Jamie Raskin targets football body’s proposed commercial sell-off and links to Trump administration

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Fifa could face a sweeping US congressional investigation into its expanding financial and political ties to Donald Trump and his family if Democrats reclaim the House of Representatives in November, a senior party figure has warned.

Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House judiciary committee, accused global football’s governing body of a “smash-and-grab scam of colossal proportions” after it proposed a multibillion-dollar privatization of its commercial operations.

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If you don't want AI scrapers training themselves on your website, there's a new way to stop them that doesn't involve server-side blocking or praying they respect your instructions in robots.txt. A team of creatives have teamed up with a typography company to create a new type of font that’ll trick LLM scrapers into ingesting poisoned gibberish. Dubbed ShieldFont, the open-source project almost seems like magic if you're not familiar with the ins and outs of computer fonts. Look at a web page written using a ShieldFont font and it’ll appear exactly as one would expect: All the content words (the nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs that give a sentence meaning) are the same as the writer originally wrote. Inspect the raw HTML that a scraper reads from a ShieldFonted page, however, and you’ll see a sentence that’s essentially gibberish. Typing “good luck reading this, you useless robot” in the online demo version, for example, turns it into “good comfort reading this, you yellow barrier.” The goal, as outlined in the ShieldFont white paper, is not to get a scraping bot to reject the text as garbage, but to convince it that the text on the page is unusual but sensible. A noun will never be swapped for a verb, for example, and a verb will never be swapped for an adjective: Swaps only come from the same grammatical pool. It goes even more distinct than that, The ShieldFont creators noted. “Not just noun for noun: plural abstract noun about communication for plural abstract noun about communication,” the white paper explains. “There are about 250 such pools, built by crossing part of speech with sense category, concreteness, singular or plural, verb transitivity, verb inflection and adjective degree.” Around a quarter of words in a chunk of text end up replaced, the creators noted, with the hope the copy still gets ingested. Even if it doesn't, and the group notes scrapers do sometimes reject it, that still means your writing doesn’t get sucked up to train an AI – a win either way. How does this black magic work? This all seems a bit mystical unless you’re versed in the functions of fonts – specifically fonts in the OpenFont family, which ShieldFont is designed to work with. First off, you may be familiar with typographic ligatures, which combine two letters into a single character for the sake of making text look a bit neater, or conveying meaning in some languages but not others. Æ is one classic example in Latin script used in some languages but not others; there's also fi, which combines a lower case F and I in a way that prevents the top curve of the F from bumping into the I’s dot. OpenType fonts all come with ligature tables that define how single glyphs or glyph sequences get substituted automatically by a word processor in a process known as glyph substitution, or GSUB. Even Google Docs supports user-configurable GSUB to an extent - you can fairly easily configure a substitution to automatically fill in for frequently used special words or characters. ShieldFont works on largely the same premise, but extends GSUB to entire words instead of letters or character pairs. So for example, a word like "daughter" in raw HTML might be rendered as "journalist" when it actually shows up to human viewers on the page. Here's what a paragraph written in the ShieldFont looks like as viewed on a web page (above), as opposed to what the raw HTML actually says (below): Even with that extended GSUB format, the font files are still quite small. We spoke with Amsterdam design studio Seneda & Abrucio, founded by Isaque Seneda and Gabriel Abrucio, the team behind ShieldFont, and they told us that the document/desktop fonts that are ShieldFonted are only around 5 MB, while compressed web fonts that include the entire GSUB dictionary still only come in at around 800 KB - large for your average font, S&A explained, but still considerably smaller than the desktop version. There’s more than one GSUB dictionary too - ShieldFont is shipping with three of them, and the GitHub repository explains how users can create their own to prevent reverse-engineering. But why poison a few words instead of just scrambling text altogether? S&A told us that they want a deterrent to scraping by introducing uncertainty and chaos into training data, not just a way to get scrapers to ignore some pages. “Pure scrambling fonts already existed,” the pair explained. “We wanted a mechanism with actual consequences: scrape without asking, and you can't tell if what you took was real. Concealment alone just gets you dropped and forgotten.” The default font that ships with ShieldFont is a modified version of Optik from Copenhagen typography shop Playtype, who partnered with S&A on the project. Like other scraping deterrents, it's not perfect Speaking of reverse-engineering, ShieldFont isn’t perfect by a long shot. As the team notes in their white paper, it can be defeated with relative ease. A screenshot of a page that’s run through OCR avoids the poisoned HTML, as does any other method that a scraper might use to scrape user-viewed pages instead of raw code. Targeted AI that downloads its own copy of ShieldFont and runs through all three GSUB dictionaries can also decode a page. SheildFont could also impose an SEO penalty on people who use it, as search engines, like AI scrapers, read the raw HTML to look for content, as do translation apps and the copy/paste function built into computer operating systems. Screen readers used for those with visual impairment also have trouble with it too, though there is a feature built in to ensure screen readers can get the user-displayed text, albeit slowly. “[ShieldFont’s] purpose is not to stop a determined actor, but to slow unauthorized mass scraping by adding cost, friction and uncertainty,” S&A said in a press release. “Scrapers cannot know in advance whether a site uses ShieldFont or which mapping it uses.” As for whether ShieldFont is just an experiment or something S&A hope gets widely adopted, the pair told us it’s a bit of both. “ShieldFont is real and working today, but it's v0/alpha, so still improving,” S&A explained. “Longer term, it's a bet on collective pressure,” the ShieldFont designers added. “Nothing currently makes bypassing a publisher's requests costly. If enough sites make scraping expensive, scrapers have to change how they operate. That's the point where negotiation becomes possible.” ShieldFont is now available to try. The online demo encoder can be used to generate protected HTML for embedding in a website, and it’s also available as a React component and for CSS and CDN integration, all of which is explained on the project’s GitHub page and the ShieldFont website. ®

Door de aanhoudende droogte is het Twentekanaal sinds zaterdag gesloten. Dat heeft gevolgen voor 45 bedrijven die afhankelijk zijn van aan- en afvoer door de binnenvaart. „We kunnen de extra kosten niet doorberekenen aan onze klanten.”

Een tiental demonstranten verstoorden een herdenking in Rotterdam waar ook de Israëlische ambassadeur bij aanwezig was. Burgemeester Schouten riep Rotterdammers op naast hun eigen pijn ook ruimte te maken voor de pijn van een ander.

Weer voor Rotterdam ☁️ - 30-07-2026 19:15 CEST

In één oogopslag:
• 25.7°C · Bewolkt ☁️ | Min 22.1°C / Max 28.5°C | Kans op neerslag 4%

Verwachting voor vandaag:
• Min 22.1°C, Max 28.5°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, Kans op neerslag 4%, 🧭 1016.0 hPa ↗️ +0.6 hPa/24h, Windsnelheid: 16.9 km/u (4.7 m/s), richting: → 258°

Uurlijkse voorspelling voor de komende 12 uur:

• 20:00: 25.3°C (Licht bewolkt) 🌤️, 🧭 1015.4 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 7.6 km/u (2.1 m/s), richting: → 269°
• 21:00: 24.9°C (Zonnig) ☀️, 🧭 1015.7 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 4.7 km/u (1.3 m/s), richting: → 256°
• 22:00: 24.4°C (Licht bewolkt) 🌕, 🧭 1016.4 hPa ↗️ +0.7 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 5.0 km/u (1.4 m/s), richting: → 259°
• 23:00: 23.9°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, 🧭 1016.4 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 6.8 km/u (1.9 m/s), richting: ↘ 293°
• 00:00: 22.8°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, 🧭 1016.5 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 7.6 km/u (2.1 m/s), richting: ↘ 334°
• 01:00: 22.1°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, 🧭 1016.3 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 6.5 km/u (1.8 m/s), richting: ↘ 323°
• 02:00: 21.9°C (Gedeeltelijk bewolkt) ☁️, 🧭 1016.1 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 1.4 km/u (0.4 m/s), richting: ↘ 306°
• 03:00: 22.0°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, 🧭 1015.6 hPa ↘️ -0.5 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 5.0 km/u (1.4 m/s), richting: ↖ 117°
• 04:00: 22.0°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, 🧭 1015.3 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 4.7 km/u (1.3 m/s), richting: ↖ 127°
• 05:00: 22.0°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, 🧭 1015.2 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 4.3 km/u (1.2 m/s), richting: ↖ 143°
• 06:00: 21.7°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, 🧭 1015.1 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 6.8 km/u (1.9 m/s), richting: ↖ 150°
• 07:00: 21.9°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, 🧭 1014.9 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 6.1 km/u (1.7 m/s), richting: → 253°

Voorspelling voor de komende dagen:

• vrijdag 31 juli: Min 18.6°C, Max 24.8°C (Lichte motregen) 🌦️, Neerslag 0.1 mm, Kans op neerslag 13%, 🧭 1016.0 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/24h, Windsnelheid: 18.7 km/u (5.2 m/s), richting: ↓ 354°
• zaterdag 01 augustus: Min 16.8°C, Max 26.1°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, Kans op neerslag 2%, 🧭 1018.8 hPa ↗️ +2.8 hPa/24h, Windsnelheid: 16.2 km/u (4.5 m/s), richting: ↙ 28°
• zondag 02 augustus: Min 15.7°C, Max 26.1°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, 🧭 1018.3 hPa ↘️ -0.5 hPa/24h, Windsnelheid: 14.0 km/u (3.9 m/s), richting: ↙ 58°
• maandag 03 augustus: Min 17.5°C, Max 27.4°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, Kans op neerslag 4%, 🧭 1014.9 hPa ↘️ -3.4 hPa/24h, Windsnelheid: 14.4 km/u (4.0 m/s), richting: ↙ 48°
• dinsdag 04 augustus: Min 19.5°C, Max 30.5°C (Lichte motregen) 🌦️, Neerslag 0.9 mm, Kans op neerslag 25%, 🧭 1012.5 hPa ↘️ -2.4 hPa/24h, Windsnelheid: 7.3 km/u (2.0 m/s), richting: ↓ 12°
• woensdag 05 augustus: Min 18.7°C, Max 24.6°C (Lichte motregen) 🌦️, Neerslag 0.6 mm, Kans op neerslag 15%, 🧭 1014.9 hPa ↗️ +2.4 hPa/24h, Windsnelheid: 14.5 km/u (4.0 m/s), richting: → 275°

Details:
• 🌡️ Huidige temperatuur (om 19:15): 25.7°C (Bewolkt)
• 🤚 Gevoelstemperatuur: 25.3°C (-0.4°C)
• 💨 Windsnelheid: 5.8 km/u (1.6 m/s), richting: → 266°
• 🌬️ Windstoten: 17.3 km/h (4.8 m/s)
• 💧 Luchtvochtigheid: 48%
• 🧭 Luchtdruk: 1015.4 hPa ↗️ +1.0 hPa/3h
• 👁️ Zichtbaarheid: 32.1 km
• ☀️ UV-index: 1.2
• 🌅 Zonsopgang: 06:01 · 🌇 Zonsondergang: 21:35

Luchtkwaliteit:
• AQI: 53 🟡 (Matig)
• PM2.5: 9.8 μg/m³
• PM10: 16.2 μg/m³

Gegevens geleverd door Open-Meteo

#Rotterdam #Meteo #MeteoBot #MeteoNetherlands #OpenMeteo #FediMeteo

RIYAD (ANP/RTR) - Saudi-Arabië is bezig met het opzetten van een maritiem samenwerkingsverband dat moet toezien op veiligheid in het Rode Zeegebied. Dat meldt het ministerie van Defensie volgens Al Arabiya.

Volgens de verklaring is donderdag met tientallen landen en een EU-delegatie gesproken over het beschermen van de Straat van Bab-el-Mandeb, de Golf van Aden en de Rode Zee. Die gebieden worden nu bedreigd door de aan Iran gelieerde Houthi-rebellen, die hebben gedreigd de belangrijke zeestraat af te sluiten, in navolging van de Iraanse sluiting van de Straat van Hormuz. Ook is gesproken over het leiderschap van de coalitie, dat Saudi-Arabië op zich wil nemen.

Veertien deelnemende partijen, waaronder Koeweit, Bahrein, Qatar en Turkije, hebben zich al solidair verklaard. Andere landen zouden dat volgens de verklaring voornemens zijn, maar moeten daarvoor eerst binnenlandse afstemming regelen. Onder de ondertekenaars is ook Jemen. De staat strijdt al jaren tegen de Houthi's, die de facto het land besturen.

GCC has adopted a policy rejecting substantial code contributions generated by or derived from LLMs. "This covers not just code copied directly from tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, or GitHub Copilot, but also any versions of the code later edited or rewritten by a human, provided that the final contribution is still based on material generated by the system," reports Linuxiac. From the report: The important point, then, is not whether a developer has used an AI tool at some stage in their work; contributors can use LLMs to discuss ideas, understand existing code, learn about a field they are unfamiliar with, or carry out general research. The limitation lies in the inclusion of copyright-significant material generated by such tools in the code submitted to GCC.

The policy also provides for a few limited exceptions; GCC maintainers are allowed to accept changes that are legally insignificant or trivial and are generated by an LLM, on the condition that they meet the project's normal contribution requirements and the use of an LLM is clearly disclosed.

Furthermore, copyright-significant AI-generated test cases could still be accepted. Since test cases usually involve small programs which are intended to reproduce compiler bugs or to verify certain behavior, the policy deals with them separately from code that is incorporated into GCC itself.

It does not follow that merely looking at or altering the generated code makes it acceptable. By the rules that have been adopted, a contributor cannot take substantial implementation produced by an LLM, clean it up manually, and then treat the resulting patch as if it had been originally written by them. Once a contribution has been derived from generated content, it is still subject to the policy.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In 1906, Devil’s Tower in northeastern Wyoming became the first national monument in the U.S., preserving a little more than 1,300 acres around the 867-foot-tall column of igneous rock. Amid the rolling hills of the plains, it can be seen from miles around, and it’s been a sacred site and gathering place for myriad Indigenous American tribes, who refer to it by names like Bear Lodge or Bear’s House.

One oral narrative describes how bears attacked a group of seven girls, and the ground swelled up to push the children toward the sky. There, they became the constellation Pleiades, or the “Seven Sisters,” which can be seen over the monument. In other stories, the distinctive striations around the landform are said to have been created by bears clawing at the earth to try to reach the girls.

For nomadic photographer Zac Henderson, the unique geological formation proved an irresistible subject. He travels the continent making dreamy images of landscapes and natural phenomena, often merging reality with a sense of the uncanny. When it comes to geology, there’s hardly a more iconic example than Devil’s Tower, which formed tens of millions of years ago as a column of hardened magma was gradually revealed through erosion.

Henderson captures the moodiness of clouds casting shadows in black-and-white images that are redolent of Ansel Adams’ deep tonal shifts. Even though the monument sees hundreds of thousands of visitors every year, there is a sense of isolation and unadulterated wonder, as if we are encountering it for the first time. Henderson also captures the changing light and otherworldly textures and ochres of the rock face, which can be seen from a network of paths around its one-mile base circumference.

See more timelapses on Henderson’s Vimeo, and explore more on Behance.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Zac Henderson Venerates Devil’s Tower in Bold Black-and-White Photos appeared first on Colossal.