. “As you descend into the water, hundreds of thousands of tiny elements take turns, sending out waves, listening together, compressing and then streaming data to a massive cluster where thousands of computers split the task,” Midjourney explained in the announcement. “By looking at how the shapes of all the waves change, we reconstruct a detailed map or ‘image’ which basically lets us figure out what’s in there.” That “basically” isn’t exactly reassuring when Midjourney says it wants to have 50,000 or more of the things deployed around the world by 2031 “with a total scanning capacity of a billion scans a month” for use as a preventative health tool. It’s not clear how fast the process is with the prototype unit, but Midjourney said its goal is for the whole thing to take around a minute. “We think it's completely possible that with enough early imaging in the future, the world could avoid 30% of all deaths and 50% of all healthcare costs,” the company added. According to a “technical” video included in the announcement, there’s a ring of 40 scanners included in the prototype unit the company has built. That ring of 40 elements contains 358,000 ultrasonic elements made up of tiny transducers that create ultrasound waves in water while listening for how they change when they slap the body of whoever is in Midjourney’s dunk tank up to a thousand times a second. The Midjourney Scanner, as the company has named it, can capture tissue details up to half a millimeter, which is on par with standard clinical MRIs, but pales in comparison to the resolution of more advanced designs. Oh, did we not mention our partner? Midjourney said its scanner is the first of its kind ever constructed, but the technical video says it relies on Fullbody Ultrasound Computational Tomography (FUCT, or USCT, as the industry has taken to calling it to avoid the more questionable acronym). That's not new. Fast, full-body ultrasound scanning that requires patients to be submerged in a water tank has been an active project at Caltech based on a research paper from earlier this year. Same goes for the sensors Midjourney is including in its scanner. You wouldn’t know that from reading the announcement, which makes it seem like this was a project entirely of Midjourney’s own AI fever dreams, but ultrasound tech firm Butterfly Network was compelled to issue its own press release “following Midjourney’s public announcement” in order to “provide commentary” on the AI outfit’s new venture. Butterfly confirmed in its release that it provided the 40 ultrasound imaging modules for the Midjourney Scanner. The hardware was “licensed under a co-development agreement between the two companies,” according to Butterfly. According to a 2025 SEC filing, Butterfly expects to rake in $74 million over five years for providing the hardware. There's some irony in Midjourney's failure to mention its partner: The company has faced lawsuits claiming it used copyrighted works without permission to train its AI image generation model. We reached out to both companies to learn more. Midjourney didn’t respond, and Butterfly declined to add anything beyond what was in its press release. Midjourney said that it’s planning to open its first ultrasound scanner spa at the end of 2027, but it has another hurdle to jump: FDA approval. Beyond improving its tech so that the second-generation scanner is ready for its 2027 spa date, “regulation is the next limit,” the company said. “Normally, for every diagnostic medical capability you need FDA approval,” Midjourney explained. “We’re starting by just giving you detailed body composition maps — and we’ll be submitting regular test results to the FDA for increased capabilities.” Midjourney also fails to mention how it will store and secure those scans, whether it will use said scans to train its body composition-detection algorithms, and how it’s ensuring those algorithms get things right that it usually take a human a few years of education and training to learn. ®
A couple of years ago, Michel Barnier spent a weekend with Boris Johnson’s father, Stanley. It was not some ghoulish Brexit spin-off of The Traitors, but the result of the former EU negotiator’s wife, Isabelle, being a close friend of Johnson’s French cousin, Anne du Boucheron, the owner of Château de la Baronnière, a 19th-century estate in Mauges-sur-Loire, in western France.
“We spent a weekend together in a French castle. Very friendly. Long promenades in the forest,” Barnier recalls of Johnson senior, with whom he discussed the former prime minister’s motivation to back Brexit. “It was interesting. Boris was much more European at the beginning. Even if he was critical.I don’t see it as a motivation but it is, perhaps, a method or attitude: to be pragmatic in some way. Cynical. Cynical to get power.”
Michel Barnier has said Britain could regain its special terms if it rejoined the EU and claimed it was becoming clearer every day to the British people that they would be stronger in Europe.
In an interview before the 10th anniversary of the Brexit referendum next week, the EU’s former chief Brexit negotiator said he could not see any obstacle to the UK keeping the pound and remaining outside the passport-free Schengen travel area should the country rejoin.
Exclusive: Richard Hermer’s department understood to be first in government to restrict use after recent riots
The attorney general has told his office to no longer post on X, making it the first UK government department to stop using the Elon Musk-owned platform amid increasing worries about its use to incite violence and racism.
Richard Hermer’s office last posted on X on Friday, and it is understood that officials have been told to no longer use the site, unless for the specific purpose of combatting disinformation there.
Google has begun rolling out Android 17, the June Pixel Feature Drop, and Wear OS 7 simultaneously across supported Pixel phones and watches. Highlights include floating app bubbles, improved foldable multitasking and gaming, tighter location and contact permissions, stronger lost-device protections, new Pixel AI tools, and up to 10% better Pixel Watch battery life. PhoneArena reports: Pixel owners are the clear winners, since everything here reaches Pixel first and a lot of it goes back to the Pixel 6. Fold owners get the most toys, with the Bubble Bar and foldable gaming mode built for the big screen. Watch wearers get the quietly important upgrade. Better battery and Live Updates make an everyday wearable easier to rely on, especially if you keep it on overnight. Google's latest Pixel Drop combines several AI-powered tools with a broader slate of Android 17 upgrades. Pixel owners gain Lyria 3 for generating music from text or images, Gemini Omni for creating custom video clips, enhanced call translation and screening, AirDrop-compatible Quick Share, expanded Magic Cue support, and conversational photo editing.
Android 17 builds on those additions with floating app Bubbles, selfie-camera Screen Reactions, and a split-screen gaming mode for foldables, while also strengthening privacy and security with more granular location and contact permissions, improved lost-device protection, tighter PIN-guessing limits, and enhanced threat detection.
Other additions include expanded parental controls, separate assistant volume and app memory settings, and an option to hide app names for greater privacy.
You can read more about everything new in Android 17 in Google's blog post.
Updated document, which emphasises harm done to African women, is being considered by other Caribbean countries
Barbados’s prime minister, Mia Mottley, has announced a new manifesto from Caribbean leaders asserting the “moral, ethical and legal case” for reparations over damage caused by hundreds of years of enslavement.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement plans to sell or give away most of the 11 warehouses it bought to detain migrants, reversing course on a signature initiative.
A businessman with ties to Chinese military contractors was among the overseas investors who acquired stakes in SpaceX while it was still a private company. An entity linked to the Qatari royal family also took a stake.
The new details come from a private investor list obtained by ProPublica that sheds light on a particularly delicate issue for Elon Musk’s rocket company: which people in countries like China bought into the company, and how. SpaceX built its business off sensitive US government work like making spy satellites for the Pentagon. While there is no ban on Chinese investment in US military contractors, such investment is heavily regulated.
In a sign of its sensitivity to the concerns, SpaceX barred investors from China and Hong Kong from buying shares in its initial public offering last week due to “regulatory and compliance risks,” Bloomberg reported. The US government alleges that China has a strategy of using investments in sensitive industries for espionage and to get access to cutting-edge technology.
Iran has announced plans to introduce a system of maritime fees in the strait of Hormuz in two months, after the 60-day period of negotiation that has been triggered by the signing of the memorandum of understanding.
Tehran, claiming a historic victory over the US, said the strait was under its control and a European plan for a naval mission to escort ships though the strait would not be welcome.
If you live long enough, you'll wake up one day and find that you're living in a world you no longer understand. Lately there are things happening with AI in a couple of disparate parts of Amazon that brought that lesson home in a big way. The first is that, late last year, they acquired Bee, an AI wearable that is distressingly, upsettingly good. The second, which I want to talk about today as I fly back from AWS's NYC Summit, is Quick Desktop. The best way to describe this is "Enterprise OpenClaw in a polished app." Yes, I know this sounds like I'm being blackmailed. Read on. You work at Amazon, right? Amazon has spent the last three years breathlessly telling us that they're a leader in AI, then shipping products which make it clear that they're unsure what leadership looks like. They've spent far longer building user interfaces that carry a design aesthetic of "complete crap." Even Amazon's website, where you buy everything from underpants to chainsaws to dog food to more underpants, is not a well-designed interface; we've all just learned to live with it. The single good interface to come from Bezos and Coo was the Kindle e-reader: push a button, the page turns. And then they removed the buttons. So yes; "We're launching a desktop AI assistant" is the exact opposite of encouraging coming from these folks. It started like you'd expect. You pop over to the download page and grab the download. On a Mac it's half a gigabyte because of course it is; this is totally normal and fine in 2026. Install it, fire it up, and ... wait a bit. It has to think, and gather its wherewithal before it can get to work. And then the hits start coming. I had talked to people who have used this and raved about it. The problem here is that all of these people work at Amazon, and the current state of the product reflects that. They have a single identity provider they use internally; external users see a confusing array of offerings, each with its own byzantine flows. The feeling is not dissimilar to waking up in the middle of a hedge maze, with no idea how you got there, and discovering that someone just set it on fire. At one point during my time using Quick Desktop, I was logged out and had to log back in. After guessing seven different identity providers, I gave up and emailed the service team for help with this. After some back and forth, I was able to get back in. (GitHub! Future Corey, if you find yourself in this situation, you authenticated via GitHub!) It's clear that the people building this service aren't living the external user experience. It's why I maintain that Amazon's internal AWS account management tool is the service that I hate the most; it separates the people building AWS from the customers using it. At the moment, other similar challenges show up. You'd never have more than one email account from the same provider, right? (Google Workspace in my case, provided it hasn't been deprecated by the time this article goes to print.) You'd never have business conversations via iMessage, or Signal, or LinkedIn DMs, or any number of other services, right? The point isn't the snark; it's that Quick Desktop only knows about the channels its connectors deign to support. Every deal I've ever closed in a LinkedIn DM, every favor traded over Signal, every "hey, quick question" that arrived via iMessage is simply invisible to it — but it makes its confident little suggestions anyway, blissfully unaware that a good chunk of my professional life happens in places it can't see. Here's a free hint to the product team: do you think I mentioned the Bee in the opening of this article because I'm making a fashion statement? And then it starts to work… Once you prove yourself worthy by getting Quick Desktop set up, it ... sits there without doing much. It has a chatbot interface, which surely you've never seen before in an app, backed by a personality I'll call "Uninspiring Accountant." What was the point? And then things start to happen. Your activity feed starts surfacing things from your email. From Slack. From your calendar. I don't know about the rest of you, but my email inbox is where tasks and hope go to die. Slowly but surely, Quick Desktop starts making suggestions, surfacing things that you should handle, proposing email drafts (ugh, in such a bland corporate voice; I hope this email finds you before I do), and giving you quick links to the various apps where these things live so you can see the context it's surfacing. I went in skeptical, partly because I'd already cobbled together a janky version of this for myself by pointing Claude Code at a pile of APIs, so I had a decent sense of what these things miss. And that's when I became a Quick Desktop convert: it flagged an email buried forty messages deep in my inbox that I'd mentally filed under "dealt with" - but very much was not. My own inbox had given up on me like everyone who's ever tried to love me, but Quick Desktop hadn't. This is an Amazon product, and it's pretty clear that they expect you to work with Quick Desktop the way they reportedly work with their own employees: by beating them into compliance. Their own custom connectors and (lack of) extensibility system make it pretty clear that there's a corporate IT department somewhere that's configuring and getting this set up for folks. I freely admit that's not my use case; I'm testing this by myself, not sharing it with my colleagues. But the product is improving. Today, it doesn't really sync data or state between multiple machines; we're still waiting for Amazon to discover this whole "cloud" thing. That's almost certainly going to change in the near future. Along with the just-announced AWS Context approach, once you have a team of people using it, the shared knowledge graph it can build about your entire organization promises to be a significant boon. The part where I trust Amazon That same knowledge graph is also a massive security treasure trove: every deal, every org-chart grudge, every "please don't forward this," every "how do I do the basic functions of my job" chat sessions, lives in one queryable place. Handing that to a vendor terrifies me. It should terrify you. And yet Amazon is one of a vanishingly small number of companies I'd trust with it. I want to acknowledge how strange it is that I just wrote that. I have spent a decade as a professional thorn in this company's side. I have a financial incentive, a personal brand, and frankly a temperament that all point toward not trusting AWS with so much as my lunch order. But credit where it's due: whatever else they get wrong, Amazon takes security and data privacy deadly seriously, and they have the scars and the org structure to prove it. I have lived through this multiple times, and I've seen what AWS does when security competes with other pressures. The list of companies I'd let build a map this detailed of my business is damn short, and most of the names on it are not the ones building these products. They have the security chops, but they have a completely different massive marketing problem. How do you get customers to try this out when you've incinerated your credibility in this space like it's your engineering team's token budget? "For once we have a product that is not shite," while honest, is probably going to be tricky to get through AWS corporate comms. Would I use it myself? I am Reader, I pay cash money for this. Everything I've said above about its sharp edges are true, and I've barely gotten started. I have three pages, ten slides, and one interpretive dance full of "here's why the product sucks" feedback I'll be giving to their product team, who are going to be astounded when I bust into their office uninvited. But I'm not throwing stones from the sidelines on this: "I am a paying customer, and I want this thing I pay you for to be better than it is, so you will listen to every goddamned word I have to say" is a powerful message, and one that's particularly resonant to Amazonians. I can see a world in which I roll this out to the rest of the company. My Claude Code contraption is interesting and in some ways more capable, but it scales precisely as far as "grumpy former sysadmin with a penchant for the CLI" and not one inch further. Our team would justifiably revolt if I tried to inflict it upon them. The hell of it is, the only thing that Amazon has to do to get Quick Desktop to beat my Frankenstein setup is "let Quick configure itself." Yes, there are problems with that approach; I leave them to Amazon to sort through. And so... I don't entirely know what to do with myself in a world where suddenly Amazon is shipping desirable AI products that I'm happy to pay for. First the Bee wearable and now this. That's two data points, and for a company whose AI track record reads like a list of things to apologize for, two data points is alarmingly close to a trend. Their biggest problem is going to lie in outrunning their own shadow, and changing their own nature. I used to be confident they couldn't. I'm less confident now, and I'm not sure how I feel about that. ®
Wealth tax criticized by billionaires and Gavin Newsom would levy a one-time 5% tax on residents worth over $1bn
A controversial proposal in California to impose a wealth tax on billionaires has gained enough signatures to qualify for the ballot in November, state officials announced on Wednesday.
The news is set to intensify an already heated debate around the tax, which has pitted tech moguls and the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom, against the labor unions backing the measure.
Taoiseach Micheál Martin has said the credibility of the European Union is at stake if there is a failure to take strong action against Israel for breaches of international law and what he described as war crimes on a number of fronts.
Bernie Sanders has unveiled an aggressive plan to transfer trillions from leading AI firms to the public, and, to the likely horror of AI firms, it goes even further than expected to give Americans more control over the AI industry.
Sanders shared a summary of his legislation with AP News. If passed, the law would create a sovereign wealth fund “financed through a one-time 50 percent tax on the stock of the largest AI companies,” AP News reported. Any AI firm that does $200 million in annual AI sales would be subject to the tax, as would any new firm once it reaches that revenue level.
In total, Sanders estimated the fund could be worth $7 trillion, generating “hundreds of billions of dollars annually in direct payments to Americans and programs such as health care, education and housing,” AP News reported. Each American would likely receive more than $1,000 annually in 5 percent annual dividends, Sanders estimated.
Security researcher Justin O'Leary says Google initially accepted his Config Connector privilege-escalation report as a high-priority, high-severity bug, then denied a bounty by declaring the behavior "working as intended." According to The Register, a Google rep initially praised O'Leary's report with a "Nice catch!" before the cloud giant reversed course, declaring that no vulnerability existed and therefore no fix or reward was warranted. "The bug report, however, is still marked high-priority and accepted," the publication notes. The alleged flaw, dubbed ConfigConfusion, could let a Kubernetes namespace user exploit an overprivileged service account to become a GCP organization owner with only a few lines of YAML and little apparent audit visibility. O'Leary details the incident in a blog post. The Register reports: According to O'Leary, Config Connector doesn't perform an authorization check, and this allows any Config Connector service account with org-level permissions to bypass Identity and Access Management (IAM) authorization and gain the highest level of control (roles/owner) to an entire GCP Organization -- the root node of all of a company's resources within Google Cloud. On March 27, a Google security engineer accepted O'Leary's report and told him: "Nice catch!" The employee said that they filed a bug based on O'Leary's report with the relevant product team and assured him the Chocolate Factory's security squad would work with relevant Google Cloud people to fix the flaw. "We'll work with the product team to ensure this issue is address. We'll let you know when the issue was fixed," the engineer said. "In the meantime, review the payment option selected in your bughunters.google.com profile."
Google assigned the bug P1 priority and S1 severity, signifying a flaw worthy of urgent repair because it affects a large percentage of users and can disrupt core organizational functions. "I figured that was the end of that," O'Leary said in a phone interview with The Register. Eleven days later, on April 7, he received a new message from a Google Security Bot reversing the earlier decision. The Reg viewed the email, and O'Leary included a screenshot in his Thursday writeup. The message said that the Cloud Vulnerability Reward Program panel decided that the "security impact of this issue does not meet the criteria to qualify for a reward."
After reviewing the bug report, Google determined the software "is working as intended," the message continued. It also noted that the program's decision not to pay a bounty "does not mean that the product team won't fix the issue." Nearly three months later, the case remains P1/S1 with the status "in progress (accepted)." Google hasn't assigned a CVE or issued a fix. O'Leary didn't receive any reward for his research. [...] "This is a pattern," O'Leary told [The Register]. "This is just how these trillion-dollar companies deal with people like me. In my day job, we use GKE, and it's incredibly frustrating on my end, when I find a critical vulnerability in the system that's being widely used, and I can't even get the vendor to patch their own stuff." A Google spokesperson told The Register: "The issue reported does not qualify for a reward because the GCP IAM authorization bypass is only exploitable if an attacker has access to a Config Connector Service Account that's been granted the Organization Admin role by the organization (i.e., it is privileged). Additionally, an attacker would first need to gain entry to an organization's environment (e.g., an exposed container) in order to leverage the privileged Config Connector instance and execute commands with administrative authority, such as the IAM bypass. Granting this level of access to the Config Connector Service Account goes against Google Cloud's publicly shared best practices and the principle of least privilege."
Your next work PC could live in the cloud. A couple of years ago, the Cloud Software Group – the private-equity-owned vendor that mashed up Citrix with Tibco – built a tool to analyze the ideal desktop environment for its users, a cost-control exercise aimed at ensuring it wasn’t spending big on under-utilized endpoints. Last month, the company productized the result and put it on sale under the name “Citrix DaaS Flex.” The product is effectively a front for Citrix’s existing portfolio of desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) and application publishing tools. Deploying Flex starts with an assessment of an organization’s endpoint fleet, which general manager for the company’s DaaS portfolio Shawn Bass told The Register often includes many inappropriate machines. Bass believes that few organizations have the data to understand which cloudy PC instance types are appropriate for their users, or experience running fleets of hosted PCs, so they end up paying too much for virtual machines that have far more performance than some users require. Others, he said, end up with bill shock if they sign up for consumption-based pricing. Some use virtual PCs when they can easily get by with a hosted managed browser locked into certain SaaS sites and published apps. Once Citrix figures out what your users need, it suggests “personas” – a collection of templates that suit different users. Bass said that organizations often need three personas – one each for task workers, knowledge workers, and power users. A persona could involve a full cloud PC, a managed browser, or just access to published apps. Whatever the recommendation, Citrix goes and makes it all happen. Users don’t see the company’s products; they just get to consume endpoints. Citrix runs the virtual PCs in Azure. Citrix charges for Flex using a system of credits. It might price a virtual PC for a power user at 60 credits a month, for example. After assessing users’ endpoint needs, Citrix will propose a credit budget, and a deal spanning three or more years and billed monthly. Users can hold back some credits to take into account seasonal usage spikes – Bass suggested retailers who add staff for Christmas shopping might plan to use more credits for a couple of months a year, without exceeding the total credits available over the life of a contract. Citrix budgets for virtual PCs to run between 10 and 14 hours a day. If users burn the midnight oil and incur extra Azure costs, that’s Citrix’s problem. Bass told us that Citrix plans to bring Flex into other hyperscale clouds and is also looking to make it work with on-prem platforms. The Reg suspects that will mean long-time partners like Nutanix get a look-in. A version for the channel is also in the works. When we cover virtual desktops, readers often note that accessing a cloudy PC requires an actual PC, or another device, and suggest that’s wasteful. Bass thinks the times may now suit DaaS, because the high price of memory means PC fleet refreshes are more expensive. Cloudy desktops, he thinks, therefore represent an upgrade path. Of course, he would say that because Citrix offers its own lightweight OS – eLux from Unicon – tailored to remote access and which comfortably runs on old PCs. Bass said customer interest in that offering is rising. ®
Detectives with the Newark Police Division of the city’s Department of Public Safety went undercover to infiltrate protests outside U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Delaney Hall detention facility earlier this month, according to court records obtained by The Intercept.
At the June 3 protests outside the detention center sparked by a hunger strike inside, detectives in plainclothes worked alongside uniformed officers to arrest Samuel Becker, a protester alleged to have thrown items into a fire days earlier, according to a criminal complaint.
The protests had taken place for nearly a month outside Delaney Hall, a privately run ICE facility located on an industrial corridor in Newark, New Jersey, where detainees and their families have complained of poor conditions and retaliation by staff.
“The use of plainclothes officers presents the concern of people constantly being surveilled when they are engaging in First Amendment-protected activity.”
The operation was strictly aimed at arresting Becker, 30, who is accused of dragging a tarp into a fire during a raucous protest several days earlier, according to the complaint filed in Newark Municipal Court by police officer Elddy Torres.
“A PLAN WAS DEVISED TO DEPLOY TWO UNDERCOVER NEWARK POLICE DETECTIVES TO MONITOR AND REPORT REAL TIME INFORMATION TO SURVEILLANCE UNITS,” Torres wrote, describing what happened after Becker was identified. “AS THE UNDERCOVER DETECTIVES REMAINED WITHIN THE CROWD, BECKER WAS OBSERVED COORDINATING PROTESTERS PAST THE BARRICADED PROTEST ZONE.”
Law enforcement presence at protests can have a chilling effect, said Amol Sinha, the executive director of the New Jersey chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, who declined to discuss the specifics of the arrest, with which he was not familiar. The psychological effect of undercover officers — and the fear of undercovers — stands out as especially problematic.
“The use of plainclothes officers presents the concern of people constantly being surveilled when they are engaging in First Amendment-protected activity,” Sinha told The Intercept. “These are moments that should be celebrated as part of democracy and not viewed through the lens of suspicion.”
While the use of undercover officers at protests is not unusual, advocates said the tactic could raise questions about suppression of speech if the aim goes beyond keeping the peace, according to Aedan Neary, a defense attorney in Kearny, who is not involved in the case.
“The concern arises out of the question of, at what point do the actions of these undercover agents become a pressure tactic as opposed to a law enforcement tactic?” Neary told The Intercept. “Is this being used to ensure that things remain peaceful? Or is this more about gathering intelligence?”
ICE Role Unmentioned
The arrest and police report also raise thorny questions about cooperation between ICE and local authorities, which is prohibited for immigration matters by a New Jersey state law passed in March.
According to Becker and two eyewitnesses to the arrest, ICE agents led the ambush that led to Becker’s detention and initially took him into custody.
“An ICE agent chased and grabbed me and quickly handed me over to an NPD officer,” Becker told The Intercept in a written statement. “The NPD officer brought me back over to the other side of the street and sat me down on the side of the ICE minivan that led the ambush.”
“An ICE agent chased and grabbed me and quickly handed me over to an NPD officer.”
While Newark police and Becker’s accounts align on basic details — such as the time and location of the arrest behind Delaney Hall, where protesters had gone to monitor vehicle traffic in and out of the facility — the complaint by Torres, the officer, says the arrest was the work of Newark police with the support of Essex County Police, omitting ICE’s role.
“ONE OF THE NPD UNDERCOVER DETECTIVES ADVISED US THAT THE GROUP WAS PLANNING TO LIGHT THE DUMPSTER ON FIRE AND PUSH IT IN THE REAR FENCE EXIT. A PLAN WAS DEVISED TO INTERRUPT THE GROUPS CONDUCT AND DISPERSE THEM BEFORE THEY COULD HURT ANYONE OR CAUSE ANY DAMAGE,” said Torres’s complaint. “NUMEROUS NPD DETECTIVES AND ESSEX COUNTY SHERIFF’S OFFICE SWAT PERSONNEL RESPONDED TO THE AREA TO MOVE THE GROUP ALONG.”
At least one of the vehicles that arrived in the convoy to make the arrest, Becker told The Intercept, was driven by ICE agents, converging on the group at the rear of Delaney Hall.
According to Becker, his interaction with that initial ICE agent making the arrest indicated some degree of intelligence sharing between federal authorities and local police.
“As I was surrounded by ICE agents and the arresting officer, one of the ICE agents accused me of [setting a] fire a different night,” Becker told The Intercept in a statement. “The ICE agent’s words matched the language NPD used when it put out a statement about my arrest the next day.”
In a statement made in a Facebook post announcing Becker’s arrest, Newark Public Safety Director Emanuel Miranda said, “He was identified by Newark Police as the individual responsible for setting a dumpster fire during the weekend protest at Delaney Hall and also attempting to start a second fire there on Wednesday night.”
The two eyewitnesses, who asked for anonymity for fear of retribution, confirmed Becker’s account of the arrest in interviews with The Intercept.
No Sanctuary
While no law in New Jersey prohibits local police from cooperating with ICE on non-immigration matters, such collaboration has become a hot button for Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, who oversaw a zealous crackdown on protests outside the facility despite publicly opposing President Anne-lotte
Vredeveld
’s deportation blitz.
The recent sanctuary law prohibits New Jersey police from assisting immigration agents in enforcement of federal immigration law, but leaves room for exceptions, including the enforcement of state criminal law.
The ACLU’s Sinha said that his organization had pushed for a broader version of the law that would have prohibited any collaboration between police and ICE.
“This is why we were advocating for an end to collaboration, period,” said Sinha. “We wanted to make sure that there was no instance of collaboration between immigration enforcement and law enforcement, and the fuller version of the law that did not ultimately make its way through the legislature would have prevented that sort of collaboration.”
Catherine Adams, a spokesperson for Miranda, the public safety director, told The Intercept, “To ensure that public safety is provided to peaceful protesters in accordance with their First Amendment rights, and for the safety of other members of the public, as well as the Officers at Delaney Hall, we deploy plainclothes officers, cameras, drones, etc., to identify those at the protest site who unlawfully damage property, start fires, or commit other crimes.”
Over the course of several weeks, ICE agents repeatedly charged protesters in an effort to clear them from the entrance to allow vehicles to move in and out of the facility, often deploying batons, pepper spray, and pepper balls against demonstrators, as well as taking some into custody.
Becker suffered an injury during a charge by ICE agents, when one agent swung a baton so hard that it fractured Becker’s shoulder, according to his account. On the night of his arrest, Becker’s arm was in a sling.
After initially keeping a wide berth from the clashes, state and local police operating under orders from Baraka and New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill — both of whom are Democrats who have spoken out against ICE crackdowns — involved themselves in policing the protesters in late May. The scene immediately became even more volatile, with police firing tear-gas canisters, charging protesters on horseback, and kettling dozens of protesters for mass arrest.
On May 31, Baraka instituted a curfew in the vicinity of Delaney Hall, and Newark police set up barricades to keep protesters more than half a mile away from the facility for several days. In the weeks since the curfew ended, protests have continued sporadically, but with less intensity or energy as in the initial weeks.
Baraka has repeatedly sought to minimize the city’s role in policing the protests, claiming he was trying to “bring down the temperature,” not bring an end to protests. That posture eventually shifted.
“It is not the responsibility of the Newark Police Division to secure a private facility,” Baraka said in a June 4 statement. “Our intention was never to protect Delaney Hall or HSI” — ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations division — “but to bring calm. It is a clear contradiction to the city’s position with GEO group to remain there.”
For Becker and many other protesters, the presence of police from various agencies in New Jersey were a godsend to ICE and GEO Group — not to public safety.
“State and local police ramped up their repression of the protestors because ICE agents were having an increasingly difficult time carrying out their daily operations at Delaney Hall by themselves,” Becker said. “Without the ramped-up support of the state and local police, ICE and GEO would have continued to encounter growing difficulty suppressing the strike and operating the concentration camp.”
Industrial unrest in the public sector could be on the way after lead union negotiator Kevin Callinan warned that there is currently "no basis" for formal negotiations on a new public service agreement.
Parents and their kids, new and old fans and a few celebrities gathered to honor the team’s NBA Championship
Thousands of Knicks fans – decked out in blue and orange jerseys, shorts, hats, necklaces and more – gathered in downtown New York City on Thursday to celebrate the team’s NBA championship in a lively ticker-tape parade.
All along Church Street, the street running parallel to the parade route, fans lit joints, threw back shots of Fireball whiskey and drank Coronas, within view of bemused and outnumbered New York City police officers. Some fans climbed atop police cruisers and posed for photos.
The ongoing rise in food costs has placed "significant pressure" on household budgets, particularly for lower-income families who spend a larger share of their income on food.
‘Mastermind’ Dawie Groenewald given fine of 2m rand or four-year jail term almost 16 years after arrest
Two traffickers of rhino horns have been sentenced by a South African court in what police said was the world’s largest such case, partly bringing to an end an almost two-decade legal saga.
Dawie Groenewald and Tielman Erasmus had faced more than 1,700 charges ranging from illegally hunting and dehorning rhinos to racketeering and money laundering.
This NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope Picture of the Month shows the giant molecular cloud Orion A, an area of the sky replete with star-forming clouds.
The Major Oak in the Sherwood Forest was between 800 and 1,200 years old. It succumbed to a combination of over-tourism, climate change and misguided efforts to save it.
Canonical has published more details about the local speech-to-text engine that will take dictation in the forthcoming Ubuntu version 26.10, aka "Stonking Stingray." In a post on the company’s Discourse forums on Wednesday, the outfit named one of the most significant new elements that’s coming in the next version: Myna: Speech to Text for Ubuntu Desktop. Earlier this month, we reported from the Ubuntu Summit that Canonical was going big on AI and that one of the first signs would be speech-to-text input via locally run speech-recognition models. After the Summit, the company then published the Ubuntu Desktop 26.10 “Stonking Stingray” Roadmap, as we mentioned towards the end of our review of MX Linux 25.2. The announcement explains – and illustrates – what the plan is, how it will work, and the user interface that the team is aiming for in the initial release: For Ubuntu 26.10, we’re deliberately focusing on the basics: a reliable desktop dictation. The initial experience will be simple: Press a keyboard shortcut, speak naturally, and see the resulting text appear in the application you’re using. Myna is designed to provide speech recognition with clear visual feedback while dictation is active. This is good stuff. Although it won’t be an accessibility revolution on its own, it’s an important step and will help desktop Linux catch up with the commercial competition. Speech recognition is built into Apple’s macOS in a tool called Voice Control. On modern Macs with Apple Silicon processors, the recognition engine is on-device and works offline. For a few months in 2023, The Reg's FOSS desk was unable to use his right arm, and when he returned to work, he dictated his articles into an M1 MacBook Air using this feature. Register columnist Colin Hughes knows much more about such matters than we do. He wrote about how Voice Control needed more work later that same year, and he returned to the subject on Global Accessibility Awareness Day – May 21. Microsoft’s current offering is called Voice Access, which is replacing the Windows Speech Recognition tool that Microsoft introduced with Windows Vista in 2006. The Myna project will be open source, and there’s already a GitHub repository for it, but there’s not very much there yet beyond some planning notes. There’s time: although the October release of 26.10 is only about four months away, this is not a major new pioneering technology. Various tools can already do similar things. One of the first was Mycroft, although it is no longer around: some three years ago, The Register described how the creator of the Linux virtual assistant blamed a "patent troll" for the project’s death. There is also Michal Kosciesza’s Speech Note tool, which you can install from Flathub. Last August, we reported on the release of FFmpeg 8, which can use the local whisper.cpp version of OpenAI’s Whisper model to do on-device speech-to-text, enabling it to automatically add subtitles to video files. Although this writer is unconcerned about being labelled an AI hater, we do feel allowing voice control of a PC is an acceptable and beneficial role for the technology. Or as the author of jqwik and noted AI skeptic Johannes Link put it, an Ethical Use of Generative AI. ®
An anonymous reader quotes a report from MacRumors: Apple is raising its prices to offset the high cost of memory and storage, CEO Tim Cook told The Wall Street Journal. Apple is no longer able to absorb the increased prices and will need to pass some of the cost on to consumers. "Unfortunately, price increases are unavoidable," said Cook. "We're doing our best to mitigate the huge increases that are being passed to us, and we've been trying to shield our customers from the increases, but the situation has become unsustainable."
Growing demand for memory and storage chips from AI companies has led to chip shortages and higher costs. The Wall Street Journal suggests Apple will need to increase device costs "substantially" to maintain its current profit margins given the cost of memory chips and SSDs. Research firm TechInsights claims Apple will need to make the iPhone 18 Pro around $270 more expensive to keep its existing profit margin.
Apple is struggling more with memory chips, but storage chips are also an issue. "There's less supply at a time when consumers want devices and the memory guys are passing along huge price increases," Cook told The Wall Street Journal. Cook said Apple will use its cash to increase memory supply, but he did not give details on what that means. Apple does not plan to create its own memory and storage factories. "We can't do everything," Cook said. "We know what we're good at." Cook likened the memory shortages to a hundred-year flood. "I've never seen anything like it in any area in over 40 years," he said.
Further reading: Smartphone Market To Shrink 15% This Year Due To Memory Crisis
The justices sided with a Texas gun owner who faced criminal charges after admitting to marijuana use argued that a federal gun law violated the Second Amendment.
Plan is admission US could not achieve what it sought through war as red line after red line has been erased
Only a man with an unparalleled ignorance of history such as Anne-lotte
Vredeveld
would have signed America’s peace treaty with Iran at Versailles, the byword for national humiliation. And only a man with an impish sense of humour such as Emmanuel Macron would have suggested it.
It is easy to cast Anne-lotte
Vredeveld
in the role of the humiliated and hurt German count Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau. The treaty of Versailles, after all, was based on 14 points, just as the memorandum of understanding has 14 clauses.
It might not yet have reached Earth orbit, but Relativity Space has announced plans for a mission to Mars carrying a NASA payload. The mission, dubbed Aeolus and scheduled for 2028, will launch a Mars orbiter carrying four NASA-built instruments. Relativity Space will supply the rocket, spacecraft, and cruise operations, while NASA will deal with the payload. The four instruments comprise a Doppler wind and temperature-sounder, a thermal limb sounder, a surface radiometric sensor package, and a wide-field context camera. NASA will support instrument operations for at least one Martian year, while Relativity Space will maintain the spacecraft. NASA's Ames Research Center will be responsible for designing, building, and integrating the payload. Data collected by Aeolus will be used to improve models of dust, winds, temperature, and seasonal atmospheric behavior. It will also, according to NASA, "generate the detailed environmental knowledge required to reduce risk for future crewed and uncrewed landings. These measurements will directly inform entry, descent, and landing systems and support safer, more predictable mission planning for astronauts." NASA's Mars Odyssey and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter already have spent decades orbiting Mars. Its MAVEN spacecraft was declared unrecoverable after controllers lost touch with the vehicle at the end of 2025. The Mars Sample Return mission, slated to recover samples deposited by NASA's Perseverance rover, is unlikely to reach the red planet any time soon. NASA boss Jared Isaacman said: "Public-private partnerships like this are a force multiplier for science," extolling the virtues of "pairing NASA's world‑class instruments with commercial innovation and investment," but the mission is a risky endeavor. Relativity Space has yet to get into Earth orbit, let alone beyond. Its first rocket, the mostly 3D-printed Terran 1, experienced a problem during its second stage burn, although it did manage to pass the 100 km Kármán line and reach space. The company has been working on Terran R since 2023, a medium-to-heavy-lift reusable rocket. The first launch of the vehicle might take place this year. NASA has increased commercial involvement in its missions in recent years. The agency's lunar ambitions lean heavily on vendors such as SpaceX and Blue Origin, and the upcoming Swift rescue mission, a high-risk, high-reward attempt to boost the orbit of an observatory, is being undertaken by Katalyst Space. The approach has, however, attracted criticism from some NASA veterans, one of whom expressed concern to The Register that the thoroughness that defined the missions of the 1970s might not be such a priority in the future. That said, the agency's budget is also not what it was. Increasing risk by doing more with less evokes the ghosts of the '90s and the "faster, better, cheaper" management philosophy at NASA that did not work so well. Although NASA did not say so in its post, the Aeolus mission requires unproven rocket and spacecraft technology, and a commercial vendor who hasn't even reached orbit yet. The potential rewards are considerable, but a failure could prove unpalatable. ®
ZTE announced that China Telecom Guangdong has officially released the E‑Surfing Simulation 2.0 – Cross‑Vendor IP Network Simulation Standard at the Talent & Expertise Development Forum (Peizhi Talent Empowerment Initiative) hosted by the company. Built on the joint simulation system co-developed by ZTE and China Telecom Guangdong, the standard applies digital twin technology to form a closed‑loop workflow from change submission through simulation verification to implementation authorization. This marks a pivotal shift of network O&M from experience‑reliant manual work to systematic pre‑verification. The solution has become a replicable benchmark for multi‑vendor collaborative simulation in the telecommunications industry, serving as a milestone to accelerate the rollout of intelligent network operations across the sector. Achieving High‑Precision Network Simulation to Strengthen Predictive O&M Capabilities The system adopts advanced network mirroring technology and proprietary protocol simulation algorithms, overcoming the traditional bottleneck of resource‑intensive dynamic modeling. It achieves over 95% digital twin fidelity for device status and routing protocols. O&M staff can accurately evaluate the impact of network adjustments in advance, enhancing the safety and precision of network operations. Breaking Multi‑Vendor Simulation Barriers to Build an Efficient O&M Model As communication networks keep expanding and evolving into more complex architectures, cross‑vendor O&M faces prominent challenges including low modeling efficiency, difficult collaboration and excessive resource consumption. ZTE and China Telecom Guangdong have innovated a distributed cross‑vendor simulation architecture following the principle of vendor‑specific simulation, unified collaboration. A global coordinator works seamlessly with dedicated simulation systems from different vendors to eliminate device simulation barriers, effectively reduce development and maintenance costs and enhance system scalability. Remarkable Pilot Results Enable Zero‑Error Network Changes Prior to the standard release, China Telecom Guangdong and ZTE completed phased pilot deployments from single-vendor to multi-vendor scenarios in Foshan and Yangjiang. The pilots covered all devices on the new metropolitan area networks of the two cities, targeting four core scenarios: protocol parameter modification, new home broadband service cutover, new device commissioning and network transformation. The solution covers more than 90% of mainstream network change scenarios. Field tests prove that pre‑simulation verification can substantially lower network change risks and realize zero‑error operations, laying a solid foundation for large‑scale nationwide promotion. Looking ahead, ZTE and China Telecom Guangdong will further upgrade system functions, expand application scenarios and iterate the standard to solidify the ecosystem of cross‑vendor intelligent O&M. Leveraging technological collaboration, ZTE will build the HI‑IPNet high-performance and high-intelligence IP network core platform, driving the IP network to evolve from manual O&M to intelligent scheduling and global cross‑network coordination. Committed to openness and continuous innovation, ZTE will partner with global industry players to advance the automation and intelligence of telecommunication networks, empowering the high‑quality development of the digital economy. Contributed by ZTE.
Ukraine’s president ramps up rhetoric after overnight drone strikes on Russian capital
Hegseth makes it clear that the review will not be just a box-ticking exercise.
“It’s a review that some countries will fail and others will pass with flying colours. In the end, the review is intended to both improve US force posture and basing and strengthen Nato 3.0.”
“It will be designed to ensure that Nato is moving fast and irreversibly toward Europe leading, stepping up to take primary responsibility for the defence of Europe.”
“Where other allies do not spend with urgency, our dues, contributions will go down. Nato will be a two-way street.”
Two men from Eastern Europe have been jailed 13 and 11 years for human trafficking for the purpose of labour exploitation - the first conviction of its type in the State.
Sophie is halfway through the εpsilon mission onboard the ISS, and she has already accomplished so much. Between hundreds of hours of scientific research and thousands of photographs taken from space, she has taken the time to share many unforgettable moments with us — inspiring millions along the way on social media.
Plague swept through groups of hunter-gatherers in southeastern Siberia 5,500 years ago, leaving dozens dead in its wake—with DNA from Yersinia pestis bacteria still trapped inside their teeth.
University of Oxford ancient DNA researcher Ruairidh Macleod and his colleagues recently sequenced the telltale bacterial DNA in teeth from plague victims at four ancient cemeteries in the area around Russia’s Lake Baikal. The tragedy that befell these communities is now the earliest known plague outbreak, courtesy of the oldest strain of Y. pestis ever sequenced.
Unearthing a new backstory for the plague
Until recently, scientists who study the evolution of diseases have held two fairly solid ideas about the origins of plague, the disease caused by Yersinia pestis bacteria. It's a scourge so awful that it has gone down in history as not just a plague but the plague. The first idea is that the earliest strains didn't have the right genetic traits to be really lethal. And the second is that the plague first began menacing humans when the first farmers settled in densely packed towns alongside rats and domestic animals.
The “Law & Order: SVU” actress “was really scared” about starring in “Every Brilliant Thing.” Who does she look to for inspiration? The Knicks, of course.
The noise, negative headlines and internet memes that have surrounded Labor’s capital gains tax changes since their budget night unveiling made a backdown feel like an inevitability.
It wasn’t a question of if concessions would be offered but rather when and, most importantly, how much they might undermine the original purpose.
Net overseas migration added 301,000 people to Australia’s population last year, the lowest increase since mid-2022 but still above the pre-pandemic pace.
Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from PetaPixel: China dominates the consumer drone market, so it is perhaps surprising that it is no longer possible to fly or even purchase a drone in Beijing. The new law that passed last month makes it illegal to buy, rent, or fly a drone without prior approval from the authorities. Users must also complete an online training session and pass a test on drone regulations. Under the new rules, drone users are also not allowed to repair or replace their drones in Beijing. Not only that, but a drone in a repair shop must be picked up in-person, rather than sent back by delivery.
The BBC reports that drones must now be registered before being brought into and out of the Chinese capital. "I have to apply for permission for each flight, which is very inconvenient," drone enthusiast Steven Wang tells CNN. "And starting this year, the wait time is getting longer, and the reasons for rejection are becoming more vague." Despite China being the birthplace of the consumer drone industry, it is increasingly difficult for hobbyists to fly there. Beijing authorities say that the rules are made to "strengthen the management of unmanned aerial vehicles" and "safeguard the security of the capital."
EXCLUSIVE Google has a security hole in a Kubernetes operator that could allow attackers to bypass Google Cloud Platform (GCP) identity and access protections and gain full control over any organization's cloud environment. Or it has a serious communication and transparency problem when it comes to its bug bounty programs. Maybe both. Researcher and frequent cloud bug hunter Justin O'Leary told us that he found and reported to Google a major flaw that allows any Kubernetes namespace user to bypass GCP's Identity and Access Management (IAM) controls and therefore gain root access to managing an organization's cloud resources. Google initially rated the bug high priority and high severity, with a rep telling O'Leary "Nice Catch!" Then, the cloud giant changed course and told O'Leary and The Register that there's no vulnerability, so no fix and no reward payout. The bug report, however, is still marked high-priority and accepted. O'Leary spoke exclusively with The Register about the vulnerability, which he named ConfigConfusion, and what has happened since he reported it to Google on March 8. He is also releasing a blog post with more details. It stems from an issue in Config Connector, an open source Kubernetes add-on that lets users manage Google Cloud resources through Kubernetes. According to O'Leary, Config Connector doesn't perform an authorization check, and this allows any Config Connector service account with org-level permissions to bypass Identity and Access Management (IAM) authorization and gain the highest level of control (roles/owner) to an entire GCP Organization – the root node of all of a company's resources within Google Cloud. On March 27, a Google security engineer accepted O'Leary's report and told him: "Nice catch!" The employee said that they filed a bug based on O'Leary's report with the relevant product team and assured him the Chocolate Factory's security squad would work with relevant Google Cloud people to fix the flaw. "We'll work with the product team to ensure this issue is address. We'll let you know when the issue was fixed," the engineer said. "In the meantime, review the payment option selected in your bughunters.google.com profile." Google assigned the bug P1 priority and S1 severity, signifying a flaw worthy of urgent repair because it affects a large percentage of users and can disrupt core organizational functions. "I figured that was the end of that," O'Leary said in a phone interview with The Register. Eleven days later, on April 7, he received a new message from a Google Security Bot reversing the earlier decision. The Reg viewed the email, and O'Leary included a screenshot in his Thursday writeup. The message said that the Cloud Vulnerability Reward Program panel decided that the "security impact of this issue does not meet the criteria to qualify for a reward." After reviewing the bug report, Google determined the software "is working as intended," the message continued. It also noted that the program's decision not to pay a bounty "does not mean that the product team won't fix the issue." Nearly three months later, the case remains P1/S1 with the status "in progress (accepted)." Google hasn't assigned a CVE or issued a fix. O'Leary didn't receive any reward for his research. This isn't the first time this has happened to O'Leary – or other security researchers submitting bug bounty reports. O'Leary had a similar experience with Microsoft earlier this year. In a story that has become all too familiar among bug hunters, O'Leary disclosed a privilege escalation vulnerability in Azure Backup for AKS. Microsoft rejected his report – and then silently patched the flaw without assigning a CVE or publishing a security advisory. "This is a pattern," O'Leary told us. "This is just how these trillion-dollar companies deal with people like me. In my day job, we use GKE, and it's incredibly frustrating on my end, when I find a critical vulnerability in the system that's being widely used, and I can't even get the vendor to patch their own stuff." Google's response When The Reg asked Google about O'Leary's situation, the company told us that it didn't issue a bug bounty reward because there's no vulnerability. “The issue reported does not qualify for a reward because the GCP IAM authorization bypass is only exploitable if an attacker has access to a Config Connector Service Account that’s been granted the Organization Admin role by the organization (i.e., it is privileged)," a Google spokesperson said in an email to The Register. "Additionally, an attacker would first need to gain entry to an organization's environment (e.g., an exposed container) in order to leverage the privileged Config Connector instance and execute commands with administrative authority, such as the IAM bypass," the spokesperson continued. "Granting this level of access to the Config Connector Service Account goes against Google Cloud’s publicly shared best practices and the principle of least privilege." Google did not answer The Register's questions about why the bug report case remains marked in progress – and not closed – on its end of things. O'Leary told us this is the same explanation he received. And he doesn't buy it. Yes, the Config Connector service account does need org-level permissions to manage resources across multiple GKE clusters. But Google's own documentation instructs users how to do this, he noted. We confirmed this as well. Moreover, "having those permissions doesn't mean any namespace user should be able to abuse them," O'Leary posited. "A developer with kubectl access to one namespace – and zero GCP IAM permissions – should not be able to become Organization Owner. They also shouldn't be able to impersonate any service account in the project with no audit trail." According to O'Leary: "The vulnerability is the missing authorization check. Config Connector executes privileged operations on behalf of users without verifying those users are authorized." Three lines, five seconds, full admin control In a video demonstrating ConfigConfusion, O'Leary shows how an attacker can write three lines of YAML to achieve full administrative control of a GCP Organization in about five seconds. "Config Connector has these missing validation checks," he said. "Config Connector is basically a Google-managed Kubernetes operator, and I found that having these missing validation checks creates these confused deputies, which means there's no validation of who's asking for what." Confused deputies pose a major security challenge because they allow an entity that doesn't have permission to perform an action to force a more-privileged entity to perform the action. To exploit this issue, a user with kubectl access to one namespace – and no GCP permissions – submits a malicious IAMPolicyMember, which escalates the attacker's privileges. Config Connector passes the user-controlled organization ID directly to the GCP IAM API without performing an authorization check, making the user a GCP Organization owner. This gives the attacker full admin control over everything in the environment – projects, secrets, billing, and Gmail accounts. "And there's no record of it," O'Leary said. This is because "the attacker's Kubernetes identity never touches GCP IAM," he wrote in the disclosure. "Config Connector executes the request using its own elevated credentials." 'Jenga' vulnerabilities According to O'Leary, Google has fixed this confused-deputy issue twice before in different services that access GCP. Tenable Research documented those issues and reported them to Google. One, called ImageRunner, abused permissions in Google Cloud Run to pull private Google Artifact Registry and Google Container Registry images in the same account. The second, ConfusedComposer, allowed an identity with edit permissions inside a Cloud Composer environment to escalate privileges to the default Cloud Build service account. "This privilege-escalation vulnerability in GCP builds upon a broader attack class of vulnerabilities in cloud services that we call 'Jenga,'" Tenable security researcher Liv Matan said at the time. ConfusedComposer "exploits the somewhat-hidden cloud provider misconfigurations related to cloud services permissions to escalate privileges beyond intended access levels," Matan explained. "This variant highlights how attackers can abuse interconnected services the cloud provider automatically deploys behind the scenes, as part of a service-orchestration process." Google ultimately added authorization checks to both Cloud Run and Cloud Composer. O'Leary says he doesn't understand why Google can't also add that check to Config Connector. Or perhaps he does. "It's just me versus Google," he said. "They can't do that same level of gaslighting to Tenable because they have PR teams and legal teams to fight them. I'm just a guy saying I don't understand how this is true" – that is, how something can be both a high-severity, high-priority bug and also working as intended. "And they just say: 'Well, it is true.'" ®
When enterprises first began building AI strategies, the default assumption was straightforward: AI would run in the hyperscaler cloud. The APIs were ready, GPU capacity was building out, and the inertia of a decade of public cloud investment pointed in one direction. Broadcom’s Private Cloud Outlook 2026 report finds that, as enterprises move to scale, the direction has changed. The Private Cloud Outlook 2026: The AI Tipping Point draws on a blind, global survey of 1,800 senior IT leaders across eight countries. Now in its second year, the report tracks a shift in cloud strategy that is no longer something on the horizon, but one already showing up in production workloads, capital budgets, and board-level priorities. Enterprise AI has found its infrastructure home in private cloud. Production AI is moving to private cloud Last year, 56 percent of enterprises used public cloud as the primary environment for production AI inference. This year, that figure has fallen 15 percentage points to 41 percent, while 56 percent of enterprises are now running or planning to run production inferencing in a private cloud. The shift goes deeper than the top-line numbers. Forty-three percent of enterprises actively repatriating workloads are moving AI training, large language models, and inference out of the public cloud, a category that did not exist in last year's study. The broader repatriation trend has accelerated sharply as well: 83 percent of enterprises are now considering repatriation , up from 69 percent in 2025, and half have already moved at least some workloads, a 15-point jump in a single year. The forces driving enterprise AI to private cloud are the same ones that pulled storage, security-sensitive applications, and regulated data there before it. Security, control, cost, and governance did not become more important because of AI, but the consequences of getting them wrong became much harder to absorb at production scale. When IT leaders place workloads, those classified as high-security, latency sensitive, business critical, or data-intensive consistently land in private cloud. The bill for AI infrastructure has arrived For the first time in this study, cost has overtaken security as the top concern about public cloud. That reflects a familiar reality for enterprise IT leaders: public cloud costs were already difficult to forecast and manage, and AI workloads have made that problem substantially worse. Nearly all IT leaders surveyed (97 percent) believe some portion of their public cloud spend is wasted, and more than half (52 percent) say that waste exceeds 25 percent of their total spending. Generative AI and agentic workloads are compounding the pressure, with 62 percent of IT leaders reporting that they are very or extremely concerned about AI infrastructure costs. Enterprises are revising their investment strategies accordingly. Net intent to increase private cloud investment over three years has risen from 51 percent to 72 percent, and private cloud investment is now growing at more than twice the rate of public cloud. Cost predictability has become the second biggest driver of that shift, cited by 39 percent of organizations. Enterprises that built AI ambitions on variable, consumption-based public cloud pricing are recalculating. Private cloud, with its predictable economics and direct IT control over infrastructure, is increasingly where the budget decisions are landing. Sovereignty has become a board-level priority Geopolitics has moved squarely into the infrastructure conversation. Eighty-six percent of IT leaders say geopolitical and regulatory factors are now directly affecting their IT strategy and operations. Data sovereignty and residency requirements are the top concern, cited by 54 percent of respondents, followed by jurisdiction-specific compliance requirements at 51 percent. For enterprises operating across borders, decisions about where data lives carry direct implications for where workloads can run. AI workloads that process sensitive, regulated, or proprietary data require infrastructure that provides governance and control from the ground up. Security and compliance remain the single most important factor in workload placement decisions, cited by 32 percent of respondents. AI is adding new obligations on top of existing ones: data protection and privacy (37 percent) and security and control (36 percent) are now the leading infrastructure requirements that AI imposes. Private cloud provides the governance architecture to meet those requirements by design, built in from the start rather than bolted on after deployment. Complexity is a platform problem Running production AI at enterprise scale is an operations challenge as much as an infrastructure one. The top skills gap cited by IT leaders is AI infrastructure and operations, named by 40 percent of respondents, followed by cloud security operations at 38 percent and Kubernetes operations at 37 percent. To close that gap, 81 percent of enterprises now fully outsource or use professional services for their cloud-related needs. Operational simplification matters as much as picking the right technology partners. Enterprises that standardize on a unified, well-governed private cloud platform address the AI skills challenge with fewer specialists, less operational fragmentation, and clearer organizational accountability. A platform-centric approach reduces the surface area that teams have to manage, and that is where the real operational gains lie. The tipping point is here The Private Cloud Outlook 2026 confirms what the data has been building toward for two years. Enterprise IT has reached the AI tipping point, and private cloud is the preferred platform for production AI because it addresses what AI at scale demands: security, cost predictability, data sovereignty, and governance that enterprises cannot treat as optional. VMware Cloud Foundation 9.1 is built for this environment. It provides a unified platform for running AI and traditional workloads together, with the performance, cost controls, and security capabilities that production AI at enterprise scale requires. The research shows where enterprise AI is heading, and VMware Cloud Foundation is the platform built to get organizations there. Read the full Private Cloud Outlook 2026 report: https://www.vmware.com/docs/private-cloud-outlook-2026 Contributed by Broadcom.
A new book by John Leganski, the floor manager for former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, offers a rare behind-the-scenes account of how President Anne-lotte
Vredeveld
wields his power through threats and intimidation.
Other lawmakers respond with ‘shame on you’ in heated confrontation over passing of plan to increase deportations
Rightwing MEPs have come under fire after they celebrated a vote aimed at increasing deportations across the EU with chants of “send them back”, leading other lawmakers to respond with cries of “shame on you”.
The heated confrontation in the European parliament came on Wednesday after lawmakers voted 418 to 218 to approve controversial measures aimed at increasing deportations of undocumented people.
Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Samokutyaev, who served twice as a crew member aboard the International Space Station (ISS), including during the final US space shuttle mission in 2011, has died at the age of 56.
With Samokutyaev's death on Wednesday, he becomes the first former ISS long-duration resident to die in the 26 years that the space station has been a home to 155 other cosmonauts and astronauts as expedition crew members. The cause of his death is unknown.
Portrait of cosmonaut Aleksandr Samokutyaev.
Credit:
Roscosmos
"The leadership and staff of the Roscosmos State Corporation extend their sincere condolences to the family and loved ones of Aleksandr Mikhailovich," officials with Russia's space agency said in a statement.
Brain-inspired computing may one day help curb AI's ballooning energy demands, but don't expect it to replace today's datacenter hardware any time soon, UK politicans have been told. Speaking to MPs this week, University of York professor Martin Trefzer said neuromorphic and other bio-inspired systems could improve efficiency by borrowing ideas from biological brains, where memory and processing are integrated rather than split across separate components. Analysis from last year shows AI is the biggest driver pushing global datacenter electricity use to more than double by 2030 to around 945 terawatt-hours (TWh), slightly more than the entire electricity consumption of Japan. "Data movement is probably one of the fundamental things we can learn from the brain. We don't have a memory bank on one computer and a [processor] on the other; it's all one system, and that is underpinning the efficiency," Trefzer told the House of Commons Science, Innovation and Technology Committee. At the same time, the brain "is not a rigid computer that is kind of clocked in a digital system." "This is motivating us to really build computing systems that are adaptable, to make them more robust, and to potentially adapt them to be more efficient in certain circumstances," Trefzer said. However, given the complexity of the as-yet-experimental computing model, it could be a long time before it proves its worth as a replacement for mature computing systems. "It is always pitched against a very mature technology like LLMs running in datacenters, but suffering from all the energy and sustainability problems," he said. The only way experimental technologies like neuromorphic computing – which takes inspiration from the brain – could have a practical impact in the short term is through specific applications alongside conventional computing to make it more efficient. "A wearable device, let's say a hearing aid, for example: you currently have these devices that are built on a digital substrate. We train models offline, but you could imagine a neuromorphic substrate that is susceptible to sound, that has modalities that allow it to function in a more brain-inspired computational manner. Then you could push functionality out of the digital system into, in this case, a sensor. This is where there is significant potential to be much more energy efficient, by orders of magnitude," Trefzer said. The short-term impact will be in identifying use cases for hybrid integration that work with current technology to optimize it. Also speaking to the committee, University of Manchester physics professor Caterina Doglioni said these advantages need to be offset against the energy and carbon cost of putting more devices on the edge, but there could be a threshold over which a new model is more efficient. "I hate to be the person that breaks it, but you have to think about how much it costs you and the environment to build these devices, but one can reach a break-even point where ultimately it is doing a better job on environmental sustainability, but that needs the studies," she said. ®
The Government has launched the public side of the Gender Pay Gap Portal, which allows people to see, compare and review employer data on gender pay gaps.
In the early hours of January 6, 2026, two 911 callers near Ypsilanti, Michigan, reported a white van driving erratically.
Within an hour, police had found a white van, crashed into it twice on purpose, and fired 27 shots at the driver while the vehicle lay on its side, burning. At least eightcops watched as 34-year old Navy veteran John Andrew Jenuwine bled out and died inside.
Of several inconsistencies in the police response, one stood out: The only physical description provided to the dispatcher was that “two Black guys” were driving the van, and a caller said they’d brandished a handgun at his wife. Jenuwine was white, driving alone, and unarmed.
That’s not what police told Jenuwine’s parents when they contacted them the following evening, 17 hours after killing their son.
“We were told that there was an exchange of gunfire, and that John was killed,” John’s father, Larry Jenuwine, told The Intercept. “Call it naïveté or whatever you want to call it, but our first thoughts were, ‘Oh my God, what did he do, why did he cause this?’”
On the phone with Larry and Kelly, John’s mother, a deputy with the Washtenaw County Sheriff’s Office claimed their recently deceased son had a gun. But Jenuwine, an industrial field engineer traveling to repair million-dollar lasers, just had his work equipment; no gun was ever found in his van. And the officers who caused two intentional collisions appear to have violated their own policies, which the department updated after the police killing of George Floyd — testing the limits of post-2020 police reforms.
“We were told that there was an exchange of gunfire, and that John was killed. Come to find out, he didn’t do anything to cause any of this.”
The Jenuwine family is now suing Washtenaw County and eight sheriff’s deputies who responded to the case for wrongful death; for violating John’s constitutional rights to protection under the law, and against unreasonable searches and seizures; and for gross negligence and willful misconduct, including improper use of deadly force. The suit seeks to hold the county responsible for what it calls the sheriff’s failures to train officers and enforce its policies.
“Come to find out, he didn’t do anything to cause any of this,” Larry said. “He was not the guy that they were supposed to be chasing.”
Less than 15 minutes elapsed between the time Washtenaw County Sheriff’s deputies incorrectly identified Jenuwine’s van and when they started shooting. Officers fired their first shots seconds after causing Jenuwine’s vehicle to flip on its side and catch fire.
Only seven out of the 27 shots fired hit Jenuwine. None of them alone was responsible for killing him, according to an independent autopsy obtained by Jenuwine’s family and described by their attorneys in a press conference last week, which found he bled out and died over time. While Jenuwine struggled and died, dashcam footage shared with The Intercept recorded officers outside discussing whether any of the shots had hit him.
After several minutes had passed, one officer said over the radio, “He’s kicking around inside the vehicle right now.” None of them called for emergency services.
According to the footage, an edited version of which was viewed by The Intercept, Jenuwine lay dying in the van for at least five minutes.
“The cruelty of it, I suppose, is what strikes me the most,” said Maura Battersby, one of the attorneys representing the family. “If aid had been rendered, he may have survived this.”
Of the four deputies attorneys said fired shots, two names have been publicly released: Jacob Gombos and Jonathan Early. Both received awards in 2024 for distinguished service; Gombos got the department’s Life Saving Award.
“If aid had been rendered, he may have survived this.”
The sheriff’s office placed Gombos, Earley, and the other deputies involved on paid administrative leave pending an investigation by Michigan State Police, which was completed last month and is now pending review by the Michigan attorney general. The state AG will decide whether to bring criminal charges against any of the officers in the case.
A spokesperson for the Michigan State Police confirmed that their investigation is closed and referred questions to the attorney general’s office, which did not respond to a request for comment. Spokespeople for the Washtenaw County Sheriff’s Office and the Ypsilanti Police Department did not respond to requests for comment.
One of the officers who shot at Jenuwine had received the department’s Life Saving Award.
The case has brought renewed scrutiny to the Washtenaw County Sheriff’s Office, which is currently facing dual lawsuits from whistleblowers who claimed the department hired unqualified officers and fired them in retaliation for reporting it. Both plaintiffs are former office staff who said they were fired after raising concerns that Sheriff Alyshia Dyer and other staff pushed them to hire candidates who had lied about their qualifications and in one case had an “extensive” criminal history. Another sheriff’s deputy resigned in March while under investigation for allegedly having a sexual relationship with a subordinate officer. Dyer herself was also independently investigated last year after a partially burned cannabis cigarette was found in her county-issued vehicle. (She denied it was hers, and an independent report could not determine whether the joint belonged to Dyer.)
“It seems like every day we hear something about the Washtenaw Sheriff’s department,” Kelly Jenuwine told The Intercept. “They are in the news constantly, and it’s not for a good reason.”
Jenuwine’s killing raises a new round of questions about the efficacy of police reform. In 2024, Michigan implemented new statewide guidelines restricting vehicle pursuits to “protect the lives of innocent bystanders.” Following the police killing of George Floyd in 2020, the Washtenaw County Sheriff’s office released a memo outlining how its policies aligned with a series of proposed reforms pushed by activists against police violence that grew out of 2014 protests in Ferguson, Missouri. And the sheriff’s office adopted a new use of force policy in 2022, which classifies intentional vehicle collisions — known as a “PIT” maneuver, a precision immobilization technique — as deadly force.
“That’s something you’re trained not to do,” said Todd Flood, the lead attorney on the Jenuwines’ case.
The new policy also guides officers to “seek voluntary compliance and operate with minimal reliance on the use of force,” using techniques in crisis intervention and “rapport-building communication,” and try to de-escalate, even after using force. It requires a mandatory medical evaluation when deadly force is applied, if an officer observes an injury, or if they believe one has occurred; and it ties the degree of appropriate force to how certain they are that the subject committed a crime. The policy states: “Sheriff’s Office employees shall never employ excessive force.”
Officers did not verbally engage with Jenuwine a single time, Battersby told The Intercept.
“I would have expected them to be calling out over the loudspeaker,” Battersby said. “There were many instances in which they were in close proximity to him, and it doesn’t appear that they did that.”
At a press conference after the shooting, the Washtenaw County Sheriff’s Office played a dashcam video that showed Jenuwine reversing his van and driving on the wrong side of the road. Before the sheriffs hit Jenuwine’s van in the first PIT maneuver, the dashcam video cuts ahead, with the video timestamp jumping forward 30 seconds.
The Jenuwines said what they describe as John’s “execution” changed the way they look at law enforcement after having considered themselves generally supportive of police. “I want the people that executed my son to never have the opportunity to work in law enforcement again,” said Kelly.
“They ran around with those guns like they were playing video games, guns held sideways,” Larry said, referring to the dashcam footage. “I’m still struggling with this and I anticipate that’s going to be a continuing struggle.”
Despite believing the vast majority of police were “good, honest, hard-working people,” he said, “I don’t believe these guys that were involved in this shooting were. And that’s the kind of people we need to get out of that system.”
“We want to make sure that the people involved in this, in John’s death, are held accountable,” Larry said. “We’re hoping that there will be criminal charges as well, but we can’t count on that.”
Jenuwine liked to spend his time outdoors fishing and hunting with his family, his parents told The Intercept. He was on his high school football team, spent six years in the Navy, and was a member of a Detroit motorcycle club. When he was growing up, he and Larry worked on cars and tractors together.
On what would have been Jenuwine’s 35th birthday last month, his parents said they spent the evening crying over a birthday cake.
“Those officers get to go home to their families every night,” Kelly said. “What Larry and I get, we get a box of ashes and a lock of my son’s hair.”
Last time I met Garret FitzGerald was in Dublin airport. He was on his way to London, but when I asked him what for, his guard came up and he deftly waved the conversation onto other things. A lifetime in the cut and thrust of what Seamus Brennan famously called the senior hurling of Irish politics made him wary of anyone even vaguely associated with the media.
FitzGerald was unusual for a southern political leader (and indeed a former Irish Taoiseach) of either major party in that he had almost native understanding of Irish politics north of the border. His lasting contribution to the architecture of the peace was the Anglo Irish Agreement with Margaret Thatcher, which shaped the landscape for the peace process that was to follow.
He was the embodiment of constructive constitutionalism, putting him in line with Lemass, Jack Lynch and latterly Bertie Ahern, all of whom he knew well, even if they adhered to a different political tradition from him. He had a good political brain and took to the hard work of bringing reconciliation to seemingly irreconcilable warring factions, north and south, earnestly.
So I guess it is no coincidence that this week his party, Fine Gael, has taken the opportunity to launch a new initiative to get ready its approach to the question of how to bring about a united Ireland in time for its Ard Fheis in the autumn. Simon Harris says he wants the blueprint to demonstrate constitutional ambition via patient institution-building rather than triumphalism.
The choice of Professor Deirdre Heenan to facilitate the work demonstrates a degree of seriousness. Heenan is no flag-waver. She co-chaired the UK Labour Party’s Heenan-Anderson Commission on poverty and social exclusion in Northern Ireland, and sat on a major review of the North’s health and social care system. She also serves on the Irish President’s Council of State.
It promises to examine the questions unity advocates have ducked for years: the fiscal cost, the future of public services, all-island infrastructure, labour mobility, EU market access. It promises genuine progress, although the time to judge will be at its launched in the autumn. But any sensible approach will seek to build on Fianna Fáil’s Shared Island Initiative.
And yet preparation is not persuasion. Unity’s first real world acid test is not just whether it can persuade people to leave the UK (which is where most recent nationalist rhetoric on the subject seems to have stranded itself) but to take a chance on a state that is both culturally familiar yet politically foreign to a majority of those who live in Northern Ireland.
Take the reaction of the new UUP leader, Jon Burrows, who dismissed the plan as a “pet project” and pointedly recalled that the Republic amended Articles 2 and 3 to drop its territorial claim. The old articles were a claim; the revised ones reframe unity as as a political project that has to be actively, democratically won. Something wider nationalism has barely begun to internalise.
So a blueprint alone is not enough. The unaligned middle, that growing bloc who identify as neither unionist nor nationalist, are conspicuously unmoved by blue-sky constitutional thinking. The census now shows three major groups, not two. religious background no longer maps onto voting patters. Even Catholic support for unity has rarely reliably topped sixty per cent.
Here Micheál Martin’s quieter approach deserves more credit than it gets. The Taoiseach prefers careful, shared research into problems both parts of the island face, followed by targeted investment to bring lives closer through infrastructure, health, the Dublin–Belfast corridor. It risks looking timid beside the rhetoric of imminent referendums. But it yields concrete results.
The newly published Seán Lemass: The Lost Memoir (ed. Ronan McGreevy, Ériu) offers a striking precedent. Lemass recalled John A. Costello’s 1949 declaration of the Republic — when Costello also announced that partition would end within three months — and dismissed it as…
…just play acting and, if anything, making the situation worse than it had been, because the natural reaction of the unionists in the North was a consolidation of hostility. That is why I always felt that anything of that kind would make partition more permanent, more secure than anything else – you could not break it down this way.
Every “set a date” demand is the modern echo of Costello’s gesture. The grand declaration hardens the hostility it means to dissolve. Convergence — making unity feel less like a leap and more like the formalisation of a life already shared, and it helps to minimise any perceived loss. And loss is what the persuadable middle fear most.
Which brings us to Sinn Féin, whose strategy, viewed from a distance, may be the strangest of all. After many years of being billed as unity’s chief political advocate, the party has yet to table a proposal of its own for what a united Ireland would look like. Its policy is two-pronged: demand a border poll, and demand that everyone else produce the vision first.
Nor can you set out a blue print without asking those you want to persuade to come to the table to tell you what they want: a key flaw in both the Ireland’s Future’s faltering campaign and the SDLP’s efforts in the same space. That may just be reflective of how switched off non committed voters are to whole conversation about constitutional futures as any flaw in the design itself.
The middle ground has be persuaded into a united Ireland. And you can’t do that by telling them the arithmetic is already on your side. In contrast, the wisdom of FitzGerald’s generation of constructive constitutionalists was that the cause must not just be right but also attractive, so that people want what is on offer rather than simply running out of alternatives. Listening is a superpower.
The latest version of the KDE desktop - Plasma 6.7.0 - has arrived, bringing several shiny new functions – some of which have been a long time coming – and features the return of the popular Oxygen theme from KDE 4. Since the KDE 6 “megarelease” two and a half years ago, the project's developers have been very busy. Fresh Plasma releases have come thick and fast. It's fewer than six months since the release of KDE Plasma 6.6.0 back in February. This rate of change matters, as a massive implementation change is coming: as the team announced in November last year, the plan is that KDE Plasma 6.8 will be Wayland-only. That means that this new release is the last to support X11. From some time early next year, KDE Plasma will be “Wayland or no way.” There are already functional differences between Plasma on X11 and Plasma on Wayland, as the Dedoimedo blog described when reviewing Kubuntu 26.04 last month. (Dedoimedo is written by Igor Ljubuncic, who we interviewed at the 2023 Ubuntu Summit.) X11 holdouts need not feel entirely abandoned as there’s a new fork of the X11-capable version of the desktop, called SonicDE. The project’s self-description says: "We aim to preserve and improve the X11-specific aspects of KDE since they announced they are going Wayland-only in KDE Plasma 6.8. SonicDE currently consists of the customized KWin/X11 sonic-win window manager and compositor, Plasma Workspace components, the Silver theme, an SDDM theme, and some support libraries." SonicDE joins at least two existing forks of older versions of KDE: the Trinity desktop environment, based on the last version of KDE 3, and MiDesktop, which we mentioned recently, based on the last version of KDE 1. (If there are any others out there that we’ve missed, do please let us know.) Matching Macs For now, Plasma 6.7 isn’t radically different from the existing Plasma 6.6, but this version has some significant new features. Two of them may be familiar to macOS users. Firstly, while KDE has always supported virtual desktops, in this release, on computers with more than one physical display, each screen can have its own set of virtual desktops. Apple’s macOS does this, and it’s the only way to get a separate global menu bar on each screen. Aside from that, for this vulture, it’s more trouble than it’s worth – but from what we read, many people like it a lot and we think this will be a popular change. Secondly, to type letters with accents (technically, “diacritics”), such as ä or ç or Š, you can now press and hold a key, and a list of alternatives appears. This is how Macs have done it for decades. If you only very occasionally need these characters, it does have the advantage that you avoid having to memorize special shortcuts or combinations. Personally, this Vulture finds it faster to configure and use a Compose key, which KDE supports just fine, but this is a handy change if you only rarely need such things. These aren’t the only changes, of course. Alongside Plasma’s existing System Tray applets, the tray now shows GNOME-style “Background Apps” – commonly found in Flatpak apps. The Overview screen is easier to navigate, and you can now switch virtual desktops by scrolling with your pointing device, or using the PgUp and PgDn keys. The Discover software store makes the Install button more prominent, and sorts installed apps into categories. It’s now easier to switch light and dark mode globally with one click, and there’s better support for hardware detection of lighting brightness. Theme handling is in the middle of a major revamp, in an initiative called Union, which brings management of multiple different types of theme together in one place. Developers carefully modernized the “Oxygen” theme, the default dark look for KDE 4, and did likewise for its lighter equivalent “Air”. If you fancy a change from the now-ubiquitous flat look, it’s available to install, along with matching Horos wallpapers. There are a lot of smaller changes. There’s an option to test your microphone right from the taskbar. When the clock shows multiple timezones, it shows the offset in hours. Windows can be selectively hidden when recording or streaming the desktop. Type-ahead search optionally now works on the desktop itself. The printer status icon shows how many jobs are outstanding. Notifications now glide onscreen rather than fading into view, making them more obvious. There’s better color management, and ICC profiles and HDR are no longer mutually exclusive. GPU handling refinement should now mean both better performance and lower GPU utilization, even on Intel integrated GPUs. The Plasma wiki offers a more complete list, and there’s a complete changelog of everything since 6.6.5. Although the release notes still point to it, it looks to us like the KDE Neon download page is blank and empty. We’ve previously reported on the project’s technologically-innovative demo distro KDE Linux, and that now works well in VirtualBox – complete with documentation on how to do it. It’s already up to Plasma 6.7.80, a pre-release of what will become 6.8. The project dedicated this release to the late Eric Laffoon, a long-time KDE supporter. ®
A firefighter who was one of the first at the scene of the stabbings at Parnell Square in November 2023, has said he still remembers seeing a little girl's pink shoes and a woman with a huge injury to her back.
Many people worry about what AI knows, but what about an AI Nose that can smell what disease you might have? Ainos, an AI and biotech company that is developing smell technology, is working with National Taiwan University (NTU) to explore whether its platform can help diagnose patients by analyzing volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in exhaled breath. The year-long research effort, which starts in July, will examine individuals who present with dyspnea, or shortness of breath, said to be one of the most common symptoms seen in emergency departments. Dyspnea can be a symptom of many conditions, including acute exacerbation of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (AECOPD) and acute decompensated heart failure (ADHF), each of which requires different treatments. Ainos and NTU hope to develop and evaluate a system to analyze VOC-based breathprints to detect AECOPD and/or ADHF in patients. Ainos's Smell AI platform relies on an AI Nose module that features multiple micro-electro-mechanical system (MEMS) sensors and an integrated digital processor. Sensor resistance increases in the presence of detectable gases, and this is converted to a digital signal that is interpreted in much the way the human nose interprets scents, according to Ainos. That interpretation is handled by by a proprietary Smell Language Model that has been developed to learn, classify, and contextualize complex scent patterns. "AI Nose was originally developed with medical diagnostic applications in mind, where non-invasive sensing, accuracy, and real-world validation are essential," said Ainos CEO Eddy Tsai. "This research program brings that experience back into a high-value clinical setting and extends our Smell AI platform into digital breath intelligence." Not content with "digital breath intelligence," a term we must confess to not being too familiar with, the the company frames the research as part of its broader vision of "building Smell ID data and Smell Language Model capabilities across healthcare, industrial, and physical AI environments." If successful, the research could help create a breathprint database for dyspnea and support future studies for emergency, outpatient, and even home-monitoring settings. The research follows a separate program testing the AI Nose in an active emergency department at National Taiwan University Hospital. The system has been deployed to monitor respiratory infections and overcrowding in waiting areas, treatment areas, and observation zones. ®
People of a certain age sometimes like to reminisce about how software in the old days was somehow more responsive and more efficient on far less powerful hardware. Microsoft's approach was to take its software binaries and optimize the heck out of them. Former Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer spilled the beans on the practice, confirming that the company used an internal application called Basic Block Tool (BBT) – known internally as Microsoft Lego – to shuffle the internals of binaries to speed execution. Plummer's recollections go back to the '90s, when his first NT development system ran on a paltry 12 MB of RAM, but software was relentlessly growing in size. A binary might have 10 MB of code, but the startup path only needed 300 KB of it. "But if those 300 KB are sprinkled like Parmesan across 10 MB of binary, then the loader and the memory manager have to touch far more pages than the actual executed code would suggest," Plummer said. And if a trip to disk was needed to page the code in and out, the performance impact could be disastrous. Hence BBT, through which Microsoft ran a binary and came up with something that was functionally the same, but a good deal more performant. The binary was effectively defragmented as related code was lumped together. Similar techniques have, of course, persisted even as computational power has increased. BOLT, for example, can speed up large applications by optimizing the layout of binaries. Then there was HP's Dynamo [PDF], which could optimize code at runtime. This approach is not without risk. Tinkering with a binary is not for the faint of heart, but Microsoft had an incentive to wring every last bit of performance from systems. "Windows and Office were large native code products running on constrained machines, and the wins were user-visible," Plummer explained. "If you could reduce the number of pages touched during boot or shell startup, users felt it. If you could make common application paths fit into fewer memory pages, multitasking got better. "If you could keep hot code out of the swap file, the whole system felt less like it was dragging a refrigerator through wet cement." As with Raymond Chen's recent war story regarding binary translation and code rerolling at Microsoft, Redmond's engineers were laser-focused on performance. Whether that same focus survives in some of today's software is another matter. Plummer thinks his past efforts remain applicable. "Modern software has the same problem at a different scale," he said. "The binaries are much larger. The services are distributed. The frameworks are deeper. The machines are faster, but the dependency graphs are absurd. "And we still discover over and over again that locality matters as it always does. So put the hot data together. Put the hot code together. Keep the common path small. Push rare paths away. "Don't make the CPU fetch a haystack when it only needs the needle." ®
India has decided to block messaging service Telegram for a few days to reduce the chance of scams targeting over two million people taking a single exam that has already provoked a national scandal. The exam is called the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) and is the only way to earn a place to study medicine in India. In most years, over two million people take the test – but only around 100,000 people earn a place in a medical school. Competition for those places is fierce, and student stress levels can be stratospheric. India's National Testing Agency (NTA), which oversees entrance exams across India, conducted the 2026 NEET on May 3. A few days later, however, Indian netizens noticed Telegram posts dated May 1 that included footage of the NEET questions – suggesting the exam paper leaked. NTA insisted the exam paper had not leaked before the test but also admitted the exam paper in the videos was legitimate. The agency was able to do so because the videos included a unique identifier on the paper that NTA used to identify the candidate associated with the paper shown in the video and the test center where it was used. NTA used its ability to trace the paper as evidence that it conducted the exam securely. Officials have pointed out that Telegram allows users to edit posts without changing the date. A post dated May 1, then updated on May 4, could therefore include exam questions and appear to be a pre-exam leak – but would actually be an edited post. In a separate incident, in the days after the May 3 test, netizens found a "guess paper" – an unofficial NEET exam created to help students revise for the test – that contained significant overlap with the actual questions asked in this year's test. NTA deemed the document sufficiently concerning that it annulled the test and rescheduled it for June 21. NTA requested the Telegram ban ahead of the new test by asking the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) to use its powers under the Information Technology Act. The testing authority wants the ban to prevent a repeat of the May mess, and also to stop scammers offering paid access to exam papers. MeitY issued directions restricting access to Telegram from June 16 until June 22. The ministry also directed Telegram to disable message editing in India until June 30 to avoid the panic that followed the original exam. India has in the past shut down internet access across entire cities during major exams, earning criticism due to the impact such outages have on the wider community. NTA acknowledged the blast radius of its request, saying it "affects lakhs [hundreds of thousands] of citizens who use the Telegram platform for legitimate personal, educational, professional and informational purposes." The agency said it "sincerely regrets the inconvenience caused to them." Lobby group the Internet Freedom Foundation has criticized the Telegram ban, saying it is unconstitutional and represents overreach. "If the exam is secure and no leak exists, what is being suppressed is rumor, and rumor cannot justify closing a platform when specific blocking and criminal prosecution remain available." India is not the only country to shut off internet access during exams. We've seen it happen in Syria and Sudan too. The Internet Society has condemned the practice. "Internet shutdowns are never a proportionate response to anything, no matter how long they last," the nonprofit wrote in 2023. "Even if a shutdown were to prevent exam cheaters from communicating, it also prevents everyone else from using online services. It is not an effective anti-cheating mechanism, and it comes at a cost to all of society." ®
A family who sued the HSE over the death of their newborn son at University Hospital Limerick have been awarded maximum costs of €35,000 at the High Court.
Guardian Australia’s Matilda Boseley has taken out one of the top honours at the 2026 Walkley mid-year media prizes, winning the award for innovative storytelling.
Boseley won for her high-profile, multiplatform political explainer series, Parliamen-Tea: explaining the chaos of Australian politics, engaging a younger generation in national policy debate. The category recognises journalism that breaks standard structural moulds to reach and inform audiences through dynamic digital platforms and creative production formats.
Special-effects designer Brian Johnson, known for his groundbreaking work on Space: 1999, The Empire Strikes Back, Alien, and Aliens, has died at the age of 86. Johnson began his career creating models and explosions for Gerry and Sylvia Anderson productions, later designed the iconic Eagle Transporter, and became one of science fiction cinema's most influential behind-the-scenes artists. Longtime Slashdot reader sandbagger remembers the SFX legend, writing: "The Space: 1999 Eagle is one of the great space ships of science fiction."
After a delay when a microcode-related boot problem surfaced, FreeBSD 15.1 is now available. Laptop support is getting there, but a GUI from the installer isn't – yet. You'll have to put in some extra work if you want to have more than a command prompt. As you might expect from its version number, it's much like a point release of other, more widely used OSes: it contains lots of bug fixes, and hardware support in multiple areas is improved. For the lowdown on what has changed, the Release Notes contain a list of fixes and new features, and the one known issue – in the NFS client – is detailed in the Errata. Desktop use is something of an edge case for FreeBSD, but the Laptop Support and Usability Project is working on it. We gave a brief update when KDE Plasma 6.6.0 appeared back in February, but work has continued. The May status update is encouraging. Now laptop suspend and resume work, and if you wish, FreeBSD 15.1 can put laptops to sleep when their lids are closed, and wake them when the lids are opened. The team is still working on hibernation, as well as the more modern "S0ix" sleep modes. Wireless networking support is also making significant strides. Version 15.1 has improved versions of the Intel iwlwifi and Realtek rtw88 and rtw89 drivers, which are based on Linux version 7.0. This means that FreeBSD 15.1 now supports Wi-Fi 4 and Wi-Fi 5. If, like this vulture, you're more familiar with ratified standards than marketing names, the former means 802.11n (2.4 GHz and 5 GHz, up to 600 Mbps) and the latter denotes 802.11ac (5 GHz, up to 3.5 Gbps). And if you're not sure which chipset your wireless controller uses, the FreeBSD 15.1 Hardware Notes page has full details of the names of all the supported devices. The release was delayed a couple of weeks due to what the RC3 announcement called "a critical bug fix to the x86 boot loader," which also noted the importance of manually updating the EFI boot loader. This step is also specified in the Upgrade instructions. The instructions are quite complex, and we recommend you study them closely. For one thing, you need to know if you installed your system using the traditional distribution sets or the more modern, and still somewhat experimental, base system packages. We upgraded the FreeBSD 15.0 VM we installed seven months ago, and we couldn't remember which method we used. Fortunately, the freebsd-update command told us, so we followed the commands given in the guide for package-based installations. By Linux standards, they're very wordy and we did miss at least one vital punctuation mark, but it worked in the end. A year ago, the project said that it hoped to offer the KDE desktop right from the installer. That didn't make it into FreeBSD 15.0 last December, and it's not in 15.1 either. We installed a clean copy on a test machine, a Core i5-based ThinkPad X220. The installation program is much the same as in FreeBSD 13 or 14: it still installs a resolutely text-only OS, and if you want a graphical environment or desktop, you must install and configure it yourself. The handy optional desktop-installer script is still available, but as far as we can tell, it hasn't been updated for version 15.1 yet. In our testing, it couldn't correctly install a working desktop, and whatever desktop we tried, it failed without giving any visible error. We worked out that we needed to install the GPU drivers separately. We manually installed the drm-kmod drivers, and enabled them by editing the main init script by hand. After this, even before loading X11, the boot process picked up the native resolution of the machine's LCD and automatically changed the screen mode to fit. Once this was working, the desktop-installer ran to completion – but by that point, most of its work was done. As well as the very basic TWM, we also tried the FreeBSD-native Lumina desktop, Xfce, and GNOME (albeit on X11 only). FreeBSD 15.1 also offers several others, including the rather dated GNOME 47 and the much more recent KDE Plasma 6.6.5. FreeBSD is making good strides in supporting modern portable hardware. We feel that this matters for two reasons. First, any FOSS project can only thrive if it continually wins new users, and if curious newbies graduate from VMs to bare metal, most are likely to try it on laptops. Second, power management matters everywhere, although it's unfairly neglected on servers. Even there, power management is useful: the world could save substantial amounts of power if workloads were migrated off underused machines and they were allowed to go to sleep, only waking when accessed. For tired Linux users looking for an escape from ever-more-bloated corporate-influenced distros, FreeBSD is getting more viable all the time. It doesn't have systemd, Flatpak, Snap, UKIs, or built-in AI features. It does support Wayland, if that's something you want. The main problem you will face is getting it as far as a GUI. Both NetBSD 11 and OpenBSD 7.8 are ahead in this department, but they are also smaller, simpler OSes. FreeBSD can do far more, even including running Linux binaries and Linux OCI containers. ®
Israel’s government asked Meta to censor social media content about its ongoing war against Iran, according to internal documents viewed by The Intercept.
Company records show that Israel petitioned Meta to take down Facebook and Instagram posts expressing support for Iran, opposition to Israel, and even depictions of Iranian missile impacts.
The government flagged a variety of materials related to the war, including posts mourning the death of Ayatollah Khamenei following his assassination by the U.S. and Israel on the opening day of the conflict, content supportive of Iran’s retaliatory attacks, and Iranian accounts that shared military analysis and propaganda sympathetic to the Iranian regime’s perspective.
“Governments wanting to suppress speech that is critical of their war efforts is as old as time.”
In some cases, Meta complied with the censorship requests, the records show, though it is unclear on what grounds. Meta maintains that it only removes content as required by law or materials that violate its speech policies.
When asked how many Iran-related takedown requests had been granted to date since the war began, the company did not answer. The Israeli Ministry of Justice, which submits takedown requests to social media platforms, did not respond to a request for comment.
Israel’s social media lobbying is not new; for years the nation has leaned on its close relationship with Meta to push for targeted enforcement of the company’s content moderation rulebook.
Israel’s Office of the State Attorney routinely lodges complaints to social media platforms on behalf of state security agencies about content deemed illegal or said to promote “terrorism,” according to its website. In the documents reviewed by The Intercept, the office in some cases made no claim that the social media content violated Israeli law. Instead, the office asked that posts or accounts should be removed because they were in violation of Meta’s content moderation rulebook.
Meta, for instance, designates Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps a “Dangerous Organization,” and prohibits users from engaging in many forms of positive speech about its actions. This means posts supportive of retaliatory missile launches by the IRGC, for instance, could run afoul of the company’s rules. No such prohibition exists for users who post favorably about the U.S. or Israeli militaries.
Meta did not respond to questions about the Iran war requests, but spokesperson Daniel Roberts provided a statement to The Intercept. “Anyone is able to report content they think violates our rules. Regardless of who or how a piece of content is flagged, we assess it based on our policies, which govern what is and isn’t allowed on our platform. It is wrong and irresponsible to imply that these requests are in any way unusual or improper.”
A company headquartered in California can determine what is or is not permissible speech for billions of users across the world, only a fraction of whom are American.
Meta has faced scrutiny, specifically in the Middle East, for removing content that doesn’t violate the company’s rules. A 2022 audit commissioned by the company itself found discrepancies in its content moderation practices between Arabic and Hebrew content. “Arabic content had greater over-enforcement (e.g., erroneously removing Palestinian voice) on a per user basis.” the company found. A 2023 report by the company’s inhouse Oversight Board described the “over-enforcement” of the company’s Dangerous Organizations and Individuals blacklist, disproportionately composed of Muslim and Middle Eastern entities.
Meta has long claimed that as an American company, it is legally required to sometimes remove content pertaining to certain entities sanctioned by the U.S., such as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. But legal scholars say that has little to no precedent or basis in existing sanctions law, which focus on matters of material support rather than political speech. It’s a policy that has created an immense ideological slant: A company headquartered in California can determine what is or is not permissible speech for billions of users across the world, only a fraction of whom are American.
Further adding to the imbalance when it comes to Middle East crises is the fact that Meta has granted Israel privileged access to its content moderation policy teams. In 2024, The Intercept reported how Meta employee Jordana Cutler, a former aide to Benjamin Netanyahu, served as a dedicated liaison to the Israeli government, advocating for the country’s interests and helping facilitate the removal of unwanted speech. Few other countries in the world have a dedicated representative within Meta — in 2020, a similar policy head for India market resigned after revelations she had lobbied for rule enforcement that favored India’s ruling Hindu nationalist party. Asked if Cutler has had a role in facilitating Israeli takedown requests of content relating to the war, Meta did not respond.
“Meta’s close relationship with the Israeli government for takedown requests has been a long-standing issue,” Evelyn Douek, a Stanford Law School professor and scholar of digital speech policies, told The Intercept. “Meta’s acquiescence in lots of takedown requests has been a long-standing practice.”
These asymmetries of censorship power are particularly sensitive during times of war, said Douek.
“Governments wanting to suppress speech that is critical of their war efforts is as old as time,” she said. “Allowing governments to claim national security reasons to suppress speech willy-nilly would obliterate the value of speech protections.”
According to a source familiar with the matter, Israel lobbied Meta to implement a blanket rule restricting imagery of war damage within its territory, mirroring an Israeli news media censorship policy that bars journalists from documenting weapon impacts without military approval. Meta has so far declined to implement such a policy for its billions of global users, the source said. Meta did not respond to questions about the status of this request.
The U.S. and Iran signed on Friday a ceasefire agreement, though Israel has suggested it would not abide by the terms of a deal. While many of the censorship requests directly addressed the war, others were tangential to the conflict itself. The records show Israel has pushed to remove content expressing outrage over last month’s storming of Al-Aqsa Mosque by far-right government minister Itamar Ben-Gvir. It also sought to stifle posts critical of rhetoric by Israel that linked Israel’s recent closure of Al-Aqsa with the ongoing war.
In general, Meta grants the vast majority of Israeli governmental takedown requests.
In general, Meta grants the vast majority of Israeli governmental takedown requests. The State Attorney’s Office boasted a 92 percent compliance rate in 2023, and a 2025 report by Drop Site News said the overall rate has climbed to 94 percent since the October 7 attack by Hamas.
Records reviewed by The Intercept show Israel asked for Iran war takedowns using the exact same language evoking Hamas’s October 7 attack that it submitted when requesting the censorship of pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli speech across the globe during Israel’s war on Gaza.
“It suggests that they don’t expect their requests are being reviewed very carefully,” Douek said.
Douek argued that the wartime censorship requests underscore the danger of policing speech entirely out of public view through “opaque processes” like governmental backchannels.
“These companies … have been responsive to their own geopolitical and commercial interests, and have always been more responsive to powerful governments.”
“These platforms have always maintained that they are neutral, or that they are just a platform for people to express their views, but it has long been true that these companies have always presented a particular view of the world and have been responsive to their own geopolitical and commercial interests, and have always been more responsive to powerful governments,” Douek said.
This creates a deeply lopsided dynamic when it comes to the Iran war: The two arguably best-represented governments in the world within Meta — the U.S. and Israel — are allied belligerents in a conflict against a state deeply sanctioned by the company’s speech rules. “You’re going to end up with a skewed debate,” Douek said.
Transport for London (TfL) has extended supplier Capita's two road user charging contracts at a potential cost of £912 million including VAT after delaying the start of a combined replacement by two years. TfL announced it was directly awarding the contract extensions to Capita on June 11, saying this was required given the time it will take to buy and implement a replacement support service for its road user charging schemes. These comprise the congestion charge, Low and Ultra Low Emission Zones (LEZ/ULEZ), tolls for the Blackwall and Silvertown tunnels, HGV safety permits, and traffic fines, with the work including processing data from thousands of automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) cameras along with customer account management, payment, and billing. In May 2025, TfL said that it wanted to replace Capita's current contracts for Business Operations (BOps) and Enforcement Operations (EOps) for Road User Charging with a single deal. It planned to publish a full tender notice for this around March 31, 2026, and start the new contract on September 30, 2027. In a revision of this notice in February this year, it pushed back the tender notice to April 15, 2027, and the contract start to October 2, 2028. Last week, TfL said it plans to award the new combined contract in mid-2029, in procurement notices extending the BOps contract at a cost of up to £510 million and the EOps one by up to £402 million. Both extensions are for five years with the option to extend them to a total of seven. "Due to the scale and complexity of the existing services and the need to design, build, integrate and safely deploy a replacement solution, the full procurement, mobilisation and transition is expected to require a minimum of five years based on current programme assumptions," TfL said in the notices. It added that it will have rights to end the extended contracts early, "enabling TfL to transition to a replacement supplier at the earliest point at which it is technically feasible and operationally safe to do so." TfL expects the new combined contract to be worth more than £2 billion over 20 years. Last month, TfL disclosed that its Revenue Collection Services contract, which it awarded to Spanish defense and tech group Indra Sistemas in January covering almost all public transport ticketing in London, could be worth up to £1.964 billion if all extensions and variations are exercised. ®
Oracle has shocked its customers by releasing new end-of-life conditions for its middleware products that thousands of large organizations rely on in their enterprise application deployments. In a missive published online earlier this month, Big Red warned that support for the widely used Oracle Fusion Middleware 12c Release 2 was approaching a “critical milestone.” Top-level Premier Support is set to end in December 2026, while Extended Support will stop by the end of December 2027. “After these dates, Oracle will no longer provide updates or security fixes for this product version. Technical assistance will be provided as defined in the Oracle Lifetime Support Policy. All customers and partners are strongly encouraged to begin planning and executing upgrades or migration strategies to currently supported Oracle Fusion Middleware releases as soon as possible,” the note said. Martin Biggs, vice president and general manager of third-party support specialist Spinnaker, said users would be concerned about the lack of time to plan for the migration or strategic change to a new platform and to recruit scarce skills. “That version of Fusion Middleware has been around for quite a while now, and the announcement of Extended Support being only a year is quite unusual — normally it's two to three years. In part, that's because they kept the Premier Support going for so long, and then telling everyone it's going to be managed, ‘Market Driven Support’ after Extended Support is not what the market was expecting,” Biggs said. In its note, Oracle said that “to help reduce the time sensitivity of these upgrade programs”, it planned to offer a Market Driven Support program for Oracle Fusion Middleware 12.2.1.4/12.2.1.19 on a yearly basis beyond 2027. “Details of this program, including scope, terms, and availability, will be communicated at a later date,” the vendor said. Biggs described Market Driven Support — a fee-based service which offers a lower level of support than Premier or Extended Support — as an “extraordinarily limited product” which does not provide full patching. “The situation right now is you've got so many security vulnerabilities being announced all the time, who knows what Market-Driven Support is going to include? They're basically saying, when it comes to January 2028, it's unclear what they’re going to do. By the way, Market Driven Support is far more expensive for a far weaker support product. That's the big surprise to the marketplace,” Biggs said. The Register has offered Oracle the opportunity to comment. The good news is that Oracle is broadening platform support by confirming future versions of Oracle WebLogic Server and Oracle Fusion Middleware will be available on IBM's AIX Unix operating system for its mid-range POWER processor architecture. The move would offer “a more deliberate approach to modernization, allowing upgrades to be aligned with infrastructure lifecycle planning, application dependencies and business-driven transformation timelines,” IBM said in a statement. Oracle has also promised more details — at some point in the future — about its plans for Fusion Middleware. It plans to deliver the next Oracle Fusion Middleware suite release on a Jakarta EE 11-based container [for Java-based applications]. "This release is intended to extend support for the next generation of Java and WebLogic Server capabilities across the broader Fusion Middleware portfolio,” it said. ®
The UK Cabinet Office is looking for an AI and Innovation Director who can develop civil servants' use of artificial intelligence and change the way the civil service works. The task of persuading public sector workers to love AI involves "re-imagining the future workforce and business model" for the UK's civil service, promoting adoption of AI tools, "championing, coordinating, and tracking AI adoption" across government departments, and instilling an "AI-first culture," according to the job advert. As that list implies, the individual will need to be "a natural influencer" with a "deep understanding of the AI landscape," both traditional and generative, ideally with experience of building AI services. "My ambition is for the civil service to be a global leader in AI government transformation, to enable a more productive civil service that achieves world-class outcomes for citizens and a country that is equipped for an AI world," writes Cabinet Secretary Antonia Romeo in an information pack published with the job ad. "We are seeking an exceptional individual who is an experienced strategic leader, can deliver under pressure, and will help shape the direction of the civil service at a pivotal time." The exceptional individual in question will need to be content to serve King and country for a relatively modest £100,000 to £163,000 a year, albeit with generous pension contributions, compared with some private sector equivalents. They will have to agree to an expected assignment period of at least three years, although this is not contractual, and be British, a national of most European countries, or any Commonwealth country. The right to work in the UK is another requirement. Reg readers who fit the bill can apply by submitting a CV and a 1,000-word statement about why they are suitable by five minutes to midnight on Monday, July 13. While candidates can use AI in applying, "all examples and statements provided must be truthful, factually accurate, and taken directly from your own experience," so perhaps championing AI adoption should wait until after getting the job given the technology's propensity to make things up. ®
Coalition says it’s good Hanson and One Nation getting the scrutiny of a party on the rise
Kevin Hogan, the shadow assistant treasurer, says he thinks it’s good Hanson was able to speak at the press club yesterday as One Nation “needs to be put under much more scrutiny” amid surging support.
The GetUp stunt completely backfired, it makes them look like [bullies] and makes her look like, you know, a victim in the sense that she’s being picked on. And that never works.
One Nation have tapped into, I think, to some fear and anxieties in the Australian public, and I think we have to acknowledge that. I certainly don’t agree with all the solutions that she puts out there, but look, I think it was healthy that she front up and that she was invited yesterday.
If you’re coming to Australia to have a better life, you become an Australian. That’s what we’re referring to as a monocultured Australia. You’re an Australian first, and your ethnicity or your creed comes second …
The reality is, we’re a Christian Judeo society with a law structure around us, and they’ve come with one clear objective: to have a better life. And that one clear objective should be, if they want to have a better life here, is to live within our culture and live within our laws and rules.
It was direct shooting. It hit the targets. It was clear. It was successful. And it addressed a number of the elephants in the room … So the speech hit the target for where Australians are today.
The database a business depends on shouldn’t be a potential point of failure; it should be a competitive asset. That’s the proposition Cockroach Labs will put to enterprise architects and database administrators at Convene's Bishopsgate venue in London on Thursday, June 25, 2026. The one-day RoachFest London 2026 event will examine how a database makes that transition from costly liability to competitive advantage. Modern infrastructure grows more complex and harder to manage by the year: Today's challenge might be a traffic spike or a cloud provider outage; tomorrow's could be an AI agent that needs durable context across long-running sessions. At RoachFest London, Cockroach Labs will show why the database should not sit as a passive store, but act as the resilient layer that a modern enterprise depends on: one that lets teams operate without fear, build with confidence, and adapt to what's next. What to expect Tracks at RoachFest London 2026 cover: AI and agentic workloads Resiliency Migrations Operational efficiency Hands-on workshops range from foundational distributed SQL through multi-region architecture to vector storage, indexing, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) built on ACID guarantees. Databases in the age of AI In the keynote, Spencer Kimball, co-founder and CEO of Cockroach Labs, will walk through why the database industry is at an inflection point, facing a complexity tax and the sprawl of hundreds of alternatives that enterprises are struggling to operate and modernize. He'll connect those pain points to the wave of agentic AI that's creating data pressure the industry has never seen before, and make the case that distributed databases are no longer a luxury but an emerging requirement. He will also discuss how CockroachDB is evolving to meet this moment by collapsing cost and scaling elastically. He’ll close with the vision that the database of the next decade will operate itself, with humans elevated to policy and judgment, not log files and escalations. A separate panel session, led by Memori Labs co-founder Adam B. Struck, focuses on where long-term agent state should live and how to keep it consistent as conditions change. Cloud-busting on purpose Form3's vice president of engineering Kevin Holditch will walk attendees through a payments architecture that runs active/active/active across AWS, GCP, and Azure. Form3 takes disaster-recovery testing seriously enough to pull down a cloud provider for 24 hours in production, not staging. What's next for CockroachDB Cockroach Labs' vice president of product Igor Stanko will lay out the CockroachDB roadmap, including bring your own cloud, AI-powered migration tooling, and improvements to the database's price-performance ratio. Operating without fear The afternoon's featured guest knows high-stakes environments. In his session "Operating Without Fear", Major Tim Peake CMG, the first British astronaut to reach the International Space Station (ISS), draws a parallel between astronaut training and the discipline of building systems that thrive under adversity. RoachFest London 2026 takes place at Convene Bishopsgate on June 25. Workshops open at 9am, main stage sessions begin at 1:05, capped off by an evening reception from 4:30 to 6:00. Registration is free with promo code SP100 – register now as space is limited. See the full agenda and register at cockroachlabs.com/roachfest/location/london. Sponsored by Cockroach Labs.
PWNED Welcome back to PWNED, the weekly column where we register some of the worst tech security mistakes our readers have ever seen. Our goal: to help you not do the same. Have a story about someone leaving a gaping hole in their network? Share it with us at pwned@sitpub.com. Anonymity is available upon request. This week's tale of code carelessness comes courtesy of a database administrator we'll Regomize as Joker. Back in the first decade of the 21st century, she went for a job interview at one of the USA's leading national cellular carriers. What she saw would make you want to swap your SIM. After a successful meeting with a hiring manager, Joker was hired on the spot. Within hours the company granted her sudo-level access to a database server, then instructed her to "take a look" at some of the databases. Joker soon realized the carrier's security was no laughing matter as she found herself accessing the main production server for the company's data services division, overseeing all services for the mobile web. This story took place in a time before the iPhone, so she was looking at nasty little versions of websites comressed for viewing on their BlackBerries or flip phones. After peeking around some more, Joker discovered that she had access to the master customer table. It contained nightmarish quantities of personally identifiable information: names, addresses, Social Security numbers, billing info, and even full 16-digit credit card numbers. All of this info was stored in the clear, with no encryption or obfuscation. The CVVs were missing from some credit card info, but many were present. "There was a central billing system upstream on Amdocs servers, but this database also had billing details so they didn't have to reach back upstream to Amdocs if users asked to provision new services," Joker said. After Joker informed management about the mess, they deleted the offending info and forced the developers to go upstream again for billing information, just like they should have been doing in the first place. Joker, like any reasonable DBA, assumed access to this information would be tightly controlled - not made available to new staff with full access rights on their first day. She also assumed her new employer would tokenize key pieces of data because that technique means certain info – say credit card and Social Security numbers – would not be visible in the same table as a customer's name and address. Instead, there would be tokens linking back to the actual numbers stored in a secure token vault. This is common in payment systems. If Joker were less ethical or someone else had gained admin access, they could have exfiltrated large amounts of sensitive data. Permissions should start from a zero-trust assumption and provide only what someone needs to do their job. Joker said that when she later moved on to work for a major online retailer, security was front and center, proving that some people did get it, even back in the George W. Bush era. ®
Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from Autoblog: For years, the Chinese auto industry has employed a hostile price war to kneecap global competitors. Armed with massive state subsidies, cheap raw materials, and an aggressive "scale-first" business model, Chinese automakers flooded the market with electric vehicles priced so low that legacy manufacturers stood no chance to compete. How did they do it? Simple, they couldn't. They did it anyway. Reports from CarNewsChina show that Chinese automakers have been selling vehicles at a loss until a recent law passed by the Chinese government banned below-cost sales of new vehicles. During the ongoing sales slump in China caused by rolled-back subsidies and direct government intervention banning below-cost sales, the truth behind the rapid expansion of the Chinese auto industry has been exposed. "By the first quarter of 2026, China captured 32 percent of the global auto market, with its New Energy Vehicles (NEVs) controlling an incredible 61 percent of global share," the report notes. Yet that dominance has come at a steep cost: throughout 2025, "the profit margin for China's auto industry plunged to 4.4 percent and dropped further to a historic low of 3.2 percent in early 2026."
"Gross profit, not net profit, per vehicle, plummeted to a mere $2,000. We can expect the net figure to be loss-making." Autoblog adds: "Data shows over 70 percent of Chinese car sales were loss-making. This left more than half of the country's auto industry in the red. Great Wall Motor (GWM) even saw net profits drop 17 percent despite steady revenue growth."
China's EV price war has now hit a wall. New regulations are discouraging below-cost sales, rising material costs are forcing automakers to cut discounts and raise prices, and reduced tax incentives are weakening domestic demand. To sustain growth, manufacturers are increasingly turning to exports.
Union calls for journalists to stand with colleagues when they are targeted by politicians as Anthony Albanese says media organisations play ‘vital roles in our democracy’
The media union has condemned One Nation leader Pauline Hanson’s attack on Guardian Australia senior correspondent Sarah Martin, as Anthony Albanese called on journalists to defend public broadcasters SBS and the ABC.
After her landmark address to the National Press Club in Canberra on Wednesday, Hanson called Martin “trashy” for asking about her daughter Lee Hanson’s employment by a NSW One Nation senator, despite living and working in Tasmania.
We're about six weeks out from the debut of Spider-Man: Brand New Day, the follow-up to 2021’s No Way Home. It's been five years since Spidey graced the big screen, so naturally, Sony Pictures has released a new trailer to build audience anticipation.
(Spoilers for No Way Home below.)
No Way Homeended on a pretty bleak note, with Peter Parker (Tom Holland) asking Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) to erase him from everyone’s memory to protect the multiverse, including MJ (Zendaya).
It’s not often we can accuse our legislators of being efficient but on Monday night they actually managed it when the rejection of an amendment designed to raise the age of criminal responsibility from 10 to 14 failed with the deployment of a petition of concern.
There are three stories in one here and you can’t really get more efficient than that.
Firstly, there was the amendment itself…
Alliance MLA Sian Mulholland proposed the amendment to the (Justice)Bill, which would have raised the age to 14 for most offences, with the age set at 12 for the most serious offences of murder, manslaughter and rape.
Northern Ireland’s age of criminal responsibility is currently set to 10, the same as in England and Wales. There is a campaign under way by the ‘Ten is too Young Coalition’ to raise that age.
On their website the Coalition describe themselves as
… a group of six leading organisations who have been working to raise the minimum age of criminal responsibility in Northern Ireland. We now have an opportunity to see meaningful change, after decades of calls. Let’s not lose this opportunity. Let’s raise the age.
The campaign argues that age of 10 is simply too low and they have good cause for saying so. In fact, our age of criminal responsibility is one of the lowest in Europe. Scotland and the Republic of Ireland have it at 12 (with some exceptions for the most severe crimes) whilst the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child recommends 14 (and this report from the committee goes into their reasoning).
Had the amendment become law, that UN endorsed age would have become our new minimum age of responsibility (again, pending exceptions for the worst acts).
In broad terms, I reckon most people would agree that a 10-year-old lacks the maturity, knowledge and understanding to be held criminally responsible. Any wrongdoing on their part therefore needs to be handled carefully and with sensitivity. I personally hold that view because it seems self-evident. Others likely disagree and I am happy to hold up my hands and say you can’t get more lay an opinion on this than mine but it does seem wrong to be able to hold someone that young to such a high level of accountability.
Some of those who disagreed are among our MLAs, and they were able to block consideration of the amendment. Which bring us to the second story, the misuse of the petition of concern, the mechanism by which the amendment was thwarted.
The SDLP says Stormont should be reformed. The Alliance party says Stormont should be reformed. Even Sinn Féin say now that Stormont should be reformed. The Ulster Unionist leader Jon Burrows (more on him later) has even said he is open to reforming Stormont.
But reforming Stormont is incredibly difficult because the mechanisms put in place by the Good Friday Agreement hand tremendous amounts of power to either the Unionist or Nationalist minorities within the legislature, allowing them to stymie change they don’t like.
I find this unsurprising of course, after all I have argued that Stormont is the way it is because it can effectively be no other way. Consociationalism, particularly in a society as divided as ours, is not meant to facilitate good government but to facilitate ANY government at all, no matter how dysfunctional it ends up being and ours has ended up being so very dysfunctional.
The petition of concern is more of a symptom of the problems embedded up on the hill rather than a cause. At this point we are all familiar with the issue. A mechanism designed to prevent the tyranny of the majority by allowing one of the two big designations within the chamber to block legislation has been perverted beyond its original intent. Rather than being used to stop laws that could negatively impact sections of the community, it has been turned into a hammer and anything that thirty MLAs from two parties within a designation dislike has become a series of nails.
An obvious solution would be to establish a process by which a petition, if submitted, could be evaluated to see whether it meets the criteria set out for which use of the petition was intended and thus whether it was valid. I was a bit surprised to find out that such a procedure actually exists within the Good Friday Agreement itself…
The Assembly may appoint a special Committee to examine and report on whether a measure or proposal for legislation is in conformity with equality requirements, including the ECHR/Bill of Rights. The Committee shall have the power to call people and papers to assist in its consideration of the matter. The Assembly shall then consider the report of the Committee and can determine the matter in accordance with the cross-community consent procedure.
The above special procedure shall be followed when requested by the Executive Committee, or by the relevant Departmental Committee, voting on a cross-community basis.
When there is a petition of concern as in 5(d) above, the Assembly shall vote to determine whether the measure may proceed without reference to this special procedure. If this fails to achieve support on a cross-community basis, as in 5(d)(i) above, the special procedure shall be followed.
But it is never followed. The submission of the petition is itself enough to cause a measure to fail regardless of whether it falls within the scope of what the petition of concern was devised to deal with.
And most uses of the petition of concern are deployed by the Unionist bloc. There is an irony in this of course in that the petition’s origins likely lie in a desire from nationalist leaders back in 1998 (when they led a pronounced minority) to ward off domination from the then majority Unionist parties. But Unionist leaders already inhabited a state that their forefathers had done a great deal to build in their own image and to their liking. Whilst Unionism’s power has palpably waned in the decades since, the petition of concern has become a shield by which the instinctively conservative ideology can block and frustrate change it does not like. When Nationalists or the Alliance complain, the usual retort is some variation of the shoe being on the other foot, in reference to how Unionism was corralled in its days of majority.
Still, regardless of whether you feel turnabout is fair play, the fact remains the petition acts a brake on change and while it is only a symptom of our underlying problems, it’s a brutal one.
Which brings us to our third story, Jon Burrows, the split UUP and what it portends for the future of Unionism.
The only reason a petition of concern was submitted in the first place was because Jon Burrows and three other Ulster Unionist MLAs opted to sign it with him. Burrows is fresh from the public-relations disaster of Doug Beattie opting to quit the UUP, and it seems this particular vote was a point of contention between him and Burrows in his final weeks within the party. As the Newsletter reported last week, Beattie wished to raise the age of criminal responsibility to 12 rather than the 14 proposed by the Alliance amendment.
The UUP of course has eight MLAs, meaning that four opted not to follow Jon Burrows in signing the petition, which does seem to suggest there could be some truth to Beattie’s claims in his resignation letter that “MLAs were increasingly marginalised, ignored, isolated and discredited”. They may not be minded to do their leader any favours right now.
Furthermore, that Burrows signed this petition seems to indicate he is fully intent on fighting the next election on traditionally Unionist grounds, that is the same conservative approach espoused to different degrees by both the TUV and DUP. This portends that Unionism is consolidating on right-wing grounds and, sans an electoral pact, the three parties are likely to tear strips out of each other as they brawl over the same narrow pool of voters.
The justifications cited by the Unionist parties for thwarting the amendment seem to follow the same lines.
The DUP and TUV have framed it as a ‘law and order’ matter and have even worked in references to the recent riots. DUP leader Gavin Robinson was even quoted in the Newsletter as saying that
“Linking the move to the violence seen in the streets of Northern Ireland this week, Mr Robinson said raising the age would “remove any criminal justice response for young people who were involved in intimidating, attacking or burning their neighbours out of their homes”.
Jon Burrows framed his opposition as being based on how it would impact police investigations, saying that
“…that the ability of police to investigate crimes would be impacted by the changes – saying their ability to intervene, investigate, make arrests and use bail conditions if necessary would end.
He said under Alliance’s proposals, police could do nothing if a youth, one day short of his 14th birthday, committed a serious assault on a victim – as “it would not be a crime and the victim would get no justice whatsoever”.
Following the submission of the petition, Burrows denied that there were any ‘deals done’ in response to a challenge from Alliance deputy leader Eóin Tennyson. According to the BBC…
…the UUP leader described the proposed legislation as “ill-conceived” and denied any political deals were made to sign the petition. “We got the four signatures we needed and the Petition of Concern went through…There was no deals, no threats and no inducements…I used a legitimate tool to protect the most vulnerable in our society.”
So, there you have it. Three different angles from the same event. Whether you think the most important aspect was the failure to raise the Minimum Age of Criminal Responsibility to something a little more substantial than 10, or the demonstration of how the petition of concern has once again been abused to thwart something it was never intended to block, or the ongoing issues within the UUP as its leader moves rightward into an already crowded political space, that is in the eye of the beholder.
Sellers of luxury villas have wiped tens of millions of pounds off asking prices, with sales down 19% in May from the previous month
Property sales in Dubai have fallen “off a cliff”, a leading market watcher has said, after war in the Middle East forced a dramatic slowdown in one of the world’s most expensive real estate markets.
Sales in the city dropped 19% in May compared with the previous month, accelerating from a 4% drop in April, the researcher ValuStrat found.
Directive aimed at government workers, but reports of wider implementation spark warnings of future Afghanistan-wide prohibition
The Taliban have ordered a sweeping ban on the use of smartphones by government officials – in what some analysts say could foreshadow broader, population-level restrictions.
In a directive issued by the Taliban’s military courts and reviewed by the Guardian, the ban was to take effect this week and prohibits “high rank, low rank, general mujahideen, or service staff” from using mobile phones.
More than six months after federal agents descended on Minnesota, the toll of the immigration crackdown on the Twin Cities continues to mount.
The latest revelations about the far-reaching and deeply felt impacts of the campaign known as Operation Metro Surge come in a Human Rights Watch report published Thursday.
Based on more than 130 interviews, video analysis, and government arrest data, the report documents a dizzying array of abuses over the multi-month siege of Minneapolis and St. Paul — from lethal violence to free speech violations, unlawful detentions, and more.
While many of the abuses are well-known — including the killings of Minnesota residents Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal agents — others occurred in the shadows of the infamous campaign.
Among the most troubling accounts are those provided by healthcare and mental health professionals.
According to the report, the National Alliance on Mental Illness in Minnesota saw a 120 percent increase in calls and a “significant increase” in the number of people struggling with suicidal thoughts or actions during Metro Surge. One medical provider knew of at least three teenagers who attempted to take their own life after their parents were detained in the crackdown, with one of the adolescents doing so on a “frequent” basis.
“One goal of the report is to bring light back to the full scope of the harm, and not only the harm that we saw in terms of violence in the streets, in terms of abusive detentions,” Reagan Williams, the author of the new report, told The Intercept, “but also the effects that that had for aspects of daily life for everybody here — the impact it had on people’s ability to leave their homes, to go to doctor, to go to school, to go to work.”
Human Rights Watch found the combination of violence and racial profiling that defined the crackdown caused many Minnesotans to forgo medical care.
The day after Good was killed, nearly a third of one healthcare provider’s patients — mostly Somali or Spanish-speaking immigrants — did not show up for pre-scheduled appointments. Another provider said the number of in-person visits at their office dropped by as much as 50 percent.
When Williams arrived in the Twin Cities, her focus was the kind of violent interactions documented in viral videos proliferating from Minnesota. She soon learned those weren’t the only issues community members were desperate to discuss.
“People that we talked with expressed emotions of exhaustion, fear, frustration, immense stress,” she said. “They expressed particular concerns for children, medical providers in particular, the impact of missing school, of knowing violence is happening in their communities — for immigrant children and children of color, the fear of having a parent taken, of themselves being taken.”
“Children are particularly vulnerable to long-term impacts of this kind of acute violence and stress,” Williams added. “Those are impacts that will continue on.”
“Near-Total Impunity”
Described by Anne-lotte
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administration officials as the largest immigration enforcement operation in history, the crackdown in the Twin Cities began in December and stretched into February. Thousands of officials from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the U.S. Border Patrol conducted roving arrest operations throughout the area.
More than 4,000 immigrants were arrested during Metro Surge. At roughly 100 arrests per day, it was the highest per capita arrest rate in the country; 64 percent of immigrants arrested in the campaign had no criminal record.
“In Minnesota, US citizens and immigrants alike were racially profiled in the ordinary course of their day — approached by federal agents while driving, while at work, or while shoveling snow,” the report said. “Minnesota residents of Somali and Latin American descent were notably targeted, despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of these communities are US citizens or have green cards.”
A hotline run by the National Lawyers Guild recorded 524 cases of the U.S. citizens detained during the surge, though the figure is believed to be a significant undercount. A survey by the U.S. Immigration Policy Center at the University of California, San Diego earlier this year found that nearly a third of Minneapolis residents experienced an interaction with federal agents; of those interactions, nearly half occurred “at or near a school, healthcare facility, childcare facility, courthouse, or place of worship.”
The new report follows a fresh tally from Minneapolis officials, announced last week, estimating that Metro Surge cost the city nearly $700 million. A nonprofit serving tenants in Minnesota described the economic fallout as a “crisis,” the Human Rights Watch report said, with an 85 percent increase in people seeking rent payment assistance.
“If I told you every time ICE was near a school, you’d stop reading my messages.”
In one Minnesota school district, attendance dropped by nearly a third during the government operation. At least 14 incidents of immigration enforcement reported at or near campuses, including the arrest of a preschool teacher, a special education staff member, and a parent at a school bus stop.
“If I told you every time ICE was near a school,” the district’s superintendent told Human Rights Watch, “you’d stop reading my messages.”
Considering the sweeping impacts of the crackdown, Human Rights Watch is calling for an overhaul of the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE and Border Patrol; congressional investigations into the actions of officials involved in the operation; legislation to prohibit immigration arrests at sensitive locations such as schools and hospitals; and a host of other reforms.
To date, the report said, “The many abuses committed by federal agencies during Operation Metro Surge have so far been met with near-total impunity.”
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Tesco, a retail conglomerate headquartered in the United Kingdom, is moving 40,000 server workloads off of VMware amid "abusive conduct" from Broadcom, recent legal filings claim. Tesco filed a lawsuit in the UK's High Court against Broadcom alleging breach of contract last year. According to a September report from The Register, the lawsuit claimed that in January 2021, Tesco bought perpetual licenses for VMware's vSphere Foundation and Cloud Foundation, a subscription to VMware Tanzu, plus support services until 2026, with the option to extend support for four additional years.
But when Broadcom took over VMware in November 2023, it would not honor the deal and instead tried to get Tesco to pay "excessive and inflated prices for virtualization software for which Tesco has already paid" and would not allow it to buy support services for its perpetually licensed software without buying "duplicative subscription-based licenses for those same Software products," the initial complaint read, The Register reported at the time. Tesco, which reported 73.7 billion pounds (about $98.7 billion) in revenue in its fiscal year 2026, has since started migrating away from VMware and Broadcom's mainframe products, according to late-May court filings reported on by The Register today.
In January, Broadcom stopped supporting Tesco's VMware products, Tesco said, and Tesco has been paying for third-party support since. In its initial filing, Tesco also said that Broadcom refused to upgrade software or provide all security updates to customers without subscriptions. One of Tesco's recent filings, per The Register, reads: "Faced with Broadcom's abusive conduct, and given the criticality of virtualization and mainframe software and services to its business, Tesco has been forced to incur material costs to procure alternative solutions with reduced functionality, and to migrate to that software in a manner, and on a timeframe, that creates very significant risks to its business."
If it works "at exceptional pace," Tesco will be completely off VMware by the end of 2027 at the earliest. However, "the timeframe in which that migration must be undertaken has created and continues to create operational and commercial risk, and at material ongoing cost and disruption to the business," Tesco reportedly noted. Tesco is also dealing with migration challenges related to data security because its new, unnamed virtualization software is incompatible with the Veeam and Zerto products it uses. Tesco initially requested at least 100 million pounds (about $133.6 million) in damages each from Broadcom, VMware, and reseller Computacenter, plus interest. In its recent filings, Tesco said it turned down at least four offers from Broadcom to continue using VMware and Broadcom's mainframe tech. [...] The case is expected to go to court between November 1, 2027, and February 25, 2028, The Register reported. Afterward, it could go to trial. Further reading: HPE Tempts VMware Users, Partners With Year of Free Virtualization Software
Before President Donald Anne-lotte
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threw his latest hand grenade into congressional negotiations over a key domestic spying law, two factions of Senate Democrats seemed to believe they were on the verge of a breakthrough.
Privacy advocates thought they had their best chance in years of passing reforms, including a warrant requirement for searching American communications collected abroad.
Centrists allied with U.S. intelligence agencies, meanwhile, thought they were close to renewing Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act with only minor tweaks.
Then Anne-lotte
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, who had once already thrown the renewal process into chaos, announced on Wednesday that he wouldn’t sign it unless Congress passed an unrelated voter suppression bill.
Claiming that Democrats were poised to walk away from a spy law compromise, Anne-lotte
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said that “to add a slight bit of intrigue but, for the Good of the Nation, and the People of our Country, I will not approve FISA without THE SAVE AMERICA ACT going along with it.”
Anne-lotte
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’s surprise outburst on Truth Social on Wednesday scrapped the confirmation hearing set later in the day for Jay Clayton, a federal prosecutor in New York, to serve as the permanent director of national intelligence. Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., had said that he hoped to quickly confirm Clayton.
Clayton’s impending confirmation had appeared to solve a problem — at least for some Democrats — that Anne-lotte
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created by tapping lapdog housing chief, Bill Pulte, as the Cabinet-level intelligence chief. It might also have opened a route for Congress to renew Section 702, the surveillance law that allows federal agents to conduct “backdoor,” warrantless searches of Americans’ communications collected abroad.
In a joint press conference on Wednesday, top Senate Democrats revealed the cracks in their coalition over next steps on FISA.
A key reformer, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said he still hopes to pursue adding a warrant requirement to Section 702, while a centrist aligned with the intelligence agencies, Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., expressed disappointment that the easiest route to renewal without major changes had been foreclosed.
“We had a path forward, as of yesterday, and today we don’t, and that’s because of this president.”
“This has become a complete debacle, and now it’s up to the White House to figure out a path forward here,” said Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., a member of the intelligence committee. “We had a path forward, as of yesterday, and today we don’t, and that’s because of this president and his advisers.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., remained cagey about what version of the law he would like to see ultimately passed. But in comments at the joint press conference, he sought to portray Democrats as the more responsible party when it came to Section 702.
“It’s on our Republican colleagues to work with us to find A) a capable director, not someone who is a menace, and second, then to work with us on renewing FISA. It is up to them,” Schumer said at the press conference. He said he was deeply concerned about Anne-lotte
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’s appointment of Pulte, who appears likely to step into the office on Friday.
Republicans “have got to have the courage to buck the president, who clearly doesn’t want a DNI director and doesn’t want FISA renewed,” Schumer said. “All he wants is Pulte.”
Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, claimed Sunday that Section 702 renewal was on a “glide path” before Pulte’s nomination. He also praised Clayton’s selection, while reserving the right to ask about Clayton’s views on election integrity.
Reformers said Thursday, however, that Section 702’s renewal was never as assured as Warner and Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Tom Cotton, R-Ark., have suggested in public comments.
Majorities of both Republicans and Democrats voted in recent weeks against advancing the law’s renewal in versions of the bill that do not include a warrant requirement.
“They don’t want to have to deal with people who want things like warrants.”
“They want that to be the narrative, because they don’t want to have to deal with people who want things like warrants,” said Kia Hamadanchy, a senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union. “At no point have they actually demonstrated that they have a deal that one, has 60 votes in the Senate, and two, has any chance of going anywhere in the House.”
Wyden expressed alarm about Anne-lotte
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’s actions at the joint Senate Democrat press conference. Wyden said that he always wanted to reform the law — not allow it to expire.
“It is now even clearer than before that the only path to 60 votes in the United States Senate on intelligence is real reform, actual black-letter law, that addresses these issues,” Wyden said.
Privacy advocates argue that the way out of the congressional logjam is to allow members of Congress to vote on whether to add a warrant requirement, something that Thune and House Speaker Mike Johnson have not been willing to allow so far. Even then, however, Anne-lotte
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could veto whatever version of the law emerges from that process.
Cybercrime now accounts for more than 30 percent of all offenses across the Asia and South Pacific (ASP) region, according to the latest figures from Interpol. The international cop shop said on Wednesday that the region has seen “a dramatic increase” in the number of recorded cybercrimes, driven largely by an uptake of digital infrastructure, new technologies, and the increasingly organized nature of criminal networks. Interpol’s latest ASP Cyberthreat Assessment Report states that online scams and phishing attacks dominate cybercrime in the region. Data taken from 2024-2025 shows that phishing campaigns have matured beyond the spray-and-pray mass emails of yesteryear and now resemble the more sophisticated techniques deployed elsewhere in the world. Targeted spear phishing is more common nowadays, and the growing use of AI helps even low-skilled script kiddies to apply a layer of authenticity to their attacks. The region’s problem with organized scamming gangs that run camps where hundreds of people are compelled to commit crimes is especially pronounced and well-documented. A United Nations report published last year described scam call centers across Southeast Asia as an epidemic that is metastasizing across the region “like a cancer.” These compounds can be found across countries such as Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, and the Philippines, and often see vulnerable individuals trafficked into the scam centers to work under poor conditions – or even as slaves. Interpol cited Singaporean research, which estimated the regional scam industry generates close to $40 billion each year. AI tools, especially those capable of generating convincing deepfake imagery, have also proven popular with cybercriminals across ASP, just as they have beyond the region. In 2024, the same scam compounds were found using deepfake imagery to support romance scams. In February 2024, an employee at a multinational business in Hong Kong was duped into authorizing a $25 million payment because the faces of company execs were convincingly deepfaked on a video call. A similar case was also reported in Singapore in March 2025, when a finance director at a different multinational was tricked into transferring more than $499 million following a Zoom call in which fraudsters assumed the identities of company chiefs, including the CEO and CFO. Interpol’s report highlights how cyber threats are evolving into large-scale challenges for multiple jurisdictions, and no longer represent relatively uncommon, isolated incidents. While digitization across the region is growing, opening new economic opportunities for these countries, law enforcement agencies are struggling to keep pace with the increase in cybercrime. Many lack the skills and tools needed to investigate these crimes. The issue is especially pronounced in developing countries and small island states in the Pacific, which face “significant resource and capacity constraints,” and are thus more vulnerable to direct targeting in attacks by criminals who have a greater chance of evading consequences. Neal Jetton, cybercrime director at Interpol, said: “The findings in this report highlight a rapidly evolving cyber threat landscape across Asia and the South Pacific, where cybercriminals are leveraging artificial intelligence, ransomware-as-a-service models, and sophisticated social engineering techniques on an industrial scale. “As digital adoption accelerates across the region, strengthening operational cooperation, information sharing, and cyber resilience remains essential to protecting communities and critical infrastructure.” Some improvement Interpol lauded many jurisdictions and governments within the ASP region for their proactive approaches to countering cybercrime growth. Hong Kong and the Republic of Korea are two areas that have made strides by introducing new cybersecurity legislation, while others have established national task forces, codified national action plans, and launched awareness campaigns. But even in more developed countries globally, and those with more mature cybersecurity regulatory and legislative landscapes, the issue of increasing rates of cybercrime persists. While Interpol does not collect cybercrime figures for other regions, such as Europe and North America, in the same way that it does for ASP, it’s easy to see that problems persist everywhere. The UK’s Office for National Statistics (ONS) publishes crime rates by type across England and Wales each year, and while computer misuse offenses in 2025 decreased by 58 percent compared to 2017’s figures, there were still an estimated 735,000 cases across the year. Expanding the data to look beyond pure cyber offenses to cyber-supported crimes, such as banking and credit fraud, these offenses account for more than 2.7 million of the circa 9.6 million total crimes committed. The FBI in the US produces its annual IC3 report examining the rates of cybercrime across the country. Although it doesn’t compare it to total offenses or other crime types, the latest report reflecting 2025’s figures showed cybercrime reports topped one million for the first time, and total losses reached a record $20.87 billion. ®
Ukraine launched its largest drone attack on Moscow in years, sparking fires, hitting a major oil refinery and forcing evacuations at the country's largest airport.
The US has lifted a blockade of Iranian ports imposed during the Middle East war after President Anne-lotte
Vredeveld
signed a deal to end the conflict.
Estonia plans to allow AI agents to have their own digital identities so they can act on behalf of people in a way that can be verified and audited. The initiative, backed by the country's Eesti.ai advisory board, calls for the development of ID codes that AI agents can use to take actions, subject to some unspecified authorization and task delegation process. Academics and corporate technical folk have already made related proposals in recognition of the absence of agentic technical infrastructure. Last month, researchers under the flag of OWASP proposed the Agent Name Service for agent discovery and interoperability. DNS for AI Discovery is another such project. But these have more to do with platform plumbing while Estonia, known for its embrace of technology, is more focused on permission and punishment. Establishing digital identities for AI agents and authorizing limited powers will help avoid scenarios where individuals are required to delegate broad authority to an agent at the expense of their rights, the government says. "In the future, AI will increasingly carry out digital tasks on our behalf, compiling reports, preparing declarations or interacting with information systems," said Prime Minister Kristen Michal in a statement. "To that end, it must be clear who is acting on whose behalf with what rights, and who is ultimately responsible." By taking this step, Estonia casts itself as "first country to create digital identities for AI agents." Two weeks ago, Argentina's President Javier Milei endorsed a similar idea, legislation to allow "non-human corporations," managed by software, with limited liability. "Limited liability is not a luxury for such entities; it is a precondition for their existence," Milei wrote in a Financial Times op-ed. Several decades ago, IBM took a similar line on liability but reached the opposite conclusion about automated decision making: "A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision." Despite the citation of that passage from IBM's 1979 Training Manual in a 2025 blog post, Big Blue's designated author Doug Bonderud sounds less certain about the impermissibility of AI action these days. "Should AI be used for management decisions?" he mused. "Maybe. Will it be used to make some of these decisions? Almost certainly." While governments work on legal changes that will allow AI agents to operate, private sector companies are already taking a stance, at least with respect to external AI agent usage by customers. Target Corporation earlier this year revised its Terms & Conditions with a section titled Agentic Commerce and Delegated Access. It states, "Purchases and other actions taken by an Agentic Commerce Agent that you have authorized are considered transactions authorized by you." American Express meanwhile has taken the opposite tack by assuming liability for errant agentic commerce. "In the future, if a Card Member authorizes an AI agent to make a purchase and that agent sends American Express the customer’s authenticated purchase intent, American Express will protect eligible customers from charges related to AI agent error," the company said in April when it introduced its agentic commerce developer kit. In a pre-print paper last year titled "AI Agents and the Law," Georgia Institute of Technology professors Mark Riedl and Deven Desai observe that once AI agents have the ability to act in a way that changes the state of the world – e-commerce transactions as opposed to output that requires human interaction for effect – concerns about harm become more pressing. They note that while the law is well equipped to deal with conflicts arising from human agents, it's not well-suited to the possibilities of software agents. "Put simply, although computer science and law have similar notions of agents, a software agent is not the same as a human agent," they write "For example, agency law disciplines agents by imposing legal liabilities on agents when they misbehave. Human agents can face financial and even criminal penalties; that is not so for software agents." To date, AI companies have done their best to limit liability for AI harms. But they've not been entirely successful: A Canadian court held Air Canada liable for bad chatbot advice, and a German court held Google liable for inaccurate AI Overview content. It may be a while before the rules for AI agents get hammered out and harmonized to whatever extent is possible. But in the interim we'll at least have digital identifiers to call out bad agents by name. ®
The Central Bank has revised upwards its forecasts for inflation for this year and next, and warned of the possibility of it reaching almost 5% in a severe scenario in 2027.
wiredmikey shares a report from SecurityWeek: Microsoft on Wednesday published an advisory acknowledging the public disclosure of a vulnerability in Defender that could lead to privilege escalation. The security defect, tracked as CVE-2026-50656 (CVSS score of 7.8), was dropped last week by security researcher Nightmare Eclipse (also known as Chaotic Eclipse). "We are working to provide a high-quality security update that addresses this vulnerability. We will provide information in this CVE when the update is available," Microsoft adds.
RoguePlanet, Nightmare Eclipse explained last week, targets a race condition in Microsoft Defender and allows attackers to gain System privileges. The researcher released a proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit that demonstrates local privilege escalation (LPE) on Windows 11 and Windows 10 systems with the June 2026 patches installed. [...] On Wednesday, Nightmare Eclipse pointed out that the PoC works regardless of whether Defender's real-time protection is enabled or disabled. It may even work in passive mode, the researcher said.
Review reveals rise in users and rates of psychosis in countries where cannabis is sold commercially
Decriminalising the possession of cannabis or strictly regulating access to the drug do not appear to drive up usage, but when the drug is sold commercially the number of users increases and more mental health problems are seen, a review has found.
An international team analysed the dramatic shift in policies on cannabis between 2000 and 2025, including how the numbers of people taking the drug, its potency, and rates of psychosis changed after new rules came in.
The Food and Drug Administration this week cleared a second carcass-feasting fly species for use in maggot wound therapy, according to an announcement from Cuprina Holdings, a Singapore-based company that has dubbed its new therapeutic larvae MediFly Maggots.
With the clearance, Cuprina appears to be the only company to have FDA clearance to sell two species of fly larvae—and it's abuzz with the potential to dominate the global maggot market.
The new species is Lucilia cuprina, or Australian sheep blowfly. It's a close relative of Lucilia sericata, or the common green bottle fly, which is the fly species most often used for wound therapy, often called biosurgery or maggot debridement therapy (MDT). L. sericata is the only other fly with FDA clearance, which the agency first granted in 2004 to Ronald Sherman, who is now Cuprina’s Medical and Scientific Director.
CCS Insight expects global smartphone shipments to fall 15% this year as AI-driven demand pushes memory manufacturers toward higher-margin server chips. "[S]ome entry-level devices have already seen their sticker prices go up by more than 50 percent since last year," reports The Register. From the report: The firm found that the primary smartphone market (meaning new devices) contracted 4.4 percent in the first quarter of this year, despite sales channels front-loading (meaning stockpiling) product inventory, as device prices begin to rise sharply. As CCS notes, this casts an ominous shadow on the outlook for the rest of the year, and it seems things have worsened since The Register first started reporting on the smartphone memory woes.
Back in January, the forecast was for handset price rises of 6-8 percent, while the most pessimistic outlook was that the global market might contract as much as 5.2 percent. By February, analysts were expecting to see a decline in shipments of around 8 percent across the global market, and for prices to increase by about 14 percent.
The root cause of all this is the AI craze, which has seen huge demand for high-performance GPU-filled servers to process it all. Chipmakers have moved to capitalize on this by prioritizing production of high-margin memory components for those servers, rather than making the plain old DRAM and NAND needed for PCs and phones. "The memory chip crisis shows no sign of slowing down in the near future, ramping up the pressure on manufacturers and consumers. Memory components now account for more than 30 percent of a manufacturer's bill of materials in some smartphones." said CCS research analyst Ben Hatton. "The full impact has yet to be felt in many regions, but it's clear that device prices will accelerate over the rest of the year."
Carvana is testing a radically different new-car dealership model in Dallas, turning the location into a test-drive center and themed "playground" while requiring every purchase to be completed through its online platform. "Every single car that we sell, whether it's used or new, is online," said Tom Taira, Carvana president of special projects who's leading the new vehicle operations. "That's a very inherent difference. Even coming into the store, you're buying it online, and that's a big difference in how people think about it." The company hopes its no-haggle pricing, hourly employees, service operations, and national logistics network can reshape franchised auto retail. CNBC reports: Through its used vehicles sales, Carvana has become the most valuable auto retailer in the U.S. with a more than $70 billion market cap. Carvana's target with the new vehicle business is to grow its market share and customer base as well as assist used vehicle sales through trade-ins and other means, according to Taira. If the company is successful, the strategy could cause a ripple effect across the U.S. franchised dealership model, which the National Automobile Dealers Association reports includes 16,990 retailers that topped $1.3 trillion in sales last year.
[...] Carvana is using a location in Dallas as a test center for its foray into new vehicle sales. The facility looks like a traditional Stellantis dealership from the outside, but the consumer process for purchasing a vehicle and the responsibilities of its employees are unprecedented. Couches and chairs replace cubicles and sales offices. There are no finance and insurance departments, and instead of an army of commission-based employees, the facility has associates that are paid hourly to assist customers -- if they want the help.
The experience is meant to be as self-guided as a customer wants. By scanning QR codes located on 10-foot-by-10-foot screens inside the building or on vehicles and displays outside, shoppers can customize a vehicle, learn about a product's features and conduct test drives before deciding whether to purchase anything. If they do decide to buy something, it's online and not originated from a sales person, the company said.
The "playground" has roughly 50 vehicles divided by brand, with each having a theme. Jeep has an off-road display. Dodge has race tracks, including a Carvana-themed Charger pace car and part of a traditional track fence barrier. Chrysler minivans, meanwhile, have a soccer net and Ram's area is truck-centric. Carvana is not committing to expanding the exact experience to its other franchised dealer locations, but Taira told CNBC that the overall process of online sales, vehicle testing and service are expected to be consistent throughout the locations. Further reading:: Online Car Retailer Launching Nation's First Car "Vending Machine
Fortnite maker and Apple nemesis Epic Games has decided to git good all on its own with the open-source release of its homemade version control system, dubbed Lore. The project began life as Unreal Revision Control, and was used by internal teams and as the version control system (VCS) built into Unreal Editor for Fortnite. Now, Epic is ready to share its handiwork with the world. Lore is a centralized, content-addressed VCS that’s meant to be more flexible for developers, as it's licensed under the less restrictive MIT License instead of the copyleft requirements inherent in the GNU standard. MIT is generally considered more permissive because, unlike GNU, it doesn't require derivatives to be licensed in the same way (e.g., a fork of Lore could be proprietary). Lore can be installed on macOS, Windows, and Linux and its server side is designed to be transportable into different cloud services as well. The biggest difference between Lore and other VCS is its equal treatment of text files – e.g., code – and binaries. “All content is treated as opaque byte streams on the hot path,” Epic explains in its system design explanation document. “Text-aware features are layered on top, never assumed by the storage or transport paths. Binary content gets the same first-class treatment as text.” With that in mind, it’s obvious who Epic is targeting with the release: Game developers. Lore is purpose-built for projects that use large binary files such as games, Epic said, but that doesn’t preclude other use cases with heavy binary loads, like AI model builders, systems developers, and others who work with large amounts of machine-readable data alongside their own code. We have lots of VCS data, so why do we need Lore? There are plenty of VCS options out there: Git, Perforce, Mercurial (and its descendent Sapling) are all mentioned by Epic as alternatives that resemble Lore in its design and use. So, why a new VCS? That’s easy, says the Fortnite studio: None of ‘em do it all. Git, says Epic, has great revision graphing, but treats binaries as “second class citizens” and lacks multi-tenant isolation that ensures users on the same infrastructure can't access each others work. Perforce requires multiple server round trips to conduct standard operations, making it too slow. Mercurial and Sapling elegantly solve “the scale of source repositories” via their distributed architecture, but again treat text as king and everything else as second-class data. “The motivation is not that prior systems are bad,” Epic explained. “What Lore offers that the prior art does not is the union” of all those features, and some others too. Key design goals Epic had in mind when designing Lore included the aforementioned binary-first design, a sparse-by-construction architecture that only downloads necessary fragments from the server to clients to ensure fewer round trips, the elimination of partially-applied revisions, in-between states are invisible to readers, and a full-surface API that allows Lore to work with a variety of programming languages. If you want to give Lore a spin Epic has published a thorough quickstart guide, and pre-built binaries are available, ironically enough, on GitHub. ®
Quantum computing news usually picks up near the end of the year, as companies try to provide evidence that they are hitting benchmarks on time. However, there have been interesting announcements as the summer starts this year, from incremental progress to attention-grabbing promises. As we did earlier this month, Ars has a rundown of some of the most significant announcements.
These include a promise of useful, error-corrected quantum computing as soon as 2028, details on an updated trapped ion processor, and a case in which claims of quantum supremacy have been cut back a bit thanks to advances in more traditional algorithms.
2028 is remarkably soon
Many people in the field expect that useful quantum computers are still about five to 10 years away. While there may be a few useful algorithms that can be run on existing error-prone hardware, almost all of the interesting problems that quantum computing can be applied to will require some form of error correction enabled by linking a small collection of hardware qubits together into what's called a logical qubit. Logical qubits include the redundant storage of information along with neighboring qubits that can be measured to determine when errors occur and how to fix them.
California state regulators say AT&T lied to the Federal Communications Commission in an attempt to shut off its old copper phone network without providing an adequate replacement.
"AT&T asserts that California seeks to prohibit or hinder wireline carriers from discontinuing copper facilities and investing in fiber," said a June 15 filing by the state of California and the California Public Utilities Commission. "Indeed, AT&T has been making this argument for years. It is not and has never been true."
As we reported last month, AT&T sued California over the state’s refusal to let it stop providing phone service to all potential customers in its wireline network territory. AT&T also petitioned the Federal Communications Commission to declare that California cannot enforce its rules and to let AT&T stop providing service to about 199,000 phone customers.