BERLIJN (ANP/DPA/RTR) - Duitsland en Oekraïne gaan nauwer samenwerken bij het produceren en aankopen van wapens. Duitsland gaat betalen voor honderden Amerikaanse Patriot-raketten en Duitse luchtafweer voor Oekraïne. En Oekraïne gaat zijn kennis en kunde over drone-oorlogvoering meer met Duitsland delen, hebben de Oekraïense president en de Duitse bondskanselier afgesproken.

Duitsland is sinds Rusland vier jaar geleden de frontale aanval op Oekraïne opende een van de belangrijkste steunpilaren van het land. Geen van zijn bondgenoten leverde meer militaire steun. Duitsland herbewapent zich, na decennia van bezuinigingen op defensie, bovendien snel.

President Volodymyr Zelensky tekende de defensieafspraken op bezoek bij bondskanselier Friedrich Merz in Berlijn. Zelensky denkt dat de dronesamenwerking "de grootste in zijn soort, in ieder geval in Europa" kan worden. De afspraken "versterken zowel de Duitse als de Europese defensiecapaciteiten en -productie", zei Merz.

ASSEN (ANP) - Het Openbaar Ministerie heeft dinsdag tot 66 maanden cel geëist tegen drie verdachten van de kunstroof uit het Drents Museum in Assen in januari vorig jaar. De hoogste eis was voor de 35-jarige Bernhard Z. Hij heeft als enige van de drie verdachten geen deal gesloten met het OM. De andere twee, Jan B. (21) en Douglas Chesley W. (37), deden dat wel. Tegen hen eiste het OM 44 maanden cel. In ruil voor deze lagere strafeis hebben zij het grootste deel van de buit terugbezorgd. Het gaat daarbij om de wereldberoemde gouden helm van Cotofenesti en twee gouden armbanden. Een derde armband is vooralsnog spoorloos.

NIEUWEGEIN (ANP) - De Nederlandse Basketball Bond (NBB) heeft het lidmaatschap van een voormalig medewerker stopgezet. Daartoe is besloten na het afronden van verschillende onderzoeken naar aanleiding van meldingen over seksueel grensoverschrijdend gedrag, manipulatie en intimidatie. Dit betekent dat "hij geen rol meer kan vervullen binnen het Nederlandse basketbal", aldus de bond in een persbericht.

Eind 2024 ontving de NBB veertien van zulke meldingen over de betreffende oud-medewerker. Het Instituut Sportrechtspraak (ISR) startte daarop een tuchtrechtelijk onderzoek, dat inmiddels is afgerond. Het ISR heeft na afronding van haar onderzoek een contactverbod van vijf jaar met zeven melders opgelegd. Volgens het ISR is de maatregel erop gericht om de veiligheid van de sporters te herstellen. Tegelijkertijd heeft de NBB zelf ook een "onafhankelijk feitenonderzoek" uitgevoerd naar de aard van de meldingen. Dit onderzoek werd medio 2025 afgerond, aldus de NBB.

NBB-directeur Maarten Hoffer betreurt dat er in het verleden te lang onvoldoende zicht is geweest op wat er speelde. Ook zegt de NBB het veiligheidsbeleid te hebben versterkt met onder meer gedragscodes en verbeterde inzet van vertrouwenspersonen. "Het was een grote stap voor de betrokkenen om melding te maken van het grensoverschrijdende gedrag. Daarna volgden twee onderzoeken waar alle betrokkenen hun ervaringen hebben gedeeld", aldus Hoffer in een persbericht. "Ik wil nogmaals mijn waardering uiten voor de moed van deze vrouwen om zich uit te spreken."

De medewerker mocht dankzij een zogenoemde ordemaatregel vanwege de ernst en omvang van de meldingen vanaf eind 2024 al geen werkzaamheden meer verrichten binnen het Nederlandse basketbal.

An interactive explainer on the physics of GPS. “The answer is in some ways simpler than you’d expect, and in other ways more complex. GPS is fundamentally a translation tool: it converts time into distance.”

J. Allen Hynek started as an Air Force consultant brought in to help explain away early UFO reports, but over time he grew frustrated with what he saw as the government's effort to minimize unexplained cases rather than seriously investigate them. Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares an article from Popular Mechanics, in collaboration with Biography.com, that argues Hynek's shift from skeptic to advocate helped shape modern ufology, and that the Air Force's attempts to control the narrative may have deepened the public distrust and conspiracy thinking that followed. From the report: Do you think the U.S. government is hiding, and possibly reverse-engineering, extraterrestrial technology? Think again. Or better yet, don't think about it at all. Nothing to see here. That's the underlying message of a report released in 2024 by the Department of Defense. The 63-page "Report on the Historical Record of U.S. Government Involvement with Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) " concludes that the DoD's All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) "found no evidence that any [U.S. Government] investigation, academic-sponsored research, or official review panel has confirmed that any sighting of a UAP represented extraterrestrial technology."

The AARO, as
The Guardian summarizes, is "a government office established in 2022 to detect and, as necessary, mitigate threats including 'anomalous, unidentified space, airborne, submerged and transmedium objects.'" This report came on the heels of, and in contradiction to, what was arguably the most high-profile hearing on UAPs -- formerly known as unidentified flying objects, or UFOs -- in decades: the August 2023 testimony of "whistleblower" Dave Grusch.

[...] The 2024 AARO report stated that during the time Hynek was working with Project Blue Book [the U.S. Air Force's best-known UFO investigation program], "about 75 percent of Americans trusted the [US government] 'to do the right thing almost always or most of the time.'" But, the report noted, since 2007, that number has never risen above 30 percent. "This lack of trust probably has contributed to the belief held by some subset of the U.S. population that the USG has not been truthful regarding knowledge of extraterrestrial craft."

Ultimately, the Air Force's efforts to stifle Hynek -- pressuring him to offer the public standard responses to questions he wasn't even allowed to ask -- appears to have backfired. Ironically, the Air Force's attempts to quiet suspicions only fueled them, leading to more conspiracy theories and distrust. People came to believe that the government was hiding the truth, contrary to Hynek's actual revelation: that, in reality, the people at the top may not care much about finding the answers after all.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

De Raad van State plaatst kritische kanttekeningen bij de voorjaarsbegroting van het kabinet. In de dinsdag gepubliceerde voorjaarsrapportage worden de kabinetsplannen als „nog te vaag” beoordeeld.

Op het vmbo is de examentijd al aangebroken. Leerlingen moeten bij praktijkexamens laten zien hoe goed ze beroepsvaardigheden beheersen. Docenten examineren. „We hebben leerlingen, die kunnen mij echt álles verkopen.”

The Guardian’s picture editors select photographs from around the world

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An independent privacy audit of Microsoft, Meta, and Google web traffic in California found that the companies may be violating state regulations and racking up billions in fines. According to the audit from privacy search engine webXray, 55 percent of the sites it checked set ad cookies in a user’s browser even if they opted out of tracking. Each company disputed or took issue with the research, with Google saying it was based on a “fundamental misunderstanding” of how its product works.

The webXray California Privacy Audit viewed web traffic on more than 7,000 popular websites in California in the month of March and found that most tech companies ignore when a user asks to opt-out of cookie tracking. California has stringent and well defined privacy legislation thanks to its California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) which allows users to, among other things, opt out of the sale of their personal information. There’s a system called Global Privacy Control (GPC), which includes a browser extension that indicates to a website when a user wants to opt out of tracking. 

According to the webXray audit, Google failed to let users opt out 87 percent of the time. “Googleʼs failure to honor the GPC opt-out signal is easy to find in network traffic. When a browser using GPC connects to Googleʼs servers it encodes the opt-out signal by sending the code ‘sec-gpc: 1.’ This means Google should not return cookies,” the audit said. “However, when Googleʼs server responds to the network request with the opt-out it explicitly responds with a command to create an advertising cookie named IDE using the ‘set-cookie’ command. This non-compliance is easy to spot, hiding in plain sight.”

The audit said that Microsoft fails to opt out users in the same way and has a failure rate of 50 percent in the web traffic webXray viewed. Meta’s failure rate was 69 percent and a bit more comprehensive. “Meta instructs publishers to install the following tracking code on their websites. The code contains no check for globally standard opt-out signals—it loads unconditionally, fires a tracking event, and sets a cookie regardless of the consumerʼs privacy preferences,” the audit said. It showed a copy of Meta’s tracking data which contains no GPC check at all.

webXray is an independent technology company that runs a search engine that lets people look for privacy violations on the internet. Its founder Timothy Libert is the former lead of cookie policy and compliance at Google. Libert told 404 Media he felt his job at Google was to protect its users but that his bosses didn’t agree. He left the company in 2023 and started webXray. 

“Shortly before I left my boss told me, direct quote, my job is to protect the company. There was another time I got into a very serious ontological discussion with a fairly senior engineer about what the difference was between taxes and fines and they didn’t understand there was a difference,” he said.

Microsoft, Meta, and Google have collectively paid billions in fees for previous privacy violations similar to the ones Libert and webXray found during the audit. According to Libert, the big tech companies don’t fear these fines. “In many ways fines have come to replace taxes,” he said. “What I’m trying to show here is, ‘How is enforcement failing?’ What we’re trying to do here is put people in the regulatory and legal community who work on these issues to have an understanding of what’s actually going on under the hood.”

One of the things going on under the hood revealed in the audit is how cookie banners work. Anyone who uses the internet has seen these annoying pop-ups that ask users how they want to handle cookies issued from the site. These are called consent management platforms (CPM). Google, one of the premier purveyors of cookies, runs a service called “Cookiebot” that certifies CPMs.

“This clear conflict of interest led us to ask: do these CMPs actually work?” the audit said. “By measuring what happens when an opt-out signal is sent to a website, we were able to find out, and the findings are clear: no Google-certified CMP we evaluated works 100% of the time, and all of them are often found to fail to prevent Google from setting cookies despite opt-out signals being present.”

webXray said it tested three CMP companies and found opt-out failure rates of 77 percent, 91 percent, and 90 percent. “It does not work. It fails. It lets Google, specifically the party who said that this will work, it lets them set cookies,” Libert said.

Google, Meta, and Microsoft all disputed the audit. “This report is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how our products work. We honor opt-out provided by advertisers and publishers as required by law,” a Google spokesperson told 404 Media.

“This is a marketing ploy that mischaracterizes how GPC works and Meta's role," Meta told 404 Media. “GPC only restricts certain uses of third-party data and allows website operators to override GPC signals, and we offer the Limited Data Use feature to help websites indicate what permissions they have. When data is transmitted to us with the LDU flag, we restrict the use of that data, as specified in our State-Specific Terms.”

“Consumer privacy is a top priority for us, and we remain committed to transparency and compliance with applicable privacy requirements. As outlined in our Privacy Statement, when we receive a GPC signal, we opt the user out of sharing personal data with third parties for personalized advertising, and our advertising systems are designed to reflect that choice,” a Microsoft spokesperson said. “Certain Microsoft cookies are necessary for operational purposes, and may therefore be placed and read even when a GPC signal is detected.”

“In my view this stuff isn’t complicated. You say, ‘don’t set the cookie.’ They set the cookie,” Libert said. “The regulators see a fox going into the henhouse and the fox says, ‘I’m just here to count the eggs, not to eat any chickens.’ And they take them at their word. They don’t make them produce any public record.”

When caught, governments levy fines against companies and the companies pay. Libert said that isn’t enough. “They can just pay fines forever,” he said.

Key to the audit is that Libert and his team provided a simple solution to the violations. According to webXray, it’s as easy as adding one line of code. “When Microsoftʼs ad server receives traffic with Sec-GPC: 1, all it has to do is return a 451 Unavailable For Legal Reasons status code to indicate the content cannot be served due to the consumerʼs legally defined opt-out. No cookie is set in this condition,” the audit said.

“This is the Strait of Hormuz in the data economy. If you want to make a change, this is where you cut it off. Anything short of that is theatrical political posture,” Libert said.

Op de Oranjeboomstraat in Rotterdam-Feijenoord is een lesauto tegen de zijkant van een andere auto gereden. De leerling en instructeur kwamen hierbij met de schrik vrij. Een vrouw die in de aangereden auto zat, raakte wel lichtgewond. Zij werd naar het ziekenhuis vervoerd ter controle.