It's now been confirmed that Carlos Sainz and Alex Albon will stay with Williams in 2027, but Team Principal James Vowles admits that he had concerns about losing the pair.

In the latest episode of F1 Nation, Tom Clarkson, Jolyon Palmer and James Hinchcliffe turn their attention to the Temple of Speed ahead of this weekend's Italian Grand Prix.

California's age-verification bill has passed in its legislature — but with its open-source carve-out intact, reports the blog Linuxiac:



Back in May, we reported that California lawmakers amended Assembly Bill 1856 to carve open-source operating systems out of the state's upcoming age verification requirements. Three months later, that exemption survived the legislative process intact, and the bill has cleared both chambers of the California Legislature... sending the measure to Engrossing and Enrolling, the final legislative preparation stage before it can be presented to Governor Gavin Newsom...

For operating systems that are covered, AB 1856 builds on California's Digital Age Assurance Act, which is scheduled to take effect on January 1, 2027. Under the current text, when an operating system runs on a device and includes an account setup feature, its provider must offer an interface that asks the account holder for the birth date, age, or both, of the device's primary user during account setup. The operating system must then be capable of providing a digital age signal to covered application stores and application developers through a reasonably consistent real-time API. Instead of exposing a precise birth date, the signal identifies one of four age ranges: under 13, 13 through 15, 16 through 17, or 18 and older... Covered application stores must request the signal from the operating system and make it available to developers.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

KINSHASA (ANP) - Het aantal ebolabesmettingen in de Democratische Republiek Congo (DRC) is opgelopen tot boven de 6000. Dat heeft de regering maandag bekendgemaakt.

Sinds de uitbraak in mei werd afgekondigd, is bij 6041 personen het virus vastgesteld. 2911 van hen zijn overleden. Experts denken dat de werkelijke cijfers hoger liggen. De huidige ebola-uitbraak is de op een na dodelijkste sinds de ontdekking van het virus in 1976. Het gaat om de bundibugyovariant van het virus. Voor deze variant bestaat geen goedgekeurd vaccin of behandeling.

Zorgmedewerkers worden sinds eind vorige week ingeënt met een vaccin tegen de zaïrevariant. Het vaccin is volgens eerste onderzoeken mogelijk ook effectief tegen de bundibugyovariant. Er zijn 50.000 doses beschikbaar voor zorgpersoneel en 20.000 voor een studie naar de effecten van het vaccin op de bundibugyovariant.

DEN HAAG (ANP) - De wettelijke onderbouwing van de coronamaatregelen was volgens toenmalig SGP-leider Kees van der Staaij niet altijd logisch. Hij zei tijdens een verhoor door de parlementaire enquêtecommissie corona dat hij liever niet had gezien dat de eerste maatregelen op basis van noodverordeningen werden ingevoerd.

"Met noodverordeningen werden allerlei stappen gezet die je bij goed doordenken over de inperking van grondrechten niet genomen zou hebben", aldus Van der Staaij. Hij werd niet gevraagd naar voorbeelden.

Volgens Van der Staaij was het beter geweest als de regering direct voor het staatsnoodrecht was gegaan als wettelijke onderbouwing om maatregelen in te voeren zonder akkoord van de Tweede en Eerste Kamer. "Al was dat ook verouderd. Het was een EHBO-doos waar dingen uit misten."

De noodverordeningen werden later vervangen door een tijdelijke wet voor coronamaatregelen. De avondklok werd uiteindelijk wel ingevoerd op basis van staatsnoodrecht. Dat vond Van der Staaij dan weer niet nodig, al begreep hij het wel, "omdat het zo uitzonderlijk was".

WIESBADEN (ANP) - De inflatie in Duitsland is in augustus licht gestegen naar 2,9 procent op jaarbasis, van 2,8 procent in juli. Dat meldt het Duitse federale statistiekbureau Destatis op basis van een voorlopige schatting. Daarmee wordt het weer wat waarschijnlijker dat de Europese Centrale Bank (ECB) binnenkort met een renteverhoging komt.

De inflatie in de grootste economie van Europa is daarmee naar het hoogste niveau sinds april gestegen. Die stijging komt vooral door hogere energie- en brandstofprijzen.

Dinsdag komen cijfers over de inflatie in Nederland en de eurozone. Economen houden er rekening mee dat de ECB bij zijn rentebesluit van 10 september de leenkosten verder verhoogt om de inflatie te beteugelen.

Voor Nederland wordt alom op een inflatie van 3,3 procent in augustus gerekend. Dat was nog 3,2 procent in juli.

Drie vrachtschepen van het Rotterdamse bedrijf Grona Shipping krijgen een nieuwe eigenaar. De schepen worden verkocht om financiële problemen het hoofd te bieden. De verkoop heeft verder geen gevolgen voor de bemanning en de rest van het bedrijf.

Oud-minister en voormalig CDA-leider Elco Brinkman is op 78-jarige leeftijd overleden na een kort ziekbed. Dat heeft zijn familie bekendgemaakt. Hij overleed in zijn woonplaats Leiden. Het is niet bekendgemaakt waaraan hij leed.

Erin West and Paul Raffile stepped out of their van about 45 minutes outside Lagos, Nigeria, and walked down a muddy hill. At the bottom, they entered a field with houses made of corrugated steel and cardboard. Raffile kept falling into the mud.

After walking about a quarter of a mile, the pair came to a hut, six feet high on stilts, and climbed up a ladder. Inside was the baba lao, a local spiritual leader. The baba lao was going to do a ritual designed to ensure a Nigerian scammer would make more money in his blackmailing or manipulation of an overseas victim, maybe back in the United States.

A scammer who accompanied West and Raffile had a photo of the victim he was trying to get money from, and the identity he had impersonated to do so. The baba lao then fused these two souls together to bring more fortune to the scammer, Raffile recalled. For two and a half hours, the baba lao jumped between grinding herbs, creating talismans, sacrificing an animal. Locals gathered outside the hut.

West and Raffile are scam experts: West is the founder of Operation Shamrock, an organization that aims to disrupt scam operations, and Raffile is a long time cybercrime researcher, who focuses especially on sextortion. This is where scammers, like those in Nigeria, will assume the identity of a young person, approach teenagers in the U.S. on apps like Instagram, have them record explicit videos, then pull the mask away and threaten to release the videos to the victim’s friends and family unless they pay up. Sextortion is common across U.S. social media platforms; at least dozens of young boys have taken their own lives after being targeted.

The pair hatched a plan to go to Nigeria to see if they could actually track down a scammer. The trip provided rare insight into how some scammers live and how brazenly many of them flaunt their scams.

Sextortion is “targeting youth. It's surging,” Raffile said. “I wonder, can we hatch a plan where we put ourselves out there as a target, create our own fake account, get scammed by these criminals, and then trace the criminal back to their home turf?”

They made an Instagram and Snapchat account pretending to be a young person. Within a couple of days, they started receiving suspicious direct messages. West said she was “flabagasted” at how quickly the messages came in.

The scammers were pretending to be young women, often using photos stolen from OnlyFans models. As the chat progressed and the scammers demanded money, the pair said they could only pay in Bitcoin, and sent a link to a website where the scammer could allegedly claim their payment. The site was actually grabbing the scammers’ IP addresses. It showed the scammers were in Lagos, Nigeria. With not much to go on just yet, the pair got on a flight to Nigeria.

Once they landed, they had around six days to find a scammer. It would not be financially viable to sit around in Lagos forever. The pair deployed the IP address grabbing website again, but this time one of the scammers granted the tool more permissions in his browser. The tool was also designed to, if possible, get their exact location, or turn on its camera and see their face. This time, it worked. They had a scammer’s face.

At one point, another scammer asked the pair to move from Instagram, where the conversation initially happened, over to WhatsApp, which revealed the scammer’s phone number. The pair’s fixer put that number into TrueCaller— an app that harvests peoples’ phone contact lists and makes them searchable, essentially — which revealed the name Big Dollar. West also provided the number to some contacts who investigated it. They worked with another expert too who was able to dig up more information and find the scammer’s real name. They then found other social media profiles belonging to Big Dollar, including a TikTok account that had posted blackmail messages. The pair were given GPS coordinates of where this scammer might be.

They drove to Big Dollar’s village, and ultimately he refused to meet the pair. West told Big Dollar on the phone, we know who you are, we know where you live, and the next step is we’re going to give this information to the FBI. Around this time, they saw Big Dollar’s social media accounts go dark. 

West said, “it was an interesting opportunity to really put some fear in a class of people who aren't really afraid of being arrested.”