Met enorme natuurbranden in Frankrijk, Spanje en Portugal staat Europa voor een nieuwe uitdaging: hoe temmen we zo snel mogelijk al dat vuur?

We wandelen langs het Planetenpad bij het Herdenkingscentrum Westerbork en verdiepen ons in de op schaal geplaatste informatieborden over de planeten in ons zonnestelsel.

Een Precies Vier bestaat uit 16 woorden, begrippen of namen, die moeten worden verdeeld in precies vier groepen van vier. Er is telkens maar één oplossing mogelijk. Welke woorden vormen een connectie?

Een kruiswoordpuzzel, maar dan heel klein (en snel).

Bass Photography has added a photo to the pool:

Western Australia

Fat Burns ☮ has added a photo to the pool:

Your comments and faves are greatly appreciated. Many thanks.

Square-tailed Kite
Scientific Name: Lophoictinia isura
Although it usually occurs singly, the Square-tailed Kite is sometimes seen soaring in pairs during the breeding season, and family groups of adults and one or two dependent young may be seen during post-fledging period. The Square-tailed Kite usually hunts by flying low over the treetops, occasionally plunging down through the foliage to snatch a bird or insect from among the leaves or twigs. The species often eats the nestlings of birds, and sometimes it will remove the entire nest to get at the young birds, and at other times may remove the tiny birds, one clutched tightly by the talons of each foot. They also catch adult birds by surprising them in the canopy of the forest.
Description: Often solitary, but can be seen in pairs when nesting. Squared-tailed Kites have a long, square tail with very long, upswept paddle-shaped wings and a large cream crescent at the base of their wing tips.
Similar Species: Immature Black Kite, Black-breasted Buzzard, and Red Goshawk
Distribution: Endemic to mainland Australia.
Habitat: The species mainly inhabits open eucalypt forests and woodlands, often where there is a broken canopy, but it also ranges into nearby open habitats. In southern Australia, Square-tailed Kites mainly inhabit open eucalypt forests and woodlands, often dominated by stringybarks, peppermints or box–ironbark eucalypts, as well as Woollybutt, Spotted Gum, Manna Gum, Messmate, River Red Gums, as well as other trees such as Angophora, cypress-pines and casuarinas. It also occurs along the edges of dense forest and along in road verges with remnant or planted trees, and in clearings within forest or in areas of regrowth, up to 4 years after the area has been logged. Other habitats which occasionally support Square-tailed Kites include mallee, heathland (mallee or coastal) and other low shrublands including saltbush plains, and also grasslands or open or cultivated farmland near remnant woodland.
Feeding: Searching for prey from the air, where they are highly agile at low levels, they mainly hunt in eucalypt open forest or woodland, and less often in low shrublands, heath, grassland or crops, and the margins between open and timbered country (forest–heath; woodland–heath; forest–open field; mallee–open paddocks; woodland edges; riparian timber; belts of trees in urban or semi-urban areas; and clearings in forests) are especially favoured. They specialise in hunting among trees, twisting between and below tree-tops, and they take most prey from the outer foliage of the canopy, but do not enter the canopy.
Breeding: Square-tailed Kites nest on horizontal branches in mature living trees, especially eucalypts, often near water, and they need extensive areas of forest or woodland surrounding or nearby.
Calls: Yelping, yeep, yeep, yeep. Also squealing ee ee ee ee
Minimum Size: 50cm
Maximum Size: 55cm
Average size: 53cm
Average weight: 568g
Breeding season: Aug - Dec
Incubation: 37 days
Nestling Period: 63 days
(Sources: www.birdsinbackyards.net/species/Lophoictinia-isura and www.birdlife.org.au/bird-profile/square-tailed-kite)

© Chris Burns 2026
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There’s new benchmark measuring AI’s ability to perform mathematical cryptanalysis. Anthropic’s frontier model actually found new attacks.

The benchmark: “CryptanalysisBench: Can LLMs do Cryptanalysis?” The idea is to benchmark the ability of LLMs to discover new mathematical cryptanalytic attacks against a series of historical algorithms.

Abstract: Cryptanalysis—the task of finding attacks against cryptographic schemes—its at the intersection of mathematical reasoning and cybersecurity, two areas where LLMs have advanced fastest. Cryptanalysis represents both a clean testbed for frontier reasoning (as practical attacks can be automatically verified) and a domain with unusually high stakes, since the primitives under study underpin our digital security. In this paper we ask whether LLMs can do cryptanalysis, and find that the answer is increasingly yes. We introduce CryptanalysisBench, 191 tasks across six families of cryptographic primitives (block ciphers, hash functions, etc.) drawn primarily from four NIST standardization competitions. Our benchmark consists of three tiers: (i) primitives with known practical breaks; (ii) primitives with no known practical break, evaluated both at full strength and as scaled-down variants; and (iii) a challenge set of production primitives at the frontier of cryptanalysis. Five frontier models (Claude Opus 4.8, Sonnet 5, Mythos 5, GPT-5.5, and the open-weights GLM-5.2) break 65%­86% of Tier 1 schemes, 6­12 Tier-2 schemes at full strength, and 24­61 across all scaled-down variants. Beyond deriving known results, models produce novel cryptanalysis, such as a key-recovery attack that exploits a design flaw in the SpoC AEAD and an error in KINDI’s published CCA-security proof, both to the best of our knowledge not previously known.

We release CryptanalysisBench as a tool to help track if (or when) AI cryptanalysis becomes a serious factor and as a scaffold for stress-testing candidate schemes before deployment. The attacks that the benchmark already surfaces are an early snapshot of a fast-moving frontier that may soon match, and in places exceed, the published state of the art.

Anthropic used the benchmark to test Mythos Preview, and found new vulnerabilities in Hawk and reduced-round AES.

Still early results, but this is definitely something to watch.

SlashDot thread.

Apple has replaced its iPhone Upgrade Program with Apple Upgrade, a Klarna-backed U.S. leasing service covering most iPhones, iPads, Macs, and Apple Watches. MacRumors reports: Apple Upgrade has lower base prices than the iPhone Upgrade Program, with iPhones available starting at $17.99 per month and the Apple Watch available starting at $11.99 per month. Macs can be leased starting at $24.99 per month, and iPads start at $11.99 per month. AppleCare+ is optional and not included in the lease price, with customers also able to opt for AppleCare One. There are 12-month and 24-month leasing options for the iPhone and Apple Watch, along with 24-month and 36-month leasing options for the Mac and iPad. Lease cost varies based on device, and is lower with a device trade-in that's applied on a monthly basis. [...]

When leasing an iPhone, customers are required to choose a plan from AT&T, Verizon, or T-Mobile, and prepaid plans are not eligible. iPhones need to be leased with a carrier plan, but the iPhones are unlocked so customers can switch carriers if desired. MVNOs like Mint Mobile or Visible are not supported. At the end of the leasing period, customers can choose to return the device and exit the program, pay off the remaining amount owed on the device with a one-time payment and keep it, or return it and upgrade to a new device with a new lease.

The payoff amount is the difference between what was paid during the leasing period and the retail price of the device, minus any remaining trade-in credits. Klarna is not charging a fee for the leasing program, so an iPhone that's $1,099 can be leased and then purchased for $1,099 with no extra cost beyond taxes. As with trade-ins, Apple will send a pre-labeled and prepaid shipping box for device returns or upgrades. If you don't opt to pay the purchase fee at the end of the leasing program, you will not own the device and must return it. Last week, after Bloomberg reported on Apple's upcoming leasing program, 9to5Mac uncovered code in the iOS 27 beta suggesting the company was developing a system that could restrict leased iPhones when customers fall behind on payments. Apple has now told The Verge that the new "Restricted Mode" will not be activated in response to a missed lease payment. What the new system is actually meant for remains unclear.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AI-assisted vulnerability discovery has yet to produce the expected surge in real-world attacks: VulnCheck found that only 14 of 1,061 attributed discoveries, or 1.3 percent, had been exploited, which is "almost identical to the rate across all vulnerabilities in VulnCheck's dataset," reports The Register. "That's a far cry from the narrative that frontier AI is dramatically tilting the balance in attackers' favor by churning out instantly weaponizable bugs." The findings suggest AI is currently better at increasing the volume of bugs found than making them easier to weaponize. From the report: The report takes particular aim at Anthropic's much-publicized Project Glasswing, unveiled in April with warnings that AI-assisted vulnerability discovery could allow attackers to hijack systems, disrupt operations, or steal data. Claude Mythos may have identified 23,019 vulnerability candidates, but there's remarkably little public evidence showing what became of most of them. VulnCheck notes that only 126 have been published as CVEs, that just one has been confirmed exploited in the wild, and that Anthropic's public disclosure record has seen little movement since Project Glasswing launched.

But that doesn't mean AI-assisted vulnerability research has failed, according to Patrick Garrity, security researcher at VulnCheck. "AI-assisted vulnerability discovery clearly has value for both attackers and defenders," Garrity wrote. "The data does not suggest that AI-discovered vulnerabilities are inherently more likely to be exploited than those found through traditional methods." Instead, he argues, AI is simply helping researchers discover more flaws, giving defenders an opportunity to patch them before criminals get there.

Garrity stopped well short of declaring the threat overblown forever, but he did suggest some of the rhetoric has outpaced reality. "The data so far, including Anthropic's own stalled disclosure ledger, suggests that AI-assisted vulnerability discovery and frontier capabilities have been overhyped relative to the evidence available today," he wrote. "That doesn't mean the risk is imaginary. It means the impact has been real but modest."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A decade ago, when I was still speaking at conferences and heavily marketing myself, I’d often think of personal branding ideas. We’ve seen the trends. The business cards. The t-shirts. The stickers. The buttons. The socks! Can’t forget the socks. My logo is branded across not only my sites but my computers and my slide decks, too.

I also liked using colour to reinforce my brand. I’ve continued that tradition with green threading throughout the latest redesign. I even considering wearing green for all my conference talks. Thankfully, that ended up being a short-lived idea.

At one point in my career, I was getting interviewed for a number of podcasts and considered starting up my own podcast. One of the ideas that came out of preparing to start my own podcast was how to brand via audio. I liked the idea of doing chimes like the NBC chimes so that’s what I did:

It’s five dings in the pattern of how I spell out my last name: Ess Enn oh-OH Kay.

Had I implemented this, I had considered using it to intro my conference talks. I likely would’ve integrated it into the site somehow as well. Maybe clicking on the logo rings the chime as the letters of my name pop in sequence.

For now, I’ll simply document this little artifact of time.

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