Formula 1 News

Formula 1® - The Official F1® Website

Best Qualifying bets for the Hungarian Grand Prix

Our expert betting writers have shared their top picks for Qualifying at the Hungaroring.

Maini takes F2 pole in Budapest with Camara on front row

Kush Maini claimed the second pole position of his FIA Formula 2 season at the Hungaroring, setting a 1m 28.896s during Qualifying.

Can Ferrari cling onto their early advantage in Hungary?

Slashdot

News for nerds, stuff that matters

Roku Raises Prices of Streaming Devices By Up To 60%

Roku has raised prices on several streaming devices, blaming memory and component shortages tied to the AI data-center boom. The Roku Ultra jumped from $100 to $150 and the basic Streaming Stick rose from $30 to $40. The Desk reports: In a phone call with The Desk on Friday, a Roku executive said the company made the tough decision to raise prices on its streaming hardware to address shortages in computer memory and other components caused by the artificial intelligence rush. [...] Still, the executive who spoke with The Desk on Friday said the company believes its hardware is still competitive against other streaming TV hardware because Roku devices are still priced aggressively compared to the Apple TV and other expensive streaming hardware, and the company remains focused on looking at ways to add value to its Roku platform before and after it enters a customer's home. "We are doing our best to have great deals like what we have going on right now," the executive said. "Roku is even upping the price for a bundle that includes a Streaming Stick Plus and a one-month subscription to Fox One," notes Ars Technica in a separate report.

"As recently as July 20, Roku listed the bundle at $60 with a sale price of $25, according to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. Now, the bundle carries an $80 MSRP and $45 sale price."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta Warn Against 'Premature Restrictions' of Open-Weight Models

Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, Palantir, and more than 20 other tech companies signed an open letter urging policymakers not to impose "premature restrictions" on open-weight AI models, warning that broad limits could "stifle competition or drive innovation overseas." CNBC reports: They wrote that open-weight models strengthen competition and ensure that the benefits of the technology are "broadly shared rather than concentrated in a few hands." "Relying solely on closed models is not inherently safe: they can be breached, misused, or fail in ways that outsiders cannot detect," the letter said. "And concentrating advanced AI capabilities behind a small number of closed models compounds that risk."

Elon Musk, who runs an AI business under his rocket company SpaceX, also applified the letter on social media, writing that it has his "full support" in a post on X. SpaceX did not officially sign the letter. Greg Brockman, OpenAI's president, said Thursday that the company believes in broad access, and that he has not been involved in any conversations with the Trump administration about potentially banning Chinese open-weight models in the U.S.

"I think that, that fundamentally, AI and AI usage is something that is actually very important to democratize," Brockman told reporters during a briefing in New York City. "And so, for me, at a sort of deep level, I think that having more models, more usage, that is a good thing." OpenAI CEO Sam Altman addressed the letter in a post on X on Friday, writing that he wants the U.S. to win with both open-weight and proprietary models, and that he is "glad to see this."

[...] In the letter on Friday, the U.S. tech companies said that concerns about unlawful distillation should be addressed through "targeted legal and commercial frameworks" instead of with "sweeping restrictions on techniques that play an important role in AI innovation." "Our AI leadership will be judged not by one frontier AI model, but by whether the United States builds a strong, open ecosystem that diffuses into every sector," the letter said. "This is essential for creating opportunities for innovation and prosperity across the country." The letter follows a separate appeal signed by nearly 200 Silicon Valley companies, including Proton and Y Combinator, warning that restricting U.S. access to Chinese open-weight AI models could cripple the next generation of American startups. "American leadership requires two things: world-leading American open-weight models and continued access for U.S. builders to open models already available worldwide," the startup founders wrote. Instead of broad prohibitions, they argue the government should adopt targeted safeguards.

Of course, these signees "have an obvious economic stake in seeing open AI models flourish," notes TechCrunch. "Companies like Nvidia, Microsoft Azure, and other infrastructure providers have a vested interest in pushing for commoditized models: If models are interchangeable, people will buy more GPUs, rent more cloud capacity, and build more applications."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

VK: Voorpagina

Volkskrant.nl biedt het laatste nieuws, opinie en achtergronden

VS-regering hield miljarden dollars aan subsidies in van staten die niet op Trump stemden

Wel.nl

Minder lezen, Meer weten.

VS-regering onthield staten die niet op Trump stemden subsidies

WASHINGTON (ANP) - Amerikaanse overheidsfunctionarissen hebben in gerechtelijke documenten toegegeven dat ze miljarden dollars aan financiering voor energieprojecten in staten hebben stopgezet "uitsluitend" op basis van het feit dat ze niet op Donald Trump hadden gestemd bij de presidentsverkiezingen van 2024. Dat melden Amerikaanse media, waaronder The New York Times.

Zo trok de regering-Trump in oktober federale subsidies ter waarde van ruim 7,5 miljard dollar (zo'n 6,6 miljard euro) uit het tijdperk van Trumps voorganger Joe Biden in voor schone energieprojecten. Daarvoor werd als reden opgegeven dat de regering daarmee verspilling van belastinggeld tegenging. Uit de gerechtelijke documenten blijkt nu dat de subsidies "uitsluitend" op basis van politieke criteria werden stopgezet.

Deze erkenning toont hoe Trump overheidssteun voor onderwijs, energie, gezondheidszorg, huisvesting en infrastructuur in zijn tweede ambtstermijn heeft misbruikt, stelt The New York Times.


The Register

Biting the hand that feeds IT — Enterprise Technology News and Analysis

Pope's official prayer app commits cardinal sin, leaks 700K+ users' info

Click To Pray, a prayer app endorsed by the Pope with hundreds of thousands of users worldwide, has leaked people’s names and email addresses for months - or longer - according to an ethical hacker who said she found and reported the security vulnerability six months ago to no avail. This app needs to take a vow of silence when it comes to your personal information. The app, available in seven languages and on iOS, Android, and clicktopray.org, is the official app of the Pope's Worldwide Prayer Network. It connects users across the globe to pray for the Holy Father’s intentions, and as of July 2026, it has 719,517 registered accounts. It’s also very leaky, according to security sleuth BobDaHacker, who says she spotted and disclosed the vulnerability to the Pope’s Worldwide Prayer Network on January 3. “The vulnerability is still live,” the hacker said in a Friday blog. “Nobody has ever responded. I guess my email wasn't in their prayers." The Reg readers likely remember BobDaHacker for her previous research exposing a free-food flaw in McDonald's ordering system and open controls on Chinese robot manufacturer Pudu Robotics. This latest security hole stems from an Insecure Direct Object Reference (IDOR) bug in the prayer app. This is a very common and easy-to-exploit type of flaw that occurs when a website or an app blindly accepts user-provided input to view or modify resources without checking to see if the user is actually authorized to retrieve the data. “You ask for your own data, the server gives it to you,” BobDaHacker explains. “You ask for someone else's data, the server gives you that too. Thou shalt not authorize, apparently.” When you sign up for a Click To Pray account, the app assigns you a sequential numeric user ID. As BobDaHacker uncovered, the API endpoint GET https://api[.]clicktopray.org/user/users/{id} will return user data for any account - not just your own account - so long as you supply a valid, five-digit user ID. It doesn’t perform any authorization check or ownership validation. “Just increment the number and get someone else's data,” she wrote. This data includes users’ email addresses, first and last names, country, dates of birth, and whether the account has been deleted, and the API exposes all 719,517 accounts on the prayer site. “With sequential user IDs and no rate limiting, an attacker could enumerate every single account on the platform,” the hacker explained. “One GET request per user. for i in range(1, 719518): scrape(). That's it. That's the exploit.” As BobDaHacker points out, many of these users are likely older individuals, not all that tech savvy, and very trusting of anything Vatican related, making these exposed accounts a “phishing goldmine.” “Imagine getting an email that says ‘The Holy Father requests your urgent attention’ with a Vatican-looking link,” she wrote. “Grandma is clicking that. Every time.” And then it gets even worse. The signup endpoint, POST https://api.clicktopray.org/user/users/sign-up, returns the account's validation_hash directly in the response body, and that value is the same UUID used in the email verification link. This means someone could sign up using any email address and verify the account before the confirmation message reached the inbox. Plus, BobDaHacker’s email client flagged the real verification email with a warning that it had failed the domain’s authentication requirements and might have been spoofed or improperly forwarded. “So not only is the API leaking 700,000 email addresses that could be used for phishing, but the real emails from Click To Pray already look like phishing,” the hacker noted. “An attacker wouldn't even need to try hard. They could send a pixel-perfect phishing email and it would have the same level of email authentication as the real thing: none. God works in mysterious ways.” The Register reached out to the Pope's Worldwide Prayer Network and did not receive any response. BobDaHacker says she’s still praying for one, too.®

Hampton Court Palace, London ハンプトン・コート宮殿、ロンドン

Mr Mikage (ミスター御影) posted a photo:

Hampton Court Palace, London ハンプトン・コート宮殿、ロンドン

Anil Dash

A blog about making culture. Since 1999.

Becoming Skilled at Making Documents

The vast majority of the documents people use to do business are really quite poor. Presentations that make your eyes glaze over, memos that are inscrutable or unclear, and all kinds of artifacts that say more about how they were created than whatever message they were ostensibly trying to communicate. It's been one of my great frustrations for years, and a big part of why I wrote Make Better Documents a while ago. That post captured a list of the suggestions I've been giving people for years on how to make better, more effective documents that can actually do work for you, instead of fighting at cross purposes to your larger goals.

To my great surprise, that list of suggestions on how to make better documents got a pretty huge response, and a lot of people told me they found it really helpful. So now, I've created a Better Documents skills.md file for people who use LLM tools like Claude to help assist them in creating business documents, to prompt their AI tools to make better documents by default.

If you're not familiar, agent skills are simple text files that describe new capabilities or processes that LLMs can take advantage of when carrying out tasks. (They're Markdown files — more proof of how Markdown is taking over the world!) The way this skill works is that it's distilled the broad principles I outlined in that post into a series of 5 tests, covering areas like whether you've properly considered your target audience, whether the overall structure is correct, if you've overdone things with your formatting, and if things are named clearly, and then either generates a new file that follows those rules, or reviews an existing document to make sure it is obeying best practices.

It's nothing too fancy, but I've been using it for a while, and shared it with a few friends, and people have told me they found it handy and it's improved some of their routine documents. I'm especially glad that people have found it useful even if they're the kind of folks who would never let an LLM generate a document on their behalf, but do think software tools are useful for things like spell check or grammar check. I see this as being a tool in that kind of category.

If you're familiar with skills, the install process is really simple and works just like any other skill. This skill is totally free and open source (if you have improvements, send along a pull request on GitHub, or if you're not a coder type, just email me or hit me up on social media and let me know what fixes/suggestions you've got), so there are no encumbrances or restrictions on its use. I am curious if it's useful to people, especially if you find it handy to use more broadly at a company, so don't be shy to get in touch if you find it valuable.

Here's to us all enduring fewer terrible presentations!