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iain.davidson100 has added a photo to the pool:
iain.davidson100 has added a photo to the pool:
More than 100,000 people have tuned in to watch ‘kākāpō cam’, which captures a rare flightless bird sleeping, tidying her nest and fighting off intruders
On an island in New Zealand’s remote southern fjords, one of the world’s strangest and rarest parrots – the kākāpō – is caring for her tiny chick as fans from across the globe watch on.
Through the black and white lens of a hidden camera, a fluffy orb with a kazoo-like squeak jostles for food from its mother’s beak. The mother, Rakiura, is attentive – scooping her chick under her large green wings, fending off an intruding bird, and periodically tidying her nest.
Continue reading...For Iranian women in Australia, watching the courageous decision faced by the team has felt personal. But seeking refuge comes with grief and uncertainty
When we watched the players of the Iranian women’s football team stand silently during the national anthem at the Women’s Asian Cup in Australia, it felt personal.
For many viewers, it was simply noted as a political gesture. But for Iranians watching around the world, that silence carried a message that was instantly understood. It felt like a handshake across distance, a quiet message delivered without slogans, without confrontation, without violence. A quiet signal between women who know what it means to live under a system where even the smallest act of autonomy can carry enormous consequences: disappearance, imprisonment or execution.
Now, the players face another form of pressure. Some will remain in Australia on temporary humanitarian visas. But that choice is not without cost. For many, staying abroad could mean continuous pressure on their families by the regime; it could mean never returning home as long as this regime remains in power, cutting them off from everything familiar – not just the streets of their cities, but the rhythms of family life.
For those who return, the burdens are no less heavy. They may have elderly parents to care for, relatives who depend on them financially, or loved ones whose lives are directly threatened by the Iranian regime. Every choice is fraught, every path dangerous. The players were described as “wartime traitors” by a state-linked commentator, who called for them to be “dealt with more severely”.
Hungary PM Viktor Orbán orders cash and gold shipment be held for up to 60 days. Moscow and Kyiv both claim battlefield gains. What we know on day 1,476
The Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, has ordered that a shipment of Ukrainian cash and gold seized last week by Hungarian authorities be held in custody for up to 60 days while his country’s tax authority investigates the case. The gold and the money was being transported through Hungary by road when Hungary seized it last Thursday. Authorities said they suspected money laundering. The shipment included $40m and 35m euros in cash, as well as 9kgs (19.8 pounds) of gold worth about $82m, based on current rates. The seizure followed a dispute over gas supplies, in which Hungary and Slovakia accused Kyiv of deliberately stalling on repairs to an oil pipeline after it was hit in an apparent Russian drone attack.
The seizure has outraged Ukrainian authorities who accused Hungary’s Russia-friendly government of acting illegally. The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, accused Budapest of “banditry” over its seizure of the bank transport, and the temporary detention of its Ukrainian crew. Zelenskyy urged European leaders not to stay silent about Budapest’s actions.
Russian and Ukrainian officials made rival claims of battlefield success, with Ukraine saying it pushed Moscow’s forces back across places on the frontline and the Kremlin insisting Russia’s invasion is making progress. Ukrainian forces have recently retaken nearly all the territory of the south-eastern Dnipropetrovsk industrial region during a counteroffensive, driving Russian troops out of more than 400 sq kilometres (150 sq miles), Maj Gen Oleksandr Komarenko claimed to media outlet RBC-Ukraine.
Meanwhile, Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, claimed on Tuesday that Russian forces have extended their gains in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, whose capture Moscow has made one of the goals of its invasion. Ukraine controlled about 25% of the Donbas six months ago, but it now holds just 15% to 17%, Putin claimed.
The US has proposed another round of Russia-Ukraine talks, mediated by Washington, Zelenskyy said on Tuesday. The talks could be held in Switzerland or Turkey, he said, after initial plans for a meeting in the United Arab Emirates was disrupted by the US-Israeli war on Iran. Zelenskyy said Ukraine-Russia PoW swaps could be on the agenda. The Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, said on Tuesday: “The conflict in Iran must not obstruct the peace efforts for Ukraine.”
Moscow’s deportation and forcible transfer of thousands of children from Ukraine to Russia amounts to a crime against humanity, a UN team of investigators said on Tuesday. The UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine said it had evidence leading it to conclude that “Russian authorities have committed the crimes against humanity of deportation and forcible transfer, as well as of enforced disappearance of children”. The inquiry said Russia had deported or transferred “thousands” of children from occupied areas of Ukraine, of which it had so far confirmed 1,205 cases. “Four years on, 80% of the children deported or transferred in the cases investigated by the commission have not returned,” it said.
Ukrainian forces struck a key plant producing missile components on Tuesday in Russia’s border region of Bryansk, Zelenskyy said. Ukraine’s military said British Storm Shadow missiles were deployed against the Kremniy El factory. It said the facility produced critical missile components. The governor of Bryansk region, Alexander Bogomaz, said on Telegram six civilians were killed and 37 injured.
A Russian strike on the eastern Ukrainian frontline city of Sloviansk killed four people and injured 16 others, local governor Vadym Filashkin said on Tuesday. Filashkin said Russia had dropped three guided bombs on the city, and that a 14-year-old girl was among those wounded.
A decision by the Venice Biennale to allow Russia to participate in this year’s event came under fire from the EU on Tuesday, which warned it could cut funding. “We strongly condemn the decision” and are looking at taking action, including suspending an EU grant to the organising body, two top members of the European Commission said in a statement. Kyiv last weekend called on the Biennale to reverse its decision and to exclude Russia, as it had done at the last two Venice art exhibitions, in 2022 and 2024.
Continue reading...
An anonymous reader quotes a report from IEEE Spectrum: Worried that your latest ask to a cloud-based AI reveals a bit too much about you? Want to know your genetic risk of disease without revealing it to the services that compute the answer? There is a way to do computing on encrypted data without ever having it decrypted. It's called fully homomorphic encryption, or FHE. But there's a rather large catch. It can take thousands -- even tens of thousands -- of times longer to compute on today's CPUs and GPUs than simply working with the decrypted data. So universities, startups, and at least one processor giant have been working on specialized chips that could close that gap. Last month at the IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in San Francisco, Intel demonstrated its answer, Heracles, which sped up FHE computing tasks as much as 5,000-fold compared to a top-of the-line Intel server CPU.
Startups are racing to beat Intel and each other to commercialization. But Sanu Mathew, who leads security circuits research at Intel, believes the CPU giant has a big lead, because its chip can do more computing than any other FHE accelerator yet built. "Heracles is the first hardware that works at scale," he says. The scale is measurable both physically and in compute performance. While other FHE research chips have been in the range of 10 square millimeters or less, Heracles is about 20 times that size and is built using Intel's most advanced, 3-nanometer FinFET technology. And it's flanked inside a liquid-cooled package by two 24-gigabyte high-bandwidth memory chips—a configuration usually seen only in GPUs for training AI.
In terms of scaling compute performance, Heracles showed muscle in live demonstrations at ISSCC. At its heart the demo was a simple private query to a secure server. It simulated a request by a voter to make sure that her ballot had been registered correctly. The state, in this case, has an encrypted database of voters and their votes. To maintain her privacy, the voter would not want to have her ballot information decrypted at any point; so using FHE, she encrypts her ID and vote and sends it to the government database. There, without decrypting it, the system determines if it is a match and returns an encrypted answer, which she then decrypts on her side. On an Intel Xeon server CPU, the process took 15 milliseconds. Heracles did it in 14 microseconds. While that difference isn't something a single human would notice, verifying 100 million voter ballots adds up to more than 17 days of CPU work versus a mere 23 minutes on Heracles.
Startups are racing to beat Intel and each other to commercialization. But Sanu Mathew, who leads security circuits research at Intel, believes the CPU giant has a big lead, because its chip can do more computing than any other FHE accelerator yet built. "Heracles is the first hardware that works at scale," he says. The scale is measurable both physically and in compute performance. While other FHE research chips have been in the range of 10 square millimeters or less, Heracles is about 20 times that size and is built using Intel's most advanced, 3-nanometer FinFET technology. And it's flanked inside a liquid-cooled package by two 24-gigabyte high-bandwidth memory chips—a configuration usually seen only in GPUs for training AI.
In terms of scaling compute performance, Heracles showed muscle in live demonstrations at ISSCC. At its heart the demo was a simple private query to a secure server. It simulated a request by a voter to make sure that her ballot had been registered correctly. The state, in this case, has an encrypted database of voters and their votes. To maintain her privacy, the voter would not want to have her ballot information decrypted at any point; so using FHE, she encrypts her ID and vote and sends it to the government database. There, without decrypting it, the system determines if it is a match and returns an encrypted answer, which she then decrypts on her side. On an Intel Xeon server CPU, the process took 15 milliseconds. Heracles did it in 14 microseconds. While that difference isn't something a single human would notice, verifying 100 million voter ballots adds up to more than 17 days of CPU work versus a mere 23 minutes on Heracles.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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KYIV (ANP/RTR) - Oekraïense troepen hebben dinsdag een belangrijke fabriek die raketonderdelen produceert getroffen in de Russische grensregio Bryansk, meldt de Oekraïense president Volodymyr Zelensky.
Het zou gaan om de Kremniy El-fabriek. Volgens Zelensky produceerde de fabriek elektronica en onderdelen voor Russische raketten. "Dezelfde raketten die onze steden, dorpen en burgers treffen", voegde hij eraan toe.
De gouverneur van de regio Bryansk, Alexander Bogomaz, meldde op Telegram dat bij Oekraïense aanvallen zes burgers omkwamen en 37 gewond raakten.
Bogomaz maakte geen melding van de fabriek in wat hij omschreef als een "terroristische raketaanval".