Scott Adams, who kept cubicle denizens laughing for more than three decades with Dilbert, the bitingly funny comic strip that poked fun at the absurdity of corporate life, died Tuesday. He was 68. From a report: His death was tearfully revealed by his first ex-wife, Shelly Miles, at the start of Real Coffee With Scott Adams. In May, he said on the podcast that he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer, which had spread to his bones. "I expect to be checking out from this domain this summer," he said.
In a statement he wrote that was read by Miles over six minutes, he said, "Things did not go well for me ... my body fell before my brain."
Sprung from Adams' days as a Pacific Bell applications engineer in San Ramon, California, Dilbert debuted in 1989 and at the height of its popularity appeared in more than 2,000 newspapers across 65 countries and in 25 languages with an estimated worldwide readership of more than 150 million. Though it had the appropriate level of cartoon exaggeration, the strip keenly captured office life and struck a nerve with the white-collar class.
Moxie Marlinspike, the engineer who created Signal Messenger and set a new standard for private communications, is now trialing Confer, an open source AI assistant designed to make user data unreadable to platform operators, hackers, and law enforcement alike. Confer relies on two core technologies: passkeys that generate a 32-byte encryption keypair stored only on user devices, and trusted execution environments on servers that prevent even administrators from accessing data. The code is open source and cryptographically verifiable through remote attestation and transparency logs.
Marlinspike likens current AI interactions to confessing into a "data lake." A court order last May required OpenAI to preserve all ChatGPT user logs including deleted chats, and CEO Sam Altman has acknowledged that even psychotherapy sessions on the platform may not stay private.
JPMorgan Chase's chief financial officer Jeremy Barnum pushed back hard on Tuesday against President Donald Trump's proposed 10% cap on credit card interest rates, calling the measure "very bad for consumers" and "very bad for the economy" during a call with reporters.
The proposed one-year cap, which Trump has said he wants implemented starting January 20, sent banking stocks tumbling last week and prompted financial groups to mount a defense. Barnum said JPMorgan would have to "change the business significantly and cut back" if the cap takes effect, adding that he believes the policy would produce "the exact opposite consequence to what the administration wants."
Wall Street analysts remain skeptical the proposal will survive, noting that only Congress can enact such a measure. The average credit card interest rate in November stood at 20.97%, according to Federal Reserve data. Financial industry groups have countered that a 10% cap would result in millions of American households and small businesses losing access to credit entirely. A banking industry body called the potential impact "devastating."
WASHINGTON (AFP) - De Verenigde Staten hebben de Moslimbroederschap in Egypte, Libanon en Jordanië aangemerkt als een buitenlandse terroristische organisatie. Afgelopen november gaf de Amerikaanse president Donald Trump al aan hiervoor de eerste stappen te hebben gezet.
Het land beschuldigt de Moslimbroederschap ervan gewelddadige aanvallen tegen Israël en Amerikaanse bondgenoten te steunen of aan te moedigen.
Volgens het Amerikaanse ministerie van Financiën doen de afdelingen zich voor als legitieme maatschappelijke organisaties "terwijl ze achter de schermen expliciet en enthousiast terroristische groeperingen zoals Hamas steunen".
Meerdere landen in het Midden-Oosten hebben al actie ondernomen tegen de Moslimbroederschap vanwege vermeende terroristische activiteiten. Egypte, waar de beweging vandaan komt, verwelkomt het besluit van de Verenigde Staten.
ARLINGTON (ANP/BLOOMBERG/AFP) - Boeing heeft voor het eerst in zeven jaar meer vliegtuigorders binnengekregen dan de Europese concurrent Airbus. De Amerikaanse vliegtuigbouwer kreeg vorig jaar in totaal 1175 bestellingen voor verkeersvliegtuigen, terwijl dat er 1000 waren voor Airbus.
Met 600 afgeleverde vliegtuigen blijft Boeing wel achter bij Airbus. Die leverde in 2025 in totaal 793 toestellen. Desondanks is het de beste prestatie van de Amerikaanse fabrikant sinds 2018. Het bedrijf profiteert van de toenemende orders door steun van het Witte Huis. Zo ontving Boeing de grootste bestelling in de geschiedenis van het bedrijf van luchtvaartmaatschappij Qatar Airways, terwijl Trump in mei door het Midden-Oosten reisde.
Ook is de financiële positie van de vliegtuigbouwer hersteld, omdat het bedrijf het productietempo wist op te voeren na een aantal crises. Zo waren er stakingen in 2024 en twee fatale crashes met een Boeing 737 MAX in 2018 en 2019. Die vliegtuigen werden vervolgens een tijd aan de grond gehouden.
AMSTERDAM (ANP) - De AEX-index is dinsdag hoger geëindigd en heeft daarmee de opmars voortgezet richting het historische niveau van 1000 punten. De Amsterdamse hoofdindex was maandag ook al geëindigd op een nieuw slotrecord, onder aanvoering van chiptoeleverancier Besi.
De AEX eindigde 0,4 procent hoger op 997,17 punten en bereikte daarmee een nieuwe recordslotstand. De MidKap steeg 0,1 procent tot 956,18 punten. De beurzen in Londen en Parijs gingen licht omlaag. De beurs in Frankfurt klom 0,1 procent.
Een wilde achtervolging heeft zich dinsdag aan het einde van de middag afgespeeld. Dat gebeurde toen de politie een verdachte auto bij Detentiecentrum Rotterdam zag, waarna een pakketje over het hek werd gegooid. Na een rit door Rotterdam reed de Koninklijke Marechaussee de auto klem in Schiedam, bij de rotonde van de Slimme Watering en de Zwaluwlaan.
In museums everywhere, collections departments are troves of historical objects, art, cultural artifacts, and scientific specimens. In our increasingly digital age, it’s easy to forget that in many cases, a good amount—sometimes even the majority—of records are documented in heavy, physical catalogues or accession registers. And over the course of decades or even centuries, labels can get damaged, items can go awol, or in the worst case scenario, fire or water damage can destroy these valuable resources.
In a sense, these analog databases are just as important as the objects they document, providing information about provenance and materials. In filing drawers, cases, and archival boxes, pieces are labeled one way or another. Archaeological potsherds, for example, may be labeled right on the piece with varnish and ink. At the Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, tiny invertebrates are preserved alongside ornate, handwritten labels that harken back to our not-so-distant pre-digital age.
One problem with the old system of analog record-keeping is that access is limited, and only those most intimately acquainted with a particular collection may know that something is there at all. Finding items often requires some old fashioned sleuthing. But thanks to growing online resources, museums are increasingly working to make their holdings more accessible to both researchers and the public.
A new exhibition, Making the Invisible Visible: Digitizing Invertebrates on Microscope Slides, highlights Harvard’s diverse collection comprising more than 50,000 examples. Many are well over 100 years old, including a slide containing a soft coral specimen inscribed with, “sent to James Dwight Dana by Charles Darwin.” Some include whole insects, while others feature only wings or antennae.
The exhibition marks an extension of an ambitious project launched in 2024 to bring the collection into the 21st century by digitizing more than 3,000 specimens. This includes locating, restoring, rehousing, and capturing high-resolution images so that the collection can be published online for use by researchers around the world. Indeed, even the addition of QR code labels to the 19th-century objects is a thought-provoking juxtaposition of historical and contemporary archiving techniques. How will scientists use these another century from now?